Tierra del Fuego

by Francisco Coloane

  He was unable to continue with these reflections, because all of a sudden his four shipmates burst noisily into the Hamburg. They had realized that he wasn’t following them anymore, and had stopped for a while to wait for him. But one of them, being a sailor, and a thirsty one at that, had also seen, out of the corner of his eye, the red and blue sign, and none of them were in any doubt that the absentee had snuck in for a few drinks. They put the coffin down in a ditch on the outskirts of town, between the sidewalk and the road, hoping that their disrespectful act would not be noticed, and the four of them headed off in pursuit of the scoundrel who had taken it into his head to drink alone.

  Foster was not surprised to see them. Plucking up courage, he immediately ordered a round of drinks, and then, surprisingly for someone who was known as a skinflint, ordered another.

  “How come you’re so generous?” one of the sailors, a redheaded man with a face made wary by experience, said with a laugh. “Did Martín leave you some money?”

  “We caught you, you old scoundrel! Martín had his money in a hiding place only you and he knew about, and now you’ve grabbed it!”

  Foster again wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and tried to smile. He lifted the glass to his lips, inviting the others to do the same.

  “You were going to drink alone, weren’t you, old man?” another of the sailors said.

  “Don’t be like that. I always drink alone, and with my own money!”

  “So why not get a whole bottle of gin?” the redheaded sailor exclaimed. “Old Foster’s paying!”

  The barman uncorked an earthenware bottle and put it on the counter . . . The sailors leaned forward and read on the label: Its pale amber color is proof of age. They started pouring it out.

  Outside, the blizzard was turning into a thick snowstorm, and Martín was alone now but for the dead wings of the snow, which fell like an offering from heaven on his abandoned casket.

  If the green goes with the green

  And the red goes with the red

  Then all is for the best

  And I’ll sleep easy in my bed . . .

  They all sang the refrain with which the helmsman Martín would recall the position of the lights when ships passed each other at night. It was a refrain often repeated by helmsmen to avoid taking a wrong turn in such situations.

  The lights had also come on inside the bar, as night had ­fallen without the sailors having realized it. Seamen and fishermen were drinking noisily, and the air in the bar was thick with smoke from their pipes and cigars. From time to time someone would put a nickel coin in the slot of a music box on the wall, and the chords of some old march, polka, or waltz would rise into the air with a great crash of drums and cymbals.

  One of the sailors looked out the window at the night and sat for a moment contemplating with a touch of melancholy how the snowflakes swirled around the window panes, like a group of butterflies fighting to get through the glass to the light, then slid like big tears down the steamed-up pane. The music, the irregular rhythm of those winged feet of snow as they danced against the panes . . . whatever it was, something aroused an old itch in the sailor, and he stood up and said something in the ear of one of the barmen. Then he stood there pensively for a while, leaning on the bar counter and looking over toward his four comrades. Old Foster was dozing and the other three were drinking slowly, already drowning in alcohol. He let out a low whistle, heard only by the redheaded sailor with the world-weary face, who immediately went up to the bar.

  “Shall we go have a bit of fun?” he suggested.

  “All right!” the redhead replied, clicking his tongue, but then added, dubiously, “What about Martín?”

  “Let them bury him . . . if they can!” he replied, with a contemptuous gesture toward the men still sitting at the table.

  They crept out and the night swallowed them up. Only after a fair amount of time had passed did the others notice their absence. But they had gotten drunk so quickly that they were barely aware of the time or the situation they were in.

  “Let’s go . . . bury Martín,” one of them stuttered.

  “When the others come back!” the other replied.

  Foster was still dozing, and woke up from time to time only to stretch out his hand and lift the glass unsteadily to his withered lips, which came back to life for a few moments at contact with the burning alcohol.

  “Poor Martín!” one of the men sniveled.

  “Poor guy!” the other said, as if reciting a litany.

  “Remember the time he bought us all drinks in Tocopilla?”

  “Yes, I remember, he treated the whole lot of us.”

  “He played better music than this stuff, on his harmonica . . .”

  For a few moments, the unforgettable image of the helmsman of the Gastelu, the best of all their shipmates, passed through the minds of the two drunks. They remembered the way he would cheer them with his harmonica, or the occasions when, without a centavo in his pocket, he’d go to a bar in this port or that with one of his friends and launch into a grotesque dance, playing the harmonica and a whole set of spoons that he’d hold between his fingers and drum in time on his head, front and back. After the dance, which always made the customers laugh, Martín would be invited to every table, but would refuse to drink without his esteemed comrades . . .

  “Remember when the María Cristina went down?”

  “When he took off his life jacket and gave it to Foster . . .”

  “Because Foster was the older of the two, and he wouldn’t have made it otherwise. . . .”

  “He handed it over and swam out to sea without a life jacket . . .”

  “And now the old rogue’s asleep and won’t even bury the man who saved his life . . .”

  “Nor will we . . .”

  “Or those other bastards who took off . . .”

  “Or anyone else . . . hic . . . hic . . . This world’s a rotten place . . . and the minute you turn your back, no one remembers you . . .” It was the drunker of the two men who was speaking, his eyes filling with thick tears. “Poor Martín,” he went on between whines and sobs. “‘If the green goes with the green, And the red goes with the red, Then all is for the best, And I’ll sleep easy in my bed . . .’”

