Still the Same Man (10 page)

“Leave him be,” said the professor. “This is between us. We’re all under a lot of pressure today.”

The hotel owner didn’t let that put him off.

“I have no intention of leaving him be,” he said. “You, sirs, are currently in my establishment, and I don’t put up with anyone fighting in front of my guests or my family.”

He paused, in case either of the accused had something to add. Since they didn’t, he added, “I won’t allow this kind of behavior under my roof. I’m very sorry, but whoever’s responsible will have to leave.”

He spoke firmly, asserting all his professional authority.

“You’re throwing me out?” asked Joanes, snapping out of his silence for the first time.

“Nobody fights under my roof without consequences.”

The professor scoffed at the hotel owner.

“Nobody’s fought anyone here. Didn’t you hear what I said? I fell over.”

“Let this man speak for himself,” replied the hotel owner.

“Fine by me,” said Joanes. “I don’t want to stay here a minute longer.”

“What are you talking about?” cried the professor. “You can’t be serious. Where will you go?”

“There’s a place,” said the hotel owner. “Back on the road to Los Tigres, you go down a couple of miles. On the left you’ll see a cabin. They put it up for the construction workers who were meant to build a hotel nearby. But the project didn’t go ahead, and now the cabin is empty.”

“A cabin?”

“It has brick walls and a solid roof,” said the owner. “It’ll hold out against the wind.”

“But how’s he going to get there?” asked the professor. “Have you all lost your minds? We’re in the middle of a hurricane!”

“It’s no big deal,” said Joanes. “I said I’m leaving.”

The professor pleaded with him to calm down. He asked everyone present to calm down.

“Let’s talk about this. You and I.”

“I don’t want to talk to you again.”

“I know. But I’m asking you as a favor. Think about this for a moment. You don’t need to do this.”

Joanes didn’t respond, so the professor asked the others to give them a moment alone. The hotel owner nodded and told the rest to return to their rooms. The Mexican guests left grudgingly. Some of them held back to try to catch what they could of the conversation.

Joanes gave the professor a look as if to say “get on with it.”

“There’s no need for you to leave. We can talk to that man, to the owner. I’m sure he’ll put you up in another room if you don’t want to stay with us.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Ah, so you think I owe you an apology? The right thing would be for
you
to apologize to
me
.”

“Don’t
you
speak to me about what’s right or wrong.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Forget it,” said Joanes, walking off. “I’m out of here.”

“No. Wait. Before you go, we need to get everything out in the open.”

Joanes stopped.

“Go on.”

“Everything I said is true. I can help you. I don’t understand why you reacted the way you did. Perhaps you thought I was talking down to you. But that’s not the case. I only want to help you, in return for you helping me.”

“This is what you wanted to get out in the open?”

“Well what else? I have to find out how my son is. I’ll do whatever it takes. I have to know if the explosion left him badly injured, or if—”

“What explosion?” interjected Joanes. “You told me it was a diving accident.”

“It was both,” hastened the professor. “A diving accident and an explosion. I don’t know the details. You see why I have to speak to my son, or with someone who knows something?”

Very slowly, a smile was spreading across Joanes’s face.

“What is it?” asked the professor, clearly offended.

“You’re lying to me.”

“Excuse me?”

“None of this is true. This story about your son in Egypt, with the explosions and all the rest, it’s not true.”

The professor turned red.

“You’re doing it again,” Joanes continued. “You’re lying to me. I don’t know why, but you are. Who knows why you want my phone. You’re a liar, a manipulator. You always have been. For as long as I’ve known you. A manipulator,” he repeated.

“How dare you!”

Joanes shook his head, still smiling.

“I should never have given you the time of day. Not now, not then.”

And with that, he walked off.

“Come back here! Don’t be a fool!”

“Do
not
call me a fool!” answered Joanes, who turned, grabbed the professor by his shirtfront, and began to shake him.

The Mexican guests in the hallway started shouting, and two of them ran over to pull the men apart. The hotel owner followed as fast as his lame leg would carry him.

“Enough already! I want you out of my house, now! Both of you!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” replied the professor. “My wife isn’t well.”

