by Mark Helprin
“I have four lines out,” I began, breathlessly. “Each line is two hundred meters of Permafil with a rated strength of seventy-five kilograms. I can cast sixty or seventy meters with the wind, but if there’s a riptide it will carry the line farther and deeper. That’s why I have so much line. The big fish are in the blue.”
“Check the lures,” he said. I began to reel them in.
BY THE TIME I had retrieved the lures, my heart had slowed down to normal. I would have been very proud if I had pulled in a big silver mackerel, but unfortunately I had no fish to show the old man. Now I know why I had calmed down. Very few people who get to be chief of state lack the ability to put others at ease. And, then, he was not in his coat, he was deferential and truly interested in my fishing technique, and we were out at the end of the pier, on the sea.
“I thought that, for it to work, you had to be pulling a lure through the water all the time,” he said. “What’s your method? When I was a boy in the mountains, we would put a lure in the stream and the water flowing past it would keep it alive. You can’t do that in the ocean, can you?”
Everyone knew that Santos-Ott had been a boy in the mountains. It was part of the national mythology: I had heard and read the phrase “a boy in the mountains” applied to him hundreds of times. “Often, you can,” I answered. “It’s because of the point. The currents sweep along the coast and then are deflected straight out to sea by the point, so it’s like a river, only it curls back in a circle and hits the shore again. If you throw a bottle over the reef it will head straight out to sea, but in a few hours it may be washed up on the beach. Sometimes the riptide is so strong that I think I have a strike. But mostly it’s gentle enough to carry the line out slowly, and then, after you brake the reel, to hold the lure just below the surface.”
“Why doesn’t the lure come back, like the bottle?”
“Because it doesn’t go far enough out. To make the full circle, something has to touch the open sea.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked. “You talk like someone who has been on the Mar Nueva all his life.”
“I have,” I answered. This made him laugh. “And I know about what happens to a lure, because we went out in a boat and found it. It spins around and goes back and forth, just like a fish that’s holding its place.”
“Do you catch a lot of fish?” he asked, as if he were thinking about getting some for himself.
“Enough for us to eat, and I sell the rest. I’ve been paying for our food,” I stated with obvious pride, and then added, “this summer.”
“But it isn’t necessary for you to do this, is it? What does your father do?”
“He’s a cotton broker.”
“A cotton broker can do very well.”
I didn’t want to tell him that my father worried about our savings as they dwindled in the heat, or when the weather was too wet, or too good in America or Egypt. And besides, our tuition was what did my parents in, and in that sense I did feel responsible for helping my father, even if he didn’t need it.
“Where are you from?” the old man asked.
I knew he could tell from the way I spoke that I was from the capital (and not many people from anywhere else had villas on the Mar Nueva), so I told him the district.
“Where, exactly?”
That meant he longed for the city. I told him the street.
“It’s not far from my house,” he said.
His house! I was sure that his house was the Presidential Palace. Inside the fence were a polo field and a golf course that you couldn’t see from the boulevards even had you been willing to risk arousing the suspicion of the guards by looking toward them. Yes, his house was near my street. If you wound your way through the Sixth District to the bottom of the hill, crossed the park, and then crossed the Boulevard of XX September, you’d be right at the gate.
Some time passed, and to end the silence I allowed myself an indiscretion. “I’d like to go in your house sometime,” I said. “I’ve never been in a house with four hundred and fifty rooms.”
“Four hundred and fifty-six,” he responded, without the slightest trace of emotion or irritation. I knew, at that moment, that his power lay in the complete control of his emotions, and that, unless he wanted to, he felt no emotion whatsoever. It was clear to me on the pier. He was intelligent, inquisitive, and pleasant. He made you admire him in the same way that you cannot help but admire a good watch or a Swiss cable car. Everything in him worked without inhibition, and he wasted neither time nor words. He was virtually an embodiment of pure forces: the laws of nature could not have been more cold or precise.
But he ruled my country for forty years because he could, at will, quickly develop within himself passion and resolution that were unparalleled and astounding. When he spoke he temporarily converted even his staunchest opponents and brought to tears crowds of men who had resented him all their lives. He fired up old women and grandmothers until they wanted to join the cavalry. With complete control, he could go from passion to reserve, at will, from light to dark and dark to light, like lightning flashes in a thunderstorm. Some men have oratorical ability and a great heart, and some think so coldly and well that they turn roiling problems into smooth ice. Santos-Ott was both.
“May I come from time to time to watch you fish?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, hardly believing that the caudillo had asked for my permission.
“Perhaps you’ll even give me a fish,” he added.
“Of course,” I said, with daring familiarity. “It’s half your pier. I owe you rent, I think.”
“I have a colonel who can plank fish the way they do in the mountains. I’d have him cook it for me.” He thought for a moment. “He says he can plank fish.”
“Would one fish be enough?”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you have big dinners, with ambassadors and ministers?”
He shook his head. “I eat alone. If you let people under your tent they come to the conclusion that they can throw you out.”
“Oh,” I said, only half understanding, because our tent had a cloth floor, and I imagined people crawling under it, making huge hills of canvas.
