He used his knife to cut open one of the large king mackerel, plunged his hand into its cold belly, and pulled it out again full of dripping guts and glands, which he tossed into the sea. When he finished cleaning the mackerel, he continued with one of the crevalle jacks. The smell was searing in his nostrils. Once they’d been cleaned, Javier put the fish in the coolers, where the ice was already half melted. Every once in a while, he pulled his lines out of the water to check the bait and then cast them again. The fish still weren’t biting. Sometimes he changed the bait out for no reason. Mario and the father did the same. The image of the murderous king, the main character in the book he was reading these days, kept turning over in Javier’s mind, while the light and the colors of the twilight blended together in a world now completely empty of boats and birds. He stood up and stretched. Before sitting again, he leaned over the edge of the boat and, thirty feet below, saw the dark shadow of the corals and aquatic plants in the water, which was still blue and luminous.
Too bad, he thought. A couple tokes of weed would have been awesome. No wonder that one guy spends all his time painting watercolors, so many of them he’s going to run out of paper even though he brought an entire suitcase of the stuff. And his wife isn’t bad. That’s the good thing about the coast – there are plenty of women around during the tourist season. A man doesn’t get bored, and sometimes you can even pick one up. Or at least talk with one. The days stretch out endless during the low season, though books help. It was nice of him to bring me books. Of course, I drove the three of them all the way from Montería in the jeep and charged them cheap. Though it wasn’t free either. You can’t go around giving away your time and labor, no matter how good of friends they are or how many favors they’ve done for you. Still wearing his clip-on sunglasses even though the sun was setting, he looked indifferently at his father, who was scowling as he held his rod, unwilling to give up even though no fish were biting. The admiration Javier had once felt for him – the only form of love the old man really made possible – had long since disappeared. Absolute power may dazzle a child, but not a young man. I’m not letting anybody fuck with me ever again if I can help it, he thought as he reeled in one of the lines to check whether the bait was still intact. He’s going to have to show me some respect, and Mario too. We’re not asking for money – we can earn that ourselves. And if he demands the bungalows back, we’ll pack up our things and take our nutcase mother to live somewhere else. But he won’t do it, because then he’d have to run the restaurant himself, and he doesn’t have the patience to go around tracking the sugar and oil stocks, and without that it won’t stay afloat. You can’t turn a profit in a restaurant if you don’t keep an eye on the little things. Employees will steal anything, even toilet paper if you’re not careful. Not to mention the quality issue – who knows what kind of crap they’ll serve to tourists when he’s in charge. The old man doesn’t care, and the cook takes off whenever she wants and makes another employee fill in. The guests eat whatever you give them – what else can they do? – rubbery fish and tough manioc, and they rarely complain. I’m not saying it has to be a sixteen-star place, but the manioc should at least be edible, damn it. And sometimes there’s fresh fish but for whatever reason they fry up frozen stuff, I’m sure of it.
The sun kept setting, and the horizon filled up with color. Apart from that, nothing seemed to change with the passing of time – the storm’s contours remained steady, as if it were a solid mass, and the sea birds were still absent, and the water continued its imperturbable rippling. But at any moment chaos was going to break out all around them, like smoke, like lava. From what he’d seen in his twenty-six years, and also from what he’d read, Javier tended to think life consisted of continually entering hell and then exiting it again. Which didn’t at all mean you might as well kill yourself, like that pussy Mario thought.
Nothing of the sort.
A person has to live happiness to the fullest when it comes, even if it’s just for a little while, especially during childhood. Even he and Mario, despite all the chaos, had experienced it. Hadn’t they? That’s why the good moments had been so intense, Javier thought. And because they’d been so intense, you had to conclude that a person was obliged to live all of life, whatever it brought. That’s why he got so pissed off when his brother expressed his childish desire to die. You had to respect life, damn it, and Javier had no patience for complaining or recriminations against God, whether from his brother, himself, or anybody else. And what was Mario complaining about anyway? Didn’t Javier see him having a good time with the boat and the motor and the lines and hooks, and completely forgetting, if only for a little while, about suicide and blaming God?
