Pescador's Wake (8 page)

‘Something for them to look forward to.' Carlos, grateful to see his friend's humour back, extends the joke. ‘What's their secret?'

‘What I'm saying is that if we take all the large fish now, then we've taken the best breeders. There goes the fishery.
¡Basta!
It's not as though it'd be the first time. Think of the cod. And the Bering Sea fishery wasn't faring too well when I was there. According to the scientists, ninety per cent of the populations of the large fishes have been wiped out.'

Carlos says nothing, allowing Eduardo to vent his spleen and rid himself of a poacher's guilt.

‘Toothfish were fished out off Patagonia after only a decade,' Eduardo maintains. ‘Now we're ripping the guts out of this magnificent place.'

Carlos switches the ship's lights on and watches through the now heavy rain as the whale descends deep below them, its gut full of krill.

‘And then there are boats coming down here for krill. ‘
¡Pendejos
!' Eduardo swears. ‘The krill drive the entire system. It'd be like us removing all the grass from a paddock and then wondering why the cattle died. It's madness.'

Dazzled by the lights, a south polar skua flies above the deck, narrowly missing the communication tower.

‘The ocean needs
real
fishermen, people who've spent
their lives pressed up against the sea, living its weather and feeling its pulse. If we owned the boats, we'd look after the fish. Instead, we're stuck working for rogues like Migiliaro, and, in the eyes of the world,
we're
the vandals.'

After a long silence, Carlos again addresses his friend. ‘What would you do if you weren't fishing?' he asks gently.

Eduardo seems to be peering deep into the soul of the sea. ‘Write a book.'

The answer comes as a surprise. Having known this man all his life, Carlos had assumed he knew his best friend's dreams. He remembers the book Eduardo wrote for María, but that was just a children's story and he always assumed it was a one-off present—the kind an uncle might give. He thinks too of a comment Julia once made that, given other opportunities, Eduardo could have been a fine writer. Perhaps he had confided his ambitions to her; perhaps because she is a teacher and he thought she would understand. ‘A book? What about?'

‘Fishing. What else?' Eduardo lets loose a small laugh. ‘The way my father fished, and his father before him. How different it was from the way we fish now.'

‘Ah. The notes in your logbook. I've been wondering what you've been up to with that. I was starting to think they were love poems to Virginia.' Carlos grins.

Eduardo studies Carlos, as if trying to determine whether he is joking, or fishing for personal musings that he'd rather keep private.

‘So, would it be a true story?'

‘No. A novel. I'd want it to come alive.'

‘Why haven't you told me before? Were you afraid of what I'd say?'

‘No. It's just too early. I haven't even discussed it much with Virginia. It's just a few notes so far, but I'll weave them together one day.' Eduardo laughs. ‘Probably when I'm too old to stand on a fishing deck.' He stoops over as if holding a walking cane and wrinkles up his face into a mock toothless grin.

There is a cough at the doorway and Carlos turns to see Dmitri, who is clearing his throat as if trying to get their attention. Carlos notices how quickly Eduardo reverts to his sober mood, visibly stiffening in the Russian's presence.

‘Sorry to disturb your joke,' Dmitri says coldly. ‘The engine, it runs good again, but we need to go north now in case we have more trouble. If engine temperature starts rising, I have to take oil purifier apart and rebuild on board. We do not want to stop engines down here.'

‘The Uruguayan Department of Fisheries has ordered us back to Montevideo,' Carlos says. He sees Dmitri shoot a hostile glare at Eduardo. ‘But if you think there's a problem with the engine, of course we'll stop earlier. One or two more days down here and then we'll head north. Sooner if we have to. Namibia is probably the best option to avoid the Australians. Are you happy to do any repairs in Walvis Bay?'

‘I would prefer Mauritius, but if that is not possible, then Namibia is okay.' Dmitri gives Eduardo a firm nod as he departs. As always, it seems that the engineer prefers to communicate with Eduardo, and Carlos assumes it is because his friend speaks Russian.

