Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  When the mist cleared, I saw Peter off to the southeast, paddling south and pointing, for my benefit, out to sea. The southwestern horizon was dark with a monumental set. It was still quite far away. I started paddling southeast, fighting panic, trying not to hyperventilate.

  We made it safely over the set. The waves, however, were the biggest waves I had ever seen from a surfboard. Peter, when we finally stopped paddling, said a strange thing. “At least we know that the ocean can’t produce waves any bigger than that.” I knew what he meant, because that was certainly how it felt. I also knew that, unfortunately, he was wrong. He undoubtedly knew that too. The ocean could produce much bigger waves, and at this rate it probably would. The idea was simply too horrible to contemplate. Better to pretend that some scientific limit had been reached.

  “You know that one you paddled for?”

  I did.

  “You looked like an ant. You were getting sucked up it backward, like you weren’t even paddling. Your board looked like a toothpick. You weren’t even looking back.”

  That was true. I had resolved, overruling basic judgment, not to look back at that wave. Now I knew why Peter had screamed, “No.”

  Our boards, both 8'0" guns, were as useless as skateboards out here. They were far too small.

  The sun was gone.

  “Let’s just paddle for the boat ramp,” I said. “We’re never going to catch one of these.”

  We set off, paddling far to the southeast, away from the surf, and then east, along the coast. Big waves were roaring down the point, but for the moment, at least, there were no more apocalyptic, horizon-blotting sets in sight. We could see people out on the Jardim church terrace, and down on the wall by the boat ramp. It was like old times, except that the crowd now probably included foreign surfers, and if anyone was whistling, the surf was too loud, and we were too far from shore, to hear it. Also, while I couldn’t speak for Peter, I was scared for my life.

  We started angling in above the boat ramp. Whitewater was slamming into the big rocks below the village. We pointed for those rocks, knowing we would get swept downcoast before we reached them. Even so, we underestimated both the level of continuous violence in the impact zone and the power of the inside current. We tried to time the sprint for shore, moving between midsized sets, but we made poor headway through the swirling currents, and then suddenly the village was streaming past us. We were still at least fifty yards from shore. I could hear shouting. But we were flying helplessly past the boat ramp, with no hope of reaching shore. Then I heard Peter yell, “Outside!” We both spun and started sprinting seaward.

  We were in another world now, somewhere east of Jardim. The waves advancing on us were not part of the great pointbreak. They were just giant, shapeless shorebreak, steaming toward a wall of cliff and rocks—a coast unknown to us. The wind wasn’t even offshore down here. The surface was choppy and gray and it seemed we were going to take this set on the head. Without speaking, we veered apart. We did not want to get slammed together or entangled underwater. Three waves broke on us. We both abandoned our boards and swam as deep as we could. Our leashes held, and we managed to stay clear of the rocks. When the set ended, we paddled slowly seaward, both too thrashed to speak. My arms felt like lead-stuffed tubes hanging off my shoulders.

  I stopped paddling. “Let’s head in here,” I said.

  Peter sat up, turned, and studied the shore.

  “Impossible,” he said.

  “I’m going to try.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You’ll get killed.”

  My notion was that I’d get hurt, probably, but not killed. I just wanted to get ashore before it got completely dark. My arms were gone. I didn’t even plan to study the shore. I knew it was extremely rugged, empty coast for miles east of Jardim. Hitting the rocks, trying to scramble up a cliff, would be bad, at best. Still, it seemed preferable to drowning.

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Paddle back to Jardim.”

  “I can’t. My arms are finished.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  This was not a completely worked-out survival plan. But at that stage I trusted Peter’s judgment more than I trusted my own.

  “Okay.”

  We started paddling west, through choppy, heaving, nearly dark water. Slowly, my arms came back. Peter, still much stronger, patiently kept pace with me. It was impossible to tell if we were making progress. The coast on our right was black. The lights of Jardim hove into view, still a long way off. We pointed forty-five degrees above them. Our hope was that we were outside the downcoast current. We were certainly well offshore. Big swells passed beneath us, and then detonated, twenty or thirty seconds later, far inside. It was hard to tell if the village lights were getting closer. But then we noticed smaller lights, lower down, jittering—flashlights. So we were in fact getting closer, and people knew we were out here. There was no coast guard in these parts, but I took some comfort from the flashlights.

  Our plan was half-insane. We hatched it with virtually no discussion. We would paddle far up the point, then separate again, to avoid collision, and this time angle in higher, just under the point. We could no longer see the waves, but when they came, when we heard them, we would take no evasive action. Instead, we would stay on the surface and hope to get blasted shoreward, across the downcoast current. The goal would be to hit the rocks above the boat ramp.

  It worked. After a very long paddle, during which we heard set after set bombing past inside, and the flashlights on the seawall kept gamely waving in vertical strokes, trying to guide us in, we turned, wished each other luck, and struck for the church tower. I didn’t see what route Peter took. I just dug for shore, taking deep, regular breaths. I noticed the smell of the water change as I entered the impact zone. A foamy, sea-bottom smell. I got farther than I expected before I heard a first set wave thunder outside. There was just enough light left in the western sky to let me see a great dark wall of water above me before it hit me.

