The Storm

by Tomas Gonzalez

  When he woke up, the darkness and the steady rumble of the motor were unchanged, and he couldn’t tell how long he’d been asleep.

  “Are we close?” he asked, but his voice was too weak, maybe, because his sons didn’t answer.

  I want to sleep, he thought, I want to go home. I definitely can’t count on these losers.

  “Are we close?” he repeated, and didn’t get a response this time either. Then he woke up, realized he’d dreamed he was asking, and, now certain of being awake, decided not to ask anything after all. Begging is the worst thing you can do in life, he thought. That’s why I’ve never liked working for anybody, never had a boss, never kneeled down before someone for a few measly pesos. It’s cold. My fever’s up again. I wasn’t born to be a slave. I’d rather die of hunger than serve some other asshole who’s actually my equal.

  “We don’t have any water, do we? I’m thirsty. What did you turkeys do with all our stuff?”

  Silence. The sons either didn’t hear or didn’t answer.

  “What time is it now? Do you think it’s almost dawn yet, Javier?”

  Again he tricked himself, thinking he was awake when he was actually sleeping. That’s why his sons hadn’t answered, of course, not because they despised him or were going to toss him overboard again so he’d drown. After a short, intense struggle to wake up, he saw himself again with his head resting on his arms, which were resting on his knees. It was very dark, and he couldn’t even see his own feet, which he could tell were submerged in water far above his ankles.

  “All right, so nobody’s bailing and we’re all just going to sink like a bunch of pussies.”

  “What’s the old coot saying now?” asked Mario.

  “Be quiet,” ordered Javier.

  The father wept a little, unsure whether he was awake or asleep, unsure whether his tears were born out of feeling sorry for himself or feeling resentment for his sons. He found it humiliating that Javier now had to defend him to Mario, whom the father had thought of as defective all his life. If he hadn’t been so enfeebled, he’d have gone and boxed Mario’s ears next to that goddamn motor he claims to know so much about. Raise crows and they’ll pluck out your eyes, he thought, again awash in self-pity, which surged and ebbed like a tide or a cramp.

  He heard his sons talking as if from a great distance.

  “Where do you think we are?” Javier was asking.

  “We passed the point. We’ve almost entered the gulf. It’s cleared up now. We’ll be able to see the lights on the beach soon. Ten minutes and we’ll see them.”

  “Beaching is going to be the hard part. And we have to pull it off no matter what, so we can find out what’s going on with the old man.”

  “I’ve landed in rougher seas than this.”

  He’s totally full of himself, the dumb-ass, even though he knows if I were feeling better I’d plunk this boat right down on the sand in front of the hotel. I’m the one who taught them to sail in the first place, and now they’re going around like kings, like they’ve come to my rescue. No way. I’m still the king around here, as the song says. Wait till I get my strength back, dipshits – this old man will show you.

  “What’s the old bastard saying?”

  “Ignore him. He’s delirious or something.”

  Keep quiet, the father told himself when he realized he’d been thinking out loud, or these two will toss me overboard again. If a man’s in rough shape, feeling weak, he has to protect himself like wild animals do when they get sick, where they go off and curl up in a cave somewhere till they get better. Because nobody’s going to look after you, no matter how much you’ve done for them, no matter how much they owe you. No way. They get it in their heads how you’re the one who’s depended on them and they’ve achieved everything through their own good looks, and they start thinking of you as a goddamn burden who’d be better off dead. Betrayals like that cut you to your core, thought the father, tears pressing once more at the backs of his eyes. Betrayals like that hurt, but they’ll be sorry.

  He looked up, and the lights on the shore turned liquid. Feeling sick, he rested his head on his arms again. Javier was still bailing, but the water seemed to keep rising above the father’s ankles. He dozed off, and when he woke up he felt better again. The lights he’d seen had definitely been on land. He forgot he’d been about to cry and instead started thinking about getting ashore and the powerful waves that must still be pounding the beach. He felt a stabbing pain in his ankle again, and felt like himself again.

