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My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a seaman; as a youngster he had worked on the government river ferries and coastal steamers, but then, after he’d had two children, and had started quarrelling with my grandmother, he took to going further away on larger ships. Often he would not return for a year or more, but whenever he did he would get my grandmother pregnant and they would start quarrelling and he would be off again, until, in his memory, their painful discord had mellowed into a romantic lovers’ tiff – at which point he would return to start all over again. When he returned after the fourth child, it was supposed to be for good, and he actually married my grandmother as a statement of this intention, but when the fifth child was visible in my grandmother’s stomach, he became so miserable (she said) and looked so trapped and forlorn, that for his own good she threw him out and told him not to come back until he remembered how to be a real man again. In this way their relationship ebbed and flowed like the great rivers that had ruled their lives and fortunes. They had nine children, although it pleased God, as Grandmother said, to reclaim two of them within their first few years of life.
The cycle of Grandfather’s going and coming (and of my grandmother’s pregnancies) was broken when he got into a quarrel in some foreign port and some bad men robbed him of his money, beat him up and left him to die on one of those dark and desperate docklands streets that I was readily able to picture, thanks to my mild addiction to American gangster movies. At least this is the version of the story of his death that they told me when I was a boy. As I grew into a teenager and my ears became more attuned to adult conversations – especially those that are whispered – I began to overhear other versions: that yes, the men had killed him, but it was because he had cheated in a card game and won all their money; that he had really died in a brothel in New Orleans, in bed with a woman of stunning beauty called Lucinda – shot by a jealous rival; even that he had been caught on a ship that was smuggling narcotics into the United States, and was thrown to the sharks by federal agents who boarded the vessel at sea... At any rate he was still quite a young man when he died.
My grandmother mourned her husband for thirty years by embarking on a building project of huge proportions – the house we now lived in. She decided she would move her family out of the unhealthy capital city on the coast and build them a home on a hill overlooking the wide river and the small riverside mining town in which she herself was born. The first section of the house (‘the first Bata shoe box’, as my father puts it) was built by a carpenter friend of my grandmother’s who had hopes of replacing my grandfather in her affections, and ultimately in the home he was building for her. My grandmother allegedly teased and strung him along, like Penelope, until the new house was habitable; then, becoming her own Ulysses, she quarrelled with him in public and sent him packing. The next section of the house was built when Uncle Umberto, the eldest boy, was old enough to build it for her, and for the next twenty years he periodically added on another ‘shoe box’, until the house became as I now know it – a huge two-story structure with labyrinthine corridors and innumerable bedrooms and bathrooms (none of which has ever been completely finished) and the four ‘tower’ rooms, one at each corner, projecting above the other roofs and affording wonderful views of the town, river and surrounding forest. It is to one of these towers – the one we call ‘the bookroom’ – that I have retreated to write this story.
When Uncle Umberto began to clear the land to lay the foundation for the third ‘shoe box’ (in the year of the great drought), he said one night he saw a light, like someone waving a flashlight, coming from one of the sandbanks that had appeared out of the much diminished river. Next morning he saw a small boy apparently stranded on the bank and he went down to the river, got into the corrial and paddled across. When he got close to the bank he realized that it was not a boy, but a naked old man, scarcely four feet tall, with a wispy beard and an enormous, crooked penis. This man gesticulated furiously to Uncle, indicating first that he should paddle closer to the sandbank and then, when the bow of the corrial had grated on the sand, that he should come no further. Uncle swears that the little man held him paralysed in the stern of the boat and spoke to him at length in a language he did not understand, although somehow he knew that the man was telling him not to build the extension to the house, because an Indian chief had been buried in that spot long ago.
My grandmother, who had lived the first fifteen years of her life aboard her father’s sloop and had seen everything there is to be seen along these coasts and rivers, did not believe in ghosts and walking spirits and she would have none of it when Uncle Umberto suggested they abandon the second extension to the house. To satisfy Uncle she allowed him to dig up the entire rectangle of land and when no bones were found, she said: ‘O.K. Umberto, you’ve had your fun, now get serious and build on the few rooms we need so your brother Leonard could marry the woman he living in sin with and move her in with the rest of the family. It’s more important to avoid giving offence to God than to worry about some old-time Indian chief who probably wasn’t even a Christian anyway.’
So Uncle built the shoe box despite his misgivings, but the day before his brother Leonard was to be married, there was an accident at the sawmill where he worked and a tumbling greenheart log jammed him onto the spinning blade and his body was cut in two just below the breastbone. Everyone agreed it was an accident, but Uncle Umberto knew why it had happened. Aunt Irene, Uncle Leonard’s bride, who was visibly pregnant at the time, moved into the new extension nevertheless and she and my big cousin Lennie have been part of the household ever since. Uncle Umberto, who never had children of his own, became like a father to Lennie and took special care of him, claiming that, from infancy, the boy had the identical crooked, oversized penis that the old man on the sandbank had flaunted. Uncle Umberto also saw from time to time in that part of the house, apparitions of both his brother Leonard and the Indian chief, the latter arrayed in plumed headdress and beaded loincloth and sitting awkwardly on the bed or on the edge of Aunt Irene’s mahogany bureau.
The others now living in the big house were my own family – Papi, Mami, my sister Mac, my two brothers and I – my uncle John, the lawyer, and his wife Aunt Monica, my uncle ’Phonso and the four children that my aunt Carmen had for four different men before she decided to get serious about life and move to the States, where she now works in a factory that builds aeroplanes and lives with an ex-monk who can’t stand children. My father’s other sister has also lived in the States from as far back as I can remember.
Actually, my Uncle ’Phonso doesn’t really live with us either – he is the youngest and, it is said, the most like his father, both in terms of his skill as a seaman and his restlessness and rebellious spirit. He took over the running of my grandmother’s sloop (which plies up and down the rivers, coasts and nearby islands, as it always has, engaged equally in a little trading and a little harmless smuggling), and always claimed he could never live under the same roof with ‘the old witch’ (his mother). So he spends most of his life on the sloop. On every long trip he takes a different female companion (‘...just to grieve me and to force me to spend all my time praying and burning candles for his wicked soul,’ my grandmother said). Once a year the sloop would be hauled up onto the river bank below our house for four or five weeks, so that Uncle Umberto could replace rotten planks and timbers and caulk and paint it. During this time Uncle ’Phonso would have his annual holiday in his section of the family home.
Uncle John, the lawyer, was the most serious of my father’s brothers – though he was not really a lawyer. From as long as I can remember he has worked in the district administrator’s office and has been ‘preparing’ to be a lawyer by wearing pin-striped shirts and conservative ties and dark suits and highly polished black shoes. His apprenticeship to the profession became an eternal dress rehearsal. Packages of books and papers would arrive