10:00 a.m.
Nora was worn out after the party. Catalina, her lifelong enemy, and the friends of a woman named Carlota had behaved quite abominably, doing things that went far beyond eroticism to filth. Filthy women. And they spent a long time talking about her, in Bulgarian, and laughing with vulgar cackles. Her persecutors were insulting her on her right and her protectors were soothing her on her left. Pleasant in one ear, belligerent in the other. Finally Armando and his chorus arrived and she had relations with all of them.
“I curse the day I failed to reach him,” said Nora, who had sat down on the porch to meditate. “Life of pleasures by my side, and here alone without you I am starting over again.”
The sun was beating down now. Some brown boobies were plunging like furled umbrellas into the water that would at that moment be surrounding her sons and her husband and, like them, were fishing for fish that looked like stones. Nora rocked back and forth in a chair that wasn’t a rocking chair and twisted her hair with one finger until her head hurt and tears nearly came to her eyes. Then she stroked her face with her fingertips. A black dog scuttled by on the ground like a cockroach on the ceiling.
“Boat, boat,” said the dog.
“Dungeon he gave her as a pillow,” the throng suddenly sang from the coconut palms, startling her. “Far from her life. Far from her home. Perfect image that she would lose. A mischievous life, hers was, playful ever since childhood. Why, when she’d been dreaming tangerine dreams, did her spirit grow ill and her soul shatter into pieces and die, alone, in her hands?”
The echo of the voices reached the mangroves and then the highway and the cattle ranches, farther back, where the zebus were grazing in the still-cool morning. Later they would seek to evade the searing sun in the shadow of the trees.
“Yes,” said Nora. “Cursed. May the water take you and carry you away.”
On the sand’s far horizon, a mirage was forming that became an apparition, then a person, and then a stout woman walking toward her with a wide basket of coconut candy on her head.
“Rhythmically the African population walks to the pounding of drums,” the throng intoned.
“Good morning, Doña Nora. I’ve got your papaya candy, your coconut sweets, your tamarind treats.”
“Your tamarind treats!” sang the chorus from the coconut palms.
Nora went to the bungalow’s kitchenette to fetch a soup bowl, and the woman filled it with candies that the twins would pay for later. She put a piece of candied papaya in her mouth; it was still warm, and the crunchy sugar flooded her ears with flavor, and she closed her eyes as the delicious sunny sweetness descended and ran all through her.
It didn’t matter whether the chorus suspected or did not suspect what was happening at that moment, but they must have known something, Nora thought, since everybody had started to sing:
“Fish, one after another, one, two, three, say thirty-three!”
“See you later, Doña Nora.”
“Wind,” Nora nodded.
The cockroach skittered past on the sand and the patches of scraggly grass in front of the house. She felt out of sorts, then sad, and said:
“Sea squalls that batter my life.”
She knew that high up in the sky, where she couldn’t see them, three black gulls were flying, with red beaks and feet, the kind that never fly low and are very beautiful even though they also resemble carrion birds. Swallow-tailed kites. Had the King died? Terrifying, terrifying. Had Doña Libe come by today? Was the morning already over, the morning of this day on which the imponderable was bearing down on the sea? Nora’s time, like everybody else’s, always moved in just one direction, toward the origin, but it was raked by powerful, disorienting winds.
She ate the whole plate of papaya and coconut candies and then craved salt. She’d had an early breakfast – eggs and boiled cornmeal dumplings – and now she wanted bread with costeño cheese and a cold glass of Colombiana soda. Nora ate too much and had gotten fat. The beautiful figure she’d had before the madness was long gone. “I had gorgeous legs – everybody wanted to eat me up,” she would say from time to time, out of the blue, making people uncomfortable. The medications damaged her teeth, and now she was missing several incisors. She rarely brushed her hair, though she enjoyed taking baths, and she spent much of the day in a robe or slip.
