“So,” Augustin finally said. “Franco never fished the Sella. It’s been resting for five weeks and still hasn’t been fished?”
My father roared with laughter and gave my brother’s neck a gentle shake. “Juanito! You will catch your first salmon on the fly this year. I can tell. Coño. What a slaughter we shall have.”
“The river is so full of salmon you can walk across their backs sticking out of the water,” the head ghillie said in his unhurried way.
“Eat up, boys. The Sella is calling us.”
Uncle Augustin turned to impatiently signal the waiter we were ready for the next course, at the exact same moment my brother turned in the other direction, to glower at one of the riverbank boys who was walking close by and clicking his tongue at us. I remember the eyebrows, the noses, the intense and wiry energy of uncle and brother—they were Álvarez mirrors of each other.
We returned to Miramar. Our manservant, maid, and cook had used the time to pack our luggage, but we still had to pack our fishing gear and went directly to the low-slung and windowless side shed that was once used to dry apricots and cure sausages but now stored our rods and fishing equipment. The pile on the floor of the shed grew larger and larger: duffel bags and reed baskets filled with fly reels and fly boxes; canvas bags to carry dead salmon down from the mountains; leather-laced boots, shin guards, and high-water wading sticks. As we came to the end of our packing, Jorge and our chubby-faced cook appeared at the hut’s door. “Perdóname, Don Jesús,” Conchata said. “La Doña. She is on the phone and asking for you, sir.”
Papá went off to take the call while Uncle Augustin had my brother and me relay the fishing equipment to the driveway, as Jorge backed the Hispano-Suiza into position. The duffel bags were packed tight in the rumble seat, then covered by a canvas tarp, and secured with leather straps. A half dozen leather canisters contained our rods, everything from locally made trout rods as agile as the birch switch our Jesuit teachers used to whip us with, to the long and heavy two-handed Hardy salmon rods made of split bamboo, lacquered and lashed with silk thread to a center rod of galvanized steel. Jorge climbed on the running board and pulled tight the straps securing our rod canisters to the car’s roof.
I had to pee and ran inside the house. As I made my way down the waxed corridor, to the ground-floor bathroom tucked off the library, something strange in Papá’s voice made me turn my head. He was in the living room, standing by the ruched silk curtains. One hand held the phone tight to his ear, while the other absentmindedly toyed with the brocade couch. His profile was pure Picos de Europa: the mountainous forehead, the black brows, the large and noble nose, the fat and sensuous lips underneath. He stared out to sea, the look on his face so intense it looked like he could see his future in its waves.
“Isabel. You are right. Totally unacceptable. I am deeply sorry she came by the house. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her . . . Now, don’t cry, my dear. She means nothing to me. You know that. A diversion. That is all. Pfft. She is nothing. I love only you and the boys. Please. Don’t cry, my sweet.”
He absentmindedly brought his hand down with a smack, squashing a fly against the back of the couch, and I turned for the bathroom. When I came back outside, Papá was already sitting behind the wheel of the Hispano-Suiza, intently studying me as I stood at the top of the stone steps. I hesitated. Jorge and Conchata were climbing into the SEAT, ready to follow us upriver.
My instinct, at that moment, was to create a distance between my father and me, and I looked to the back of the Hispano-Suiza, but Uncle Augustin was already sitting there with Juanito. My father, still studying my face and without a care in the world, or so it seemed to me, leaned over and popped open the door. I slid silently into the passenger’s seat next to him.
Papá lit a Ducados and then, with two fingers, deftly slid the Hispano-Suiza gearshift into first. “Are we ready?”
“Ready!!!” we cried.
“Entonces. Let us pay our respects to El Rey Salmón.”
FOUR
Conchata rose early the next morning, and soon the fishing lodge, a converted sheep’s corral on the banks of the Sella River, was filled with the smells of a Spanish tortilla in the pan and a metal pot percolating coffee on the stove. My brother and I came stumbling from our cots.
Uncle Augustin was fully dressed in corduroy and flannel and sitting at the dining-room table. “Good morning, nephews,” he said softly, as he reached for a plate of manchego cheese and fig jam.
