The Storm

by Tomas Gonzalez

  The storm seemed to be static, but raging. After swallowing most of the coast, it stopped, still very far away, locked up in its fury. It wasn’t expanding, but its grays contrasted more and more intensely with the green of the sea, and the dark blue line separating the gray-almost-black from the turquoise was becoming more sharply defined. Mario was sure that the people on the island had told Javier it was foolish to go out in these conditions and Javier had chosen not to say anything to his brother and father. And he’s right. What’s the point? Mario thought. The King’s going to insist on going out anyway, no matter what. And it makes no difference to me. If we drown, we drown – no great loss. Though I do feel bad about Javier. And our crazy mother.

  For a while the only sounds they heard were the motor and the monotonous thudding of the hull against the waves. Mario stopped thinking about his father and for a very long, mercifully long, time he became one with the boat, with the motor and the sea, and took a break from being Mario. Then the motor coughed twice and recovered. It coughed again and cut off.

  “Carburetor,” said Javier.

  On engine-powered vessels – ocean liners and thirty-foot fishing boats alike – a feeling of powerlessness descends immediately when the motor goes out. Even the smallest ripple jostles the hull, and life’s true proportions are reestablished. The vessel’s power on the water is revealed to be an illusion, and all that remains is its inert arrogance. Fear of thirst, sun, and hunger emerges: fear of death.

  He’s glaring at me like I shut it off on purpose, thought Mario, who was happy about the situation, since if there was any area in which he surpassed his father it was in his knowledge of outboard motors. Now he’s going to ask me why it went out when it’s almost new.

  “Goddamn practically brand-new motor,” the father said in his rough Antioquian accent, which contrasted with his sons’ gentle coastal speech.

  The twin knew his father was clueless, totally inept when it came to motors. The disgust he felt at the engine grease was visible a mile off, the way he tried to avoid getting it on his hands, which, though they were strong, hairy, tough, had lately been too well taken care of, now manicured by Iris, his new younger wife – the fingernails of a flirty old man, a lecherous old man, a disgraceful old man, Mario thought. Just to annoy him, he decided to take his time fixing the motor, which, as Javier had said, had gone out because some gunk was blocking the flow of the gasoline.

  Mario knew he had his father by the balls.

  Now that they weren’t moving, the sun pounded them like a battering ram. Mario disassembled the motor while Javier and the father portioned out lunch. Javier set a plate down on the bench next to his brother, but Mario didn’t even look at him. The rice and beans were aglow in the bright tropical sun. Mario removed little parts and arranged them neatly, like pieces of jewelry, on a red chamois he had spread out on the bench, and from time to time he picked up the plate and took a few bites. The sea rippled gently, dazzling. Mario was all too familiar with the way his father ate when he was in a foul mood. He chewed quickly and eyed his food contemptuously, as if he were doing it a favor by eating it. Mario knew all of his father’s facial expressions by heart.

  “Do you have to take apart that whole thing?” Javier asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “You’re going to take apart the whole motor?”

  “You want to fix it, then?”

  “No, no, no. Keep going.”

  “It looks pretty bad,” Mario said, studying the motor. He glanced up at the sea. “And there’s a current, so we’re going to end up drifting if we can’t get it started. And the sea’s not looking good.”

  Nobody mentioned death but there it was, decked out in hood, cape, and scythe, perched on one of the benches.

  “Pretty bad, my ass,” said the father. “You just get it running, you hear me?”

  “Your wish is my command, Your Majesty,” the twin muttered, removing another part.

  The jewels multiplied on the chamois. Mario blew on parts, rinsed them in fresh water, held them up toward the sun and squinted at them, rinsed them with gasoline, dried them with a rag, blew and looked again. I can make sure we all drown if I feel like it, you miserable old bastard. Either that or die of thirst, he thought. Half of the motor gleamed in pieces on the bench, and the other half was a carapace full of bones. Mario realized his father was observing his skill with fascination and involuntary admiration.

