Despite his misgivings, the workers spent their first night at his house. Between one thing and another, it was too late to head to the other finca on foot carrying their chainsaws and their other belongings. They strung hammocks up on the veranda and settled down for the night. J. stayed up late with them, drinking aguardiente and talking about business, about how many board feet a lumberman could cut per week, what sort of rigs would need to be installed on the steeper slopes, and so forth. They came to an agreement about food: initially they would come to the house where Mercedes would cook for them, but J. was already talking to Salomón and his wife to see whether they might be prepared to take on the work. Seemingly keen to show willingness, the loggers agreed with everything.
All night, Elena and J. were plagued by the sound of the men snoring and the reek of petrol. Elena, already in a foul mood because the loggers were staying at the house, woke J. again and again to tell him she could not get to sleep for the smell of sweat and gasoline and complaining about the snoring from the veranda. Finally, J. snapped: the loggers smelt no better or worse than any other men, he said angrily; besides, they hadn’t come for a society ball, they’d come to cut timber. And she might as well get used to the smell of petrol since it would be around for some time. “We have to make a living somehow,” he growled, “so shut up and stop bitching.” Elena fumed in silence until eventually she fell asleep while J., now wide awake, sat up drinking and smoking until drink finally got the better of him at some point.
The next morning, they were woken by laughing voices from the veranda. They were still in bed when they heard the deafening roar of a chainsaw. Elena leapt out of bed and went to remonstrate with the man who had started it up. He told her he had simply been testing it. “Well go test it somewhere else, hermano,” she said. “We don’t need fucking chainsaws making a racket here.” The man shut off the engine, staring at Elena with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, but he said nothing. Back in the bedroom, she found J. with the sheet pulled up to his chin, staring at the ceiling, nursing a vicious hangover from too much aguardiente. He did not like the way she had spoken to the lumberman, but the throbbing pain behind the eyes deterred him from starting what could easily become a protracted argument. He took two aspirin and slept for a little longer. When he woke up again, he felt better and went out to talk to the loggers.
The men had already left for the other finca and the veranda was spattered with oil stains where the chainsaws had leaked during the night. Elena and Mercedes tried to get rid of them with hot water and a scrubbing brush, but the porous wood had already absorbed too much oil, leaving permanent marks on the floorboards. Elena flew into a rage out of all proportion to the incident—after all, in such an ugly, ramshackle old house, a few stains more or less made little difference—and vented her anger on Mercedes. As usual, the woman started crying and locked herself in her room. When Elena finally calmed down, she went to apologize. Perhaps she felt guilty, perhaps she was worried that J. or Gilberto would come home. Whatever the reason, Mercedes accepted her apology and promised not to mention the incident to her husband.
That day, J. witnessed the felling of the first tree. The chainsaw gnawed and gnawed at the trunk with a cowardly whine, and suddenly the tree, a towering kapok, started to make a deep rending sound that seemed to come from deep within the earth itself. The lumberman shouted and the tree fell with a shriek, and its fall—like the Apocalypse—brought down a whole world of parasites, birds’ nests, shrubs, vines and saplings. When all was still, the loggers hacked the fallen tree to pieces, dismembering it like a pack of ravening dogs.
When J. got home, he looked gloomy. Without a word, he sat on the veranda and stared at the sea; without a word, he drank the coffee Mercedes brought him. After a while, he went into the shop where Elena was reading, took a bottle of aguardiente from the shelf, opened it and took a long swig as he strolled back out to the veranda. He sat down, took another drink and set the bottle on the floor next to him. He refused lunch. At 2 p.m., in the harsh glare of the sun reflected on the waves, he fell asleep in the chair, dead drunk. A flock of gannets glided slowly over the water. Elena and Mercedes carried J. to bed, took off his sandals and covered him with a sheet. He slept all afternoon. When he woke, it was dark and he could hear the purring of the sewing machine. He put his head out the window and saw a large moon rising over the sea. Still half-drunk, he went into the shop, crept up behind Elena, kissed her ear and stroked her breasts.
