Fourcade gave a shrug.
‘I couldn’t say… it’s not from here… it’s got a funny name.’
‘What name is that?’ he said.
‘I couldn’t say… it won’t stick in my mind.’
Long scratched his head.
‘I think it’s going to rain.’
He’d looked at the boat every time he’d crossed the Bajo, and then, as a rule, every time he pulled the net in out on the Sueco.
Fourcade took the silverside, and got a pretty good price in the port at San Fernando. As dusk came on each evening, he tied the little boat onto the Juanita Florida, and they journeyed back together.
The daft little fellow and the dog didn’t move from where they’d ended up. He went on asking about the boat, now and then. You know how all these stories go. Someone tells it one way, someone else another. As a rule, too many stories, and with no real reason to put faith in even half of them. He heard it said, in the store on the Piccardo Canal, that the boat was from the north. Or rather, it was said that it had come down from the north. From the south, there’s only wind. No one knew whose boat it was. Or rather, whose it had been. Old man Polestrina was inclined to call it his.
The only certain thing was that it had turned up there one morning, after the southeaster.
He decided, that morning, not to cross onto the Sueco. He had a mind to try out the Aguaje del Durazno. He hadn’t let Long know, because he’d made his mind up just like that. He came across him anyway, as night was coming down, on the Bajo. He had almost brought along the little fellow. But as it was a new spot, he decided that he wouldn’t.
It took as long as getting to the far end of the Sueco, and even then it wasn’t the Aguaje, strictly speaking. In truth, to reach its far end is a good way further still. And then, he’d stopped a while on the inlet of the Chaná.
Where the boat was.
It came out from the shadows, on a level with the Sueco, then glimmered in the fog a while, as if it might dissolve, until at last it settled on the morning.
It was half into the water, just a little tipped to port, and with the bow aimed to the east, giving the impression, when you saw it from the Bajo, that it sailed on still, close to the wind.
It was a cutter in the old style, with a very slender line, and with that melancholy air that disappeared for good around 1930. He couldn’t stand those shining hulls they shaped into a knife-blade, without a forward boom and showing off Marconi rigging. They were the work of calculation, products made to measure for a man (for that subspecies of sportsman) and designed against the river. Not for the river and the man. He saw them come and go, and the same thing every weekend, not going very far at all, and knew, because he saw them, it was Saturday or Sunday. They went by, overloaded with technology and comforts. And, as Sunday evening came, they made their docile way back all together in a flock. There was one day when he’d seen its members climb out on the shore, get into their motors and, without a pause to take breath in their never-ending prattle, leave behind this world they didn’t have the faintest notion of, had never tried to understand, their engines roaring off in the direction of the city, until the next weekend.
But this boat was distinct, despite its distant look of nobility, and of the folk who’d ordered its construction (forty, fifty years before), and of all that which spoke clearly of techniques from other days.
There was a lot of timber in the boat, as anyone could see, with a low-running gunwale and a sheer that was pronounced, and echoing a bird, and the gentle stern projection too, which stuck out like a balcony. The bow had no projection. The frame was low and short but the cockpit very spacious.
It didn’t have much beam but it had a lot of depth, which was a feature of its time. Although the keel was large it seemed to fit well with the hull, and doubtless gave the vessel good stability, as well as lateral strength. A feature that was surely from the old days were its chain-wales. But they lent a certain elegance.
It was now a proper wreck, of course, and what he was admiring was its face in other days. That time of which the old ones spoke (that worn and melancholy splendour still seen on the river), as if all that could be done here was accomplished in the years between 1890 and 1925.
All the spars were lost with the exception of the boom, which looked to be much longer when you saw it from a distance. Of course, there wasn’t a single strip of ironwork remaining. He could see the marks of chainplates where the chain-wale was fixed, three of them, long and wide, placed along each side. Several lengths of canvas were still hanging from the upper deck, all a dirty green shade, faded almost white. It surprised him that the tiller was still there in place. It was a fine tiller with a fine handle. He’d never liked to see a boat of this bearing fitted with a wheel.
Studying it carefully, from the bow and slightly at an angle, exactly as he saw it now, the hull bore some resemblance to the form of a dorado. And then perhaps it was the case this fish had got into his blood, and it wasn’t really like it, but evoked it in the same way it evoked in him the summer, so summer, boat and fish had come to be, in some way, one.
He went round to the stern and at last he read the name. The letters were cut in fretwork on a little cedar board, in the old style, and with the board fixed to the stern. Nobody had touched it for a boat dies with its name, it’s a custom all get used to, and the least that one can hope for from this river and its folk. And so he read, with effort, and because the name was strange indeed: A… LE… LU… YA.
It didn’t mean a thing, but he thought it sounded nice, and a name that was well-suited to a vessel of this type. ALELUYA. Perhaps, if he’d been capable, he would have made a name up that would sound a bit like this.
It was then a gentle gust of wind, coming from the south-east, folded up the never-ending murmur of the islands. And this was when he felt on his own with the boat. And felt it in a special way. Something like nostalgia and mistrust and also reverence, and all of this at once. However you explained it, a feeling of a gentle pain that, rising in himself, concerned the boat as well as him, as if they were in some way one.
A plaintive limpkin croak came through the air from the south-east, and barely had it reached him than its shadow slipped across the limpid sky, behind the call that went on quivering in the air, like the cry of someone falling through a chasm.
It was only at this moment, and now he thought it through, that he could say this summer’s wandering, right from the Anguilas all the way up to Ñancay, was done, and finally had brought him here, to the Aleluya.
Yes, this was what he’d searched for all this time. The summer had matured in him this tame and stubborn longing for a boat, and had then brought the boat. What else could a man want on this river, with its solitude? Normally he dies with his desire, but nothing more, because it’s hard to have a boat. Bastos often spoke of boats, and Deaf Angarita, whose words were for himself, spoke of nothing else at all. But he, he’d really wanted it, or else had made it happen, and now he had the boat.
It was old and beaten-up, and maybe it was useless. But was there any other way he ever could have found it?
He cast the trammel twice, and with a pretty good result, and the second time arriving almost back up by the boat. But what was in the net didn’t interest him now, whatever it might be. And well before midday he turned the rowing boat to shore, where he beached it near the larger vessel, and had a little bit to eat. He hadn’t landed right beside it, wanting to make sure that there weren’t others prowling round.
It was a day of forceful wind and the reeds whipped in the air with a mournful humming. A Sandringham flew overhead, low, towards the aerodrome. He rolled his trouser-legs up high, took off his boots and jumped down from his boat. He preferred to walk in bare feet for his boots were rather low-cut and the shore was mainly mud. When he wore them he got stuck.