The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  Lurid images of Miguel and the bouncer, rolling around in bed, filled my head. I was furious he had lied to me. Thought I might get sick.

  “Do me a favor, Sigi. Just don’t talk.”

  Sigi switched into four-wheel drive and carefully crossed the bottom end of a pool, the water rising to the top of our wheels. We continued in silence like this, me fogging up the door window with my hot breath, Sigi concentrating as he maneuvered the swaying vehicle over the submerged rocks.

  On the far side, he pulled out of the pool, water pouring from the underbelly of the jeep. Back on dry land, he leaned over, switched out of four-wheel drive and back into higher gears, and we were soon racing across the plain.

  “Your youngest son has a fish on.”

  Rob, fishing the middle branch of the river, came into view, just as we plowed over a small and shrubby island and plunged back into the river. He was some three hundred meters ahead, his fly rod bent in two as he played a nice-sized fish in a small pool.

  Rob slowly backed away from the water and the fish jumped, always a dangerous moment. But my son, just seventeen, expertly lowered his rod, to avoid pulling the fly out of its mouth when it was airborne, and then just as quickly raised his rod again and tightened the line when the salmon fell back into the water—just as I had taught him.

  “Nice fish,” said Sigi. “About eight kilos. It’s well hooked. You can tell.”

  A flash of light caught the corner of my eye and I turned in its direction. It was the sun, glinting off the nylon of Rob’s worm rod that was leaning against a shrub. I remembered, then.

  This is the first salmon your youngest son has ever caught on a fly rod.

  Sigi had been cheering Rob on these last few days, giving him his best advice, and I could see, in his expression, how pleased he was that my son finally had hooked a decent fish and was well on his way to bringing it ashore. The young ghillie applied the brake and began to slow the jeep down, so I could jump out and assist Rob and share with him this father-son moment.

  As he did so, however, we spotted Sam. He was striding hard across the tundra and gravel, heading back to help his younger brother land the fish and celebrate this rite of passage. He was only two hundred meters or so away.

  I smacked the dashboard of the Lada. “Keep going. Sam has this. I want to start fishing. Keep going. Go on. Go.”

  Sigi opened his mouth, as if he was going to speak, but I must have bristled a warning not to meddle in my family affairs, because he closed shut his mouth with a chop, and moved into higher gear, picking up speed again.

  Rob was too busy concentrating on playing the fish to worry about what we were doing behind his back, but on our way upriver we passed Sam, coming up on our eastern flank. I remember that initial look of surprise on his face, as he came over the gravel bar and saw the Lada roar past him, its tires spitting stones, my face pressed up against its fogged glass.

  Sam’s shock quickly morphed into disappointment, then anger, all of which I saw in that brief moment when he and I locked eyes, just before the Lada sped away, taking him out of my sight.

  Now that time has passed and the memory is before me, I am filled with shame and regret. But I did what I did, there is no denying it, blinded at the time by my rage and hurt over Miguel. I cannot change that. It crowded out all the other feelings I was having or should have been having about my boy, and at the time all I could do was fish—the only balm that has ever soothed the wounds inside me.

  The Nordic sun was still orange and hovering at the horizon when they picked me up at Red Rock. It was 9:00 p.m. and I was sitting by the river, tiredly smoking a cigarette. A bloody line of seventeen salmon was laid out behind me on the riverbank.

  Sigi jumped out of the jeep with a roll of plastic under his arm. “José!” he exclaimed. “That’s a river record! You caught twenty-four salmon in one day. Congratulations!”

  He bagged the fish I had already bled with a cut into the gills. Sigi was visibly excited. “Incredible! The Professor has struck again. I have to say, you are the best fisherman who has ever fished this river. It’s amazing what you can do with the fly.”

  I flicked away my cigarette. “Thank you. I once caught more, long ago. On the Ribadesella in Northern Spain.”

