Tomás Gonzáles - In the Beginning Was the Sea

J.’S WORRIES about the livestock were short-lived; when his loan finally fell due, he had no choice but to sell the herd. One evening, during a heavy downpour, he sat out on the veranda with a bottle of aguardiente and watched as the cattle were led away. Doctor Penagos’s estate manager had already given him a cheque that J. had slipped into his shirt pocket without so much as a glance. The cowhands noisily began the roundup and, once the cattle had been corralled, the estate manager counted them while J. stared impassively at the sea. Finally, J. watched as they passed, stumbling and lowing in the rain. When the estate manager, drenched to the bone, came up to the veranda to say goodbye, J. offered him a shot of aguardiente .

It was a long, dark winter. Perhaps it was because of the rainy season, perhaps because he had had to sell the livestock that J. increasingly retreated into silence. He now drank almost every day and the quarrels with Elena became more frequent. She had also begun to drink too much, perhaps to blot out the insufferable rain. When drunk, their arguments turned vicious, almost murderous. Late into the night, Gilberto and Mercedes would hear them screaming abuse and sometimes hitting each other. Elena knew that they always sided with J., that they considered her no wife for such a noble, generous man. She waged a merciless war of attrition against them, against the whole village, against life itself perhaps. Battle commenced from the moment she woke up and, in one form or another, in words or in silence, it raged all day long. To get away from her, J. invented pretexts for going to Turbo, where by now in the bars and the brothels he was famous for his charm and his ability to hold his liquor. From time to time, he would spend a night in the village or spend the day working in the forest with the labourers. There were rumours that he had several mistresses, one of whom, Elena had heard from a reliable source, was the wife of Juan, the grocer.

For J., sleeping with Juan’s wife was like sinking into a pleasurable swamp, a bottomless morass of oblivion and death. She was an abysmally stupid and sensual woman, a warm mass of listless, voluptuous flesh. J. never knew, nor did he care, whether Juan found out. Recklessly, taking little precaution, he would simply wait until Juan left the village — the grocer made frequent trips to Turbo — before slipping into the brimstone bed of this buxom woman. Sometimes when he had been drinking for days on end, he could not even tell whether it was real, whether he was burying his head between breasts so huge they spilt out past his chin, almost suffocating him, or whether he was sinking into the bog of some dark nightmare. Often he would leave Juan’s house in the early hours and drink as he walked back along the forest path leading to the finca . The overgrown trail was dark and filled with ominous noises and yet he enjoyed these drunken rambles through the forest (“forest, little forest, fucking forest”), stumbling, grabbing hold of anything in the darkness to stop himself from falling, roaring with laughter — a clear, bright, timeless laugh that echoed endlessly through the woods — tumbling down hills, getting covered in mud and suffering scratches and minor bumps that later blossomed into bruises. Some nights he would fall asleep on the beach to be woken by the dawn light and the trilling of birds and sometimes, perhaps to postpone the inevitable encounter with Elena, or perhaps because in the morning light he felt like another drink, here among the birds, staring at his islands, listening to the crashing waves, he would take a long swig from his bottle and, drunk again, would stumble on, as in a dream, to a crumbling mansion where, curiously amused and aloof, he would laugh his clear, high laugh as some strange woman screamed abuse at him.

When, finally, he emerged from one of his four- or five-day drinking bouts, a warning bell would tell him to get his life in order, something J. found easier than might be imagined. He would go back to managing the finca , to accurately adding and subtracting in his ledgers; he would make sure he was eating properly and would do everything possible to patch up his increasingly precarious relationship with Elena. The endless cycle of light and shadows felt akin to sailing rudderless across uncharted seas and — at least when drunk — J. felt that each time he washed ashore he found himself more alone, more vulnerable, more free.

AND SO by the time of the incident with the ring, not only did J. no longer care about Elena but — being in the middle of a drunken binge — he did not even care what she did with the shotgun. Besides, he slept through the incident and only found out what had happened when it was all over. He was also aware that although she might not go right now — Elena was a proud woman — it was inevitable that she would leave.

J. had spent the afternoon on the veranda drinking and staring silently out to sea. At about six o’clock he got up without a word and stumbled to the bedroom where he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. It had been drizzling steadily all day. That night, lightning split the skies, the rain grew heavier, the house was caught in the eye of a storm. Elena, who had been dreaming she could hear screaming and sobbing, was brutally woken by a thunderbolt so close it seemed to strike the very room in which they slept. With a tight knot of sadness in her stomach, she padded into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, then went into the shop and sat at the Singer sewing machine staring out the window. She could see a solid curtain of water sweeping over the sea, violent gusts battering the palm trees, she could dimly make out the blurred, ghostly forms of the islets in the cove. In the darkness of the shop she began to weep, tears coursing down her face, falling from her chin, trickling down her neck. Then, furious at herself, she angrily wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “We’ll have no crying now, hermana ,” she muttered, taking a long, deep breath and squeezing her eyes shut; when she opened them again she noticed the bottle.

She had downed almost half of it by the time she noticed her ring was missing. She had been sitting on the bedroom floor drinking and examining the contents of the wooden box in which she kept her personal possessions. She could still hear the hateful roar of the sea, although it was muffled by the rain hammering on the roof tiles. By the light of a candle, she reread the letters J. had sent, read the letters her brother had sent from prison, pored over her wedding photographs. It was then that she noticed that her ring was missing. She tipped the contents of the box onto the floor and began to hunt for it among the scattered earrings, the bracelets, the photographs. Suddenly panicked, she emptied all the clothes out of the trunk, took the books down from the shelves, dashed back into the shop and moved everything that could be moved. Still there was no sign of the ring. “Those fucking bastards have stolen it,” she thought. She went back to the bedroom and tried to rouse J.

“Wake up,” she said, shaking him roughly, “those bastards have stolen my ring.”

J. opened his eyes and stared sightlessly at her, muttered something unintelligible and fell back like a stone. Stomping to Mercedes’s room, Elena found the woman darning a shirt. Gilberto was out.

“My ring!” she shrieked. And since Mercedes did not seem to understand what was happening, Elena strode over and examined her hands. Mercedes was wearing a ring, but it was her own — a finely wrought gold wedding band, whereas Elena’s ring had a modest diamond in the sort of ornate setting favoured by her ex-husband. Without asking permission, Elena began searching through Mercedes’s belongings, tossing clothes on the floor, ransacking drawers and suitcases. Woken by the racket, the child sleeping in the hammock started crying for his mother, but Mercedes, rooted to the chair, her hands frozen in her lap, could not move.