“Silence may also be a form of legitimate defence,” the young man said as he sifted though the pages of a book. “Do not forget, Captain, you were assigned this mission only after the ship that was to have brought me here in the first place got quarantined with typhus. We have arrived two months behind schedule. Who knows what toll the solitude took on the former weather official? Even if some misfortune has befallen him, this man here has the look of a witness, not a culprit.”
The captain abruptly turned his attention to an Asian mariner who continued to rummage through the crates. Before the sailor knew it, the captain delivered three sharp blows to the scruff of his neck. The captain confiscated a silver cigarette case the man had stolen. He examined it severely, never taking the cigar from his lips, and then swiftly slipped the case into the depths of his peacoat. The youth was unfazed. He was surely accustomed to such scenes.
He held up The Golden Bough and said pompously, “Have you read nothing else in all this time? I must tell you that the world of letters has moved forward. Intellectuals today must appeal to higher principles.”
No. He was mistaken. Nothing had changed. He would have done well to consider those filthy men who had invaded the lighthouse like clients piling into a brothel. While he spoke of summits of learning, they debased all they touched. He should have looked at me, who feared the noose much less than living among those men. I had chosen exile over chaos and would no longer be able to retrace my steps. He was hopelessly smug. If only there had been a scale in front of us, I would have challenged him to pile all his books on one side and Aneris on the other.
Naturally, the captain’s threats were absurd. I was merely an obstacle and was treated as such. He tore off his cap at some point, bellowing all the while. He employed the headpiece as a lash, egging the men on in a mix of French and Chinese, or some such babble. Yet before I knew it, they were gone. I could still hear them on the stairs. Orders, curses and insults were bandied about in equal measure. A hush fell afterward. They went in the same manner they had come. The ocean was unusually rough. At times, as the waves slapped against the lighthouse, it sounded like someone crushing stone in a quarry. At other moments, the sea’s clamour brought to mind a lion’s roar. To have seen a ghost is not an uncommon thing, but I was under the impression of having been the first to witness an entire crowd. Or perhaps it was I who was the ghost.
I did not budge from the balcony the entire day, fascinated by my own curiosity. It had been so long since I had seen a group of men that their every move was a novelty. The crew set to repairing the weather official’s house. They toiled most begrudgingly, goaded on by the strict orders of the captain. At times, the wind carried the clamour of banging tools and the captain’s voice. But not even he put much spirit into the task. His taunting commands seemed overly theatrical. The captain struck a poor compromise between completing a mission and embarking as soon as possible. I saw a thin column of smoke rising, and the men moving to and fro. The captain began to drink more than he smoked. He paid little attention to the youth’s suggestions. The captain took short nips from a hip flask, turning his back on the others for an extra swig. He was impatient to get away.
The dinghies abandoned the beach at twilight, and I felt absolutely nothing, not even homesickness. The ship seemed to sink into the horizon. Smoke rose up from the weather official’s chimney. The trapdoor creaked open. I did not need to look round to know it was her. Who knew where she had been hiding.
I felt restored after eating a tin of baked beans. Aneris immediately obeyed when I clicked my tongue. She cleared the table and hastily threw off the ragged jersey. In her own way, she was content. I suppose that my drunken state had been both unexpected and puzzling. Yet there I was, faithful and not asking any more from her than she was willing to give. I, too, undressed. I was just pulling off my last jersey when she abruptly changed posture. Her face contorted into an electrified grimace. She sat, legs crossed, and began to sing in a melodious voice.
Blood began to course through my veins. I secured the barricades on the door, lit the lighthouse’s beam and sorted what little ammunition remained. I wanted to keep a flare handy. My God, there were hardly any left. Was all in readiness? Yes and no. Everything was ready. My surroundings were so carefully ordered that they no longer needed me.
The Sitauca invaded from the east and west coasts of the island simultaneously. They had divided into two small groups, which then met in the forest to prepare the attack. They drew toward the lighthouse in leaps and bounds. The beam would occasionally illuminate a pair of eyes, which gleamed like greenish copper. While I was taking aim, an old manual of military tactics came to mind: a fortification should only be attacked by night and in superior numbers, especially in the case of insufficient arms. And they must always seek and find the enemy’s point of weakest defence before initiating their assault. It may seem pure common sense, but true warriors are much in need of common sense.
They vanished, and a minute afterward I heard them howling on the other side of the island. The order of things no longer required my presence as I calmly cleaned my rifle and listened to the play of gunfire. I played dumb while another human fought for his life, there, on the same patch of ground. After all, what should I have done? Inform the captain that we were surrounded by a million sea monsters? Abandon the safety of the lighthouse in the middle of the night? I counted at least nine shots and all I could think of was that such a rash waste of ammunition ought to be prohibited. I went to see him the next day. He was shrouded in a thick fog until I had practically reached the doorstep. As far as one could tell, he was more or less alive. Wild curls and swollen eyes. The man was still dressed like an insurance salesman. The island had never seen such an unlikely ensemble. I should have laughed, had I any sense of humor left. He wore a white waistcoat missing its buttons and a black suit, wrinkled in the course of battle. He even wore a tie, although it hung loosely off his neck. One of the lenses in his glasses had cracked into a spiderweb and his shoes were caked with mud. He had gone from being a petit bourgeois to an expatriated pariah overnight. A smoking revolver dangled in his right hand. Paradoxically, the diminutive weapon just added to his stamp of vulnerability. He trotted toward me through the mist.
“Mr Gruner, thank God! I feared I should never see a member of humankind again.”