‘Seems like Plan B is falling into place,
mi amigo
,' Carlos says to Eduardo. ‘And we don't even need to ask him to lie for us. Are you sure you don't want to be
capitán
?'

‘No. That honour is all yours.'

Carlos laughs quietly and whispers behind his searoughened hand, ‘He's a serious fellow isn't he? Those Russians must have only been allocated a set number of smiles at birth. A good character for your novel, maybe?'

‘Probably,' Eduardo says, but a sudden slowdown in the boat's speed interrupts the conversation. The
Pescador
has entered the pack again, and the ice is thicker than both men had anticipated.

The steady irregular rapping against the hull has become a steady groan. ‘Seems we might have to head north now anyway,' Carlos observes. ‘If we stay here much longer, we'll be staying here for good. A well-preserved feature of the Antarctic landscape.'

‘There has to be an easier way to look young forever!' Eduardo teases, as if relieved to finally be changing course.

In under half an hour, they're free of the pack once again but are exposed to the waves a new gale has whipped up.

‘Watch out,' Carlos shouts too late as a sudden shift in wind direction pushes the starboard side of the
Pescador
into an iceberg. The boat shudders with the impact, but Eduardo manages to move it away from the berg and into open seas.

Minutes later, with the iceberg behind them, Dmitri is back in the wheelhouse, waving a damaged hand, which he has wrapped in a greasy rag and bound with duct tape.

‘I demand you head this boat north. Immediately! No more delays,' the Russian shouts. He faces Eduardo directly, continuing in Spanish. ‘I play no more games. You tell Carlos, or I will!'

Carlos looks to Eduardo for an explanation but the first mate directs his attention only to the Russian.

‘Enough,' Eduardo commands.

Carlos is struck by the hardness in Eduardo's voice. He watches as the first mate holds up his hand in front of Dmitri's face, silencing him.

‘We've
already
changed course. Look!' Eduardo points to the compass.

Dmitri reads the direction, but says nothing.

‘What happened to your hand?' Carlos asks the Russian.

The veins have risen in Dmitri's neck. ‘The spanner slipped. Cut me,' he replies in Spanish before turning to face Eduardo and switching to Russian. Carlos doesn't understand the sudden barrage of words, but cannot miss seeing Dmitri slice a finger across his throat in Eduardo's direction.
Dismayed, he looks to the first mate who seems to know how to manage the truculent engineer. They need Dmitri back on side.

‘Go and clean it before it gets infected,' Eduardo says, his monotonal words delivered as if a threat. Carlos feels the heat of the anger in his friend's eyes.

When Dmitri has left the wheelhouse, Carlos faces Eduardo, incredulous, his unspoken earlier misgivings about the Russian vindicated. But there is something else—an unwelcome concern that he has been insulated, by language, from discussions with Dmitri, perhaps even shielded by Eduardo from the worst of their engineer. Carlos wonders whether, because Eduardo had been the one to recommend the Russian, the first mate feels he must wear the consequences of that decision too. ‘What was he going to tell me? Why is he so angry?'

‘I have no idea.'

Julia Pereira de Sánchez is watering the potted hibiscus on her small back porch, when the
gorrión
chick falls from its nest in the apartment's roof. It is dead on impact and cuts a forlorn picture on the lawn. Blue skin stretches over eyes still closed to the world. The orbits bulge from the meagre skull against a broken, featherless backdrop of a body. The chick's bent wings and rudimentary tail are reminiscent of the prehistoric fossil skeletons of the archaeopteryx, that Jurassic cross between a dinosaur and a modern bird, which Julia has seen at the museum. It's uncanny, she thinks, how closely an embryonic form can resemble that creature's extinct ancestor. Even in humans, the stages of embryonic development (from egg to tadpole-like being, to forms resembling frogs, then lizards, and, finally—a complete, hominid foetus) repeat the sequences seen in evolution (from unicellular organism to fish, to amphibian, to reptile, to mammal). ‘Ontogeny replicates phylogeny' was the shorthand way she described it to her biology students. It never ceases to amaze her.

