In the Beginning Was the Sea (3 page)

T
HE 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.

T
HE 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.”

T
WO 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.

“Is the hunting good around here, Don Carlos?”

“Agoutis, armadillos, a few wild turkeys,” said the old man, “though they’re all dying out… or rather we’re killing them off.”

Suddenly they came to a clearing in the woods and saw about a dozen shacks with cob walls and palm-thatched roofs. The dirt track that also served as the village square
was impeccably swept. At the end of the path was an orange grove which looked extraordinarily verdant and cool.

As they strolled through the village, faces appeared from windows. People sitting on their porches called, “
Salud
, Don Carlos!” and he greeted each of them by name. The old man had already mentioned the village: it was inhabited by a single family and every time a couple married they were apportioned a plot of land and the villagers helped build a new house; everyone was ruled by the moral authority of the grandmother.

Her house was located at the centre of the village.

“
Salud
, Doña Rosa,” said Don Carlos as they came to the house.

“Come in,” called a faint voice from inside.

The house consisted of two rooms and a kitchen; the rooms were at the front while at the rear there was a lean-to kitchen. The first thing J. noticed as they entered was a plaster statue of the Virgin almost three feet tall which had pride of place on a low table and was lit by a votive candle. Next to it was a large, pale-green plastic radio. Doña Rosa sat enthroned in a red wicker chair. In the next room, he could dimly make out a mosquito net. The living room was cool and hazy and smelt of smoke.

The old woman apologized for not getting up to greet them, explaining that her rheumatism always played up in cold weather. She gestured for them to sit in two rough-hewn wooden chairs that tipped backwards alarmingly like some
prehistoric imitation of a rocking chair. Sitting in his anti-rocking chair, J. found himself facing a back door which led out into a yard where pigs and chickens scrabbled about under a grove of mango trees. On the ground were several windfalls already gnawed by the pigs.

Doña Rosa and J. took to each other immediately. When Don Carlos explained who J. was and why he had come, the old woman stared at him with eyes that saw much more than she pretended and solemnly told him that the villagers would be at his service. Then she asked Don Carlos whether he was thinking of leaving the area.

“J. has bought one of my
fincas
, but I’m keeping the other,” said Don Carlos. “You know I could never leave this place, Rosita.”

The old woman looked pleased. She also looked happy when J. mentioned that he and his wife were planning to live on the
finca
.

“When you come, call by and visit this old woman,” she said.

Some days after they arrived, J. suggested to Elena that they visit Doña Rosa. The narrow path leading to the village seemed much less wild and overgrown. “I won’t let anyone cut down another kapok tree on this farm,” he said as they passed several large fresh stumps. In the village, they were greeted as before. Elena watched black faces appear at the windows and could feel the eyes of children staring at her through chinks in the walls. Outside Doña Rosita’s house,
three naked youngsters were dragging along matchboxes tied together with thread.
“Holaaaa!”
people called when J. greeted them.

This time, the old woman did not seem ill or infirm. She served them black coffee in floral cups of delicate bone china that starkly contrasted with the ceiling of palm fronds, the smoke belching from the kitchen and the beaten earth floor.

Doña Rosita was not particularly gracious towards Elena—she served the first cup of coffee to J.—although she was friendly and talkative. She had twelve children, she told them, sixty grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Eight of her children were still living in the village—four girls and four boys, all but one of them married—while her four other daughters had been taken by their husbands to live elsewhere. She told them that she had been married four times and had buried four husbands. His previous visit had left J. with the impression of a weak, crippled woman; now he saw her as she truly was: a forceful woman trapped in a tiny body, wizened by the years.

When they took their leave, the old woman addressed Elena as “
seño
” rather than Doña Elena though she had pointedly referred to Don Carlos’s wife as “Doña” during their visit. Elena was quick to notice the difference in address and only with some effort did she manage not to take it as a personal insult.

“What a filthy dump,” was her only comment when they arrived back at the house.

Three days later, at 6 p.m., a little girl appeared carrying a gleaming battered crockpot.

“My grandma sent this for you,” she said.

It was a crab stew. J. took it and poured the contents into a saucepan—the claws tinkling against the tin—and gave the pot back to the girl.

“Here… for you,” he said, holding out a ten-peso note. The child looked at J., her eyes shining, almost coy, and thanked him. Before she left, she said if they had any clothes to give away they could give them to her.

The dining room consisted of a simple rough-hewn table on a side porch that overlooked the yard. J. picked up the pot and a single plate and sat down to eat. He did not bother to call Elena, knowing how much she hated crab.

G
ILBERTO BEGAN
to do the weekly shopping at the market in Severá, usually on Sundays. He would set off early on horseback, with a second horse on a leading rein. Every Saturday night, Elena would give him a list of what he was to bring back and lecture him on brands of soap, the quality of the rice, and so forth. This was the only time when the two had anything that might be called a conversation; for the rest of the week, she simply gave him orders—almost always relating to odd jobs around the house—and occasionally enquired about the weather. Whenever she spoke to Gilberto, her voice became brusque and sharp. If there were any problem with the groceries—impurities in the sugar, weevils in the black beans—she would reprimand him twice: once when he got back from the market and a second time the following week while she was giving him the new shopping list.

“If we’re not careful, that man will be bringing back whatever he feels like,” she explained to J. once, when she saw that he was uncomfortable with her curt manner.

Gilberto would set off at first light and come back at dusk, usually stinking of booze, half a bottle of
aguardiente
tucked into the back pocket of his trousers and a certain awkwardness to his movements. He was never falling-down drunk. His eyes shining and a little glassy, he would take the groceries from the packhorse and carry them into the kitchen, then unsaddle his own horse and lead both animals to the stable where he had a few quick shots while doling out their feed. Then he would go into the house to listen to any complaints from Elena who, by then, would have unpacked the groceries while lecturing Mercedes on how to judge the quality of the produce, how certain things should be cooked and others preserved…

In the early days, J. got drunk only once a week. Every Sunday, at about three in the afternoon, he would go out to the paddock and pick a few green mangoes from the tree which Mercedes would peel and slice. Then J. would settle himself at the dining table, sometimes with Elena, setting the fruit, a salt cellar and a bottle of
aguardiente
next to his chair. By the time Gilberto arrived, the bottle would often be half-empty. When Elena was not with him, J. was delighted by Gilberto’s arrival, knowing that as soon as he had carried in the groceries, he would come out and join J. on the veranda, take the bottle from his back pocket and offer him a drink. Between them, they would finish off Gilberto’s flask of
aguardiente
while
discussing any work that needed doing—though more often in silence—then they would drink J.’s bottle.

When Elena was out on the veranda, Gilberto would stop by only for a moment, offer them a drink and then take his leave.