In the Beginning Was the Sea

by Tomás Gonzáles

  11

  LESS THAN two months after their arrival, J. found himself obliged to go back to Medellín.

  “I’ll head off on Tuesday, hermana,” he told Elena, “I’ll be leaving you in charge of everything.”

  “No problem,” she said without a flicker of hesitation.

  J. gave her some advice, talked to Gilberto about the work that needed to be done in his absence, and set off.

  In Medellín, disaster awaited him. Before he and Elena moved to the sea, J. had entrusted his money to a relative to invest, planning to live off the interest until he could find a way of making the finca profitable. A number of people had advised him to be wary. The man had a chequered history—something J. knew, but managed to overlook—and more than once he had been sued for breach of trust. There were rumours that he was a professional swindler. But J. ignored such stories. Persuaded, perhaps, by the fact that the man was a relative and tempted by the exorbitant interest rates he was offering, J. had lodged a meagre three hundred thousand pesos with a bank and handed over the rest to be invested. It proved to be a terrible mistake. When he reached Medellín, he discovered that the relative had declared himself bankrupt in suspicious circumstances. In blunter terms, he had robbed J. blind. There were bitter arguments, lawyers, legal battles, but in the end J. lost everything. After wrangling for a month and a half, J. realized that the finca and the three hundred thousand pesos in the bank were now his sole means of survival. He sent a letter to Elena with Don Carlos, who happened to be heading to Urabá, explaining that he would have to stay in town another fortnight; he told her not to worry, that everything would be fine.

  The terrible blow he suffered as a result of this sordid affair was immediately followed by an irrational need to fight back, an overwhelming desire not to fail—at least in the long term. J. spent sleepless nights calculating how much money he would need to set up a shop on the finca and how much profit he might make from cattle farming. Though deeply reluctant to contemplate cutting down the majestic trees on the finca, he also initiated conversations with timber merchants who advised him there was money to be made in lumber. “At worst it would pay for the food and the aguardiente,” J. thought, having done some rough calculations. “The sunshine and the sea don’t cost us anything.”

  He negotiated a loan for two hundred thousand pesos with the bank and boarded the bus back to Turbo with a cheque for five hundred thousand pesos in his pocket—a sum he hoped would be enough to set up the shop and subsist until the business took off—and a bottle of aguardiente in his backpack. He spent the eighteen-hour journey juggling figures, drinking aguardiente and glorying in the upheaval in his life.

  Elena was waiting for him on the beach when he arrived back at the finca. Seeing her there, the wind whipping her skirt against her shapely legs, J. felt touched. Solemn, bronzed by the sun, she watched the boat arrive with a calm, assured expression.

  They kissed passionately.

  “The stock should arrive tomorrow or the day after,” said J.

  “What stock?”

  “For the shop, hermana. We have to open a shop. Things in Medellín have gone to shit and we’re pretty much broke.”

  “OK,” she said, “Let’s do it.”

  The following day, Gilberto arrived early with timber to build the shelves and the counter.

  “I’ll have it ready in a week, Don J.,” he said, immediately setting to work.

  The stock did not arrive the following day, nor the day after, but a week later in two large boats, by which time the shelves had been built. Much of the order was missing. J. had paid for fifty bottles of aguardiente but only twenty arrived; there were only ten of the forty cartons of cigarettes he had ordered, and the quantities of rice and beans were short. He argued with the boatmen who insisted that this was all the warehouse manager had supplied. Elena accused them of being thieves but they ignored her. Whenever she spoke, they behaved as though she did not exist, allowing her to say her piece, then carrying on talking to J.

  “I’ll go back to Turbo with you,” said J., somewhat calmer. He turned to Elena. “You start stocking the shelves, but don’t sell anything before I get back.”

  The discrepancy turned out to be a misunderstanding. The warehouse manager told J. that he had written a note—which he had forgotten to give to the boatmen at the last minute—explaining that the outstanding items would be despatched with the next order since they had been having problems with their suppliers and were running low on several products.