Using a hand trowel, Julia collects the bird's tiny floppy form and buries it under the single
Tipas
tree in the shared back garden. The mother bird is nowhere to be seen. How
can she be so uncaring? Doesn't she know her own flesh and blood is being buried? Raucous cries erupt from the rooftop nest, interrupting Julia's thoughts. The mother bird skims overhead, her beak ajar with a fat insect. She's feeding her surviving chicks, Julia realises. God knows there's little time for grief when there are other young to nourish. Nature horrifies her sometimes, biology teacher or not. Using a branch of the tree, she hoists herself up from the ground and looks down at the tiny grave before going inside to console herself with a warm drink.

She takes her favourite ceramic
mate
gourd from the shelf and prepares the herbal tea, methodically tipping the gourd back and forth until the dried herbs are properly dispersed in the hot water. Before inserting the metal straw, she adds a spoonful of honey, her mind already elsewhere. She ruminates over the phone call she received yesterday from Francisco. He said he had had another conversation with Eduardo and been assured that the
Pescador
was on its way home. There had been some minor engine trouble, but fortunately all was well again.

The conversation has left Julia restless. Only another couple of weeks and Carlos would be home. Eduardo too. But the thought of engine trouble turns her stomach to water. She doubts Migiliaro would have spent one more peso on the boat than he had to. If the mechanics fail again, and conditions are bad, the
Pescador
could go down. Carlos, Eduardo and the
entire crew would have only moments to reflect before their lives froze over. Maybe that would be the government's preference. And Migiliaro's too, for that matter. No scandal. No court case. Just an unfortunate incident at sea. The catch would be buried with the men, making it impossible to prove whether the vessel had been fishing illegally.
Señor
Migiliaro would escape fines and, through his middleman, claim insurance on his boat. The Uruguayan government, she suspects, would hide their knowledge of the
Pescador
's illegal operations behind a smokescreen of fabricated concern for the tragic loss of life. It would be in bad taste to sully the dead men's names with slanderous allegations.

Julia shakes her head. Here she is worrying herself sick, while Carlos and Eduardo are no doubt still scheming about how to sell part of the catch without Migiliaro finding out. Ever optimistic. Overly optimistic. Eduardo may have promised to keep Carlos out of those arrangements, sparing him—and her – the consequences, but she is angry at the pair of them, and at herself, for agreeing to any of this. She finishes her
mate
and empties out the gourd, tipping the spent herbs down the sink and swirling her finger in the plughole to help the slurry disappear. For now, she has day-to-day life to contend with. She peruses the calendar. There is an antenatal appointment at the hospital at two o'clock, and she needs to be back in time to collect María from school. With a thick black pen, she crosses off another week of her pregnancy. Today marks the beginning
of week twenty-six. For the baby's sake, she tries not to think any more about Carlos and Eduardo at sea.

The phone rings. It's the school. María has a high temperature and is vomiting. ‘I'm on my way,' Julia says, hanging up the phone without even saying goodbye. She checks her watch. The next bus to the school leaves in fifteen minutes, enough time to reschedule her antenatal appointment. But the receptionist at the Hospital Maciel says they are fully booked for another two weeks. Julia writes the new date on the calendar, and hopes Carlos will be back by then. She clutches the small cross that he had fastened around her neck on a fine silver chain just months ago. ‘For our baby,' Carlos had whispered. She holds it to her lips and utters a small prayer for their unborn child, for María, and for the safe return of her husband.