  Shoving my board away but staying on the surface was profoundly strange, counterinstinctual, and the violence of the wave’s impact from that deliberately vulnerable position was shattering. It flipped me very rapidly and then drove me so deep that I hit the bottom face first. Normally I would have had an arm in front of my face, but I was trying to be a missile, letting the wave propel me where it would. The face-plant in blackness was a shock, but the blow was to my forehead, and it wasn’t particularly fierce, and at least part of the shock was the realization that I was not in very deep water. I was possibly fairly close to shore. When I finally surfaced, the village lights were above me, and the roar of whitewater hitting the rocks was horribly/encouragingly close. I let the next wave hit me the same unnatural way. It drove me onto the rocks, then hauled me off. The downcoast current now had me in its grip. It carried me quickly down the point, very close to shore, bouncing me across the bigger rocks. Another wave came and threw me against the seawall just above the boat ramp. Trapped in a surge, I slid across the mossy surface of the ramp, unable to find a handhold, and spilled off the downcoast side into blackness. I could hear people yelling. They had seen me slide past. I could hear my board clonking hollowly—it was still attached to my ankle. Then the current, interrupted by the rock wall of the ramp, lost its hold on me as the shorebreak drained off the rocks. I got an arm around a rock, hung on, and felt the water, weakening, leave me. I turned and, from a sitting position, hauled in my board across the rocks. With it under my arm, I scampered up the lee wall of the boat ramp. And there was Peter, staggering up the same wet-moss incline with his board.

  • • •

  “YOU SURFERS HAVE NO RESPECT for your parents, no respect for your family and friends. To go out there and risk your lives in such a sea—for what? You have no respect for this village, for the generations of fis
hermen who have risked their lives in the sea in order to feed their families. People here have lost their lives, and lost their loved ones, in this sea. You have no respect for them!”

  These were the imprecations (my translation) of an old woman in Jardim, berating four Portuguese surfers on the seawall next to the boat ramp shortly after they had attempted to paddle out on a big day. They had failed, snapping boards and leashes, and had just washed in, thoroughly whipped. I happened to catch the tirade. This was two years after our sundown Götterdämmerung. Nobody had chastised us that night, but the old woman’s feelings were, I had since learned, a common sentiment in the village. There were exceptions—José Nunes talked feelingly about the courage of certain surfers, notably a goofyfoot from New Zealand named Terence. But most villagers had grown bored (if not appalled) by surfing, aside from the few commercial opportunities that surf tourism afforded.

  Peter had not come back. Gnarly as he was, he had taken a hint from our close calls. When I asked him about it some time later, he said, “Things were finally set up like I wanted, and this one slipup was going to ruin it, and make a lot of people sad.” I could have said the same thing. In fact, I should have said it. But I lacked his clarity. I wasn’t through with Madeira.

  I was staying in a room on the point in Jardim. My landlady, Rosa, lived downstairs. She was in her twenties, born in the village. Her husband was in England, working at a fast-food restaurant at Gatwick Airport. Rosa had two rooms that she let to visiting surfers. Both were tiny and bare, but they looked straight down on the great wave. The eight dollars a night I paid didn’t seem to brighten the family financial picture much. Rosa’s mother lived with her, and the two of them would walk up the mountain to the main road at Prazeres, a grueling one-hour hike, rather than pay a few escudos for the bus. Like all rural Madeirans, they had formidable legs.

  Jardim, for all its beauty, was a melancholy and fractious place. There were family feuds. There was a bearded woman, mentally impaired, always barefoot. In her youth she had been, I was told, sexually abused by men and boys. One night she fell off the cliff near the point, landing on the rocks in a sitting position, dead. Some people thought she had jumped. There was a young woman, bright and frustrated with village life, who angrily rebuked me for walking on the shore, under the cliffs, to Ponta Pequena. Her brother, she said, had been killed by falling rocks on that path. A cheap homemade sugarcane rum known as aguardente took a toll on the village, particularly on unemployed men.

  The only really prosperous family seemed to be the Vasconcellos. They were the traditional overlords of Jardim. The family’s members all lived in Funchal now, or Lisbon, but they had run the place for centuries. All of Madeira had been divided up and handed out, complete with serfs and slaves, to factions and individuals on the lower half of the Portuguese crown’s long list of toadies. Old Jardimeiros remembered when villagers were required to carry priests and rich people up and down the mountains in hammocks. This was before the road was built down from Prazeres, in 1968. There had been a fat priest whose visits were particularly dreaded. And the island’s history only got darker the farther back you looked.

  The quinta—the manor house—in Jardim belonged to the Vasconcellos. It was a rambling, crumbling old place with its own chapel, easily the biggest house in town. One year, the village council gathered its courage and asked the quinta family if it could convert some of the family’s banana fields into a soccer field. There was no other patch of land in Jardim large or level enough for a field, and every other village—even lowdown, raggedy-ass Paul do Mar—had one. The quinta family, or perhaps its lawyers, said no. “Não.” So one night, not long afterward, somebody snuck into the quinta family’s fields and chopped down all the banana trees. The following winter, when I came back to Jardim, the fields had not been replanted. Rosa smirked when I asked her about it. She seemed to believe that replanting would just inspire more vandalism. What I couldn’t tell was whether she thought the attack on the bananas was a justified peasant revolt or a shameful, destructive act. I could never figure out what people in Jardim really thought about anything political. I despised the quinta family on principle. It probably helped that I never met any of them.

