Two days later, after he had witnessed the lurid burial rites, Guillermo left, taking a bag of ripe mangoes and several kilos of guagua meat bought from the village. “If I don’t leave soon, those two will turn me into an alcoholic,” he thought as he watched the coastline recede.
J. was sorry to see him go.
28
JUST AS he had feared, the timber shipment that J. accompanied to Turbo in mid-February was declared poor quality. The sum paid by the lumber merchants scarcely covered his expenses and he was strongly advised to keep a close eye on the quality of the loggers’ work. Returning to the finca, J. was sullen and unforthcoming. His loan was due in less than two months and he knew that Fernando would not renew it again — in fact, he would ostentatiously refuse. His foul mood led him to ill-treat the loggers, sometimes without reason, and to become distant from them. This was a mistake because, since Maximiliano’s departure, they had once again begun to work well.
He also became infuriated by the cattle; it was as though God — or God knows who — had determined that his herd should never increase in number. Every time a calf was born, a bullock was stolen, a cow was struck by lightning or a heifer disappeared. At first, J. attempted to deal with the problem with his usual calm; later, news that one of the cattle had died could cast a pall over his whole day, and he would become paranoid, imagining some dark conspiracy was at work. At such times, he needed a few drinks to avoid the sudden squalls of fury that frequently led him to spew abuse at Elena, Gilberto, or indeed anyone who crossed his path.
Some months earlier, J. had come back from Medellín with a German shepherd, a pureblood pedigree pup that proved fretful and frustrating. The dog chewed its way through various things including a number of J.’s books, Gilberto’s little transistor radio and several pairs of Elena’s sandals, and so, barely a month after buying it, he decided to give the pup to Salomón, who had a way with animals. When Salomón died, J. reclaimed the dog, now a full-grown bitch with a glossy black coat, but as fretful as ever. It was a curious case of animal madness: the dog yapped constantly, compulsively, she attacked visitors and, whenever J. or Elena came back from somewhere, she would descend on them like a tornado, pawing, burying her snout in their crotches, getting mud on their clothes. The dog was so temperamental they sometimes carried a stick to fend her off. Once, when Don Eduardo came to visit, the dog tried to bite him and J. decided he would have to chain her up, something that simply made her madder still. She barked day and night, got caught up in the chain and howled, often in the dead of night, until someone went down to the beach to disentangle her, and every time she managed to break free, she wrecked the house.
One night, unable to sleep, J. was sitting up worrying about the finca. Outside, the dog barked furiously, choking on her collar as though there was an intruder. Obviously, no one was prowling around the house; the dog could just as easily be barking at a firefly, at a bat, at the moon. Suddenly J. felt a black liquid flooding his brain. In a blind rage, he leapt out of bed and grabbed his rifle. Senseless with rage, he rushed down to the beach where the dog was tethered to a post and, without a second’s thought, fired both barrels into the animal’s head. The gunshots echoed through the forest as the dog fell dead in a heap. Without a word, J. fetched a spade, went to the paddock and began to dig. A few minutes later Gilberto arrived with a shovel and silently set to helping. Elena watched from the veranda for a while, then went back to bed.
Such outbursts, while violent, did not occur often. The finca and its crew were like a ship becalmed with no fixed destination. This did not particularly matter to J. since he had never expected to grow rich here — that, he realized, was impossible — nor did he even expect reason to thrive in this sweltering, tropical climate. In fact, he had come here in order to escape a demeaning form of rationality that was as sterile as crude oil, as social climbing as bitumen. This was why he loathed Elena’s fence; it was a caricature of a caricature, a pitiful example of what human endeavour could achieve. This was why he became so exasperated when the timber was badly cut, because it needlessly compounded one madness — the felling of a tree — and plunged him into an absurd vortex of senselessness and death. When one of the cattle died, he was not troubled by the money it represented, and only slightly by the fact that the finca as a business would not prosper, but simply because he had once dreamt of owning fields filled with healthy livestock, an innocent dream, ultimately, of wanting things to be fruitful and multiply.
