‘What about you?’ Mr Herbert shouted at her. ‘What’s your problem?’
The woman stopped fanning herself.
‘Don’t try to get me mixed up in your fun, mister gringo,’ she shouted across the room. ‘I haven’t got any kind of problem and I’m a whore because it comes out of my balls.’
Mr Herbert shrugged his shoulders. He went on drinking his cold beer beside the open trunks, waiting for other problems. He was sweating. A while later, a woman broke away from the group that was with her at the table and spoke to him in a low voice. She had a five-hundred-peso problem.
‘How would you split that up?’ Mr Herbert asked her.
‘By five.’
‘Just imagine,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘That’s a hundred men.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘If I can get all that money together they’ll be the last hundred men of my life.’
He looked her over. She was quite young, fragile-boned, but her eyes showed a simple decision.
‘All right,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘Go into your room and I’ll start sending each one with his five pesos to you.’
He went to the street door and rang his little bell.
At seven o’clock in the morning Tobías found Catarino’s place open. All the lights were out. Half asleep and puffed up with beer, Mr Herbert was controlling the entry of men into the girl’s room.
Tobías went in too. The girl recognized him and was surprised to see him in her room.
‘You too?’
‘They told me to come in,’ Tobías said. ‘They gave me five pesos and told me not to take too long.’
She took the soaked sheet off the bed and asked Tobías to hold the other end. It was as heavy as canvas. They squeezed it, twisting it by the ends, until it got its natural weight back. They turned the mattress over and the sweat came out the other side. Tobías did things as best he could. Before leaving he put the five pesos on the pile of bills that was growing high beside the bed.
‘Send everybody you can,’ Mr Herbert suggested to him. ‘Let’s see if we can get this over with before noon.’
The girl opened the door a crack and asked for a cold beer. There were still several men waiting.
‘How many left?’ she asked.
‘Sixty-three,’ Mr Herbert answered.
Old Jacob followed him about all day with his checkerboard. His turn came at nightfall and he laid out his problem and Mr Herbert accepted. They put two chairs and a small table on top of the big table in the middle of the street, and old Jacob made the first move. It was the last play he was able to premeditate. He lost.
‘Forty pesos,’ Mr Herbert said, ‘and I’ll give you a handicap of two moves.’
He won again. His hands barely touched the checkers. He played blindfolded, guessing his opponent’s moves, and still won. The crowd grew tired of watching. When old Jacob decided to give up, he was in debt to the tune of five thousand seven hundred forty-two pesos and twenty-three cents.
He didn’t change his expression. He jotted down the figure on a piece of paper he had in his pocket. Then he folded up the board, put the checkers in their box, and wrapped everything in the newspaper.
‘Do with me what you will,’ he said, ‘but let me have these things. I promise you that I will spend the rest of my life getting all that money together.’
Mr Herbert looked at his watch.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘Your time will be up in twenty minutes.’ He waited until he was sure that his opponent hadn’t found the solution. ‘Don’t you have anything else to offer?’
‘My honor.’
‘I mean,’ Mr Herbert explained, ‘something that changes color when a brush daubed with paint is passed over it.’
‘My house,’ old Jacob said as if he were solving a riddle. ‘It’s not worth much, but it is a house.’
That was how Mr Herbert took possession of old Jacob’s house. He also took possession of the houses and property of others who couldn’t pay their debts, but he called for a week of music, fireworks, and acrobats and he took charge of the festivities himself.
It was a memorable week. Mr Herbert spoke of the miraculous destiny of the town and he even sketched out the city of the future, great glass buildings with dance floors on top. He showed it to the crowd. They looked in astonishment, trying to find themselves among the pedestrians painted in Mr Herbert’s colors, but they were so well dressed that they couldn’t recognize themselves. It pained them to be using him so much. They laughed at the urge they’d had to cry back in October and they kept on living in the midst of hope until Mr Herbert rang his little bell and said the party was over. Only then did he get some rest.
‘You’re going to die from that life you lead,’ old Jacob said.
‘I’ve got so much money that there’s no reason for me to die,’ Mr Herbert said.
He flopped onto his bed. He slept for days on end, snoring like a lion, and so many days went by that people grew tired of waiting on him. They had to dig crabs to eat. Catarino’s new records got so old that no one could listen to them any more without tears, and he had to close his place up.
A long time after Mr Herbert had fallen asleep, the priest knocked on old Jacob’s door. The house was locked from the inside. As the breathing of the man asleep had been using up the air, things had lost their weight and were beginning to float about.
‘I want to have a word with him,’ the priest said.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ said old Jacob.
‘I haven’t got much time.’
‘Have a seat, Father, and wait,’ old Jacob repeated. ‘And please talk to me in the meantime. It’s been a long time since I’ve known what’s been going on in the world.’
