He was wondering if he’d take the little fellow. It helped if you could count on having someone in the boat, to hold it in position while you gathered in the nets. It was a big help for all kinds of things, even with a dog in tow. But he wouldn’t say a word of this unless it came from him, his plan had been to go alone and now he was too wedded to it. And then, he hadn’t decided if he liked the little fellow or not, he likely never would decide, for things would run their course and he wasn’t a man to stop them, which was why it had to come from him, entirely from the little fellow, if he came or if he stayed, and maybe it was better if he didn’t come after all, because he still found him freakish or at least a very odd sort, and because there was that thing behind him, something like a hidden trap that might move on elsewhere if he left the fellow behind, although he knew he didn’t think he’d do this, it was as close as being certain, at least not for the moment and, even if he did, it wouldn’t change the slightest part of what was written down already, if this was how things are, and whether good or bad or otherwise.
The little fellow saw him jump aboard and seemed to be expecting that he’d say something to him, but he didn’t even look, just pushed the boat out from the shore and rowed off strongly. The night still hadn’t lifted, but he caught sight of his silhouette, standing on the shoreline by the white patch of the dog. At last they disappeared behind the first bend on the stream and he felt a little sorry then, as if he’d let them down in spite of himself.
Before he reached the river, he turned up his coat lapels and then put out the lamp. A chilly breeze was blowing and he listened to the reed bed as it shivered in the half-light, close on either side of him, as if an unseen animal were creeping through the reeds. He saw, as if through curtains, the river’s pallid surface and the rhythm of its swaying in the dawning of the light, which seemed to rise straight out from it, cold and rather thick. The sky was high above him, it had almost disappeared out to the east, and in the west, what remained of it was sinking as if soaked up by the mouth of a storm, behind the horizon. He looked up at the morning star, a drop of gold that trembled there among the other lights, before it fell. He blew into his hands and then he rubbed them on his legs. Then he took the oars in hand, and went onto the river.
It was clearer now, and the water rising. It was the best time now, in April, to go after silverside, but it would be another hour or more before he cast the line, that’s if he reached the Sueco. The cold air helped his rowing. He set himself and pulled with strength, not hurrying, but using all his body, rowing deeply. He had to make corrections for the drifting as he went, in this case with the bow turned just a little to south-east as he advanced, against the water, which came in strongly, pushing him away towards the Aguaje del Durazno.
The Bajo del Temor is wide, and with these heavy, sluggish boats, it seems as if the stern will never break free of the shoreline. You sail out from the reed beds and the coastline quickly turns into a lengthening grey line, growing hazy to the north-east, but then it never changes, a line drawn out as if pulled by a tug. It’s best to think of something else, even though your eyes are always coming up against it, as if there’s nowhere else: the toecaps of your shoes and then the seat set in the stern, the trammel with its yellow tin, and then a stretch of water and the coast… and the sky. But it all ends in the coast, because the heavens are a void.
It felt good to be alone now, more than in the summer when he went onto the river, and the cold air of the morning seemed to make the small things smaller still, the man and little rowing boat were now a single figure, an undetermined blemish that was making laboured headway to the Sueco.
The water here was choppy as it ran in from the east and met the wind set from the west. He felt the little blows against the starboard of the boat. It’s a sound that is particular, an unremitting gurgle. It sounds, after a time, as if your boat were shipping water. If you listen to it hard enough, you end up dozing off.
Every now and then, there was the squawking of a scrub-hen or the whining of a dog coming over from the islands. Then he heard the sound of voices, other noises too, on the side of the Chaná. But the sounds were disproportionate, altered by the distance, and it seemed as if they came out from the air above his head. There was nothing that connected all the vast space there in front of him with all these sounds, familiar once, and now so strange and lonely.
It was then the sun appeared above the line of the horizon. He was almost halfway out across the waters of the Bajo and, by screwing up his eyes, he could make out the location of the mouth of the Riestra, of the Inca and Gutiérrez, and even saw as far up as the Medio and Chaná, despite the growing fog. But that was when the light broke in the east, as if the sky broke, and wiped it all away, just for a moment. Now he seemed to be elsewhere, rowing through the air between the long and layered cloud plumes. The water almost disappeared, it disappeared, in fact, because what lay around the boat now was a hard metallic framing that reduced him close to blindness, but he knew it was the sea when he saw its wide, black borderline, swaying to and fro before the giant, red globe, or half-globe, scarcely bright at all now, at the level of his eyes. He could observe it without squinting. It struggled up towards the sky and then it seemed to waver, and several seconds passed before it broke from the horizon. There was an instant when its lower edge, which rested in the water, seemed to stretch as if held fast onto this dark line of the border, which it briefly dragged aloft with it.
When it rose from the horizon and he once more saw the water in the fullness of its reach, he thought the sea had halted and turned into something solid, a sea of sand that puckered into millions of points, the light raking fiercely in and clinging to each curl, as if this was where it started, or this was simply light itself, a small cup of perfect shade behind each cup of light. In truth the water carried on, he felt it in the boat, but his eyes still held the counter-image, leaping out against the grey of dawn.
In spite of his precautions, the current had displaced the boat a little to the west, and now he had the Chaná inlet almost right ahead of him, astern. He saw the coast again. The fog had mostly lifted and the view was at its clearest. He saw a flock of lake ducks, black widows, as they called them, on the point of Punta Temor, and he launched a silent curse. They disappeared in twos and threes, to bob up not far off, either closer or more distant, as if they followed orders. They had to be positioned on a shoal of silverside. If he’d had the old man’s shotgun he’d have let fly with abandon. When he looked in their direction next, the ducks had moved on east, onto the inlet of the Chaná. And that was when he saw it.
It seemed to be a boat. It was, in fact, a boat, but it was very odd to see it there. It was owing to the light he hadn’t seen it there before. Until the sun came out and reached the entrance to the Chaná, it had been there but run together with the grey line of the coast, perhaps as a suggestion of a darker kind of mark, but not to be distinguished in the misty dawning scene, before the sun. But now the sunlight warmed the coast, it lay there clear and well defined, if strange, on the western shore, lying at the entrance to the Chaná.
He slackened off his stroke at first, but further on he stopped. He felt a little puzzled. He found himself a cigarette and lit it very slowly, feeling how the current took him towards the west, but not so strongly now, and with his eyes fixed on the boat. The impression that it gave was of a giant, wounded bird, or something of that nature. It made him sad to see a boat had got in this predicament. He couldn’t get its measure, being so far off and on its side. But even with all that, it had the signs of being a handsome boat. The way the hull was lying and the angle of his view of it enhanced the bow projection, which gave the boat the look of being pierced by desperation, as if, and as it died, it reached an arm to deeper waters after being dragged here all the way across the sandbanks. All this forward movement, all this vain and final movement, was gathered in the prow boom, violent and cut in black against the morning sky.