The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  Miguel again stopped and this time his expression sent a shiver down my spine. I followed his gaze. Carved into a column was a tableau of a drunk man abandoning his family—a little boy was clinging to his father’s legs, a desperate attempt to prevent him from leaving the family hut. But the man was mad with drink and was dragging his clinging son across the dirt, determined to flee his responsibilities. The carving was good—you could sense the tragic ending.

  A look came over Miguel’s face—I will never forget it—as his great wound, buried deep within, was suddenly torn open. At first you could see, in Miguel’s eyes and frozen face, a herculean struggle to contain the rising emotions, but he couldn’t keep the riptide at bay, and as the feelings of hurt washed over him, his mouth opened in a soundless cry.

  My instinct was to shake him out of it. I grasped his elbow and said, “Just stop it. You’re safe with me. Now let’s get this over with.”

  I pushed him forward, forced him to take a step, and in this labored way we shuffled down past the remaining pillars, to our little gnome of a guide, who was energetically waving us on, perplexed as to why we were taking so long to join the ritual at that moment unfolding on the slightly raised dais.

  The colorful statue commanding the back wall was of Lord Ayyappa, a cherubic boy with a bell around his neck, leading a ferocious tiger through the forest. He was a golden child, a healer of the wounded, slayer of the evil demoness Mahishi, a granter of wishes. Believers, pressed hard against the raised platform, adoringly looked up at the priest and the idols, hands clasped in prayer. Their steepled fingers were raised high in front of their faces, their black eyes flinty and fiery and transported somewhere else. And in central position among the believers, the young man who had commissioned the ritual, his head bowed in prayer, desperate to find his soul mate.

  The priest approached the young man dressed in his finest formal mundu, smeared his forehead with paste, and chanted extra prayers over his crown. Then he moved down the podium, handing out banana leaves smeared with a sticky-sweet rice lump and more smudges of the crimson paste he dabbed with his fingers on every believer’s forehead. The air itself was filled with ecstatic awe, of hope and redemption and the possibility that love could be found on this earth.

  I glanced over at Miguel. The look on his face spoke of an ache so deep, a yearning so powerful, I had to look away. A prayer unexpectedly rose to my own lips.

  God, let me save Miguel, my penance for not saving Juan.

  Let me in this way redeem myself before I die.

  I did not sleep well Miguel’s last night at the resort. I woke to the sound of the nuns and monks praying in the seventeenth-century Catholic monastery down below the cliffs, a half ruin originally built by the Portuguese. It was the lead-up to Christmas, and the Christian servants of God and a handful of devout villagers were singing their early-morning prayers. It was an otherworldly sound—half Gregorian chant, half Hindi pop song, the background crash of the waves keeping the music’s beat—and it made my heart swell, pulled me naked from the bed, had me standing on the cold stone floor, looking back down at Miguel through the mosquito net.

  Miguel was as usual naked and sprawled out across the sheets. His thick eyelashes were calmly pressed shut, his mouth and sensuous lips relaxed. He looked like a young god, asleep and at peace after a hunt in the woods. I let him be, pulled on a pair of drawstring pants, and padded across the suite, quietly slipping out the bungalow’s carved teak door.

  The terrace was moist and the surrounding jungle throbbed with chanting frogs and thrumming bugs and snuffling rodents and birds swooping through the branches. Above me, the stars were out in a squid-ink night sky, as was the silver moon, slivered like a shiny crescent pastry. There was a warm breeze coming off the ocean, suggesting the day would be very hot.

  The nuns and monks were in their fifth verse, full of their love for Christ, and their otherworldly song rose up the cliffs to where I stood. I dropped into the hammock, but kept one foot solidly on the ground, rocking myself to the beat of their chant and the eternal crash of the waves. I don’t know how long I was there, but the joy of that sound, the sight of the sun slowly rising across the Arabian Sea, spreading sorbet across the platinum water, it somehow made more poignant what I was feeling inside—the loss, the loss. Miguel would leave me in a few hours, without a backward glance, to fly off to Barcelona.

