The Storm

by Tomas Gonzalez

  He shivers in the chilly air. The waves are lifting the boat higher and higher, and the lightning is growing closer and louder. When Javier tells him that if they leave “right this minute” they’ll elude the storm and make it back to the hotel beach, the father makes a decision once and for all: betting the storm won’t catch them head on, they’ll keep fishing till they hit the quota he’s set. It’ll be less than two hours, he guesses, and it’s not for sure that the storm’s going to come this way in the first place. Plus, even if there’d been a chance he’d agree to flee the storm like a bunch of chickens, Javier’s imperious “right this minute” would have made it impossible. Right this minute? I’ll show you right this minute, asshole, the father thinks viciously.

  “Right this minute?” he asks aloud, like an echo, nearly choking. More than anything, in his rage, he’d like to seem scathing, but there are so many things he wants to say, he can’t get them out.

  “Goddammit, it’s going to take a lot more than a couple of pussies still living at home to make me turn tail before I’ve run into so much as a little ocean spray. Your mother spoiled you two rotten, if you ask me. Leave now, when the fish are practically flinging themselves into the boat? I’m no idiot!” The father always has something to say about the twins. He can’t really deem them cowards, since it’s clear Mario wouldn’t mind ending up floating facedown in the sea amid the storm debris, and Javier’s fully justified unease is nowhere near turning into panic. But judging his sons harshly has become a habit by now, almost a hobby, regardless of the truth of things. As he sees it, the fact that they haven’t struck out on their own by now, at twenty-six, gives him the right to say anything he wants.

  Javier doesn’t respond. Calming down, the father focuses on his fishing rods; he’s so sure of himself, he forgets about the oncoming storm and especially about his sons’ feelings, which are as palpable as gusts of wind. His ankle throbs. Javier’s headlamp goes on as the twin replaces the hook a fish has just carried off. The father studies his son’s profile without affection. The waves are getting higher, but they’re moving slowly, so the swell isn’t making them seasick. The father has been hauling fish in literally right and left – a lot more than his sons have, he thinks. Afraid they’re all going to end up at the bottom of the sea, the twins are working listlessly – they’re young and lazy, no drive, no conviction. And look at them smoking again, he thinks when he sees the smoke dimming the glow of Javier’s headlamp.

  “The light,” says Mario. A few seconds go by, and Javier doesn’t turn off his lamp. “The light, asshole. You’re a real pain in the ass, huh?”

  The father shakes with mounting fever. Before the lamp goes out, he catches a glimpse of the masses of water now swelling and sinking beneath the boat. Perhaps in the grip of fever, he surveys them with both admiration and scorn. On the afternoons he spends drinking aguardiente at Playamar, the father always tells his guests he has a lot of respect for the sea – but he says it not to describe a real feeling but because it sounds good and is the sort of cliché that tourists who come down to the coast from Antioquia like to hear and carry away with them afterward as a souvenir, like a piece of local handicraft, back to the mountains, where they repeat it to impress those who have never seen the sea. Before buying the hectare and a half of land to build the hotel, the father analyzed the tourist industry for several months. Baffled though he was by Medellín residents’ penchant for frying in the sun on the scorching sand, that was none of his concern. That impulse – it was crystal-clear from the beginning – was as powerful and ineluctable as sea turtles’ egg-laying ritual and therefore enormously profitable for vacation-bungalow owners. There was nothing to stop him from getting in on the score. So he surveyed the palm trees, the wide stretch of beach, confirmed that the subsoil contained sufficient and easily accessible freshwater, calculated how many units he’d be able to build in an initial phase, did some sums, paid for the land, and started building the first three bungalows, which soon paid for themselves and funded the construction of another seven. Though Nora and the boys were with him and she hadn’t gotten sick yet, the father never took her needs into consideration; he did everything as if he were on his own.