Only the seedbeds had fulfilled his expectations. Providence had ushered in a clement summer, and Gilberto had carefully tended to them, ensuring they never lacked water in the dry season. In the late afternoons, usually alone, J. would visit the fields to watch them grow, to see the palm saplings unfurling their fans and the lush green wreathing the branches of the orange trees. With winter now scarcely a month away, their survival seemed assured. And indeed it was; later, when they had been transplanted — not by J. but by another soul — the palm trees grew sturdy and tall, and the orange trees blossomed and bore fruit. Some years later, coconut palms in the area would be devastated by a disease called porroca at which point other people would sow new seeds, watch the saplings grow, wait for them to be ready to be transplanted. Once more the palms would grow straight and true, once more they would bear fruit: coconut palms like these, standing by the sea, swayed by the salt breeze.
29
J.’S WORRIES about the livestock were short-lived; when his loan finally fell due, he had no choice but to sell the herd. One evening, during a heavy downpour, he sat out on the veranda with a bottle of aguardiente and watched as the cattle were led away. Doctor Penagos’s estate manager had already given him a cheque that J. had slipped into his shirt pocket without so much as a glance. The cowhands noisily began the roundup and, once the cattle had been corralled, the estate manager counted them while J. stared impassively at the sea. Finally, J. watched as they passed, stumbling and lowing in the rain. When the estate manager, drenched to the bone, came up to the veranda to say goodbye, J. offered him a shot of aguardiente.
It was a long, dark winter. Perhaps it was because of the rainy season, perhaps because he had had to sell the livestock that J. increasingly retreated into silence. He now drank almost every day and the quarrels with Elena became more frequent. She had also begun to drink too much, perhaps to blot out the insufferable rain. When drunk, their arguments turned vicious, almost murderous. Late into the night, Gilberto and Mercedes would hear them screaming abuse and sometimes hitting each other. Elena knew that they always sided with J., that they considered her no wife for such a noble, generous man. She waged a merciless war of attrition against them, against the whole village, against life itself perhaps. Battle commenced from the moment she woke up and, in one form or another, in words or in silence, it raged all day long. To get away from her, J. invented pretexts for going to Turbo, where by now in the bars and the brothels he was famous for his charm and his ability to hold his liquor. From time to time, he would spend a night in the village or spend the day working in the forest with the labourers. There were rumours that he had several mistresses, one of whom, Elena had heard from a reliable source, was the wife of Juan, the grocer.
For J., sleeping with Juan’s wife was like sinking into a pleasurable swamp, a bottomless morass of oblivion and death. She was an abysmally stupid and sensual woman, a warm mass of listless, voluptuous flesh. J. never knew, nor did he care, whether Juan found out. Recklessly, taking little precaution, he would simply wait until Juan left the village — the grocer made frequent trips to Turbo — before slipping into the brimstone bed of this buxom woman. Sometimes when he had been drinking for days on end, he could not even tell whether it was real, whether he was burying his head between breasts so huge they spilt out past his chin, almost suffocating him, or whether he was sinking into the bog of some dark nightmare. Often he would leave Juan’s house in the early hours and drink as he walked back along the forest path leading to the finca. The overgrown trail was dark and filled with ominous noises and yet he enjoyed these drunken rambles through the forest (“forest, little forest, fucking forest”), stumbling, grabbing hold of anything in the darkness to stop himself from falling, roaring with laughter — a clear, bright, timeless laugh that echoed endlessly through the woods — tumbling down hills, getting covered in mud and suffering scratches and minor bumps that later blossomed into bruises. Some nights he would fall asleep on the beach to be woken by the dawn light and the trilling of birds and sometimes, perhaps to postpone the inevitable encounter with Elena, or perhaps because in the morning light he felt like another drink, here among the birds, staring at his islands, listening to the crashing waves, he would take a long swig from his bottle and, drunk again, would stumble on, as in a dream, to a crumbling mansion where, curiously amused and aloof, he would laugh his clear, high laugh as some strange woman screamed abuse at him.