In the Beginning Was the Sea

by Tomás Gonzáles

  The stormy relationship before the incident with the ring had given way to a truce that was at once chilly and cordial. Since they were both busy, they ceased to mention the downpours that rolled in every day. It almost seemed as though J. enjoyed getting soaked to the skin on his treks into the forest to supervise the workmen. Only occasionally, on lazy Sunday afternoons as they stared out the driving rain, did they find themselves engaged in moribund conversations where Elena tried to raise the subject of the ring in the hope that J. might forgive her. She never succeeded. Though J. seemed affectionate and understanding, Elena keenly sensed he was actually distant and aloof. It was as though he were saying, “If you want to leave, leave; if you want to stay, that’s fine, stay. I don’t care one way or the other…” His attitude naturally infuriated her but, given the situation, she had no choice but to bite her tongue. At least for as long as she could.

  It was then that Octavio arrived.

  32

  “THERE’S SOMEONE for you,” said Elena.

  “Who?”

  “Some old man. He’s out on the veranda.”

  It was early and J. was still in bed. A light drizzle was falling.

  “Ask him what he wants.”

  “I asked, he said he wants to talk to you in person.”

  Out on the veranda, J. encountered a man of about sixty with cropped grey hair and a grey beard. He wore a tight-fitting shirt that showed off a muscular body with not a gram of fat. Every time he scratched behind his ear—a nervous tic—his well-defined biceps were visible through the fabric. His face was broad and harsh, while his ears and his eyes were small.

  He was looking for work, he said, and had heard J. was looking for an estate manager. His broad accent was that of an Antioquía farmhand. When J. asked where he had come from, he offered a rambling explanation, mentioning a coffee plantation “not far from here, up in the mountains”, and something about a lawsuit which, apparently, had cost him his land. When pressed, the old man simply repeated the same vague story and J. realized he did not want to talk about it. J. asked whether he knew anything about timber production and the old man said he had managed teams of loggers in Antioquía and Córdoba. He had no references and was probably in no position to get any. He was a man of few words; he would half-answer a question, stopping in mid-sentence when he felt he had been sufficiently understood, or when he feared he had said too much. He claimed to be married with five children and gave his name as Octavio Sossa.

  “Let me think about it, Octavio,” said J. “Come by and see me tomorrow and I’ll give you an answer.”

  “OK, Don J.”

  That afternoon he did some investigation, but no one seemed to know anything about the old man. It was as though he had popped up out of the ground like a crab, with a wife and five children. J. asked Elena’s opinion and she said that she had not liked him at all. But since this was her opinion about everyone, J. paid it little heed. And so, the following morning, when Octavio called, he still had not made up his mind. In fact, J. had not taken to the man either; there was something underhand and insolent about the man’s eyes that gave him the creeps. But since he really did need an estate manager, he found himself telling Octavio that he could work a week’s trial to see how they got along.

  And the man accepted.

  He was an excellent worker. Surefooted and intelligent, he seemed to know everything there was to know about the finca. He immediately took charge of the loggers, knowledgeably appraising their work and offering valuable suggestions. The men, seeing that he knew how to deal with them and that he understood the business, respected him. Later, they would come to fear him.

  Octavio talked little and worked hard. When the week was up, J. said he was satisfied and told the man he could go and fetch his family. Elena said again that she did not like the old man, but J. did not listen. The man went off and returned three days later with his wife and five children. The eldest could not have been older than ten.

  The difference in the house was immediately apparent—and did nothing to allay Elena’s fears. The wife was listless and lazy—much more so than Mercedes had been—and the children were noisy and boisterous. Since the woman had never lived by the sea, she did not know how to cook the local food and so every day they ate frijoles. And unless Elena took over the cooking—as she sometimes did—even the beans were inedible, undercooked, oversalted and sometimes full of grit. The woman managed to burn the arepas and carbonize the fried plantains.

  “She’s the stupidest woman I’ve met in all my life,” said Elena.

  But worse than the food were the children. The older ones crept into the shop and stole sweets and tins of condensed milk, the little ones wailed constantly and shat on the veranda. All of them stank to high heaven, and their mother did not seem to give a damn. Octavio treated them with the same indifference he might a pack of dogs; when they got in his way, he brutally beat them and they would wail for hours on end. Between the slovenliness of Octavio’s wife and the continual rains, the atmosphere in the house became stifling. But since the rest of the finca was now functioning properly, J. turned a blind eye and was careful not to complain about the food or the children, especially in front of Elena.

  He simply made sure he spent as little time as possible in the house.

  33

  A MONTH AFTER starting work, and without consulting anyone, Octavio took down the fence that surrounded the little cove. One day, J. came home to find the rusted rolls of barbed wire stowed under the veranda. He anticipated a terrible row with Elena, but she did not say a word. J. was astonished. He did not know that she had not been swimming for several days and therefore did not know what had happened with the fence.

  When J. informed the old man that he did not appreciate the fence being taken down without permission, Octavio made no attempt to apologize but simply said that there were better uses for the barbed wire. J. reminded him that he was to do nothing on the finca without authorization: Octavio was free to manage the loggers as he saw fit, as long as he could guarantee quality timber and did not fell trees unnecessarily, but in all other matters, “including that shitty fucking fence”, he was to consult J.

