Nora was about to summon her magnanimously to her side and ask her to accompany her in gazing at what might well be the last night of the universe, but she changed her mind, thinking that the girl might be a neatly packaged hypocrite hired by her husband and the lackey government to spy on her. She didn’t believe it, but it was always best to be mindful in this world, where everything always ended up disappearing or turning into pain. Prudence.
Then, out of nowhere, the children appeared in the distance, a herd of them hollering in the night. They ran past her without seeing her, wielding flashlights and sticks to chase and destroy crabs in the starlight.
9:00 p.m.
After Javier told him to shut up, damn it, the father had fallen silent. Almost an hour later, he still remained silent. The school of tarpon had left, and fish were scarce. Javier broke his promise not to smoke marijuana during the fishing expedition and groped around in his bag for the jar. He also pulled out one of those headlamps like miners use and turned it on so he could fill his pipe. The father didn’t say anything, either about the light or the marijuana. Mario didn’t object to the light either, though it would scare off the fish even more. Javier took three long tokes on the pipe, put it away again, and felt at peace. Without removing the lamp from his head, he turned it off so he could see the black sea that surrounded them and look up at the flashes of the distant storm. The water Mario disturbed as he fished sounded like music.
“Yeah?” Javier asked.
“Snapper. Medium size.”
He could barely see Mario and his father. They’d both crossed to the other side, belonged to chaos rather than to light, were specters rather than living beings. Javier took three deep breaths, something he always did whenever marijuana suddenly threatened to open the doors of darkness and horror. If his father had said anything right then, if he’d hurled some barb or bit of sarcasm, Javier would have plunged irretrievably into hell, but the father didn’t say anything. With momentous effort, Javier was therefore able to return to this world of ours, where things are what they seem – a rose is a rose and a storm is just a storm – and he watched the silent glow of the here-and-now storm with deep admiration. The bolts of lightning overlapped and varied in intensity and duration, as if expressing an extraordinary and inhuman emotion.
“I smoked too much. I can’t pass out now,” he thought, and had to work hard to keep his father’s silence in the darkness from overpowering him.
“Pass me a thermos,” he said to Mario.
His brother moved comfortably in the darkness. Javier heard him pour coffee into the lid of the thermos, which they used as a cup, and move toward him.
“Here,” said Mario, and handed him the cup.
With the coffee, Javier regained a degree of equanimity, though he was still catching glimpses, like little flashes, of the monstrousness of life. He took three more deep breaths and managed to calm down. Tranquility restored, he decided to stop fishing for a while. He reeled in his lines, as if he were going to switch the bait, and cast them again, empty, into the sea. He looked up at the sky, hoping to see a shooting star, and felt content even though he didn’t see one.
It occurred to him that if all it took was three deep puffs of Cannabis sativa to provoke such distress, poor Sahamarakahanda’s world must be unbearable. Sometimes Javier would look at her or listen to her and wonder if she ever experienced moments of happiness, or if instead she lived in an endless, stupefying inferno. You could wonder the same thing about people who are sane, he thought. In the books he’d read so far, people were almost never happy. In Shakespeare’s plays, which he read as if they were novels, but whose immense power overwhelmed him, the closest thing to happiness was found in the fleeting frenzy of greed or triumphant revenge, before the characters’ ultimate undoing. Javier had read somewhere that a person is born not to be happy but to admire the world. When joy comes, it does so without rhyme or reason, just because. I mean, take me, living it up out here with sore butt cheeks at nine thirty at night, on a boat with two men who want to claw each other’s eyes out.
He rummaged for his cigarettes and lighter in his bag, and the smoke dissipated invisibly into the night. He found beauty in the ember of the cigarette, which looked to his father and brother as if it were suspended in the air, like a firefly. The light from a star, the cherry of the Pielroja cigarette, and the light of a firefly were all exactly the same. None of the three mattered. People didn’t matter either. His father was a miserable loser who was convinced he was a king. Sahamarakahando V. And now the King’s ankle was all fucked up and his soul was a pit of bile. And he himself wasn’t anything either, thought Javier. And that was actually the beauty of it all.
