We don’t know how the goats came. Perhaps there was a pair of goats on board, for the milk, and they swam ashore from the wreck. Ours were strong, large goats, they had a great many young. They had many more young than we had; in the end they ate up the island — the grass, the trees, at night in our houses we could hear those long front teeth of theirs, paring it away. When the rains came our soil had nothing to hold it, although we made terraces of stones. It washed away and disappeared into the shining sea. We killed and ate a lot of goats but they occupied some parts of the island where we couldn’t get at them with our ropes and knives, and every year there were more of them. Someone remembered us — a sailor’s tale of people who had never seen the mainland of the world? — and we were recruited. We took our grandmothers and the survivors of our matings of father and daughter, brother and sister (we never allowed matings of mother and son, we were Christians in our way, in custom brought down to us from the shipwreck) and we emigrated to these great open lands — America, Australia, Africa. We cleaned the streets and dug the dams and begged and stole; became like anybody else. The children forgot the last few words of the shipwreck dialect we once had spoken. Our girls married and no longer bore our name. In time we went into the armies, we manned the street stands selling ice-cream and hot dogs, all over the mainland that is the world.
The goats died of famine. They were able to swim to survival from a ship, but not across an ocean. Vegetation and wildlife, altered forever by erosion, crept back: blade by blade, footprint by footprint. Sea-birds screamed instead of human infants. The island was nevertheless a possession; handed out among the leftovers in the disposition of territories made by victors in one or other of the great wars waged on the mainland. But neither the United States nor Britain, nor the Soviet Union, was interested in it; useless, from the point of view of its position, for defence of any sea-route. Then meteorologists of the country to which it had been given found that position ideal for a weather station. It has been successfully manned for many years by teams of meteorologists who, at first, made the long journey by ship, and more recently and conveniently by plane.
A team’s tour of duty on the island is a year, during which the shine of the sea blinds them to the mainland as it did those who once inhabited the island. A long year. A plane brings supplies every month, and there is communication by radio, but — with the exception of the goats, the islanders must have kept goats, there are the bones of goats everywhere — the team has neither more nor less company than the islanders had. Of course, these are educated people, scientists, and there is a reasonable library and taped music; even whole plays recorded, someone in one of the teams left behind cassettes of Gielgud’s Lear and Olivier’s Othello — there is a legend that Othello was blown in to anchor at the island. The personnel are subject to the same pests the original inhabitants suffered — ticks, mosquitoes, recurrent plagues of small mice. Supposedly to eat the mice, but maybe (by default of the softness of a woman?) to have something warm to stroke while the winter gales try to drown the weather station in the sea that cuts it adrift from humankind, a member of a team brought two kittens with him from the mainland on his tour of duty. They slept in his bed for a year. They were fed tit-bits by everyone at that table so far from any other at which people gather for an evening meal.
The island is not near anywhere. But as it is nearest to Africa, when the islanders left towards the end of the last century, some went there. Already there were mines down in the south of the continent and the communities of strangers diamonds and gold attract; not only miners, but boardinghouse- bar- and brothel-keepers, shopkeepers and tradesmen. So most of the islanders who went to Africa were shipped to the south and, without skills other than fishnet-making and herding goats — which were redundant, since commercially-produced nets were available to the fishing fleets manned by people of mixed white, Malay, Indian and Khoikhoi blood, and only the blacks, who minded their own flocks, kept goats — they found humble work among these communities. Exogamous marriage made their descendants’ hair frizzier or straighter, their skin darker or lighter, depending on whether they attached themselves in this way to black people, white people, or those already singled out and named as partly both. The raw-faced, blue-eyed ones, of course, disappeared among the whites; and sometimes shaded back, in the next generation, to a darker colour and category — already there were categories, laws that decreed what colour and degree of colour could live where. The islanders who were absorbed into the darker-skinned communities became the Khans and Abramses and Kuzwayos, those who threaded away among the generations of whites became the Bezuidenhouts, Cloetes, Labuschagnes and even the Churches, Taylors and Smiths.
The Teraloynas are an obscure curiosity in the footnotes of ethnologists. The surname survives here and there; the people who bear it are commonly thought, without any evidence but a vague matching of vowel sounds, to be of Spanish or Portuguese origin. Linguists interested in the distortion of proper names in multilingual, colonized countries have suggested the name probably derives from a pidgin contraction of two words the shipwrecked, presumably French-speaking, used to describe where they found themselves. ‘Terre’—earth, ‘loin’—far: the far earth.
The Teraloynas occupy no twig on the family trees of white people. Whites in that country have not yet acquired the far-sighted circumspection of claiming a trace of black in their genes, and blacks who, in pride of origin and search for unity among their different shades of black, claim an admixture of the blood of non-negroid indigenes, the Khoikhoi and San, never bother to assert kinship with such scarcely-identifiable bastard groups as the St. Helenans (Napoleon had a forced stay on their island) or the Teraloynas. Those of Teraloyna descent whose blood is so diluted that no one — least of all themselves — could learn from the shape of their mouths and noses, the lie of their hair, from their names or habits of speech that they have such ancestry, sometimes fly in Business Class over their island: down there, all wrinkled and pleated in erosion, all folds (the ravines where the goats held out so long) and dark inlets edged at the mouth by the spittle of the sea — it is not marked on the coloured route map in the flight magazine provided in each seat-pocket. Their island; and they emigrated from that unrecognized piece of earth, poked up out of the sea, to the great open lands — America, Australia, Africa. They doze in their seats.
When a certain black carpenter draws a splinter from under his nail, the bubble of blood that comes after it is Teraloyna. And when a certain young white man, drafted into military service straight from school, throws a canister of tear-gas into a schoolyard full of black children and is hit on the cheek by a cast stone, the broken capillaries ooze Teraloyna lifeblood.
It is a mere graze, he is lucky, he might have lost a blue eye.
This year there are six hundred cats on the island. An estimate: there may be many more, they breed in the ravines. Their mating howls sound terrifyingly over the night sea. Othello would turn about in horror from an island of demons. Survivors from a wreck would rather go under than make for that other death.