The Pacific and Other Stories (34 page)

A
LTHOUGH THREE HOURS
in the sea then seemed as long and expansive as the years now seem short, the weeks of our vacation passed quickly. The Mar
Nueva could have been another planet—a sea planet—where no unpleasant things existed, where you didn’t have to study logarithms or dress in a suit, where your parents were always nearby but you were old enough to go off by yourself, where gravity was annulled for much of the day in astoundingly transparent water that, either blue or green, glowed as brightly as an electric light.

In February, when the cities were unbearably hot and strangely empty and yachts glided across the Mar Nueva as quietly as moths, I determined that I would help my father struggle against the vagaries of his profession by providing food for the table. I decided to become a fisherman, and much to my own surprise, for I have never had much confidence in my own resolve, I did.

I fished single-mindedly from dawn to late afternoon. Though I knew that my parents and even Claudia were as disturbed by my devotion as they were impressed, I aimed to impress them until they had forgotten what had made them uneasy.

On the very first day I caught three bluefin, of which we ate one and gave away two. When I got better, and could cast as far as a grown man, when I knew what kind of bait to use with different tides, and when the fish were running, how they ran, how to drop a hook right in the middle of churning water far offshore, and how to get a fish in fast enough so that I could hook another from the same school, I did so well that my father had to take me into town every night to sell my catch.

At first we stood by our car in great embarrassment, with the fish resting in a box of ice propped up against the running board. It took a long time to sell them off, and my father didn’t like all the driving, so we struck a deal with a man who had a stall in the market. Every day at four o’clock he arrived in a truck that steamed with dry ice, and pushed a wheelbarrow to the pier, where my catch was strung, fresh and alive, riding the promise of the waves but never able to break loose.

I provided the main course almost every night, and with the money I earned supplying fish to a market strained by the needs of the summer people I provided the rest of our food, too. I was sinfully proud of myself. In the long hours I spent casting from the pier I frequently imagined that every girl I liked in school was somehow able to see me, and I often moved as if I
were fishing in front of an audience. I was ashamed if I failed to cast beyond the point where I could actually see my lure as it splashed into the waves, and delighted if I could throw it temporarily into oblivion. The critical observers I made up for myself slowly forced me into expertise, and I caught an overwhelming amount of fish. I remember that often when I whipped the lure off one of my long surf-casting rods I looked ahead nobly and said, “Rosa!” Rosa was a little girl who was not very pretty, I loved her like crazy for years, and she grew up to be extraordinarily beautiful.

I was at the pier every day from dawn till four. After the fish man came I brought the money to my father and took the best fish I had caught into the kitchen, drank some fruit juice, and went into the ocean until dinner. The waves in late afternoon have an exhausted quality. I have noticed in many places all around the world that beaches empty at about four. Everyone has had enough, even the ocean. The light is too bright, the wind too steady. But underwater it was the same: the temperature was constant, the light was only slightly different, and the fish did not go back to their villas to shower and eat cherry ices.

S
OLDIERS APPEARED
in the bungalows. My father had been right about them: they did have rifles. When I looked in their direction, they didn’t look back. Except for an officer who came out of the bushes and asked me what I was doing, who my father was, and how long we had lived there, they did mainly what I did: they scanned the sea. And the officer had refused to tell me who lived in the huge villa sheltered among the trees.

Soon I was as indifferent to the guards as they were to me. In the capital every other doorway was guarded by a detachment of infantry, and soldiers with rifles slung across their chests stood on street corners all day long looking at the women who passed by. I concentrated on fishing.

