The man bent down and put the shotgun barrel to his head. It was a trick. And yet he couldn’t bear it. The man stepped into the boat from the other end, taking every kind of care. Boga had fallen near the prow. The rocking of the boat had now become a real torment and he had to make an effort to keep still.
The man came close and poked him with the barrel of the gun. He jogged him with his toe. He tried to turn him over with the barrel, but he couldn’t. This really made him nervous.
At last the man put the gun down, propped against one side, and leaned towards him. He clearly heard the sound of the gun against the side, and made a calculation of the moment when the man crouched down. He leapt up like a spring and seized the man around the arms, as he came towards him, and pulled his body to him using all the strength he had, and clung on tight. Now he saw the man’s face, its tension and surprise, while his body shook inside his arms, immobilised completely, and then began to hit him in the face, with his head. The man’s whole body shuddered and he uttered little noises that were strangled in his throat, he heard the man’s teeth cracking, and the bones inside his jaw. The man was trying to shape himself to knee him in the stomach, but they’d fallen in the bottom and he couldn’t find a way. Then he butted harder still and then at last he felt the other’s strength begin to fail. He still fought back a while, thinking how to free himself and make it to the gun. It seemed as if he’d fainted, but he wasn’t going to trust a fellow like this.
He pushed the man away from him, as far as he could manage, and in the same thrust grabbed the gun. He stood up in the stern and aimed directly at the man.
But now the man had fainted, and he looked quite badly injured. His face was all messed up.
The man was getting on a bit, his face was gaunt and hardened. Boga left him on the bank, sitting propped against a tree, with the empty gun beside him, as if he was a hunter who’d sat down to take a nap. There was his face, of course, but you couldn’t see it from further off. The two of them were quits. It was possible the man would come to see it that way too. Neither of them wanted any problems.
The pain made him demented. If he hadn’t been a man who accepted what life brought him, he’d have cursed the day he set out from Morán, and further back, his setting out from the Anguilas.
Pain for him, quite naturally, was not the same as pleasure, and yet the line between them, the line that kept all things apart, seemed anything but clear. Life went through him like a river. Pain and pleasure came and went when neither was expected, one led to the other, each thing brought what followed it, and if you stopped to think about it, all things were at root the same, a dark and wild water in a never-ending current. He accepted every part of it; he was all of it in some way. He couldn’t have risen up against it, couldn’t have forced this life, this river, in any way at all.
When he’d put the Sagastume Chico well behind him, he made himself a camp in a secluded spot. He built a fire in which he made his rigging knife spike red-hot, and removed the pellets one by one.
He couldn’t understand how those black dots in his flesh could be the cause of so much pain. His soul raged in those little dots. He felt their very pulsing and, if he closed his eyes, he could imagine that his arm was growing infinitely larger.
He’d heard it said that myrtle leaves were good for wounds like this. But he didn’t make his mind up what to do for quite a time; he preferred to bear the pain than have to raise himself and struggle through the scrub. At last he did get up when the pain became unbearable, but stayed there with his eyes half-closed, lurching like a drunkard as he stared out at the river. The water glittered fiercely. He walked towards the brightness and stepped down into the river. After this he kneeled and put his head into the water. It brought him back to life, a little.
He moved along the shore until he came across a ditch. He followed it a fair way up, and deep into the weeds, and he didn’t find the plant because he didn’t pay attention. He travelled like an idiot, conscious of the smarting of the grasses on his hands, and at times he lost all sense of things, like walking in his sleep, and feeling in some vague way he’d been doing so for ages. He finally sank down onto the margin of the ditch, beside a willow, utterly exhausted. The heat and the humidity and his panting enclosed him like a cloud. And that old, bitter smell of the vegetation.
When he’d calmed a little he at last picked up the other smell, sweet and persistent. He must have been aware of it for quite a while, in fact. He looked and saw them there above his head, the little pointed leaves and blue-coloured berries of a myrtle plant two metres high, maybe even three. And a little way beyond it was another.
He went back to the boat and crushed the leaves against the seat, until he had a kind of paste, which he spread on a section of the sleeve that he’d torn off. This is what he’d heard, that you make a myrtle poultice, and he did his best to fashion something like it. Then he cut some line and tied the poultice on his arm. Now he had to wait.
At first it seemed to help a bit, but after that it seemed to make the pain even worse. At last he tore the poultice off and threw it far away, cursing everybody else for swallowing this nonsense.
He wished he had a decent lump of unsalted pig fat, the only thing he trusted, he’d seen for himself how it cured the wounds on dogs, however bad they were. The old man always had some, hanging from a kitchen beam.
He spent two days and nights like this, lying on the beach with his back against the boat, or else beneath a tree in the hot hours of the day, and living with his pain alone; he didn’t know what the time was, he was smothered by the atmosphere, and there between his eyelids was that giant shining slick, like a ball of fire that rose up from the middle of the river, and which left him at a certain hour of day completely blind.
Time ran slow and fussily, as if it were an acid trickling from his wound.
He felt sick all the time and his annoyance was tremendous, a rancour of some kind against a thing he couldn’t identify, something in the river, he felt, perhaps the river itself. And each attack of pain was succeeded by despondency. Compared with this, though, what he feared was when the pain announced itself. And then it fell on top of him, the real pain itself, summary and cutting. And always there was a part of him left to be surprised that he could take it at all. Then the long despondency, a thick and blackened water. And after this the rancour and the feeling of malignity he felt on every side, and he might have come to hate this endless river, really hate it, if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing moved him very deeply.
At last he would fall asleep. But his body never quite forgot the pain lodged in his arm.
He came back far more quickly and he only stopped off once. He’d seen a boat aground as he passed the Pantanoso. It must have been there quite some time, and wouldn’t be worth much now. The vessel was a wreck. Some use any excuse to take a boat out of the water, but in truth this is only ever a death sentence. A boat that’s getting old can’t hope for any happy outcome when it’s taken onto land.
Instead of being up on props, it lay there on one side, as if it were asleep. He reckoned that the side on which it rested would be rotten, the timber soft and black with the consistency of cork, and then completely warped beneath the full weight of the vessel. He didn’t remember having seen the boat, which must be old, before; its lines were clearly from the past, though it was not as old as some you still saw sailing on the rivers, the Gorrión for instance, and then the San Pedrito.
The mast and boom were still there and he stopped off for the latter, thinking it might serve him as the mast his boat was needing.