The water helped him onward, and almost all the time, for the bajante took him with it once he’d reached the Paraná, and, with an oar just to keep the boat on course, the current took him right across and on into the Sueco, and swept him along it to the Bajo del Temor.
He was rowing with his arms alone, setting up a stroke that used a minimum of effort. He watched his hands go up and down, the skin a perfect white where there wasn’t any mud, as if these hands were not his own. His left arm didn’t exist. His shoulder was the limit of his body on that side, a limit made of pain, and which at times appeared to hold a massive weight. He felt his other arm was growing longer in some wondrous way, and at a place he couldn’t fix it ceased to be his own. The wound in his thigh wasn’t leaking blood for now, but he couldn’t bear its throbbing. On the Honda Canal, he stuck a finger in his trouser leg and ripped the fabric open all the way down to the knee. Then he leaned across the rail and washed the wound a little. His shoulder went on bleeding, perhaps because he moved it. A sluggish line of blood ran all the way beneath his clothing, and joined with the haemorrhage that, when he moved from time to time, still welled up short and sticky from the hole in his stomach. The sun had dried out the mud that was covering his body and he felt it pulling at the skin on his neck. Once he tried to smoke, but he found the cigarettes and the matches had got wet. He laid them down beside him, spaced out on the bench, and waited for the sun to dry them out.
He saw the debris from the Caporale floating on the water in the middle of the current, to the outlet of the Arroyón.
In the end he was numbed by the sun and the fever.
He seemed to be advancing with his head inside a blazing cloud. The river fired relentlessly into his eyes. At times it seemed to glitter like the scales of a fish that was leaping on the beach before it died. He saw things floating round when he let his eyelids close, shifting greenish patches on a dark and sticky ground, dissolving in the cloudy murk. He often drifted off, but the pain was always stabbing him, waking him again. The whole of his body coalesced in this pain, was reduced to nothing else. There was something, even so, that stood apart in him and watched as he died, that lay beyond all suffering, as if this couldn’t die.
On the Honda Canal he was tormented by the barges. They buffeted the dinghy and his stomach bled again. He felt the wave approaching once the barge had travelled by and, guessing how the boat would move, he tried to ride the rolling, but he never quite surrendered, and it didn’t end well.
He sailed on to the Paraná and rounded Isla Nueva, going round the long way, otherwise he ran the risk, between Isla Nueva and Isla YCA, that the current would get hold of him and carry him away beyond the Sueco. He saw a group of barges, black, and, as it seemed to him, motionless, there in the light. In fact, they were sailing to the Serna Canal.
Once he’d passed the island, the wind and the smell that recalled the smell of sea made him feel a little better. The pain had stopped its nagging, but he knew, with strange lucidity, that death would come before the night. The river shone intensely in the fullness of the summer as he died in this splendid isolation.
He could see the Cangrejo, just make out its inlet on the far-distant shore, a scarcely darker point set in the lengthy bed of reeds, and remembered how the fishing there was excellent. He had been there, once, a couple of summers ago, or maybe three, and had always thought of going back.
A little boat was going across the river to the Víboras. He heard the pitter-patter of its engine as it sailed, and only some time after saw the trail of white advancing bit by bit across the river. He was watching how the boat sailed at the time he fell asleep.
It must have been a while, because the entrance to the Sueco was before him when he woke. The heat was still intense but the sun was going down. It felt even hotter once he’d sailed into the Sueco, sheltered from the wind by Isla Lucha. He’d made this passage many times, downstream, with the trembling curve of the head rope between him and the shore. Now, without the trammel, he was running down more quickly. The sun had dried his cigarettes, but he no longer wanted to smoke. And he wasn’t sure he could.
He’d kept hard to the coast when he came into the Sueco, fearful that the stream would bring him out onto the Bajo on the far side of the Chaná. The reed beds closed his way and he was held up for a while in the middle of the channel.
He was patient in his waiting for the tide to lift him out. He didn’t have the strength to move the oars inside the reeds. And so he watched the river through the curtain as it swayed with a slightly troubling sigh. He was up beside the channel that ran in between the islands, with its shelter for the fishermen standing there on the bank. At the end of the channel he saw the open sea, a different colour. The afternoon was beautiful. I’d like to have the boat rigged and go out onto the river, he thought. It’s one of those afternoons… what was going to happen to Old Froglia’s little boat? he thought straight after. How would it end up? It had another year still in it, maybe two. One never knows.
The water didn’t lift him out, but sent him further in. He lay across the starboard rail and reached out to the reeds. He used them to pull the dinghy out gradually. He felt no pain at all now and his stomach wasn’t bleeding, unless he moved too roughly. He could hardly move at all, though. He felt horribly tired, and emptied.
He was still lying on the rail once he’d left the reeds behind, when the water started pushing hard, and he had one final view along the channel through the islands. He saw there, in the distance, in the softened evening light, the white and slender figure of a sloop out on the open sea, its spinnaker unfurled. It looked just like a giant bird in slow, majestic flight across the sleepy afternoon.
The channel was behind him and the sloop was lost from sight. He tried to sit and take the oars into his hands. He managed with his good arm, but he couldn’t do a thing to stem the dark blood from his entrails. He felt a little cold now and he thought this wasn’t normal. It isn’t cold at this hour, in this season… I’m going.
He stayed close to the left bank as he moved out from the Sueco, even at the risk of getting caught up in the reeds again. The Bajo was before him, still, and then, to reach the Chaná mouth, he would have to fight the current.
Perhaps he had a will that was more obstinate than death. His will had battled death the whole day long. Now he was here.
At this hour of the evening, the still and cloudy waters of the Bajo looked like aged bronze. A curious kind of stillness weighed across them. His big eyes of a dying fish looked all along the distant shore, showing no distress. Towards the east, the highest of the treetops stood up clearly on the dark, uncertain limit of the coast. The slanting sunlight brushed across them, giving them the look of distant feathers up in flame.
He looked out for the Chaná inlet. Then, across the Bajo, curiously still against the last light of the day, he saw the silhouette, long and beaten, of the Aleluya.
Going across the Bajo took forever. He always had the boat in sight, and yet it seemed to be moving away from him. The truth is it was getting dark, and in the waning light one had the sense the boat moved away. The water moved him just a little eastwards, even so. He stopped his rowing now and then, utterly exhausted, and stared out at the boat, his face expressionless. I won’t get there by looking… nor will it come to me…
And then the water started rising, pushing him towards the Aleluya.
‘Who understands this river?’ he said. His whisper was touched with gratitude.
He couldn’t feel his thigh, nor his shoulder, nor his stomach, just an infinite fatigue. There it was, his body, and perhaps already dead, and something very small in him was beating very weakly on the far side of a tender wall of silence.