Island of Lightning (14 page)

Or maybe you are a rabbit, Sig? So many rabbits are served on this island, roasted, stewed a week in garlic and crusty wine. The peasant cuisine. But what peasant could wait a week. Please prove to me Sigmundo that you are not a bucket of bones and that I retain traces of sanity.

But, sir, I honour you. The Luftwaffe didn't get you, nor the skull-embroidered legions. And you are so beautiful in this sacred twilight, a goblet dressed in madriperla. And, best of all, there's no-one near the saint's inglenook to hear me talking to a bone.

Well, such are my rituals in this city, where I live quietly and attend to my duties. A coffee at Leone's and a word with Sigmundo in his crystal. And truly, yes, I would like to take him outside to the rampart to watch the sea breaking below. Because the light would have you gasping, Sig. Maybe I'd offer you Raybans.

Yes my friend, there in your aquarium, staring over the Libyan Sea that spits like an iron's hotplate, tell me which way did the galleys come?

Ah yes, the same way the ferries do now. Because, as you know, this is where all trajectories meet. East and west merge upon our Phoenician rock, and a hollow rock it is, hollow with caves, and churches in caves and casbahs in caves and taverns in caverns and calabashes in caves and jewellers' and haberdasheries and harlotries in caves. Yes an island of caves, Sigmundo. Maybe you hear the tide beneath our feet?

So let's wait here a while and realise we have come to the centre of things. A rock on the horizon. That's us, my friend. A limestone mote in Africa's eye. But think of our forebears. Odysseus was here once, and Bloodaxe too, while Philip's fleets brought figs and falcons. So gaze with me here, Sigmundo. And realise the world is looking at us.

17. Waiting for the Barbarians

A cup of the warm south, says my friend. But nicely chilled.

We take our seats and here she comes, a pale girl, a goose of a girl, a gorgeous gooney girl with a mouth like a goldfish, a tall and serious girl with slender neck and hair in a tortoise-shell clasp plaited down her back.

Now she ghosts towards us and now she ghosts away, this servant who will bring our glasses. My friend is astonished. The girl cannot speak the island's language. Where can she have come from? She a servant, too. A minion.

It's written right through her, he says. From one of the so called republics to the north. One of those insane ragbags of counties and impoverished commotes. That's where she's from.

Since the island entered the confederation such outlandish types are seen more frequently. But the bar owner is a cruel man. He shouts at the goosey girl. He makes her stand in a corner and clean the necks of the ketchup bottles. Maybe he will make her do other things.

Wild dogs in the squares. The Presidents all turnip farmers. Black magic in the back streets and the children not in school but the uranium mines. And the old men drinking eau-de-cologne and antifreeze. It's true. They worship salamanders there. And now, here they come, here come the salamander-worshipping eau-de-cologne drinkers. And they're unstoppable.

I look at the girl. She dribbles rice grains into salt cellars. At an empty table she reads the Borges olive oil bottle label and the Borges vinegar bottle label. And very slowly, as if she has recognised an old friend, she begins to smile.

18. Klandestins

One day I arrange to meet Omar at Nannu's place. When I arrive no-one but Nannu is present. I wait in a darkness lit by one red candle on the board. Outside, the light is shattering and the sea wild, a curdled milk. Inside, it is midnight.

As usual the Caccarun is silent and I pour my own drink. I wonder whether it is his laundry that hangs over the entrance. The Caccarun must have better things to think about than personal hygiene, and I too must look unkempt, a week's bristles, and sour wine in my armpits, appropriate for the tavern of the two eyes. If I need a pexpex, there's a slop pot. But no lavaman that I've seen. My research is not going well.

At last Omar arrives.

Has the catastropher been talking to you? he asks.

Nannu?

Wars and invasions, Nannu knows when. And why. Ask him, man. He'll tell you when the rains are due. The new rains. He understands how hot it will become. Nannu has predicted how far the tide will creep up the ramparts. And yes, Nannu has even counted how many people are moving towards us, across the desert, over the waves. Towards us now, at this moment. He can see them all. Or rather…

Omar takes a shell from a shelf and gives it to the old man.

What do you hear, Nannu?

