He wasn’t from the coast, but found he felt much better off here at the moment.
The coast is neither land nor river. Nor simply something in between. It’s an unclear world of shadows on a backcloth of neglect, of badness and despair. The man who’s from the coast feels that he’s tied down by the river. If he touches it, it takes him. But this is where he finds himself, on neither land nor river, in among dead boats and ancient stories.
They moved along the coast from San Fernando to beyond Vicente López. It’s a pleasure in the summer. You see the river differently when looking from the coast. They came on other groups of drifters, going in one direction or the other. It’s a route favoured by wanderers. Above, on the embankments, the electric train appeared and disappeared from time to time, with its thunderous drumming sound. They saw the vacant, cryptic faces, peering out from or pressed up against the windows. Faces that perturbed them. That looked as if they wished them ill. Cabecita shouted when the trains came into view, attacking them with stones. He yelled with all his strength, but they only saw his lips move. They turned in from the coast when they came to certain stretches, and walked along the rails. Somehow here the sun felt closer, more alive, much closer to the ground. The pair of gleaming lines and the sleepers and the ballast and a long unbroken silence like a tunnel through the morning. And there below, the coast. And the flat and sleeping river.
The air began to hum a little. Then a sombre hammering began inside the rails.
‘Here it comes!’
They moved away to one side and the train went past them bellowing darkly, grim, with all those empty faces.
It’s not a lengthy stretch of coast, but changes face so often that it seems extremely long, and even different, as if you made your way down several coastlines. Once you pass Olivos, after all the mud and weeds and areas of broken ground, the beaches are exposed and long, and infinitely sad in winter. Here the river looks just like the sea. There’s something of a fundamental sadness in the likeness, this seeming and not being the sea. Now, in these summer days, the bathers leave the land behind and set themselves up here, on this sand that has a smell of fish, as if they were awaiting something. When the sun goes down they leave. Once they’ve disappeared, and the water goes out far enough, some fellows begin to wander round and round across the sand, their faces to the ground.
‘What is it they’re doing?’ he’d said, squinting at the roaming shadows.
‘They’re looking for bits and bobs.’
They looked for objects lost there in the water by the bathers. Watches, rings, earrings, penknives, glasses and false teeth.
‘What use are they to them?’
‘They’re drifters.’
He didn’t really get it.
They heard a sand boat’s siren as it moved into the port. Some barges sailed the channel. Rubia and Cabecita went to comb the beach.
‘It’s contagious,’ said the man.
They walked this way and that, moving slowly and deliberately, stamping on the sand from time to time. The dog strayed just behind them, looking rather lost.
Night came slowly from the east, just above the water, while the light drew up its last glow to the heights, above the trees, above the houses. It was strangely still and peaceful, with those shadows raking through the sand. The buoys out on the channel started winking in the night. The sand boat pressed its dark lament and then they heard the tumult of the chain run through the hawsehole like a waterfall of steel. A DC-3 was gaining height, coming from the airfield, and only seconds later it was flying overhead, the blinking of its lights up in the twilight. A restless breeze blew over from the river now and then.
Rubia and Cabecita came back from the beach, still immersed in silence. They all set off towards the port, one behind the other as they walked atop the breakwater, looking at the sand boats that unloaded at this hour. It was a lively spectacle. Scarcely had the boat docked than a line of lights switched on, right above the hold, and then came the washing of the sand with hoses plumbed in to the sides. The growling of the diesel engine pumping round the sand was heard a long way through the night. The sound grew ever clearer and it also grew more lonely, a soft beat in the silence. A noise born of the water.
Now and then a gust of wind brought music from the nightclubs, the Cuba Libre mainly, being nearest, on a pontoon. The little coloured lights were slowly climbing through the night, daunted by the river and the darkness. But the lights along the breakwater fell straight into the water, chilly and quiescent. There were one or two men fishing.
They left this stretch of coast after the man adjudged that stripping all the swimmers of their things at once, not waiting till they lost them on the beach, made better sense.
‘We’re going to raid the huts,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up with these people.’
Beyond the stretch of limestone ground, secluded by the trees, between the high embankment of the tracks that keeps the world away and the river there below, runs a string of wooden dwellings with their Ruberoid-membrane roofs. The larger part of all these huts is fashioned out of boarding from Mercedes-Benz packing crates, mounted on a tall brace frame, and sagging, as a rule, either one way or the other. When the river gets too high the water gets beneath the huts, and sometimes undermines them more, and always carries something off, or moves it round at least.
They came through in the afternoon, along the silent street that keeps the two lines of huts apart. They walked out in the light, slightly blinded by the sun. Their slow-moving steps, which patted lightly on the ground, sent up a little cloud of dust. The sun was coming at them from the far end of the street and they appeared to float, swept on with the flowing of the light. Once, the train went by above them, past the edges of the roofs of all the huts along the left. They saw the shifty faces, quickly snatched off by the curve, and the dog began to bark again, seemingly at nothing, not even looking at the train.
They saw several boats lying underneath some huts, and a cabin cruiser up on blocks and in between the trees. Its hull was painted yellow with the rubbing strakes in red. Boga stopped a moment and he studied it with interest.
The man gave him a look, although he barely turned around.
‘What is it?’
He only shrugged his shoulders.
‘It’s been there for a while, several summers,’ Rubia said. ‘I think it was the other way before. Red hull with yellow strakes.’
‘It’s not the same.’
They saw an old man working on the caulking of a rowing boat. He left off with his hammering and peered at them a bit.
They knew that they were being watched from inside the huts.
A young boy crossed the street. He stopped out in the middle, to observe them. But he was not more than a fluctuating mark against the sunlight.
When they reached the far end of the street, they stopped when they were opposite a hut set on the right. The river was in sight between the framework of the braces, and a buoy out on the channel. A sand barge made its turn as it approached the Olivos docks. The buoy they could see was black K17, the barge was rounding K15, not visible from here. The man gave this a bit of thought, as if it were important. He knew the Costanera Canal quite well.
When they had come through here more hurriedly, south-east to Buenos Aires, they walked along the rails. All they saw from up there were the undulating roof lines of this shabby string of huts, sticking out between the willow crowns.
Rubia had said, stopping there between the rails:
‘I’ve got a friend down there.’
‘What kind of friend is that?’ said the man without much interest, and walking some way past before he stopped.
‘A beautiful little whore.’
The night was coming down. They heard the long lament of a sand boat on the river. The man stood and waited for the tumult of the chain as it tumbled through the hawse-hole, but the boat was too far off. The hour was very peaceful.