It takes three days for María to regain normal colour in her face. Over the phone, Julia's mother had scoffed at the doctor's diagnosis of a virus. To her, a virus is a convenient label for any illness the doctor doesn't know the cause of. There was no such thing when she was young, she insisted. How can something invisible to the naked eye wreak so much havoc? It doesn't fit with her robust, practical, hands-in-the-dirt view of life. ‘No, it must be something María ate,' she'd said emphatically, the fact that food poisoning is also caused by
microbes apparently lost on her. Julia let her mother's opinion lie. Sometimes it's better not to bring biology classes home, she has learnt. It was her mother's chicken soup she had phoned for, not an argument.

Julia opens María's bedroom window and lets the afternoon light spill inside. María wastes no time in leaning out over the sill to take in the view of the back garden. The mother
gorrión
snatches an insect from the
Tipas
tree and María twists her head around in the direction of the chicks' hungry calls. ‘The nest's too far away. I can't see,' María complains, squinting into the sunlight.

‘Watch out or they'll make a nest in your hair,' Julia teases. ‘It's such a mess. Come and I'll fix it.' She taps the bed beside her and waves the hairbrush. María eventually obliges and Julia forms two straight plaits with practised hands. ‘It always makes you feel better to have your hair done,
mi chica
.'

‘Can Sofía come over and play?'

‘Let's give it a couple more days,' Julia answers. The last person she feels like seeing now is Cecilia. ‘Just to make sure you're all better. Here, I'll read you a story. Which one would you like?'

María reaches for
El Pez
(
The Fish
), which Eduardo wrote and illustrated for her when she turned two. It's still her favourite.

It makes Julia laugh as well. Laugh and cry. It reminds her of all the things about Eduardo that she can't share with
another living soul. In the book, Eduardo has drawn perfect line-illustrations of his father's boatshed at La Paloma. The boatshed's back window shutter is open to the breeze, and there are footsteps, two sets, in the sand. The pictures, Julia knows, were drawn for her. A secret code.

María turns the page and Julia thinks back to her holidays as a teenager at the small fishing and surfing town just a few hours' drive from Montevideo. She is transported back to the long summer days of sand and swimsuits, of sipping soft drinks on La Paloma's shores. She remembers, too, the hours spent with Eduardo in the boatshed.

As she touches the pages of the book that his hands made, Julia feels again the deep ache in her womb that would build as her parents drove the family car along the Atlantic coast towards her favourite headland, kissed by the ocean on both sides. As the beaches grew whiter and the ocean clearer, she recalls how the flame in her heart rose up into her neck, warming her face until she could see it in the rear-vision mirror—her cheeks red at the thought of seeing her young lover again. Eduardo would let her know if his father was out fishing by leaving the boatshed's shutters open. (Eduardo's father always kept his shed closed tight like a clam, even if he was busy repairing nets inside. Julia supposed it was a relief for him just to be out of the wind, having spent so much of his life braced hard up against it at sea.) Seeing Eduardo's secret sign to her as they passed in the car, Julia would quickly help her parents unload the luggage, stacking it
neatly against the wooden walls of the small rented bungalow. Then, announcing that she was going for a walk to stretch her legs, she would make her way down to the boatshed, shrouded by windswept pines, and to Eduardo.

They would climb in behind an old dinghy and lie together on a pile of salty, dry netting. She would feel his ropecalloused hands under her blouse, first on the small of her back, then on the sensitive skin of her stomach until, finally, with her silent encouragement, they brushed against her breasts. She liked the roughness of his palms and fingers worn from fishing nets, and projected onto her young lover a physical maturity beyond his years. They kissed and talked, dreamed and touched, but they never made love. Julia was terrified of becoming pregnant, a fact that sits uncomfortably with her now. Instead they discovered other ways to satisfy their young ardour. Ways that wouldn't result in a baby, but that, she realises now, would be the envy of many a staid and married couple who had run out of time, ideas and passion. Afterwards, the shutters would be closed, and Julia would leave the boatshed, her face glossy with its thin veil of sweat as if she had, indeed, just been for a walk.

