Boga shook his head, unable to decide.
‘That scumbag always has some brilliant scheme on the go. Remember the otter farm?’
‘They say he ripped off half the country.’ This, from the second patient, came muttered in a thin, cracked voice.
‘Not me.’
‘You’re one of the other half then…’
‘And that business of the Co-op…’
‘Ah! A cracking piece of fiction that was…’
‘It was indeed, yes…’
‘What a splendid chap! Ha, ha!’
‘A son of a bitch, more like.’
And the voices gathered life on either side, like distant blinking beacons on a night out on your own, and he listened to them in a way, but only to the sound, to the sighing that they made, not even thinking what the words were, and much less what they meant, absorbed by these two faces, a pair of trembling smudges in the half-light of the room. The first voice was embittered, crushed into itself. The second a little shout, a sterile sound in fact, something odd and set apart that came from just in front of the shrunken face now fighting with the shadows.
‘There are a lot inland who get rich with that business.’
‘Inland’s full of idiots… but here… when did it ever happen here?’
‘Don’t you believe it…’
‘Come on! Everyone’s a smart-arse here…’
‘There’s always one who takes them for a ride…’
‘There are plenty of men shrewder than Fat Soriano.’
‘The man’s a real expert.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘An expert.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Do I think what?’
‘That he’s an expert.’
‘But what did I just say? Ha, ha! You’re on another planet. Are you feeling all right?’
‘Of course I’m feeling all right! Better by the minute.’
‘Oh, yeah!’
‘I’ll be out of here any day now, rattling my bones about. Didn’t you hear the nun?’
‘I wasn’t listening to the nun.’
‘Any day now…’
And the voices sounded fainter all the time, and grew more distant, like the whisper of the heavy sea on a sandbank.
The same thing had happened every time. Every time he’d tried to have a talk with the old man.
He crossed onto the other bank just two days after this. The men with the net were back, and that was when he met them, in the middle of the river.
‘Hi there!’
‘Hi!’
They came from time to time, always busy and hurrying.
He crossed behind their head rope.
They turn up here today, tomorrow over there. As if they sprung up from the river. They had a certain shiftiness, an air of something volatile. He didn’t recall their faces when he saw them, in all truth. All he could remember was the shadows of the men and the gentle curve of the head rope. He saw them on the river and his feeling was of worry and nostalgia.
‘Are you on some fish?’ he said as he was passing.
‘Nothing worth the trouble…’
‘There’s less and less here now…’
‘For some time now on this part…’
‘The nets of the fish-oil plant let nothing through at all.’
‘It’s not just that in any case… it’s not as if they’re close.’
‘It’s what I hear people say.’
‘But all fish have their good and bad patches…’
Boga lit a cigarette and then, for the first time, he looked into their faces. They were toughened and inscrutable, moulded by the harshness of the winters. Their eyes looked rather dazzled, blind even.
‘What happened with the silverside?’
‘We’ve nothing to complain of there… this time we tried right next to Baldissera’s hull, searching out the harder sandy beaches. It’s a pretty decent place to drop a paternoster line…’
‘So they say…’
‘Then we took the trammels to the mouth of the Guazú, all the way beyond Martín García. There you find the Gran Paraná.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘You’ve never been up there?’
‘Not to fish, no.’
‘There’s not much for a rod, in truth… there’s isn’t a bit of shelter for a craft in all those places… only drift fishing, and then in decent weather…’
‘I see…’
‘Nothing’s for sure, of course… the silverside have their ways, like all these little fellas…’
‘As everybody says…’
‘To begin with, they don’t bite in the same way everywhere… the Paraná silverside has a bite that’s distinctive… it takes the line off one way first, away against the current, and then it sinks the float. You have to rod the other way.’ He gave a demonstration. His speech was slow and satisfied. ‘A bite on open water, far out from the shore, isn’t always equal… you’re not sure if it’s silverside, or bucktooth, or the sea bream…’
One of the men was following the head rope back towards them in another boat, close in to the shore. The fisherman had stopped his talk, and watched the man, annoyed. The water now rushed powerfully out towards the river mouth.
The high points of the sandbank had begun to break the surface.
‘At the start, you find the best bites happen at dawn. In the middle of the season, it’s best at night. In the spring, it’s as at the start.’
They heard the squeal of rowlocks coming on in their direction, getting louder.
‘Of course, it all depends… if it’s a cloudy afternoon, and cold, and then the south-east wind lifts and the river rises slowly, that’s when the silverside are there…’
‘It’s what happens with the tararira…’
‘They’re woken by cool water…’
‘I’ve seen it in late afternoon… the water rising evenly…’
The men had seen the lines. Sometimes just the lines and at other times him setting them.
‘The time is getting close for going upstream, to the north.’ The man had said it to himself.
Boga looked at him awhile.
‘That’s what I was thinking…’
‘The dorado are upriver.’
It seemed as if he spoke of things that waited far away. He looked into the man’s face, as if trying to read it.
‘Anyway, it’s not as if you have to go so far,’ he said, with just a hint of bitterness.
‘No, of course you don’t… there are those who are quite satisfied to stay at Punta Temor.’
‘That’s what I’m saying… where the Felicaria joins the Aguaje del Durazno.’
‘All along the sandbank is a good place for manduví and dorado… in their season… come in from the Paycarabí, you’ll find a spot to anchor, and well sheltered too…’
‘I’ve done it in a rowing boat and coming from the Sueco, along that very sandbank.’
‘It’s all good fishing there… where all those rivers drain into the Bajo del Temor… everyone agrees on that…’
‘Punta Morán, most of all…’
‘No doubt…’
The man stopped for a moment. It seemed as if he studied something far out in the distance, away above his shoulder.
‘Even so, all of this is nothing in comparison with going to the rapids of the Upper Paraná…’
‘I’ve heard some talk of that,’ Boga said in spun-out words, in his whisper of a voice.
‘Itatí, the Jupiter Strait, the shoals at Mboi-Mbusú, the Itá-Cuá Strait, the Corpus Falls, Apipé, the shoals at Paranay…’
The voice was growing distant. The sound of all these names in the spring, with summer close.
The other boat was near them.
‘What is it?’ called the man as if a bit annoyed.
‘See you then!’
‘See you!’
He turned the boat towards the other bank and set to row. He listened to the voices, close at first, then far off, blown on by the wind.
The old man died exactly when the summer came along. As if he’d been delaying it, waiting for this moment. Many things then happened, decisive in their way, and important even though they’d go unnoticed.