The Flying Island by Romana Petri

Do you know what I used to do when I was young? I used to dance the chamarrita. I would happily show you what it's like, but now the bones up and down my back ache, and that's a dance where you really shake yourself about. I can show you the arm movements that are like this, and then you do this, but you can't really get an idea of the whole thing from that. It's not an easy dance, you know. You have to work hard at it because it's made up of many different patterns and you need someone in the group to have a strong voice to call out when to close and open up the circle. Generally it's a man's voice, but when I was young and we used to dance after the fiesta of the toro, the bull, often that powerful voice was mine.

She stopped to look at me and then she broke out into a peal of laughter that transformed into a rare beauty, seductive and bright like a serpent. And so I thought she might have been born of the union between a South American with a beautiful serpent of the sertao, the ones which have joyful names like Yarananŕ and deliver either ecstasy or death with a single bite.

The best thing about Malvina Sebastiao is her eyes, and then there's her almost masculine laughter and the absence of age. Prodigious elements, these, which render her human and beast-like at the same time, close to the divinity when it is in a pagan form. That day I was listening to her talk about her life as a young woman, while she stirred a pan where she was boiling twelve kilos of blackberries which she had picked the same morning somewhere near Figueira. She was warming herself at her improvised fire out in the open, in front of her house, and she was getting covered with the damp smoke, almost as if it was real sweat.

She had to prepare her blackberry liqueur in plenty of time, at least a year before her son arrived from Canada, and this time she wanted to make it really good, of the kind that ages well in bottles in the cool of the cellar.

Malvina Sebastiao makes you feel safe; she seems happy. Just as for all those who have been on the face of this earth a very long time, this can't have been true at all, but the thing that struck you about her, the wonderful thing about her, lies precisely in this appearance which takes you in when you look at her, and not just for the first time. She has the ability to keep life at a distance through an absolute and total participation in life itself. This might seem a contradiction, but in this way she really does keep it at arm's length and never abandons herself to sorrow. As I watch her I think that hers is a wisdom without origin, entirely circular, and that she has fallen into the middle of it.

Do you know what my mother used to say? She asks, pulling a wooden spoon stained bloody with cooked blackberries out of the mixture. She used to say that passions are for … I won't say it, it's a bad word, and my mother was an unhappy woman, because life without passions would drive you mad. Do you know what she used to do? She was always thinking, and that's not much good for you, it makes you feel empty and sad. In life you shouldn't let your thoughts go with you, you should go with them, and sometimes send them on their own way, which is not necessarily the same path as ours. Do you know how old I am? Sixty-five, sixty five years, all of them mine. There are not many who can say that. Two half naked little boys, her grandchildren, buzz around her, coloured red all over with the dark blackberry juice, their tongues almost blue by now. The smallest one is crying because he's been bitten by an ant which was crawling around the fruit. It bit my tongue, he says, grizzling. That's because you chat on too much, she consoles him, holding all his hair in one hand. And then she laughs, covered in sweat, her narrow eyes like melon seeds criss-crossed by a thousand black lights. Her teeth are tiny, you only see them when she opens her mouth to laugh, never when she speaks. She clicks her fingers still raising her arms in the movement of the chamarrita, but without minding me, perhaps just to cheer up her nephew who is still crying. The older child eats a boiled corn on the cob sitting on the steps of the house, while with a piece of iron he is hitting the lava rock staring straight in front of him. He seems to be doing it just to hear the noise.

Now I'm fine, Malvina Sebastiao tells me, my life is peaceful and calm. People should appreciate life, yet instead everybody spouts a heap of nonsense about sorrow. Do you believe that life is one big sorrow? I don't believe it. Too many days each the same as the next, so much the same that you don't even notice it. It's work, that's what life is above all. People are afraid of forgetting, but I try telling people to stay in the present, maybe a bit unaware of anything else, what do you think? I waited patiently all the time I was over there in Canada. Eighteen years, not just a few days. I had a husband and three children, in the end I understood American, but I never learnt to speak it. I didn't suffer, but I never fully adapted either. I always found that astonishing in other people. At the beginning I had to console them, help them find the good things about the place we were all in, then, as the months and the years began to roll by, I had to start backtracking and do the opposite. Hang out the sheets together with the other women and say: But have you all forgotten our own land?

I had to cross the street holding the children by the hand and turn round to my sister-in-law who was coming behind me doing the same, and say: It's a fiesta in Pico today, another month and the heavy rains will start.

Just the thought of that might send a shudder through her, and I would push the point. They were wonderful, those heavy rains of ours, those were the best. That's how for some people coming back was as bad as going; they found themselves rootless all over again. Maybe that's why they come away with that business about life being one long sorrow; because they are stuck in the past and over there they are looking to the future.

Twice she tasted that thick, burning liquid after blowing on it silently, just to try it for flavour. Then she began mixing again.

Do you like to laugh? She said. It's a great satisfaction, a way of feeling feverish even when you are in perfectly good health. Everyone has a special laughter place, I can feel it running down my arm here, running down inside, like happy blood which goes skipping off by itself. Everybody has their bad moments, but it's much better if they keep them to themselves, because if you go around going on about it you risk infecting everyone else. I was quite content over there, I didn't like it but I was content, and I let the days go by without counting them, and forgetting them when night fell. I did what I could to stay in one piece, it's no easy feat. I knew that I had to be on top of things, my gestures, I don't know if I'm explaining myself, getting dinner ready and being that dinner, cleaning the window and being that moving arm, that clean window. The others suffered and then forgot, but I was the things themselves. Would you like to try it?