Jorge came barreling through the front door, sending a gust of wind swirling around the stone floor. “Hombre,” he said. “There’s a chilly drizzle coming down from Los Picos.”
Papá emerged from the toilet, his suspenders still dropped and dangling around his knees. He sat down at the head of the dining-room table and pulled the iron skillet of tortilla in his direction. Jorge pulled from his jacket pocket a few straws and silently laid them on the table by my father’s elbow. Papá shuffled them, held them up, and we pulled straws to see who would fish what stretch of river: I got the top and, at this time of year, worst beat.
“Juanito,” Papá said. “You are fishing with me this morning. We’ll take my small fly rod. You can manage that now. It’s time you caught a salmón on the fly.”
“But we’ll take the worm rod, too, won’t we? Just in case.”
“Aaah. You have been defeated before you started. You must go fully committed to the fly, Juanito. Trust me. You will catch a salmon on the fly this morning. If you work at it, have confidence.” He made a face, like he had a taste of bad milk in his mouth. “Worm fishing is for farmers. Gentlemen fish with the fly.”
But things changed once we went outside. Out on the gravel drive, my brother was circling our father, parrying his fly rod like it was a fencing foil. Papá was sitting on the stone bench and had his head down, peering through his bifocals as he tied his leader to the fly line.
“It’s gray today,” Juan said, “so I think I will use a bright fly—something red and yellow—to make the fish see it. What do you think, Papá?”
“Yes. Yes. That sounds good,” my father said in a faraway voice, never bothering to look up from his line. “The fly boxes are over there.”
I stopped what I was doing and turned in their direction. On a dark day you use dark flies, and on a bright day, bright flies—every serious fisherman knew this. My father, failing to correct my brother, was condemning Juan to a day without fish.
I studied my father—how he peered through the curling smoke of his cigarette, how those beefy and fluttering lids masked his true thoughts—and saw for the first time he was totally bored with his younger son and greatly regretting he had insisted they fish together. Papá, I knew, would spend the entire day running roughshod over everyone and anything getting in the way of his fishing, and in the end, my little brother, instead of experiencing his rite of passage, his day of joy, would somehow wind up paying the price for our father’s self-absorption.
“Papá, I want Juan to come with me. I want to be with him when he catches his first salmon.”
“Really?” said Juan.
My father was relieved—you could see he was, just below the lids of his eyes—and he said, “If you boys insist.” Juan clapped his hands in excitement. I suspect he knew there was some unseen gulf between him and our father that could never be bridged, and, because of that, he preferred to be with his older brother on that special day.
The knowledge that Juan wanted to be with me flooded me with elation, a physical tingling that ran right down my arm to the very center of my being. The sensation was so overwhelming, in fact, that I had to turn away from Juan, lest he see how much the moment meant to me. Luckily, Ignacio’s grandson, Felipe, assigned to be my fishing guide and just then coming around the side of the lodge, served as distraction. “My brother is joining us above,” I said brusquely.
Felipe was nineteen, only three years older than me, but knew the surrounding land and river like it was the pear orchard out
side his family farm. He was standing against the wall of the Sheep’s Corral when we emerged from it for the last time, patiently waiting to take my brother and me upriver. Felipe wore a drizzle-dampened black cap, pulled over his curly hair and black eyes; a hand was resting lightly on the sheathed hunting knife hanging from his belt. We looked at each other, blinked an acknowledgment, and then lowered our eyes.
By 7:00 a.m. we were heading upriver, Felipe leading the way. We passed through a field of persimmon trees, planted by Felipe’s great-grandfather, before the rough track led down a hillock and through blackberry bramble. Juan trudged after us, contentedly humming “Hound Dog” to himself, an American rock-and-roll song that had recently invaded the state-run airwaves throughout Spain.
The blue-green river was to the left of us, curving around boulders at the bottom of the Dead Priest’s Pool, a long and deep stretch of river named after the local monsignor who had drowned two hundred years earlier when he came home drunk one night from his mistress and slipped from the path. Ever since, the locals said, the waters here were haunted by the priest’s penitent spirit.