  My three sons slowly climbed from the jeep. They were standing in a tight line on an elevated grassy knoll, silently staring down at me and my fish slaughtered on the riverbank. When I looked up at their blank faces, dead of expression, I was reminded of the way the peasants stared stonily down at Franco from Omedina’s town bridge.

  It was my youngest son who broke the silence.

  “Congratulations, Dad.”

  He spoke, I recall, in a small voice.

  That night we celebrated Rob’s salmon in the most appropriate way—we ate it for dinner. The Frenchmen and Italians who were fishing the lower beats joined us in the lounge for the customary predinner drink, and among them was a white-haired Italian who owned three Ferrari dealerships, accompanied by his charming and fleshy mistress. The lodge filled with our chatter and laughter, in several languages, as we merrily drank vodkas and scotches, while entering our day’s catch into the log and boasting of our river conquests. The dinner bell rang. Inge brought out the steaming platter of fish, and we all, starving after a day of hard fishing, scampered to our positions around the table.

  My sons did not sit next to me, as they normally did, but strategically placed themselves in between the lodge’s other fishermen. I didn’t say a word. Whether they did so to make the other guests feel included and festive in our celebration of Rob’s fish, or to keep their distance from me, I wasn’t sure.

  The Ferrari dealer in the pale yellow Armani sweater lifted his glass of white wine in Rob’s direction, and sonorously said, in his Milanese accent, “To you, young man, for so fantastically losing your virginity.”

  Rob blushed and we all roared with laughter, but for the Italian’s mistress, who smacked her white-haired lover on the arm in a mock-angry way and told my youngest son, “Ignore these crude old men. They’re just jealous.”

  Shortly thereafter the head ghillie came out of the kitchen, to congratulate Rob and hand him a wooden plaque, engraved with his name, the date, and the Icelandic name of the pool where he had caught his fish.

  “That’s so cool. Thank you.” Rob was beaming.

  A short and stocky Icelander was standing by the head ghillie’s side, a craggy-faced fellow with spiked hair and an impish smile. “For those of you who don’t know, this is Orri,” the head ghillie said. “Orri Vigfusson. You might have heard of him.”

  The effect was electric. A Frenchman at the table leapt out of his chair, bounded across the room, and energetically shook Vigfusson’s hand. “Such an honor to meet you, Orri! Such an honor! Please. Come join us at the table.” He turned back to us and said, “Orri is the man who is single-handedly saving the salmon from extinction.”

  Sam, in his second year at Bowdoin College, leaned across the table and whispered at me, “We’ve been studying what Vigfusson has done in our Economics and the Environment class. He’s a rock star in the environmental movement right now. Because of him, many environmentalists are waking up to the fact the private sector has an important role to play in saving the planet.”

  I was not, I confess, that familiar with Vigfusson’s work, so I eavesdropped, as the Italian’s mistress demanded to know what the fuss was about from her lover and the enthusiastic Frenchman to her right.

  “Look, cara,” said the Ferrari dealer. “The young salmon leave the river after two years and enter the sea, to fatten up on arctic squid and shrimp, before they come back to the river, big and strong, to spawn. It was always a mystery about where the salmon went to feed in the vast oceans. Mah, a few years ago, fishing vessels with the latest sonar technology pinpointed the salmon’s feedings grounds off the Faroe Islands and in the deep waters off Greenland. The mystery was solved.”

  “Bu
t that’s a good thing. No?”

  “Non, non, madame,” said her neighbor. “The commercial fishermen everywhere immediately rushed to where the salmon were congregating to feed, and strip-mined the sea with their drift nets, scooping up hundreds of thousands of tons of wild salmon and whatever else got caught in their nets.”

  “Oh no. The poor fishes!”

  “You can imagine. The Atlantic salmon’s population was cut in half in just four years. At the current rate, the salmon will be extinct in a few more years.”

  “But this is terrible! The governments must do something.”

  The Italian waved his hands dismissively. “The World Health Organization and national governments, their fisheries and maritime authorities, are all sucking their thumbs. They want to ‘study the issue’ further and commission more reports from marine biologists.”