She lifted the steaming wooden spoon to my lips and we blew on it together, because the more the liquid caramelised over the fire the more likely it was to burn.

If you want to take a drop back to your own country you can buy it here, everybody makes it, but here in Pico if you buy it at Sao Miguel it's more syrup than liqueur. My husband worked in the building trade, a simple labourer. Now that I think about it, there was an Italian engineer over there for a while, my husband learnt to say a few words in Italian, he liked it, and that engineer was a really nice gentleman. Some get by well in life and others have a much harder time. My husband was one of those who had no luck at all, but he never complained, he lived and died with dignity. But let's not talk about death now, it will just make us sad, you end up getting too close to it, you end up being death itself, and that's dangerous. I have always thought that I wouldn't like to go backwards and I wouldn't like to go forwards, I just want to be exactly in the moment where I am, the one magnificent moment of uncertainty. When I wake up I never understand that I am alive, does that ever happen to you? So I start to move my hands and feet slowly, because that's where life is, and that always puts me in a good mood. I know that I have a day of work ahead of me. Over there, in Canada, the winter cold used to frighten me, so many other things used to frighten me, including the way I just wanted not to say anything. When you change your world there is something that just falls silent; if it's out of surprise it doesn't last long, if it's out of fear you have to find your speech again quickly. I wanted to find the good things about those years, the unexpectedly good things. Do you know what it is? Maybe this is just my own invention, I've already mentioned it to you, it's the way I have of letting things flow without following them too closely, going with them without letting them go with you. I think I have saved much of my life, and now I can pick the good fruits of old age without the other things which normally afflict the old. Now watch.

As she said that she took the pan off the flames and started to pour off the liquid leaving on the bottom the fruit, which by now had turned, into a mush. She said it slowly, and very ably. Now whatever's left of the blackberries is fit to be thrown away, she said, it's no good any more. It's like our bodies when the moment of death finally arrives, the substance goes off elsewhere and doesn't want to be weighed down. This is the great danger of life, the sorrow that we no longer want to abandon. I learnt that lesson watching a lot of other people. Sometimes it seems as though all people do is become expert in sorrow, their own sorrow. And to begin with, it hurts like an open wound when you rub salt into it, then, with time, you don't seem to feel it any more but it isn't true, it's that you've been overwhelmed by it and you don't notice because you have no healthy spaces left, you've become one with your pain. This is a terrible danger, because with the passing of time the bad thing goes right to the bottom, into your depths of your being, and feeds it, makes it heavy, and when the soul is on the point of taking its leave it's confused, it doesn't know how to take the light road of height which it should rightly go on and it stays here, on earth, it stays here even though it knows this is no longer its proper place. Now, if I tell you that there are any number of these ghostly beings amongst the living, you'll think I'm mad. But I'm telling you that I can feel them, I can feel them as if I could see them with a special inner eye of mine, and when I meet them it grieves me for there is nothing I can do, because the living have no power over these things, they stay alive, do you see what I mean? This island is full of them, as you'll see for yourself. That house down there, for example, the one at the end of the road that they call the priest's house, even though the priest never comes here because he's in America, well, in front of that house, in the garden, there's a strange plant with a single large flower which hasn't faded for years, which always looks fresh and new. Sometimes, at night, exactly where the plant is there's a man from another time, a plant-man who comes back because of the need to show himself to whoever can and wants to see him. But nobody can go near him, just look from a distance, that's all. He seems to count every step of mine every time I go anywhere near him to take a closer look, no more than five and then he disappears. I know it is a soul, one of the many that I see -- a soul that, in his time, has lived too much within the sorrow of the world. We should understand before it's too late that this is no joking matter and pray God to absolve us all.

Do you know what I think? Exactly the opposite of what we normally think, I think we haven't come into the world to suffer. The God of the universe is too good to want harm for us poor creatures of the earth. All this about suffering is the work of the devil, stuff which is put into our head by the one who has as much power as the Lord God of the universe, and who shares this kingdom with him. It's a facile belief to think that suffering strengthens us, but that's not why we were created and put on the face of the earth. When I say things like this people take me for a heretical witch, and that's strange, don't you think? But life is a gift made for joy, and suffering, when it arrives, is only something which we should let accompany us at a distance of several paces, and we should say to it, don't follow me, go another way and let me see the back of you. As strange as it might seem to you, I think life is easy to go along with, naturally divided into different phases. The secret is not to desire anything of the past or the future, and to look with the gentleness of our feelings on all things, whether it's the joy of birth or the sadness of death, as things which will not last. Now I've said enough and the liqueur is ready. All I have to do now is add the alcohol and bottle it for my son. I'll not add anything to what I've said, just that I believe I have lived well, here in my old age and over there in Canada as a young woman, when I danced the chamarrita to remind myself of the place where I was born, but without suffering, with pleasure… you make this movement with your arms … and then this one, without feeling any pain in the bones of your back.