The Island

After lunch she would drag her rocking chair to the window of her private drawing room (mist and gloom, the scorching, damp wind tearing itself open on the agaves or pushing the chestnutcoloured leaves under the almond trees ; swollen, leaden clouds blurring the green brightness of the sea)

the horror that fell from the lips of Antonia, the housekeeper. (‘They say they’re killing whole families over there, shooting priests and putting out their eyes … throwing people into vats of boiling oil … May God have mercy on their souls !’)

I took every opportunity to show my grandmother that I was there against my will. Anyone who has not been moved around constantly between the ages of nine and fourteen, changing hands like an object, will not understand the hostility and rebelliousness that characterized me then.

And while we anxiously waited for news, which was always unsatisfactory (the war was barely six weeks old), the four of us – my grandmother, my aunt Emilia, my cousin Borja and myself – stewed in the heat, the boredom, the loneliness and the silence of that corner of the island, in the far-flung vanishing point that was my grandmother’s house.

(Ah, the Taronjís. The island, the town, the sombre charcoal burners, each kept his eyes firmly on their ankles when they passed by.) The Taronjís took anyone suspicious to the ditch by the side of the road, where the forest began, beyond the square in the old Jewish quarter. Or to the cliff where the road turned, just beyond Son Major.

In the middle of the holidays the war started. Aunt Emilia and Borja could not go back to the mainland, and Uncle Álvaro, who was a colonel, was at the front. Borja and I, caught by surprise like victims of a strange ambush, understood that we would have to stay on the island indefinitely.

What would you know about any of this ? What have you ever lost ? You’ve never lost anything !’ We didn’t understand, so Borja laughed. I thought, ‘Have I lost something ? I don’t know. I only know I haven’t found anything.’

In the darkness, moths roved on the air like tiny floating boats, like the ones that passed over the Little Mermaid and made her tremble with longing.