Tomás Gonzáles - In the Beginning Was the Sea

“It’s him,” he said.

Affable and sober for once, Julito arrived with his assistant. Elena was taking only a single suitcase, having decided to leave behind the sewing machine, partly because she wanted to believe that this separation was temporary and partly because she did not want to travel with something so cumbersome.

She could not know that she would never see J. again.

The boat put out to sea and moved away, gradually getting smaller until it finally disappeared into the green. J. took off his sandals and walked along the beach. He went to the little cove where Elena used to swim and sat on a tree trunk staring at the water. There was no sign now that there had ever been a fence, nor the slightest indication that here Elena had been enfolded and suffused by the tropical sun. J. was reminded of the painting hanging in the bedroom of a woman offering herself to the waves, to the sunlight. He thought about the hard kernel of truth hidden in such artless paintings, just like the love that lived on, beyond all doubt, beyond death itself, in the hackneyed lyrics of a bolero . For some vague reason, he thought back to the time when he considered a pretentious critic at some literary magazine more truthful, more important than a taxi driver and his family washing their car and bathing in a cold, rocky stream.

“You’re on your own now, hermano ,” he thought, feeling a faint twinge in his belly.

“Sorrow,” he said softly.

It had come. He had known it would.

HE COULD NOT bring himself to sleep in the house that night. He went to the village where he chatted for a while with Doña Rosa and then on to Gilberto’s house where he asked if he could spend the night. He slept fitfully in a hammock, constantly waking up thinking about Elena and desperate for a cigarette.

In the early hours, he headed back to the house where he was greeted by the wailing of the children and a greasy breakfast that left him with terrible indigestion. With a burning pain in his chest, he went into the shop and began going through the accounts. He was aware they had been offering too much credit, but had not realized quite how much. The loggers’ credit amounted to more — much more — than he owed in salary. “Enough of this bullshit,” he thought. “No more credit for those thieving bastards.”

In the late afternoon, he watched Octavio, grey-haired, taciturn, muscular, come back from overseeing the logging. They had a few glasses of aguardiente on the veranda and talked about the issue of credit. Or rather, J. outlined the problem and the old man, in a few brief words, suggested that he be allowed to take over the shop, that he knew how to deal with such people. J. did not know what to say and Octavio did not press him for an answer. For a while they sat in silence, drinking. Finally J. handed him the credit book and told him he could deal with the outstanding payments, but J. would continue to manage the shop. Octavio took the book without a word, drank two more shots and then headed off to bed.

Two days after Elena’s departure, the skies grew dark and the rains began again. J. spent the whole day taking down bags of sugar from the shelves, selling individual cigarettes in exchange for tattered, sickly smelling banknotes disintegrating from use and from the sea air. Everywhere, he could feel Elena’s presence but he also felt the relief brought by her absence. Once, stumbling upon a dress of hers, he buried his face in the fabric trying to capture some trace of her.

Octavio had a no-nonsense, almost brutal approach to debt collecting. He made sweeping deductions from the workmen’s earnings. J. heard rumours that there had been a bitter row with one of the lumbermen but the old man had clearly prevailed because one morning the workmen showed up en masse and begged J. — there were no demands, no threats — to recover the debt in three or four instalments, since deducting it as a lump sum left them without money for food. J. promised to speak to Octavio and see what he could do.

The old man laid out the matter in bald terms: if J. wanted him to manage the workmen, he had to be allowed a free hand. As he understood it, he had been asked to recover the debts, which he was doing; the battle was already won and there could be no going back, and he would leave the finca rather than back down, since to do so would irreparably weaken his authority and make it impossible to manage the workmen.

“Besides, people like that don’t die of starvation so easy, Don J.” he said by way of conclusion. “You take my word for it.”

Once again Octavio’s manner took J. by surprise, leading him to miss the last opportunity he would have to rid himself of this individual without any risk. For a split second, he considered telling the man to leave, then he thought about how well things were going with the timber business, how badly off he was for money and how useful it would be to recover all his debts at one fell swoop, since he himself owed a considerable sum to his suppliers.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Octavio,” he said. “You collect the debts on the list I gave you. As for any future credit, I’ll make the decisions and deal with it myself. If there are any specific cases where you feel it’s possible to take payment in, let’s say, three instalments, then come to me and I’ll approve it. What do you say?”

The old man stared at him for a long moment.

“I have to shoe the grey mare,” he said finally and walked away without another word.

So the days passed, slow and bleak. Now and then, the sun glimmered on the sea, on the trees, warming J.’s heart a little only for the distant rumble of thunder heralding more rain to start up again. For want of companionship, J. went back to writing his book, recording incidents in the usual minute detail: he would have to keep the current estate manager until someone better appeared (Gilberto had gone to work for Don Carlos and was very happy there); that he was sick and tired of winter dragging on; that the timber business was bringing in more money than ever, but not enough for him to be able to pay Ramiro what he owed; that Ramiro had called by to collect the overdue interest and J. had fobbed him off as best he could; that Don Eduardo—“who tends to bang on about his God, but is completely trustworthy”—had brought coconuts and pineapples; that one of the loggers had been badly injured felling a tree and had to be taken to hospital in Turbo. “Things don’t look good,” he concluded. “He probably won’t pull through.”

The solitude meant that he went back to drinking too much. He would drink alone in the shop while reading one of his books — now sodden and swollen from the humid air — listening to Octavio’s children bawling. When drunk, he would write long, rambling letters to Elena telling her in explicit detail what he would do when they were next in bed together, how much he missed her and how happy he was that she had finally left him in peace. The following day, he would rip up the letter without reading it.

He could no longer visit Juan’s wife because, for some mysterious reason, the grocer no longer set foot outside the village, and so J. found himself gripped by a dark inchoate desire that left him breathless as he watched the village girls walking along the beach. He had no choice but to leave Octavio in charge of the finca and go to Turbo, not because he needed to accompany the timber consignment — something Octavio could do just as easily — but so that he could visit the brothel. He went with Julito, who was not one to pass up the opportunity for a good time, and frittered away almost every peso he had been paid from the timber on booze, buying drinks for anyone and everyone who cared to join them. The drinking session carried on into the next day, during which the two men were joined by various other boatmen. It was a quiet, relaxed session but one that, for J. at least, was also a little melancholy.