Claudia hardly ever came to the pier. My father visited often to check the fish, to sit and talk, and to bring me pitchers of ice water. Even my mother, who walked in tiny steps and hated to go through the bushes, came to visit a few times. But Claudia was in a sulk because she longed for the social life of the town—a sun-bleached extension of social life in the capital, which,
though much less formal, was just as self-serving. I think she wanted the boys who had just left school, or were perhaps a little older than that (though not by much), to lose their breath as she passed by. She wanted to be noticed, and, of course, she would have been: she would have been a sensation. But in that regard my parents were unambitious. They never went out, they didn’t sit in cafés, they had a small circle of friends—cotton brokers, unknown journalists, businessmen who didn’t do too well, and some people whose strength and troubles prevented them from settling into any one profession. And relatives—my mother’s brother was an inventor who invented a thousand things, not a single one of which was ever patented or produced (who needs a shoehorn that doubles as a drinking straw?).

My parents were grateful that Claudia was still with us, and they patiently endured her outbursts. After all, she was almost eighteen, and would soon be marrying. “She is undergoing a painful transition,” my mother said. I used to stare at Claudia and wonder about this transition. She spent so much of the day reading Russian novels that her ears were red where she had rested her head on her hands. Reading in winter always seems to me to be rather businesslike; in summer, it puts you in a trance and makes your bones ache.

Anyway, one day in the third week of February—the seventeenth, to be precise—I was sitting at the end of the pier. There was a breeze, and the waves were rolling in slowly. They hardly broke, except on the beach itself, where they quietly tucked themselves in. It was before lunch, and the sun was high. I was casting into the wind, trying to close in on a big school of fish that had me praying for them to veer shoreward. These were mackerel, which belonged in the open sea, and the water around them looked like the rapids in a river. They had no business where they were. They should have been out deeper in the blue, and as they passed inshore I was able to cast my lines farther than ever before. My four lures fell short of the fish, but I was enthralled anyway, and I shouted into the wind for them to come closer.

They didn’t. They vanished beneath the swells, leaving me with beautifully taut lines drawn by the power of the sea. I turned around. Right next to me, practically on my heels, was an old man dressed in sandals, a bathing suit, an open shirt, and a peasant’s straw hat.

I almost fell into the water. “Sorry,” he said. “You couldn’t hear me because of the wind, and I didn’t want to interrupt you when you were going great guns. I saw that school, too. I thought I’d come over and see if you could pull one in.”

I knew I had a volatile imagination. I was the one who claimed in near hysteria to have seen a prehistoric bird. Still, I was terribly afraid that this old man, who was unusually tall and wore impenetrable sunglasses, was actually Santos-Ott. I wanted to run home and say that he was Santos-Ott, and to be convinced of it, but for him not to be Santos-Ott.

How could it have been Santos-Ott? The soldiers were still in their bungalows and he was alone with me. He wasn’t in a general’s white summer uniform, and he seemed shy.

I think I knew that he was indeed Santos-Ott, but if I had admitted it to myself I would have fainted, so I pretended that he wasn’t. This is just an old man who’s going to go on and on about fishing, I thought, as deep within me alarm bells were going off, flames were licking the back of my lungs, and choruses of the damned were singing, “Caudillo! Caudillo! Caudillo!”

“I have four lines out,” I began, breathlessly. “Each line is two hundred meters of Permafil with a rated strength of seventy-five kilograms. I can cast sixty or seventy meters with the wind, but if there’s a riptide it will carry the line farther and deeper. That’s why I have so much line. The big fish are in the blue.”

“Check the lures,” he said. I began to reel them in.

B
Y THE TIME
I had retrieved the lures, my heart had slowed down to normal. I would have been very proud if I had pulled in a big silver mackerel, but unfortunately I had no fish to show the old man. Now I know why I had calmed down. Very few people who get to be chief of state lack the ability to put others at ease. And, then, he was not in his coat, he was deferential and truly interested in my fishing technique, and we were out at the end of the pier, on the sea.

“I thought that, for it to work, you had to be pulling a lure through the water all the time,” he said. “What’s your method? When I was a boy in the
mountains, we would put a lure in the stream and the water flowing past it would keep it alive. You can’t do that in the ocean, can you?”