  The explanation sounded unconvincing and J., unsurprisingly, flew into a rage and threatened to have the man fired. Then, as always, he calmed down.

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” J. said. “You pay for my trip, you give me the missing stock now, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

  After a brief, feigned attempt to object to this idea, the man was forced to concede. Before he left, J. insisted that all future orders be shipped through Julito.

  This was the first night J. slept at Julito’s house. They met by accident on the town square and when the boatman heard that J. was looking for a hotel for the night, he immediately invited him to stay.

  Julito lived in one of the stilt houses J. had seen when he first arrived in Turbo looking for the harbour. It comprised three rather dark rooms with a lean-to kitchen at the back. The central living room was furnished with a small table in an alcove and there was a hammock strung from one corner to the other. As they stepped inside, Julito unhooked the hammock, pushed the table into the centre of the room and drew up two crude unpainted chairs.

  “Sit down, jefe,” he said.

  Julito’s wife was fat—unsurprisingly—and surly. But this was not the same “wife” J. had met at the market. She addressed her husband in a mocking, sarcastic tone that made it clear she was no longer his dupe, that she knew how he ticked, this poor excuse for a man, that she no longer had any illusions. With J., however, she was friendly if not particularly talkative; it was clear that she was proud to have him as a guest in her home.

  Julito left him sitting in a chair and went out to get some aguardiente. Meanwhile, his wife brought coffee in one of the little cups he had seen at Doña Rosa’s house. This spartan room had a certain elegance and the delicate porcelain cup shimmered in its centre like a spray of flowers. The sun began to set and deep blue shadows began to gather in the corners. J. watched through the door as the sky gradually grew darker. The sunset was peaceful and he felt happy.

  Julito came back with a bottle, brought out two glasses decorated with bullfighting scenes and sat in the other chair. The two men drank late into the night. When the bottle was empty, the boatman suggested going to buy another but J. declined: he urgently wanted to get back home and needed to get up early. Julito hung up the hammock and J. stretched out and immediately fell asleep.

  The following morning, after a four-and-a-half hour boat ride, he arrived back at the finca.

  Elena had arranged everything on the shelves, and all that remained to be done was putting prices on them. Gilberto, who knew about local prices, helped her. They opened one ledger in which sales were to be carefully recorded and another for those who bought on credit, and the shop was ready for business.

  That night Gilberto and Elena had their first serious argument. J. knew it had something to do with the counter, but never quite understood how it had started. Coming back from a walk on the beach, he found Elena in a fury while Gilberto seemed more stunned than anything else. J. knew that when Elena was in a rage, nothing and no one could calm her down; the only thing to do was wait it out until her anger, like a volcano, subsided. Taking Gilberto to one side, J. told him not to pay her any mind, that her fury would quickly pass. Gilberto shrugged and said he understood.

  “All women are hot-blooded, Don J.,” he said.

  After Gilberto left, J. went back to the shop.

  Meanwhile, Elena pretended to study the price list.

  “I will not stand for you undermining me
in front of those hijos de puta,” she said after a moment without looking up from the ledger.

  12

  ON HIS FIRST TRIP to Medellín, J. had bought a nylon fishing net measuring fifteen metres by three. It was a wide mesh net, ideal for catching tarpon and bluestripe jacks. It took five people to handle it.

  The finest fisherman in the area was Salomón, one of Doña Rosa’s sons. Though taciturn and physically unremarkable, he seemed to have an extraordinary talent. During lean times, when other men came back with empty nets, Salomón would still land ten-pound sea bream.

  He was always immaculately turned out. No one had ever seen him break a sweat. He wore impeccably ironed white shirts with the Red Indian logo of his Pielroja cigarettes faintly visible through the breast pocket. The pack never got wet, and even empty it was still the perfect rectangle it had been when full.