  He ate his breakfast with his usual appetite, filling his plate with mango and yogurt and Indian breads stuffed with fish curry and rice balls studded with almonds and currants.

  “I could eat an elephant. It was all that hot sex with you.”

  “You say that to all your friends.”

  “True, guapo. But with you I mean it.”

  “Who are you meeting in Barcelona?”

  “No. No. No. Don’t do that. You know our agreement. You don’t ask questions about what I do when I am not with you. That’s our deal.”

  “I can’t stand it. Please. Stay.”

  “You are sweet. But no. That’s not happening . . . Pass the marmalade.”

  We went back to the room and I morosely watched him throw his Speedo bathing suit, a few toiletries, into the bag and zip up. There was a bang on the door and the porter came in. “The taxi to the airport has arrived, sir.” He bent down and, with one swoop, had hoisted Miguel’s bag onto his shoulders and was slowly, methodically, crossing the terrace and climbing the cliff’s stone steps.

  Miguel came over and threw his arms around me.

  “Thank you for the fantastic vacation, guapo. You are a good and kind man. I hope the work you have to do isn’t too boring. If it is, just think of me in that plunge pool and jerk off. See you back in Zürich.”

  Don’t leave me. Stay with me.

  What I said, rather stiffly, was “Goodbye, Miguel. Thank you for the lovely time. Please stay safe.”

  “There you go again, going all formal and uptight and cold. Relax, guapo. Come on. Be cool.”

  He hugged me warmly one last time and then was gone.

  I was alone.

  I worked long hours, a form of penance for all my sins. I covered up my ache, pushed away every thought of Lisa and the boys and Miguel, and focused solely on the work. Day in and day out, I stayed inside the gray-walled office of the Trivandrum bank, under a turning rattan fan, working on my client’s problem with a Chartered Sun Trust Bank manager and local lawyers, trying to figure out an innovative way to meet the client’s mandate to squirrel away his inheritance.

  The Indian heat was almost unbearable. It beat down on the bank’s flat roof like a hammer, until my underwear was wet and soggy and chafing. I am not sure if it was the rising heat without, or the steaming and pressured heat within, but on the last day, unable to bear it any longer, I put down my pen, stood, and walked abruptly from the bank. I headed down the cliff, through the flowering jungle, to the beach and roaring surf. Here, I found a breeze and a cool ocean spray to moisten my face.

  There was a line of blue-and-white fishing boats pulled up on the beach, and next to them stood two lines of sun-blackened men. There were a dozen fishermen in each line, and they were all wearing the little wraparound skirts called lungi.

  The two orderly lines of chanting men were almost a kilometer apart, I guessed, and as I approached I saw that each was partaking in a relay of arms, pulling rhythmically at a net still out at sea, to the incessant beat of their song. I swiveled, cupped my hands to my eyes, and looked beyond the waves pounding ashore. Orange buoys marked the perimeter of the net, which, for all their pulling, still appeared to stretch over a kilometer out to sea.

  A tall and skinny fisherman at the end of the line, shirtless and with a large silver cross dangling from his neck, broke off from the men, circled to the front of the rope coming taut out of the sea. He grabbed the thick hemp with two hands and then fell back with a hard tug and a grunt-chant, the force of his tug sending the entire line of chanting men behind him back another foot. The last man on the rope brok
e off, circled forward, and the relay started again.

  Slowly, as the morning progressed, the two strings of men at either end of the beach, each tugging at one end of the net and dragging it forward through the wide sea, inched their way closer and closer together.

  The bottom of the net was coming in; I could tell, because suddenly the pulled coil of curled net was making the beach reek of fish. The smell must have been a sign of sorts, because a shirtless man with a large belly tucked his lungi this way and that—so it wasn’t hanging down as a skirt, but tight around his thighs like swimming trunks—and then unraveled his turban to tie the band of cloth around his waist, turning it into a belt.

