Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (5 page)

That night I had trouble finding Ursa Minor, lost in an endless maze of stars. I had never seen so many. It was hard to locate an empty space in the entire span of the sky. Once I spotted Ursa Minor, I didn’t dare look anywhere else. I don’t know why I felt less alone looking at Ursa Minor.

On shore leave in Cartagena, we often gathered at the Manga bridge in the small hours to listen to Ramón Herrera sing, imitating Daniel Santos while someone accompanied him on the guitar. Sitting on the wall of the stone bridge, I always found Ursa Minor on one side of the Cerro de la Popa. That night, sitting on the gunwale of the raft, I felt for a moment as if I were back at the Manga bridge, with Ramón Herrera next to me singing to a guitar, and as if Ursa Minor weren’t two hundred miles from Earth but, instead, up on top of the Cerro de la Popa itself. I imagined someone in Cartagena looking at Ursa Minor while I watched it from the sea, and that made me feel less lonely.

My first night at sea seemed very long because absolutely nothing happened. It is impossible to describe a night on a life raft, when nothing happens and you’re scared of unseen creatures and you’ve got a watch with a glowing dial that you can’t stop checking even for a minute. The night of February 28—my first night at sea—I looked at
my watch every minute. It was torture. In desperation, I swore I would stop doing it and I’d stow the watch in my pocket, so as not to be so dependent on the time. I was able to resist until twenty to nine. I still wasn’t hungry or thirsty, and I was sure I could hold out until the following day, when the planes would arrive. But I thought the watch would drive me crazy. A prisoner of anxiety, I took it off my wrist to stuff it in my pocket, but as I held it in my hand it occurred to me that it would be better to fling it into the sea. I hesitated a moment. Then I was terrified: I thought I would feel even more alone without the watch. I put it back on my wrist and began to look at it again, minute by minute, as I had in the afternoon when I searched the horizon for airplanes until my eyes began to hurt.

After midnight I wanted to cry. I hadn’t slept for a moment, but I hadn’t even wanted to. With the same hope I had felt in the afternoon as I waited for airplanes, that night I looked for the lights of ships. For hours I scrutinized the sea, a tranquil sea, immense and silent, but I didn’t see a single light other than the stars.

The cold was more intense in the early hours of morning, and it seemed as if my body were glowing, with all the sun of the afternoon embedded under my skin. With the cold, it burned more intensely. From midnight on, my right knee began to hurt and I felt as though the water had penetrated to my bones. But these feelings were remote: I thought about my body less than about the lights of the ships. It seemed to me, in the midst of that infinite solitude, in the midst of the sea’s dark murmur, that if I spotted the light of only a single ship, I would let out a yell that could be heard at any distance.

Dawn did not break slowly, as it does on land. The sky turned pale, the first stars disappeared, and I went on looking, first at my watch and then at the horizon. The contours of the sea began to appear. Twelve hours had passed, but it didn’t seem possible. Night couldn’t be as long as day. You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day. But soon dawn begins to break, and then it’s wearying to know it’s another day.

That occurred to me on my first night in the raft. When dawn came, nothing else mattered. I thought neither of water nor of food. I didn’t think of anything at all, until the wind turned warmer and the sea’s surface grew smooth and golden. I hadn’t slept a second all night, but at that moment it seemed as if I’d just awakened. When I stretched out in the raft my bones ached and my skin burned. But the day was brilliant and warm, and the murmur of the wind picking up gave me a new strength to continue waiting. And I felt profoundly composed in the life raft. For the first time in my twenty years of life, I was perfectly happy.

The raft continued to drift forward—how far it had gone during the night I couldn’t calculate—but the horizon still looked exactly the same, as if I hadn’t moved a centimeter. At seven o’clock I thought of the destroyer. It was breakfast time. I imagined my shipmates seated around the table eating apples. Then we would have eggs. Then meat. Then bread and coffee. My mouth filled with saliva and I could feel a slight twisting in my stomach. To take my
mind off the idea of food, I submerged myself up to my neck in the bottom of the raft. The cool water on my sun burned back was soothing and made me feel stronger. I stayed submerged like that for a long time, asking myself why I had gone with Ramón Herrera to the stern deck instead of returning to my bunk to lie down. I reconstructed the tragedy minute by minute and decided I had been stupid. There was really no reason I should have been one of the victims: I wasn’t on watch, I wasn’t required on deck. When I concluded that everything that had happened was due to bad luck, I felt anxious again. But looking at my watch calmed me down. The day was moving along quickly: it was eleven-thirty.

The approach of midday made me think about Cartagena again. I thought it was impossible they hadn’t noticed I was missing. I began regretting that I had made it to the life raft; I imagined that my shipmates had been rescued and that I was the only one still adrift because my raft had been blown away by the wind. I even attributed reaching the life raft to bad luck.

That idea had hardly ripened when I thought I saw a speck on the horizon. I fixed my sights on the black point coming toward me. It was eleven-fifty. I watched so intently that the sky was soon filled with glittering points. But the black speck kept moving closer, heading directly toward the raft. Two minutes after I spotted it, I could make out its form perfectly. As it approached from the sky, luminous and blue, it threw off blinding, metallic flashes. Little by little I could distinguish it from the other
bright specks. My neck started to hurt and my eyes could no longer tolerate the sky’s brilliance. But I kept on looking: it was fast and gleaming, and it was coming directly toward the raft. At that moment I wasn’t feeling happy. I felt no overwhelming emotion. I had a sense of great clarity and I felt extraordinarily calm as I stood in the raft while the plane approached. I took off my shirt slowly. I felt that I knew the exact moment when I should begin signaling with it. I stood there a minute, two minutes, with the shirt in my hand, waiting for the plane to come closer. It headed directly toward the raft. When I raised my arm and began to wave the shirt, I could hear, over the noise of the waves, the vibration of the plane’s engines grow louder.