Wearing a slip, Nora went to the hotel kitchen and asked the cook for bread and costeño cheese and sat down in a chair to eat. The sea wasn’t visible from there, but you could hear it. In the mornings the waves rolled slowly in the gulf and got rougher as the day went on. The salty costeño cheese had to be eaten in small bites and with lots of bread. The local bread was almost sweet; the Colombiana, very cold, spicy from all the carbonation, foamy. Suddenly the chorus started chanting so loudly that Nora couldn’t hear what the cook was saying to her, much less what the sea was murmuring a hundred meters away:
“Rarefied sun. Vengeance. Gale, stone, and wall.”
“Yes,” Nora answered heatedly, unable to hear what the cook was still saying. “Cancellation and stupor.”
The cook finished saying what she’d been saying, whatever it was, smiled, and floated off, round as a balloon, to work at the counter beside the stove. The chicken flew up, split into pieces, and plunged into the stewpot. With two strokes of the knife, the plantain lost its tips and was flayed. Another three rapid strokes chopped it into pieces and it, too, dropped into the abyss. A little cloud of cumin floated in the air. Then a larger cloud of annatto, as if a sapote-colored demon had opened its wings above the pot of what would become sancocho stew. Ten filets of sea bass were waiting, pellucid, on a cutting board. The manioc was white, like the nape of an angel’s neck. Horrible! The tropics, the tropics, thought Nora.
Wind.
11:00 a.m.
Javier pulled out the pipe and marijuana again and took a drag, holding back the smoke, silently releasing it and making sure it didn’t blow toward his father. The calm that sometimes emanated from things was something the old man had never managed to enjoy and could not understand. It was fine to like money and business dealings – greed makes the world go ’round, thought Javier – but there was no need to get irritated about everything else.
The sun beat down on the boat from the cloudless sky.
Javier pulled three mandarin oranges out of his bag and tossed one to Mario and another to his father. They caught them without thanking him and peeled the fruit, and a mandarin-scented stain spread over the boat, the intense flavor invading them all, especially – since he’d been smoking – Javier. Time passed. They didn’t talk much. Javier pondered aimlessly, sometimes thinking, sometimes silently admiring the sea and the sun and how clean they were, sometimes admiring the storm that off to the north had already overpowered the coastline and blotted it out. He thought about Mario. He thought about his father, hatless as the sun grew fiercer by the minute.
He pulled out his clip-on sunglasses and attached them with a click to protect himself from the sun that, despite the bill of his cap, was now making him squint. A blue runner hooked itself on his first fishing rod, and he pulled it out of the water after a struggle that was intense, efficient, brief. The fish kept nibbling. When he ran out of bait, Javier tossed his bowl made of coconut shell so it landed by his father’s feet, next to the cooler that contained the backpack filled with sardines and shrimp.
“Some bait, would you?” he said.
In the boat’s forty square feet, everything seemed larger and more complicated.
“So the ducks are shooting at the hunters now,” the father said.
The bowl had fallen too forcefully into the muddle of water and fish in the bottom of the boat, splashing and humiliating the father. Javier realized that his request for bait had also sounded peremptory, and that all it took was the merest hint of an insult on his sons’ part to raise the father’s hackles.
“Hunters?” he said, aware that his father knew that he, Javier, had understood and was now playing dumb just to annoy him.
Javier agilely dodged the hurled bowl, which could have given him a deep gash in the bridge of his nose and knocked his glasses off. The bowl landed five meters from the boat, and Mario, without saying anything, dove into the sea and brought it back in two strokes of his arms. Mario climbed out of the water, passed his own coconut-shell bowl full of bait to Javier, and, dripping, headed to the cooler and filled the one he’d just retrieved, careful not to look at the father or bump against him.
Almost noon. The fish were biting less now. Javier thought that if they went back now, they would have had a good day’s work anyway, but neither Mario nor his father was going to agree. He estimated they had about four hundred pounds of fish. Most of them were still opening and closing their mouths, and some of them were still flopping around, but as long as more were still biting, he, Mario, and their father would keep fishing – they’d keep going even if the fish stopped biting altogether. There was still the rest of the day and then the night, for deep-water fishing, where you could catch grouper, tarpon, and other large species. Afterward, if the sea got rough, they’d toss the excess overboard.