Felipe made the sign of the cross as we passed, and when I gave him an odd look, he said, “The old women down in the village say the dead priest rises from the river and visits those who are near death.”
Juan and I laughed at this ridiculous superstition, and Felipe, hurt that we should make fun of him, looked away.
Our breathing soon became labored as we ascended the mountains, tracing the river to its source. Felipe was an amateur cantaor and began singing an old country song, about yearning, and my younger brother, who spoke that language, too, joined in the chorus, the two of them creating a haunting cry that seemed to shimmer out into the warm embrace of the trembling oak leaves and the tinkle of goat bells.
Through the next brush, whinnying at our approach and tethered to a cork tree, stood three horses. Two canvas bags for toting fish hung from a branch. Felipe turned and said, in his usual unsmiling way, “I brought the horses up yesterday afternoon, so we could move quicker, fish longer, and waste less time walking. Not even my grandfather knows I took them. The chestnut was meant to carry our catch, but Juan can ride her.” He smiled with his eyes, then, over the paper and tobacco shreds he was rolling into a cigarette. “I had a feeling you were going to wind up with the worst beat. Shit on them. We can’t let the old men beat us.”
Juan and I laughed and thanked him for his foresight. We mounted the mares and headed twelve kilometers up the stony goat path, sending rabbits scurrying into the hedges. A weed-tufted millstone from Roman times stuck half in and half out of the far riverbank, the marker that told us we had just reached the Mill Pool. We crossed the shallows with the horses, and crept up along the far field, carefully staying well back from the water so the fish wouldn’t see us and get spooked. We tethered the horses to an oak. The animals began feeding on the silvery grass underfoot, as we walked our gear down to where the field and limestone met.
The jagged-peaked Picos and their crevice patches of blue ice hovered behind the yellow-flowered forsythia blooming in the foreground. We each took a four-piece rod from its case, and, rubbing the joint ends against our oily foreheads, slipped the greased male-female rod pieces together, starting with the cork and split-bamboo double-handed base.
I looked over at Juan. “Coño,” he said. “It’s not like I haven’t done this a million times before. You don’t have to keep checking on me like that.”
We each screwed the heavy Hardy reels into the rods’ cork bases, and then threaded the reel’s wax-coated canvas line through the rod rings and out the top. Felipe reached inside his pocket for a spool of nylon, to tie on as leader. “Don’t go lower than ten-kilo test,” he said. “There are some big fish in the river this year. I saw one down at the bridge the other day. It was at least fifteen kilos. Almost shit my pants.”
Juan laughed. I peered unsurely at my leather billfolds filled with flies, at the red-and-yellow feathers, the florid spread of jungle cock, the dyed bits of tufted wool and tinsel tied to the high-water hooks. I chose a No. 6 Carmela, its black-and-yellow body and multicolored wings hand tied by Uncle Augustin, and handed Juan a blue-and-red Primorosa. “Good choice,” Felipe said.
We turned and faced the river. A side stream came fast down the steep mountainside on the far bank, a series of waterfalls that fell over moss-covered rocks, entering the Sella just after a gravel bar squeezed the main river current into a white-water run.
High above, a hawk circled, hunting for rabbits and mice. “I’ll start, you follow,” I said to Juan. “If I catch a fish, then you move ahead of me and start fishing first, until you catch a fish. Then we switch again, with me going first.”
Juan, usually so bold, licked his lips. “I’m not that good. I might spook the fish, the way my fly comes crashing down on the water sometimes. It drives Papá crazy.”
“So be it. We share our fate.”
My brother and I looked at each other, nodded, and went down to the river’s edge. As was the custom then, we spat on our flies, pissed into the river, and made the sign of the cross. Felipe stood still between us, talking quietly. “José María, start first in the top basin hollowed out by that stream. Sometimes, when the fish are running, you can catch one or two in the fast water there. But use the sinking tip in that fast water—and don’t waste too much time. The real action is down below.”
