Now everything seemed better. From this moment on, out here on this empty beach, with his fish to cook and eat, he could feel himself a wanderer.
He didn’t exactly think these words, but rather felt invaded by a curious serenity, a newfound sense of calm that put contentment in his smile. He was doing all the things it seemed he’d wanted to do for ages.
He ate the tastiest pieces and the parts which had most meat. The patí is a splendid fish, even if it’s greasy. The old man used to lose his mind for a slice or two of patí, fried in just a little oil.
He got up to have a look around the boat while he was eating. He circled round it several times, and here and there he kicked it. The best thing he could do, if he wanted to go on with this, was put the boat in order now. He’d brought along a few planks, a ball of cotton wicking and a tin with dribs of paint in.
But he wanted to get just a little further on, before that. He wasn’t a man to rush at things. He’d only just set out. The mouth of the Anguilas was still visible from here, and he’d landed on the sandbank he’d been working on all year, more or less. Nothing, up to now, had really changed at all. He was still really going round the circuit of before, and what he sought was hardly closer.
He lit himself a cigarette and turned to watch the river.
He wouldn’t make his first stop yet, at least until he’d crossed the Paraná.
He went back to the river, but running north-west now, so by afternoon he’d sailed beyond Isla Zárate, all the way across its sandbanks to the channel.
The wind was getting up at bit. He ought to get a move on if he didn’t want a wait. He’d been rowing facing forward for several hours now, with the stern advancing first, and watching where he headed. Now he turned the boat around, settled in a posture that was steady on the cross-beam, and set to row again with his back towards the channel.
He’d gone beyond the island and the current started pulling. The water was two metres here, and five soon after that. He’d keep buoy K42 along his left side as he went.
There, stretching out towards the right, was the island. The sandbank off its northern side is excellent for fishing. But he chose to sail on past.
The water took him on in the direction of the buoy, but by the time he’d gone that far it was behind him by a distance. He was now out in mid-channel. He’d probably come out quite near the Isla Lucha sandbank.
It’s not the sandbank off the east end of the island, but another, smaller one, and separated from it by a current that’s a metre deep.
And this was how it all worked out. He passed very close beside the winking scarlet eye of buoy K41. The channel was behind him now and so he dropped the oars. He felt a little tired. He wanted to go on, as far up as the islands, up to Nutria and Lucha, and go into the channel that ran all the way between them, and before the night came down, if he could. He remembered having seen, on the latter of these islands, just metres from the shore, a lean-to built for fishermen. The area all round here is popular with them.
He’d camp out in the lean-to. But first he’d set a line up at the entrance to the channel, and tie it in the reeds. He’d collect it on the way back, when he set out once again.
The river was now rising and the sky had clouded over. The wind was blowing steadily. It all seemed fiercely barren now, and lifeless.
These are low-lying islands, and it isn’t very long ago they reached their finished state. Their warm and dampish tangling of ever-sprouting grasses makes them seem, from a little way off, rather higher than they are. One imagines it’s a perfect place to land. But your feet sink in the mud and you feel the rock-like roots stab through the bottom of your shoes. There isn’t one dry corner. The mud is always gurgling. His panting and his sweat wrap around him like a shroud.
The water had submerged the land a while before midnight. Boga heard the water come, and listened through the night, through the timbers of the platform, to its churning. He’d tied the boat to an upright on the shelter, calculating then that the ground was going to flood. In the middle of the night he took the rope up in his hands, and the boat came all the way in underneath him.
He’d only set one line because the current here is mighty, and if he had to leave when the level was this high, the work would not be pleasant with more lines to gather in. On more than one occasion, he’d had to fish out the end a line completely submerged in the water, ducking through the surface where he thought he’d tied it up. He ought not to have left even the one on the sandbank. If he wanted to set out in the morning, he might have to resign himself to losing it.
In truth, he didn’t know quite why he’d climbed up on the platform. The lean-to was collapsing and the weather filtered into it from every side at once. There were holes across the roof where the straw had disappeared and he looked out through the holes at the soft light in the sky, a ghostly incandescence in the low cloud of the night. He would have been much better off in the bottom of the boat, and covered by the canvas — once he’d bailed the water out, of course. It wouldn’t have filled the boat up to the point where it would wet him, not in a single night, if he stayed up on the deck planks.
Disregarding all this, he took several things out from the boat and put them in the shelter. There was a sheet of metal nailed down in a corner of the platform, on which to make a fire. Boga lit the Primus stove and, while he ate the leftover fish, he drank down several matés. Then he wrapped the canvas tightly round him, and lay down on the log floor.
At one point in the night he’d expected it to rain, but now was sure it wouldn’t. He’d crossed his hands behind his head and watched the night sky gleaming through the spaces in the straw. The water made its way across the ground underneath him. He heard it coming in. He was lying in this shelter in the midst of this colossal space inhabited by no one. It was, in a way, like lying on a drifting raft. The feeling was of satisfaction, curious but real. He could feel his body breathing and the thousand little movements that he made inside his clothes, clammy now and cracking with the dirt that turned them hard; he smelled himself and heard himself, and all parts of his body, in a hundred different ways. His presence weighed upon him, like something that was sleeping, warm and quite alone. He was, right at this moment, the centre of this flooded world. One who had survived. The silence and the night and the waters overflowing and the loneliness of this river that was like a sea, all came to die around him. The feeling, not the thought, provoked in him a strange elation and an odd sense of security. He didn’t have to journey out to anything at all. Things all converged on him.
The wind began to blow more strongly, damp gusts bringing in the smell of ozone from the river. This wind and smell aroused him.
He was lying there awake for the best part of the night. Suspended in the darkness, there above the water, in the wind brought on by summer.
Dawn had not arrived when he heard the muffled wailing of a launch out in the distance. There was no way to determine the trajectory it followed. The wind was toying with the sound, advancing or delaying it, or stifling it completely. Until a bellow rose up at the entrance to the Sueco, rather indistinct, and from that moment on swelled up in the night, drowning all else out, as if it were coming straight for the shelter and would strike at any moment.
The clamour of the motor launch abruptly disappeared, taken somewhere by the wind. The silence sounded more intense.
The deep and changing glow of night was followed by a flat and doughy light. The day was starting.