Tomás Gonzáles - In the Beginning Was the Sea

“What’s your name?” she asked as she put scraps of rotten canvas and broken plastic into a cardboard box.

“Mercedes,” the woman answered. She smiled but did not say another word.

Armed with a spray can and covering her face with a handkerchief, Elena completed her spring clean by fumigating the rooms with liberal quantities of insecticide.

“Keep spraying the place with poison, and we’ll all wind up thrashing on our backs like roaches,” said J.

Cockroaches scuttled from every corner and fell dead, making a dull thudding sound on the floorboards. Elena swept the dead bugs into a pile and proudly summoned J. so he could see them.

“The Angel of Death is a novice compared to you,” he said.

By the time Elena had finished, there was a mountain of rubbish piled up on the beach. That night, they lit an enormous bonfire.

Since it would take some time for the insecticide to disperse, that night they slept out on the veranda, Elena in a cot bed and J. — hoping to avoid the repulsive twitching cockroaches — in a hammock. Elena quickly fell asleep while J. stayed awake for a while, drinking aguardiente straight from the bottle and watching the embers glow amid the darkness of the beach.

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.

THE MATTRESSES arrived a week after the bed was completed. J. had sent a message to Julito with one of Gilberto’s relatives who was heading for Turbo asking him to buy the mattresses and transport them to the finca . And so one day, in the blazing noonday sun, Julito’s boat puttered into the cove with the boatman sitting swigging rum on top of a huge package encased in plastic while his assistant manned the tiller. This time they came ashore on the beach in front of the house.

When sober, Julito seemed strong and healthy; drunk, he looked feeble and decrepit. He dropped limply from the mountain of mattresses into the sea. Clutching a bottle of aguardiente , he waded towards the shore, staring at the water which came up to his waist. It took him an age to reach them. Having reached the beach and hugged J., he offered him the bottle. “ Mucho gusto, seño ,” he said to Elena, but she did not respond. This time, both Julito and his compadre were wearing trainers, clearly planning to unload their cargo on the rocky stretch of coast.

In the sweltering heat, Gilberto and the assistant carried the mattresses onto the beach. There was no wind. A few birds glided lazily out over the open sea. Julito and J. sat on a tree trunk under one of the palms and while the boatman, in his reedy voice, droned on about his life, J. watched as the mattresses were unloaded, swigging rum from time to time.

By the time they headed back, Julito was fast asleep in the bottom of the boat. As it disappeared over the horizon J., a little dizzy now, climbed the steps to the veranda.

“Did you see that?” said Elena.

“See what, mamita ?”

“This time those idiots landed right in front of the house?”

J. did not want to get into an argument.

“Why don’t we go and try out our new bed?” he said.

“You go try it out by yourself! I’m not going to bed in this heat.”

TWO LEAGUES from the house, on land directly adjoining the finca , there was a little village; an hour’s walk — or fifteen minutes on horseback — was the seaside town of Severá; Turbo was four and a half hours away by boat or half an hour in the little plane that made irregular trips to a small town — one inland rather than on the coast — which was some two hours’ ride from the farm.

J. had been to the village with Don Carlos E. on his first visit, before he bought the finca . He and the old man had walked a little way along the beach before trekking up a hill through sparse woodland where J. saw tall cashew trees hung with wisps of liana, kapok saplings and the stumps of older kapoks that had clearly been huge.