The Storm Page 3

  8:00 a.m.

  They were catching so many, there was no time to club and stun them, so the fish flopped around on the floor of the boat like a frenzied rainbow, their odor strong but by now deeply familiar. We can’t take on more than a thousand pounds anyway, or this thing will sink with the slightest swell, the father thought. We’d have to throw the sodas overboard. And the beans. And one of the twins. He smiled at his joke. There was a violent tug on one of the lines, the reel shrieked, and he started to pull in his catch, which, from the way it was fighting, seemed like it might be a crevalle jack or a really big horse-eye jack.

  The storm they’d seen off to the northwest still had solid contours, like slabs of stone, but it had at least tripled in size and was moving toward the coast. The father pulled a beautiful golden crevalle jack, almost three feet long, out of the water and gave it two sharp blows, then looked at the storm, his mind empty. It was still far enough away that they couldn’t hear the rumble of the thunder.

  “Come on, get to work, idiot,” he told Javier, who’d stopped for another smoke. “You should have just stayed home if all you’re going to do is sit on your ass.”

  Javier didn’t say anything. He rarely answered back, and maybe that was why his father had fewer problems with him. The other twin was cocky and had earned himself a shout and a slap on more than one occasion. The father doesn’t like hitting his sons, but sometimes it’s the best way, since it clears the air and everything works out better. Despite Nora’s madness and his complicated relationship with his sons, the father thinks, when looked at the right way, and especially given the prosperity the hotel has brought them, things have turned out pretty well.

  Everybody’s got problems.

  The hotel was worth a hundred million pesos; the jeep, ten; the parcel of land across the highway behind the hotel, where he’s planning to expand once it becomes necessary, another twenty; and the house in the village, fifty. What else? He’s forgetting something. Oh, right, and the house in Medellín, where three of his sisters, the ones who aren’t married, live rent-free; it’s worth a hundred million or a hundred fifty million. The father was about to start adding it all up when he felt a tug on one of the rods and after a few minutes reeled in a sea bass weighing about a pound, pound and a half.

  The world is a horn of plenty.

  The night before, he’d sat around until ten with the guest who was talking about buying the hotel, and then he’d gone to bed. The father had an ascetic streak. If he drank, it was only as part of his job catering to tourists, and if he made showy displays of his wealth and his contempt for his sons, it was partly out of vanity but also to make sure his guests had an enjoyable, interesting stay. And of course he never drank too much or let it get in the way of his business. His amiability was shot through with a streak of frigidity and a sort of disdain for tourists, like you might feel for a fool or the goose with the golden eggs, precisely because the fool and the goose allowed themselves to be taken advantage of. There was a tinge of violence in his notion of the hotel industry and related enterprises.

  What he found impossible to accept – and the astute tourist could sense this impossibility – was the idea that, even though they were great fishermen, he and the twins were not of the sea. That particular arrogance, the presumption of knowing the sea, has led to disaster for as long as the sea and human history have existed. The boys had practically been born on the gulf, it’s true, but they were still landlubbers, not unlike the tourists in some ways. The three of them were expert fishermen, and the father had even won contests for landing the largest swordfish and grouper, but no fisherman descended from a line of gulf fishermen would have stayed out at sea in those conditions. Many of them wouldn’t have gone out at all that day. But the greed of the hobbyist, and perhaps an excess of sun, had conspired to cloud the father’s judgment, and at some point, after night had already fallen, it would become clear even to him that something might go wrong – and Javier would tell him that, but either the father didn’t hear him or he pretended not to.

  At eight thirty in the morning, the sun mingled with the turquoise sea, and the boat and the three of them floated in an eternal splendor. They pulled in seven- or eight-pound king mackerel, forty-pound red snapper that would sell for eight thousand pesos a plate. His hotel and the neighboring ones were full, so that meant eighty people – the restaurant’s maximum capacity – at eight thousand pesos each. Tourists always ate quickly – they were voracious after staying in the water till their eyes were red with salt and their fingers and toes as wrinkled as raisins – and pretty soon they’d get up from the table to go off for a nap, so the restaurant was able to serve maybe a hundred customers a day at lunch. Eight thousand pesos a plate. The plantain barely costs anything. Rice costs even less. Two slices of tomato, four shreds of cabbage. You do the math.

  The father didn’t consider himself greedy or stingy, just pragmatic. It didn’t make sense, for example, to do up the bungalows with lots of luxurious touches when they were going to be booked solid regardless. The guests had come to the beach; they didn’t care about the heat. They could make do, and a lot of them drank aguardiente to help them sleep. He gave them fans, of course, and good mosquito nets – they’re really expensive, those nets, and they see some hard use – so the guests would be able to sleep without sheets, unmolested by heat or mosquitoes. No little decorations on the walls or cheesy knickknacks; no shower curtains, since the guests never bother closing them and everything gets wet anyway – they’re the ones who have to mop it up, not me. Tourists don’t take care of things; why waste gunpowder shooting chickens? If they want five-star hotels, they can go to Cartagena and pay an arm and a leg to swim in the sea there, which is full of mercury, not clean like the waters of this beautiful gulf.

