In the Beginning Was the Sea

29

J.’S WORRIES about the livestock were short-lived; when his loan finally fell due, he had no choice but to sell the herd. One evening, during a heavy downpour, he sat out on the veranda with a bottle of aguardiente and watched as the cattle were led away. Doctor Penagos’s estate manager had already given him a cheque that J. had slipped into his shirt pocket without so much as a glance. The cowhands noisily began the roundup and, once the cattle had been corralled, the estate manager counted them while J. stared impassively at the sea. Finally, J. watched as they passed, stumbling and lowing in the rain. When the estate manager, drenched to the bone, came up to the veranda to say goodbye, J. offered him a shot of aguardiente.

It was a long, dark winter. Perhaps it was because of the rainy season, perhaps because he had had to sell the livestock that J. increasingly retreated into silence. He now drank almost every day and the quarrels with Elena became more frequent. She had also begun to drink too much, perhaps to blot out the insufferable rain. When drunk, their arguments turned vicious, almost murderous. Late into the night, Gilberto and Mercedes would hear them screaming abuse and sometimes hitting each other. Elena knew that they always sided with J., that they considered her no wife for such a noble, generous man. She waged a merciless war of attrition against them, against the whole village, against life itself perhaps. Battle commenced from the moment she woke up and, in one form or another, in words or in silence, it raged all day long. To get away from her, J. invented pretexts for going to Turbo, where by now in the bars and the brothels he was famous for his charm and his ability to hold his liquor. From time to time, he would spend a night in the village or spend the day working in the forest with the labourers. There were rumours that he had several mistresses, one of whom, Elena had heard from a reliable source, was the wife of Juan, the grocer.

For J., sleeping with Juan’s wife was like sinking into a pleasurable swamp, a bottomless morass of oblivion and death. She was an abysmally stupid and sensual woman, a warm mass of listless, voluptuous flesh. J. never knew, nor did he care, whether Juan found out. Recklessly, taking little precaution, he would simply wait until Juan left the village — the grocer made frequent trips to Turbo — before slipping into the brimstone bed of this buxom woman. Sometimes when he had been drinking for days on end, he could not even tell whether it was real, whether he was burying his head between breasts so huge they spilt out past his chin, almost suffocating him, or whether he was sinking into the bog of some dark nightmare. Often he would leave Juan’s house in the early hours and drink as he walked back along the forest path leading to the finca. The overgrown trail was dark and filled with ominous noises and yet he enjoyed these drunken rambles through the forest (“forest, little forest, fucking forest”), stumbling, grabbing hold of anything in the darkness to stop himself from falling, roaring with laughter — a clear, bright, timeless laugh that echoed endlessly through the woods — tumbling down hills, getting covered in mud and suffering scratches and minor bumps that later blossomed into bruises. Some nights he would fall asleep on the beach to be woken by the dawn light and the trilling of birds and sometimes, perhaps to postpone the inevitable encounter with Elena, or perhaps because in the morning light he felt like another drink, here among the birds, staring at his islands, listening to the crashing waves, he would take a long swig from his bottle and, drunk again, would stumble on, as in a dream, to a crumbling mansion where, curiously amused and aloof, he would laugh his clear, high laugh as some strange woman screamed abuse at him.

When, finally, he emerged from one of his four- or five-day drinking bouts, a warning bell would tell him to get his life in order, something J. found easier than might be imagined. He would go back to managing the finca, to accurately adding and subtracting in his ledgers; he would make sure he was eating properly and would do everything possible to patch up his increasingly precarious relationship with Elena. The endless cycle of light and shadows felt akin to sailing rudderless across uncharted seas and — at least when drunk — J. felt that each time he washed ashore he found himself more alone, more vulnerable, more free.