Tip Marugg - The Roar of Morning

Sandoval watched with a smile and wiped his arm clean. Then he knelt down again and lifted a hind leg of the suckling creature with one hand and its tail with the other. Among the still-wet hairs he saw not two but only one orifice. He turned to me and said, happy and proud, “It’s a bull! I’m damned if it isn’t a bull!” I couldn’t understand his enthusiasm. A new cow was more profitable, surely? Then he told me that twenty years earlier his wife had died giving birth to their only child. It was a daughter, who was now married and living in Crispo. And he confessed that he had always wanted a son. “Tonight my son was born!” he shouted, and burst out laughing.

Returning home on the train was less interesting and took longer than the outward journey. All was quiet once more in our town. A new alcalde had been appointed, a few troublemakers were in prison and the workers from the burnt-out factory were out of a job. Apart from that, everything was back to normal. Even the schools were open again. At home too, everything continued as before. Whenever I wanted a glass of water and opened the door of the fridge to get it, I saw a silver mug inside containing my uncle’s spare dentures.

About six months earlier my uncle had come home one evening with his upper lip strangely caved in. He told us that for the first time in his life he had been to see a dentist, who was now in the process of extracting all the teeth from his upper jaw. He was to be fitted with a complete set of top dentures. I could hardly stop myself laughing at the strange hissing noise he made when he spoke. Sensibly, he had ordered two identical sets. “These things can break at any moment and then you’re stuck. I can’t keep interrupting my work to go to the dentist for new dentures. So I’m having two sets made at the same time.” When he got his dentures, he put the spare set at the back of the fridge to protect them from dust and germs. This fridge was a wooden contraption lined with sheets of aluminium. Every day two large blocks of ice were placed on a grille and the space beneath was filled with bottles of water, meat and other food that needed to be kept cool. Although the false teeth were not visible when you opened the door, you could see the mug. I often slammed the fridge shut without drinking a thing.

Two months after our stay on Sandoval’s farm my uncle’s wife died. He came home earlier than usual, and I realised at once that something was wrong, because he did not take off his hat until he got to the middle of the room and then wiped his neck and brow with a handkerchief and placed the hat on a chair. His unvarying nightly routine was to take his hat off as he came through the front door, hang it on the top peg of the coat rack just inside, and only then wipe his neck and brow. My uncle quickly realised he had departed from his usual routine, so he went back to the chair, picked up the hat and hung it on the peg. Then he wiped his forehead and neck a second time.

He sat down on the big sofa and motioned me to sit next to him. He put his arm round my shoulders and asked if I had heard about the train crash that afternoon near Crispo. No, I knew nothing about it. Then he said softly, “A terrible disaster. Twenty-nine people were killed. Your aunt was one of the victims.” At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Had a sister of my father or mother come to the mainland and been killed in the train crash? He saw my confusion and said even more softly, “My wife, my dear wife has departed this life.”

When I heard this, I cried and expected him to do the same. But he hugged me and said in an almost accusing tone, “It is God’s will. We must be strong at a time like this. He knows what He’s doing, even when we can’t fathom His mystery.” At that moment I conceived a great dislike of the man who was hugging me. How could anyone talk so coolly when his own wife had died a terrible death a few hours before?

After the death of his wife, while I was waiting for a ship back to my island, I had to sleep in my uncle’s room, although I could not see why this was necessary. My narrow bed was placed in a corner of the huge room. It was a cheerless place with spotless linoleum on the floor, containing my uncle’s enormous bed with a tall chair at its foot, a washbasin with strange curled legs and a solid mahogany wardrobe with a brass keyhole plate. On the white walls hung two paintings, one a portrait of some nineteenth-century preacher who had been killed and probably eaten by an Indian tribe — he served as a model to my uncle — and the other a depiction of the Last Supper, or as my uncle called it, “Our Lord’s Holy Supper.” Many homes have a Last Supper hanging in the dining room, but here it was in the bedroom, right at the foot of my bed, so that I was forced to gaze at it every evening. On the print I could identify only Jesus and Judas — Iscariot, as my uncle called him — but he could name all thirteen figures from right to left. I’ve never understood how my uncle could be so sure who was who. I preferred the preacher in the other picture, with his flabby face, shifty stare and silly hat.

When my uncle came to bed, he always opened the door of the bedroom carefully, shuffled in and put the light on. I would wake with a start and he would say in surprise, “What, aren’t you asleep yet? Boys need lots of sleep if they’re to grow up healthy.” Then he would take his neatly folded pyjamas from the foot of the bed, draping first the trousers and then the jacket over his left arm, and shuffle out of the room again. It was ten minutes or so before he reappeared, now in his pyjamas, with the jacket buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple. “What, are you still not asleep, my boy?” He smoothed out the clothes he had just taken off and hung them over the chair by his bed. Next, he ran his fingertips over his veined temples and pressed his eyelids with his forefingers. Then he climbed into bed and lay flat on his back in the very middle. Not long after I heard his heavy breathing, punctuated by horrid rasping sounds. As a child I firmly believed that all good Christians slept straight as a die in the middle of the bed and that all of them snored.

Six weeks later I was on a ship taking me home. I felt rather seasick during the twelve-hour journey, though this had never happened on my previous crossings. Dizzy and slightly nauseous, I sat on the stiff canvas seat of a deck chair. Then I heard the sound of wings. A large, grubby-white bird fluttered along and perched on the deck rail. Its belly and feet were covered in oil. It had a long beak with a pocket attached and looked as old as the world. Only its eyes glittered as it gazed at me with curiosity. As I in turn studied the bird closely, it suddenly dawned on me what I had learned from the thin prisoner in the Castillo: he had shown me without words how to look at birds and plants differently, to see details that most people miss. And despite the unpleasant taste of vomit in my mouth I was overcome by a faint sense of elation and gratitude. I drew up my knees and arched my back against the canvas, then stuck my thumb in my mouth and sucked it like a little child until I fell asleep.

On this island, when a white man outlives his white wife there is often a black woman waiting for him. When he has become a widower, lonely and less of a man, there is always the black woman who receives him with open arms and cares for him lovingly during his declining years.

As I sit on my terrace, half-drunk and brooding on my solitude, the night is my black woman. In the embrace of her strong cinnamon arms I feel at once dominant and protected. Her ancient face has a rough beauty as inextinguishable as the wild north coast, with its rocky monuments carved out by sea and wind. Her eyes, wise but tired from her long vigil, gaze endlessly at a mysterious image, a compound of emptiness, mystery and long distances, that I will never fathom. How often, night after night, I have basked in her silken black embrace. The scent of her black woman’s body merges dream and reality, blurs the outlines of earthly things into insignificant shadows, and blots out the false world and its threats. I press my back against her huge breasts and when the warmth of her flesh transmits itself to my skin I can erase all scarring memories at a stroke. Then I caress her knees and full of gratitude call her the guardian of my drunken nights. And I ask her, although I know she will never reply: have I ever been happy?