Letter from the Island of Giants

At the foot of the falls - amidst dense forests of Japanese cedars with trunks as straight as ships' masts, magnificent reddish-brown bark and small, plump, shiny needles coiled in a spiral - stretched crystal-clear lakes over which white, sharp terns glided and various species of migratory birds found refuge. There, as everywhere there was shade and water, grew carpets of wild taro, with its huge heart-shaped leaves, also called elephant ears. African elephant, surely, because of how wide they are. Leaves larger even than the giant rhubarb, which also grew here. So large and so similar in shape to those of the wild violets that, proceeding among them or among the tall mosses, I thought I had reached the size of an elf, or a snail, and like this one, peeping out with its antennae above the mums.

So much was I immersed in this astonishing beauty, so much did everything attract and engulf my gaze, that at certain moments I forgot I existed, and it was a sweet disappearance. When I walked along the roads that climbed up the cones of the volcanoes and were the only way to cross the island, because the coast is in many places impassable, to my right and left ran the tall hedges of hydrangeas like a procession of royal welcome, tilting their heads to the wind. If they were interrupted, it was to make way for the flamboyant kahili ginger lilies with their long lance-shaped leaves and sumptuous spikes of yellow flowers that spread an intense, sweet scent similar to that of honeysuckle in the shadows. Amongst these shimmered sometimes the vermilion red of the crocosmia aurea, which the British also call falling star, or the deadly violet of the foxglove. Polynesian, Tibetan, Japanese, African and Australian essences grew luxuriantly here, arriving in the period that followed the great maritime explorations, thus defining the voyages that paved the way for the ruthless plundering of resources, land, treasure and, above all, human lives, carried out by the European empires that stocked up and refuelled on the island - discovered some fifty years before Columbus traded the Caribbean for India - as did the pirates. Whatever the place of origin of the plants, they all had turgid and verdant leaves, nourished as they were by those austere peaks that lifted great masses of humid air from the central Atlantic, causing them to condense and fall in rain on the slopes that plummeted to depths of up to 5,000 metres below sea level.

The waters surrounding the island were no less astonishing than this one: 23 different types of cetaceans had been sighted there, a third of all the world's species. The largest ones that ply the planet: blue, common and boreal whales, and humpback whales - which passed through every spring on their way to the North Pole where krill is abundant - and sperm whales, pilot whales, orcas, zyphids and several species of dolphins, which could be seen all year round, scanning the surface of the ocean where all the shades of blue, violet, grey and silver overlapped as you stretched your gaze to the horizon or moved it across the cardinal points. Above was an unfurling of prodigious, imaginative clouds, intricately interwoven and layered. Also testifying to the processions of the giants of the sea was the architecture of the main harbour, over which cast its shadow the factory chimney where the huge sperm whale carcasses were dismembered and dissolved in oil.

Only the numerous jackrabbits were small on that island.... And now, just as I write this, I finally understand! Foster's rule is the explanation! That principle of zoology also known as the rule of insularity, according to which members of a given species tend to decrease or increase in size over time depending on the resources available to them. Although nowadays it is disputed in its generality, it explains the impression I had of shrinking: I had not become small, it is Flores an island of giants!

'Geography counts for us as much as history' wrote a native poet of that rarefied archipelago, Vitorino Nemésio, of himself and his compatriots: 'like sirens we have a dual nature, we are of flesh and stone'. Some of those rocks must have remained in me too: I realise this now that I am back in this world where wealth is becoming more and more concentrated, and we really do become smaller and more defenceless; where every day we have to contrive to at least keep control of our minds. I bitterly regret when I used to lose myself in the thousands of shades of blue and grey of the ocean and the sky; in the nocturnal chattering of the shearwaters, in the hypnotic observation of their superb, very clear flight at the water's edge; a water ploughed by the small but deadly Portuguese caravels, their lugubrious sail edged in purple; in the joyous choreography of the dolphins, calling each other by name, each one a different whistle. I now understand the sailors who dived to follow them into the depths, dolphins or mermaids that they were. There was little use in copying Odysseus' stratagem, getting himself tied to the ship's mast. From Odysseus' voyage there is never really any return.