THE JOURNEY
69
lie engulfed, foundering beneath the slow rustle and thrash. And who
will
not have preceded me between those stiff sheets, at that stall!
What bearded old adventurer escaped her?
The innkeeper hovers over me, lamenting the days of the penal
colony. The great drunken times are gone, the Saturday nights of orgy
when the convicts squandered their week's pay. As jailer, he would
give them their weekly coin for subsistence in the morning; as inn–
keeper he took it back before dark. In those days the convicts bought
wine and roamed the one street hammering on barricaded doors,
calling for the fishermen's wives. The cottages shook as beneath the
wildest winds. Inside, their pensioners the political exiles (Freemasons,
lawyers, professors, liberals, madmen, ideologues) lay trembling in the
dark. It was an island of priests and fishermen then, and of political
prisoners in dark glasses and double-breasted suits; and the convicts
in their stripes. The fishermen were gone from April through July,
hovering off Spanish and African shores, for sponges especially. In
those months the convicts were allowed to work the mines, and so
earn
a few coins. But the exiles were restricted to the town.
Now only the two convicts remain, scavengers of despair. They
have no other clothes than the striped ones, no resources to take
them to the mainland.
The smell of sulphur becomes abruptly more intense, as though
the volcano had relieved itself quietly through a hillside fissure. A
thin
layer of ash lies on the table, on the dish holding olives and figs.
It blends with the dust. The pumice isle: coating streets, floors, dishes,
hands,
tongues. In the dim prehistoric past (of the earliest convicts)
it rained twice in a single month. That was also a year of wild
eruptions. In the church are many ex-votos, affixed to a painting of
the erupting volcano: white stuffed arms and legs and eyeballs
covered with patches. The little rain here is collected on the roofs
scooped out to receive it. The vineyards cling to a soil cracked by
drought. Gashes of rust, sulphur yellow, and the blinding white
quarries: the stone ripped by hand then crushed to powder. The land
is
split and cleft by earthquake and drought, has been vomited by
eruption. Veins of lava, dark, obsidian and serpent green, emerge
from the barrancas and creep to the sea. And everywhere the dust
and ash.
So I go up to Serafina, to the room where Peralda still lies asleep
