Tierra del Fuego (11 page)

“Old wives' tales!” the skipper cried.

“Maybe so, but the fact is, they had to tie the guy down to stop him from jumping overboard . . . I'm surprised you don't know about these things, being the skipper of a schooner!”

“I was a whaler, not a seal hunter . . .”

“Obviously, with a whale, it'd be a whole lot more difficult,” the mussel fisher said sardonically, and everyone laughed.

The cook's eyes flashed angrily at the group, and the skipper pounded his fist on the little table next to the mainmast, rose to his feet in disgust, and climbed up on deck, saying in a loud voice, “Animals, worse than animals!”

Outside, the night was dark and cloudy. Dámaso Ramírez stood on deck for a moment looking out at the surroundings, as he usually did before going to bed. A lighthouse blinked from one of the dark cliffs of the Paso del Indio. The islands stretched away to the east, like a flotilla of darker shadows. On the second floor of the wireless station, there was a light at the window, which gave a strangely urban touch to the desolate area. Beyond the wireless station, on a slope that went all the way down to the shore, stood the sealskin tents of the Alakalufa. Another mussel schooner was at anchor at the entrance of Malacca cove, and in a shallow to the northeast, the lights of a camp of mussel fishers added a certain animation to the wild landscape.

The skipper could hear the conversation still going on down below in the cabin. From here, it sounded like water coursing through an underground tunnel. He heard the cook bustling about in his kitchen in the bow, heard that long yawn of his, an annoying mixture of moan and sigh. All the same, there was definitely something different about him these days—he wasn't as obstinate or as unapproachable as he used to be.

Dámaso Ramírez was a man of about fifty, not especially tall, but well built, broad shouldered and muscular, as whaling masters often are. He had been reduced to commanding this mussel schooner due to the failure of the whaling concern for which he had worked, a Chilean-Norwegian company that had tried to establish itself in the region of the Gulf of Penas. They had had a factory ship and four hunting ships, and he had been the captain of one of these, the
Chile
. But even though these pioneers of whaling in the southern seas had given their ships names like that, the fledgling enterprise had incurred the wrath of certain government circles, due to the fact that it was competing with another whaling company from the north owned by a man of great social and financial influence who was a friend of the President of the Republic. Dámaso Ramírez still felt bitter about it. He remembered one of the owners of the Chile-Norway Whaling Company showing him a copy of a wire from the President's office ordering the governor of Magallanes Province to make things as difficult as possible for the pioneers based in Punta Arenas. The company had been forced into liquidation and had had to sell its factory ship and the four whaling ships to that same powerful company from the north. And so Dámaso Ramírez had lost his job and his status as a whaling captain, but, more than that, he had lost his faith in men, especially those in government . . . As an expert whaler, accustomed to vanquishing that great monster of the sea, it seemed to him that, while man may have mastered nature, he had not yet mastered his own nature . . .

In his long years at sea, he had seen and heard many things, but none that had left him as disoriented as the atrocious story he had just heard below deck from the lips of the mussel fisher who had been visiting the schooner. He looked at the sea, its waters becoming even blacker each time a squall came down from the hills to the west and eddied between the islands toward the wide channel. Then he looked at the mountains, their top halves covered in snow. They were the only things white in the darkness, that eternal snow of the mountaintops, but even their brightness had something hazy about it and merged into the blackness above. He searched in the sky, as he often did, for his guiding constellation, which so often at night on the high seas, during his time as a whaler, had told him his position on the planet and even indicated the course he should take. But he could not see a single star. Like the rest of them, the Southern Cross was hidden behind that low dark vault, as if a demonic hand had scrawled all over the sky in soot blacker than the coal-black night. He raised his fist threateningly toward that dark sky and said to himself two or three times, swallowing the words in his anguish, “Heaven, where is your salvation?”

And then he went down below deck and through the door that led to his bunk, as if swallowed by a floating tomb.

 

The heavy night rain was followed by a morning so luminous that Puerto Edén looked newly born. In the western channel, Grossover Island lay across the middle of the narrow Paso del Indio, green and motionless, like a great whale cast on the waters, and beyond it were vistas of blue, white and green, lining the channel that stretched ahead like a road leading to other worlds.

The
Huamblín
landed the three divers with their rubber suits and diving bells, and they immediately took their places in the boats that were waiting for them. That same day, the schooner began its constant journeying through the adjoining seas, in search of the fifteen boats, each with its divers and assistants, which the owner in Puerto Montt maintained in the region all winter, along with the
Huamblín
.

The boats—which had kept their whaling names from the days when they had hunted those great sea creatures, equipped only with handheld harpoons—plied those waters with their own sails, a mainsail and a jib. Sometimes, the crews allowed themselves the luxury of hoisting a foresail, which made them look like small sailboats with high bows and pointed stern posts. Each diver had two assistants whose job was to supply him with air from a pump that one of them worked with a wheel. When the diver at the bottom of the sea had filled his wire basket—the
chinquillo
—full of mussels, he would give two tugs on the rope, and the other helper would raise the ­basket.

The heavy snowfalls of June made this work a lot more difficult. Everything was covered in a thick white mantle. The wind brought the snow down from the high peaks all the way to sea level, where the high tide gave it a beveled edge, like a cornice of glass.

Morning often saw the vegetation on the islands also wrapped in white vestments, which gave the stunted oaks and capricious laurels and cypresses softly sculpted shapes held miraculously in place above the clear blue waters.

Sometimes, the sea in the channels was covered with a sheet of ice, and the divers would have to break that fragile, glassy surface before stepping through into the vast underwater world as if through a window. With their white rubber suits and the great globes of their shiny copper diving bells, often streaked with green mold, screwed onto their necks, they would slowly descend, like ghosts, down the iron ladder hooked to the edge of the boat, and onto the sea bed, attached only by the red rubber tube that carried the air from the boat to their lungs.

