Tomás Gonzáles - In the Beginning Was the Sea

He left, happy and grateful to the villagers, and arrived back at the house at six o’clock to find Elena waiting for him wearing a beautiful dress.

“Did you put the wine out in the sink to chill?” he asked.

She had, she said, it should be perfect now.

“Go fetch a bottle, hermana . Let’s drink a toast before dinner.”

Mercedes had prepared two large lobsters with lemon and onions and there was a platter of oysters on the half shell which they ate with lemon and salt. From the village, they had been sent two bowls of arroz con camarones .

“An aphrodisiac Christmas,” said J.

The wine was better than they had expected; only the last bottle was a little vinegary but they drank it nonetheless.

When they had finished off the wine, they started on the whisky.

J.’s Christmas presents to her were a blue bikini all the way from Italy and a copy of the Diccionario de la Real Academia . Whenever Elena read, she liked to jot down unfamiliar words on a piece of paper — in her case, there were a lot of unfamiliar words. Later, in a naïve attempt at self-improvement, she would look up the words in a battered old dictionary with missing pages they had picked up somewhere. Elena gave J. a History of Erotic Art with illustrations ranging from Pompeii to Picasso. Months later, one of the police officers involved in the investigation would slip the book surreptitiously into his backpack, and when his wife found it later it ended up being sold to a textile merchant in Turbo who would use it as cheap pornography.

“There’s nothing like sophisticated pornography,” said J.

They spent the evening listening to the strains of vallenato drifting from the village. Just before midnight, Elena and J. launched a huge paper lantern. Since there were only two of them, they had to use fine threads to hold the lantern open while it filled with hot air from the candle. They managed to succeed. The lantern soared and, carried on a gust of wind, drifted over the forest.

“I bet it floats all the way to Panama,” said J.

Until about 3 a.m., J. remained calm, but clearly the whisky did not agree with them and both he and Elena foundered. They had a terrible argument, though neither of them quite understood what triggered it. It had clearly been a vicious quarrel because the following morning Elena had a black eye and bruises on her thighs and J. had long, deep gouges across his face. The books had been pulled down from the shelves and the shotgun was under the bed; one barrel had been fired.

“If we carry on like this, we might really hurt each other,” said Elena.

The words sounded strange to J.’s ears, but he sensed that she was right. Both of them felt ashamed and afraid.

December 25 was a traumatic day. They racked their brains trying to remember, but to no avail. By the morning of the 26th, after a night spent tossing and turning, J. felt better.

“Let’s not screw up our lives over this,” he said. “If neither of us can remember, then clearly we weren’t ourselves.”

AFTER CHRISTMAS, the loggers were once again idle and intractable. They were cutting less timber and doing it badly, something that infuriated J. The due date for the loan was looming yet again and he had not managed to save a single peso towards paying it off.

Once, he made an unannounced inspection while the loggers were working in an area he rarely visited since it was a long, steep climb. He stumbled onto a veritable bloodbath. The labourers had been cutting down trees so small they would hardly yield a single plank of wood; they were working from the wrong side so that, as they fell, the trees uprooted smaller saplings; the timber was crudely sawn, many planks were too short, others too long…

“I will not be paying a single peso for this wood,” said J.

The men looked at each other and were silent for a moment. Then, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground and never raising his voice, one of them began to protest. J. was convinced he could see the man smiling. After a moment, the other men joined in: there was nothing wrong with the timber, they insisted, J. did not know what he was talking about; they went on to rant about the high prices in the shop, about their earnings, about the quality of the food, the accommodation.

Keeping his temper, J. dealt with their complaints as best he could. He could be extremely persuasive when he needed to be. Besides, the loggers knew as well as he did that their working conditions here were much better than they would find anywhere else. Still the men tried to bargain over the timber J. had dismissed as badly cut.

“I will not pay for miscut lumber. And I’m not going to let you guys bankrupt this finca with shitty second-rate work.”

There was another howl of protest, voices were raised, someone muttered the word “robbery”.

J. stood his ground: he could not yield on this point without risking the whole venture. When one of the loggers became aggressive — a surly, broad-shouldered man named Maximiliano, who stood almost two metres tall — J., indignant and a little afraid, informed him that his services were no longer required and told him he could collect what was due to him that afternoon. At first, the astonished Maximiliano was dumbstruck; after a moment he growled that J. deserved to be hacked to pieces with a machete. He drew his blade and, without looking at J., buried it in a tree trunk. J. turned his back, insisting again that he would not pay for miscut timber, and stormed off. When he had gone some distance, he took the bottle from his backpack and gulped down two long swigs.

“You did the right thing,” Elena said when he told her what had happened. “You can’t let these people walk all over you.”

Late that afternoon, Maximiliano showed up at the house alone and much calmer. He tried to persuade J. not to fire him, but, while J. agreed to give him a good reference, he said that he could not take him back. Maximiliano took his money without a word.

That night the labourers got drunk. Someone heard them in the early hours, ominously banging the blades of their machetes against the floor and spluttering threats against J. Two days later, Doña Rosa warned him: “You need to be careful, these men are bad men.”

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.”