In the Beginning Was the Sea

28

JUST AS he had feared, the timber shipment that J. accompanied to Turbo in mid-February was declared poor quality. The sum paid by the lumber merchants scarcely covered his expenses and he was strongly advised to keep a close eye on the quality of the loggers’ work. Returning to the finca, J. was sullen and unforthcoming. His loan was due in less than two months and he knew that Fernando would not renew it again — in fact, he would ostentatiously refuse. His foul mood led him to ill-treat the loggers, sometimes without reason, and to become distant from them. This was a mistake because, since Maximiliano’s departure, they had once again begun to work well.

He also became infuriated by the cattle; it was as though God — or God knows who — had determined that his herd should never increase in number. Every time a calf was born, a bullock was stolen, a cow was struck by lightning or a heifer disappeared. At first, J. attempted to deal with the problem with his usual calm; later, news that one of the cattle had died could cast a pall over his whole day, and he would become paranoid, imagining some dark conspiracy was at work. At such times, he needed a few drinks to avoid the sudden squalls of fury that frequently led him to spew abuse at Elena, Gilberto, or indeed anyone who crossed his path.

Some months earlier, J. had come back from Medellín with a German shepherd, a pureblood pedigree pup that proved fretful and frustrating. The dog chewed its way through various things including a number of J.’s books, Gilberto’s little transistor radio and several pairs of Elena’s sandals, and so, barely a month after buying it, he decided to give the pup to Salomón, who had a way with animals. When Salomón died, J. reclaimed the dog, now a full-grown bitch with a glossy black coat, but as fretful as ever. It was a curious case of animal madness: the dog yapped constantly, compulsively, she attacked visitors and, whenever J. or Elena came back from somewhere, she would descend on them like a tornado, pawing, burying her snout in their crotches, getting mud on their clothes. The dog was so temperamental they sometimes carried a stick to fend her off. Once, when Don Eduardo came to visit, the dog tried to bite him and J. decided he would have to chain her up, something that simply made her madder still. She barked day and night, got caught up in the chain and howled, often in the dead of night, until someone went down to the beach to disentangle her, and every time she managed to break free, she wrecked the house.

One night, unable to sleep, J. was sitting up worrying about the finca. Outside, the dog barked furiously, choking on her collar as though there was an intruder. Obviously, no one was prowling around the house; the dog could just as easily be barking at a firefly, at a bat, at the moon. Suddenly J. felt a black liquid flooding his brain. In a blind rage, he leapt out of bed and grabbed his rifle. Senseless with rage, he rushed down to the beach where the dog was tethered to a post and, without a second’s thought, fired both barrels into the animal’s head. The gunshots echoed through the forest as the dog fell dead in a heap. Without a word, J. fetched a spade, went to the paddock and began to dig. A few minutes later Gilberto arrived with a shovel and silently set to helping. Elena watched from the veranda for a while, then went back to bed.

Such outbursts, while violent, did not occur often. The finca and its crew were like a ship becalmed with no fixed destination. This did not particularly matter to J. since he had never expected to grow rich here — that, he realized, was impossible — nor did he even expect reason to thrive in this sweltering, tropical climate. In fact, he had come here in order to escape a demeaning form of rationality that was as sterile as crude oil, as social climbing as bitumen. This was why he loathed Elena’s fence; it was a caricature of a caricature, a pitiful example of what human endeavour could achieve. This was why he became so exasperated when the timber was badly cut, because it needlessly compounded one madness — the felling of a tree — and plunged him into an absurd vortex of senselessness and death. When one of the cattle died, he was not troubled by the money it represented, and only slightly by the fact that the finca as a business would not prosper, but simply because he had once dreamt of owning fields filled with healthy livestock, an innocent dream, ultimately, of wanting things to be fruitful and multiply.

Only the seedbeds had fulfilled his expectations. Providence had ushered in a clement summer, and Gilberto had carefully tended to them, ensuring they never lacked water in the dry season. In the late afternoons, usually alone, J. would visit the fields to watch them grow, to see the palm saplings unfurling their fans and the lush green wreathing the branches of the orange trees. With winter now scarcely a month away, their survival seemed assured. And indeed it was; later, when they had been transplanted — not by J. but by another soul — the palm trees grew sturdy and tall, and the orange trees blossomed and bore fruit. Some years later, coconut palms in the area would be devastated by a disease called porroca at which point other people would sow new seeds, watch the saplings grow, wait for them to be ready to be transplanted. Once more the palms would grow straight and true, once more they would bear fruit: coconut palms like these, standing by the sea, swayed by the salt breeze.