  He kept baiting the hooks and hauling them back in loaded with fish, their many servings of flesh already sold and eaten before they left the water. Forty or fifty pelicans flew over the boat in a V, accompanied, as always, by silence. Though he was annoyed when Javier stopped to look at them, this time he didn’t say anything and instead felt an involuntary thump of compassion for his two children, as if from up there in the sky he’d suddenly been shat on by a seagull.

  The poor kids had wound up with a real headcase for a mother.

  People love running their mouths, but none of it was my fault, he thinks as he reels in a line that’s been robbed of its bait. Everybody’s responsible for his own life. She was already a little screwy when we got married, and maybe that’s why she quickly forgot what I’d told her: I was doing it for the kid, but I wasn’t made to be faithful to any woman. She’d have her house, her food, her nice clothes, and she and the kid – who turned out to be two kids – would never want for anything. But I was born to be free. When I married her, I’d already seen a fair bit of life. I left home when I was practically still a boy. I was selling pots and pans door to door in the villages before I’d turned fifteen, not like these two good-for-nothings – they don’t have a clue what it means to have to hustle to make a living. Sometimes they seem like spoiled brats.

  Mario had caught almost as many fish as his father. He’s a good fisherman, you’ve got to give him that, unlike his brother, who spends hours in a stoned haze. He’s good at pulling them out of the water once they’re hooked, Javier is, but not so good at hooking them. No matter what the father says or thinks, there’s some element in his relationship with Javier that he has a hard time acknowledging. Though he almost never says anything positive about the young man, he can’t help respecting him. It may be that the books have something to do with that respect, since, though the father has read very few, he’s well aware a person can’t go around making fun of Shakespeare, for example, and saying he was a loser or a flaming queer. The father is an intelligent man. He knows that no individual, not even him, understands everything about the world, and so he recognizes that human beings will be forever doomed to humility. He’s
seen the way Javier remains unflappable despite his crazy mother and how he’s preserved his optimism and good sense over the years. With some degree of pride, he concludes that Javier’s strength and maturity are due in large part to the father himself, who has always been a model of steadfastness and intransigence.

  But the twins do sometimes go off and take drugs, and that shiftlessness has been an endless source of scorn and worry for him. When that happens, he confronts the boys and rants loudly and at length about what a burden they’ve been, how weak they are, how much they owe him. “Let’s be frank here. Look how you shut yourselves up in your rooms to rot away – you don’t even eat. You’re going to end up like your mother, I’m telling you.” The cook and the other employees overhear him, as do the guests, the former admiringly, the latter faintly shocked.

  Stretching before them, always, is the water, sometimes gray-green, sometimes turquoise blue. The air is filled with herons and gannets moving against the blue sky. In summer, like now, the heat is powerful, dry, gusty. During the rainy season, when the boys tend to go off and smoke and do drugs, the humidity and heat are intense and melancholy, and the storms are massive and threaded with lightning.

  The father hooks a barracuda that dashes from one end of the boat to the other. He has to shove his sons out of his way, and in the scuffle they nearly capsize and lose the two hundred pounds of fish they’ve already caught. The line suddenly goes slack as it snaps, and the father’s elation evaporates in an instant, his euphoria replaced with fury directed at the twins, who have gotten in his way, at the sea, at the fish. He shivers a little with the cold.

  He’s well aware his sons would be pleased to see him defeated.

  9:00 a.m.

  He’ll haul on that line till it snaps on him, the old bastard, thinks Mario, who has not overtly hindered his father, though he did exhibit a certain lethargy while his father was battling with the fish.

  He watches the father sit down on the second bench, defeated, take out two hard-boiled eggs and an arepa, crack the eggs against the gunwale of the boat with unnecessary force, peel them disdainfully, drop the shells on the cushion of fish splashing in the bottom, salt the eggs, and begin to eat, gazing out at the water with his intense black eyes. Mario decides to wait for his father to finish eating and return to his own bench so he can get his breakfast without having to go near the old man.

  “Pass me a thermos,” the father says, and Mario pretends not to hear him. “Pass me the thermos, will you, don’t play dumb with me,” he says, and Mario, leaning against Javier’s shoulder as his brother reels in one of the lines, picks up the thermos but doesn’t hand it to him, instead placing it on the bench between his father’s bench and Javier’s, where his father will have to get up in order to reach it.

  The air is less chilly now, and you can feel the mallet of the sun descending.

  When the father, holding his coffee, moves back toward the prow and away from the food cooler, Mario leans again against Javier’s shoulder – his brother has just pulled the hook out of a little shark less than two feet long and is about to toss the animal back into the sea – and takes out two eggs and two arepas. But his father is still relatively close by, so Mario’s movements are unconsciously too quick and somewhat furtive, like those of a thieving monkey. Old bastard, he thinks when he realizes that, in his hurry, he’s forgotten the salt. He asks Javier to pass it to him, and his brother stops baiting his hook and tosses the salt-shaker so Mario can catch it in the air. Mario has been calling his father an “old bastard” since early adolescence.

  “Who’re you calling dumb, you old bastard?” he mutters now between clenched teeth.