He turned on the headlamp again and pulled a beer out of the basket. There were some cold ones in the cooler next to his father, but getting to them would be complicated. The bottle opener was in the cooler too, so he uncapped the beer by striking it against the side of the boat. The sound boomed in the oceanic night. Javier switched off the headlamp and sipped his beer slowly to avoid the unpleasant sensation of the lukewarm carbonation tickling his tongue and foaming too much in his throat. Astutely, the father realized his son didn’t want to come near him. The guy in that story who gets walled in suddenly goes quiet, just like him, when he realizes he’s being walled in, thinks Javier, who is once more invaded by dark thoughts and focuses instead on the tapestry of stars and the gentle euphoria produced by the beer. He switches on the headlamp and checks his watch. Nine forty. The father hasn’t said a word for more than fifty minutes. Javier nearly asks how his ankle’s doing, but in the end he doesn’t say anything. I don’t give a crap how his ankle’s doing, he thinks.
“What’s up with you and that headlamp?” asks Mario, and Javier turns it off.
Again they hear the sound of a fish being heaved into the boat, and Javier feels an involuntary twinge of admiration for his father, who, despite everything, has kept fishing in silence. Listening to the club strike the fish, Javier thinks how God does shoddy work. We Playamar monkeys enjoy butchering pigs, wringing chickens’ necks, and clubbing fish. And then chewing them up and swallowing. Like Mario, Javier is constantly aware of the cruelty of Creation, though his awareness is much less intense and naïve than his brother’s. His amazement at the slaughterhouse of life springs less from a sense of pity for animals than from an aesthetic one – It is what it is, and who the hell gives a shit about a chicken? Plus, if God was so slapdash when it came to justice, that means, doesn’t it, that when it comes down to it, they could do whatever they want. Which they never did, of course, at least not in serious instances. But a man decides to respect others only of his own free will, Javier thinks, and he can decide otherwise just as freely.
Javier contemplated how his thoughts were pushing insistently into labyrinths where the world no longer had an up or a down and murder became conceivable. The sounds coming from the father’s side weighed on him more and more, and he pricked up his ears and attempted to decipher them: a fish had just nibbled on his father’s line, he’d just changed the bait on one of his lines, the bait had been stolen from another, maybe he’d leaned against the side of the boat to urinate…There were some noises that Javier didn’t recognize immediately – the sound of a foot being inserted again into the cooler full of ice and fish, the gurgling of the water in the jug as the father drank – and there were murmurs that were almost clear though not unambiguous, like when the father seemed to say “Damn ankle” or maybe “If it weren’t for this damned ankle,” and ones where Javier couldn’t be sure whether he was hearing them because his father was thinking them, or if he was really hearing them out loud. And all of the sounds commingled with the lapping of the water against the hull and became indeterminate and infinite.
Then he heard, this time unmistakably, the father’s voice, speaking as if he’d finally risen from the dead:
“Gotcha!”
The father switched
on his flashlight and, still seated, began fighting with what would turn out to be one of the largest groupers Javier had ever seen. Four hundred pounds, if not more. But they didn’t end up getting that fish into the bottom of the boat either. Though the twins both offered to take care of the animal, the father refused to hand over his rod or even respond to their offers. Sitting on his bench, huffing and cursing, he struggled with the fish for a long time and finally lost it when it was right next to the boat, as if the fish had halted its approach of its own accord to make sure they would shine their lights on it and see it in the full glory of its tremendous size and power. Then it broke the fishing line and vanished, victorious, into the vastness of the dark water that was striking the sides of the boat with increasing intensity.
“The old bastard pulled till the line just snapped,” said Mario, not nearly under his breath, after turning off his flashlight.
10:00 p.m.
