The Roar of Morning

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I live on a core of sedimentary and igneous rock surrounded by coral reefs, part of the arc of islands that encloses the Caribbean basin; on clear afternoons I can see the outline of the mountains on the northern coast of South America. I’m not as young as I was, and on occasion I give myself over to that solitary gratification which the good friars back in school used to call self-abuse — a practice that, as I knew even then, flies in the face of all that is right and sane.

It’s about an hour and a half past midnight. I sit on the paved terrace in front of my house and watch the low hills opposite me descend in serried ranks towards the coast. During the day they are grey, but, now, through the magical effect of night, they are shrouded in a mysterious bronze-green veil. Attached to the façade of virtually every house scattered across the nearby slopes is a bare neon tube, and from this distance they look like giant straw-coloured glowworms gnawing at the walls with gently undulating movements. When there is a moon, you can make out the wrecked cars strewn around the houses like so many fossils, not decaying, but eternally waiting. My loyal bitch Fonda lies at my feet and now and then licks my toes slowly and obsequiously through my open slippers. In my garden, six yards or so to the right of where I’m sitting, there’s an old indju tree, a giant bowed by the wind. At irregular intervals it lets out a rasping moan, very like the dull, subdued growl that occasionally issues from the throats of old men. There is an unsightly kink in the trunk and the bark is covered in thick brown veins, formed by the sticky sap secreted by the tree. A worn-out veteran who knows he has grown too old and hasn’t bothered to clean up after his last ejaculation.

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