I did not reply; the man had been reduced to a walking phantasm. He followed me about like a dog as I rifled through the dwelling. A glimpse of the abyss provokes a sort of compulsive loquacity in some people. He prattled on and on. I paid little attention to what he said. Two crates of ammunition lay beneath two large sacks of beans. They were shaped like tiny coffins. A hush fell when I pried one open with an iron crowbar, as though we had desecrated a saint’s tomb. I ran my fingers through the bullets.
“Oh, sir, I nearly forgot,” he said, kneeling at my side. “There must be a rifle in one box or another. Weather officials are required by regulation to pack a minimal arsenal. I did not have my wits about me yesterday and somehow forgot to mention it. Luckily, I carried this revolver on board to fend off certain sailors’ unwanted attentions. Who would have thought that I was to take up residence with the devil?”
“You never know where you may end up. We should look through your supplies,” I declared.
“Well, you seem to have made good use of your supplies.” Then he added in a meek voice, “Otherwise, you would have perished.”
Although he was right, I could not help feeling vaguely offended. I could not tear my eyes, or fingers, from those copper bullets.
“Now you too must put them to good use. For my part, I have no qualms with splitting the island by halves. Take two boxes of ammunition. I’m sure you shan’t mind if I keep one.”
He blinked in incomprehension and stood up. The young man slammed the top of the crate shut with his foot. It was a near thing that he didn’t smash my fingers.
“What do you mean by trying to take the ammunition to the lighthouse? It is I
whom you must let into the lighthouse.”
His tone of voice had changed. I observed him carefully for the first time. He was the sort of man who meets his death with hope on his lips.
“It is impossible for you to understand. All is obscurity here.”
“I have seen that much for myself: turbid depths, infested by skittering sharks.”
“Indeed, you simply cannot understand.”
I took him by the neck with one hand and dragged him to the beach. I was not the stronger of the two. However, he was disconcerted and my muscles were hardened by island life. I wrenched his head so it faced the water.
“Look!” I bellowed. “Last night was hell, wasn’t it? Now, look carefully at the ocean. What do you see?”
The young man let out a whimper and collapsed onto the sand like a broken rag doll that had lost its stuffing and began to cry. Naturally, I could easily imagine what he had seen. If he had been capable of envisaging anything else, he would never have ended up on the island. A frigid wind lifted the fog. The sun was lower than I thought.
He stopped sobbing. “Nothing has made sense since I disembarked on this island. But the fact is I have no wish to die in this place.” He made a fist. “No desire at all.”
“Then leave,” I replied. “That lighthouse is a mirage. There is no refuge to be found within its walls. Don’t go inside. Leave; go home.”
“Leave? How do you expect me to go anywhere?” He spread out his arms. “Look around you. Do you see a single ship? We are at the end of the world.”
“Do not trust the lighthouse,” I insisted. “Only those who have lost their faith arrive on these shores. Faithless men cling to delusions. But one cannot embrace a delusion.” My voice cracked. “If you had faith, you should be able to walk on water and go back from whence you came.”
“You either mock me or you are demented.”
“How can you treat me like a madman having passed a night in this place?” My bones ached. “I am weary.”
I sat down on a rock. He looked at me in wonder. I had been a mere ventriloquist. The chains that bound me kept me from believing what I had just said. To my surprise, however, his eyes narrowed into lucid dots. He did not blink. The young man stood up savagely and took off his shoes. He roughly rolled up his trouser legs, setting aside his jacket and glasses.
Yes; the youth began to walk, without hesitation or doubt, toward the waves. I was taken by a sudden inspiration as I gazed at the boy’s tender and determined back. He stopped at the imprecise border between land and sea. A wave, longer than the others, lapped at his feet. I shuddered from the cold along with him, as though we were united by some invisible cord. I was plagued by doubt. What if he left?
The rifle fell from my hands. I could not believe it. He was actually walking on water. He took one step, and then another. The ocean supported his weight like a liquid bridge. He was leaving, abolishing the lighthouse and the evils that had kept the fires of war burning. He had realised that delusions are not to be argued with; they must be ignored. He had eradicated all the passions and perversions by renouncing them right from the start. That boy was the eyelids of the world. A few more steps and we would wake from our nightmare.
He turned indignantly toward me.
“What the devil am I doing?” he cried, with his arms flung wide open. “Do you think I am Jesus Christ?”
He turned back. By the time the youth had reached land, he had the spirit of a warrior. He was ready to fight to the death. The young man spoke of two-legged sharks, poisoning the water with arsenic, circling the coast with nets covered in broken mussel shells, which would cut like knives, and a thousand other deadly strategies. I went up to the water. A flat reef lay inches beneath its surface. So much for walking on water.
I sank down onto the beach, cradling the rifle like a baby. I let myself fall back until my spine felt the cushion of sand. Definitively, the world was a predictable place, lacking in novelty. I asked myself one of those questions to which one already knows the answer: Where had my little Triangle gone, where?
The sun was beginning to set.
COLD SKIN
Albert Sánchez Piñol was born in Barcelona in 1965 and is an anthropologist and writer. Cold Skin is his first novel and has already been translated into fifteen languages. His second novel, Pandora in the Congo, will also be published by Canongate.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
Originally published in Catalan in 2002 under the title La Pell Freda
by La Campana
This English translation published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux L.L.C., 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003, USA
All rights reserved
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2002 Albert Sánchez Piñol
Translation copyright © 2005 Cheryl Leah Morgan
The moral right of the author and the translator has been asserted
This work was published with a grant from the General Books Council for the Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 620 7
www.meetatthegate.com
Cold Skin Page 17