In the Beginning Was the Sea

6

THE HOUSE was ready now: spotless, immaculate, and empty. The sewing machine stood uselessly in one of the rooms. It had been seriously damaged in the fall and its presence was more symbolic than anything else. “Leave it, when we’re next in Medellín we’ll get a whole new pedal drive for it,” J. said, more to placate Elena than because he genuinely thought it was important.

Their bedroom — which had reeked of bleach and insecticide for a whole week — was now furnished with two cot beds, a wardrobe containing their clothes and the trunk full of books. A landscape painted by Elena’s brother hung on one wall, a sunset over the Andes as seen from his prison cell in Ladera, and on another was an oil painting of a woman offering herself to the sea. Two years earlier, during a drunken binge, J. had burnt his reproductions of Modigliani, Picasso and Klee and since then had rejected the notion of “good taste”, and gradually transformed his apartment in Envigado into a gallery of bad art, crude daubs depicting everyday life.

The other bedroom, where they would later open up the shop and where, later still, the corpse would be bathed, was completely empty. J. avoided going into the room since the very emptiness brought on a feeling of vertigo. Later, abhorring the vacuum, he hung a hammock in the room that no one ever used.

“The guest room,” Elena called it.

J. now spent all day in shorts and sandals. He had made an inventory of the tools — he had not found much — and, accompanied by Gilberto, he had inspected the byres. Only then did he discover that, of the thirty-five head of cattle he had bought with the finca, two were dead and three had disappeared. The remainder were scrawny and infested with wood ticks. The cowsheds were crying out to be cleaned, the fences in the paddocks needed to be mended if they were to avoid more cattle straying. He asked Gilberto to repair the fences, clean out the byres and delouse the cattle.

But Gilberto’s first task was to build a bed. For this, he used thick, rough-hewn boards he found under the veranda. The planks were long and J. said: “Make it two metres by two, Gilberto.”

The man opened his eyes wide. In all his life he had never heard of a bed of such a size.

The resulting bed was bigger than king-size and sturdy as a high altar. It looked like a raft with a headboard and they had to buy four single mattresses, two to cover the space and two more for height. It was not as comfortable as they had hoped since the only mattresses they could find in Turbo were hard and lumpy, but even so the bed looked impressive. The two cot beds they had slept in until the mattresses arrived looked like flimsy sailboats next to this transatlantic liner.

“Well, it’s not exactly attractive,” said J., “but it’s sturdy as hell.”

When he had finished, Gilberto used the leftover timber to build a bookcase as large, sturdy and rustic as the bed. J. took great pleasure arranging his well-thumbed books. The complete works of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Lagerkvist, Camus and Neruda, the volumes about animal husbandry, coconut farming, Bertolt Brecht, tropical fruit trees, Hermann Hesse, Hegel and many others quietly took up their positions on the shelves, disturbed only by the occasional lizard scuttling across their spines as flocks of parrots flew above the house and barefoot black men with machetes slung over their shoulders walked along the beach, whistling and trailing behind them the faint scent of tobacco. Very occasionally, J. took the time to read a poem or a favourite page after it was dark, lying on the bed with a candlestick balanced on his belly. The dim glow rose and fell with his breath, moths darted through the flame — something J. found faintly disgusting — while outside the waves thundered.