“I played that game for twenty years,” he added, “and then I realized one day that I didn’t have to play any longer. But you’re too young to remember what it was like then. You weren’t even born.”
I smiled. It was a disadvantage not to have been born then, but it was also an advantage, and I knew it.
He didn’t smile back. “Let’s see you cast those lures out to blue water.”
I looked over the reef. “I can’t,” I said. “It’s too far.”
“Clear the reef,” he commanded.
I picked up the first of my poles and leaned back. Arching my body, I cast out the lure, extending my arms like a ballet dancer. The lure kept flying through the air until it landed in the blue band. Elated because I had never cast so far in my life, I picked up the other rods and sent three more lures, one after another, with strength newly discovered, right into the blue.
When I turned around, he was gone. Perhaps because the sun was so hot I was not sure that I hadn’t dreamed him up in an extended hallucination. But I continued to feel a sense of power and motion, and for a moment or two I was sure that I was destined for great things, and I would not become the kind of ordinary man that I have, in fact, become.
These sensations were so strong that I had to doubt them. Then I looked at my lines and saw that they were fixed solidly and skillfully in the distant band of deep blue.
KNOWING MYSELF THEN, and now, I would think that my immediate reaction to an encounter with Santos-Ott would have been to run home proclaiming it in half-insane breathless squeals. Adults at that time were either members of the Institutional Party, subversives, or scrupulously apolitical. My father was the last. In many ways the neutral ground was the most dangerous, for the subversives were enough under control for the authorities to be vexed mainly by the apo
litical, whom they always suspected and for whom they had the greatest contempt.
My father, being carefully undeclared, did not betray his real views even to his children, probably for fear that we would blurt them out and bring upon ourselves some terrible disaster from which none of us would ever recover. We knew that he had contempt for La Prensa, but so did everyone else. Even Santos-Ott, in the famous speech during which he laughed, had said, “Do you think I am so stupid that I believe what I read in my own newspaper?” And the whole country laughed with him, and loved him for having told the truth.
So I was left at an impressionable age to judge for myself questions of which I had neither knowledge nor understanding. I knew that Santos-Ott was a terrible figure, intimidating and cruel, but I knew as well that being in his presence was exciting. Perhaps alone among all the people in my country I was able to talk with him as if he were a mortal man. I have long since forgiven myself for imagining in a boyish way that because I was such a good fisherman he would take me under his wing and make me his successor. Though I would continue the practice of looking out at everyone from photographs of me in a Weimaraner-colored coat—and here I rejoiced that my eyes, too, were blue—I would be kind, I would allow La Prensa to say anything it wanted, and we would live not in the Presidential Palace but in our house, more beloved than feared.
Above all, I would return to the Mar Nueva every summer with my family, and although soldiers would stand in the bungalows and people would line up on the road to see me as I passed, I would fish from the pier, with Rosa by my side, leaving the affairs of state to run themselves after the first gentle push from my all-encompassing benevolence.
That afternoon, when the fish man paid me, I laughed at the crumpled currency with the picture of Santos-Ott, thinking for some reason that together Santos-Ott and I controlled hundreds of millions of neatly pressed linen bills in closely guarded vaults in the capital. The fish man asked me what was so funny. Didn’t I like his money?
“Ah, money!” I said. And then, looking at him portentously, “When you have the means of production, then”—I nodded my head—“you see.”
“You see what?”
“Ha!” I said.
“You should wear a hat,” he told me as he climbed onto his truck. “Always wear a hat in the sun.”
That night I sailed in to dinner, a demigod. Instead of reaching for the pepper grinder I simply held out my open hand as if it would fly to me of its own accord. My mother passed it my way without a word, and I chuckled without noise, like the villains in films.
“Did you eat any strange fish or floating thing?” my father asked tentatively.
I laughed and shook my head.
“Fermented fruit, moldy bread or cookies, unfamiliar seeds or gourds?” He sounded like a customs inspector.
“We have no moldy bread or cookies,” my mother said indignantly, as I shook my head slowly, tolerantly, back and forth.
“Perhaps he found them on the side of the road, or they were washed up on the beach,” my father ventured.
I tipped my head back and laughed like an African chieftain, with more depth and percussion in my lungs than I knew I had. This really stunned them.
“It’s the sun,” my sister declared, while my mother reached out to feel my head. “You can’t stay in the sun all day long, day after day, and not … you know.”
With her many recent outbursts and tears in mind, I said, quite royally, “So sayeth the cuckoo, from deep within the clock.”
“Enough!” my father insisted. “You behave, or you’ll spend the next four days in your room rolling marbles around in the shade.”
A look of vindication passed across my sister’s face.
“Both of you,” my father said in a way that betrayed the existence of his many pressing problems, “have been behaving like inmates in an asylum. Let me remind you that you are privileged to be here, that we may not be able to afford this place next year, and that the Sixth District in February—something you have never experienced—is so hot and miserable that cast iron gets as soft as gutta-percha and the drinking fountains become steam vents.
“I know you don’t have friends, and are isolated,” he said to my sister, “but you should swim in the sea sometimes.” And to me, “I think it might be a good idea for you to stay indoors at midday. The fish don’t run then anyway.”