Look, look at that sunset! he thought then, as if the orange on the horizon were presenting the conclusive argument against his brother’s darkness, his own darkness, and even the cruel and involuntary darkness of the madwoman back on shore.
5:00 p.m.
My name is Ligia María Zuluaga, I’m in fourth grade at the Colegio María Auxiliadora, and I live in La Floresta, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia, South America, the Americas, Earth, the Milky Way, the Universe. I thought the ocean was so pretty. Those sunsets, just gorgeous. We came on vacation from Medellín in my father’s jeep, and when we got to Tolú and I saw that huge, blue, blue enormousness that you could see – you know? – at the ends of the streets, it sort of gave me a jolt and I almost started crying. My daddy has three taxis that my uncles drive for him and an eighteen-wheeler. It gave my mommy a jolt too. My two little sisters were sleepy, silly things, and looked at the sea with their eyelids drooping and didn’t see anything.
I’ve had so much fun here!
We came to a hotel that’s named Cabañas Playamar because the bungalows are by the sea and there’s lots of sand. There are lots of kids, and I made friends with them. Last night like a hundred of us from all the bungalows went out with a flashlight to shine it on the crabs and chase after them on the beach. Some of the boys killed them with sticks, poor things – none of us girls did. We’re going to go out tonight too, but they’re saying the sea is going to get real rough so we can’t go swimming, but I’m scared to get in the water at night anyways because I’m afraid a fish will bite me, or a barracuda. The water is warmer than the outdoors.
We’ve had a good time, but my mommy told my daddy he couldn’t keep staying up all night with the man from the hotel and doing so-called business deals. My mommy says she’s getting fed up because we came here to rest, not to fool around or get drunk. Of course, the man from the hotel isn’t here today because he went fishing with his sons. The cook says they’re going to drown. The lady from the hotel is crazy and goes around in a slip and my mommy says poor thing because sometimes at night she screams and he goes and gives her a shot to make her be quiet, the cook’s children told me. They’re blackest black and they know how to play with tree trunks in the ocean. Here on the coast there’s lots of different fruits. There’s watermelons, mangos, papayas, melons, and loquats too, but different from the ones in Medellín. My mommy says they’re really gritty, but I love them, though they do stain your clothes.
Everything’s just so so so pretty!
I like fried fish. My favorite kind is called lane snapper, which is small and red. I always tell the cook, “I’d like a lane snapper, if there are any!” She always says look how this little blond girl wolfs food down, it’s like she’s been out in the fields all day. The cook comes over to talk to my mommy, and my mommy doesn’t like it because she hates gossip, but she’s not sure how to get away. The cook says the owner has made life really hard for the crazy lady. The cook is fat, but I like her because she braided my hair with beads and says the beads look really pretty with my blond hair and my eyes because they’re green. But I don’t like people telling me I have green eyes all the time, it’s so boring. We’ve had such a good time on this vacation. Yesterday we drove to Tolú and visited the church…
I’
m Yónatan, the eight-year-old boy who goes to the Escuela Fernando González in Envigado, but I don’t live in town, I live on a farm up in the hills, and I walk down to school like twenty minutes every day. I’m the one the twin gave the money to, the bill all tattered and stinky, and it ended up falling apart afterward. Us kids don’t like that twin because he’s always mad. But Javier’s cool, all the kids say so, and he plays soccer with us on the beach. I was supposed to do some homework on my vacation, but I haven’t started yet. Why do they give us homework when we’re on vacation? Or why do they call it vacation then?
