The same night, he would reread the last pages he had written, tear out the entry marked Dec. 1, 1976 and throw it down the toilet. In its place he would write:
Dec. 2, 1976: Today we felled the largest cashew tree I’ve ever seen in my life. We’ll make a lot of money from the timber. I also saw a huge troop of monkeys. One of the loggers shot at them but he didn’t hit them.
A snake killed a young bull calf.
24
J. PERSONALLY accompanied the second consignment of wood to Turbo, planning to stay there for a week. The day after his arrival, the sea was stormy and remained that way for several days. He stayed at Julito’s place, and spent his days drinking in a second-floor bar that overlooked the plaza, passing the long hours gazing down at the town square, half-hypnotized by the heat, the beer and the comings and goings of the jeeps below. He spent a couple of evenings watching karate movies—the only kind of films that were showing—in an open-air cinema with wooden pews exactly like a church. And one night he went with Julito to a brothel.
The cathouse smelt of perfume, sweat and cigarette smoke. There were ceiling fans and tango music. At four in the morning Julito, looking smart in a blue guayabera shirt, was slumped in an armchair staring at J. He was drunk but trying not to let it show. J., half dozing, rested his chin in the cleavage of the pale, well-rounded woman sitting on his lap. There was a bottle of rum on the table next to tall glasses with gilt rims, a puddle of water and a bucket in which the ice had melted. The light was a pinkish-blue. The whores, dressed in flaming red or hot pink, appeared and disappeared through dusty brocade curtains. A thin, shadowy black queen fluttered like a moth amid the soft lights and the drapes.
When J. got to his feet, dizzy and reeling from the drink, the woman slipped under his arm. Together, they disappeared behind a low curtain while Julito watched, his face flushed. An hour later, the madam—an ageing malicious old shrew decked out with tinkling bracelets and thick makeup—came and told Julito to take his friend home as he was drunk and had fallen asleep in the bedroom. Julito woke J. up as best he could, helped him outside and took him back to his house.
Four days later, when he arrived back at the finca, J. saw that there was a new barbed-wire fence encircling almost a thousand square metres of land and a small strip of sea. Running from a stake planted in the sea, five strands of razor wire were strung across the beach, the barbed wire snaking through two hundred metres of forest and then back across the beach where it was nailed to another stake embedded in the water, completely sealing off the little cove where Elena went swimming.
On the boat trip back, J. had been happy and talkative, chatting to Julito and listening for the hundredth time to the same hoary old stories. Now, before the boat had even begun to slow, he spotted the barbed wire from the distance.
“What’s with the fence, jefe?” asked Julito.
The stakes looked tall and sturdy, the strands of wire were close together. A neat section of sand and sea had been carefully carved out of empty tropical space.
“No idea,” said J.
When J. got to the house, he noticed that the barbed wire under the veranda—ten new rolls he had bought a month earlier to fence the paddocks—were missing. Elena was in the shop, standing on a chair, arranging things on a high shelf.
“What’s up?” she said, without getting down. “I didn’t even hear the boat. Did Julito come back with you?”
“What’s up?” J. repeated with cold fury. He was in shock.
He tossed his backpack into a corner, stalked out and went to inspect the fence. The wires were taut and firmly nailed in place. It was a fine piece of workmanship. Rolling up his trousers, he waded into the sea. The posts were thick and sturdy.
He went to find Gilberto.
“Are you out of your fucking mind, Gilberto?” he said, dispensing with a greeting.
Gilberto launched into a rambling explanation so confused and contradictory that it left J. speechless with anger. Gilberto babbled that he assumed Señora Elena was in charge in J.’s absence; that he had tried to persuade her to wait until Señor J. came back before doing anything about a fence, but she had threatened to fire him; that he would take down the barbed wire if that was what J. wanted.
“You know what Señorita Elena is like when she’s angry,” he said finally.
“Who put up the fence?”
“Me and Roberto.”