  I had spent that fall reporting on the civil war in Sudan. On days without waves, I sat at a card table in my room writing about Nile geopolitics, famine, slavery, political Islam, cattle-herding nomads, and my travels with Sudanese guerrillas in the liberated, terrifying South Sudan. I spent a lot of time staring at wind-torn ocean. We were plagued that year by southeast winds—“the devil’s fart,” I heard a Cornish surfer call them. At low tide the villagers picked lapas (limpets) off the exposed rocks. There was a dwarf, Kiko, who went for lapas, but his legs were too short for clambering across big, slippery rocks and his struggles were painful to watch. At high tide, though, Kiko spearfished off the point, and then he was in his element. His swim fins and his masked head looked huge at either end of his muscular, abbreviated body. He would disappear underwater for what seemed like minutes. People said he wriggled fearlessly into crevices where the octopus hid. Born and raised in Jardim, Kiko knew every boulder in the sea off the village. He sold his catch to a local café, the Tar Mar, where his octopus was a house specialty. I often ate it.

  I liked to study the movements of the small fishing boats working the steep bank off Jardim. On still nights they would stay out, their yellow lights bravely knitting the blackness under a sheet of stars. The Portugese national anthem is “Heróis do Mar”—Heroes of the Sea. And The Lusiads, the sixteenth-century epic poem that enjoys pride of place in the country’s literature, is oceanic in both rhythm and subject, celebrating Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in more than a thousand stanzas of ottava rima. The poem is fantastical and too ornate for modern tastes, but it is terrific on the sea and ships. Small details come radiantly into focus, just as they do in the architecture of the Portuguese Empire’s golden era—the Manueline style, it’s called, after King Manuel I. Even in the stonecarving around church doors of the period, the finest details (bits of perfectly rendered coral, shockingly accurate seaweed) are invariably maritime. Henry the Navigator, King John II—the Portuguese Renaissance was brief but rich and solidly sea-centered. By the time Luís de Camöes, a hard-luck patriot and sailor and the author of The Lusiads, wrote his masterpiece, the Inquisition was on and the empire was in terminal decline—already in hock to German bankers.

  I wondered if the keening, nostalgic sadness of the fado, the national folk music, which is itself often sea-themed, came from a pervasive sense of lost grandeur. More likely I was just hearing the fado’s Arabic taproots. Portugal, like Spain, has always been Western Europe’s interlocutor and borderland with Morocco and Muslim North Africa.

  Madeira, which is closer to Morocco than to Europe, was uninhabited until 1420, when Portuguese explorers stumbled on it. The island was heavily wooded—hence its name. The settlers cleared the land by burning the primeval forests. One great fire burned out of control, according to legend, for seven years. Madeira became a center of the sugar trade and then the slave trade. Everything came and went by sea, and in that sense Madeira was more Portuguese than Portugal: it was even more pelagic. These days, the island’s economic mainstay is tourism. Cruise ships call in Funchal, a city bristling with hotels, casinos, and tourist shops. Germans, Brits, and Scandinavians ride around the island in enormous buses and tiny rental cars. The more adventurous hike the mountains and gorges.

  At one point that winter, I came down with a nasty cold. Rosa’s mother, Cecilia, got it too. She blamed her illness on a fruit seller who had failed to wash the pesticides off a batch of custard apples. We went together in my car to a clinic down the coast in Calheta. Cecilia was coughing, her eyes swollen. We kept passing men with big yellow jerry cans strapped to their backs and wandlike nozzles in their hands—pesticide sprayers. Cecilia glared at the men, muttering.

  But we each got well in time for Carnival, a lo
cal festa that runs for four days and ends with a blowout celebrated on Shrove Tuesday. In Jardim people were gathering at the Tar Mar. Rosa and Cecilia and Rosa’s little niece and nephew were rigging up party costumes. They dressed me in an atrocious lime-green wig and big disco sunglasses and we all headed over to the café.

  At least half the village was at the party. The jukebox was blasting samba, Europop, fados. Most people were in costume—little kids in superhero capes and bunny rabbit outfits, with many adults done up, to my surprise, as ugly, oversexed women with huge breasts, huge pillow-enhanced bottoms, big wigs, and rubber masks with deep wrinkles and too much makeup. A certain hysteria surrounded these flamboyant hags, mainly because one couldn’t tell if the person inside the costume was male or female. The painted ladies were dancing and carousing and flirting outrageously, but were careful not to speak. I was no doubt more in the dark than others about who was actually who, but the giddy confusion and sexy buffoonery were general. And a collective delirium seemed to build through the evening as the wine flowed and the music pounded and laughter broke in great waves against the ceiling. It was a brilliant party, and, surrounded by witty disguise, I had never felt closer to the secret, unspoken communal life of Jardim do Mar.