“Yes, but they were gold prospectors, and you find all sorts among them, whatever the sea washes up. My men are all hard workers, and I know them . . .”
“All the same, I’d suggest that, if your wife has had problems, it’d be better to send her back with us . . . Someone could replace her . . . We have a young man on board who’s come to work for you.”
“Another man? But I haven’t hired anyone!”
“Take a look at this letter. I was given it to give to you. The bearer himself would rather stay on board until it’s time for the ship to leave.”
Puzzled, Vladimir opened the envelope and read: The bearer of this letter is a young relative of the government official who gave us the contract, and among the things that were agreed on was that we would give this young man a job, or at least pay him a wage. I tried to get out of it but, since the Navy will be keeping an eye on what he does, you have to take him in, let him stay, and give him something to do to justify his wages.
He barely glanced at the signature of his friend in Santiago who had helped him get the contract to build the lighthouse, and put the letter away.
For more than a week, Vladimir tried to involve young Esteban in the construction work, but the results were far from positive. One day, having had enough, he confronted him, but the young man told him that in reality he wasn’t here to work on the lighthouse. His father held a top ministerial post, and they had sent him here just so that he could get a wage.
There was nothing else Vladimir could do but leave him in the house, with his wife. The house was little more than a shed, made of wood and zinc and divided into three rooms, one for the workers, another for the builder and his wife, and the third and largest, which was used as a kitchen and dining room.
And so, Esteban, who was about twenty, although his slight physique and fresh face made him seem younger, stayed in the house, bored stiff when he wasn’t reading or when the wind or the drizzle, both very common in the area, prevented him from going out for a walk on the cliffs.
The sea had been a consolation at first, but he had soon grown weary of staring at the horizon, which was usually stormy but sometimes gray or calm, with nothing to vary the monotony but the occasional glimpse from that bleak promontory of a passing albatross, seagull, or penguin. Every now and again, some seals would appear, chasing the shoals of sea bass and swordfish, and then a flock of birds would swoop down noisily to join the hunt. The sea would come alive, and he would think how good it must be to be a bird or a seal that could travel to the north, which was where he often turned to gaze longingly.
One day, as he stood on a solitary rock by the sea, a seal that was fishing suddenly stuck half its body out of the water, some fifty to sixty-five feet from him, and, miraculously supporting itself on its flippers, looked at him for a long time with its round black eyes, with a curiosity that was almost human. He shuddered, realizing that the seal had taken him for another seal standing on two big flippers on the rock. How he had fallen in the scale of human values by which he had judged himself back in the city!
Human values! . . . He was an only child, dragged from the maternal cocoon by his father’s firm insistence that he come south, to this place, where he could “learn to be a man” . . . His mother’s mollycoddling and his own incompetence had conspired to prevent him from graduating school, and he had been stuck in a kind of limbo, unable to enter a profession like law or medicine, or to go into business. Now, for the first time, he was going to earn a wage, save some money and feel independent! That was why he had begged his mother not to oppose his father’s plan. Besides, ever since he was a child, his imagination had been nourished by the stories he read, adventure stories of intrepid men braving the seas and the jungles. His mother had wept a lot, but in the end had consented. And that was how he had ended up here, in the south.
But reality proved unexpectedly harsh. He tried to learn to cut trees in the woods, but with every blow of the ax he sank further into the peat . . . The peat was soaked with water like a sponge, and the ax barely dented the bark of the oak and sometimes slipped and came dangerously close to his legs . . . Then he tried to help the men to carry the material used in mixing concrete, but he was incapable of carrying a sack of cement for even a short distance without his shoulder dislocating. The cold and the blizzards often made him weep with an unknown pain, a pain that penetrated his flesh, his bones, even his soul. Was it the pain of physical labor, which he had never before had to confront? He did not know whether to admire or despise these men who weathered the storm like animals as they struggled together to build the lighthouse.
They had put a camp bed in a corner of the kitchen for him to sleep on, which meant that he had to get up before Vladimir and his team of workers came in for breakfast. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have spent all day in bed, reading or watching Ana as she went about her work—he thought of her as one of the maids from his house transplanted to the south.
Ana was kind to him, and often sent him like a child to fetch water from the spring that ran into the sea. At other times he helped her to dry the dishes or bring in the firewood. Everyone ate meals together, and the workers frequently teased him, though always with a certain deference, as if he were the son of a distant landlord who had suddenly showed up for a meal at the house of some of his tenants.
Among these men was one named Ricardo, who had once been a boatswain on a seal-hunting schooner, but after the fur seals had been exterminated he was forced to stay on land, where he learned bricklaying and plastering. A strong, sturdy man of medium height, he was the best worker in the team. Whenever he had plastering to do, he got through the work more quickly than any of the others. That was why he had a certain amount of free time, and he often went down to the rocks to gather sea urchins with a trident-shaped fish spear.