  “It’s going to be tough,” he said, and Javier turned the flashlight on him. “Get that shit off me. Let’s be honest, I’m down for the count. Otherwise, I’d take over. Our best bet is for that dumb-ass Mario to give it his best shot, because you’re no good at this, as we all know.”

  Javier didn’t say anything.

  “What?” the father asked.

  “Fine,” said Javier.

  “If we capsize, we capsize.”

  “All right, all right, all right.”

  5:00 a.m.

  Mario had calculated they’d reach the hotel a little before daybreak. The waves were still wide and high, but the stars were out again, and they could see the lights along the beach on the northern end of the gulf. The old man was now telling him what to do, giving him useless orders. Mario had been on the brink of either liberation or perdition, and either would have been welcome. Now he felt sapped by the futile effort and angry at Javier for having thrown their catch overboard, and especially for forcing him to continue living burdened by fate.

  We’ve just got to make it ashore, and what’s done is done, Mario thought. The euphoria of imminent danger and defiance helped mitigate his despair. He tried to ignore his father’s instructions so they wouldn’t piss him off. Mario had seen him in the grip of extreme weakness and vulnerability, the old dolt, but that hadn’t restored any of his affection or made his loathing any less corrosive. He recognized the lights of Playamar and saw that there behind it, among the mangroves, the light was starting to dawn. He could also see the foam when the waves crashed and rolled across the water and then across the sand. Without hesitation or consultation, Mario headed the boat toward the beach.

  “You have to position yourself on the rear part of the wave and not get up onto the crest,” the father said in the darkness, which was now the attenuated darkness of daybreak, and Mario barely managed to hold his tongue and refrain from replying that he already knew what to do, you old bastard. He didn’t realize that some of his irritation also came from the fact that his father, when he thought he was teaching them something, used words like position instead of put and rear instead of back. And it didn’t occur to him that if his father, with a possibly broken ankle and a near drowning only barely behind him, was now being pedantic and overly refined in his speech, it might be because he still wasn’t in his right mind.

  “Just do your thing. Don’t get distracted. Ignore him – he’s kind of out of it,” said Javier.

  Mario waited for the father to lash out at his brother, but it didn’t happen. The old man kept staring at the coast as if Javier hadn’t spoken.

  They were starting to be able to see the outlines of things. The dawn traced the silhouettes of the mangroves and palms. The lights of the hotel, which remained in darkness, were still on. Our crazy mother must be there, thought Mario, a little worried, since storms sometimes exacerbated her condition and led to severe crises. Her suicide attempts had taken place on stormy nights, when malevolent creatures flew free on the distraught wind and came from all over like vampires to torment her. Mario was quite familiar with the beings, good and evil, that populated his mother’s universe. He knew them better than Javier, since for a time he’d been able to see them – only every once in a while – though they didn’t see him and he wasn’t able to talk to them or touch them. And these were things their mother had shared with him, not his bro
ther.

  “Once we get near shore, you’re going to have to keep the boat moving at the same velocity as the waves. Don’t try to go any faster than them, understand?” said the father, and nobody responded. “Did you hear me, asshole?”

  “Is there any way to shut him up?” asked Mario.

  “All right, keep the speed steady, fine,” said Javier.

  “And don’t let the breakers get ahead of you. If you don’t stay on top of these two, they’ll screw it all up.”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Mario.

  The father fell silent again as they moved toward the beach. The day kept breaking, generous and varied – in comparison with the night, which was stingy in individual forms yet rich in profundity – but also implacable. Mario had already realized, with some disappointment, that only traces of the rough seas remained and that they’d be able to beach the boat without difficulty. Now he confirmed it. The beach was strewn with branches and bits of trash that had been deposited by the storm surge, and the waves were rolling in, still powerful but now serene.

