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 mango — 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.
The same night, he would reread the last pages he had written, tear out the entry marked Dec. 1, 1976 and throw it down the toilet. In its place he would write:
Dec. 2, 1976: Today we felled the largest cashew tree I’ve ever seen in my life. We’ll make a lot of money from the timber. I also saw a huge troop of monkeys. One of the loggers shot at them but he didn’t hit them.
A snake killed a young bull calf.
24
J. PERSONALLY accompanied the second consignment of wood to Turbo, planning to stay there for a week. The day after his arrival, the sea was stormy and remained that way for several days. He stayed at Julito’s place, and spent his days drinking in a second-floor bar that overlooked the plaza, passing the long hours gazing down at the town square, half-hypnotized by the heat, the beer and the comings and goings of the jeeps below. He spent a couple of evenings watching karate movies — the only kind of films that were showing — in an open-air cinema with wooden pews exactly like a church. And one night he went with Julito to a brothel.
The cathouse smelt of perfume, sweat and cigarette smoke. There were ceiling fans and tango music. At four in the morning Julito, looking smart in a blue guayabera shirt, was slumped in an armchair staring at J. He was drunk but trying not to let it show. J., half dozing, rested his chin in the cleavage of the pale, well-rounded woman sitting on his lap. There was a bottle of rum on the table next to tall glasses with gilt rims, a puddle of water and a bucket in which the ice had melted. The light was a pinkish-blue. The whores, dressed in flaming red or hot pink, appeared and disappeared through dusty brocade curtains. A thin, shadowy black queen fluttered like a moth amid the soft lights and the drapes.
When J. got to his feet, dizzy and reeling from the drink, the woman slipped under his arm. Together, they disappeared behind a low curtain while Julito watched, his face flushed. An hour later, the madam — an ageing malicious old shrew decked out with tinkling bracelets and thick makeup — came and told Julito to take his friend home as he was drunk and had fallen asleep in the bedroom. Julito woke J. up as best he could, helped him outside and took him back to his house.
Four days later, when he arrived back at the finca, J. saw that there was a new barbed-wire fence encircling almost a thousand square metres of land and a small strip of sea. Running from a stake planted in the sea, five strands of razor wire were strung across the beach, the barbed wire snaking through two hundred metres of forest and then back across the beach where it was nailed to another stake embedded in the water, completely sealing off the little cove where Elena went swimming.