In the Beginning Was the Sea

27

IN FEBRUARY, they had a visit from Guillermo, a cousin of whom J. was very fond. A chubby man of about twenty-five, J. thought of Guillermo as the embodiment of energy without intellect. He was a boorish lout who could eat three pounds of fried pork at a single sitting. Strangely, his greed and his gluttony were his greatest charms; he ate with a sort of intense pleasure that originated deep in his gut and arrived at his brain only with some difficultly. He had a keen sense of the comical — he was very observant — and would roar with laughter, baring dazzling white teeth with not a single filling. He had those dark, soulful eyes and long lashes that certain women found attractive.

“Fine mango tree!” were his first words as he stepped onto the veranda. He had arrived at noon while Elena and J. were having lunch. Mercedes fried more fish and Guillermo ate with painstaking relish, sucking out the eyes, pulling the heads apart to gnaw on the pieces, piling the bones up on the side of his plate. Grease trickled down his chin and his fingers as he rhapsodized about the food. There was a gently mocking twinkle in J.’s eyes as he watched Guillermo eat.

After a siesta, Guillermo pulled on a pair of shorts and went for a swim. When he came back, he was about to ask about the fence but J. made it clear he was not to raise the subject. “Best never to mention that fucking fence,” he explained later. “The little woman goes apeshit.” Guillermo felt that Elena had every reason to want to swim in private. “A pretty thing like that, guys are bound to want a taste,” he thought. “Right there on the hot sand.”

That afternoon, the three of them sat down at the dining table to drink. Guillermo had a particularly colourful way of speaking; he told them he had just taken up a job with a company named Bananos de Colombia who had posted him to a village full of starving people that smelt like an open sewer. The company had provided him with accommodation. “The fucking house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and hot and cold running mosquitoes.” The village was on the road between Turbo and Medellín and J. realized he would have somewhere to stay if he wanted to make the trip in two stages.

At six o’clock, already slightly drunk, all three went off to see the stud bull mount a cow that one of the neighbours had brought. Guillermo, clearly aroused by this startling display of copulation, stared surreptitiously at Elena’s cleavage on the way back. They carried on drinking until dawn.

A few hours later they were woken by Gilberto, who told them Salomón was on his deathbed. J. felt a sudden wrenching terror in his stomach and ran to the outhouse to vomit.

Salomón had got up at dawn to work in the forest. Though he had been carrying a machete when he felt the snake bite into his calf, in his panic he did not even think to draw the blade. With the snake still hanging from his leg like a whip, the man stumbled out of the woods, tripped and accidentally buried the machete in his stomach. He was delirious by the time he was found; his face was blue and already he smelt of rotting flesh.

When J. and Guillermo arrived at Salomón’s cabin, they found him dead. There were four candles on the ground, one at each corner of the long table on which the corpse — grotesquely swollen and purplish — was laid out. J. did not want to get too close to the body, but Guillermo, whose fascination with death was equalled only by his obsession with food, watched as Don Eduardo embalmed the corpse.

Having embraced Doña Rosa, J. headed back to the finca. Since they were all in shock, they sat on the veranda and drank. That night, J. dreamt Salomón had come into his room and was walking towards the bed. In the middle of the night, he woke up screaming in terror just as the dead man was about to speak. Elena calmed him, rocking him like a baby until he fell asleep again, his head resting on her breasts.

Two days later, after he had witnessed the lurid burial rites, Guillermo left, taking a bag of ripe mangoes and several kilos of guagua meat bought from the village. “If I don’t leave soon, those two will turn me into an alcoholic,” he thought as he watched the coastline recede.

J. was sorry to see him go.