Three of the hotel owner’s relatives stepped forward. One of them was well over six feet tall. He wore a sleeveless shirt, and you could see his muscly, heavily tattooed arms and shoulders plainly. He was holding a beer can in his hand, flexing his arm to show off his biceps.

“What’s the problem, man? Didn’t you hear my uncle?”

The hotel owner held up his arm, calling for calm.

“You have to go,” he insisted.

“But, my wife . . .” began the professor, clearly worried.

“What’s wrong, old man?” Joanes cut in. “You scared? It’s just a little storm.”

The professor’s cheeks went red again.

“If you’re considering staying,” continued Joanes, “remember you don’t have any money to pay for the room. You spent it all trying to get ahold of your son. The one who had an accident.”

The hotel owner accompanied Joanes to the storeroom, where he handed him a kerosene lamp, a box of matches, three blankets that had been darned and re-darned innumerable times and gave off a thick stench of damp, three bottles of water, and something to eat.

“That’ll keep you going till tomorrow morning.”

Joanes felt the weight of the lamp.

“It’s half empty.”

The hotel owner scratched his lame leg and shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s all there is.”

“Right, that’s all there is,” said Joanes, who gave the owner a few pesos in exchange for the bundle of things.

“And the money for the room.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

The hotel owner held his gaze but in the end let it go.

The lobby was heaving. Most of the guests had congregated there to witness their departure. The professor turned up, pushing his wife in her wheelchair. Far from seeming shocked or worried, she was smiling a kind of resigned smile. When she reached Joanes’s side, she told him, “I knew it would come to this.”

One of the Mexican women offered her a waterproof poncho. The professor’s wife looked at her suspiciously but then took it, muttering a few words of thanks.

“You’re going to need this,” the hotel owner told Joanes, handing him a flashlight. “You should head out first. Bring the car around so it’ll be easier for them to . . . you know.”

He pointed to the wheelchair.

Joanes nodded and put his rain jacket over his head and shoulders. The hotel owner went and stood by the door. When Joanes gave him the sign, the hotel owner unbolted the door and opened it. The wind and slashing rain flew straight into the lobby, driving back the crowd. Within seconds, the floor was plastered with water, leaves, and branches.

“Go!” bellowed the hotel owner.

Joanes hesitated, taken aback by the howling of the storm. Then, clutching his backpack to his body, he dipped his head and launched himself into the darkness.

The hotel owner needed the help of one of his relatives to close the door. Then all eyes turned on the professor, who stared back at them without the slightest hint of emotion.

He made for the car as fast as he could. The front lawn had turned into a quagmire. The beam of the flashlight barely penetrated the darkness.

Once inside the car, he sat motionless behind the wheel, catching his breath. It was as if invisible hands were hurling buckets of water at the windshield. He said to himself that this wasn’t exactly a hurricane. Just a storm. And it would weaken in strength as it traveled north.

He also told himself that it would be pretty easy to bolt right then and there, without the professor. He only had to start the engine and go. They’d look after the man and his wife at the hotel.

He started the car. As he turned on the headlights, he saw, just beyond the lawn, the thick undergrowth thrashing about like a choppy ocean.

The current wasn’t as strong at the guide had led them to believe, but even so, the professor’s son didn’t let go of the cable during his descent. He followed the wake of bubbles left by his partner, a few yards ahead of him. Visibility was good. They soon caught sight of the boat wreck. The cable guide was fixed to one of the deck rails. More bubbles, this time emerging out of the hulk’s various orifices, told them there were more divers inside.

The
SS Thistlegorm
sank on October 6, 1941, in the northern part of the Red Sea, while en route to Alexandria, where it was taking supplies to the allied forces in Egypt. It was spotted by a pair of German bombers who were returning to their base in Crete after completing a mission. The planes were almost out of fuel, so they wasted no time. They launched straight at the boat. The bombs went through the deck and all the way down to the hold, where they exploded, splitting the freighter in two. Nine of the forty-one crew members died in the shipwreck.

The boat was covered with a bulbous layer of rust, corals, and sponges. The professor’s son saw a moray eel emerge from the open mouth of a deck canon, which was now the animal’s fixed abode. On the sandy sea bed, not far from the boat, lay one of the two locomotives that the
SS Thistlegorm
had been transporting for Egyptian National Railways. It was tempting, but there’d be time for that later.