When I told my grandma about the money and how the twin never paid attention to us kids, she said, “Poor thing, the boy’s had a rough time of it.” My grandma is Doña Libe, and we live in my grandparents’ bungalows that are down past Playamar. She said, “But if he messes with any of you, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.” On vacation my aunts and uncles come with their children so there are like fifteen of us cousins. Almost all of them live in Medellín, except my aunt, who lives in La Estrella. They put all of us boys in one room and all the girls in another with lots of bunk beds and in the boys’ room we have lots of fun turning on the flashlights at night and farting. “You’re so gross!” the girls yell at us from their room, and we laugh. We have so much fun!
And I’m the tourist who had his first shots of aguardiente at nine in the morning, after a breakfast of corn bollos and eggs at the hotel restaurant, and who’s been drinking ever since. Today, though, I’m taking it slow so I don’t get blackout drunk and start wandering down the beaches like a zombie.
“Juan Carlos, you’ve got to watch that drinking, man,” Javier, the twin, who’s a friend of mine, told me one day.
What had happened was I’d fallen asleep on the beach down there where the huts with the food and dancing are. Other guests went to let him know, and Javier sent some people to get me and carry me to my room. But luckily I’d already woken up and they didn’t have to carry me.
“Something could happen to you, dude – you could get robbed or killed. Things are pretty quiet around here, but you never know.”
And he’s right. Especially in my case, since I came here alone and who’s going to ask after me. Javier’s a good guy. I’m going to go sit on that tree trunk and watch the sun set.
My name is Johanna. I came with Ricardo, my boyfriend, who’d promised to take me to Cartagena, but he couldn’t afford it – Cartagena’s for the jet set, he says, he’ll never be able to afford it – so here we are. Ricardo wanted me to put on a happy face, since he says this wasn’t cheap either, the flights from Bogotá and everything, but how could I? I mean, this place is packed. Since everything was full, they put us in the bungalow beside the owner’s wife, who goes around all day in a slip, sometimes stark naked until they force her to put clothes on, and sometimes she starts talking and shouting in the middle of the night. Yesterday this drunk guy was blasting cantina music practically all night in one of the other bungalows, and I couldn’t get to sleep. It’s all really weird, because the owner, who’s like seventy years old, has a girlfriend, a much younger woman with a little baby. Everything here on the coast is weird. So different! He’s also got twin sons. They’re handsome, especially the one with light-colored eyes, very much my taste. All tanned and wiry and with blond curls. Golden boy. Ricardo was really pale and made the mistake of staying in the water a really long time and got totally sunburned – even the sheet against his skin makes him cry out, so now he’s in the bedroom with a fever and milk of magnesia smeared all over him, and I have to be out here on my own, entertaining myself as best I can. If the owner’s son hadn’t gone off fishing with his dad and brother, I’d have at least been able to talk to him.
But no, and now I’ve got to come down to walk on the beach alone where there aren’t so many people playing with beach balls, children crying and shrieking, or men drinking aguardiente. The cook recommended I come here in front of the airport, where it’s quieter. And it is. It’s definitely quiet and pretty in this area. Not for swimming, since I’m terrified of jellyfish, but for walking…Look at that! Just look at that sunset! Poor Ricardo’s really missing out. The sea is so beautiful!
6:00 p.m.
The father had looked at the sunset without wanting to make too much of it. Today’s had been so striking, though, that he gazed at it a couple of seconds longer than he usually did at those postcard-worthy sunsets the tourists got so excited about. When he was drinking with his guests, he’d of course join them in watching the setting sun and even wax poetic, but in such situations his lyricism had a touristic, professional quality, quite different from his proud and intimate relationship with the sea. And if it weren’t bad for business, on more than one occasion when the guests were going on and on about some everyday, run-of-the-mill sunset, he would have told them, “After a while around these parts, a man gets tired of watching so many goddamn sunsets, believe me.”