The old man remains silent.

Does he hear the sea? I ask.

I'll tell you what Nannu hears, says Omar. Ships' bells. So much louder than church bells. And so many more of them. Many men with many oars. That's what Nannu hears in the shell. The sound of oars. The galleys coming this way, the galleons with bells in their rigging, the gondolas, the gharbiels, the lazzarettos, the cruise liners. And the king astride his driftwood shaking that five pointed fork.

But does he hear the gods? I whisper

Maybe Omar doesn't hear.

Occasionally on my travels I pass a derelict barrakka on the west side. The blocks in the wall have shrunk and the building is unsafe. So there are plenty of places to stow away, to squat, to put a bedroll in the dust.

I suppose that's where I see most of the illegals, in the holes in the walls, holes such as the fishermen use. The ramparts are a honeycomb, entrances and dead ends and who knows how deep a labyrinth it all is. And there they are, rats in the rock, or in and out like flying foxes, because I've seen the bats too in the dusk on their own journeys, sharing their chambers now with these unfortunates.

Many's the time I've seen klandestins go in one hole and come out another. I've looked in too and seen dried palm leaves covering blankets, old clothes, yoghurt pots with rainwater, stale bread from the wheelies, bags of olives.

Because that's what these people do. Pick up olives. They sit under the olive trees and fill a bag, green going black, medicinal-tasting olives, most of the crop already soft and trodden to oil under the benches.

Who's going to buy? I always wonder. There are more olives than cockroaches on the island. More olives than children and there are children everywhere, hanging from tenement windows, bobbing still in the sea before me, the coal-coloured sea with clouds massing in the north. The coral is black now and the fishes invisible.

So slight in the sun are those slim fishes that silver the eye as light stuns time. Yes the fishes have vanished. But who will buy olives when they can pick the olives themselves? There are olives everywhere.

Yet that is what the klandestins do. They pick olives and look at olives as if they have never seen olives before. Maybe they haven't. Perhaps olives are a strange fruit to these people.

Takes all sorts, I suppose. Perhaps they don't know the olives need to be soaked in brine. Soaked for weeks and even then they're not ready. They'll have to learn the hard way.

Who are they, these visitors? I ask Omar. A troupe of outcasts from the desert?

Everyone comes to the island of lightning, he says. Eventually. The Greeks in their gold breeks, Palestinian farmers whose peach trees are full of cluster bombs. They all find themselves adrift, and the currents bring them here.

We go to the highest rampart and look out. The sky is dark and there are lanterns lit.

The rafts will come ashore in the night, says Omar. They don't have long to wait. You can imagine the passengers. Pregnant women who had never seen the sea before their journey, teachers, students, the brave, the mad.

Think of them now out on the ocean, their skins indigo in this light. Behind one another one, and behind him yet more. What if a wave takes a child from the stern? Who would know? When the snake steals the chick does the mother remember? Swallowed whole, it was never there.

Why do the superintendents let them in? I ask.

The island's grown old, he says. It's full of old men. And women. Old men are like cicadas, telling all they know. Children are the same. We are talkers now, not doers. Not warriors. We're cicadas on a tree. And ugly as cicadas. No-one listens so we sing louder. Who can tell when one of us falls because the racket is the same. And if we could learn from cicadas we would have already done so.

You wish to contact the ancients? You wish for the gods? Oh yes, I know what you wish. Those voices in our heads? Maybe those are the gods' voices. Certainly they are the cicadas. Dream sounds. The dreams of old people with the sheets up to their chins and their teeth chattering. We should honour the cicadas.

But the gods, I say.

The gods? Yes, it is always the gods with you.

Then he smiles.

Here, says Omar. For you.

He gives me a poster, old paper, cracked and stained.

There are names on it, a concert advertised for the theatre. But there's no time, no date. Abdallah Ali will play the santur; Sha'ubi Ibraham and Hassan Ali the djoze; Abdul Razzak Madjid the tabla; Kan'an Mohammed Saith and Dia Mahmoud Ahmed the deff. And the chanter, the poet? Yusuf Omar.

Yes, says Omar. This is your dream music. Listen again.