  J. knew from experience that Salomón was an exceptional fisherman, having often accompanied him when he was line fishing on the beach. Every movement of his hands had a rigorous logic; some casts were tentative, allowing him to play to random chance; others were precise, perfect casts which, if executed a second earlier or later, would have failed.

  J. asked Salomón to try out the new net. Since this was not high season for fishing, the early catches were modest. The men would go out at night, drop anchor three hundred metres from shore and fish for three or four hours. J. never went with them, but he liked to watch the lights bobbing on the waves; he could just make out the shadows of the boats against the dark water and hear the distant voices of the fishermen.

  In Salomón’s care, the fishing net remained as good as new—perhaps better than new, since it seemed to improve with experience. Staked out on the beach, the nylon mesh gleamed in the first rays of sunlight with a delicate, spectral beauty; the sun coursed along threads still glossy with dew while the breeze created ripples of silvery light that looked like tendrils of wind itself.

  At noon, Salomón and his eldest son would come to pick up the net. They never came into the house. J. would watch from the veranda as the son unpegged it from the stakes, folding the net into sections which he handed to Salomón, who gathered it into his outstretched arms before slinging it over his shoulder with an effortless gesture, and the two men would walk up to the house.

  Having stowed the net in the room where the tools were kept, Salomón would come out onto the veranda, crouch down and chat with J. for a while, almost always about fish. He would smoke a couple of cigarettes and then head on his way. Rarely did he accept a drink. “Come winter, the real fishing season will start,” he always said before he left.

  13

  THE RAINS CAME and so began the first of the two winters J. would spend on the finca; the first of his last two winters on earth.

  Thick grey clouds massed over the sea, lending it a mournful, boundless beauty. Before the first drops fell, the sun would slip through a chink in the clouds spilling showers of light over the dark waters. Lightning shattered the skies with a thunderous boom as gulls shrieked high in the heavens. Then the clouds merged and fat raindrops chimed like pebbles on the corrugated iron roof, heralding torrential downpours that seemed to last forever. The muggy heat that preceded the cloudbursts would give way to a bleak, dusky coolness as the leaden outlines of the clouds melted until it seemed as though the land and the waters had merged again and the darkness was one with the light. Sometimes it was possible to hear above the raging elements the muffled purr of a boat, its blurred outline barely visible out at sea.

  At the beginning of winter, Elena and J. would shut themselves away in their bedroom to wait out the rain-storms, overcome by damp, dark desire. As heavy raindrops hammered monotonously on the roof, they made love until they were exhausted. But whenever Elena had to get out of bed to serve a customer in the shop, she could not help but look outside. The desolate, dark seascape made her heartsick and the muddy streams gushing down the mountain and turning fields around the house into swampland made her want to cry. The tall mango tree in the garden, so majestic in summer, now seemed crumpled and shrunken in the rain. Everything she could see, the dogs, the placid cattle, the battered palm trees, even the sea itself looked dreary. Overcome by a wave of crushing loneliness, Elena would go back to the bedroom, to the warmth of J.’s body.

  After two or three days of incessant rain, the waters would retreat. After a long night listening to the clattering on the roof, J. would wake to find himself suddenly faced with light and silence. “The rain has stopped, hermana,” he would say, shaking Elena awake, and the two of them would run out onto the veranda where a universe that seemed new-made appeared before their eyes. The sun beat down on the wet leaves of the trees, beat down on the sands, beat down on the spume thrown up by the waves. Leaping from the water, the sardines seemed to tinkle in the air. Flocks of seagulls, dazzling white in the dawn light, wheeled above the ocean, diving for fish in exultant confusion.

  And yet, these periods of remission were short-lived. Before long the clouds would gather again, covering the earth with their flinty shadow. When the waters once again began to teem, Elena and J. would lapse back into their desperate lust and shut themselves away in the bedroom.

  Until Gilberto said:

  “Now would be a good time to plant the seedbeds, jefe.”

