Beyond the Sea
Page 14
He becomes aware that he has not heard this silence before.
He can see now how he has been afraid of this silence all his life without knowing it. And now that he can feel it he is no longer afraid. He tries to put form upon the silence. He tries to think of it as sound but it cannot be heard. He tries to think of it as colour. Gradually his mind rests upon the feeling of what silence might mean.
The silence of the past.
The silence of the future.
The silence of the dead.
The silence of those not yet born.
This silence waiting within all living things.
Night will fall upon your journey.
He can see this now and is no longer afraid.
What this silence tells him.
That silence is a form of forgiveness.
* * *
He arches his old foot and rubs at the cramp down the length of his calf with wrinkled fingers. Then he sits and seeks within memory. How life used to be on the strip. He can feel inside the memory until feeling is the doing thing. Getting ready now to leave. He opens the cabin door to let in more light upon the mirror. He washes his face in the enamel sink and brushes his stained teeth, takes a toothpick from the box. He wets his cheeks with cologne. Slicks back his hair with cream. He buttons his good black shirt. Then he watches himself in the mirror. He tries to see who he is. He looks carefully until he can see himself as he always was, the hair a little mussed, the skin with its leathery sheen, the bones broad beneath the skin. That big strong body.
You look good, Bolivar. You really do. So this is how it is. This is who you were.
* * *
A bird enters the deep white quiet. It lands with a scratch beside him. He studies it with a half-open eye. The bird unknown to him, the feathers black, a beak of fiery crimson. A ringed gaze that meets his own gaze without alarm. Its claws are caught in a mess of discoloured twine. He considers the bird for a moment. He has not the strength to move. And yet the will finds spark within the body, lights through the blood. He finds his fingers upon the twine, the bird taking flight to find it cannot escape. He sits a moment winding the twine while the bird assails his hand with its beak.
His eyes prizing the bird’s aliveness.
He licks the blood off his skin.
He says, look, I am sorry, but what do you expect? It is a simple question of laws that already exist. It is either you or me.
* * *
For days he drinks water thickened with blood, feeds slowly upon the meat. His body a crooked old thing and yet he can feel the return of some basic strength.
He asks himself if he wants this.
* * *
Night is falling upon the ocean. He watches the plunging sun, a burning orange that reaches towards the boat as though lighting a path just for him. His eyes watching the light fall into its deeper hues, the dark smoothing the sea into its oiled night-colours, the sea and the sky vanishing as though into a single becoming. It is then he sees it, the exact moment it happens, the last moment of light upon the water as it meets the dark. He cannot believe it. It is silent. At last, he thinks. You have witnessed this. You always knew it would happen. He can feel it rising through the centre of his being, spreading through his limbs, a tingling whitely of bliss.
* * *
By night, by day, he rests within sleep.
* * *
He is woken from a dream. He sits up. He has dreamed a different sound in the wavelets as they strike the boat. He moves slowly to the trim and cocks his head and listens to the water. He cannot be sure, it is hard to tell, so he just sits and listens a long time. Then he is sure. He wonders how it can be. And yet it is. There is a different feeling in the water. A feeling of something else.
* * *
He sits leaning forward, watching the water release against the boat. He studies the dawn’s sedate eruption. Within his body now he can trace the edge of a limit that is a profound and total exhaustion. And yet he wills the will, wills sight to watch the water for this feeling of something else. Evening falls and he is afraid to sleep. He wills himself throughout the night listening to the water, sensing this feeling in the water as though the water’s expression can speak. Willing himself into the dawn, listening, watching, feeling the water. Later, he stands slowly up and moves towards the cooler. It is then that he sees it. Serene upon the water. A palm frond floating by. He cannot reach it.
* * *
He becomes the feeling carried by the water. He cannot explain it. He studies how the ocean moves and cannot see any difference within it. And yet he feels. Then he sees green and brown. Upon the water two palm fronds pass like hands entwined. With the plank he is able to reach and take hold of one, runs his fingers along the dried-out curling fronds. He puts his nose to it, sniffs hidden within it the old living green. He asks Alexa, what do you think?
