He also became infuriated by the cattle; it was as though God—or God knows who—had determined that his herd should never increase in number. Every time a calf was born, a bullock was stolen, a cow was struck by lightning or a heifer disappeared. At first, J. attempted to deal with the problem with his usual calm; later, news that one of the cattle had died could cast a pall over his whole day, and he would become paranoid, imagining some dark conspiracy was at work. At such times, he needed a few drinks to avoid the sudden squalls of fury that frequently led him to spew abuse at Elena, Gilberto, or indeed anyone who crossed his path.
Some months earlier, J. had come back from Medellín with a German shepherd, a pureblood pedigree pup that proved fretful and frustrating. The dog chewed its way through various things including a number of J.’s books, Gilberto’s little transistor radio and several pairs of Elena’s sandals, and so, barely a month after buying it, he decided to give the pup to Salomón, who had a way with animals. When Salomón died, J. reclaimed the dog, now a full-grown bitch with a glossy black coat, but as fretful as ever. It was a curious case of animal madness: the dog yapped constantly, compulsively, she attacked visitors and, whenever J. or Elena came back from somewhere, she would descend on them like a tornado, pawing, burying her snout in their crotches, getting mud on their clothes. The dog was so temperamental they sometimes carried a stick to fend her off. Once, when Don Eduardo came to visit, the dog tried to bite him and J. decided he would have to chain her up, something that simply made her madder still. She barked day and night, got caught up in the chain and howled, often in the dead of night, until someone went down to the beach to disentangle her, and every time she managed to break free, she wrecked the house.
One night, unable to sleep, J. was sitting up worrying about the finca. Outside, the dog barked furiously, choking on her collar as though there was an intruder. Obviously, no one was prowling around the house; the dog could just as easily be barking at a firefly, at a bat, at the moon. Suddenly J. felt a black liquid flooding his brain. In a blind rage, he leapt out of bed and grabbed his rifle. Senseless with rage, he rushed down to the beach where the dog was tethered to a post and, without a second’s thought, fired both barrels into the animal’s head. The gunshots echoed through the forest as the dog fell dead in a heap. Without a word, J. fetched a spade, went to the paddock and began to dig. A few minutes later Gilberto arrived with a shovel and silently set to helping. Elena watched from the veranda for a while, then went back to bed.
Such outbursts, while violent, did not occur often. The finca and its crew were like a ship becalmed with no fixed destination. This did not particularly matter to J. since he had never expected to grow rich here—that, he realized, was impossible—nor did he even expect reason to thrive in this sweltering, tropical climate. In fact, he had come here in order to escape a demeaning form of rationality that was as sterile as crude oil, as social climbing as bitumen. This was why he loathed Elena’s fence; it was a caricature of a caricature, a pitiful example of what human endeavour could achieve. This was why he became so exasperated when the timber was badly cut, because it needlessly compounded one madness—the felling of a tree—and plunged him into an absurd vortex of senselessness and death. When one of the cattle died, he was not troubled by the money it represented, and only slightly by the fact that the finca as a business would not prosper, but simply because he had once dreamt of owning fields filled with healthy livestock, an innocent dream, ultimately, of wanting things to be fruitful and multiply.
Only the seedbeds had fulfilled his expectations. Providence had ushered in a clement summer, and Gilberto had carefully tended to them, ensuring they never lacked water in the dry season. In the late afternoons, usually alone, J. would visit the fields to watch them grow, to see the palm saplings unfurling their fans and the lush green wreathing the branches of the orange trees. With winter now scarcely a month away, their survival seemed assured. And indeed it was; later, when they had been transplanted—not by J. but by another soul—the palm trees grew sturdy and tall, and the orange trees blossomed and bore fruit. Some years later, coconut palms in the area would be devastated by a disease called porroca at which point other people would sow new seeds, watch the saplings grow, wait for them to be ready to be transplanted. Once more the palms would grow straight and true, once more they would bear fruit: coconut palms like these, standing by the sea, swayed by the salt breeze.