After the bait incident, the atmosphere became even more tense and the boat seemed to grow heavier. Javier used a coconut-shell bowl to scoop out the water in the bottom of the boat, which now covered the tangled cushion of shuddering or suffocated fish. His movements were precise, swift, those of a person who’d been bailing out boats since he was a kid. The father, Mario, Javier, the fish, the boat, and the sea itself were a horn of plenty on the brink of the abyss. The breeze was gentle. Things might shift from that serene blue in a fraction of a second, thought Javier, at any fraction of a second, to a world of confusion and death.
He finished bailing, stood up, and urinated into the ocean. He thought, What if I turn around and piss on the old fucker, but he didn’t do it, more out of habitual respect than out of fear. Looking off at the horizon, which was empty of sails and clouds, and without urinating on his father, he stuffed his member back into his shorts and sat down to fish. He was looking after three lines, and he hadn’t gotten many breaks so far. He preferred shrimp to sardines, but his father never let him choose his bait when he retrieved it from the cooler.
Between eleven fifty in the morning and twelve noon, nothing happened. Javier’s watch was large, the scuba-diving kind, and it glittered on his strong, hairy arm. None of the three caught any fish during that brief period. But there was no need for anything remarkable to happen for existence itself to be remarkable, even admirable, at least for Javier, to whom marijuana presented a world of vast detail and slowness.
From his spot in the boat, he could see his father’s hairy arms, very similar to his own. He traced their veins, which looked as if they were carved in wood, and pictured the powerful tree of blood rhythmically swelling his father with the beating of his heart. His heart must be the size of a green coconut, same as his balls, Javier thought absurdly. Then he saw a flock of boobies fly overhead, heading toward the coast, and followed them with his gaze and there was the storm. The gray blotch was expanding, more mineral in appearance, lit by lightning in its core as if what was being produced was not sorcery – which is human evil, small-minded evil – but something larger and more impersonal. Through his dark glasses, Javier was also able to surreptitiously observe his brother’s profile; Mario’s thoughts seemed to be elsewhere as he focused on a bunch of fishing lines, some with cane rods, others wooden, which he cast and then propped one by one carefully along the boat’s gunwale. He was also holding a line in his mouth. Mario had already separated out some fish to use as live bait, and they were in a bucket of water, their fins and gills hardly moving, waiting for nighttime, when they would hang on metal hooks, and then grouper and crevalle jacks, in attempting to devour them, would also die. Javier suddenly thought about his father’s death. Death’s the only thing that exists, he thought, a little overwhelmed by these most recent images the marijuana was bringing him.
As a distraction from his dark thoughts rather than out of thirst, he asked his brother for a bottle of water. His Adam’s apple, just below the edge of his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, rose and fell many times as his father watched, seeming to have guessed, Javier thought, what had been passing through his mind.
Noon. He felt his father’s gaze on the nape of his neck for a good while. He turned his head when he was sure the old man had stopped looking at him just in time to see the father leap onto one of his rods and almost tumble into the water from the momentum and the fish’s pull. The size of the animal that finally emerged from the sea, after a tough fight in which the father seemed to be hauling a motorcycle or a jeep transmission out of the deeps, was startlingly small – only twelve pounds, Javier guessed – in proportion to the tenacious resistance it had exhibited. That’s jacks for you, he thought. He eyed his father with a certain curiosity; the father looked tense, wound up, triumphant. The old bastard and the sea, thought Javier, and he started rummaging for his marijuana pipe in the bottom of his bag.
12:00 p.m.