And Omar sings:

Oh these nights, these sleepless nights.

Who have I lost myself for?

A drunken man, a sober man, who have I lost myself for?

Take me to my home, take me to my home.

Who have I lost myself for

In these nights, these sleepless nights.

From the great tradition, he says. Or, one of the great traditions. In the dialect of my street, from a city far away. In fable, that is. But not so far across the black land.

19. The Venuses

I thought I was a scholar, I whisper to Omar. Until I met you. Sir, you understand everything on the island. Surely you can show me the gods. It's the gods I came for. Not the sailors. Not the fireflies. My research grant is spent.

Omar smiles.

I was at the bakery this morning, he says. Down the passageway I stepped and along that chancery. I saw a man carrying the hot trays, his mother counting the cents out on the mensa, flour in her eyes and apron. And the loaf she handed me? As big as an oxcart wheel. That's what I thought this morning. And I remembered wheels I once heard go rattling through the prickly pear. You will come with me.

And so the next evening I go to see the venuses. Omar directs me to the bus, but warns I will have to make my own way home.

It is the far side of the island. Wind blows, the stone dust flies. But the venuses are not hard to find. They sit together on a hillside looking east. The rain has worn their brows like temple steps. Loaflike they squat, and I think of Omar's loaf, his great wheel. For the venuses are loaf upon loaf. Their bellies are bread and their faces swollen dough, globular in the dusk and gilded with the last sun upon them. Sowlike I suppose, these beady-eyed matriarchs, with clefts in their bellies and shadows conglomerating in those gourds. A race of lumpen stone the venuses, looking where they have always looked. Forever out to sea.

I sit down. I sit amongst the Aphrodites in their ancient easiness.

How venerable these venuses. Their breasts and buttocks so cool under my fingers, these women who wait for time to stop, heads crushed into their shoulders' yoke, seven thousand years patient in this limestone sorority, their faces hidden, expressions concealed, knowing what they know and grown fat on the wind's salt, resting here on their millstones.

In the dark the gods are carboys of greenish wine. I gaze with them out to sea. The moon is coming up but is no whiter than their shepherd-polished thighs. These are the gods. These are the goddesses. They have survived so long that their religion is dead.

And I think of the women I passed on the track out of town, grandmothers come from market with halma and grapes. The last bus late.

Yusuf Omar (1918-1987) “was the last great traditional singer of the school of ‘Iraqi maqams'.”

The poem quoted occurs in the Baghdad sialect of Arabic and is an ancient popular lyrc, used in the ‘Maqam Hsseini', “one of the seven fundamental maqams”, and recorded for Ocora radio France, 1996, as ‘Les Maqam de Baghdad'.

Cynffig

When the river reaches the sea it makes no fuss at all. There is no triumphal estuary, no saltmarsh or riverine flatland of grey glasswort. Simply a running over the cobbles and a low key disappearance. The landscape does not celebrate and the river refuses to exult. It is a small river with a corrupted name, a name older than the tree roots exposed in the dune walls, older even than its present course for this river has flowed several ways in its time.

Over the beach it runs, going quietly, its name the sound it used to make centuries ago, a gulp, a swallow, yet its consonants are still sharp against each other and a faultline divides its syllables. It is already a little brackish, poking its tongue into the ocean, a transfusion of warm effluent and acid snowmelt from the plantations on the hills behind.

When the twelve knights reached the river they stopped their journey. They decided there was a border that followed the river, up from the ocean and into the hills that gave little grazing and no grapes or honey, but sheltered a scattered people who chose to live in barren places. The knights built their fortress here close to the beach, and a town of a thousand souls grew about its walls, an important town that knew grapes and honey and poetry. Salmon were caught here, and trout whiskery as nettle flowers. Then the sand began to drift and the town was abandoned. The people moved away and history ceased. Sand was ruler now. It had settled in the wells and lapped the altar-stone. It smoked in the chancel and made minging rain. Out of the sea came the armies of sand, bloodying the air, their warcries of Chinese whispers. Yet the river still flowed and it remained a border. For the few travellers who came this way there was clearly a boundary here. The land changed; the air was different. When the travellers crossed the river they became different people.