  Intermittently, a ship’s siren sounded out of the night. It could be heard inside the bar, cutting through the noise and the music—an anguished howl, with something human about it, a plaintive, touching voice in the midst of that vastness. It was the horn of the Gastelu, crying out for her five crewmembers who had disembarked on a mission of mercy.

  “Hey, sailors!” the owner of the bar cried, shaking the two men still dozing at the table where five men had sat down that afternoon. “A ship’s been calling her crew for the past half-hour!”

  It was no easy task to wake them. Fortunately, he did so just as the ship’s siren resumed its long, anguished lament, again calling for its crew to set sail before the tide rose in the exit from the Straits.

  Still rubbing their eyes, the two sailors recognized the intermittent hooting as the voice of the Gastelu.

  “That’s our ship!”

  “She’s telling you to hurry up!” the bar owner said.

  “What about our shipmates?” one of the men asked, somewhat sobered after his sleep.

  “They left . . . a few hours ago . . . in search of other entertainment!”

  “Even Foster?”

  “Who’s Foster?”

  “The others may have gone to find women, but Foster’s an old man, and he should be with us!”

  “Oh, yes, the old man! I saw him with you, but he vanished a while ago . . . You never know, sometimes the older you are, the more of a skirt-chaser!”

  At that moment, the horn of the Gastelu blew again, calling its men back from town, and the last two customers of the Hamburg quickly grabbed their caps and left.

  Outside, they ran headlong into the black night, and the frozen tentacles emerging from the darkness fanned their faces and sober
ed them up.

  “What about Martín?” one of them said, suddenly remembering the coffin they had abandoned on the sidewalk.

  “We didn’t bury him!” the other exclaimed, as if resuming the drunken litany.

  “Let’s keep quiet about it . . . We’ll agree on a story with the others when we’re in the boat.”

  “Someone’ll find him tomorrow and bury him!” the other replied, and they set off toward the quay and vanished like two shadows darker than the darkness around them.

  But the following day there was no coffin to be found anywhere—snow had been falling all night, forming a mantle about three feet thick and turning everything white, and it continued snowing, slowly but so copiously that no one was going to go looking for coffins by the side of the road that day. Neither that day nor the days after that, with the snow hardening into a thick crust of ice . . .

  It was as if the helmsman Martín had returned to sea after his death, like the souls of those who have died in shipwrecks and who follow the wake of what were their ships or the trail of those who tormented them in life or at the hour of their death.

  Around mid-morning on that first day, Don Erico, the owner of the Bar Hamburg, started cleaning his establishment, and to his surprise, found an old gray-haired sailor sleeping it off behind some barrels in a room adjoining the toilets that served as a storeroom.

  “Who are you?” he said, prodding him awake with his foot.

  “Me?” Foster stammered. “I’m from the Gastelu . . .” He got to his feet, rubbing his eyes, still not quite realizing where he was.

  “The ship that was calling her crew all night?”

  “Yes . . . What about . . . my shipmates?” he stammered. “Did they go . . . Did they leave me?”

  “Now that I come to think of it, they were asking after someone called Foster. Are you Foster?”

  “Yes, I’m Foster!”

  “I told them you’d gone with the others . . . looking for women!” Don Erico said, and laughed uproariously.

  “And what about the ship?”

  “She’ll be long gone by now! No ship waits for a sailor!”

  “Give me a gin!” Foster muttered, feeling in his pockets for money.

  They went into the bar, where Don Erico poured him a large glass of gin.

  “I used to be a sailor, too!” he said. “I sailed on the Hapag for years. Many’s the time the ship left without me, and I had to get on another!”

  Foster was stiff with cold after the night he had spent on the storeroom floor, but the gin stopped his teeth chattering, so he steadied himself with another glass before heading for the door.

  “Don’t go out,” Don Erico warned him. “It’s snowing hard!”

  “It doesn’t matter, the ship may still be there!” he replied.

  “They would have sounded the siren again!” the bar owner retorted.

  Foster went down to the quay anyway and peered out at the mist-shrouded bay, but there were only a few old hulks moored there, along with some small craft that plied the coast and the odd wool-carrying ship that had been late getting out. The Gastelu was nowhere to be seen. By now she must be emerging from the eastern mouth of the straits, en route for Africa, and then Europe, the Mediterranean. From what he had heard, this was her last voyage. She was too old and had been forbidden to sail anymore. Some ship owner was sure to buy her, break her up, and sell the scrap at a profit. His hard heart cracked, as if a knife had gone through it . . . If he couldn’t find the Gastelu again in any other port in the world, or if they broke her up for scrap, how would he ever find the money that Martín had hidden under a lantern near the top of the foremast? Who would be the lucky person to discover that treasure, for the sake of which he had committed the foulest act of his life—not giving his dying friend a glass of water with his medicine?