His partner caught his attention and pointed toward a hatch. The professor’s son nodded. They switched on their flashlights and swam down into the hold.

Everything was brown inside the boat. The beams from the flashlights lit a narrow passageway. What looked like particles suspended in the water proved on closer inspection to be a shoal of tiny fish the same color as the rust on the bulkhead.

The
SS Thistlegorm
had been carrying a wide array of cargo
—
rain boots, trucks, armored vehicles, radio equipment, rifles . . . In the hold, the floor was covered by a jumbled mess of debris that looked like trash piled up by floodwaters. The two divers moved carefully, so as not to disturb the sediment. They spotted a row of Norton motorcycles leaning one against the other, like books on a shelf. The professor’s son fiddled with his underwater camera to photograph a scorpionfish posing on one of the seats. His partner signaled for them to move on. They swam around the hold for a while and then left again through one of the bomb holes in the hulk. They continued exploring the freighter and taking photos until their air gauges told them it was time to go back.

They followed the cable guide as they made their ascent. It ended in a buoy, and just next to that was the boat. Their Egyptian guide gave them a hand hoisting themselves onto the platform at the stern
.

“Everything OK?”

The professor’s son gave two thumbs up. His partner took off his tank, which the guide then put in the rack set into the side of the vessel. He did the same with the professor’s son’s tank
.

“Something to drink now?”

The two men nodded
.

They took off their wetsuits, and the guide grabbed a couple of beers from the cooler. He took another for himself and sat down at the helm.

The professor’s son and his partner drank as they recounted the dive. There were other diving boats anchored around the buoy. They ate something and then took a dip in the nude, not caring that they could be seen by the other boats. The professor’s son got out of the water with a cheeky laugh and went into the cabin. His partner followed him. They closed the door.

The guide didn’t pay them any attention. It wasn’t the first time he had a pair of fully-grown men fooling around like kids and having a kiss and a cuddle. What’s more, they’d accepted his boat rental price without any haggling, and his instinct told him they’d probably leave a decent tip, too. He killed time reading the previous day’s paper. Eventually his passengers came out of the cabin and told him they were ready to do another dive.

“The locomotive now?”

They nodded
.

At the stern end of the deck, the professor’s son squeezed into his wetsuit. His partner went back into the cabin
.

“I’m gonna grab my other goggles,” he said. “These ones pinch my nose.”

From among the various tanks, the guide chose a full one. It had spent all morning in the sun, its contents expanding in the heat. This fact in itself wasn’t enough to cause what happened next. But the tank was old, and it had a crack where the cylinder joined the air valve. When the guide put it down on the deck with a little thump, the bottle exploded
.

In the cabin, the explosion threw the professor’s son’s partner against a bulkhead. He got up, stunned. He was bleeding from the forehead, and there was a sharp buzzing in his ears. He staggered out on deck, which was stained red with the guide’s blood. There were pieces of him stuck to the gunwale and others floating in the sea, in pink patches of water. The professor’s son was also in the water, having been propelled outward by the explosion. He wasn’t moving, and was floating facedown.

His partner leaped into the water after him
.

Joanes drove leaning into the wheel. The wind and rain lashed against the car. They came off the small lane that led to the hotel, turned onto the Los Tigres road, and followed it away from the town, which disappeared into the distance. They made slow progress due to the almost total invisibility and the branches strewn across the road.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Joanes. “The cabin should be on the left.”

In the back seat, the professor’s wife pressed her nose against the window next to her, but she couldn’t see a thing. Her husband passed her the flashlight, and she shone it at the passing roadside.

“See it?”

“Not yet.”

The wind sent a garden chair flying out of nowhere, and it smashed into the side of the car, making all three of them jump. A nightgown, presumably belonging to some lady from Los Tigres, went flying past the headlights, all puffed up in the wind, its sleeves flailing wildly.

“Focus!” the professor told his wife. “It must be around here somewhere.”

“You don’t think we already passed it back there, do you?”

Nobody answered.

A hundred or so yards further along, the woman shouted, “There! There’s something over there!”