  Of course he enjoyed the color of the sea, the whiteness of the beaches, the gannets flying overhead, but he so often heard from guests how beautiful the place was and how it was worth preserving that in time their praise began to irritate him, as if he were being forced to listen to two people making love. And though he wouldn’t have thought twice about selling the hotel to anyone who agreed to his asking price, he was truly attached to the place and even somewhat fond of it. To give it an eco-friendly vibe, which is always good for business, he attached green plastic trash cans to the trunks of the palm trees and put up signs in the showers that said, “Water belongs to all of us. Conserve it.” But he was a realist and saved on the cost of a new septic tank by directing wastewater from the two rearmost bungalows through pipes that dumped straight into the mangrove swamp. You could smell it in those bungalows, and only in them, but very few guests complained. Most of them figured that was the way the air sometimes smelled at the seaside.

  A bolt of lightning strikes not far from the boat, and the glow turns it to mercury. The father is blinded and dazed. He is bristling with fever in the deep darkness that follows lightning, and his teeth are chattering again.

  “Don’t give me that shit right now,” he tells the lightning or whoever’s responsible for it. “A couple of big booms aren’t going to scare me – I’m a man, not a goddamn pussy.”

  Aloft on a wave in total darkness, along with his boat and his two sons, the father starts reeling in one of his lines. A powerful fish, maybe a barracuda – though its tugging feels strange, like that of a human or another intelligent creature – puts up such a fight that the father doesn’t even notice how the boat is rising higher toward the blackness above and sinking farther toward the ocean depths. The storm may have failed to frighten him, but fear now rises in his throat because of the fish he’s hooked. Lightning bolts of pain shoot through his ankle, and he ignores them just as he does the lightning that’s crackling nearby and illuminating the boat as it scales the mountains of water. He is overwhelmed and worried by the creature he is fighting to pull out of the sea, but he keeps reeling in his line, tempted though he is to let go of the rod and allow it to plunge with the fish, just like that, into the abyss. Pride and fury stiffen his resolve. All at once the fish stops pulling, and it’s as if the line has broken or as if the father never caught anything in the first place. And when he starts to reel it in, the crushing weight returns and he has to cling to the rod with all his might so the sudden tug doesn’t pull it from his grasp. Part of him thinks it’s another huge grouper.

  There are things the father doesn’t hear. He doesn’t hear Mario when he asks Javier what’s going on over there with the old bastard, and he doesn’t hear Javier when he says he chose a bad time to get hurt. He doesn’t hear Javier when he tells Mario that he, the father, probably has a broken ankle, or hear Mario reply that he hopes it gets infected, that’ll teach him a lesson. It’s possible that at times the twins can’t even hear each other, since the thunder has become a constant growl even though it’s not on top of them yet and the wind hasn’t yet started to blow or the rain to fall. And most of all the father doesn’t hear Javier when he says they should head back to shore.

  Suddenly he’s alone. The pain in his ankle becomes as external as the thunder and lightning, and his sons disappear. Rising from the abyss toward the surface, toward them, comes an unknown something that provokes horror in the father, and tries to get into the boat. It’s not a fish. He’s delirious. Everything around him merges with the tall waves, and he forgets that they’re only fifty feet above the coral reefs and not suspended above an abyss. “You’re not going to bring me down, you bastards,” he says, attempting to sound resolute.

  But he’s afraid. He’s hardly ever been afr
aid in his life.

  Sunday, 12:01 a.m.

  Mario heard his father talking to himself in the darkness in a feverish voice, a madman’s voice, and felt uneasy. Now what? His brother turned on his headlamp, and Mario saw his father hurriedly cut one of the lines, retreat in terror, and tumble into the water. Javier leaped up, grabbed the father by the arms, and hauled him back into the boat, which was now atop an immense wave.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” said Javier, and Mario started the motor, which sounded flimsy, almost nonexistent, in the rolling thunder.

  It was about two hours from where they were to the hotel beach in normal conditions. Now there was no way of knowing how long it would be. One and a half, if the waves were in their favor; four, if the winds picked up or the sea was against them; an eternity, easily, if the storm came down on them with all its fury. In any case they’d have to avoid sailing through the islands and go around them, approaching the gulf via deeper waters. Mario felt an exultation akin to happiness, not so much because of the father’s apparent defeat, which under the current circumstances he didn’t really have time to consider and appreciate, but because he felt that he had the world at his command through the Evinrude’s steering arm. Mario watched as Javier, without consulting anybody, tossed the coolers holding their catch overboard, and then the large fish in the bottom of the boat. He saw him sit down and shine a light on the father, who was raving in the bow, clutching his head in his hands – hoarse with terror because of what he claimed he’d been about to pull out of the water – and keep shining it on him, as if he was afraid that at any moment the older man might leap into the sea. Just look at him playing the good son now, the twerp, Mario thought.