22
UNLIKE J., who went to the village at least twice a week—he invariably stayed for lunch and they usually served him crabs and rice—Elena had not returned since her first visit. Apart from her own mother, whose religious fervour she found irritating, Elena knew very few elderly people and tended to mistrust them. She had particularly disliked Doña Rosa: she had been appalled by the way the old woman treated her as though they were equals. Several times J. suggested she come with him to visit her, but Elena always found some excuse. “I don’t want to go there and have all those black men staring at me like I’m some sort of exotic animal,” she said finally, and after that he did not insist.
The villagers, in turn, did not much like Elena. At the beginning, their low opinion derived from the tales Mercedes told about how Elena treated her and Gilberto; later, many of them had direct experience of her brusque manner.
Elena began to take her daily swim in a small, sheltered cove not far from the house where the sand was bone white and the sea deep azure. She usually swam alone—J. preferred to stare at the sea rather than to swim—and afterwards she would lie on the sand and sunbathe. The cove was on the narrow road between the village and the town so that villagers passed the spot where Elena—wearing a white bikini that contrasted with her coppery skin, now darkened by the sun—went swimming every day. When men passed, whistling or smoking, Elena could feel their eyes on her and even as they walked away, still whistling, she could feel they were still watching. And often she was right. Nor was it just the men. She exerted a fascination as instantaneous and innocent as it seemed inexhaustible on everyone, from children carrying strings of fish to passing women balancing pots on their heads. Rarely did the villagers greet her as they passed. Sometimes, the children would stop and stare, their wide eyes neither mocking nor friendly but simply curious. When she chased them, they would walk away slowly, still watching her. “Bye-bye, seño!” they would sometimes shout as they left.
Once, she had an altercation with a black woman—full-figured, dignified, majestic—who passed by every day carrying a basin of laundry on her head. When the woman, never stopping, slowed so that she could look, the basin would whirl slowly. And when her neck could no longer maintain the whirling, she would gracefully raise her head and, never for a moment wavering from this slowness, this poise, this dignity, woman and basin would set off down the narrow path and disappear.
On the morning in question, Elena had had an argument with J. about the loggers coming to the house to eat every day. She was lying on the beach thinking about this, her mind teeming with murderous thoughts. Just then, the woman passed. Whether because she was tired or perhaps because one of her sandals had come loose, she sat down, took the basin from her head and set it on the ground.
Elena could not contain herself.
“Get out of here, you nosy bitch!” she yelled. “This is private property!”
The woman did not move. She did not raise her voice, but merely said that she had been taking the same route for twenty years and did not need some newcomer telling her where she could and could not walk. The argument went on for some time—Elena became bitter and angry while the black woman remained calm and sardonic. In the end, the woman stayed as long as she pleased and, since she refused to leave, Elena finally snatched up her towel and stalked off.
“They’re so nosy, these people,” she complained sullenly that night.
She and J. were sitting on the beach in front of the house. Waves pounded onto shore, raining pebbles like hai
lstones and ebbing in a clatter that sounded like maracas. On a tray next to J. were a little salt cellar, slivers of lemon and slices of green mango. He had got into the habit of drinking a few glasses of aguardiente—sometimes too many—every night. Now, wearing shorts and sitting staring at the sea, he gripped the bottle with his bare feet. There was no moon, but the night was clear and filled with stars. For the umpteenth time, he tried to explain what Elena already knew: that people stared out of genuine curiosity and not some sinister reason.
“The more you get angry, the more they’ll stare.”
Elena said nothing, drank some aguardiente and handed back the bottle.
“I’m tired,” she said, “I think maybe I should go to bed. Try not to get too drunk.”