I’m the tourist taking cover from the blazing noonday sun in his camping tent, sometimes reading and sometimes staring at the sea. I was sitting in a canvas chair on the tent’s sort of front patio, under a wide awning made of lime-green nylon held up by two aluminum tubes, light as feathers and strong as bones. My wife and son were sleeping in the tent behind me, her in her bikini and him naked. My son was two years old, very handsome and sturdy and healthy. The tent was excellent, easy to set up, easy to carry – a gift from my wife’s sister, who lives in Miami and always buys the most expensive and modern versions of everything. “It’s nicer than a lot of the hotels I’ve stayed in,” I told her by way of thanks. In fact, I’d argue it was the best tent on the whole island, the lightest and most waterproof, the most lime-colored, probably the best one that’s ever been pitched along these beaches.
I was thirty years old, the same as my wife. Sometimes my desire for her was insatiable and consumed my days. She desired me too, so sometimes love was what consumed our days. The sea is so beautiful at midday. The father and the twins had sailed past that beach a few hours earlier, while we were sleeping. The people on the island knew them, of course, and later commented that it had been quite foolish of them to go out despite the brewing storm.
I’d met the boys a year earlier in Bogotá in the restaurant and bar owned by a mutual friend. They’d been visiting their paternal grandmother, who lived in the Teusaquillo neighborhood. At the bar, the twins told me about their lives. They didn’t say much about their mother, except that she was sick, and they didn’t speak too harshly of their father. They spoke glowingly of the sea and the mangroves and told me how much I’d enjoy a few days in the hotel, “since you like painting water so much.” I had just paid out of my own pocket – or, rather, my pocket, my wife’s, and also those of a few friends – to publish an illustrated book of very short poems about the sea, rain, and rivers, a book I handed out in person, one at a time, since in my view that’s how poetry should be distributed. I gave a copy to each twin, of course, with a hug and everything, signed.
I liked them, each in his own way. Mario was good-looking, resembling – if you stretched things a bit – one of those young men painted by Renaissance artists. His skin was too tanned and a little blotchy, and his blond curls looked scorched and straw-like from the sun. In his light-colored eyes there was always a glint, a splinter of alarm or terror or anguish, as if a significant part of his soul had been crouched and huddled somewhere since childhood. The two brothers didn’t look anything alike. Javier had strong features, like his father’s, and just as there was a glint of terror in Mario’s eyes, in Javier’s there was another, not so much of cruelty or mercilessness, but of audacity, toughness, willingness to push limits. When he started drinking, you began to feel a bit uneasy, since t
he kind of happiness he exuded was dangerous in the right circumstances. And the circumstances were right that night at our friend’s bar. It had gotten late and they were closing up, and I’d been drunk for a while and was crashed out in a chair when Javier got swept up in a brawl and Mario joined in, right outside in front of the place. I heard that ultimately the two of them had made the other guys – I don’t know if they were gang members or muggers, but in any event there were a lot of them – drop their knives and run.
Before coming to the coast, I’d gone by one of those wonderful large secondhand bookstores in Bogotá and bought the fifty thousand pesos’ worth of books Javier had asked me for. I brought a list of what he already had and chose more according to my own taste. I bought a lot of things he hadn’t read or didn’t own, but not as many as I’d thought I’d be able to get with that money. Money never goes far when you’re buying books, even used ones, and everything ended up fitting into two small cardboard boxes that didn’t weigh much. Javier collected the boxes from me at the Montería airport, where he’d come in his father’s jeep to pick us up.
Back at the hotel, I didn’t get much of a chance to talk with them since they were busy taking care of the other guests. I had a few drinks with Javier the day I arrived and we chatted a little about books and poetry. I didn’t see him much after that since he was off taking guests to the swamp in the motorboat or taking them waterskiing. My wife, the baby, and I stayed at Playamar for just three days. There was too much going on – too much noise, too much blaring music by Rodolfo Aicardi and Los Graduados, too many people walking along the beaches clutching bottles of aguardiente – so we decided to go out to the islands.
The woman who sold us lunch after we arrived suggested to my wife that we sleep in her house that night since the tide was high and the water might flood the beach where our tent was pitched and drag us all out to sea. She had a room with three hammocks, so that night we slept in hammocks. Our son made friends with the woman’s kids, and it was wonderful to watch him playing with those beautiful black children.
The Storm Page 4