The Roar of Morning by Tip Marugg

Author:Tip Marugg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

I was often left by myself during the twenty months I spent on the mainland. After lunch my uncle always went out to declaim biblical texts or to convene mysterious meetings in derelict houses. He did not return until the evening, sometimes very late. His wife was constantly travelling into the city or out into the countryside to sell her contraband to wealthy people and plantation owners. This was how she supported her husband. I was left at home with an elderly maid who left at four in the afternoon. Yet I did not feel abandoned. That was the time when I learned to love solitude and books. Even now I look back on the reclusive years of my youth with a certain fondness.

On the frequent days when there was no school, my uncle would sometimes teach me math, Spanish, biblical history and chess in the mornings. In the afternoons, when he had gone out, I secretly read the books in his bookcase. This wasn’t too easy at the start, but soon Spanish ceased to present any great difficulty. With few exceptions they were religious books, and I could not always understand the difficult passages. Eventually, because I was reading so much about religion and matters of faith and how man should live, I developed an intense curiosity about the other side of the coin. I yearned for “bad” books—but I was to have a long wait. In the meantime, however, I indulged my own fantasies, creating characters that I made do things I myself had never done. These fantasies, which sometimes lasted for hours and to which I was constantly adding new episodes, gave me great satisfaction and at the same time a sense of sinfulness, a contradiction that I blamed on the empty, silent house. I lived in a no-man’s-land seemingly equidistant from bad and good. The image of my uncle would loom up before me, dressed in immaculately pressed clothes, each hair on his head kept in its place by the green pomade that he rubbed in each morning, its musty smell still reminiscent of candles that had just been snuffed out. His starched clothes emphasised the tenseness in his body. At his side, his cool, calm, stately wife was always in her Sunday best. At such moments I felt sorry for my uncle and his wife; I almost hated them and longed to be home again.

Naturally, I did not spend the entire twenty months cooped up in the house like a monk. I had two friends at school whose houses I sometimes visited, and I also went for walks through the city. I went into the country a few times too: our ten-day visit to Chimbarí was particularly memorable.

That visit took place when rioting broke out in the city. It all started with a strike at the two government factories. The workers demanded a rise, put down their tools and took to the streets. There was turmoil all day long, but by the evening everyone was drunk and then the real pandemonium began.

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