  Vigfusson, who had been listening in on this account from the other side of the table, couldn’t help himself and roared, “But we know what the issue is! We are overfishing! Catching too many fish at sea. It’s pure human avarice!”

  I looked over at Sam and was shocked to discover he was looking up at the Icelander with an expression I had never seen in him before. It was sheer adulation.

  I turned back, as the Italian woman turned her rapid-fire questions directly on Vigfusson. The Icelander was, we learned, part owner in three salmon rivers on the eastern coast of Iceland, which is possible in that country. Vigfusson’s livelihood was of course threatened by the overfishing, and, disgusted by the inertia of the multilateral organizations, he created a philanthropic foundation called the North Atlantic Salmon Fund and raised capital with wealthy families and passionate sport fishermen from around the world. He then used the fund’s war chest to pay a premium for the commercial fishermen’s nets and salmon quotas at sea. Within six months, he had removed 72 percent of the commercial nets in the North Atlantic.

  Salmon stocks rebounded rapidly. “There’s a simple arbitrage behind the net buyout,” Sam whispered across the table. “A sport fisherman will pay one hundred times more per pound of Atlantic salmon, to catch them on a fly in the river, than a housewife is prepared to pay for ocean-netted salmon bound for the family dinner table. That’s why it made economic sense for river entrepreneurs like Orri to buy out the commercial nets at sea.”

  We were all suitably impressed and grateful for the Icelander’s understanding of free-market economics and his efforts to save the salmon, of course, but eventually all this adulation began to bore me. Happily, we all returned to smaller chats with our immediate neighbors when two massive bowls of sherry trifle, one of my favorite desserts from childhood, were plopped down at either end of the long table.

  I used the opportunity to tell the Italian woman how I had caught my biggest fish of the day, and, as she politely listened to my account, I dipped the big spoon into the trifle, smacked three dollops on my plate, and then pushed the pudding bowl across the table, toward my oldest son.

  Sam, who moments earlier had been looking at Vigfusson with nothing but awe, looked at me with undisguised disgust. He paused a second, deciding what to do, and then leaned over and said, “Dad, that’s the third time tonight you took more than your fair share of the food. There are other people at the table here, you know.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Don’t be so selfish and greedy and I won’t.”

  I pushed my plate away. I had no more appetite.

  Bad news awaited us when we got back to Switzerland. Lisa’s father had inoperable pancreatic cancer, and her mother was both hysterical and insisting on caring for him herself. She refused to hire outside nursing help. “I don’t know what to do,” Lisa said.

  The look on Lisa’s face that night, when we climbed into bed, broke my heart. She was back—that person who had been terrorized by the alcoholic father and enabling mother, who had stood helplessly by and watched her brothers get beaten into the floor by their father for the simple act of trying to protect her.

  But, in the middle-aged face getting slathered with moisturizer that night, there were also traces of memories that recalled her sober father patiently and lovingly repairing her dollhouse, those giddy childhood moments when her mother dressed up as a fairy and took her and her friends trick-or-treating on Halloween. Those flashes of memory existed, too, between the scenes of carnage, and they all seemed that evening to bang violently up against her own strong, internal sense of loyalty and family duty.

  “Ohhhh,” she sighed, before turning off the light.

  We lay there in the dark, both in our own confusing space and staring at the ceiling. The silence built until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  I rolled over. Hugged her tight.

  The next morning, at the kitchen counter, Lisa sat pale and deflated in front of a half-eaten bowl of Greek yogurt and blueberries, toying at her breakfast with a spoon. “I hardly slept,” she said. “This is such a mess. My brothers won’t help. Paul says he’s in the middle of closing a deal out in San Francisco, and Charlie has his own health problems. Of course, it’s also very convenient. They’re washing their hands of Dad because of what he did to them when they were growing up. I can’t blame them.”

  “In the end, he is your father. You should go see him. Before it is too late.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. You didn’t even go to your father’s funeral.”