Before she left, she grabbed the bottle and took another mouthful, shook salt on a slice of mango and, slipping it between her teeth, walked away. Shortly afterwards, J. watched her shadowy figure in the bedroom as she undressed. “Everything is so fucking difficult and so fucking beautiful,” he thought as he watched Elena’s shadow move through the shaft of yellow light, a tiny pocket of affection in the immensity of darkness. He shook a little salt onto a slice of lemon and held it ready while he drank another shot. Sometimes, particularly when drinking, J. felt as though he might explode with joy. Lights, sensations, visions and insights coursed through him like fen-fire. His belly warmed by this feeling, he went on sitting there for a long time, drinking and pushing deeper into the night.
The following day, Elena decided not to go to the cove. When the time came for her swim, she sat fuming in the shop, reading a book. When the face of a little black girl appeared at the window (“Mamá sent me to ask if she can have a pound of rice on credit”) Elena glared at her contemptuously and told her she couldn’t have any fucking credit because they already owed her too much money. The girl went on staring at her as she pretended to read.
When the little black face had disappeared, Elena looked up at the shelf where the bags of rice were. She put her head out the window and called to the girl slowly walking back along the beach. The girl came running and Elena, without looking at her, set down a bag of rice in front of her.
“Tell your mamá she can have two hundred pesos more in credit, but that has to be the limit.”
“Thank you, seño.”
Once the girl had disappeared again, Elena hurled her book, which fluttered across the shop like a crazed chicken and crashed into the far wall.
For several days, Elena refused to leave the house. She told J. that she felt unwell and spent all day in bed reading and dozing. She got up only to serve the occasional customer or to have lunch with J. On one occasion she told him she felt terribly sad and she started to cry. J. knew that she was not ill, it was obvious she was having a hard time—this was not the first time, it had happened even before they came to the finca—and needed to be pampered for a while. This he was happy to do: he took her temperature, got up in the night to fetch things for her, made her laugh. They were surprisingly happy days. Among the last happy days they would spend together.
23
SMELLS. The murky smell of the mangrove swamps carried sometimes on the breeze. The musky, resinous smell of crabs, dead and still raw. The smell of paddocks pounded by the immovable hammer of the noonday sun. The smell of mingled smoke and coffee from the kitchen. The lunchtime smell of fried fish, fried plantains, the heavy scent of coconut rice. The smell of the suntan lotions and the moisturizers that made Elena’s perfect skin more perfect. The smell of her freshly washed hair, of shampoo enriched with seven herbs. The antipodal smell of the toilets where blowflies buzz lazily in the heat and geckos doze in the cracks of the adobe wall. The permanent, immovable smell of dust from the timbers of the house. The smell of freshly opened books—the pages bloating and buckling in the humid heat, spines falling apart from the salt breeze and from lack of use—like daisies wilting in a muggy attic. And, also new, the smell of freshly cut wood mingled with petrol fumes; the same petrol that purifies, burns and drives out life.
Nov. 16, 1976: The first shipment of wood was a success. The timber merchant was very complimentary about the quality, though he complained about some defects caused by mishandling of the chainsaws. He suggested I keep a careful eye on the loggers to make sure they do a proper job. Payment for the agreed sum received.
Nov. 19, 1976: Salomón’s wife has finally started bringing food to the labourers. Elena can’t stand having them around the house. This way she’ll only have to see them when they come to buy something at the shop—they’ve been running up a lot of credit—to buy petrol or to talk to me. Since they arrived, sales of aguardiente have gone up a hundred per cent.
Nov. 22, 1976: The weather is still mild, there’s been very little rain and we’re not being scorched by the heat. Since Don Eduardo last sorted it out, the water tank and the pump have given us no trouble. The man is good with his hands.
Nov. 25, 1976: Elena has finally come through her bad patch. Today we went swimming together. She’s absolutely right about the staring, these people are disgusting! Then again, I can’t really blame them: slathered in suntan lotion, her skin looks like polished copper. I’m sure they can see her shimmering from miles away. Besides, you never know when she’s going to fly off the handle.
Salomón ran the boat onto some rocks and put a hole in it, but he’s already repaired the damage and the boat is holding up better than it did before.