“Sometimes they do,” I protested.
THE NEXT DAY began like any other. I arose at five-thirty and found my sister reading in the living room, never having gone to bed. After crushing the scorpions on the kitchen floor, I took some bread and fruit juice, and left with my fishing equipment to pull in the fish as they fed.
In early morning the sea and the light ran together. The water surged with great energy as if to show that it had been refreshed during the night. And in the privacy of dawn, the sea and the beach coexisted without argument—no breakers, no sparkle in the sands. The tide was up, and blue-green water glowing almost white on its surface moved gently under the pier, quite close, hissing occasionally as it was forced through crevices in the pilings.
I attended to my rigging and ate breakfast. When I finished I looked up and saw the gleaming blue band, the first part of the sea to take the sun. I cast my lures and watched them fly. They landed in the cold blue, and the lines stretched taut. The morning tide took them out where I couldn’t see them.
In the deep and luminous world of the sea, fleets of huge fish circle the globe, neither breaking the surface nor touching bottom but suspended in silent layers of shadowy green and blue, rising a mile or falling two, fighting noiseless battles in great societies of which we have never even dreamed.
Perhaps because of a change of season, a migration, or a war among the fishes, a vast school of bluefin passed by the Mar Nueva that morning. The waves were broken by their churning, and they crowded the entire bay, seething underwater for as far as I could see. For all I knew, the school was as wide as five days’ sailing and as long as ten. Just an edge of it may have been enough to fill the bay.
In their excitement the bluefin took my lines as fast as I could pull them in and cast out again. They were the biggest fish I had ever caught, inhabitants of the open sea more amazed than I by their turn of fortune. They weighed as much as I did, and in two hours I exhausted myself. I ran to the house to get my father to help me, but he had gone with my mother and sister to town, so I took whatever extra lures and heavy line I had and returned to the pier.
The fish eventually swallowed all the lures, and then I was casting out empty hooks, on which they impaled themselves without thought. Though some got loose and others snapped my lines, by the time I had broken three poles and was too tired even to think of casting I had almost thirty bluefin tethered to the pier, each of twenty kilos or more, with some of at least fifty. They were so big that I was afraid to fall among them. I even wondered if they might destroy the pier, for had they been able to concentrate their powers, they undoubtedly could have.
I lay down, peering through the cracks at my catch as it circulated below me. My muscles were stiff and aching and I could hardly move. The wood upon which I rested was as dense as concrete, slightly rosy, almost coffee-colored, with a scent that complemented the scent of the brine. Each time the waves withdrew, they exposed the backs of the bluefin. When the bluefin crossed they sometimes had the leverage to part the fishing line, and when they did they would circle in confusion among the pilings until they found an opening to the sea and sped away. After some early losses, the tangling ceased as the distance between the fish increased, and I was left with more than twenty.
As the sun beat upon my back, I had a strong urge to let them go. Because freedom can be understood only as the absence of restraint, and the restraint I had known had always been benevolent, I valued freedom insufficiently for myself. But I could tell the difference between them and me. Their movements were so sad and aimless that I knew I had to cut them loose.
On the other hand, I had
been trained over many long days to appreciate a strong bend of the rod, and the more fish you catch the more you treasure the feeling. Down below me was the equivalent in live currency of two weeks on the pier in the hot sun. If I didn’t throw back a single mackerel, why should I release this herd, no matter how noble or powerful they seemed?
My answer to myself was that they had everything about them of the open sea, and I had never intended to capture the open sea. I turned to look for the thrashing of the school from which I had taken them. It was there, but fast disappearing. The mass of bluefin was part of something very great and beautiful, and I felt keenly that I had no right to powers over them.
Because the temptation to hold the wealth for which I had struggled was great, I put off a decision. As the sea moved beneath me and the bluefin grew quiet, I fell into an uneasy sleep.
I AWOKE, weak from the sun and disquieted by dreams that I could not remember. My sister was sitting beside me, her knees pulled up to her chest. Our parents had sent her to the pier to call me for lunch. Usually this was my father’s job, but he and my mother had gone back to town to wire money to a bank. We were all to converge upon our meal at once.
“What happened?” she asked, referring to my three broken rods and a disordered tangle of lines, hooks, and leads.
“Look,” I said, and knelt to peer through the planks.
She dropped down in imitation. Because she was wearing a straw hat that kept the glare away from her eyes, she could see better than I could. The water underneath was glowing, and the bluefin had become as patient and apathetic as dogs on a hot afternoon. But, unlike dogs, they were in a cool sea. They had lost none of their sparkle or bearing, and they remained exquisitely beautiful.
“How did you catch so many?” she asked.
I told her. And then I added, “I think I’ll let them go.”
Young girls, especially those who are troubled by loneliness, and who stay up all night reading Russian novels, can be so profoundly sensitive that passion springs from them quite easily, and though their love may be focused inexplicably, the love itself is as innocent and genuine as they are and can readily convince you of sentiments you might not otherwise adopt. Claudia was always quick to decide, and in this case I hardly needed convincing. “Cut the lines,” she said.