* * *
He sits defying the midday sun with a sweater over his head. His shadow as it rests is his narrowest self. He sits seeing the water. There is a change now within the current, this much is true. The panga moving freely, yet there is no sign of a swell. His eyes reaching, hoping to reach. And then almost imperceptibly he sees. He does not want to believe. Something is touching the far surface of ocean. He stands on the seat and stares. He rests within his breathing and watches it grow. The blood surging now into the heart. He is afraid to blink.
A veiled and distant shape.
* * *
He hears a voice, the old voice within him that speaks. Look, Bolivar. It is a trick of the light. A mirage that looks like an island. How many times has this happened? Or a giant whale. Maybe some floating rubbish catching the sun. Maybe some type of pollution. Who knows what it is. Maybe you are hallucinating again. Do not get your hopes up. Hey! Are you listening to me? Hey!
* * *
He stands alert for many hours. His shallow breath hardly meeting the air. What he sees is something massing out of the water. He begins to think it is an island. He is afraid to move in case what he sees might disappear. Then he closes his eyes and opens them. It is still there. He closes his eyes and turns around to face the cooler and opens his eyes upon the encircling sea. Then he turns again and sees what he sees as though it were painted. A rising of grey. A whispering green.
* * *
It is an island. His mind reeling, his mind still in doubt and yet he knows it for sure. He can feel different energies coursing through him, a moment of sadness met with elation and then he is sad again. He does not know what is wrong with him. The current is carrying the panga towards the shore. You must be dreaming but if you are dreaming this shore looks real. He looks for boats but there aren’t any. He looks upon the blurred landscape for buildings or smoke. He wonders now if he is heading towards some uninhabited landscape, what that might mean, another beginning not an ending, he does not care. Hour upon hour the panga drifts until in the afternoon he decides he is close enough to the shore to swim. He sees rocks and a thin-lipped beach. Nodding green trees upon a hill. His mind now fully entering the body, the will entering the blood at full swim. The blood flowing through the heart and into the limbs. He listens to what the limbs tell him, that he has not the strength to swim, that his body is broken, that he is an old man, that he will die in the water. He sits and thinks about this.
* * *
He enters the water gripping the trim. For a long time he is afraid to let go. He asks the body to live again. He asks the body to go home. He does not notice he is crying. He still cannot let go.
* * *
He makes a slow and heavy forward stroke. The body shouts but obeys. Soon he is without breath, the arms and legs pulling him down and yet he continues forward, his eyes fixed upon the beach. He watches the palm trees upon the beach. The sea, he thinks, there is only the sea and maybe this is only a dream and yet you can feel – the water, the air, the body swims, you are really moving towards the shore, you are going to go home. The heart shouts for blood and he swallows water yet still
he is willing the body until he can will it no more. His legs drop and his feet touch rock. Water in the mouth and nose and he is blind for a moment, his arms grappling, and it is then that he falls upon the shore.
He finds himself crawling.
He thinks he can see a haze of smoke. The outline of a hut. He tries to shout but his breath is gone, his voice broken. He can hardly breathe. The feeling of time coming to be again, time flowing into the body, time flowing through thought. This the solid shore. This the solid earth. And then he hears a call. A shadow half-seen becomes a shape moving towards him. He tries to shout. He falls down. The countenance of a child growing before him as he crawls along the beach, his cry broken, he has not the breath to speak, to put into words, he wants to say it over and over again, home, I can go home now, but the words will not come. He falls before the child, it is a little girl, and he lifts his head and he thinks, you believed. A feeling now of the world he once knew. And it is then he finds the breath to speak, and he seeks not to frighten her, speaks in his own tongue.
I am only a fisherman.
ALSO BY PAUL LYNCH
Red Sky in Morning
The Black Snow
Grace
A Note About the Author
Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, and Grace. He won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2018 for Grace, which was short-listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing the same year. Grace was also short-listed for France’s Prix Littérature Monde, the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne, and Madame Figaro’s 2019 Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. The Black Snow won France’s Prix Libr’à Nous for best foreign novel, and Red Sky in Morning was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Also by Paul Lynch
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2019 by Paul Lynch
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2019 by Oneworld, Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2020
Title page photograph copyright © Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography / Getty Images
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72114-5
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This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.