‘People have all scattered,’ the priest said. ‘It won’t be long before the town will be the same as it was before. That’s the only thing that’s new.’
‘They’ll come back when the sea smells of roses again,’ old Jacob said.
‘But meanwhile, we’ve got to sustain the illusions of those who stay with something,’ the priest said. ‘It’s urgent that we start building the church.’
‘That’s why you’ve come to see Mr Herbert,’ old Jacob said.
‘That’s right,’ said the priest. ‘Gringos are very charitable.’
‘Wait a bit, then, Father,’ old Jacob said. ‘He might just wake up.’
They played checkers. It was a long and difficult game which lasted several days, but Mr Herbert didn’t wake up.
The priest let himself be confused by desperation. He went all over with a copper plate asking for donations to build the church, but he didn’t get very much. He was getting more and more diaphanous from so much begging, his bones were starting to fill with sounds, and one Sunday he rose two hands above the ground, but nobody noticed it. Then he packed his clothes in one suitcase and the money he had collected in another and said good-bye forever.
‘The smell won’t come back,’ he said to those who tried to dissuade him. ‘You’ve got to face up to the fact that the town has fallen into mortal sin.’
When Mr Herbert woke up the town was the same as it had been before. The rain had fermented the garbage the crowds had left in the streets and the soil was as arid and hard as a brick once more.
‘I’ve been asleep a long time,’ Mr Herbert said, yawning.
‘Centuries,’ said old Jacob.
‘I’m starving to death.’
‘So is everybody else,’ old Jacob said. ‘There’s nothing to do but to go to the beach and dig for crabs.’
Tobías found him scratching in the sand, foaming at the mouth, and he was surprised to discover that when rich people were starving they looked so much like the poor. Mr Herbert didn’t find enough crabs. At nightfall he invited Tobías to come look for something to eat in the depths of the sea.
‘Listen,’ Tobías warned him, ‘only the dead know what’s down inside there.’
‘Scientists know too,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘Be
neath the sea of the drowned there are turtles with exquisite meat on them. Get your clothes off and let’s go.’
They went. At first they swam straight along and then down very deep to where the light of the sun stopped and then the light of the sea, and things were visible only in their own light. They passed by a submerged village with men and women on horseback turning about a musical kiosk. It was a splendid day and there were brightly colored flowers on the terraces.
‘A Sunday sank at about eleven o’clock in the morning,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘It must have been some cataclysm.’
Tobías turned off toward the village, but Mr Herbert signaled him to keep going down.
‘There are roses there,’ Tobías said. ‘I want Clotilde to know what they are.’
‘You can come back another time at your leisure,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘Right now I’m dying of hunger.’
He went down like an octopus, with slow, slinky strokes of his arms. Tobías, who was trying hard not to lose sight of him, thought that it must be the way rich people swam. Little by little, they were leaving the sea of common catastrophes and entering the sea of the dead.
There were so many of them that Tobías thought that he’d never seen as many people on earth. They were floating motionless, face up, on different levels, and they all had the look of forgotten souls.
‘They’re very old dead,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘It’s taken them centuries to reach this state of repose.’
Farther down, in the waters of the more recent dead, Mr Herbert stopped. Tobías caught up with him at the instant that a very young woman passed in front of them. She was floating on her side, her eyes open, followed by a current of flowers.
Mr Herbert put his finger to his lip and held it there until the last of the flowers went by.
‘She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in all my life,’ he said.
‘She’s old Jacob’s wife,’ Tobías said. ‘She must be fifty years younger, but that’s her. I’m sure of it.’
‘She’s done a lot of traveling,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘She’s carrying behind her flowers from all the seas of the world.’
They reached bottom. Mr Herbert took a few turns over earth that looked like polished slate. Tobías followed him. Only when he became accustomed to the half light of the depths did he discover that the turtles were there. There were thousands of them, flattened out on the bottom, so motionless they looked petrified.
‘They’re alive,’ Mr Herbert said, ‘but they’ve been asleep for millions of years.’
He turned one over. With a soft touch he pushed it upward and the sleeping animal left his hands and continued drifting up. Tobías let it pass by. Then he looked toward the surface and saw the whole sea upside down.
‘It’s like a dream,’ he said.
‘For your own good,’ Mr Herbert said, ‘don’t tell anyone about it. Just imagine the disorder there’d be in the world if people found out about these things.’
It was almost midnight when they got back to the village. They woke up Clotilde to boil some water. Mr Herbert butchered the turtle, but it took all three of them to chase and kill the heart a second time as it bounced out into the courtyard while they were cutting the creature up. They ate until they couldn’t breathe any more.
‘Well, Tobías,’ Mr Herbert then said, ‘we’ve got to face reality.’
‘Of course.’
‘And reality says,’ Mr Herbert went on, ‘that the smell will never come back.’
