The Storm

by Tomas Gonzalez

“Don’t reel him in,” Mario told his brother, who had to move quickly to keep up with the fish’s rapid circular path. The father turned on the flashlight again and shone it on Mario. The twin had started the motor and was ready to follow the fish with the boat so they wouldn’t have to give it too much line.

  “What are you doing, moron?” the father yelled, but Mario seemed not to hear him. “Can’t you see I hurt my ankle? Come grab this shit, will you?”

  “Shut off the motor, shut it off, shut it off,” said Javier, giving the fish some more line. The father was convinced Mario was just pretending to help his brother in order to sabotage the father, taking advantage of the fact that he was weak and battling both pain and the huge fish. Mario shut off the motor.

  “Go and help him,” Javier said.

  Agilely, Mario clambered toward the father, snatched the fishing rod, and, still holding it, shoved him in the chest so the older man fell back on his rump on the cushion of fish and felt the pain shoot through his ankle. It took the father a few seconds to process what had happened. He’d have liked to beat his son to death, but he barely had the strength to get up from the bottom of the boat and go over to sit on his bench again, wordlessly, like an old man. The pain was intense, and as the twins fought with the tarpon, the father felt the chill of night coming on. He’d brought a nylon jacket, but his backpack was in the compartment in the bow and there was no way he could get to it since his ankle couldn’t bear his weight. Their hands full, his sons couldn’t help him either. Fucking Mario wouldn’t pass it to me anyway, he thought, suddenly remembering the shove he’d already forgotten, maybe because it was so ludicrous. He took off his soaked shirt, wrung it out, and began to shiver. His ankle started swelling. His anger surged again and turned cold. He turned on the flashlight, then pulled ice cubes out of the cooler and put them on his ankle. He tore up the T-shirt and bandaged the ankle to see if that would brace it and allow him to stand. Painfully, he tottered to his feet and promptly sat back down. The two fish were leaping, struggling to escape, closer to the boat, but now, with the darkness falling, their gleam in the air was only imaginary. The father thought he’d better watch out for his ankle when Mario or Javier pulled the tarpon into the boat, since he’d have to help them with the hook, and one blow from the fish’s tail could crush his ankle and leave him completely helpless. Sitting on the bench, he lifted his bandaged foot and placed it in the ice chest until it started to hurt too much and he pulled it back out. Every once in a while, he’d submerge it again. You’re going to get what’s coming to you, assholes, he thought. The sentence was directed at everything that was not himself: his sons, the fish, his ankle, the distant storm, even God.

  The storm was moving away but also intensifying. Streaks of lightning flashed at its edges with horizontal and vertical branches and tentacles, while a formless glow flickered within it, illuminating an enclosed inferno of lightning, rain, and wind.

  The storm occupied one corner of the universe. Everything else seemed tranquil and faintly undimmed by vestiges of light.

  7:00 p.m.

  Mario was aware that when he lifted the tarpon into the boat he’d get another chance to shove his father in the darkness. He remembered the hook and wondered whether the old man, frenzied with pain, might be capable of turning it against him. But he was determined. From time to time, out of the corner of his eye, he would glance at Javier, who had worked the fish effectively and now had it under control and ready to reel in to the side of the boat. The father had come over with the hook to help him pull it out of the water, and for an instant Mario thought that Javier, too, was thinking of shoving him. Then his brother said curtly, “Cut the crap.”

  Javier had guessed at his brother’s intention to injure the father further or even knock him overboard if it came to that. So now he’s defending the old bastard, Mario thought as he lowered the rod after the tarpon’s leap to keep the line from breaking as the fish fell back into the water. The fish was a fighter, and the twin had managed to bring it only a few meters closer. Instead, he should be taking the opportunity to teach him something he never learned as a kid: to respect my mother, damn it, and treat people right. Mario had to make an effort not to haul on the fish too hard in his rage and risk losing it.