  “Even you would be able to land here,” said Mario.

  “And pull up the propeller when we touch bottom or you’ll ruin the motor, you hear?” said the father.

  Three fishermen who’d gotten up early to look at the sea spotted the boat and came to stand in front of the hotel, waiting to help them ashore. Herons flew over Doña Libe and her daughter, who were walking, tiny in the distance, toward the swamp. A bad sign that the mother wasn’t with them.

  “I have to tell these clowns the same damn thing every single time.”

  Javier was going to want to rush him to the hospital in Montería so they could take a look at his ankle and see if he’d had a stroke or what, but Mario wasn’t about to go anywhere with the old bastard. He planned to drop by to see his mother, get cleaned up, down five or six shots of aguardiente, and sleep twenty-four hours straight. He wasn’t even hungry – he just wanted to drink some aguardiente and go to bed. If Javier wanted to deal with the father, that was his business. As far as strokes went, Mario didn’t think he’d had one – too bad for them, since they’d have been spared listening to all his bullshit. Hopefully his mother was OK and they wouldn’t have to deal with that. The first breaker tried to hurl them forward, but Mario was able to slow the boat down in time so it fell along with the wave. After moving through two more breakers, they reached the most dangerous one, the one that was crashing onto the sand.

  “He may not be too bright, but when he learns, he learns,” his father said. “Nice job, Mario.”

  The twin could no longer hear him in the din.

  6:00 a.m.

  The twins leaped out of the boat. The waves were powerful, and if the fishermen hadn’t come to help, they wouldn’t have been able to keep the sea from carrying the boat back out, with the father aboard, as the waters ebbed. With the boat beached, the men offered to lift him down, but sitting there on his bench he said no thank you, his sons were more than enough help, and suggested they go inform his wife – Iris, you know? – that he’d arrived.

  Javier surveyed the beach, which was strewn with plant debris and trash carried in by the waves. Among the branches and seaweed were empty tin cans, their labels gone. There were soles from men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes. There were toothbrushes and various other kinds of brushes; there were soles from rubber flip-flops. And there was the black Darth Vader helmet, battered by the elements but imposing, perched on a hummock of sand.

  Javier climbed into the boat to help the father, whose ankle couldn’t have been broken, since otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to stand up and lean on his son’s shoulder, or lift his foot over the side of the boat and plant it in the sand, grimacing with pain. Mario remained sitting near the water, his elbows on his knees, watching the waves unfurl on the beach. Javier didn’t want to call for him to help, since he might refuse.

  “If we leave right this minute, we can be at the hospital in an hour and a half,” said Javier.

  “Hospital? Right this minute? Are you stupid or something? For a sprained ankle?”

  “You lost consciousness out there. You almost drowned.”

  “Because you two idiots were careless. Right? Hang on tight – my foot hurts like hell when I put weight on it.”

  Javier didn’t respond to the carelessness charge. His father might as well have said the sun rises in the west or mangoes fall toward the sky. And though there was no sense in arguing, Javier couldn’t help feeling indignant or prevent that indignation from gradually increasing and turning to rage. At that moment, he would have loved to hand the old man off to that bimbo Iris and not have to deal with him again for a long time. If it weren’t for his mother and Mario, he’d have told his father and everything else to go to hell and taken off. Just two months back, he’d turned down a job running a hotel in Cartagena.

  Sleepy and half dressed, Iris was waiting for the father, leaning against the door frame on the bungalow porch. She didn’t move when they arrived, and Javier had to help his father up the three steps. She didn’t move once they were on the porch either. Is she expecting me to put him to bed too? thought Javier, and said, “All yours, Iris.”

  Iris roused herself and hurried to help. The father’s weight lifted off Javier’s shoulder – the twin felt as if he’d been carrying a load of rocks for twenty-four hours.

  “What happened, baby?” Iris asked the father, more out of obligation, Javier thought, than out of real curiosity.