  It was soon after crossing the Paso del Abismo, when they were in the channels, that Martín fell sick and called him over to reveal the place where he had hidden his savings from his years of sailing on the cargo ship Gastelu. He had planned to use that money to retire to his native village, in the province of Pontevedra, where his old mother still lived—the savings would be for her now. They already knew her well in the harbormaster’s office at Vigo because of the money he sent her every month. Foster could leave the savings there for her, but if he had time, he’d prefer it if he could go to the village and give it to her personally. It was his final wish, his only wish!

  From that moment on, a shadow began to rise slowly but inexorably inside Foster. “How can it be?” he said to himself. “Could I really be that evil?” He had looked after Martín in his sickness, but after the revelation, doubt crept in, slowing down his actions as much as the sick man’s. He avoided him and even started to wish that he would die as soon as possible and stop annoying him . . . Why did he want him to die sooner rather than later? For the money at the top of the mast? Surely not! He couldn’t be so wicked as to keep what another man had saved for himself and a poor old lady!

  Anyway . . . He’d take care of the money . . . He would make sure the old woman got something . . . Because there was enough for the two of them . . .

  He shuddered at the realization that he could be thinking this for the second time! Was he really so wicked? If he was, if this test had finally revealed his true nature, then why not take all the money and retire once and for all from these old ships, with their dubious routes and even more dubious cargoes, where all the dregs of the ports ended up? Money was everything in his life and here was his opportunity!

  And that was what had made him hesitate so long, when Martín was on his deathbed, to hand him the glass of water with the medicine that he so desperately wanted! That glass of water could have helped Martín to hold out a little longer! He might even have recovered! Who knew God’s will?

  But he had delayed handing him the glass of water with the medicine, as if there were invisible shackles on his feet, stopping him from moving.

  At last, Martín himself realized his friend’s intentions, and it was then that the helmsman had turned that strange look on his villainous friend. It was the last look he had given him, at the moment of death, but its brilliance had flooded the cabin and impregnated the walls, and ever since had stopped him from sleeping.

  With that brilliance, whether of fear or of hate, the look had passed into eternity, and had remained in the atmosphere like one more sigh of pain at human wickedness. A kind of rarefied air had surrounded him on all sides since the day of Martín’s death. Whether he was turning the helm or scraping off the paint in bad weather, it was always there, filling him with a strange unease.

  And in that cruel hour of abandonment, when he was faced with the evidence that the Gastelu had left for good, en route for other seas, with its little treasure hidden in the mast, the atmosphere become even more rarefied, despite the snow, which kept falling, endlessly, its white petals touching him, as if someone were reaching out from a distance, trying to see if it was him . . . and realizing that he had suddenly turned into someone else . . .

  Foster wandered through the harbor like a ghost searching for another ghost . . . And, gradually, he realized with horror that the sailor’s superstition was coming true in him and that he himself was carrying that other ghost inside him.

  The loss, the abandonment, the lack of money increased his sense of remorse and marked his days. He was so crushed that he kept the secret, and never told anyone about the strange case of the coffin he was so feverishly searching for . . . Circumstances had conspired to leave him completely ignorant of the place where his shipmates had left it. And then he had gotten drunk . . . well, he’d gotten drunk because of everything else . . .

  Where was Martín’s body? Had he mysteriously been carried away by the snow and returned to sea, to stop Foster from living in peace? Had he already joined his soul to his, splitting it in two and tormenting it, while his body stayed on the ground or roamed the depths of the sea?

  He inquired casually
after the cemetery, but no one could tell him anything. Don Erico, the owner of the bar, knew nothing either. No one knew anything about what had happened.

  His life became agonizing, unbearable. He wandered like a beggar from door to door, lighting fires in the morning in restaurants and bars in exchange for a piece of bread or a glass of aguardiente. Later, even these simple tasks were beyond him, and he missed the alcohol that had sustained him.

  Early one morning, his body was found in a little cave in the cliffs to the west of the port. On his face was the grimace typical of those who have frozen to death, and his open eyes stared eastward, toward the mouth of the straits and the horizon where the masts of those old wandering ships—which usually sail past the port and only drop anchor if some damage needs repairing or a sick person needs to be landed—gradually disappear from sight.

  Then what is known as “the little summer of San Juan” arrived, and the pale southern sun grew hotter for a few days, thawing the thick covering of snow that had formed with the previous storms. On a street on the outskirts of town, on the way to the cemetery, a strange coffin appeared one fine day, painted green, with a frozen corpse inside. The discovery roused the authorities. The police investigated, an autopsy was carried out, but no one was able to discover anything for certain.

  But when Mike, the baker’s half-mad son, saw the coffin being carried from the morgue to the cemetery and took off his hat to accompany it, he tried to say something. He held up five fingers, swayed like a sailor, and kept pointing at the coffin, but no one understood that with this mime he was trying to say:

  “Five sailors and a green coffin.”

  PASSAGE TO PUERTO EDÉN

  Man’s capable of anything if you don’t keep an eye on him!”

  The words were spoken by Dámaso Ramírez, skipper of the schooner Huamblín, as he turned the ship’s wheel.

  “It’s not as bad as that,” Seaman Ruperto Alvarez replied, not having quite understood what the skipper was talking about. “Look what happened when the Taitao went down. One man saved the lot of us!”