Below, in the greenish waters, they would look like big white frogs with bronze heads, or strange fish forcing their way through the seaweed.

Slowly, the men on the boat would turn the wheels of the air pump, making sure the umbilical cord carried vital sustenance to the son of the earth in the belly of the sea. Of the life that depended on them, nothing was visible except, every now and again, the ring of bubbles, like soap bubbles, that rose to the surface every time the man inside the metal helmet tilted his head to the side and pressed the valve to let out the stale air from his lungs and continue to live. The procedure was so slow and mechanical that the assistants sometimes forgot that in those bubbles of air life had gone down into the heart of a man, a life linked as always, tragically, to death.

What do divers think as they walk on the bottom of the sea? Many of them say that all they think about is filling the wire basket with mussels as quickly as possible and tugging on the rope so that the assistant will hoist it. As far as what they see is concerned, they usually keep silent, with that tired, sphinx-like smile with which they breathe the air when they are half out of the water at the side of the boat and the assistants unscrew the copper helmet.

It is said that walking underwater is like walking through heavier air, but that the body becomes as light as you could wish, since it only takes a movement of the head on the valve of the diving bell for more air to go in or out of that ­pneumatic suit floating beneath the sea.

The surface of the sea bed is no different than the surface of the land, with the same passes, the same meadows, only calmer and more silent, since neither the motion nor the noise of the waves penetrates that far down. Through the great square eyes of glass, shoals of curious fish sometimes appear, swimming calmly around the metal head for a moment, then suddenly dispersing like the petals of a rose blown away by a sudden wind. Sometimes, a dolphin, the mammal with the heaviest brain, proportionately, after man, approaches to get a good look at this white creature, similar to itself, which swims in that strange vertical way.

Some of the divers are superstitious, and have more faith in their amulets, which they carry on their belts along with the bottle for urine, than in the assistants to whom they have entrusted their lives, in spite of the time-honored law of the sea stating that in an emergency the life of the man down below comes before the life of the man up above.

One of the divers from the flotilla of boats, for example, was unable to work without his two
quetros
, which he had trained to follow him underwater. The
quetro
is a grayish-blue sea duck, the size of a goose, which cannot fly. It is so heavy that its wings can barely lift it above the ground, but it flaps its wings rapidly and kicks the water with its feet, leaving a churning wake like that of a steamboat—hence its other name, “steam duck.”

This diver had raised them since they were chicks and, whenever he went down, so would they. They would move in front of the eyes of glass, looking in at their master and friend, he would give them a few little fish from the rocks, and then they would come back up to the surface to frisk. And so they went on, diving and frisking, until the diver came up from the bottom, bringing them some tidbits, and the
quetros
would lift their big orange bills to the sky and eat. When the diver got off the boat, the
quetros
would follow him to his zinc house on the coast and stay with him like two big farmyard ducks. “They bring me luck,” he would say, and never excluded them from his work.

In the same way, the lamb had also brought luck to the
Huamblín
. During the four months they plied those waters, they had not suffered any mishaps, and the owner of this unusual mascot, the cook Villegas, had been transformed with time into a different man, a good shipmate.

He would often be seen walking up and down the deck, followed by the lamb. Sometimes they would play, the man squatting and the two of them jostling each other, as if they were two lambs, or two children . . . The men on the boats stopped giving the lamb greedy looks, even though it was ready for roasting by now. They considered it the true mascot of the
Huamblín
.

Villegas was another man who had come down in the world. Some had known him when he was a cook on the great cattle ranches of Patagonia, where a head cook is the best paid of all the workers. It was rumored that he could never again work on a ranch because he had been an informer during one of the many violent strikes that took place in the region and the workers had vowed revenge. But others said that he had always been a bad character, and that he wasn't going back to Magallanes because he had killed a man, throwing a kitchen knife at his back. The fact was, Villegas didn't want to be on the
Huamblín
. He felt that it demeaned his profession to be working in that little kitchen in the bow of the ship and serving that kind of crew. There was something disdainful and aristocratic about his pallor and thinness and, even though his character had changed, he still looked down on the others.

All the same, the change in him was so obvious, he barely recognized himself . . . What had happened to the man? Could that little animal, huddled against his chest that night in the middle of the bleak Desertores islands, have brought out the tenderness that had been lacking in his hard heart? Or had some instinct for preserving that new life been awakened when he had cut the throat of the mother that had given birth to it? Whatever the reason, the young animal had established a kind of communication between this man who had always been surly and unsociable and the rest of the crew . . . When a stranger strokes a child, doesn't he also stroke the father a little? Something like this had happened with the lamb!

But not even Villegas knew what had really motivated that transformation . . . It was one of those inexplicable things, like a stone cracking open to reveal a seed inside!

 

All that winter, the
Huamblín
sailed up and down the coast through the most remote creeks, fjords and channels, where the little boats were fishing for mussels. Sometimes, she passed through that huge cleft in sea and river, the mouth of the Baker, in the middle of the Patagonian Andes. The mussels were put into sacks and taken in her holds to Puerto Edén, where they were loaded onto the coasters that would take them north.

The great oceanic depressions that come rolling in from the edges of the Pacific Ocean crash with their full force against those foothills of the Andes, which stand there defying the sea, furrowed with coves and navigable channels. There are frequent storms, and the wind howls across the coastal shelves, and sometimes roars as if enraged at being prevented from continuing to roll over the surface of the sea. In spite of its fury, the waters are relatively calm between the walls of rock, but sometimes a squall comes down in the form of a snowstorm and takes a cruel revenge on them, too. Then trees and native huts and even blocks of ice go flying through the air.