“I’m not going to pay you a peso for the work, Gilberto,” said J. “And you’ll have to pay Roberto out of your own pocket, that’s all there is to it.”
“Whatever you say, Don J.”
“And this is the last time you do anything without my permission, you got that? When I’m not here, you do whatever jobs we agree on before I leave, no more, no less.”
“OK, Don J.”
J. turned on his heel and left. His mind was still shrouded in a seething black fog and he decided it was best not to go back to the house straightaway. He walked on the beach for a while, careful to head north, then he sat down and waited for his anger to subside. Eventually, he decided to have the fence taken down.
When he told Elena, she hit the roof. She was not going to be treated like some nobody, she told him, this was her finca as much as his and she had rights, besides why was he making such a big deal about a few rolls of barbed wire, swimming was her only pleasure in this godforsaken shithole and she was not about to let him take that from her.
“You take that fence down and I’m leaving,” she said.
It was no idle threat, and so J. did not remove the fence. Nor did he go swimming with her any more. The next time Don Carlos came by, he innocently asked about the wire fence.
“It’s Elena’s Country Club, Don Carlos,” said J.
Elena called him every name under the sun and locked herself in the bedroom. Don Carlos left soon after.
Since the wire cut across the dirt road, the villagers were forced to make a detour through the forest and rejoin the path farther on. In general, however, they only did so when Elena was on the beach; if she was not there, they simply lifted the wire and squeezed through the gap. Elena would often find the barbed wire held apart by lengths of rope or fabric, sometimes it was ripped from the posts. Every week, with J.’s authorization, Gilberto repaired the gaps, a never-ending task made all the more absurd since Gilberto and his family were the ones who most often damaged the fence on their way to and from the village.
25
NEITHER OF THEM felt like going to Medellín for Christmas. The weather here was cool, the nights were long and they were once more happy in each other’s company. Sometimes, J. would make a little jibe about the barbed-wire fence which would trigger a minor squabble; over time it became a sort of game.
On December 24, they were invited to the Christmas Eve ball in the village. Since Elena did not want to go, J. dropped by during the afternoon. When he got there, everyone was happy and excited. Salomón was the first to greet him. He was clutching a bottle of whisky and cradling his baby daughter in his arms, but when he saw J. he set his daughter down and ran over to hug him. One arm still around J.’s shoulder, he offered him a drink of whisky. At Doña Rosa’s house, J. was plied with food and more drink. Primped and powdered and wearing bright red lipstick, the old woman looked jovial. She was pleased that J. had come to visit, but disappointed that he could not stay for the party. She effusively thanked J. for his gifts—a bolt of fabric printed with yellow daisies and several bars of imported turrón.
He left, happy and grateful to the villagers, and arrived back at the house at six o’clock to find Elena waiting for him wearing a beautiful dress.
“Did you put the wine out in the sink to chill?” he asked.
She had, she said, it should be perfect now.
“Go fetch a bottle, hermana. Let’s drink a toast before dinner.”
Mercedes had prepared two large lobsters with lemon and onions and there was a platter of oysters on the half shell which they ate with lemon and salt
. From the village, they had been sent two bowls of arroz con camarones.
“An aphrodisiac Christmas,” said J.
The wine was better than they had expected; only the last bottle was a little vinegary but they drank it nonetheless.
When they had finished off the wine, they started on the whisky.
J.’s Christmas presents to her were a blue bikini all the way from Italy and a copy of the Diccionario de la Real Academia. Whenever Elena read, she liked to jot down unfamiliar words on a piece of paper—in her case, there were a lot of unfamiliar words. Later, in a naïve attempt at self-improvement, she would look up the words in a battered old dictionary with missing pages they had picked up somewhere. Elena gave J. a History of Erotic Art with illustrations ranging from Pompeii to Picasso. Months later, one of the police officers involved in the investigation would slip the book surreptitiously into his backpack, and when his wife found it later it ended up being sold to a textile merchant in Turbo who would use it as cheap pornography.
“There’s nothing like sophisticated pornography,” said J.
