Even at its widest point, the Delta of the Paraná is barely seventy kilometres. But this is only the beginning. Things go well beyond this: 3,282 kilometres along the River Paraná and 1,580 kilometres along the River Uruguay. And it’s not certain that everything ends there.
But then, it makes no sense to try to use this kind of measurement. An aeroplane, a P11 or else a tiny J3, taking off from the San Fernando airfield and heading northwest, sees the Paraná de las Palmas before it’s climbed 400 metres, when it’s still in its ascent, and then could shut its engine off and simply glide to the far side of the Delta. A sloop that leaves the shore in the middle of the morning, set for Punta Morán, in the mouth of the Paraná, does well if it arrives the following day, with all the snags it meets. Unless the wind is really kind, it starts out making long tacks, which will bring it slowly closer, but not so as you’d notice. At noon it sails the river that’s an open sea, the shoreline always visible and probably appearing from a new direction every time. The shore grows ever smaller. It’s a bobbing line, if that. Now it seems the sloop is in the middle of the sea. That it’s heading not towards somewhere, but rather leaving all behind. Sometime in the morning it will stand off Buenos Aires. To starboard all this while, almost to the bow at times, the filmy hedge of buildings has been emerging like a grey ship, its funnels under the constant cloud of smoke that is the city’s authentic sky. After noon, the sloop turns north. Now it sails close-hauled, heading straight into the wind. If things go on the same way it will come to Punta Morán at the end of this enormous tack. For now it’s mid-river. Just like the middle of the sea. When the boat begins to pitch you hear a fleeting cracking noise from underneath the stem. The wind sings in the rigging as if this is what amuses it, and never takes a breather. The sails maintain their curvature and at times they give a shake. This constant, steady pressure makes its way into your blood. Inconclusive points appear, swaying out there in the distance every now and then, and you locate them feverishly on the charts. The effect of seeing a buoy, or a marker out in front of you, is something quite incredible. All of your anxiety is drawn towards that inconclusive point, which takes on so much significance. But if you look too hard it disappears.
Now it’s getting dark. The points begin to wink. There’s something in each glint of light that carries something warmer, even tender. The boat sails in the night, now. The river dark and baleful. It runs towards a buoy that has a white and flashing light. The jet-black silhouette grows large, and hovers like a ghost. You hear the water slipping around its sides as you go by. These buoys are so enormous that they startle you a little. Their light is kind when distant, but once you come up close and see them standing like a rock face, their look is simply dismal.
Even with no buoy in sight, you sense how deep the water is, how crushing. The sloop sails on the channel now, across the Paraná, and the pressure of the current here compels you to correct the drift. Now it is night. The sky seems more inhabited than all this empty solitude with its winkings in the distance. The stars seem low and very close. Sliding south, and slowly. Once across the channel you come up against the sandbanks, the water just a metre deep, and sometimes even less. Best to drop the anchor. Punta Morán will be there when you wake up with the dawn, directly ahead, but still a good way off. With the water on the rise you can sail across the Bajo del Temor.
Yes, this is another kind of time and another kind of measurement. Distances expand and one’s objectives grow further away. When you’re at the halfway point, everything is distant: the point from which you set out, the point of your arrival.
He had with him a kedge anchor, which he’d found at the bottom of the river. Not that he’d thought he would ever use the thing. But as it was still hanging where he’d left it, on a cross-beam that ran underneath the house, it had struck him that the anchor might be of some use after all, when he was on the open sea. So that when the night was falling as he drew towards the island, he didn’t make for land and instead tied the anchor on the rope and dropped it, some way from the shore. He wasn’t absolutely clear why this was what he did, but what really carried weight was that he simply had a preference for sleeping in the boat.
In the last light of the day, he took a paternoster line and baited it and threw it in the river. As far as paternosters went, he wasn’t one for strewing them, nor using many hooks. A single twenty-metre line seemed practical to him, with only four or five hooks, of five-and-a-half size, and a good-sized sinker on the end. He was in the habit of tying this type of line onto the stern shackle, so all he had to do was add the bait and throw it in. It took seconds to gather in, and didn’t slow his progress. He preferred to drag the line if the spot that he was moving to was relatively close, and even when he pulled it in, he threw it back again minutes later with the same bait on the line.
And so, in that last light, he was throwing in the line, and he didn’t need to light the lamp to feel down in the bag and reach for the pork belly and then a piece of sea bread. When he’d eaten, he leaned out on the rail and drank some water from the river. Then he lit a cigarette and looked out at the night, with that faint little blinking somewhere just before his face. And then this brilliant little point drew a longer line, before it sank back in the darkness and left there behind it just the briefest reddish wake.
Boga checked the line and then he slipped down into the bottom of the boat.
In any case, the following day he was forced to land. He’d shipped a lot of water in the little rowing boat. All the things would get too wet, conditions that made the rowing hard. A boat that’s holding water doesn’t only weigh a lot, but it handles very badly and can heel at any movement. It’s a curse in every sense.
He checked the line and felt the drag of something on the end. He decided not to bring it in until he reached the shore. He was looking at the boat, and did so for a good while, without deciding anything. He didn’t know whether to turn the boat or use the tin to empty it. He wasn’t very keen on having to take out all the things. He chose the latter course. But first he pulled the line in. He had two yellow catfish and a patí weighing a kilo. Thinking better about it all, it made a lot more sense to make a fire here and eat, and then go on his way. The idea perked him up a bit and so he set to empty all his things out of the boat. When he’d nearly finished, he went to gather branches and then he lit the fire. He filled the kettle half-full and he set it on the fire. He stuck two forked sticks in the ground and spanned them with a green branch, on which he hung the kettle.
While the water boiled, he finished emptying the boat. Then he drank some maté. He lay down on the beach and enjoyed the murmur of the sand, and the wind from the south-east that cleaved the air around his face.
He finished with the maté and set to clean the fish. If you haven’t got the mood for it, there’s nothing more disagreeable than having to clean a fish. He kept one of the catfish, putting it to one side, for later use as bait. Then he grilled the other one with the patí. In fact he’d cleaned them well. He sprinkled the fillets with boiling water to get rid of all the odour, salted them and pierced them with a stick to hold them open on the grill.