29
J.’S WORRIES about the livestock were short-lived; when his loan finally fell due, he had no choice but to sell the herd. One evening, during a heavy downpour, he sat out on the veranda with a bottle of aguardiente and watched as the cattle were led away. Doctor Penagos’s estate manager had already given him a cheque that J. had slipped into his shirt pocket without so much as a glance. The cowhands noisily began the roundup and, once the cattle had been corralled, the estate manager counted them while J. stared impassively at the sea. Finally, J. watched as they passed, stumbling and lowing in the rain. When the estate manager, drenched to the bone, came up to the veranda to say goodbye, J. offered him a shot of aguardiente.
It was a long, dark winter. Perhaps it was because of the rainy season, perhaps because he had had to sell the livestock that J. increasingly retreated into silence. He now drank almost every day and the quarrels with Elena became more frequent. She had also begun to drink too much, perhaps to blot out the insufferable rain. When drunk, their arguments turned vicious, almost murderous. Late into the night, Gilberto and Mercedes would hear them screaming abuse and sometimes hitting each other. Elena knew that they always sided with J., that they considered her no wife for such a noble, generous man. She waged a merciless war of attrition against them, against the whole village, against life itself perhaps. Battle commenced from the moment she woke up and, in one form or another, in words or in silence, it raged all day long. To get away from her, J. invented pretexts for going to Turbo, where by now in the bars and the brothels he was famous for his charm and his ability to hold his liquor. From time to time, he would spend a night in the village or spend the day working in the forest with the labourers. There were rumours that he had several mistresses, one of whom, Elena had heard from a reliable source, was the wife of Juan, the grocer.
For J., sleeping with Juan’s wife was like sinking into a pleasurable swamp, a bottomless morass of oblivion and death. She was an abysmally stupid and sensual woman, a warm mass of listless, voluptuous flesh. J. never knew, nor did he care, whether Juan found out. Recklessly, taking little precaution, he would simply wait until Juan left the village—the grocer made frequent trips to Turbo—before slipping into the brimstone bed of this buxom woman. Sometimes when he had been drinking for days on end, he could not even tell whether it was real, whether he was burying his head between breasts so huge they spilt out past his chin, almost suffocating him, or whether he was sinking into the bog of some dark nightmare. Often he would leave Juan’s house in the early hours and drink as he walked back along the forest path leading to the finca. The overgrown trail was dark and filled with ominous noises and yet he enjoyed these drunken rambles through the forest (“forest, little forest, fucking forest”), stumbling, grabbing hold of anything in the darkness to stop himself from falling, roaring with laughter—a clear, bright, timeless laugh that echoed endlessly through the woods—tumbling down hills, getting covered in mud and suffering scratches and minor bumps that later blossomed into bruises. Some nights he would fall asleep on the beach to be woken by the dawn light and the trilling of birds and sometimes, perhaps to postpone the inevitable encounter with Elena, or perhaps because in the morning light he felt like another drink, here among the birds, staring at his islands, listening to the crashing waves, he would take a long swig from his bottle and, drunk again, would stumble on, as in a dream, to a crumbling mansion where, curiously amused and aloof, he would laugh his clear, high laugh as some strange woman screamed abuse at him.
When, finally, he emerged from one of his four- or five
-day drinking bouts, a warning bell would tell him to get his life in order, something J. found easier than might be imagined. He would go back to managing the finca, to accurately adding and subtracting in his ledgers; he would make sure he was eating properly and would do everything possible to patch up his increasingly precarious relationship with Elena. The endless cycle of light and shadows felt akin to sailing rudderless across uncharted seas and—at least when drunk—J. felt that each time he washed ashore he found himself more alone, more vulnerable, more free.