  The old bastard’s already having some doubts, he thought, ecstatic.

  3:00 p.m.

  “A wave always arrives at its destination, and it always starts out from its place of origin,” says the mother as if she were describing in detail, rather than prophesying, an imminent event. “Same with the wind. Wave and wind. Human heart.”

  She’d gone to the kitchen looking for lunch and sat down at the table with the members of her retinue. The neckbone of the chicken was dissolving in her mouth, and the cook warned her, or maybe it was her conscience, to be careful not to choke on a vertebra or on the head either, which was watching her with curious, mocking eyes. A breeze blew through the restaurant. The succulent yam split open under her fork like a hot iceberg.

  “And the plantain. Look! The plantain!” she said.

  “Motorboat, motorboat becalmed in its solitude,” the throng chorused in response, reminding her of the existence of the father, her husband, the King, whom Nora had forgotten while she slurped the chicken head and sliced the yam with her fork.

  “Oh, yes, oh!” replied the mother, Queen of Persia and Playamar, saying “oh” again and again until the cook came over to see what was going on.

  “May God forgive him for his wickedness, and forgive them if they end up doing what the sea suggests!”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that, Doña Nora, no, no,” advised the cook, who was black, born and raised in Santiago de Tolú. She had an age-old sadness in her eyes and smile and, on top of the sadness, joy.

  “Oh dear, what are we going to do, Cordelia!” Nora said.

  “Imogenia. Don’t shout, you’ll frighten the angels. Cordelia’s my cousin, remember? She helps out on Sundays. She lives in Múcura.”

  Nora wasn’t sure the cook had actually mentioned angels, and this uncertainty provoked a twinge of terror. “Names, names, what do names matter?” she said hastily. “Go on, Imogenia, go get me a little more sancocho, but don’t tell Him – he’ll kill me.”

  “Him!” cried the throng in the distance, startling her.

  They’d all headed off toward the beach to sing with the waves in the background, which had grown larger and filled near to bursting with light. “Him who caused so much pain. Him who is killing her, has killed her, will kill her,” the throng cried, and boom, the wave fell, opening up its fans across the sand, ushhhhh, like labyrinths of the soul. Nora heard every detail of its sandy seepings and tiny eddies, like those of sadness. And the sea stretched out at their feet, slowly, with all its lugubrious bolts of imperial silk.

  “Sea that grows shadowy with my love,” said Nora as sturdy Imogenia grew progressively smaller and more compassionate, as if she were moving away through the eyepiece of a telescope or through the tunnel of death.

  Imogenia returned. She was actually part of the plot the death squads were cooking up against Nora with her husband’s help, and she wasn’t the least bit compassionate, or at least not a reliable bit, and the treacherous cook was coming with the bowl of sancocho, accompanied by her husband, who was black with powerful arms, arms that could at any moment, together with Imogenia’s, tie her to the bed the way you would a goat. Nora knew the King had instructed them to tie her down and summon a nurse from a luxury hotel twenty minutes away to sedate her. That could happen any time the boys weren’t around – they never would have put up with it and would have stood up to their father and cut the slave’s throat to keep him from tying her up and poisoning her with sed
atives or giving her electroshocks, as had happened a few times before.

  “Everything all right, Doña Nora?” inquired the black man, who looked like a prince in his arrogance and elegant clothing.

  “If it weren’t for the hatred and resentment in your eyes that expose you as a slave, you would have had me fooled!” Nora said, and let out a gale of laughter that revealed the pink gaps of several missing incisors and the blackness of her molars.

  “Calm down now, Doña Nora, or I’ve got the strap and the syringe over there,” the evil black man replied. When her boys were around (not the husband, whose most obsequious slave he was), the scoundrel was more careful about the way he talked to her.

  “Don’t talk like that, don’t be cruel – you get her even more upset. I shouldn’t have asked you to come!” Imogenia said.