  The boat, illuminated by his and Javier’s flashlights and by the intermittent lightning, moved through the masses of water as they rose in search of the highest blackness and then sank again, drawn by the bottom of the sea. Mario had an instinct for catching the waves in the darkness, and he knew he was a better boatman than his father, even if nobody acknowledged it. For as long as he could remember, he’d been floating in the sea: on tree trunks when he was practically a baby, and later on rafts that he and the other kids built, which they impelled along the sandy bottom using mangrove poles; on rafts with crude sails, in skiffs, in sloops, and in motorized sailboats. But when he went out with his father, he sometimes felt inhibited by his father’s presence and would end up making mistakes, big mistakes, ones that would have been inconceivable in other circumstances.

  “Old bastard,” he’d mutter then.

  Old bastard, he thought now. The waves were as tall as houses, but as wide as rice paddies or baseball fields, and gentle in that vastness. And though he didn’t say anything, Mario thought his brother had been wrong to throw out the fish. They’d sailed rougher seas than these, and while the storm might grow stronger, it also might not. Sometimes weed makes problems seem bigger than they are – your perception gets out of whack, he thought. That’s at least six hundred pounds down the tubes.

  Mario also didn’t agree with the decision to turn back. The only reason he hadn’t objected was that he enjoyed navigating the choppy seas, but he would rather have stayed where they were until the storm passed, since if it had hit them, it wouldn’t have been with much force. As the boat perched briefly at the crest of a wave, Mario thought he saw the lights of one of the islands in front of them. No point in asking Javier. The father, with his keen eyesight, could have confirmed it, but look at him there, totally useless. Despite his euphoria, Mario couldn’t help feeling astonished by the state his father was in. He and Javier had never seen him laid out like that, not even on those rare occasions when he’d had too much to drink or come down with the flu. Seeing him now, Mario felt a mix of revulsion, fear, and indifference, similar to what one might feel at watching the death throes of a rabid dog. The boat climbed once more to the summit of a wave, and this time he had no doubt he was seeing the lights from the nearest island, the one where they’d bought the beer. He shouted to his brother.

  “Yeah, we’d better get clear,” Javier replied.

  Mario turned the boat to start moving away from the islands toward the center of the gulf. He thought he’d heard the waves crashing against the nearby reefs. The islands themselves were probably being walloped by the surf, and any tourists camping in tents would already have been flooded out. Back at Playamar, the sea will be rushing through the mangrove swamp, like it always does, he thought. The nutcase must be freaking out with all the thunder. He had to meet the waves practically head on to get the boat out into open water where there was no risk that the crushing billows would sink them. It was slow going, since they were moving against the swell, but once they were in deeper waters, Mario turned again and headed toward the middle of the gulf, moving in the same direction as the waves but taking them on the diagonal so they didn’t carry the boat ashore. The father had curled up on the floor between two benches, or maybe Javier had laid him there, and he looked like he was sleeping, using the bag as a pillow and with water lapping against part of his shoulder, arm, and leg. Javier was bailing with a coconut bowl. In the glow of the lightning, Mario could see that the storm was giving signs of changing directions. If the old man hadn’t looked so rough, they could have gone back and started fishing. Javier had really pulled a dumb move, dumping everything overboard.

  There was no strong wind, no rain, and the waves were becoming smaller and less frequent. In the bottom of the boat, the father looked like he was dead. He was acting weird even before he fucked up his ankle, Mario thought.

  “I don’t think it’s a stroke,” said Javier, as if reading his thoughts. “He does have a really high fever. We need to get back and take him straight to Montería. Whatever’s going on, it’s serious.”