30
AND SO by the time of the incident with the ring, not only did J. no longer care about Elena but—being in the middle of a drunken binge—he did not even care what she did with the shotgun. Besides, he slept through the incident and only found out what had happened when it was all over. He was also aware that although she might not go right now—Elena was a proud woman—it was inevitable that she would leave.
J. had spent the afternoon on the veranda drinking and staring silently out to sea. At about six o’clock he got up without a word and stumbled to the bedroom where he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. It had been drizzling steadily all day. That night, lightning split the skies, the rain grew heavier, the house was caught in the eye of a storm. Elena, who had been dreaming she could hear screaming and sobbing, was brutally woken by a thunderbolt so close it seemed to strike the very room in which they slept. With a tight knot of sadness in her stomach, she padded into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, then went into the shop and sat at the Singer sewing machine staring out the window. She could see a solid curtain of water sweeping over the sea, violent gusts battering the palm trees, she could dimly make out the blurred, ghostly forms of the islets in the cove. In the darkness of the shop she began to weep, tears coursing down her face, falling from her chin, trickling down her neck. Then, furious at herself, she angrily wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “We’ll have no crying now, hermana,” she muttered, taking a long, deep breath and squeezing her eyes shut; when she opened them again she noticed the bottle.
She had downed almost half of it by the time she noticed her ring was missing. She had been sitting on the bedroom floor drinking and examining the contents of the wooden box in which she kept her personal possessions. She could still hear the hateful roar of the sea, although it was muffled by the rain hammering on the roof tiles. By the light of a candle, she reread the letters J. had sent, read the letters her brother had sent from prison, pored over her wedding photographs. It was then that she noticed that her ring was missing. She tipped the contents of the box onto the floor and began to hunt for it among the scattered earrings, the bracelets, the photographs. Suddenly panicked, she emptied all the clothes out of the trunk, took the books down from the shelves, dashed back into the shop and moved everything that could be moved. Still there was no sign of the ring. “Those fucking bastards have stolen it,” she thought. She went back to the bedroom and tried to rouse J.
“Wake up,” she said, shaking him roughly, “those bastards have stolen my ring.”
J. opened his eyes and stared sightlessly at her, muttered something unintelligible and fell back like a stone. Stomping to Mercedes’s room, Elena found the woman darning a shirt. Gilberto was out.
“My ring!” she shrieked. And since Mercedes did not seem to understand what was happening, Elena strode over and examined her hands. Mercedes was wearing a ring, but it was her own—a finely wrought gold wedding band, whereas Elena’s ring had a modest diamond in the sort of ornate setting favoured by her ex-husband. Without asking permission, Elena began searching through Mercedes’s belongings, tossing clothes on the floor, ransacking drawers and suitcases. Woken by the racket, the child sleeping in the hammock started crying for his mother, but Mercedes, rooted to the chair, her hands frozen in her lap, could not move.
“I’ll find it, I’ll find it,” Elena said, storming out, leaving the room looking as though it had been looted and Mercedes in a state of cataleptic shock.
Doña Rosita was sitting in her rocking chair listening to the radio when Elena, flushed and dishevelled, burst into the house clutching the shotgun.
“Give me back my ring!” she screamed.
After a brief flicker of surprise, the seemingly imperturbable old woman told Elena that there was no need to threaten her with the shotgun, that if she wanted to search for a ring, or for anything else, she was welcome to do so—being a frail old woman, there was little she could do to stop her. Doña Rosa continued to rock in her chair while Elena turned the shack upside down, knocking things over, smashing and trampling all before her.
Doña Rosita did not move; she did not even glance at Elena as she left the house and prowled around, shotgun in hand, insulting the villagers, conducting a house-to-house search, pointing the rifle at anyone who tried to stop her. Still she did not find the ring. By the time she left the village, the rain was lashing harder, a heavy gale was whipping the trees alarmingly and the whole sky was streaked with lightning. As she tramped home, weeping with rage, calling down curses on J., on the villagers, on the whole area, Elena would not have cared had she been struck by a thunderbolt. Back at the house she sat drinking in the shop, the shotgun by her side, until she finally fell asleep on the counter.