‘It will come back.’
‘It won’t come back,’ Clotilde put in, ‘among other reasons because it never really came. It was you who got everybody all worked up.’
‘You smelled it yourself,’ Tobías said.
‘I was half dazed that night,’ Clotilde said. ‘But right now I’m not sure about anything that has to do with this sea.’
‘So I’ll be on my way,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘And,’ he added, speaking to both of them, ‘you should leave too. There are too many things to do in the world for you to be starving in this town.’
He left. Tobías stayed in the yard counting the stars down to the horizon and he discovered that there were three more since last December. Clotilde called him from the bedroom, but he didn’t pay any attention.
‘Come here, you dummy,’ Clotilde insisted. ‘It’s been years since we did it like rabbits.’
Tobías waited a long time. When he finally went in, she had fallen asleep. He half woke her, but she was so tired that they both got things mixed up and they were only able to do it like earthworms.
‘You’re acting like a boob,’ Clotilde said grouchily. ‘Try to think about something else.’
‘I am thinking about something else.’
She wanted to know what it was and he decided to tell her on the condition that she wouldn’t repeat it. Clotilde promised.
‘There’s a village at the bottom of the sea,’ Tobías said, ‘with little white houses with millions of flowers on the terraces.’
Clotilde raised her hands to her head.
‘Oh, Tobías,’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Tobías, for the love of God, don’t start up with those things again.’
Tobías didn’t say anything else. He rolled over to the edge of the bed and tried to go to sleep. He couldn’t until dawn, when the wind changed and the crabs left him in peace.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
A Tale for Children
The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see it was a drowned man.
They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he weighed more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he’d been floating too long and the water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the floor they said he’d been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men. He had the smell of the sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was the corpse of a human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales.
They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.
That night they did not go out to work at sea. While the men went to find out if anyone was missing in neighboring villages, the women stayed behind to care for the drowned man. They took the mud off with grass swabs, they removed the underwater stones entangled in his hair, and they scraped the crust off with tools used for scaling fish. As they were doing that they noticed that the vegetation on him came from faraway oceans and deep water and that his clothes were in tatters, as if he had sailed through labyrinths of coral. They noticed too that he bore his death with pride, for he did not have the lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned in rivers. But only when they finished cleaning him off did they become aware of the kind of man he was and it left them breathless. Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they
were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination.
They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there a table solid enough to use for his wake. The tallest men’s holiday pants would not fit him, nor the fattest ones’ Sunday shirts, nor the shoes of the one with the biggest feet. Fascinated by his huge size and his beauty, the women then decided to make him some pants from a large piece of sail and a shirt from some bridal brabant linen so that he could continue through his death with dignity. As they sewed, sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse between stitches, it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless as on that night and they supposed that the change had something to do with the dead man. They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman. They thought that he would have had so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by calling their names and that he would have put so much work into his land that springs would have burst forth from among the rocks so that he would have been able to plant flowers on the cliffs. They secretly compared him to their own men, thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he could do in one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest, meanest, and most useless creatures on earth. They were wandering through that maze of fantasy when the oldest woman, who as the oldest had looked upon the drowned man with more compassion than passion, sighed:
‘He has the face of someone called Esteban.’
It was true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that he could not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who were the youngest, still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they put his clothes on and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his name might be Lautaro. But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough canvas, the poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt. After midnight the whistling of the wind died down and the sea fell into its Wednesday drowsiness. The silence put an end to any last doubts: he was Esteban. The women who had dressed him, who had combed his hair, had cut his nails and shaved him were unable to hold back a shudder of pity when they had to resign themselves to his being dragged along the ground. It was then that they understood how unhappy he must have been with that huge body since it bothered him even after death. They could see him in life, condemned to going through doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, remaining on his feet during visits, not knowing what to do with his soft, pink, sea lion hands while the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him, frightened to death, sit here, Esteban, please, and he, leaning against the wall, smiling, don’t bother, ma’am, I’m fine where I am, his heels raw and his back roasted from having done the same thing so many times whenever he paid a visit, don’t bother, ma’am, I’m fine where I am, just to avoid the embarrassment of breaking up the chair, and never knowing perhaps that the ones who said don’t go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee’s ready, were the ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone. That was what the women were thinking beside the body a little before dawn. Later, when they covered his face with a handkerchief so that the light would not bother him, he looked so forever dead, so defenseless, so much like their men that the first furrows of tears opened in their hearts. It was one of the younger ones who began the weeping. The others, coming to, went from sighs to wails, and the more they sobbed the more they felt like weeping, because the drowned man was becoming all the more Esteban for them, and so they wept so much, for he was the most destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth, poor Esteban. So when the men returned with the news that the drowned man was not from the neighboring villages either, the women felt an opening of jubilation in the midst of their tears.