  “All right,” the man said through gritted teeth. “You’re the boss.”

  From the moment Octavio first arrived until the day that she finally left the finca, Elena’s attitude to the old man was aloof and curiously respectful. She did her best not to criticize Octavio’s wife and not to have any dealings with him. But more than once she suggested that J. try to find out where Octavio had come from; she had tried to wheedle information from his wife, who had clearly been well trained and offered only vague and unimportant details.

  Though by now the rains should have been easing off, still the sky was overcast and the thunderstorms were heavy and prolonged. Elena wanted to leave, but it saddened her to think of abandoning J. here in the dark winter. Besides, now that he was drinking less, he had become more affectionate and the cold civility that had existed between them since the shotgun incident had begun to thaw. J. had even asked her to accompany him on his treks into the forest, invitations she rarely accepted since she disliked tramping through the overgrown jungle and hated the way the workmen stared at her. Also, and for no apparent reason, J. had stopped seeing his lovers—or at least he no longer visited Juan’s wife, the only mistress Elena knew about for certain. What Elena did not realize was that J. was aware of her desire to leave, of her intention to leave, and he did not want her last days at the finca to be corroded by jealousy.

  In his heart, J. was unsure whether he truly wanted Elena to leave. He was afraid of being alone, afraid of discovering he loved her more than he realized, more than he was prepared to admit even to himself. But by now they had hurt each other too much, they had flayed each other body and soul and might do so again at any moment. And regardless of what they might say when they parted, both of them knew that they would never live together again.

  The morning of Elena’s departure w
as bathed in a dazzling glow that made everything seem radiant, as though the light was emanating from within. Although this was merely a respite between downpours, J. was grateful for the fact that it did not rain that day. A few cottony clouds drifted over the sea, hugging the coastline. To the north, where they were beginning to mass on the horizon, bolts of lightning flickered—inaudibly, at such a distance—in the louring grey sky. Sitting on the beach, Elena and J. stared to the south waiting for Julito’s launch to appear at any moment. They had already said all there was to say and now tried hard not to think, simply gazing at the sea. They followed a flight of gannets far out at sea, so small that at times they were invisible. In the cove, the little islands glittered like precious stones: lush, luminous, flawless.

  “I think the boat is coming.”

  On the horizon, the tiny spark of the boat’s hull glittered. Anxiously, they watched as it grew brighter, trying to work out whether or not it was Julito. When J. saw the hazy reflection of the yellow hull in the water, he knew that it was.

  “It’s him,” he said.

  Affable and sober for once, Julito arrived with his assistant. Elena was taking only a single suitcase, having decided to leave behind the sewing machine, partly because she wanted to believe that this separation was temporary and partly because she did not want to travel with something so cumbersome.

  She could not know that she would never see J. again.

  The boat put out to sea and moved away, gradually getting smaller until it finally disappeared into the green. J. took off his sandals and walked along the beach. He went to the little cove where Elena used to swim and sat on a tree trunk staring at the water. There was no sign now that there had ever been a fence, nor the slightest indication that here Elena had been enfolded and suffused by the tropical sun. J. was reminded of the painting hanging in the bedroom of a woman offering herself to the waves, to the sunlight. He thought about the hard kernel of truth hidden in such artless paintings, just like the love that lived on, beyond all doubt, beyond death itself, in the hackneyed lyrics of a bolero. For some vague reason, he thought back to the time when he considered a pretentious critic at some literary magazine more truthful, more important than a taxi driver and his family washing their car and bathing in a cold, rocky stream.

  “You’re on your own now, hermano,” he thought, feeling a faint twinge in his belly.

  “Sorrow,” he said softly.

  It had come. He had known it would.

  34

  HE COULD NOT bring himself to sleep in the house that night. He went to the village where he chatted for a while with Doña Rosa and then on to Gilberto’s house where he asked if he could spend the night. He slept fitfully in a hammock, constantly waking up thinking about Elena and desperate for a cigarette.

  In the early hours, he headed back to the house where he was greeted by the wailing of the children and a greasy breakfast that left him with terrible indigestion. With a burning pain in his chest, he went into the shop and began going through the accounts. He was aware they had been offering too much credit, but had not realized quite how much. The loggers’ credit amounted to more—much more—than he owed in salary. “Enough of this bullshit,” he thought. “No more credit for those thieving bastards.”

  In the late afternoon, he watched Octavio, grey-haired, taciturn, muscular, come back from overseeing the logging. They had a few glasses of aguardiente on the veranda and talked about the issue of credit. Or rather, J. outlined the problem and the old man, in a few brief words, suggested that he be allowed to take over the shop, that he knew how to deal with such people. J. did not know what to say and Octavio did not press him for an answer. For a while they sat in silence, drinking. Finally J. handed him the credit book and told him he could deal with the outstanding payments, but J. would continue to manage the shop. Octavio took the book without a word, drank two more shots and then headed off to bed.