  He walked forward, solid as a rock, and then dove headfirst into the water and swam hard, past the breaking waves, to the last bobbing buoy. He hung from the far side of the net and peered down into the water, looking for fish in the underwater basket. He waved his arm when he wanted the men to pull in one direction or another.

  A fisherman broke off from the net and came to me.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “I am Simon.”

  “I am José.” I pointed at the man in the water. “Who is that?”

  “That is Peter. He is our foreman.”

  Before I could ask another question, there was a commotion and we both turned back to the water. Four younger fishermen dove into the sea and stood or bobbed in the surf, ducking when the biggest waves rolled in. They began smacking the water and yelling. They swam out a little ways, repeated their water dance, chasing the fish toward the back of the net and away from its open mouth at the beach.

  The foreman swam back ashore. The two strings of men were now side by side. They hauled and hauled the last stretch of net, after three hours of praying and pulling, and the net came in quicker now, lying coiled and glistening in the sand. We looked and looked as the last beads of net were hauled ashore.

  There were just two flapping fish, neither bigger than a child’s palm, in the entire net.

  The fishermen were silent.

  “We are fishing in the wrong place,” Peter said. “We won’t fill our empty bellies this way. We are looking in the wrong place.”

  FOURTEEN

  It was late July of the same year and the salmon were running. I stood on the ridge, just outside the fishing lodge, and squinted down at the wild river below, looking for my sons. The wind was blowing hard, as it always does in Iceland, but that afternoon the arctic sun was also bright in the sky, and it was making every wind-buffeted blade of tundra grass and shard of rock glint as if made from diamonds.

  I snapped my Polaroid shades into place, and peered down at the Kjara River roaring through the ravine below. Devil’s Gate was named for the frightening roar the water made as it poured hard through the funnel at the top of the gorge. The long pool, below the white water, was the blue-green of Murano glass.

  Even from where I stood, I could see the silver glint of a salmon occasionally turning on its side, but I saw no sign of the boys, so I walked up the ravine another hundred meters and again stepped to the edge.

  I spotted them. My sons had each taken one of the three branches of river threading through the plateau, and were methodically fishing every pot as they headed upriver, hunting for the salmon resting after an exhausting swim up through the powerful falls of Devil’s Gate. I fished in my jacket for binoculars and zeroed in on the farthest figure. It was Sam, playing what looked like a one-year-at-sea grilse, on the outer branch of the river. Before I could swing my binoculars over to the other two boys, however, I sensed, in the momentary lull of the wind before another gust came barreling down the tundra, someone approaching me from behind.

  Inge, the lodge maid, stood timidly, her blond hair fluttering wildly in the wind. We exchanged shy glances. That morning, on my way to the bathroom, I had seen Inge slink out of the married head ghillie’s bedroom, and we both froze, embarrassed, before averting our gazes and continuing on our journeys.

  “Señor Álvarez. Your wife is on the phone.”

  I followed her back to the lodge, wiped my feet on the mat. We passed through the beamed great room, its large window serving up a high-ridge view of Devil’s Gate below. The dining room’s long table, standing below the window, was already set for the 10:00 p.m. dinner. The lounge, on the other side of the great room, was filled with sturdy couches and leather armchairs, a coffee table covered in fishing logs, and a sideboard dotted with half-empty bottles of vodka, whisky, and cognac.

  The public phone booth with the accordion door was in the hall at the back of the lodge, past the guest bedrooms. I picked up the receiver lying on its side.

  “Lisa?”

  “Darling! Hello! How is the fishing?”

  “Fantastic. I’ve caught thirty-eight salmon in two days. None less than four kilos.”

  “That’s wonderful. And the boys?”

  “They’re all good. They’re on the river now. We just had lunch. I took a brief siesta afterward, and the boys went directly down to the river to fish. They don’t want me to pull too far ahead. They’ve caught twenty-seven fish—altogether.”