Everyone knew that Santos-Ott had been a boy in the mountains. It was part of the national mythology: I had heard and read the phrase “a boy in the mountains” applied to him hundreds of times. “Often, you can,” I answered. “It’s because of the point. The currents sweep along the coast and then are deflected straight out to sea by the point, so it’s like a river, only it curls back in a circle and hits the shore again. If you throw a bottle over the reef it will head straight out to sea, but in a few hours it may be washed up on the beach. Sometimes the riptide is so strong that I think I have a strike. But mostly it’s gentle enough to carry the line out slowly, and then, after you brake the reel, to hold the lure just below the surface.”

“Why doesn’t the lure come back, like the bottle?”

“Because it doesn’t go far enough out. To make the full circle, something has to touch the open sea.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked. “You talk like someone who has been on the Mar Nueva all his life.”

“I have,” I answered. This made him laugh. “And I know about what happens to a lure, because we went out in a boat and found it. It spins around and goes back and forth, just like a fish that’s holding its place.”

“Do you catch a lot of fish?” he asked, as if he were thinking about getting some for himself.

“Enough for us to eat, and I sell the rest. I’ve been paying for our food,” I stated with obvious pride, and then added, “this summer.”

“But it isn’t necessary for you to do this, is it? What does your father do?”

“He’s a cotton broker.”

“A cotton broker can do very well.”

I didn’t want to tell him that my father worried about our savings as they dwindled in the heat, or when the weather was too wet, or too good in America or Egypt. And besides, our tuition was what did my parents in, and in that sense I did feel responsible for helping my father, even if he didn’t need it.

“Where are you from?” the old man asked.

I knew he could tell from the way I spoke that I was from the capital (and
not many people from anywhere else had villas on the Mar Nueva), so I told him the district.

“Where, exactly?”

That meant he longed for the city. I told him the street.

“It’s not far from my house,” he said.

His house! I was sure that his house was the Presidential Palace. Inside the fence were a polo field and a golf course that you couldn’t see from the boulevards even had you been willing to risk arousing the suspicion of the guards by looking toward them. Yes, his house was near my street. If you wound your way through the Sixth District to the bottom of the hill, crossed the park, and then crossed the Boulevard of XX September, you’d be right at the gate.

Some time passed, and to end the silence I allowed myself an indiscretion. “I’d like to go in your house sometime,” I said. “I’ve never been in a house with four hundred and fifty rooms.”

“Four hundred and fifty-six,” he responded, without the slightest trace of emotion or irritation. I knew, at that moment, that his power lay in the complete control of his emotions, and that, unless he wanted to, he felt no emotion whatsoever. It was clear to me on the pier. He was intelligent, inquisitive, and pleasant. He made you admire him in the same way that you cannot help but admire a good watch or a Swiss cable car. Everything in him worked without inhibition, and he wasted neither time nor words. He was virtually an embodiment of pure forces: the laws of nature could not have been more cold or precise.

But he ruled my country for forty years because he could, at will, quickly develop within himself passion and resolution that were unparalleled and astounding. When he spoke he temporarily converted even his staunchest opponents and brought to tears crowds of men who had resented him all their lives. He fired up old women and grandmothers until they wanted to join the cavalry. With complete control, he could go from passion to reserve, at will, from light to dark and dark to light, like lightning flashes in a thunderstorm. Some men have oratorical ability and a great heart, and some think so coldly and well that they turn roiling problems into smooth ice. Santos-Ott was both.

“May I come from time to time to watch you fish?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, hardly believing that the caudillo had asked for my permission.

“Perhaps you’ll even give me a fish,” he added.

“Of course,” I said, with daring familiarity. “It’s half your pier. I owe you rent, I think.”

“I have a colonel who can plank fish the way they do in the mountains. I’d have him cook it for me.” He thought for a moment. “He says he can plank fish.”

“Would one fish be enough?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you have big dinners, with ambassadors and ministers?”

He shook his head. “I eat alone. If you let people under your tent they come to the conclusion that they can throw you out.”

“Oh,” I said, only half understanding, because our tent had a cloth floor, and I imagined people crawling under it, making huge hills of canvas.