The sea had sewn this beach in pearls, and the sea continued to strew its pearly shells upon the shore where they awaited the dew as one awaits the bridegroom, for they are conceived of the dew and impregnated by the dew, and if the dew is pure the pearls are white, and if the dew is murky, they are dark and shadowy: pearls, daughters of the sea and sky. I had emerged from their cradle and now walked among their coffers, Sire, and I asked myself heatedly whether I was seeing and touching these marvels with the senses I had lost, or through the perceptions of death, and whether when I was resuscitated I would lose them on the spot and see only sands and gull droppings where now I saw great treasures. I raised a large pearl to my mouth; I bit it, almost breaking my teeth. It was very real. Or was it real only in this land of death and dream? It didn’t matter: I told myself that whether this were the prize or the price of death, I happily accepted — reward or final end.
I picked up pearls by the fistfuls and only then did I experience the sadness of death and lament the absence of life. I moaned. The only person who would profit from these riches was one who could remember nothing, either of his life or of his death. I longed to be a living man again, Sire, a man of passions and ambitions, of pride and jealousy, for here was the wherewithal to exact the most passionate revenge against the enemies who had harmed us in life, or to confer the greatest favors upon the coldest and most inaccessible of women — or the warmest and most approachable. Neither the fortress of the warrior, nor the palace of the King, nor the portals of the Church, nor the honor of a Lady, I told myself at that moment, could possibly resist the seduction of the man who owned such opulence.
With outstretched arms, fists filled, I offered the pearls to the land of death. My shining gaze was returned by the veiled and inhospitable stares of the true masters of this beach. Only then did I see them, for their enormous carapaces blended with the color of the jungle behind them. I saw gigantic sea turtles, scattered along the verge where the sand ended and the jungle thicket began. And those sad veiled eyes reminded me of my old friend Pedro, and as I remembered him, I felt that the pearls in my hands grew soft and faded and finally died.
“Old man,” I murmured, “I was the first to set foot on the new world, as you wished it.”
And I threw the pearls back to the pearls. The sea turtles looked at me with suspicious torpor. And at that instant I would have exchanged all the treasures of the beach for the old man’s life.
RETURN TO LIFE
I slept a long time on a bed of pearls. When I awakened, I told myself that time hadn’t moved: the same light, the same warm waves, the eternal sea turtles watching me from that frontier between the beach and the forest. Everything was exactly the same, but I felt that in my sleep I had deeply penetrated the veil of an imaginary night. If this was Paradise it could not accommodate the contrasts and measures of life — night and day, heat and cold. And nevertheless, I was hungry and thirsty. I decided to investigate the shoreline of this recaptured Eden; no doubt my hunger and thirst were of a new order, not physical, and I was confusing the needs of an errant soul with the demands of a nonexistent body. Who would guide me to the water and the fruit of death?
I seemed to remember, from instinct more than any teaching, that upon our arrival at the other shore, someone waited to lead us to our eternal abode. Someone, or something: beast or angel, dog or Devil. Were the drowsing sea tortoises the guardians of death? As I walked toward them another instinct, stronger than memory, for it is called survival, caused me to put my hand to my waist. I felt the tailor’s scissors, secure in the belt of my breeches. The sea turtles’ oily eyelids slowly opened and closed: they were the image of passivity, but as I drew closer I could see what preoccupied them.
They were spawning, Sire; two dozen sea tortoises, flattened beneath verdigris shells crusted with ocean debris like that on the back of the whale, were emptying their slimy eggs into nests hollowed from the sand, but at my approach they became alarmed and began to bury their eggs in the sand, waving their short ribbed flippers, uncertain whether to hide their reptilian heads beneath those enormous shells or extend their scaly, blemished necks in challenge. Hunger commanded; I hazarded the risk. With one foot I attempted to raise one of the turtles, but its weight was excessive, it lay as heavily motionless as a rock. Then I saw the nearby river and decided to slake my thirst while I formulated a plan to move one of the sea turtles from its nest.
I walked toward the river. Its mouth was only a narrow notch in the thicket through which the jungle bled its venom. Where the river met the sea a poisonous sand bar had built up, covered with rotting leaves, reeds and slime, and corpses of the wineskin monster I’d seen dying drifting out to sea. The remains lodged on the sand bar were bits of dark, decaying flesh, and the opaque waters of the river’s mouth were covered with a thick scum of green slime. I splashed this aside and it was as if I had stirred a hornets’ nest; my action seemed to wake a fine cloud of insects from their lethargy; born from the waters or fallen from the sky, they swarmed over my head and hands, seeking out the slight wounds the storm — and the effects of clinging desperately to the ship’s wheel during my deliverance — had left on my fingers and elbows, along with deeper gouges on my knees. As I fought the flies, the insects gorged themselves on my blood, quickly glutted; as I swatted them against my skin, I noticed they were as yellow as the bloom of dyer’s woad.
I fled before that storm of mosquitoes, quickly bathed my body in the sea, and now I did not hesitate. I walked toward the sea turtles as I searched for a receptacle among the seashells on the beach. With one hand I picked up the deepest shell and in the other I firmly clutched my scissors. I approached the turtle farthest from the others; as I drew near she stretched her neck far outside her shell, at the same time hurriedly covering her eggs with sand. I straddled her carapace, grabbed the scoriaceous neck and drove in the scissors to the hilt — for I knew that these beasts have a sac filled with pure water that permits them to live a long time without thirst, like the camels in the desert. I collected the water in the concave shell and, when this was filled, pulled off parts of my clothing in order to catch even more liquid, which I could suck to satisfy my thirst. By the time I held my shirt to the turtle’s neck, only blood ran from the wound, staining it and the sand and the scattered pearls. But I didn’t complain, for the blood of the turtle is as good as water. Thus I quenched my thirst, drinking the water from the shell, then squeezing the blood from the moistened doublet onto my lips; and I had already imagined the savor of the flesh of that ageless beast, said to be as ancient as the ocean and, like it, immortal, when I became aware of the terror — a terror more terrible for being totally silent — of the other turtles that were abandoning their fecund nests in the sand and beginning to disperse across the mother-of-pearl shells toward the protective ocean where they would regain their speed and strength.
I feasted then upon a great banquet of turtle eggs, which are similar to those laid by hens except that those of the sea tortoise are covered only by a thin membrane instead of a shell. And as I was eating I watched the spectacle of that powerful squadron of turtles reentering the sea; and so vast was their company that if a large boat had been in their path, they would have slowed its course. They left behind, for my solace, the flesh of one of their companions and the seed of their children. And a beach stained with blood.