  Nora didn’t feel like answering and turned back to her sancocho. If she wanted to save her own life and thereby secure the future of the human race, she was going to have to be cunning and trick them. She didn’t even try to protest or insult them, fearing they’d take advantage of the commotion to swipe a piece of manioc from her plate. Cunning, more cunning, endless cunning was what Nora needed in order to defeat them. Her sons would come back to avenge her and the blood would flow on the beaches.

  “Debacle,” said Nora with her mouth full.

  “What did you say?” Imogenia asked.

  When Nora looked up she realized Imogenia’s husband wasn’t there anymore. Her eyes were exhausted from having the glow of so many worlds, some of them friendly, many of them razor-sharp, crammed inside them.

  “She’d like to take a nap,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The queen of Persia. Sahamarakahanda V.”

  “The fifth?” asked the husband, who’d been hiding in the thatch of the roof like a bat.

  “Hush, devil-man. Get out of here,” said Imogenia. “Go on and finish your sancocho, Doña Nora. Did you like it?”

  “She liked it,” Nora answered. “But it could have used some avocado.”

  “And what is Queen Saharawhatthehellever going to do with that avocado, if I may ask?” said the husband, and Imogenia told him that if he didn’t leave right now she would chase him out with a broom. The husband skulked out with his tail between his legs, and this time he didn’t even attempt to fly up and hide in the roof of the restaurant, the damn vampire.

  “That’s how you expel demons and cockroaches,” said Nora, who was almost ready to trust Imogenia again.

  As the cook and Nora walked toward the bungalow, the swallow-tailed kites wheeled there at the far edge of the sky, and the waves rolled in with the enormous power and brightness of that time of day. Some cold bells took flight, startling Nora, as if she had climbed up a medieval cathedral and squatted down to urinate in the bell tower. Then they stopped ringing and went quiet. Everything returned to the tropics and the glare of the tropical sea, and she realized that today she’d have the opportunity to resolve the issue of the cook once and for all. With Imogenia dead, exterminating the husband would be child’s play, and that hussy Carlota and the gaggle of gossips with their rotten phalluses who’d tormented her so grievously would fall alongside him.

  It would be today, but not right now. Right now she was sleepy and little inclined to embark on matters having to do with the common good. They would understand the situation at the ministry, since they were familiar with her legendary efficiency and diligence. The important thing was that she suspect nothing, the whore. That she believe she loved her. And when she came into the bungalow now, Nora should take care not to look at a particular plank in the ceiling, where the blunt instrument of justice and redemption was hidden. Imogenia would die. Iris, the placid concubine, would die. The boy would live. Imogenia’s toad of a husband would die.

  “Splendor of the afternoon,” sang the chorus of the virtuous, now packed in behind the shower curtain, egging her on. “Vengeance that will come without warning, a swell and surge in his throat. Scattered brains, spattered blood can be auspicious. Discord.”

  “Exactly. Completely mistaken. Thank you, boys.”

  “Shall I turn on the air conditioner, Doña Nora?”

  The cool air blew across Nora’s sweaty forehead, bringing profound relief. She lay down on the bed and stared up at the planks of the ceiling, except for one in particular, and she forgot about the cook, who covered her with a white sheet that Nora pushed away.

  “The flies are going to bother you.”

  “Just sleep,” Nora said.

  “Do you want me to send over one of the girls to give you a bath?”

  Nora shook her head and removed her slip.

  “If you’re going to get undressed, I’m going to cover you up.”

  She placed the sheet over her and Nora flung it off again. The air conditioner purified the tense room. The mother slipped into the fathomless sleep of the mad while outside the bungalow the grackles piercingly expressed their thoughts in the almond trees and coconut palms.

  4:00 p.m.

  Javier saw his brother take apart almost the entire motor, put it back together, fail to start it, and start taking it apart again. They were floating adrift, the islands gradually fading from view. Without a motor, the current would carry them inexorably out to sea.

  I can’t believe this shit is too much for you, Javier almost said, but he kept quiet so as not to set his father off.