I had a hard time sleeping that night. I wasn’t used to sleeping in a hammock or having so many people under a single roof. I’m the tourist who came to go camping on the islands with my wife and son. I had a powerful itch to scratch! My wife and I had been arguing that evening – she says I become insufferable when plans change – and I didn’t like the idea of leaving our tent on the beach because of the storm. She never would have welcomed me into her hammock under those circumstances, and even if I’d managed to convince her, I haven’t mastered the art of making love in midair, and the dirt floor wasn’t a viable option. In an effort to distract myself, I listened to the thunderclaps booming in the distance, one after and on top of the other, and smoked. When I left the house, I didn’t even look at the people sleeping in hammocks and on canvas cots in the other rooms, like in a refugee camp. Using the flashlight, I followed the path through the mangroves to the beach where we’d been camping, to not just see but bear witness to the lightning and the stars, which, despite being opposites, seemed to have spilled simultaneously across the heavenly vault. It sure does make a man feel tiny, with his watercolors and charcoals, to stand face to face with something like that! Only the greats, like Turner, dare paint the totality; the rest of us can, at most, strive to capture parts, details, with the hope and aim that they will evoke the whole. And so, sitting on the sand, I lost myself in these disquisitions, attempting to ward off the erotic images harassing me from all sides.
No boat lights were glowing out at sea. The fishing boats from the industrial fleet based in Tolú had been berthed at the docks to shelter them from mishap if the tempest ended up visiting us here in the gulf. And later the harbor master had forbidden the smaller boats from going out, especially those used by the local independent fishermen. I’d learned all of that from Javier, the young man from the Playamar bungalows who’s become a friend, the bookish one we ran into at the island’s general store when he came in to buy beer.
“Most likely the sea’s going to be really rough tonight,” he said.
“But you’re going out anyway?” I asked.
His reply was brief and had a brusque Antioquian tinge to it, though it was uttered in a coastal accent: “We’ve got to die of something, right? Nobody lives forever. Plus, who’s going to convince the old bastard to stand down?”
I asked what he was reading, and we started talking about Macbeth, of all things. In the hot, jumbled store – at that time of day, the Milo chocolate powder had practically turned to liquid in its tins – Javier, all tanned and barefoot and shirtless, wearing yellow shorts and a Yankees cap, spoke rapidly and fervently about the scene where Lady Macbeth washes the blood from her hands. We drank a couple of ice-cold beers. We also discussed King Lear, and he got so worked up that, after a few impassioned observations (“The old man really outdid himself in the dipshit department, didn’t he?”), he fell silent, seemingly still pondering the subject. Or maybe he remembered they were waiting on him, so he gulped down the second beer in a hurry. Javier didn’t put on intellectual airs; he was simply astonished by what the king had allowed to happen to him. “All right, man, we’ll talk soon, David, see you around. Good luck,” he said. I invited him to have another beer, but he said no, no can do. He had to go; his old man was probably going to have a fit, he’d taken so long.
So, as I was saying, I’d been feeling suffocated in that crowded house and decided to go down to the beach for a smoke. With my wife relatively far away and my erection under control, I serenely contemplated the sea. Above it, the blackness of the storm had begun to advance, blotting out the stars. Somewhere out there, the three of them were in their boat, watching, like me, as the sky grew smudged and the water choppy. With the gale blowing on the back of his neck, Javier would be thinking about the tragedies he’d been reading, where all the characters, from beginning to end, had death blowing on the backs of their necks. In my mind, images of the three fishermen with the storm looming over them like a grim angel came one after another, distinctive in their lack of edges, in the way they were already half immersed in chaos, paintings that strove to portray the oily affections and animosities of those three precarious beings on the verge of falling apart.
We are the tourists.
