And Boga gave a shrug before he went back to the passage. It struck him as hilarious.
‘Hey, stop mucking around, old man,’ he said, and brought a snigger up from somewhere very deep inside and laughed it in the old man’s face.
‘It’s true,’ the old man said.
‘Where’d you get this idea from?’
‘I know exactly what I’m saying.’
‘Yeah, don’t make me laugh!’
‘I’m on my way out, son. You can believe me or not.’
Boga felt a bit disturbed.
‘You’ll soon put this behind you. Whatever it is you’ve got. I can’t see anything wrong with you.’
‘There’s nothing to put behind me. It’s time for me to die… that’s all.’
Boga gave a shrug.
‘All right, whatever you say.’
The next day he went down to San Fernando with the reeds. It was something that the old man did, but now that he was busy with his dying it was down to Boga. Up to now, he’d simply loaded the bundles on the boat and gone along. It wasn’t easy work fitting them all onto the barge, owned by Deaf Angarita, but they always did it in the end. The old man would get dressed as if to sit there in the passage, in his clean, collarless fleece shirt, and then he’d put on his waistcoat and knot on his neckerchief, both of which were black, and then came his black and very wide-brimmed hat, which had a high, round crown and which he pulled down straight onto his head, and then his pocket watch with its heavy silver chain. Boga, for his part, put on trousers and a coat, and then Pirelli boots, the same kind as the old man’s, but his had two red patches. He did the steering on the way out and then, when they were coming back, the old man insisted on his turn at the tiller. He would wander round the town while the old man pursued his business, and sometimes went as far as Pona’s, where for fifteen pesos he could take her to bed, or else one of her two daughters, depending on whichever of the three was in the house.
Now it fell to him to do the whole job on his own, the old man’s part as well, and it all became quite difficult.
Old Bastos showed his face when a couple of days had passed. As expected. He roamed around the sandbank with his boat that was half-rotten and the rod he always fished with.
‘What does that man want here?’ said the old man, to say something.
Old Bastos was his only friend, and yet they seemed to loathe each other, going by appearances. There’d never been a time when they didn’t end up bickering, as if they were possessed, and once the old man had emptied both the barrels of his shotgun through the air above his friend’s head.
For a time the Pajarito was where Bastos lived (the New Canal, to use its proper name), between the Pacú and Anguilas, but then three years ago he’d made the move to the Anguilas, where the stream is at its narrowest. He had been living on his own ever since Cabecita — a halfwit he’d picked up on the Antequera during the 1940 flood tide, when he’d seen the idiot clinging for his life to a canoe already sinking in the middle of the river — had drowned on the sandbanks. No one ever knew quite where this Cabecita came from. Not that it concerned them much. Since Cabecita disappeared, he’d lived on his own with his two mottled dogs, just skin and bone.
They heard the sorry squealing of the rowlocks in the gloom long before the little boat came into view. The squealing rose and fell with an exasperating rhythm in the sleepy quiet of dusk. Boga had arrived back shortly before they heard him coming, and flopped down in the passage just as Bastos hobbled up the rubble path. He looked up at the old man from the bottom of the steps, peering out from underneath the wide brim of his hat.
‘Hey!’
‘Hey.’
‘What is it you’re doing there, sitting like an old man?’
‘Being an old man.’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘Who says you have to hear it?’
Old Bastos scratched behind his ear and spat into the distance.
‘Ok, ok… so what is it you’re doing?’
‘You can see what I’m doing.’
‘I can see you’re sitting down.’
‘That’s what I’m doing.’
‘Which isn’t saying much.’
‘I do what the hell I want. Is that all right with you?’
‘It seems all right with me.’
He started up the steps.
‘I don’t see why it’s anybody’s business,’ said the old man, shuffling himself forward as if he meant to jump.
‘There’s no talking to this chap, then,’ said Bastos.
‘Don’t you call me chap.’
‘It’s just a way of speaking. There’s no harm in it I can see.’
‘Well I can see the harm!’
The old woman came out then, and looked across at Bastos.
‘I asked him what he’s doing, nothing more than that.’
‘Don’t give me that!’ the old man yelled, and turned his head away.
‘What is it he’s doing, sitting there?’ Bastos said.
‘He says he’s dying.’
Bastos looked hard at him and he frowned. He looked worried now.
‘He could do it, to be awkward,’ he said at last, and scratched behind his ear.
The river spreads wide and silent, and is bleak on the sandbanks.
He worked the season on his own, although the dog came with him sometimes and became his only company. He went into the reed beds a little after dawn and, most days, didn’t even stop at midday for a break, to take a rest back at the shelter. When the water level dropped he made himself a bed of reeds and lay down for half an hour. As a rule, he went back to the shelter when the water rose, or else he stopped just long enough to chew a piece of sea bread with a slice of pork belly, and to smoke the longest stub that he could find in his pockets.
The wind pulled at the river, and above its rippled surface was the changing sea of green in which he worked. He heard the whistling curl itself around him, like a serpent, and then the beating heart of this colossal solitude. He took this world around with him, wherever he might find himself. The wind had aged his hands and face of tight and weathered skin. The distance emptied out his eyes, the isolation turned him pensive, melancholic.
The droning of the aeroplanes first blossoms and then withers overhead from side to side across the sky. After that, the silence. The engine of a motor boat is howling in distress somewhere far off in the distance, which teases the sound. A dark bird vents a lonely screech and rises into flight. Then he hears the dog bark, all the notes astonishingly uniform and sad. When at last the barking stops, his ears continue throbbing. Closer by, the constant chafing sound of the reeds, and the mud that gurgles underneath his feet. The thick and steady booming of the sand boats on the channel gives a warm sense of bonanza.
He returned to San Fernando on two or three occasions, and once down to the Tigre, to the River Corporation yard, where he’d picked up a two-cylinder Ailsa Craig engine — this was some time back in the autumn — which, in short, did not do the job they’d had in mind for it.
The old man, at that time, was involved with Colorado Chico, trying to buy the hull of a seven-metre fishing boat. Its keel was of lapacho and its planking made of viraró. Built by José Parodi, it had been on sale in ’39, but with a British 40–50 h.p. engine and new gaff sails. All for 2,800 pesos, cash in hand. Now Colorado Chico wanted 15,000 pesos, and that just for the empty hull.
While they were in talks, the old man bought the Ailsa Craig for 4,500 pesos, thinking of the fishing boat. To summarise what happened, it was Colorado Chico who ended up purchasing the Ailsa Craig; the old man sold it on to him, together with two camp beds with woodworm in the legs.
There was a week of rising waters while the weather was still cold. He gathered the trammel nets, loaded up the Elbita and went out on the Sueco, for the last few days of the silverside fishing. This time, when he came back, he found the old man somewhat changed. He’d been changing all the time, but it took those days away for Boga to see it for himself. Perhaps the old man had been right after all. He seemed to be much skinnier, and yellow.