  He says “get back” like we’re just out running errands or something. If this tub capsizes, nobody’s getting anywhere. We have to get within reach, so to speak, but nobody’s going to try to make land with the waves crashing at Playamar. If he had a stroke, too bad. There’s nothing we can do, even if we end up with a swimming pool in here, thought Mario without conviction, since he knew he was capable of getting the boat to shore safe and sound with all of its occupants, no matter the conditions. The gulf’s beaches were wide and clear, no rocks or boulders, pure sand, so you just had to know how to work the waves.

  The boat kept moving swiftly through extreme darkness that alternated with the extreme brightness of the lightning. The bow struck the large waves, shattered them, and the water surged over the twins. In the fiberglass microcosm of the boat, which had gone from sky-blue to now black, Mario saw Javier shine his tiny headlamp on their father, adjust the injured man’s head on the bag so he wouldn’t choke on the water that had accumulated in the bottom of the boat, and start bailing again.

  1:00 a.m.

  When Nora opened her eyes, the lightning demons made of ice and coal were flying everywhere, and the chorus’s chanting boomed out between the thunderclaps. The marsupial-snouted donkey was waiting. The explosions of the sea were crashing down on the beach.

  “The instrument of my redemption.”

  “With Imogenia destroyed, foul-smelling Carlota will be forever silent, and your sons will be saved from the surging waters,” the throng prophesied.

  The cook would have to die. The chorus had been showing Nora the way, which was both tricky and simple: she would have to come up with some pretext to summon the woman to her bungalow, and as soon as the cook entered the bedroom, the weight of universal justice would come down on her skull.

  “Her filthy spirit will then travel on ragged wings to Hades, flying through bats and palm fronds,” the chorus sang. “Harbor no compassion. Did he harbor it for you or your sons, who are threatening at this very moment to annihilate him and annihilate themselves? Remember, Sahamarakahanda, he had no qualms about bringing the young concubine and his son here and smearing them on your face like chicken f
eces.”

  “Like feces. Exactly,” Nora nodded, pensive, sad, practically sobbing with fury.

  The throng went quiet to make space for whatever would happen next, and once their clamor had ended, the thunder and the booming of the sea retook center stage. Nora cried out in the night split by lightning. The cook might or might not come. Nobody knew. Nora picked up a chair and started breaking everything she could. Then the hammer-eared donkey came down from the ceiling and Nora, certain that her plan would triumph, stood next to the door and kept shouting. The sea descended toward the mangrove swamp. The wind roared across the rooftops and through the palm trees, but not enough to bend them or quiet Nora’s cries, so it was no surprise to anybody that Imogenia had tried to turn on the light in the kitchen and, upon discovering the power had gone out, as it often did during storms, then switched on her flashlight and, pushed along by the powerful wind, headed to Nora’s bungalow.

  “Shattering of glasses. Blood,” cried two of the prophets. “If you fail, coral will gouge out the boys’ eyes.”

  Nora’s shouting grew louder and louder, but the cook was taking a long time to arrive, so Nora and the others figured she’d decided to go for help before coming to the bungalow. The donkey would have to take a break and make sure the cook was the first one to enter the room so that she, and only she, could fulfill her destiny. There was a knock at the bungalow door.

  Then Carlota intervened.

  Carlota was an ant, a cockroach, a green bottle poop fly that had been trapped in the bungalow and buzzed swiftly in Nora’s ear to distract her. The cook had come on her own after all – she’d walked to the bedroom door and unhesitatingly opened it, but with Nora distracted, the startled rabbit tore the air asunder and everything turned to smoke, turned to nothing, turned to emptiness. When she came back from the air, Nora found herself on the bed, trussed up like a baby goat. Many faces were smothering her breath. There were normal ones and monstrous ones. Some with chicken beaks and some that were beautiful and serene in their wickedness. And all of them wanted to destroy her, and they cursed her and insulted her so she’d abandon wisdom and become lost. The existence of the universe and her own now depended on her ability to remain still. To steel herself, she thought, Star silence of my sons, silence mine, boat silence, house silence, high sea, seventh that terrifies, jealousy mine, my life no longer calls out. If death takes place in the heavens, everything will slough away if the sky turns green after death. The cheerful fountainhead endures. Endless fatigue. Fragile are those who have never loved. Silence. Silence…