  “What’s that? What did you say? Speak up when you talk, would you? That way we’ll be sure to understand each other.”

  “Hey, hey, cut it out, you two. Shut up and let me fish.”

  During the period that had followed his awakening to consciousness – in those days of euphoria at the presence of the sun, the sea, the world – Mario had even felt great affection for his father. Those were the days when his father and the sea and the mangroves were one and the same. His father and the canoes and the boats and the outboard motors. His father and the cast nets and the hooks and the rods. Nobody could have imagined back then that the boy’s fondness would begin to fade rapidly before adolescence and end up transformed into resentment.

  The boy had spent those fishing trips with his father in wonderment as they moved through the mangrove swamp, full of silence and noise, darkness and light. He was eight or nine years old. With dripping oars suspended above the water, we floated silently through the mangroves, our lives stilled amid the hubbub of nearby birds, the twin would have reminisced, had he been the sort of person given to words. The morning light descended from the sky and grew heavy as it fell through the branches and plunged into the water, seeking the origin of the mangroves as they rose out of the mud and caressed the water with their branches.

  With the flashlight, the father would show the twins those stretches of water in the mangrove swamp where, at a little before six in the morning, the night remained intact. In them, the caimans’ eyes gleamed. High in the mangroves, the herons glowed as if they contained the origin of light. And in the dense water, farther off, were the caimans. In the bottom of the canoe, all tied together, six crabs waved their legs and pincers, and I’d also caught a few sea bass.

  Around the time when the boy reached the age of reason, the mother began to lose hers. His mother’s illness and the twin’s suffering in the face of it were equally vast, both full of sound and fury, and for him they were as mute and inexpressible as the magic of the mangrove swamp. Words would never be Mario’s strong suit; even as a boy he’d tended toward silence or monosyllables or short sentences. Nor had he ever taken pleasure in books or learning. Fishing, the boat, and his love for his mother were all that mattered to him.

  Whenever they returned from the sea or the mangrove swamp, the boy would be immersed in his mother’s reality, moving from one extreme to another, in a world of pure delusion: the singing of her throng, who would just come to visit at first and eventually stayed for good, and whom he sometimes could even hear; the people who went in and out of the two bedrooms, in the living room and kitchen, on the roof and in the bathroom, and whom he sometimes could even see; and especially the things she said – Once the baby’s born, I’m getting out of this house – which confused and frightened Mario so much that Javier, to soothe him, would tell him not to pay any attention to her, there was no baby and she wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t believe everything she says, you know – she’s crazy.” Javier was eight or nine, but seemed like he was twelve.

  So Mario would get to his mother’s house and enter a world of overabundance and fear, a world where the incomprehensible sentences were more compelling than the comprehensible ones, though some of them engulfed the boy from all sides and left him shipwrecked.

  “Belladonna flower that grows beside my face,” said the mother.

  “What?”

  “Inerrant night, night of ravens, precious apricot of mine. Right, Mario?”

  “Is that a song?”

  His mother had gone to college, used strange words, and gave Javier books or read them with him. As long as Mario could remember, his mother’s books were always there on the shelves, organized by size, not scattered across the floor like his brother’s. Years later she would start burning them one by one in the courtyard, over the course of days, months, cackling to herself very quietly, teeheeheehee, like a witch in a movie, until only the empty shelves remained.

  “Bird, black bird praying outside my door.”

  “What?”

  The mother would look at him and keep speaking in words suffused with color and a terrible logic that left him frozen there, as if caught in a powerful spotlight. Suddenly tired, the boy would walk toward the door, saying I’ll be back, mamá, I won’t be long. H
e’d go wander along the beach, and after a while Javier and the manager’s boys would show up and they’d all leap into the sea and play in the water with the wooden rollers that the fishermen used to pull the boats up on the beach. They were the motor and the rollers were the boats.

  After breakfast, Mario poured himself some coffee too and then passed the thermos to his brother, who was staring off at a spot on the horizon as he ate. The father started baiting the lines, and soon the twins joined in, and once again they started pulling in large king mackerel, crevalle jacks, and nine- or ten-pound snappers, and the pounds kept adding up in the bottom of the boat.

  The storm was still far away and hadn’t gotten any larger, but it had intensified. There was so much lightning, one on top of the other, that now in the boat they heard a constant rumble, as if somewhere in the distance stones were tumbling over one another. Mario caught a huge sawfish that glinted in the air with metallic flashes after a long struggle in which the nylon fishing line sliced the surface of the water like a knife. The father was grudgingly impressed by the animal, though he didn’t say anything and certainly didn’t look at the twin. They had more than three hundred pounds now, and they hadn’t had time to clean the fish and put them in the coolers, and they were losing hardly any of their catch. The sea was still calm. The father hooked another king mackerel, and fought with it, and pulled it out of the water, and it glistened in the air, larger than the one Mario had caught. A gust of wind blew for a few seconds, as if impelled by a distant blast, and the air went quiet again.

  The two king mackerel opened and closed their mouths as they gazed up at the cloudless sky, and sometimes they flopped around there on top of the other fish in the bottom of the boat.