  “Nothing. That’s what I get for hanging out with losers. Bring me a jug of water with no ice. Help me to the shower – I want to get this salt off me. And tell Imogenia to make me some scrambled eggs.”

  “Baby, they had to tie Doña Nora up, did you hear? But they’ve untied her now,” said Iris.

  “What? The hell with that woman! Such a pain in the ass, goddammit!”

  Javier walked back to the boat. Mario was waiting for him so they could go see their mother. The hotel employees were with him, and a few kids were watching. Somebody had handed him a bag of ice to hold against the swelling on his face. Imogenia came walking toward them.

  “I know, I know, I know,” Javier broke in irritably when Mario started telling him about their mother’s breakdown. He was all too familiar with those episodes and didn’t have the patience to hear the details right now.

  After talking for a minute to the cook, whom Javier had to interrupt to keep her from telling them what had happened, the twins walked in silence to Nora’s house. Gardel’s timeless voice was issuing from one of the bungalows. I shouldn’t have sold Dairon that coke, Javier thought. The moron’s never going to go to sleep now.

  “Now the old bastard’s saying we were letting him drown out of pure carelessness,” said Javier, aware that it was rash to say anything that might revive his brother’s resentment for their father.

  Mario stood staring at the sand but this time he didn’t say anything rude about the father:

  “You shouldn’t have gone back for him. Things would have been good, Javier.”

  The grackles were whistling in the palm trees, the herons were traveling their daily route toward the swamp, and a few early-rising tourists were walking along the beach looking at the waves and the debris. Nothing superfluous, nothing lacking. Javier managed to refrain from saying what he was thinking. They’d go fishing with the father on other occasions.

  “We’d better take the motor apart and clean it right away,” he said instead. “That’s all over now, so we can get some sleep, which we could really use at this point.”

  6:00 a.m. again

  The father downed the strong coffee he always drank to start the day and, still limping but without the cane he’d used for almost a month and stopped using two days earlier, went over to Manny’s crib, lifted him with his strong, hairy hands, and held the baby in front of his face. Without consulting the doctor,
he’d also stopped wearing the annoying ankle brace. The baby smiled. He was a dark cinnamon color, skinny with intense black eyes. He almost never cried. A gorgeous child.

  In the bedroom, Iris was sleeping.

  Iris snored like a bulldozer, Iris ate a lot, Iris was placid and sensual, Iris was excellent company for a man like him, thought the father. She didn’t nag or meddle. She was expert at certain caresses. Sure, she’d gained a little weight from Imogenia’s cooking, but her body was even more desirable that way, and she performed those caresses even more expertly, the father thought. Shirtless, in shorts, holding the baby in his muscular right arm, he went out onto the porch and carefully descended the three steps to the sparse grass in front of the house. In the palms, the grackles were whistling, the bitterns gurgling. Limping only slightly, he walked among the bungalows, which were almost all empty now that the high season was over. Waves broke gently at the edge of the glassy sea. He hobbled into the water, and his knotty legs felt the cold, the presence of sardines, happiness. He scooped up water in his hand to wet the boy’s head, and the boy did not cry. He kept going till the water was up to his waist, stopped, and submerged the boy little by little. The baby twisted under the water, sleek and firm in his hands, and, when he emerged into the air again, his powerful baptismal wail rang out over the empty beaches.

  In the morning the sea mingled with the sun. The father suddenly felt a pang of scorn, love, and compassion for the twins. Some bitterness too, since they were conspiring to mar even that moment. The herons flew over the mangroves, parallel to the beach. Please, God! the father asked, almost ordered, in his direct, unsentimental way. Don’t let this one turn out weak like the other two, all right? Strands of seaweed had been strung out along the sand by the waves, and a few purple jellyfish were gleaming in the first rays of sunlight. Hardly a trace remained of the deluge of chaotic debris that the storm surge had deposited on the beach.