She woke the next morning as J. was carrying her to bed and immediately she started to cry. By now, he had heard about the incident, but he did not want to ask about it, did not want to discuss it. He wiped her tears away with his shirttail, stroked her hair and told her to go back to sleep.
Later that day, Gilberto came and calmly explained that Mercedes could not go on working in the house; that they had no issue with J., but perhaps it was their presence that was unsettling Señora Elena’s nerves. J. said he was sorry to see them go, thanked them for all they had done for him, but he made no attempt to dissuade Gilberto since he knew it was impossible.
31
SO BEGAN an endless succession of wretched, interminable days. There was little conversation in the house and the rain pounded constantly on the roof. Elena took over the cooking and the cleaning, chores she had never found distasteful and which she carried out efficiently. J., for his part, arranged things such that he was out of the house as much as possible. He did not reproach Elena about the shotgun incident, but neither did he make any attempt to bring her out of the depression into which she sank after the incident.
As a gesture of friendship to J., Gilberto continued to make sure there was a stack of logs on the veranda every morning. He knew J. would get blisters on his hands if he had to chop the firewood himself. The attitudes of the villagers towards J. did not change after the event. On the contrary, crockpots filled with crabs arrived even more frequently and, whenever he visited, the locals were as welcoming as ever.
Without an overseer, things on the finca began to go downhill. The horses were infested with ticks, and the heavy rains rotted the saplings in several of the seedbeds because J. had failed to deal with the drainage problems, while the loggers were increasingly unmanageable. For some time, Gilberto had been responsible for dealing with the labourers when J. was on one of his frequent trips to Turbo, on days when he was with Juan’s wife, and on those days he spent holed up in the house drinking. Though he was not a particularly brilliant foreman, Gilberto proved able to keep the men under control and ensure that the quality of the timber was adequate. After Gilberto’s departure, things deteriorated so much that a whole consignment was rejected because the quality of the lumber was so poor, and J. was forced to ship it back from Turbo. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that, when sober, J. would try to stop the rot by summarily firing people, docking their wages or ranting at the loggers. Such measures did not go down well with the men who, in a puerile attempt at revenge, began to deliberately sabotage their own work.
The truth was that, despite his best intentions and the pains he took to treat them as equals, J. had never liked the lumbermen. He was exasperated by their infantile insolence an
d their clumsy chicanery. He was infuriated by the fact that they stole anything they could and were constantly trying to swindle him—and each other. Worse still, they considered this systematic insubordination not as a matter of defiance but one of principle. Obviously, among the labourers there were what Don Eduardo called “just men”, but J. could only see them as a group, an enemy battalion and—his head addled from too much booze—he proved incapable of singling out individuals and making them, if not allies, then simply friends. A month after Gilberto’s departure, realizing that relations with the labourers were becoming untenable, J. managed to curtail his drinking and once again took control of the finca. At first, his newfound authority was precarious, not because of the men’s work—the timber was passably well cut and sold for a reasonable price—but because the men, believing they knew J. better than he knew them, played a waiting game assuming that he would weaken and they could strike home. But J. did not weaken. With almost superhuman effort, he managed to keep a cool head and to assert his authority. Eventually, the loggers—to use a cliché that has existed since mankind first accepted that certain individuals were born to lead—ended up, if not liking him, at least respecting him.
However, the work was arduous and J. was not prepared to spend his days cleaning shit from the rabbit hutches, chopping sugar cane into fodder for the horses and mending wire fences. He needed an estate manager. He spoke to a number of people in the village and the town, but it quickly became clear that everyone for miles around knew about Elena’s volatile temper and no one was prepared to take the job. This simply served to fuel J.’s sense that Elena was a liability—though he cared for her and occasionally they were still good in bed.
In the Beginning Was the Sea Page 9