Nov. 26, 1976: Yesterday a motorboat pulled into the cove—a fancy fibreglass job with brand new outboard motors. Aboard it were five rich college kids from Medellín, two girls and three guys, all perfectly tanned and kitted out with harpoons, snorkel masks, flippers and whisky. The girls were really hot. One of them is the daughter of a certain Doctor Penagos, who owns a huge finca just north of here. I’ve heard rumours about him—he’s famous for being filthy rich and for evicting farmers from their land.
They came up and joined me on the veranda and we chatted for a bit. I’m so different to these city folk these days, it terrifies me to think I might have turned out just like them—or like Ramiro. Maybe it was the finca that saved me, or maybe the gods are on my side. One of the kids asked when we were getting a generator, another one saw my books and asked if I’d read Papillon. Obviously I’ve read it, but I said I hadn’t—I had no desire to talk about some shitty potboiler.
Just as we finished the bottle of whisky and I was starting to take to them, the two girls started bleating in that whiny fucking bourgeois accent, “We gotta go, Juan Camilo, it’s getting late, Papá will be so worried,” and shit like that. They piled the masks and flippers back into the boat and headed off, the outboard motors roaring and belching smoke. They said they’d come back but I hope to Christ they don’t.
Dec. 1, 1976: I think what I like best about the sea is the smell of the mangrove swamps. The fens in England are bland and insipid but here the swamps smell slightly of decay, of life and death, of a place where both meet.
I think maybe I’m a little drunk. I tend to come over all literary when I’m tanked up. Elena is sleeping, breathing slowly, one of her tits is exposed. I go over to her; she smells of Johnson’s baby oil. I suck on her nipple; it tastes of salt. Salt.
When I finish this book I’ll throw it down the toilet. It can moulder away inside this house, rot down into its basic elements—gases, ephemeral organisms, mulch, vegetation. Such is the humble, commonplace transubstantiation of all things, “brother”: the eternal return, the same worm, the same toilet, the same old shit.
Excuse me, I need to take a piss.
Dressed only in boxer shorts, J. went down the wooden steps feeling the prickly grass under his feet, walked on until he could feel the sand of the beach, and on to the shoreline until he felt sharp shells and smooth pebbles underfoot. He took three steps into the sea, careful not to stab himself on a sea urchin. He pissed into the waters.
Oh, yes. No thought is more powerful than the simple act of biting into a ripe man
go—I truly believe that. Not to mention papayas, melons and guanábanas. On the other hand, no pain is greater than needing to take a piss and not being able to, and there is no greater achievement than pissing into the sea—water mingling with water—in the ghostly glimmering of the planets. Mercedes must be up already—I can smell coffee.
He took off his boxers and pulled on a pair of shorts. He found Mercedes perched on a stool, leaning back against the wall, breastfeeding her child—a great lump of a boy who was already beginning to say his first words.
“You’ll be lucky to get that boy weaned by the time he’s doing military service.”
Mercedes’s laugh was clear and musical.
“Oh, Don J.!” she said.
Cupping the child’s buttocks with one hand, she got to her feet, fetched a tin mug and set it down on the stove. Without using a dishcloth or anything to protect herself—something J. always silently admired—she picked up the steaming pan and filled the cup. J. sipped his coffee as he padded out of the kitchen onto the veranda, where he added a jigger of rum and sat down to wait for dawn.
Before long, the sun rose slow and golden above the horizon. There was a smell of bacon frying, a clamour of dogs and chickens. Out at sea, Salomón and his son were rowing steadily. The luminous world quivered in J.’s eyes. Mercedes brought breakfast out to the veranda and he ate hungrily. Then he showered and put on a clean shirt and a pair of sandals. J. slipped a ruler, a hammer, a notebook, and a half-bottle of aguardiente from the shop into his backpack. He kissed Elena and headed out to the forest.
In the Beginning Was the Sea Page 7