  “I’m so pleased. I hope Rob has caught a salmon on the fly rod. He was so determined it would happen this time.”

  “Not yet. But it will happen. The fishing is good.”

  We talked some more, about the house in Ägeri; about how many kilos of cherries we harvested this year; how the farmer who was leasing the outer fields was now cutting the tall grass to make winter hay. We told each other we loved each other, in that perfunctory way long-married couples do, and then hung up.

  I stared at the phone, back in its cradle, deciding what I should do next. I knew it was a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. I fished inside my pocket for my little black address book. I picked up the phone, called Switzerland again.

  “Hola, Miguel.”

  “Papi! What are you doing calling? I thought you were in Iceland.”

  “I am. I had to hear your voice.”

  I could hear, in the background, the sound of music, a deep voice.

  “That’s so sweet of you. How’s the fishing?”

  “Fine. What’s going on there? Sounds like you’re having a party.”

  “No. No . . . it’s a client. He just arrived. So I can’t talk now. I’ve got to get off the phone. See you soon, Papi. I can’t wait until you come back.”

  As he went to put down the phone on his end, I distinctly heard a voice, speaking Swiss German, calling out from somewhere in the apartment. I knew instantly it was Miguel’s friend, the bouncer from the nightclub.

  “Did you get rid of that boring old fart? Now come here, handsome.”

  I put down the phone. I wanted to gaff the bouncer’s face.

  I banged hard on Sigi’s door in the staff quarters and some seconds later the young ghillie peered myopically out from his room. He was tousle-haired and smelled of Brennivin, the local firewater. He was the ghillie assigned to guide the Álvarez family, shuttling us back and forth from the river. The head ghillie and another assistant were working the lower beats of the river with a larger group of wealthy French and Italian clients, who were also staying at the lodge and somehow connected to each other through the car industry.

  “Sigi, I’ve paid a hell of a lot of money to fish here. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect someone to take me to the river.”

  “No, sir. You can get into the Russian jeep. The Lada. I’ll be right there.”

  I stomped back to the mustard-colored jeep that looked like a squat bug, climbed into its passenger seat, and slammed shut the rattling door. I had already attached my rods to the hood. I lit a cigarette, leaned over, and blasted the car horn several times. Sigi came tearing out from the back of the lodge, buckling his pants, as if he had just taken a piss.

  The young Icelander climbed in behind the wheel, fired up the Lada, released the hand brake, and rolled us forward—all in one seamless motion.

  �
�Sorry. I fell asleep.”

  “Listen, Sigi, I’m not paying twenty-five hundred dollars a day per rod so you can drink Brennivin and fuck the cook’s help. I’ve lost twenty minutes of fishing looking for you. Do you need me to do the math as to how much that cost me?”

  “No, sir. I understand. You are right. I’m sorry.”

  “The boys are still fishing the Pools of the Lost. They’ll be there for a while. Take me to Red Rock. Let’s get ahead of the boys and fish the rested pools. I think the large run of fish we saw last night has already moved farther upriver.”

  Sigi sucked in his breath, the look on his face making it clear his sense of river etiquette had been violated. “Your sons told me they were going to fish upriver this afternoon, into Red Rock, and that you were going to fish the pools below Devil’s Gate. This is what was agreed.”

  “Yes. That is what we agreed at breakfast this morning, but now river conditions have changed, and so I have changed the plan. Do you have a problem with this?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, then. Do as I say. Let’s go.”

  We came to where the dirt road finally met the valley’s hard and flat lava bed, the lacing branches of river stretched out before us. For a moment, a back tire was suspended high as it rolled over a large boulder, while the front wheels were already on the flat plain below. When the back wheel rolled completely off the high rock, we hit the lava bed with a hard thud and I was thrown against the dashboard, banging my head.

  I exploded in Spanish curses.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Cabrón. You’re always apologizing. It’s annoying.”