I switched rods, after fishing the fast water, and made my way, with the floating line, centimeter by centimeter through the calmer water. First came the backward cast, the swirl of green line rising in the air, like I was a medieval monk drawing letters in the sky with a quill. Then the forward thrust of the heavy rod, which reversed the line’s course, the looping forward momentum shooting the tapered green line straight and hard to the far side of the river. The fly shot to the end of the line and then hovered for a brief second, just a few centimeters above the water, before gently sinking with a sigh to the watery deck, only a raindrop plop to show where the fly had entered the river.
The current tugged at my line and swept the Carmela, just below the surface, on a diagonal race across the river, across a thousand different underwater currents stirred up and twirling, complicated eddies created by gravel and boulders and old branches felled and cast into the river by hard storms past.
I stripped my line, cast again, swept away by the sound of the running water and chirping finches in the brambles and the buzzing flies and the horses’ rhythmic tearing of grass behind me; by the pull and cast of the line, like a steadily pulsing heart; and by the river itself, as clear as aguardiente, making us all drunk.
Pulled up short, after reaching the end of the line, the crossing fly swung through the water to my side of the pool, that sudden change in direction sometimes so enraging the salmon that they darted forward to kill it. But still no takes. The only sign of life was the black tobacco smoldering in Felipe’s stained fingers and the aromatic wafts of sweaty horse flanks that came to me on the wind.
Felipe was gently telling Juan where to drop the fly. My brother, not wanting to disturb the fish, was fishing well, his line straight. Juan unexpectedly filled me with pride, the way he was fishing, and, sensing my every move, he turned to look in my direction and shook his head.
No rise. No sign of fish.
I made a poor cast a good two meters above the pool’s last big boulder.
The steel hook hit the river’s surface and the water boiled as a salmon rose furiously in a roll of white water, brutally bringing down the fly. I gasped, took a half step back, and raised my rod, sinking the hook into the fish’s jaw. The salmon instantly shot hard upriver, the reel screamed, and Juan and Felipe scrambled out of the river, to get out of the fish’s way.
“Keep your rod up!” Felipe barked.
“Ayyyyy, hermano!” Juan yelped.
The fish headed downriver, back up again, jumped twice. Then it made a run for the white water that led down to the next pool. I bore down
hard on the line, trying to hold the fish before it reached the rapids. It turned just before the river erupted in boils and white froth, and I walked the fish back up to the deepest part of the pool, the flashing salmon coming in, running out again, jumping again on the far side of the current. It was tiring, and I carefully walked backward toward the field and snorting horses behind me, slowly bringing the fish up onto the riverbank.
Felipe, ankle deep in the shallow water, unclipped the gaff on his belt. The fish was now in the shallows, shaking its head, trying to drop the fly. Felipe’s arm darted out, quick as a picador, and came back with the salmon’s head gored at the end of his gaff. He straightened his back and almost languidly came in from the water’s edge, his elbow up, the silvery fresh salmon shuddering and flapping and pouring blood from the gaff hole just below the pectoral fin.
“A fresh fish,” he said. “Four and a half kilos.”
Juan clapped me on the back. “Our first fish, José! You broke our streak!”
“Get in there, Juanito. It’s your turn. There’s more where that came from.”
Juan eagerly walked down to the water with his rod, as I turned back to the gaffed salmon. It shivered death. Blood was still pulsing down its flanks, splattering the smooth pebbles and stones below our boots. I was shivering, too, elated, high, pumped with adrenaline.
Felipe gently removed the gaff from the twitching hen fish. She was bursting with orange eggs that would never produce life.
“She came in last night. Look how fresh.” His knife poked at the four black sea lice clinging just below the fish’s adipose fin. “The heads of the lice haven’t dropped off yet, which means she hasn’t been in the river twenty-four hours yet. We were right to come this far upriver.” He pointed at the water. “The fresh fish are here.”
I lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. With a thrust and crunch, Felipe cut through the wine-red fan of gills, a bloodletting that entirely drained the fish and allowed the meat to taste extra sweet, with no bitter clots of coagulated blood marring the salmon’s flavor when it was cold smoked.
The Man With No Borders Page 6
