I feared that if we received one blow from that tail we would sink, broken in two. But the ship was proving its good construction. It behaved like a cork, and the old man and I, hanging on to the same mast, my hands grasping his shoulders and his clutching mine, felt our vessel was the plaything of the tumult; but the boat did not fight the waves; rather, it bent to their hostile commands, bobbing over the crests and in this manner keeping us afloat. Pounding foam sprayed over our heads.
I saw the reason for it all. I shouted to the old man to watch the terrible combat an enormous swordfish had launched against the whale, for so close to us was the struggle that we could see every detail of the fish, the jaw filled with ferocious teeth, the hard rough sword struggling to puncture the whale’s thick hump, and it was a marvel to watch how the fish played the side of his rapier, not the point, ripping and tearing the leviathan’s best defense, the tough striated skin, seeking the opportunity to plunge his sword into the wildly rolling eye of the enemy.
I was grateful that the great fish was employing his sword against the whale and not against our ship, for he could have penetrated our bulwarks a handsbreadth deep, as now, quick as a flash, with an unexpected movement he drove his sword deep into the whale’s eye, with the same gusto and to the same depth the male thrusts into the female. I don’t know whether we shouted with surprise as we saw how the fish, precise and quivering, knew instinctively how to press his advantage in the battle, for it seemed to move with greater speed than the whale could comprehend, whether Pedro and I cried out in empathetic pain, whether the terrible moan came from the enormous jaws of the suffering, wounded giant, whether a victory cry could have been born of the silvery vibrations of the fish, or whether the ocean itself, wounded along with its most powerful monster, issued a mournful cry from the deep, a great bellow of reddish foam.
But imagine, Sire: the leviathan leaps for the last time, attempting to free itself from the fatal pike driven deep into its eye; then it sinks, perhaps also for the last time, seeking refuge in the deep, and perhaps relief from pain. And as it submerges it drags in its green wake the fish, trembling now, eager to free itself from its prey, victimized in turn by its victim, and carried by it to the silent kingdom where the whale can wait whole centuries for its wound to heal, cured by the sea’s medicines, salt and iodine, while the fish, formerly master and now slave to its body’s weapon, body and weapon inseparable, will die, its fine brittle skeleton, as silvery as its scales, deposited in crusts of lime and shell on the hide of the great whale. I must rejoice that the arms of man, staff and iron, though propelled by flesh and blood, are not part of our bodies.
There we stood, blindly clinging to the mast, rubbing our soaking shoulders and our hairy necks. When we opened our eyes, we moved apart, made sure the rudder was in good condition, the lines well secured, and that nothing indispensable had been lost. Only then did we look at the sea of blood surrounding us, the red bubbles ascending from the depths capturing the light of the sun, staining it with blood. What awaited us ahead? Drop by drop, our water clock measured the spilled blood of the wounded ocean.
WHIRLPOOL OF THE NIGHT
Life’s everyday habits must be immediately reestablished; routine boredom seems like noble perseverance when marvels — by their abundance — acquire the aspect of custom. Thus the old man and I, when we touched the hair at the back of our necks, realized that neither scissors nor blade had come near our unshorn heads for many days; nor had we consulted a mirror in more than two months.
We moved away from the stern and its red wake; who would have dared seek his image in a mirror of blood? For a better tool, I rummaged through a canvas sack for the glass I’d stolen from some sleeping household, and braced myself to look at my face. I saw where salt and sun had left their marks, white where the indication of a question, joy, or fear was wont to wrinkle the skin, but the color of polished wood where the twofold action of sun and spume had touched my face. There was little beard, a fine, golden fuzz, not at all like the gray, tangled and abundant fleece adorning Pedro, but my mane reached my shoulders. A young lion and a bear, companions in the middle of the ocean. I looked at myself, and as I looked asked my reflection: “Where do you come from? Where have you been and what have you learned that there is no trace of malice in you? Can innocence be the fruit of experience? One day, when you remember, tell me.”
I showed my aged companion his reflection; we laughed, forgetting the fish and the whale. I sat upon a keg while the old man, with shiny tailor’s scissors I’d also stolen on the shore cut my long hair; I put away the glass in my double pocket.
It was growing dusk when we exchanged positions and I performed the barber’s rites, trimming Pedro’s rough and savage neck; neither of us spoke of what truly occupied our thoughts. For more than two months we’d been sailing in a straight line from East to West, and still no sign of land nearby, no bird or vegetation or floating log or strong-scented breeze of oven or of meat or bread or excrement or stagnant water, as Pedro had hoped — nor precipitous waters and atrocious death, as I had feared. The skies were beginning to grow heavy with clouds.
“Hurry,” the old man said. “There’s little light left and a storm is threatening.”
“That’s good,” I replied. “I hope the rain will fill our empty casks.”
I recall our words, and I connect them with the familiar sound of scissors as I trimmed my friend’s neck, because those were the last words and that the last ordinary action we were to say or do. Sire: beneath my feet I felt a growing suction as if a lightning flash were issuing not from the stormy sky but from the tormented waters, a flash passing from my head to my feet; an inverted flash, so it felt to me, striking without the warning the good firmament offers us; that must be so because the sky and land look upon one another openly, while it’s different with the kingdom of the sea, which having taken the veil is to the sky and land what the nun is to man and woman.
This was a flash, I say, born of a profound eruption at the very bottom of the sea; liquid fire. The ship creaked frighteningly; the natural night was doubled in another, cyclonic darkness; the storm burst and I gave thanks that the heavens thundered like our boat, that the clouds descended to hover above the mastheads, that real lightning announced real thunderbolts. Each of us ran to a mast; we trimmed the sails, attempting to furl them and lash them down with rope, but the sudden heaving of the boat prevented us; we rolled across the deck and crashed against the bulwarks. I seized a large iron ring embedded in the starboard rail; we had voyaged, sailed, tacked, settled onto the calm Sargasso, been driven by soft trade winds, agitated by the tumult raised by the whale, but what was happening now was totally different from anything we could ever have foreseen. The wheel was uncontrollable, whirling madly at will; Pedro was helpless, his outstretched hands mercilessly drubbed by the wildly windmilling spokes and knobs. The ship wasn’t sailing, it was whirling, sucked lower and lower, the Devil’s toy, caught in a suction originating in the yawning jaws of the deep.