He didn’t neglect the fish while he was working on the boat, especially as this was what he lived on. He checked the lines he’d set at nightfall early every morning. There was always something on them, even if not much. Once he’d taken the hooks out from the fish, he put new bait on all the lines and threw them in again, but moving one or two to different places. As the day went by, and when the work began to bore him, he took a look around the lines, and if, when he came back to it, he found the boat still bored him, he made himself a new line, or else he had a swim. He was trying a dorado line he’d put a lot of faith in. He’d used ceibo wood to fashion all the floats himself. First were several round floats, standard-size and white, then came the final float, which was larger and cut square, rather like a half-brick, cut out from a lifebelt that had seen better days. He fixed every hook with a snap and a lead, and used triple swivels on a short length of leader, placed exactly halfway between one float and another. A pretty piece of work. To bait his dorado lines, he used, if he had them, eel and catfish pieces, knowing most dorado have a preference for the former, and placed them alternately.
Along the other shore was a lengthy stretch of sandbank noted for good fishing, in a kind of elbow, or perhaps it was a pocket, at the drain of the Diablo. But he had no way to reach the place unless he had a boat. Notwithstanding this, one morning when he got up, he swam across the river with a tightly rolled line that he’d wrapped inside a cloth then tied securely round his waist. He understood that somewhere round this spot there was a guard-post of the military command, so he made a sweeping detour on his way out to the sandbank.
Once he’d cast the line, he wondered if it wouldn’t be best to stay there while he waited, so he wouldn’t have to make another journey in the evening. He’d look around the sandbank and come back and check the line. If he didn’t have a bite by then, he’d come back in the afternoon, or else the following morning.
He was gone for about an hour, going out and coming back. He went to check the line. He’d barely touched its thread when he knew he had a catch, and began to reel it in with a tingle of excitement. It’s a thing you never get used to. The first two hooks were empty, but the water smashed like glass as the third came to the top. He pulled hard on the line. When he realised what he had, he gave a leap and then he whistled, and held the fish up high.
‘Fucking hell!’ he said, somewhere in among the whistling, feeling how his arm was already getting tired.
He’d caught a chafalote, over half a metre long, and something like four kilos. It must have followed bream as they’d gone into the reed bed. It was a handsome fish indeed and it looked quite aggressive with its bulldog lower jaw.
He took it off the hook and crashed its head against a log, so he could take it back across the river with him.
It was on the second day he was working on the boat that these strange, gigantic birds appeared. They came in from the south, at times a little west of this, and cut across the entire sky in a matter of just seconds, as if they were crossing a patio, or something even smaller. Sometimes only one appeared, more often two or three of them came over in a group. They flew very low, which made them seem quicker still. He’d heard somewhere or other that they had a base at Morón, and that sometimes they just exploded in the air, and were gone without a trace. You expected nothing less when you heard the noise they made. He stood underneath them as they charged across the sky, 600 kilometres per hour they went, chased on by their own din, and waited for the bang. They were the Air Force’s Glosters, and one time he thought they’d seen him, because they’d wheeled on the horizon and flown back across the beach, so close overhead that he’d dived onto the sand, quite deafened by the noise they made, and had made out the pale, strangely peaceful face of one of the pilots.
As the work on the boat advanced, he felt a growing appetite for working here one day on the building of a real craft. It was just a passing thought at first, but then it made him think that he was wasting time on this job, that he’d never really wanted anything else in life. Now this job was really only holding up his plans, it was nothing but a pretence, a pale imitation. Finally, he began to get fed up, his longing for a boat mixing up with his longing to move on. It all became one thing.
And so he finished up and left, as if, by moving on, he would in some way start his boat as well. As if, behind these rivers that he had in mind to travel, his boat was out there waiting, and the only way to reach it was by going out to meet them. Even so, he’d managed to do the rudder.
And he left.
The man sailed up the rivers until almost the middle of the summer, and then came back in much less time, arriving at midsummer proper, at its height. In truth it wasn’t very far, some ninety kilometres. But for the man, in his small boat, it was what you called a journey.
Setting out from Punta Morán he went up the Diablo, and reached the Paraná Miní in only half a day, although he hadn’t set a time for his arrival. Then he made his way out to the Pozos del Barca Grande, and sailed across these sandbanks from buoy K47 to the unlit, black K50. It was here he left the Pozos and entered the Barquita, crossed the Barca Grande and, going up the Pantanoso, Borches and Camacho, he finally came out onto the Paraná Guazú. This is a river. In this part of the world, you have to come this far to know what river really means.
He stayed here for a day before he set out for the other shore, sailing a completely quiet river. Across, he took the Ceibito, and then down what remained of the Ceibo to its mouth, and the River Uruguay. There, he was thinking about skirting all the sandbanks, between the Argentine coast and the Canal Principal, or else to make his way down to the Alférez Pago, and then on by the Bravo, up the Paciencia Chico to the Gutiérrez Chico, and come out by that way, and in between the sandbanks, beyond Nueva Palmira at Punta Chaparro, on the coast of Uruguay. He settled on the Bravo, but, once he found himself on the Gutiérrez Chico, he went round to the left and then upriver on the Delta. He took the Brazo Chico and then the Brazo Largo, and after that he sailed on by the Brazo de la Tinta. From there he took the Sagastume Chico to the sandbanks, sailing out across them, and in between the currents, to the mouth of the Ñancay at the Delta’s northern limit.
He sailed upriver all this time without the slightest hurry, and stopped off here and there for several days along the way. What he liked above all was to let the currents take him, running with the waters. He was going up towards the north, and after the dorado, after fish in general, but with his mind on the dorado, as if the fish and the king of all these fish were running on ahead and he had to catch them up. He wasn’t yet aware of the extent to which this fish, this one in particular, had for him become a myth. He’d fished it several times before, but still lived with the feeling that he hadn’t really fished it, as if what he’d been fishing hadn’t really been this fish, but a kind of imitation. And somehow not the fish. He felt its best was over when he raised it from the water. And even just before.