  “Weren’t you supposed to be the genius at this kind of thing?” the father asked suddenly, his voice heavy with contempt. “He’s all jingle and no popsicle, this kid.”

  Javier saw death in his brother’s screwdriver and went to grab him and hold him back if need be. But Mario just blew on another engine part without looking at anybody, not even the sea, and kept removing more and more parts. Javier sat down across from him on the bench, his back to the father.

  “Is it going to start?” he asked.

  “It’s going to start. They haven’t made a motor that’s bested me yet. But it’ll start when I feel like it.”

  “Smartass, like everybody around here,” said the father with a primordial disdain for the high-spirited and minimally violent nature of the coastal people.

  “Or he can come over and start it himself – I’ll wait.”

  “Shut up, shut up, asshole,” Javier said in a low voice, close to losing his temper. “Fix that shit and shut up.”

  After a while, when he felt like it, Mario started the motor. He revved it and made the boat rear up so it slapped against the water a few times, but the father was braced and didn’t fall. He must be going crazy too, thought Javier. When the slapping became less intense, Javier avoided looking up so as not to see the expression on his father’s face. Twenty minutes later the father said, “Here,” and when it seemed like Mario wasn’t going to stop, Javier leaped up, shoved him gently out of the way, and shut off the motor.

  “Cut it out. It’s not right, it’s not right,” he muttered, looking at the floor of the boat, where countless fish – colorful, cold, slimy, sharp, their mouths opening and closing – flopped ankle-deep.

  “We’re not going to catch shit here,” said Mario, also in a low voice.

  “You looking to get smacked?”

  “Let him just try it!” said Mario. He’d left the screwdriver within reach, on the platform where the motor was strapped down.

  “If he doesn’t smack you, I will.”

  At first Javier thought his brother was wrong, since they managed to catch a few medium-size mojarras and a king mackerel that weighed almost four pounds, but then the fish just stopped biting. And he was happy when they did. Can’t give the old man the satisfaction, even if it means we have to keep sitting here without a nibble. The sea had grown agitated. At any moment, the grays of the far-off storm might burst from their confines and the torrent of rain, wind, and lightning b
ear down on them. Javier decided not to smoke any more marijuana until they were back from fishing. Now’s not the time, especially with these two assholes and their death wishes. I’ve never seen Mario like that, and the old man had better watch out or he’s going to get stabbed with a goddamn screwdriver. It might do him some good, actually – maybe he’d learn some respect, he thought, and took a deep breath to keep his blood from boiling too. Since the fish weren’t biting, Javier idly watched the storm. It looked close, but though the lightning was intense, the thunder was still taking a while to reach them. Yet it could change directions at any moment, and if it turned south, they wouldn’t have time to escape. He mentioned it to his father, who didn’t answer. Mario, for his part, muttered something Javier didn’t quite catch, though he imagined, knowing his brother, it was probably something about how it’d be a good thing if the sea swallowed them up and this shitty world came to an end once and for all.

  Javier was exasperated by Mario’s endless whining about how he’d never asked to be alive and it would have been better if he’d never been born. He was always tempted to retort that a person didn’t get to ask to be alive or not, don’t be a pussy – you get life, and then it’s your business if you shoot yourself or stick your fucking head in the toilet, nobody gives a shit. He had to bite his tongue, especially since, when he was drinking, after a certain point Javier would get more and more worked up, and two or three times he’d ended up punching or slapping Mario in a drunken fury and then felt bad about it afterward.

  On the western horizon, to the right of the stone-colored storm, the sky was turning gold and pink, presaging an intensely glowing sunset. Javier was tempted to dig around in his bag for his pipe, but he refrained. Things might seem calm now, but everybody in the boat, himself included, was tense with worry, and arrogance, and uncertainty, and disdain, all of that combined, and somebody had to keep his head together as much as possible. Javier was willing to kill for his brother, even if he sometimes lost his temper and struck him, just as he was willing to kill for his mother.