I’m Yónatan again, grandson of Doña Libe, the woman from the bungalows down the way. I’m eight years old and look like I’m seven, but I’m really smart even though I’m little, and when I came back from killing crabs, I was starving. My grandmother was waiting for me on the beach. “Heavens, Yónatan, it’s getting late!” she said. “Don’t you realize the storm that’s coming in? If it catches you fooling around on the beach with those other goof-off kids, one of those waves’ll get you and you won’t even have time for an aspiration.” An aspiration is something like All glory be to God. So you’re walking along the beach minding your own business and you barely manage to squeak out, “All glory be…” before, boom, the wave’s got you. My grandma says I’m a real card. The other boys and I were planning to sneak out at around ten that night, as soon as the storm started, to go watch it and see the waves they say are as big as two-story houses. Sneak out? What a joke! When I woke up, it was already the next day, and I looked out the window and the beach was full of trash and branches. Everybody said they’d never seen such a big one, and there were even toys buried in the sand. Still wearing my PJs, I went over to the manager’s house, and her kids and I started looking at all the things the water had brought. I found a beat-up, faded Darth Vader helmet, and my grandma told me I looked like a mushroom wearing it.
And I’m Johanna, the one whose boyfriend stayed out in the sun too long the first day and got burned to a crisp – that was so careless, going swimming without a T-shirt or sunblock even though he’s so pale. So I didn’t hear much about them, the three fishermen, because I was worried about my boyfriend’s fever – he started raving and insisting we couldn’t let him die. “Nobody dies of sunburn, silly,” I told him, but he was still scared, saying he’d dreamed about some old sows that were going to carry him off to God knows where. I’m sure he was freaked out because of the owner’s crazy wife, who suddenly started shouting in the middle of the night about some lady named Carlota and calling her a horrible old sow. I went to the office to complain and see if they could recommend a doctor for Ricardo, but…office? What a joke! The so-called office is the owner’s house, and of course he was one of the fishermen who was out at sea, the moron, and with his sons too. Everybody was saying they were going to drown.
The cook came – she’d spent the night in a hammock in the kitchen so she could look after the crazy lady, who’d been agitated that day. She told me the nearest doctor was in Tolú, but that there was no need to call him over a sunburn. Between the two of us, we got poor Ricardo up and into some cool water to get his fever down. He was so disoriented that he barely complained about us hurting him when we helped him into the shower. We gave him two extra-strength aspirin. Just what the doctor ordered! He went to sleep and slept so deeply I actually started worrying – it seemed like he was
in a coma, or worse. And later the wind came and lightning loud enough to raise the dead, and the waves booming like they were right outside our door. The seawater was rushing between the guest bungalows, and he didn’t even notice. The water even came into ours, but only a little, since they were elevated on concrete slabs, but I sometimes felt like more was going to come flooding in and snatch us away. I swept the water out with the broom, and when I thought it had seeped back in, I’d relight the candle – the power had gone out – and get up to push the sea away again with the broom.
11:00 p.m.
It’s going to take a lot more than a couple of losers and some fucking waves to get rid of me, the father thinks to himself. His ankle hurts a lot, but he’s tired of propping his foot up for relief on the cooler that now contains fish, cold water, and very little ice, and he’s braced to just suffer through the pain, as if he’d been born with it. From time to time, using the oar as a crutch, he gets to his feet – not to do anything, since he’s doing everything sitting down, but to make sure he’s not completely incapacitated and at his sons’ mercy.
The fish start biting like crazy again.
Father and sons hook sea bass and blue runners and goatfish and tuna, and they’ve barely baited and cast their lines when they have to reel them in again. The boat floor, where only large fish remain – the rest of them, neatly gutted, are in the coolers – becomes covered with medium-size fish that gape and flop in the darkening night. The father estimates they’ve got about six hundred pounds and they need to bring in nine hundred, including their catch so far. There are no more stars in the sky, and the darkness is so deep they can’t even see one another. The father first smells pot, then a Pielroja cigarette. He’s never smoked and can’t stand addictions. He considers his fondness for alcohol to be not a weakness but a professional tool, since he’s chatty when he drinks and quiet when he doesn’t – hospitality is an effort for him.
The Storm Page 9