  “Qué pasa aquí? You said you didn’t know what to do—so I gave you my opinion. Why are you jumping down my throat?”

  “Your judgment is not valued or respected anymore.”

  I slowly turned in her direction, my heart thumping wildly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The boys told me you didn’t stop to help Rob catch his first salmon. Shame on you, José.”

  I poured some milk into the coffee.

  “You’re even competitive with your own sons. What’s happening to you? I almost don’t recognize you anymore.”

  When I brought the espresso back to the counter, I spilled half of it. I swore, went back to the machine, and started again. “It was not my finest hour,” I finally said, banging the old coffee grounds out of the portafilter. “I should have stopped, to be with him. But I was upset—had some bad news from the office—and wanted to fish. I needed to fish. You know how I am.”

  She pushed her half-finished bowl of yogurt away from her. “There is no excuse, José. It was Rob’s first fish. You always go on and on about how it was an Álvarez ritual to make a fuss over the first salmon on the fly. My God, how many times have you bored me repeating that story about the day your brother caught his first salmon? And how you of course caught more fish than anyone else.”

  “OK. I get it. I behaved badly. I let my son down. Coño. Now stop it. We were talking about you and your parents. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t really have a choice. I have to go.”

  Right then we heard the sound of Sam above us, clearing his throat and pounding his way down the hall to the bathroom.

  “Do you have your passport?”

  “Honestly, José. What has gotten into you? I am a forty-six-year-old woman. I have traveled before, you know.”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Her bags were packed and she was sitting at her vanity table, sorting through her purse. “Why are you so nervous? I’ll be fine. And the boys are teenagers. You’ll hardly see them. They’ll be off with their friends.”

  “That’s what I am worried about.”

  Lisa smiled wanly at me in the mirror. I don’t think she had ever looked so beautiful—the worry about her father and mother had softened her, and, in that moment, I just wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I loved her more than anything in the world. But I did not move. Whether it was guilt or shame, I do not know, but I did not close the space between us.

  “Boys!” I yelled. “Come say goodbye to your mother.”

  There was the sound of sullen te
enagers on the move. Frye boots came thudding down the old wooden staircase with such force they made the old farmhouse shudder.

  “Dios mío. They sound like a herd of elephants.”

  Lisa was dropping a lipstick into her purse when John came in. He bent down and tenderly kissed her forehead. “Have fun, Mom . . . Oh, shit, that’s probably not the right thing to say. Sorry, but you get it. Give my love to Gramps and Grandma.”

  “You could call them directly or write a letter.”

  He looked vaguely out the window, scratched his chin. “Yeah, sure, I’ll do that . . .”

  Rob squeezed my shoulder, a morning greeting as he passed, and then threw his arms around his mother and kissed her.

  “You rock, Mom. Don’t let Gramps be an asshole and bully you.”

  As he hugged her, Lisa lifted up an arm and gratefully touched the back of Rob’s head. After a few seconds breathing in his warmth, she opened her eyes and patted his forearm in appreciation.

  “No, Rob. I won’t. Thank you.”

  “How long will you be gone for?”

  “I’m not sure. Three weeks at minimum. Maybe more. Depends how things go and what stage he is in and whether Mother will listen to reason.”

  Lisa turned on the stool as Sam entered. Tall and gym-fit, Sam was already exuding a natural authority. He, too, bent over and wrapped his mother up in a bear hug. “Mom, don’t forget to treat yourself to something fun every now and then, so the whole trip isn’t just about caring for your psycho parents. And, remember, your mom can be a needy bitch, too, almost an equal match . . .” He was probably going to say “to Gramps,” but I had a sense he was also thinking of me.

  “Thank you. Good advice.” Lisa was teary with gratitude. She stood and grabbed her coat. “All right. I am ready for this. You are so darling. You boys are the greatest thing I have done with my life.”

  John and Rob carried her bags downstairs and loaded them into the back of the Mercedes, as Sam held open the passenger door for her. I took out my keys, was just about to get in behind the wheel, when Sam spoke over the roof of the car.