  Another fish bit and made the reel on the father’s second rod shriek. Mario saw him turn on the flashlight, go over to the side, cut the line, and hobble back to Javier’s bench. When you want to catch them, they escape, and when you want them to escape, they end up getting hooked, he thought. Maybe it’s for the best. The tourists don’t like tarpon because it’s so bony. They don’t know how to eat it. The cook fries it and serves it with coconut sauce, which makes it seem less bony. When she puts her mind to it, it’s the most delicious fish out there, but two of these giants is plenty. Jesus, this one’s really got a yank in him!

  He’d abandoned his plan to shove the father again, since Javier was sure to intervene and he didn’t want any trouble with his twin. They sometimes fought, as brothers do, but the bond between them was so strong that afterward they always felt terrible about it and tried to avoid fighting as much as possible. There were still many hours to go, and Mario would find another opportunity to get even. Stubborn as the father was, there was no way he was going to decide to turn back just because of a sprained ankle. He’ll want to keep going even if we end up having to saw his damn foot off when we get home, Mario thought. That’s one thing about the old bastard – he won’t back down from anything.

  “Hold on to it, I’m here,” the father said.

  As young boys, and even as teenagers, he used to bring them with him when he had to take care of anything at the banks in Montería or Sincelejo so they could see him dealing with money or filling out paperwork and learn a little something about it. The father strode unfazed through those intimidating, overly air-conditioned offices and spoke to the officers responsible for reviewing his loan applications as if he were their equal; they almost always approved him. And the boys came to recognize his superiority and perceive his pride at not ever having had to put on a necktie in order to be somebody, unlike the directors and assistant directors of those institutions, public and private alike, who were, he claimed, mere employees, grunts, stiffs, poor suckers.

  Mario saw him grab the hook and, still half mad with pain, brace himself to haul the fish into the boat. The twin thought the ankle might be fractured and made an effort not to feel either compassion or distress at giving in to compassion, and focused on wearing out the tarpon with lateral tugs. It wasn’t leaping anymore, but the fish still maintained a static, almost lifeless tension on the line, as if the hook had gotten caught on a coral reef.

  As they landed the tarpon, which weighed more than two hundred pounds and was at least six feet long, Javier made his father lose his balance and fall back onto his rear end in the bottom of the boat with the hook and the fish. The father cried out in pain. The shove hadn’t been intentional, Mario guessed, since the old man got to his feet again, cursing his ankle, and didn’t yell at Javier or try to do anything to him. He stopped cursing once he reached the bench and, holding his ankle in his left hand, shone the flashlight on the tarpon, which was flopping in the bottom of the boat, metallic and radiant.

  “Son of a bitch sure is gorgeous,” he said.

  During their childhood and into adolescence, the boys had admired the father’s self-confidence, and even his ruthlessness. When he was confronted by the drunk he’d persuaded to sell him a jeep while on a bender – who turned out to be the son of a prominent politician and landowner from Montería – the father held his ground on the porch of his house in Playamar. He ended up convincing him that people are just as responsible for the things they do when they’re sloshed as they are for those they do when they’re thinking clearly. And he told him that nobody ever got anywhere going around moaning about their mistakes or being consumed with regret. It was best to just face things head on and tak
e your losses. Pretty piddly losses, too, really, he added, since while he’d gotten the jeep for cheap, it had hardly been free. And throughout that conversation, which got tense at times when it looked like the landowner’s son might resort to violence, he didn’t tell the twins to leave, or admonish them that this was a conversation for grown-ups, because he wanted them to learn how men do business.

  Mario’s fish was getting weaker. It was no longer dashing or leaping. It had dived deeper and now, when he tugged on the line, it felt like he was uprooting a boulder from the ocean floor. Distracted by what had happened or, rather, not happened between Javier and the father, Mario’s attention occasionally wandered, and he was lucky the line didn’t break. Javier came up and gave him advice – “Keep working him, don’t let him rest” – advice that was completely superfluous, since Mario knew exactly what he was doing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the father remove his bandage to examine his ankle and then put it back on. When the father said to pull harder, that he looked like a pussy, the twin’s ire came flooding back.