They spent the evening listening to the strains of vallenato drifting from the village. Just before midnight, Elena and J. launched a huge paper lantern. Since there were only two of them, they had to use fine threads to hold the lantern open while it filled with hot air from the candle. They managed to succeed. The lantern soared and, carried on a gust of wind, drifted over the forest.
“I bet it floats all the way to Panama,” said J.
Until about 3 a.m., J. remained calm, but clearly the whisky did not agree with them and both he and Elena foundered. They had a terrible argument, though neither of them quite understood what triggered it. It had clearly been a vicious quarrel because the following morning Elena had a black eye and bruises on her thighs and J. had long, deep gouges across his face. The books had been pulled down from the shelves and the shotgun was under the bed; one barrel had been fired.
“If we carry on like this, we might really hurt each other,” said Elena.
The words sounded strange to J.’s ears, but he sensed that she was right. Both of them felt ashamed and afraid.
December 25 was a traumatic day. They racked their brains trying to remember, but to no avail. By the morning of the 26th, after a night spent tossing and turning, J. felt better.
“Let’s not screw up our lives over this,” he said. “If neither of us can remember, then clearly we weren’t ourselves.”
26
AFTER CHRISTMAS, the loggers were once again idle and intractable. They were cutting less timber and doing it badly, something that infuriated J. The due date for the loan was looming yet again and he had not managed to save a single peso towards paying it off.
Once, he made an unannounced inspection while the loggers were working in an area he rarely visited since it was a long, steep climb. He stumbled onto a veritable bloodbath. The labourers had been cutting down trees so small they would hardly yield a single plank of wood; they were working from the wrong side so that, as they fell, the trees uprooted smaller saplings; the timber was crudely sawn, many planks were too short, others too long…
“I will not be paying a single peso for this wood,” said J.
The men looked at each other and were silent for a moment. Then, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground and never raising his voice, one of them began to protest. J. was convinced he could see the man smiling. After a moment, the other men joined in: there was nothing wrong with the timber, they insisted, J. did not know what he was talking about; they went on to rant about the high prices in the shop, about their earnings, about the quality of the food, the accommodation.
Keeping his temper, J. dealt with their complaints as best he could. He could be extremely persuasive when he needed to be. Besides, the loggers knew as well as he did that their working conditions here were much better than they would find anywhere else. Still the men tried to bargain over the timber J. had dismissed as badly cut.
“I will not pay for miscut lumber. And I’m not going to let you guys bankrupt this finca with shitty second-rate work.”
There was another howl of protest, voices were raised, someone muttered the word “robbery”.
J. stood his ground: he could not yield on this point without risking the whole venture. When one of the loggers became aggressive—a surly, broad-shouldered man named Maximiliano, who stood almost two metres tall—J., indignant and a little afraid, informed him that his services were no longer required and told him he could collect what was due to him that afternoon. At first, the astonished Maximiliano was dumbstruck; after a moment he growled that J. deserved to be hacked to pieces with a machete. He drew his blade and, without looking at J., buried it in a tree trunk. J. turned his back, insisting again that he would not pay for miscut timber, and stormed off. When he had gone some distance, he took the bottle from his backpack and gulped down two long swigs.
“You did the right thing,” Elena said when he told her what had happened. “You can’t let these people walk all over you.”
Late that afternoon, Maximiliano showed up at the house alone and much calmer. He tried to persuade J. not to fire him, but, while J. agreed to give him a good reference, he said that he could not take him back. Maximiliano took his money without a word.
That night the labourers got drunk. Someone heard them in the early hours, ominously banging the blades of their machetes against the floor and spluttering threats against J. Two days later, Doña Rosa warned him: “You need to be careful, these men are bad men.”
