Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The Teraloynas are an obscure curiosity in the footnotes of ethnologists. The surname survives here and there; the people who bear it are commonly thought, without any evidence but a vague matching of vowel sounds, to be of Spanish or Portuguese origin. Linguists interested in the distortion of proper names in multilingual, colonized countries have suggested the name probably derives from a pidgin contraction of two words the shipwrecked, presumably French-speaking, used to describe where they found themselves. ‘Terre’—earth, ‘loin’—far: the far earth.

The Teraloynas occupy no twig on the family trees of white people. Whites in that country have not yet acquired the far-sighted circumspection of claiming a trace of black in their genes, and blacks who, in pride of origin and search for unity among their different shades of black, claim an admixture of the blood of non-negroid indigenes, the Khoikhoi and San, never bother to assert kinship with such scarcely-identifiable bastard groups as the St. Helenans (Napoleon had a forced stay on their island) or the Teraloynas. Those of Teraloyna descent whose blood is so diluted that no one — least of all themselves — could learn from the shape of their mouths and noses, the lie of their hair, from their names or habits of speech that they have such ancestry, sometimes fly in Business Class over their island: down there, all wrinkled and pleated in erosion, all folds (the ravines where the goats held out so long) and dark inlets edged at the mouth by the spittle of the sea — it is not marked on the coloured route map in the flight magazine provided in each seat-pocket. Their island; and they emigrated from that unrecognized piece of earth, poked up out of the sea, to the great open lands — America, Australia, Africa. They doze in their seats.

When a certain black carpenter draws a splinter from under his nail, the bubble of blood that comes after it is Teraloyna. And when a certain young white man, drafted into military service straight from school, throws a canister of tear-gas into a schoolyard full of black children and is hit on the cheek by a cast stone, the broken capillaries ooze Teraloyna lifeblood.

It is a mere graze, he is lucky, he might have lost a blue eye.

This year there are six hundred cats on the island. An estimate: there may be many more, they breed in the ravines. Their mating howls sound terrifyingly over the night sea. Othello would turn about in horror from an island of demons. Survivors from a wreck would rather go under than make for that other death.

But they are really only cats — the demons. Descendants of two kittens, a pretty black queen with a beauty patch of white on her cheek and a ginger tabby torn, who kneaded the pillows of a member of one of the meteorological teams in his lonely nights and were fed tit-bits at the only dining table for thousands of sea-miles around.

The meteorologists have tried poisoned meat, and being scientifically-minded, infection with cat flu, so deadly to pets on any mainland. But these feral creatures know no mainland. The soft beds and tit-bits have disappeared in ancestral memory. They have forgotten the comforts and dependence on humans natural to them; to succumb to the forms of eradication devised by humans would be a form of atavism. Their howls are the only cries heard on the island; they have eaten all the eggs of the sea-birds. They have caused the giant turtles to disobey, in amphibian wisdom, the imperative of their slow drag up the beaches to lay their eggs; the turtles have learnt something they did not need to know before in thousands of years in the chain of their existence: that cats, the claws of cats will dig up their eggs no matter how much breath — and how agonizing it is to breathe, out of water! — is expended in burying them in the sand. The hares are fast being eaten out; and even the butterflies — caterpillars are milky-bodied and nutritious.

The meteorologists have no trouble with mice, of course. But two kittens, so soft and small, have almost destroyed the ecology of the island, and this (apart from the infernal wails of feline rut) is an embarrassment to the team. When the SPCA protests against the cruelty of inflicting on animals a painful death by germ warfare, the meteorologists cite the near-extinction, by those non-indigenous animals, of wildlife. But this only emphasizes the careless disregard for ecological balance shown in the first place; why were the kittens not spayed, in the case of the female, and castrated, in the case of the male (a precaution against his mating with some kind of wild feline that might have existed on the island)? Well, they were pets, and nobody thought of it, nobody could have dreamt of the consequences: of such fierce fecundity in that place where there were no women. It was simply out of mind; out of the mainland.

A new solution is to be tried.

The fact is, there is an emergency on the island.

As the solution involves an element of sportsmanship — who could be persuaded to carry it out, otherwise? — it was never intended to get into the papers, but due to another indiscretion on somebody’s part, it has. Only a line or two: the cats are to be shot. If the hunters are good marksmen the death will be far quicker and less painful than death by arsenic or cat flu. The meteorologists are not the sort of men who shoot for sport, of course, they don’t handle firearms, so others must be found to do it. The army would be the obvious choice, but another sort of State of Emergency exists in the mainland country and all troops are required to man the borders, take part in pre-emptive raids across them, and install themselves with tear-gas, dogs, and guns in the vast areas where blacks live. Every young recruit is needed: there are boycotts, strikes, stay-at-homes, refusals to pay rent, all of which bring blacks into the streets with stones and home-product petrol bombs and sometimes grenades and AK-47s that have somehow been smuggled past the troops on the borders.

But there are thousands of young white men outside the army who are proficient in handling firearms. Only temporarily out of the army: all these healthy males have done their initial period of military service, but they are called up for short periods wherever an emergency within the Emergency arises. No one has had time enough in civilian life to lose his touch, handling an automatic rifle, or needs practice to get his eye in on target. Under command, and sometimes out of panic, they have shot chanting black schoolchildren, black mourners dispersing from those children’s funerals, black rioters fleeing, black men and women who happened to go out for a pint of milk or a packet of cigarettes and crossed the path of an army patrol in the streets. Pick them off. They’re all black. There is no time — it is no time — to distinguish the bystanders from the revolutionaries.

A large party of these healthy young white men from a university in the capital city of the country has been invited on a holiday that will also serve a useful purpose. Not exactly a study vacation, although the students will be shown round the meteorological station and have its complex and sophisticated weather-satellite system explained. More like a spree, taking them abroad to an unusual and little-known destination. They are going to the island under orders to shoot the cats. They are game for it. Among them is the young fellow who could have lost a blue eye by means of a stone thrown by a black, but was merely grazed to ooze a little of his Teraloyna blood-line. He is going, soon, to see through the oval of the aircraft window (pushing and shoving among his pals) — Look! Look down there—

The island we left for the mainland, all wrinkled and pleated in erosion, just topping out of the sea mists: the dark ravines where the goats held out long before felines did, the dark shores edged with bright surf, its movement frozen by the vertical distance of thousands of feet, before the aircraft slowly loses height.