He’s here now, at a standstill in the middle of this calm. He’s put aside the oars and has his feet in the water to his ankles. The scrub-hen calls from time to time, squawking like a thing possessed, as if there were an unseen hunter wringing out its neck behind the nearest of the trees. He lights himself a cigarette and dozes in the stillness of the dusk. Here, the night is falling. Not so on the open sea that’s only just behind him, as if a thousand years away. A clear line marks the boundary. There, the open sea is agitated by the wind and its waters show another colour, shine a different light. He watches how they pucker in a million little points, in a movement that’s mechanical, or almost is, but futile, and now and then he smells it. Here, these other waters lie quite calm and very dark. Here the night comes quickly.
It would have been a madness to land at this hour and try to make a camp on shore. Mosquitoes come in clouds and they drive you round the bend. It isn’t even possible to go in close to shore. The best thing is to anchor just a little way offshore, gauging that a change of wind won’t drive your little boat into the net of water hyacinths. This is what he did. And bailed the boat out one more time before he lit the Primus, before having a piece of sea bread along with several matés. Then he took a couple of lines and baited them and cast them, one on either side. He hadn’t had the time to fix the line onto the stern.
The fish stirred up the water with a snapping sound like gunshots. It’s not a sign that augurs well, despite what some folk think. When fish are making all this noise they won’t be taking bait. He cast the lines in any case, trusting to the night.
Then he pulled the canvas out, wrapped himself inside it and slid down into the boat. Perhaps he could have anchored closer in after all, somewhere with more shelter. The south-east wind can rise at night, and when it does there isn’t much to choose between the open sea and this. But he wanted to wake up right here, not further out, nor in. Everything is different in the morning when you wake, and it feels you really are coming in from the sea towards these islands that you’ve seen so many times before in dreams.
He caught the river’s smell at dawn, opening his eyes and breathing through the sharp and acrid odour of the canvas. He didn’t feel hot or cold, so he’d likely feel the coolness when he pushed away the canvas. He heard the wind whine overhead, the little blows of water knocking all around the boat. He couldn’t see any more than a turbid show of light as he looked into the canvas with its blackened heavy weave, but he imagined all those details of the morning.
He pushed away the canvas and got up to his feet. The sun was just ascending from the line of the horizon, and the place was quite transformed. The river mouth and open sea were now one and the same, a water that had thickened and was milky-coffee-coloured, as if its bed had been stirred up, and folded in a million points in steady movement. And then the water’s sighing and the water itself appeared to separate, with all connection broken. The sound was here around his head, a hundred thousand swarming bees, and then there was the water with its movement like a strange machine, a dislocated image.
He saw a little fishing boat bobbing in the distance, on the line of the horizon.
The light broke through the line of trees and areas of sand could now be seen in several places. These beaches, by the look of them, had surfaced in the night, for at dusk the trees had seemed as if they’d stood against the water.
He lifted off his cap and put his head into the river. Then stood up on the mast-hole seat and looked into the distance, across the brightened water. The wind soon dried his face and his skin felt taut and frozen. In time he grew aware of the whispering from the trees, and at length turned to the islands. The feeling that he had was of hanging somewhere over things, not standing in the boat, but hanging weightless from the sky on this fresh and radiant summer’s day.
He would have liked to land at once, stopping where the shoreline gently turns away south-west, before it runs into the distance. Right here on this curve which folds just like a balcony above the open sea, at the entrance to the Chanacito Stream. But he was set on the Piccardo mouth, going up and bringing back supplies that afternoon.
He gathered in the lines that had been set as night came in. He took hold of the first and felt the movements of a fish. It was sitting on the bottom, pained, perhaps a bit perplexed to feel this cruel thing catch its mouth. He felt the gentle weaving of its protest underwater, and then the desperate fighting when it came up to the surface, and seemed about to free itself.
Now it came just below the water surface, and even skipped right out at times. He saw its flashing back two or three times while it struggled. It wasn’t such a marvellous catch after all. A middling yellow catfish with a slightly swollen belly. Possibly a female. But a catfish swallows anything, and what you take for spawn can be entirely something else.
He held the fish a while before he took it off the hook and threw it down into the boat. He’d always been amused by this clicking of the catfish when it finds itself entrapped. The damp back of the animal shone brightly and it looked handsome, in spite of being a catfish. He looked down at its round and puzzled eyes. And, for an instant, he felt pity. This poor little catfish, with its barbels beating wildly, was the only friend the man had at this moment. But the man was not at all sure that he needed a companion. And a catfish isn’t a dog, of course, or anything of the sort. Perhaps in other times he would have answered to this timid call, and yet it wasn’t likely. He’d been hardened by the river. If anything was clear-cut in this man, if there was anything that really stood out, it was precisely this submission, this acceptance of or obedience to what he met along the river, the fine or dirty weather, the floods or lack of water, everything, when all was said and done, life or death.
He unhooked the catfish, took out the Sheffield knife and broke off all the fish’s barbs before he threw it in the bottom, where the water in the boat would keep the animal alive.
It seemed as if the other line was empty. He’d noticed it was slack when he was dealing with the first. He leaned across the gunwale and began to pull it in. And there wasn’t any drag, except that of the lead weight and the length of line itself. But when the first hook surfaced, he had a premonition and he pulled hard at the line. In truth he couldn’t have said if it was really a premonition, or if in that moment the fish revealed itself, or if both things had happened almost at the same time, and with so little margin between them that the premonition held. He pulled and it pulled back in turn, at his hand. And he knew what he was dealing with at once and fought hard, with a sureness and a speed that were quite prodigious, while something still eluded him and he heard how he was panting and was laughing at the same time, and the water went on cleaving, shattering into pieces and he saw, for an instant, its body, like a dark scar, or a dark wake. He shouted:
‘Now!’
And he noticed that his voice, which for so long had been silent, rebounded in the morning, as if it came from somewhere else.
He struck, but not with violence. With a certainty of movement that was even and sustained, drawing on the line but also checking as he played it, his arm both spring and damper as he worked.
The fish paused for an instant with its body almost completely out, as if the water held it there despite his greatest efforts. He felt the burning in his hand and was sure the line would break at any moment. The fish ran twice from one side then back to the other, beating at the water, and then rose in the air with a furtive shine. He held it in the air, but now above the boat, so that its weight, its total weight, that was hanging from its mouth, would keep it still. He watched, his breathing laboured, and whistled just the once, with astonishment, and then he burst out laughing as he held on to the fish, which doubled like a spring and made his arm vibrate from end to end.