Julia's family, devout Catholics, would never have approved of such a love before marriage, and so, at Julia's insistence, the young couple kept their holiday romances a secret. Not even Carlos—who Eduardo introduced to her as his best friend—knew.

Every school holiday for two years, Julia returned to La Paloma, her heart beating hard to see Eduardo, her face flushed in anticipation. It was on the first day of one such vacation that she learned their love affair was abruptly over, their future undone, torn apart and cast aside like an unravelling, old fishing net. Eduardo had become involved with another young woman and she was expecting his baby.

Virginia had moved to La Paloma with her parents only four months before. She was tall and tanned, and difficult to ignore. Julia later found out from friends in La Paloma, who knew nothing of her own love for Eduardo, that Virginia had sat beside him in class from her first day. On weekends she had sunned herself near his father's boatshed. It was love at first sight, they had said.

Julia hid her devastation well. She had no choice. Virginia was pregnant. Eduardo was to marry her.

Soon after, Carlos innocently asked Julia out, his invitation made casually in front of Eduardo. It was clear that Carlos still hadn't the faintest suspicion that she and Eduardo had been anything more than friends. Even if her first love had not remained faithful to her, he had at least kept his promise to keep their relationship a secret. And, from the sadness in his eyes, Julia knew that he still had feelings for her. Perhaps he even regretted his situation—bound to a new girlfriend forever by a child. Nevertheless, she punished him for his
infidelity and accepted, on the spot, Carlos's invitation to see a film: a love story.

But she couldn't sustain her anger. She still cared for Eduardo and, it had to be said, respected his commitment to the mother of his unborn child. And there was something else that softened the hurt. In the months that followed, Carlos persisted in his attempts to woo her, and she began to enjoy his attention. He found fishing work in Montevideo and invited Julia for long walks along the riverfront and cheap meals in the Ciudad Vieja. He was solid and dependable, and seemed incapable of causing her the hurt that Eduardo had inflicted. The physical side of their relationship was slow to develop, but perhaps that was a good thing.

When she turned twenty, a marriageable age, both sets of parents approved of the union. Carlos asked Julia to be his wife and, on the same day, asked Eduardo to be best man. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Julia tortured herself with a Catholic's guilt about her secret first love. In truth, part of her still yearned for him, a sentiment that was only heightened by Eduardo's speech on the day she and Carlos married. Julia was sure that Eduardo had been talking to her when he told the gathered guests that ‘real love only happens once'.

As the years passed, there were other times when she felt tempted to tell her husband the truth about Eduardo. Times when their marriage felt so strong that nothing could rock
the boat, and times when the motivation was completely different: when Julia felt that Carlos was taking her for granted and spending too long at sea. But to admit the truth would change everything: Carlos's friendship with Eduardo, Eduardo's relationship with his wife, and Julia's relationship with all three. It would also draw a line through her intimacies with Eduardo forever, and they were not all ancient history.

Just six months ago, when Eduardo casually mentioned that he had almost finished restoring his father's old wooden dinghy, the one they used to lie behind, Julia found herself asking if she could come and see it. She told him she could catch an early-morning bus to La Paloma and be home in time to put María to bed. She'd ask a neighbour if they could take María to school and mind her afterwards, she'd said out loud as she thought it through.

When they met at their teenage hideaway—their bodies older, their smiles complicated by thoughts of spouses and children—what followed was no accident.

Eduardo had replaced the old nets behind the restored dinghy with a mattress and a sea blanket. Perhaps it was spare bedding for the boat, but Julia suspected they were new additions. She wore a soft sandalwood perfume and a white, knee-length dress dotted with red flowers. Thin straps dropped easily from her shoulders, and the zip at the back was loose from wear. It was all too easy. Neither one of them held back their desires, instead letting years of suppressed
passion and curiosity carry them forward to the natural conclusion for the first, and probably final, time.