  J. was sitting on the veranda at dusk, watching the darkness move from grey to black. Elena was in the bedroom, asleep. He needed to shake off this lethargy, to rid himself of the despair that burned like an ulcerous panic in his belly. For almost six weeks, he had done no work of any importance on the finca.

  “OK, Gilberto,” he said, “let’s start tomorrow.”

  The following day, wearing heavy oilskin capes, they began preparing the ground. At first, Elena worked with them, but later, when she could no longer stand the insidious raindrops that dribbled down her neck and trickled down her back, when the muggy heat that smelt of rubber became unbearable, she abandoned the work and shut herself in the house.

  “If the bloody sewing machine hadn’t been damaged, at least I’d have something to do,” she said to J.

  She ate in an attempt to cancel out the terrible weight of her boredom. Hardly had she finished breakfast than she was already salivating, with neurotic delight, anticipating the fried sea bream she would have for lunch. Between meals, she gorged on ripe mangoes.

  As Salomón had said, with the rains came huge catches. Fish were so abundant that the net did not need to go out every night. Every time it was hauled in, the net teemed with enough fish to feed the house and the surrounding area for days.

  On the night of the first big catch, Salomón brought J. thirty large bluestripe jacks, fifteen sunfish and four sea bream a metre and a half long. This was half of the catch.

  “Just give us half of this, Salomón,” said J. “Take the rest and give it to the people in the village.”

  But even this proved to be too much. Mercedes hung some of the fish over the wood stove to smoke and salted the rest. Four days later the salt fish began to stink and they had to throw it out.

  14

  THE DUE DATE on the loan with the bank coincided with the depths of Elena’s boredom during that interminable winter.

  “One of us should go to Medellín to try and renew the loan,” J. said, knowing she would be the one to go.

  “Fine,” Elena said immediately. “You sign a power of attorney and I’ll make the trip.”

  Two days later she walked next to J., trailing behind Gilberto as they headed for the town. Since money was short, it had been decided that she would take the weekly ferry rather than hiring an express boat. Though it had stopped raining, the dirt track was a quagmire. Elena and J. were wearing rubber boots while Gilberto had on the same battered leather sandals he wore in summer. In the deep mud, his feet made a sucking sound Elena found nauseating.

  They reached town with two hours to spare before the ferry sailed. At noon, Gilberto took them to a café owned by one of his relatives where they
had a huge sunfish casserole, then, drowsy from the heavy lunch, they sat on the beach on an upturned canoe waiting for the ferry.

  Just as Elena clambered into the canoe that would take her out to the ferry, the first fat raindrops began to fall. By the time she was aboard, the downpour was in full spate.

  The ferry was a wooden hulk twelve metres by four painted in blue, yellow and red. Ten long benches ran from stem to stern and the deck was covered by a broad canopy to shelter passengers from the rain. Elena stowed her suitcase and then settled herself next to one of the guardrails in the bow. She could see J. staring at the ferry from the shore. She waved and he waved back but made no move to leave. He went on standing there, staring out at the ship. “He’s getting soaked,” thought Elena.

  The last passenger to arrive was a cantankerous old man with Parkinson’s disease clutching a lit cigar between trembling fingers. When he was finally hoisted aboard, the ferry’s engines began to roar and the engine room belched thick clouds of blue smoke. “Let’s just hope this heap of shit doesn’t sink before we get there,” thought Elena.

  Elena had no desire to spend the night in Turbo. A porter with a handcart wheeled her suitcase to the station where she sat on a metal chair to wait for a bus. When she discovered that the next bus would not leave until 9.30 p.m., she went to a restaurant and ordered roast beef, cassava and a mountain of rice atop which a fried egg glittered like a star.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, the bus rolled in to Medellín. Elena felt her heart race as they arrived. Emerging from the dazed stupor of the long journey, the passengers suddenly became cheerful and talkative. The sky was blue and cloudless, a hot, dry wind came through the open window. Pleasurably breathless, her eyes half closed, Elena let her hair billow in the breeze while one or two of her fellow passengers stared.