Esteban would join him on these adventures and they became quite friendly, although Esteban did not dare go as far out as his companion, whereas Ricardo ignored the danger of falling in the sea in order to spear sea urchins with his wooden trident. One day Esteban saw Ricardo slip and fall. But, instead of going to his aid, he ran to the house to fetch help. In the meantime, Ricardo got back on his feet and took off his clothes to dry in the sun. When Esteban and Ana arrived, they were confronted with a bearded sea god, a naked Neptune. Ana covered her eyes and ran back to the house. Ricardo let go of the spear and dived, coming up with both hands full of sea urchins. Over the next half-hour, until it was impossible to stand the cold anymore, he collected more than two hundred of the creatures.
“The lady saw me in the buff . . .” Ricardo said, laughing, as they were walking back to the house to look for a basket for the sea urchins.
“You startled her,” Esteban said in a low voice.
“But how is she? Is she any good?”
“I don’t know.”
“Haven’t you tried her yet?”
“In what way?”
“The way you’re meant to! Aren’t you alone with her in the house all day?”
“I don’t do anything like that.”
“Dammit, man, are you completely useless? Run away from a drowning man, all right, but not from a woman . . . Haven’t you seen her legs?”
“They’re nice.”
“How about higher up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dammit, man, when she bends down you must see her thighs! Okay, maybe I’m talking nonsense, and you’ve already tasted the fruit! Look, I’ll tell you this frankly, I wouldn’t mind her myself, just to put one over on the guy for bringing his wife here to dangle in front of our faces.”
“She feeds us all.”
“And he eats the best of the food, whereas none of us will even see a potato until we get home . . . Do you think it’s right that a man can’t sleep at night knowing that guy’s on the other side of the wall with a woman?”
“She’s his wife.”
“Why did he bring her here, then? And tell me this, what the hell are you d
oing here?”
“I was sent here. My father thought I could work.”
“Are you kidding? What kind of work could someone like you do in a place like this?”
“I had no choice.”
They carried the sea urchins to the house in two baskets, and that night there was a kind of party, where the only thing missing, to savor to the full those little pieces of sunshine torn from the seabed, was a bottle of wine.
“Dammit, man, when she bends down you must see her thighs! . . .” The voice of the sea god, climbing the cliff with his trident in his hand, seemed to echo in Esteban’s ears when he woke up the following morning. That dinner of sea urchins, served as they were or cooked in tortillas, had been sumptuous, and Vladimir and his men had only just left for the construction site. He had been half-awake when he had heard them having breakfast, but he had turned to the corner and dozed off again—but only dozed, because, even wrapped in the warm blankets, as if in a soft cave lined with cotton wool, he could hear Ana’s footsteps as she came in and out of the house, busy with her household chores . . . and the footsteps evoked the image of her legs and “Dammit, those thighs!”
“What time are you planning to get up and help with lunch?”
“Right away,” he replied, getting out of bed and putting on his clothes.
The woman trusted him by now, but, in her shyness, tried to avoid being in the room when he got up. He was no less shy than she was, but that morning . . .
“No, no!” Ana cried when he grabbed her from behind, put his hands on her breasts and kissed her hard on the neck.
Then they stood there, not knowing what to say. She looked at him with her deep gray eyes, her face transfigured and pale. He took a few steps back. He seemed somehow diminished, as if accepting defeat after that uncontrolled impulse. In a shaky voice, he said, “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t know what I was doing . . . it was madness.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said, and then, raising a corner of her apron to her eyes, as she had when she was startled at the sight of the naked god, she added, “But I have to tell my husband.”
“No, please don’t!” Esteban cried.
“Yes, yes, the husband must be told!” she replied, her voice cracking as she uttered the word “husband,” and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.
Vladimir and his six workers came back at lunch time as always, and sat down around the rustic-style trestle table. He sat at one end of the table and Esteban at the other. Ana generally ate between serving the courses, sitting discreetly at the corner of the table beside her husband. None of them ever spoke much, especially when there was food in front of them. So they were all surprised when Ana, before serving her husband, said to him, “I need to talk to you . . .”
“Go on.”
“Not here. In the bedroom . . .”
Husband and wife went into the adjoining room, which was separated from the kitchen by a wooden partition wall. The workers were too busy eating to notice how pale Esteban was, but they all looked up, startled, when they heard a loud roar of laughter. There was something so strange about the timbre of that laughter that all of them, even the terrified Esteban, thought the lighthouse builder had gone crazy. The laughter ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and Vladimir came back in and sat down and Ana served him.
Once the dish had been served and she sat down at the corner of the table beside him, Vladimir started laughing again, less loudly but with a hint of sarcasm this time. It was strange behavior indeed, and the men waited for an explanation.
“Want to know something?” Vladimir said, quite calmly. “This boy thought he could have my wife!”
The six workers looked at him nervously, thinking he really might be crazy. It wouldn’t be the first case of a Yugoslav immigrant going crazy. “This boy thought he could have my wife!” The words rang in Esteban’s ears like the echo when a shell explodes.
“Oh, yes!” Vladimir went on. “Ha, ha, ha!” And again he laughed, and the laughter boomed like an anchor reaching the seabed.