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For at least five minutes I waved my shirt furiously, but I quickly saw I had been mistaken: the plane wasn’t coming toward the raft at all. As I watched the black speck growing larger, it seemed as if the plane would fly overhead. But it passed far away, too high to see me. Then it made a wide turn, started to head back, and disappeared into the sky from where it had appeared. Standing in the raft, exposed to the scorching sun, I looked at the black speck, not thinking about anything, as it erased itself completely from the horizon. Then I sat down again. I was disheartened, and though I hadn’t given up hope, I decided to take precautions to protect myself from the sun. In the first place, I shouldn’t let my lungs be exposed to the sun’s rays.

I had spent exactly twenty-four hours aboard the raft. I lay supine on its side and put the damp shirt over my face. I didn’t try to sleep, because I knew the danger that awaited me if I dozed off on the raft’s gunwale. I
thought about the plane: I wasn’t sure they were searching for me, and I couldn’t identify the plane.

There, lying on the gunwale, I began to feel the torture of thirst. At first it was thick saliva and dryness in my throat. It made me want to drink sea water, but I knew that would be harmful. I could drink some later on. Soon I forgot about thirst. Directly overhead, louder than the sound of the waves, I heard another plane.

Excited, I sat up. The plane approached, from the same direction as the other plane, but this one was flying right toward the raft. The moment it passed overhead I waved my shirt again. But the plane was flying very high. It was far away; it flew off, disappeared. Then it returned, and I saw it in profile against the sky, flying back in the direction from which it had come: Now they’re looking for me, I thought. And I waited on the gunwale, shirt in hand, for more planes to come.

One thing about the aircraft became clear: they appeared and disappeared at a single point. So land was in that direction. Now I knew what course to follow. But how? Even though the raft had traveled a lot during the night, it must still be a long way from the coast. Now I knew in which direction it lay, but I had no idea how far I would have to row, with the sun beginning to give me chicken skin and my stomach aching from hunger. Above all, there was the thirst. And it was becoming harder to breathe all the time.

About 12:35—I didn’t notice the exact time—a huge black plane, with pontoons for landing in the water, roared directly overhead. My heart leaped. I saw it distinctly. The day was so clear I could see a man looking out of the cockpit, searching the ocean with a pair of black binoculars. The plane flew so low, so close to me, I thought
I could feel a gust of wind on my face from one of its engines. I identified it clearly by the letters on its wings: it was a plane from the Canal Zone Coast Guard.

As it turned back buzzing toward the interior of the Caribbean, I didn’t for a moment doubt that the man with the binoculars had seen me waving my shirt. “They’ve found me!” I shouted, still waving the shirt. Crazed with excitement, I jumped up and down in the raft.

In less than five minutes the black plane came back and flew in the opposite direction, at the same altitude as before. It banked to the left, and in the window on that side I again clearly saw the man searching the sea with his binoculars. I waved my shirt again. But now I wasn’t shaking it desperately. I waved it calmly, not as if I were asking for help, but as if I were enthusiastically greeting and thanking my rescuers.

Although the plane was coming closer, it looked as if it were losing altitude. For a moment it flew in a straight line, almost on the surface of the water. I thought it was going to land, and I got ready to row toward the place where it would touch down. But a moment later it began climbing, then turned around and flew overhead a third time, so I didn’t wave my shirt vigorously. When the plane was directly over the raft I gave a brief signal and waited for it to pass again, lower down. But just the opposite happened: it climbed rapidly and headed back toward the place from which it had appeared. Still, I had no reason to worry. I was sure they had seen me. It was impossible that
they hadn’t, flying so low and directly over the raft. Reassured, unworried, and happy, I sat down to wait.

An hour passed. I reached a very important conclusion: the point from which the planes had first appeared was undoubtedly Cartagena. The point where the black plane had disappeared was over Panama. I calculated that, rowing in a straight line, and detouring a little from the force of the wind, I would probably reach the resort of Tolú. That was more or less midway between the two points.

I thought I would be rescued within an hour. But the hour passed without anything occurring in the blue sea, which was clear and perfectly calm. Two more hours went by. And another, and another. I didn’t move from the gunwale for a second. I was tense, scrutinizing the horizon without even blinking. The sun began to set at five o’clock. Although I hadn’t given up hope, I was beginning to feel uneasy. I was sure they had seen me from the black plane, but I couldn’t understand why so much time had gone by without their coming to rescue me. My throat was completely dry. It was even getting harder to breathe. I was distractedly looking at the horizon when, without knowing why, I jumped up and fell into the middle of the raft. Slowly, as if hunting its quarry, a shark slid by the side of the raft.

It was the first creature I had seen after thirty hours on the raft. A shark fin inspires terror because one knows how voracious the beast is. But in fact, nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn’t look like part of an
animal, even less part of a savage beast. It’s green and rough, like the bark of a tree. As I watched it edge past the side of the raft, I imagined it might have a fresh flavor, somewhat bitter, like the skin of a vegetable. It was after five. The sea was tranquil in the afternoon light. More sharks approached the raft, patiently marauding until darkness fell. Then there was no more light, but I sensed them circling in the darkness, tearing the calm surface with the blades of their fins.

From that point on, I stopped sitting on the edge of the raft after five in the afternoon. Over the next few days I would learn that sharks are punctual creatures: they would arrive a little after five and vanish by nightfall.