The heat had diminished as the evening advanced. Feeling less suffocated by the sun, the father took the reins again. In his immense self-confidence, he noticed but then dismissed as inconsequential the way Mario had cranked the boat’s motor and at one point had clenched the screwdriver in his fist. He thought he understood how his sons thought, so he never felt fear, not even now that he was at a clear disadvantage, since any strength the two of them had was thanks to him – otherwise they would have been as helpless as their mother. And if Javier thought he was going to intimidate him with his books, he had another think coming. The father felt some pride in his son’s intellectual capacities and even bragged about them – if he’d been drinking and Javier wasn’t around, he’d go to the young man’s bungalow and show a tourist the piles of books – but he also despised them.
The sun set and deep twilight fell.
“Get that shit running so we can start fishing for real,” he said.
Mario turned on the motor and started the boat moving smoothly through the water, as if he’d lost his nerve or as if, at the last minute, they’d declared a truce and rationality now held sway once more. The father and Javier started organizing everything so they wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark for the wire cutters or the tackle box, or turn on the flashlights to find them and scare the fish away. From time to time the father would stare intently at the water, looking for the best place to drop anchor. Only once did he glance at Mario out of the corner of his eye; the twin was frowning at the steering arm and following his instructions without saying a word. Good choice, he thought. The more defiant he is, the worse it’ll be for him.
The water was starting to turn dark blue in its swift transition to blackness.
“Here it is,” he said.
Mario shut off the motor, they dropped anchor, and the father instructed Javier to serve the food. They ate beans and rice in silence. The father looked out at the sea as he chewed; his sons looked down at their plates or the bottom of the boat. He asked Javier to pass him a Coca-Cola and drank it in large gulps after wiping the mouth of the bottle with his hand.
Fishermen freaking out about the slightest hint of a breeze, he thought. They make up excuses not to go out and then go around complaining about how poor they are. That’s what I’m always telling them: you assholes were born in a goddamn cornucopia. All you have to do is go out and catch a fish and come back home to fry it up and eat it. Coconuts fall out of the palm trees right on your damn head. Plantains and rice are super cheap. But these lazy blacks can’t even do that, and then they kick up a fuss when a man goes out fishing when there’s a storm somewhere, even if it’s practically all the way in La Guajira or goddamn Venezuela. And then their kids go hungry and their bellies swell up and everything.
“Pour the coffee, would you?” he told Mario.
Deep twilight turned to night. The sky filled with stars. Lightning was still flashing at the edges of the storm, but the thunder had stopped rumbling, as if the storm was moving fart
her away. After coffee, they baited and cast their lines. The father wasn’t expecting the first bite to be so aggressive, nor that it would come almost as soon as the line hit the water. As he yanked on the rod to lodge the hook firmly in the bony, almost rock-hard, mouth of the tarpon – he could tell immediately what kind of fish it was – he stumbled and twisted his ankle, which made him curse loudly. Javier grabbed the rod and started fighting with the fish as it tried to escape, leaping and gleaming not just silver but phosphorescent and fantastical some twenty meters from the boat. Much more real than the tarpon itself in the shadows of evening was the din it made as it crashed back into the water. The father’s cries of pain suddenly ceased, and the world was filled only with the struggle with the fish.
“Let out the line a little, don’t pull,” said Mario. “He could snap it. Let him wear himself out. Just let him wear himself out.”
The father turned on the flashlight, examined his foot, and decided his ankle wasn’t broken, though the sprain hurt as much as a break. It’s going to swell up like crazy, he thought. The fish leaped again and plunged into the water, and the father guessed it weighed at least a hundred and seventy-five pounds. All at once he realized they were surrounded by a huge school of tarpon. He could sense their presence by the sound of their fins gently beating under the water and the murmur they made when they came to the surface for oxygen. In his excitement, he nearly forgot about the pain. He felt a nibble on another line and gave a sharp pull to hook the fish. He applied the brake mechanism to the reel, which stopped screeching, and the tarpon rose up in the deep darkness and crashed back down again some fifteen meters from the boat. Whenever the father moved, the pain in his ankle would flare up again and make him cry out, while Javier was going from one side of the boat to the other as the fish dashed back and forth.
The Storm Page 7