  “Screw you,” he replied, though he wasn’t sure his father heard him.

  Javier did, though, and said quietly, “Just ignore him. Keep doing your thing.”

  As a vast spread of stars filled the part of the sky that wasn’t blotchy with storm clouds, the father and sons seemed to become trapped in a deepening well. Mario battled with the fish while waves of resentment toward his father swept through him. He felt the tarpon’s leaps through the rod. The beams of the flashlights illuminated the fish, and it floated suspended for a moment, like a moon, some twenty meters from the boat. It was even bigger than Javier’s. Startled, Mario barely managed to lower the rod to keep the line from tensing and breaking when the fish plunged into the water again.

  “This is going to take a while,” Javier remarked.

  The father said that if his ankle weren’t busted to shit, he could land it in half an hour, forty-five minutes max. The boys pretended not to hear him.

  “Shit,” said Mario as he yanked on his rod. “He’s got his second wind.”

  The fish had been able to rest while the twin was distracted by his hatred. You can’t give an inch or you have to start over from the beginning, he thought. It’s crazy how they catch their breath and keep fighting. Old bastard. I hope his foot is fucking broken. But I doubt it. Look at him. The father had turned on the flashlight and was using one of the oars as a crutch as he headed over to the tackle box, went back, and started tying the hook and sinker to the line he’d cut.

  “It’s flagging again,” said Javier.

  Mario fought another long hour with the fish and then, just as he was hauling it in, a second before Javier managed to snag it with the hook, the fishing line snapped and both the tension and the fish suddenly vanished. The father said:

  “I knew you were going to let it get away.”

  “Shut up, damn it,” said Javier.

  8:00 p.m.

  Nora was awakened by the noises of the long-snouted marsupial hiding in the ceiling – the instrument of her justice. The grackles had been quiet for a while, and the herons were no longer winging their way overhead toward the swamp. The world belonged to the bats and crabs once more.

  “Wind,” said Nora.

  The air conditioning made her shiver.

  “Wind,” replied the chorus.

  She didn’t turn on the bedside lamp. One of the girls who worked in the kitchen knocked on the door, came in, and switched on the overhead light. Nora was naked.

  “Turn it off,” she said, and everybody corroborated her command. The girl turned it off.

  “What would you like to eat, Doña Nora?” she asked. When Nora didn’t answer, the girl said, “There’s some leftover sea-bass sancocho.”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I turn off the air conditioning? Do you want a sheet?”

  “Yes. No.”

  Fifty meters from the bungalow, the sea murmured. The throng, crammed in behind the shower curtain, had begun pointing out that when the time came, she was going to have to do the kangaroo with the hammer snout, the hammer with kangaroo ears. Brains. Audacity. Cracked skulls. Audacity, more audacity, endless audacity.

  “Order in the court. The appeal is dismissed,” said Nora in a loud, firm voice.

  “What did you say, Doña Nora?”

  “I didn’t say anything, Doña Lora. But I did say something. Hee-hee-hee-hee.”

  She put on her slip and went out on the porch and down the steps to the strip of sparse lawn in front of the house. The stars seemed unsteady, as if at any moment a hand might sweep them away like a sand mandala. Nora knew about mandalas, Buddhism, and Tibetan monks. Her mother often told her she couldn’t understand how Nora, who’d been such a hippie, had ended up marrying such a monster. Nora’s mother, who was dead now, had been the principal of a girls’ school in Cali. Nobody had loathed and despised the father more than her.

  “Om, om, om!” Nora shouted at the top of her lungs, still gazing up at the stars.

  The girl, perplexed by the sacred syllable, was unsure what to do.

  “I’ll bring you your food, then,” she said finally, and practically ran off toward the kitchen.

  The throng chanted:

  “He wished to leave you deprived of both sky and firmament. To abandon you, live with her, and do away with your children.”