  Two days after Elena’s departure, the skies grew dark and the rains began again. J. spent the whole day taking down bags of sugar from the shelves, selling individual cigarettes in exchange for tattered, sickly smelling banknotes disintegrating from use and from the sea air. Everywhere, he could feel Elena’s presence but he also felt the relief brought by her absence. Once, stumbling upon a dress of hers, he buried his face in the fabric trying to capture some trace of her.

  Octavio had a no-nonsense, almost brutal approach to debt collecting. He made sweeping deductions from the workmen’s earnings. J. heard rumours that there had been a bitter row with one of the lumbermen but the old man had clearly prevailed because one morning the workmen showed up en masse and begged J.—there were no demands, no threats—to recover the debt in three or four instalments, since deducting it as a lump sum left them without money for food. J. promised to speak to Octavio and see what he could do.

  The old man laid out the matter in bald terms: if J. wanted him to manage the workmen, he had to be allowed a free hand. As he understood it, he had been asked to recover the debts, which he was doing; the battle was already won and there could be no going back, and he would leave the finca rather than back down, since to do so would irreparably weaken his authority and make it impossible to manage the workmen.

  “Besides, people like that don’t die of starvation so easy, Don J.” he said by way of conclusion. “You take my word for it.”

  Once again Octavio’s manner took J. by surprise, leading him to miss the last opportunity he would have to rid himself of this individual without any risk. For a split second, he considered telling the man to leave, then he thought about how well things were going with the timber business, how badly off he was for money and how useful it would be to recover all his debts at one fell swoop, since he himself owed a considerable sum to his suppliers.

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Octavio,” he said. “You collect the debts on the list I gave you. As for any future credit, I’ll make the decisions and deal with it myself. If there are any specific cases where you feel it’s possible to take payment in, let’s say, three instalments, then come to me and I’ll approve it. What do you say?”

  The old man stared at him for a long moment.

  “I have to shoe the grey mare,” he said finally and walked away without another word.

  So the days passed, slow and bleak. Now and then, the sun glimmered on the sea, on the trees, warming J.’s heart a little only for the distant rumble of thunder heralding more rain to start up again. For want of companionship, J. went back to writing his book, recording incidents in the usual minute detail: he would have to keep the current estate manager until someone better appeared (Gilberto had gone to work for Don Carlos and was very happy there); that he was sick and tired of winter dragging on; that the timber business was bringing in more money than ever, but not enough for him to be able to pay Ramiro what he owed; that Ramiro had called by to collect the overdue interest and J. had fobbed him off as best he could; that Don Eduardo—“who tends to bang on about his God, but is completely trustworthy”—had brought coconuts and pineapples; that one of the loggers had been badly injured felling a tree and had to be taken to hospital in Turbo. “Things don’t look good,” he concluded. “He probably won’t pull through.”

  The solitude meant that he went back to drinking too much. He would drink alone in the shop while reading one of his books—now sodden and swollen from the humid air—listening to Octavio’s children bawling. When drunk, he would write long, rambling letters to Elena telling her in explicit detail what he would do when they were next in bed together, how much he missed her and how happy he was that she had finally left him in peace. The following day, he would rip up the letter without reading it.

  He could no longer visit Juan’s wife because, for some mysterious reason, the grocer no longer set foot outside the village, and so J. found himself gripped by a dark inchoate desire that left him breathless as he watched the village girls walking along the beach. He had no choice but to leave Octavio in charge of the finca
and go to Turbo, not because he needed to accompany the timber consignment—something Octavio could do just as easily—but so that he could visit the brothel. He went with Julito, who was not one to pass up the opportunity for a good time, and frittered away almost every peso he had been paid from the timber on booze, buying drinks for anyone and everyone who cared to join them. The drinking session carried on into the next day, during which the two men were joined by various other boatmen. It was a quiet, relaxed session but one that, for J. at least, was also a little melancholy.

  The following morning, they set off back to the finca.

  35

  THE FIRST TIME J. complained to Octavio about his wife’s slipshod habits, the old man’s face clouded over, but he said nothing. He clearly did not discuss the matter with his wife since in the days that followed the house was as filthy and untidy as always. The first time J. said anything to the woman herself—politely asking her to stop the children from urinating and defecating everywhere—he realized that, aside from being slovenly, she was also insane.

  “It’s not their fault, señor,” she said.

  “I know it’s not their fault,” barked J. “Teach them to use the toilet!”

  The woman burst into tears.

  He had written a letter to Elena describing the steady deterioration of the meals and the housework. The quality of the food was much worse since Elena’s departure. J. would often push away his plate untouched, having spotted a cockroach or a dead moth in the frijoles, and had to open a tin of sardines if he was not to go to bed on an empty stomach. He had a nagging suspicion that all his meals might be contaminated by infant faecal matter. “It’s just a suspicion, hermana, only a laboratory would be able to say for sure. But whether or not it’s true, every time I sit down at the table, I can feel my stomach closing up like a poppy at night. Luckily the villagers still send food every now and then, and if I want something edible I just show up at Doña Rosa’s house and bluntly invite myself to lunch.”