27
IN FEBRUARY, they had a visit from Guillermo, a cousin of whom J. was very fond. A chubby man of about twenty-five, J. thought of Guillermo as the embodiment of energy without intellect. He was a boorish lout who could eat three pounds of fried pork at a single sitting. Strangely, his greed and his gluttony were his greatest charms; he ate with a sort of intense pleasure that originated deep in his gut and arrived at his brain only with some difficultly. He had a keen sense of the comical—he was very observant—and would roar with laughter, baring dazzling white teeth with not a single filling. He had those dark, soulful eyes and long lashes that certain women found attractive.
“Fine mango tree!” were his first words as he stepped onto the veranda. He had arrived at noon while Elena and J. were having lunch. Mercedes fried more fish and Guillermo ate with painstaking relish, sucking out the eyes, pulling the heads apart to gnaw on the pieces, piling the bones up on the side of his plate. Grease trickled down his chin and his fingers as he rhapsodized about the food. There was a gently mocking twinkle in J.’s eyes as he watched Guillermo eat.
After a siesta, Guillermo pulled on a pair of shorts and went for a swim. When he came back, he was about to ask about the fence but J. made it clear he was not to raise the subject. “Best never to mention that fucking fence,” he explained later. “The little woman goes apeshit.” Guillermo felt that Elena had every reason to want to swim in private. “A pretty thing like that, guys are bound to want a taste,” he thought. “Right there on the hot sand.”
That afternoon, the three of them sat down at the dining table to drink. Guillermo had a particularly colourful way of speaking; he told them he had just taken up a job with a company named Bananos de Colombia who had posted him to a village full of starving people that smelt like an open sewer. The company had provided him with accommodation. “The fucking house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and hot and cold running mosquitoes.” The village was on the road between Turbo and Medellín and J. realized he would have somewhere to stay if he wanted to make the trip in two stages.
At six o’clock, already slightly drunk, all three went off to see the stud bull mount a cow that one of the neighbours had brought. Guillermo, clearly aroused by this startling display of copulation, stared surreptitiously at Elena’s cleavage on the way back. They carried on drinking until dawn.
A few hours later they were woken by Gilberto, who told them Salomón was on his deathbed.
J. felt a sudden wrenching terror in his stomach and ran to the outhouse to vomit.
Salomón had got up at dawn to work in the forest. Though he had been carrying a machete when he felt the snake bite into his calf, in his panic he did not even think to draw the blade. With the snake still hanging from his leg like a whip, the man stumbled out of the woods, tripped and accidentally buried the machete in his stomach. He was delirious by the time he was found; his face was blue and already he smelt of rotting flesh.
When J. and Guillermo arrived at Salomón’s cabin, they found him dead. There were four candles on the ground, one at each corner of the long table on which the corpse—grotesquely swollen and purplish—was laid out. J. did not want to get too close to the body, but Guillermo, whose fascination with death was equalled only by his obsession with food, watched as Don Eduardo embalmed the corpse.
Having embraced Doña Rosa, J. headed back to the finca. Since they were all in shock, they sat on the veranda and drank. That night, J. dreamt Salomón had come into his room and was walking towards the bed. In the middle of the night, he woke up screaming in terror just as the dead man was about to speak. Elena calmed him, rocking him like a baby until he fell asleep again, his head resting on her breasts.
Two days later, after he had witnessed the lurid burial rites, Guillermo left, taking a bag of ripe mangoes and several kilos of guagua meat bought from the village. “If I don’t leave soon, those two will turn me into an alcoholic,” he thought as he watched the coastline recede.
J. was sorry to see him go.
28
JUST AS he had feared, the timber shipment that J. accompanied to Turbo in mid-February was declared poor quality. The sum paid by the lumber merchants scarcely covered his expenses and he was strongly advised to keep a close eye on the quality of the loggers’ work. Returning to the finca, J. was sullen and unforthcoming. His loan was due in less than two months and he knew that Fernando would not renew it again—in fact, he would ostentatiously refuse. His foul mood led him to ill-treat the loggers, sometimes without reason, and to become distant from them. This was a mistake because, since Maximiliano’s departure, they had once again begun to work well.
In the Beginning Was the Sea Page 8