  “Yes, yes, yes! Oh yes, the bastard!”

  “And now his servants will pay dearly for it, with their brains shattered, tattered, battered, spattered, scattered, splattered. And afterward the princes will grant him the sea as his tomb,” the throng intoned. “Silence, the slaves are coming. Audacity, more audacity, endless audacity.”

  “Yes, yes. Ha ha ha!” cried Nora at the top of her lungs, but when she saw the girl coming back with one of the other women who worked in the kitchen, she started muttering quietly and so quickly that it was almost another language. The tourists came to their windows and out onto their porches. A few of the children sidled closer.

  “Sometimes it calms her down to eat something,” said the woman, who’d been at the hotel longer than the girl. “Go get the sancocho. I’ll keep her entertained. Give her a big helping – she sure does eat! Don’t bring a knife or fork, just one of those plastic spoons.”

  “She can’t even keep her cunt entertained and now she wants to entertain you,” the wicked Carlota, of the many facelifts, of the face plastered with nauseating makeup, whispered in her ear, and she let herself be provoked:

  “You can’t even keep your cunt entertained and now you want to entertain me,” she repeated too loudly, and the scandalized mothers who were watching it all from their porches with their children would no doubt complain to the King afterward, if he ever returned.

  “And tell her she can stick that plastic spoon up her ass,” Carlota added, and Nora couldn’t help repeating it.

  When the sancocho arrived, there were no longer any children on the porches or anywhere else, except the ones who’d hidden to watch from behind the coconut palms and almond trees. The mothers had also gone inside, exclaiming, “Unbelievable, saying such vile things in front of innocent children! Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Other mothers had said to forgive her for she knew not what she said, but they, too, had gone into their bungalows with their offspring.

  The sancocho calmed Nora’s agitated spirits. Alarmed by her lack of prudence, more prudence, endless prudence, which might lead to devastating consequences, she wordlessly, using her humiliating plastic spoon, tucked into the delectable potatoes, yams, and chunks of sea bass. “Spectacular, spectacular,” she said. Up in the ceiling, the rabbit winked at her and wiggled its ears. For a few seconds, Nora stopped eating. Brains. Starting today, her strategy would be to retreat while moving forward, like in tai chi. The sancocho disappeared quickly, but her hunger increased.

  “S
he wants seconds!” intoned the throng. “Queen Sahamarakahanda V wants seconds!”

  “Who?” asked the new girl, and the other woman explained:

  “It’s her. It doesn’t matter. Don’t pay it any mind. Let her have seconds if she wants. Go get her another helping. That way she’ll fall asleep faster and let us sleep.”

  “Why don’t they just put her in the loony bin?” asked a harpy from within one of the guest bungalows.

  She must have been one of wicked Carlota’s allies. Nora was about to insult her in that unique way of hers, but the girl had reappeared with the sancocho, so she had more urgent matters to attend to.

  “Endless guile,” said Nora with her mouth full, pointing a wise, admonishing index finger at the new girl.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re from Sahagún.”

  “How did you know, ma’am?”

  “You see. I know everything that happens on these beaches. And you’re also very pretty.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You can go.”

  The girl from Sahagún would be saved from the bloodbath and was thenceforth pardoned. After her second helping, Nora began to feel tired from all the tubers, however delicious they’d been, and though she’d have liked to eat more, her growing lack of appetite made that impossible. She got up from the table, went out onto the porch again, and walked, clad in her slip, among the palm trees illuminated by the light from the bungalows. Reaching the shore, she sat down in a plastic chair there in the darkness, far from the light of the lampposts, which mercilessly flooded the wide strip of sand in front of the hotel. The sancocho had satiated her, but she didn’t want to go to bed again without seeing the stars, before the wind wiped them out and the world came to an end.

  She also wanted to see the sea foam, which was beautiful even though her two sons were tangled up in it, each wearing a crown of thorns, as if they were in a burning bush. The girl from Sahagún watched her from a distance, certain that Nora hadn’t seen her.