Once again, he wished he’d had the old man’s shotgun with him. For whatever need arose. A shotgun is essential on all parts of the river. Some will have a shotgun with the barrels sawn off short. But to carry one of these you must be halfway to a killer.
He nestled at the stern and looked.
He was stretched out on the starboard couchette. Lying on his back and with his head towards the bow, he leaned back against the bulkhead of the deck. He had his eyes wide open and it seemed as if he watched him there and didn’t show alarm, yet there was no way he could see him. He wasn’t really lying down, but almost sitting upright, his legs half-off the couchette and with one laid on the other. He was a tall and bulky man who filled the cabin and seemed confident, in spite of how things were. His face was that of someone who had spent a rotten night, but who still retained his humour. He held his stomach with his hand; a redness lined the gaps between his fingers, and blood oozed out beneath it. The blood had left a wet patch on his jacket and his trousers. The clothes he wore were strange. A three-piece suit just like the kind that’s worn by thugs, thin white stripes on black cloth, and the jacket very long. One jacket sleeve was half torn off. Protruding from his trousers was a pair of low-cut boots. The man had mud up to his knees. His other hand hung off the couchette, covering a part of what was certainly a hunting knife, its handle carved from antler, that he’d stuck into the floor.
There was an air of cold resolve in him. It overlay the tiredness and pain set in his face, but he was finished. Boga saw he’d had it, and that he tried to hide the truth. He jumped into the cockpit and he slipped up to the door. Once the man could see him there, perhaps he’d change his temper. He wouldn’t know who he was dealing with. He had to see him standing there. As for him, he didn’t know the man’s face.
He took the lantern from the hook and let him see his face, with the light held up above him.
He tried to keep his voice firm.
‘We don’t want any quarrels, pal.’
The hand took up its grip around the handle of the knife.
‘Come on, just keep calm… you can’t take anyone on in your state… keep calm, that’s all.’
A silence.
He was absolutely finished, but his face remained impassive.
‘We’ve got no quarrel with you,’ he said.
And then he added, amiably:
‘We’re going to fix you up, pal, one way or another.’
The man relaxed his hand.
‘I’ve had it, pal,’ he said, his voice exhausted.
‘Yeah, that’s how it looks,’ he said.
And he went into the cabin.
And so, with the first signs of the change, the man arrived, and stayed there on the Aleluya. In the month of August, that curious month that lay between two seasons and two lights. At first he didn’t notice, and it seemed to him that nothing much had changed. It was only some days later, when he saw the man stretched on the deck and taking in a bit of sun, he saw the weather changing. But that was all he noticed.
That night they took his jacket off and pulled away his shirt, and when he saw the wound he scratched his head. The best thing they could do, he said, was take him down to San Fernando. But he wouldn’t agree to that, not for anything in the world, and so they patched him up as well as they knew how and spent the whole night listening to his moaning. It was anything but easy. He scratched his head and shrugged a lot. And somehow the man got through it.
He stayed there several days, lying on the same couchette. They couldn’t get his boots off without jostling him around too much, so they washed them with a rag instead, and then they washed his trouser legs and left him as he was. His eyes began to brighten and his beard began to grow, and he stood a lot of pain, from what they saw. He gave off a bit of smell. But he was tough and didn’t moan. He remembered Sagastume. The man was just like that, his body wracked in pain, picking at the hours against his stomach.
There were days he went out fishing, but he left the little fellow behind and then he kept a distant lookout on the boat, now less apparent on the coastline. He wouldn’t have been upset if in the end the man had died, but it would be less complicated if he lived, now he was there.
Fourcade brought him bandages and alcohol and ointment of the kind that has no salt, but he didn’t tell him why he needed them. The man had told him:
‘Don’t say a word.’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘It’s all I’m going to ask you.’
He wouldn’t have, regardless.
When he came back, close to night, he rested on the door frame and watched him for a good while. There he was with his pain. It was the only thing he had. Himself and his pain in a silent struggle to the death. His eyes shone brightly in the dusk, and yet they didn’t see him or the strip of August sky, because their silent gaze was inwards, to his pain.
He stood before those eyes when he returned one afternoon. And the man at last said something after many days of silence, as if he’d just awoken from a monumental sleep, his tired voice arriving from a distance.
‘My guts are burning up.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I figured.’
‘But now it’s getting easier…’
He spoke about his pain as if he spoke about a person, with anger and with pride.
Now he spent the hours lying stretched out on the deck, smoking nice and slowly. He pretty much ignored them. He seemed to be kept busy by whatever he was thinking and by taking in the sun.
Boga thought that he’d move on once he was feeling well again, for there was nothing of this life in which he showed the slightest interest, and because it also made sense that he should leave. But he came to feel much better and he stayed there, on the deck, stretching out and smoking slowly.
Boga thought he’d have his plans.
He had some money and he liked to ask for things.
‘I’d like a bottle of brandy if you go up to the store. Or maybe I’d like two. Here, take some money, and pick up something for yourself as well… I can’t just lie around like this. Just spend what you need to, it’s what the money’s for.’
He began to feel a bit annoyed. The man was the type who liked to overstep the mark. He seemed completely at ease when giving others orders.
He saw them one day, in the distance, alongside the Juanita Florida.
‘Who’s that?’ he said.
‘He lives around these parts.’
‘Who is he?’
Boga looked at him a long time.
He was stretched out on the deck and had his hands behind his head. He turned and looked towards him. His face was slow and hostile, with a rather glassy look. He looked out from under his raised eyebrows, and as if he might be joking.
‘His name is Long Fourcade, of the Juanita Florida.’
He seemed to think it over.
‘I don’t know who he is.’
‘I don’t believe he bothers folk.’
‘The better for him.’
He was starting to consider how he’d get him off his hands, or, as a last resort, how he’d free himself. It wasn’t just the man, in truth, but something else he felt. Something hatched by summer and that ripened, like a fruit, by time, this time that weighed with curious tensions. Yes, things were tangling in an unfamiliar way.
The end of August came. The days grow slowly livelier. Small events take place, they gather and produce the change. The willows start budding. The line of islands darkens. They felt that vague restlessness that accompanies the change. A physical anxiety. A vigilance.
He wondered what would happen, what this summer held for him.
The man was still around.
Sometimes he remembered the thing the little fellow had brought behind him.