“Forgive me,” Esteban stammered, as six curious pairs of eyes turned to him. “Let me explain . . .”
“Not to me . . . She’s the one you have to speak to . . . You may have better luck if you change tactics . . . Explain to her! Explain to her! Not to me, no, not to me! She’s the one you have to make a play for! Ha, ha, ha!”
“For God’s sake, Vladimir!” Ana said, standing up to serve the next course.
In a daze, Esteban stood up and left the house. At first he walked with a certain dignity, but then the six workers saw him quicken his pace.
“As long as he doesn’t throw himself in the sea,” one of them said.
“The guy won’t go anywhere near the water,” Ricardo said, and made an attempt to laugh with Vladimir. But when he saw Esteban disappear into the gully, he felt uncomfortable and stopped.
Vladimir also stopped laughing and started eating his stew like a bull rooting about for food, snorting loudly. A few bits of the stew got stuck in his bristly blond mustache. His tangled beard was the color of a peat bog at twilight, the few gray hairs that ascended like a trail of ashes toward his temples indicating that he was nearly fifty. Ana was at least ten years younger than him.
He continued eating, saying nothing more about the matter. There was a grim expression on his round, moonlike face. The workers finished their lunch in silence, occasionally stealing a glance at Ana, who was bustling about with her head slightly bowed. Several times, Ricardo, the former seal hunter, moved his head like an otter coming back to the surface, breaking the winter ice.
The men always worked from morning to night on the scaffolding, seeing the framework of iron and concrete gradually take shape. Usually they whistled or sang songs of their own invention as they worked, but that afternoon even Ricardo, who liked to amuse them with his jokes, was silent. Vladimir joined in the work, placing the iron, mixing the concrete, but his heart did not seem to be in it either. The men, who were mostly easy-going types, could not stop wondering what exactly the young man from Santiago had done, or what Vladimir was going to do next. They found it hard to believe that those strange roars of laughter during lunch had been the end of it all. Surely, they were more like the first rolls of thunder presaging a storm.
A strong west wind started lashing the men as they worked on the half-finished tower. Then a fine drizzle came in from the gulf, where the sea was churning on the horizon, and by nightfall they had had to take refuge in the house. Such were the hazards of working in the stormiest area of the South Pacific.
“The man could die out there on a night like this,” one of the carpenters said, as they were getting ready to go to bed after dinner.
“There’s a seal cave behind one of those promontories,” another man said. “He could shelter there.”
“Isn’t he your friend?” someone asked Ricardo.
“Hah!” he replied. “He didn’t jump in the water for me the other day when we were gathering sea urchins, so why should I go out on a night like this to look for him?”
When all the other men had gone to bed, Vladimir was still up, staring at his wife. She was blinking, the way the lighthouse her husband was building would surely blink on stormy nights like this, piercing the heart of the darkness to guide a ship to Puerto Refugio . . .
“Leave the bar off the door, so he can come in!” he said, as he went to bed.
The storm broke around midnight, but to these hardened men it was like a mother’s lullaby and they did not stir from their sleep. Ana, though, was woken by the rougher song of the wind on the corrugated zinc roof. The house, she thought, might break apart at any moment or be carried off by the rain and the wind. Whenever the wind died down, the song became almost melodious, and from each corner a different kind of whistling could be heard, as if the different Aeolian gods had come together to compose a strange symphony. The great waves of the Gulf of Penas pounded the cliffs and seemed to make the whole earth shake.
<
br /> Vladimir woke to see his wife praying.
“What are you praying for?” he said.
“Vladi . . . For you, and for me!”
“Aren’t we both here?”
“I’m asking God to make sure this house isn’t blown away.”
“We aren’t going to be blown away. This storm’s not even force twelve!”
“Well, I need to pray anyway . . . for all those who are in danger on the sea.”
“You’re here with me . . . Stop your praying and let me sleep.”
For a few moments, husband and wife listened to the storm.
“All right,” he said. “Carry on praying if you like, for those who are out at sea . . . Though I don’t see the point, because they have no choice.” And, turning his back on his wife, he went back to sleep, like a huge seal. After a while, his heavy snoring entered into competition with the wind. To Ana and her trembling heart, this snoring was like another prayer, and she fell asleep, safe in the lee of his powerful back, although still thinking of all those who had to spend that terrible night at sea in the storm . . .
But not so much of Esteban, because she had heard him creep back in just before she had started praying—although she hadn’t dared to tell Vladimir, being still fearful and confused by the way he had reacted. She had never before heard him laugh in quite that way, and, just like the men, she was still waiting for the full force of his anger to be unleashed.
But Vladimir continued to disappoint everyone, even Esteban, who was quite puzzled by his behavior.
“And how goes it today? Did you or didn’t you? How was it? Did you get the treasure?” he would ask every time he ran into him in the house.
And these teasing questions would inevitably be followed by a raucous, primeval burst of laugher, just like the one they had heard that first day, even though more than a week had now gone by.
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