In the Beginning Was the Sea

15

“TELL J. this is the last extension I can authorize on the loan,” the bank manager informed her.

His name was Fernando and he and J. had been school-friends. Despite his youth, he was almost completely bald and grimly serious. “He might be a first-rate banker,” J. often said, “but he’s a piss-poor excuse for a human being.”

Fernando had a low opinion of Elena. He had heard rumours that she and J. were living in sin, and meeting her only confirmed his preconceptions. He treated her with a mixture of desire and disdain that manifested itself in polite superciliousness, a ready smile and flushed cheeks. Elena felt a visceral loathing for the guy.

Having succeeded in renewing the loan, Elena stayed on in Envigado for a fortnight enjoying the same wild, chaotic life she and J. had shared in the months before they ran away to sea.

The return journey took thirty hours. The road outside Medellín was blocked by an unexpected landslide causing an endless tailback of cars along the mountain path. For several hours while bulldozers shifted the rubble, the passengers whiled away the time sleeping, chatting half-heartedly, eating boiled eggs and getting out to urinate by the roadside.

Elena slept through the night, a long dreamless sleep from which she was woken in the early hours by the roar of the bus starting up again. She woke in a foul mood. “Just my fucking luck to get caught in a landslide, my life is shit,” were her first words to the astonished woman sitting next to her.

As the bus drove through the oil palm plantations, a torrential rainstorm battered the earth. The windscreen wipers flicked frantically, trying in vain to sweep away the cataract coursing down the glass. Headlights on, the bus moved cautiously while the passengers, disoriented by the rain hammering on the bodywork, felt shut in by the condensation gathering on the windows.

The storm eased just before they came to Turbo. By the time the bus pulled into the town square, it had slowed to a steady drizzle that seemed as though it might go on forever. The central plaza was a mire. People carefully picked their way across the streets, hiking up their trousers to avoid the mud.

Elena cursed the vast swamp.

When Julito’s boat finally pulled into the cove, Elena was surprised not to see J. waiting, waving to her from the beach. She felt disappointed. Though it was not raining, the sky was overcast, the sea dark. She found J. lying in bed, reading. His feet were pitted with fungal infection.

“It’s the rubber boots,” he explained, jerking his chin at his feet. “It’s agony, even when I’m sitting down.”

They kissed and she sat on the edge of the bed, staring at his feet.

“You’re in a terrible state,” she said.

The fungal infection presented as white pustules with tiny tentacles that buried into the skin causing terrible itching. When they burrowed beneath the toenails, the pain was unbearable. The pustules had to be carefully removed and the livid, pockmarked skin smeared with a thick layer of fungicidal cream. The treatment was lengthy, painstaking and painful. The pustules removed at night would reappear by morning.

Elena immediately took over caring for him with great success. Being a coward when it came to pain, J. needed someone to force him, almost bully him, into persisting with the treatment. A week after Elena came home J. was still unable to walk, and only after a fortnight did he take his first painful steps along the hallways.