In the Beginning Was the Sea (12 page)

H
E 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
.

T
HE 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.”

Octavio and his wife had now been living on the
finca
for almost two months. Winter was finally over and the nights now were cloudless and strewn with stars. In the two months since their arrival, Octavio’s wife had not once washed the coffee pot. At night, J. sometimes heard the old man beating her, heard the woman crying or laughing hysterically. “I need to get rid of them as soon as possible,” thought J. “Either they leave, or I do.”

He began to consider the idea of hiring a competent estate manager and moving back to Medellín. Sometimes, he almost accepted that the
finca
was going nowhere; that without Elena it was hardly worthwhile; that he was sick and tired of the forest and the roar of the sea. But the prospect of moving back to Medellín, finding a job, having Ramiro or someone like him as a boss, brought him out in a cold sweat. He vaguely considered various business possibilities—a ceviche restaurant, a bar, a bookshop—but nothing seemed to fit. Besides, he was up to his neck in debt that he would have to pay off before he could even consider raising money for a new venture. Nor did he relish the thought of returning to the life he had lived before running away to the sea, the
familiar routine of alcohol- and cocaine-fuelled sessions in dreary apartments and pounding rock music in nauseatingly “hip” nightclubs.

Sometimes, when he had a particularly brutal hangover, or during long afternoons spent drinking on the veranda alone—he felt uncomfortable drinking with Octavio—J. saw everything with such crystal clarity that he felt as though the land had trapped him here for all time. He wrote to a woman who had been his lover years earlier, telling her he felt so alone it sometimes seemed as though his life were drawing to a close. “But I plan to go on living,” he wrote. “After all, the sea is not so bad and even the palm trees are beautiful in a way.”

He had word from Elena that she was thinking of going to stay with one of her brothers in Venezuela. The job prospects there were good, apparently, and the pay for people with no qualifications was better than in Colombia. It was not a letter, but simply a scribbled note—Elena was busy preparing for her trip—that informed him that she was leaving. In it she gave him a forwarding address on the Isla Margarita and promised that as soon as she felt less stressed she would come back to him, to the
finca
. It ended with the words “I love you”.

For two months they exchanged increasingly infrequent letters, but still J. languished in this listless, indolent state, not knowing whether he could leave, where he could go, or why he might stay. He had lost any sense that his actions
served a purpose. He tried to justify his life through the sensual pleasures offered by what passed before his eyes: the seagulls, the flaring sunsets, the sail of a fishing boat far out on the open sea. He drank in order to escape the endless turmoil of the house. He had still not found anyone to replace Octavio; people seemed to fear him and no one dared take his place. He began to hear rumours about the man, none of them good; people said he had murdered a neighbour on his
finca
in Balboa; they said the old man had spent time in Quibdó gaol where he had stabbed and been stabbed many times. People said all these things, as usual, only after it was too late. Other than Elena, the only person to actually warn J. was Doña Rosa. She told him to be wary of Octavio, that there was evil in his eyes.

J. wrote to one of his brothers-in-law who owned a sugar cane plantation in the Valle del Cauca asking whether there might be work for him there, perhaps as an overseer.

If there came an answer, he never received it.

O
NE MORNING
, J. got up early despite drinking all night. The moment he opened his eyes he was wide awake and convinced that the time had come to dismiss the lumbermen, to dismiss Octavio, to find someone to manage the
finca
and to leave this place forever. Stepping out onto the veranda, he saw an emerald-green iguana basking on top of one of the fence posts. “I’ve never seen a stamp with an iguana on it,” he thought. He considered this notion and realized he was happy. The sea was glassy as a mirror and the sound of the waves breaking was fitful as the breathing of a sleeping animal. “A huge, slumbering beast,” he thought. “A pathetic literary cliché—you’re not exactly inspired this morning, little man. But there’s a grain of truth in it.”

He was happy.

He decided not to have breakfast at the house and walked to the village where they fed him eggs and fried plantains. He had already begun to see things through the eyes of someone about to leave. He felt a pang of nostalgia. He loved the village, the orange grove, loved Doña Rosita and
the locals, loved the smell of smoke wafting from the houses and the scent of soap that drifted from the villagers. He took a short walk through the forest, trying to avoid the workmen and, at noon, as he passed back through the village, he bumped into the wife of Miguelito, one of Doña Rosa’s sons, who offered him lunch. They ate together and then he and Miguelito—who was sweet and terribly shy—walked back to the house. As they arrived, he saw that the iguana had not moved, something he found strange. It seemed stranger still that the animal did not scuttle away when he approached. It was warm from lying in the sun all day but had probably been dead when he first saw it that morning.

At five o’clock he went out to the mango tree and picked a few green fruits. He sat on the veranda to drink one last bottle while he stared out at the sea. “A week from now, I’ll be in Medellín,” he thought. “Or maybe I should head straight to the Valle del Cauca, see if they’ve got any work for me.” He drank slowly, careful to pace himself so that he did not miss the sunset. Then the vast night drew in and a bright crescent moon blazed on the horizon. And with the night came Octavio, who greeted him and went into the kitchen where his wife could serve him dinner. Gilberto passed in front of the house on his way back from town and J. invited him to come up and have a couple of drinks.

J. informed him that he was leaving and that Octavio and the lumbermen would be leaving too. He would need someone to check on the
finca
now and then; he also wanted
to give the horses to someone who could look after them and find a use for them. “I’ll have to come back from time to time, Gilberto,” he said. “For the moment, if I can make a little money, I’ll invest it in having the house done up so it can be rented out to tourists. One way or another, Octavio will be leaving so if you know anyone who would be prepared to live here and keep an eye on things, please, let me know.” Their elbows on their knees, the two men talked in whispers so the old man would not overhear.

Before he left, Gilberto promised to help as much as he could.

By ten o’clock, the moon had risen over the sea and was glistening over the forest, silhouetting the house from behind and casting a silvery shadow over the meadow in front of the house. The moonlight glittered on the spray of the phosphorescent waves as they crashed on the beach. J. knew that tonight he would have to fire Octavio. He could hear the man in the kitchen talking to his wife. But since the old man went to bed late—he slept little, less than five hours—J. postponed the difficult conversation for as long as possible. He saw the lights of a passing shrimp boat out on the open sea. He heard the muffled rumble of the engine. He saw Kaiser walking along the beach, heading for the village, and watched until he melted into the shadows of the forest. J. had already drained half the bottle of
aguardiente
and the more he drank the more desperate his need to be rid of Octavio and his wife. He felt trapped by them, as though tangled in
a mass of seaweed dragging him down into the murky sands of a world he did not recognize at all. Anger welled in him. A small, jet-black cloud covered the moon for an instant and the shades of night were plunged into the sea. Then the cloud scudded on and the darkness was made light once more. From the village came the sound of dogs yapping.

Talking to Octavio was not easy; he liked to remain aloof and
aguardiente
did little to mellow him. Between sips, vast silences extended like murky lakes. Stripped to the waist, the old man was sitting in a chair leaning back against one of the pillars, his back to the sea. The paraffin lamp cast a dim glow on his chest, matted with grey hair, and glistened on the scar snaking across his belly. J. had once asked about the scar and the old man had told him it was from an operation on his liver. “The old bastard has his liver where his stomach should be,” J. thought but did not enquire further. Now, unwillingly, his eyes were drawn to the gleaming weal. Suddenly, realizing he was afraid to fire the old man, J. felt a surge of anger: he needed to act quickly, to settle the matter once and for all.

“I’m selling the
finca
, Octavio,” he said brusquely. “I need you and your family to move out within the next three days because I have to leave.”

He took a long swig of
aguardiente
as the words hung in the air, echoing like a church bell. For a moment, the old man said nothing. He looked dumbfounded.

“You are not going to sell the
finca
,” he said finally.

J. stared down at the bare boards of the veranda, feeling his face flush with rage.

“Whether or not I sell is my business,” he said slowly. “One way or another I need you out of here by Wednesday.”

“This is what always happens with rich fuckers like you: you bleed a man dry and then toss him on the scrapheap.”

“I’m not rich, I’m not throwing anyone on the scrapheap, and I have not bled anyone dry.”

“You know how hard I’ve worked.”

“That’s enough,” roared J. “The
finca
is mine and I don’t have to justify myself to anyone.”

“There’s no need to humiliate me.”

“I’m not humiliating anyone! I’m sick to the back teeth of you and your pig of a wife and your children. I don’t want to have to deal with shit all over the veranda, and I don’t want to have to listen to those fucking brats squalling.”

Octavio turned pale, got to his feet and challenged J. to a fight. The situation was absurd. J. was thinking that the old man had spent all day working in the forest and probably stank of sweat. The idea of him and the old man wrestling on the ground was insane. J. became very calm. He felt no fear now.

“I am not about to fight anyone, Octavio. You’re a much stronger man than I am, you could do me serious damage. Now go and pack your things. If I see you here tomorrow morning, I’ll get the police and have you thrown off my land.”

“You’re a pitiful excuse for a man.”

“Don’t talk such shit,” J. said almost affectionately. “I think it might be better if you went to bed.”

J. stared out at the luminous waves crashing on the beach. He felt the
aguardiente
, cold and harsh, trickle down his throat. He listened as the waves retreated in a soft clatter of shingle. Octavio, he sensed, had gone back into the house. He had just started to urinate when he heard the first shot, felt the bullet hit him, and collapsed. He was bewildered. He felt a tingling in his right arm. Looking down, he saw his shirt was soaked with blood. “Dear God!” he said. He tried to get up but his right arm was too weak and he slumped back onto the grass. He put his weight on his left arm and managed to struggle to his feet. He felt sick. Just as he was about to run, he heard the second barrel and collapsed again onto the meadow.

“Dear God,” he said, “I’m dying.”

He lay motionless for a moment, staring at the blades of grass.

He turned his head and saw Octavio standing on the veranda, holding the still-smoking rifle.

“That’ll teach you to humiliate poor people.”

“Octavio, I need a doctor.”

But the old man had already disappeared. He locked his family in their room and set off for the village to announce he had killed J.

“Octavio, get a doctor.”

There was a sibilant hiss now as he breathed. In the locked bedroom Octavio’s wife and children were crying. Branches brushed against the old man’s face as he raced along the dirt track like a lunatic, aiming the shotgun at the darkness.

“A doctor,” J. groaned.

He no longer tried to get up. He knew he would not be able. He gazed at the shimmering waves as they broke, listened to the whispered drone of the fishing boat out at sea.

“Oh, God!”

Salomón arrived and told him the best fishing would come with winter. When J. opened his eyes Salomón was gone and still the waves shimmered as they broke. He called again for a doctor. He closed his eyes, and heard Salomón telling him the best fishing would come with the rainy season.

It was the last human voice he would hear.

By the time the tide ebbed in a soft clatter of shingle, he could no longer hear it.

Octavio returned, followed by several shadowy figures—none of them dared come close—and walked over to where he lay, now motionless and deathly pale. Octavio gathered him up as one might a sleeping child, climbed the steps to the veranda, walked as far as the bedroom and laid him out on the bed. Then he set off on the road to town.

He was going to turn himself in.