Joanes braked suddenly and looked to where the flashlight was shining. He couldn’t see more than a track coming off the main road. The light didn’t reach any further than that.

“Do you think that’s it?” asked the professor’s wife.

“We’re going to have to risk it,” replied Joanes.

He turned onto the side street, which was narrow, riddled with potholes, and almost completely choked with vegetation. They pressed on, crushing branches and praying they wouldn’t get stuck.

“There!” they cried all together.

A one-story building, the windows boarded up. Joanes stopped the car in front of the door, which was closed but rattling inside its frame in the wind.

“Give me the flashlight,” he told the woman.

He jumped out of the car and ran toward the cabin, which was raised above the ground on a platform about a foot and a half high. A couple of steps led up to the entrance. At some point a lock had protected the door, but it had been wrenched off a long time ago. Somebody had passed a piece of rope through the remaining hole and attached it to a hook on the front of the building. Joanes removed the rope, and the wind shot the door open. He gave the place a quick once over and went back to the car.

“We’ll carry your wife in together,” he told the professor. “The chair stays in the trunk.”

They carried the woman to the cabin, splashing through the soaking mush of leaves. They left her on a metal bed base whose one missing leg had been replaced by a few bricks and on top of which lay a grayish mattress smattered with stains. It was the only piece of furniture in the cabin.

Joanes went back one last time to the car for the blankets and the rest of the things that the hotel owner had given them. The next priority was to close the cabin’s door in such a way that it would stay closed. On the inside of the wall there was another hook, and Joanes wound the rope around it. The door banged fiercely against the frame, and it looked like the rope wouldn’t hold out for long. On the floor there were several more boards like those covering the windows. He chose the one that seemed most resistant and used it to buttress the door. All the while, the professor shone the flashlight on Joanes. The door stopped rattling, and the noise of the wind dimmed.

Having done all this, Joanes could finally take a proper look at the place where they were going to spend the night.

It smelled of damp, of stagnant air, of rot, and of something else, which the three of them could only associate with excrement. The biggest room took up almost the entire surface area of the cabin and, given its size, they guessed it was where whomever the construction had been built for had slept, if indeed it had ever been occupied. Another room, tucked away in a corner at one end of the building, was closed off to them by a metal door. Joanes pushed the door, and it gave a little groan as it swung open. There before him was an empty, windowless space, just a few feet long on each side. He guessed that at some point it had been intended as an office or storeroom.

The bathrooms were on the other side of the cabin. There were three showers, another three more stalls for the toilets, and a couple of sinks. The stalls didn’t have doors, and if at some point they’d had toilets, someone had long since done away with them. Only the plumbing pipes were left, jutting out of the wall, along with some holes in the grounds, holes which someone had used not too long ago. Of course, there was no water. In the corner lay the remains—the skin and a muddle of bones—of what might have been a possum. The whole cabin had a polished cement floor.

That was it.

Some rusty cans of food, bottles, and other trash were littered across the floor, signs that other guests sometimes stopped by the cabin. This worried Joanes, who then double-checked that the door and windows were firmly shut. Whoever had blocked the windows had done so with great care. At least they’d be protected from the rain.

The scene was so dismal that Joanes preferred to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t want to overstress the place’s obvious deficiencies, and he guessed from the others’ silence that they felt the same. The darkness and the storm only intensified the poor impression the cabin made on them. Joanes forced himself to see it another way, with new eyes—with a little sweep of the floor and some sunshine, the place wouldn’t be so bad. The walls were painted a pistachio color, and on the upper part, skirting the ceiling, some well-intentioned if poorly skilled person had begun to draw a decorative border of vines and tropical birds.

The professor held up his wife, while Joanes turned the mattress, hoping—in vain—to find fewer stains on the other side, and then spread one of the blankets over it.

“You can lie down now,” he told the woman.

The professor put her down on the bed. Afterward, he lit the oil lamp and, carrying the lamp and his luggage, took himself off to the bathroom to put on a dry change of clothes.

“The hotel room was a positive suite compared to this,” said the woman once she and Joanes were alone.

He kicked away the garbage around the foot of the bed. A blanket of dead cochineals—their shells parched and curled into little balls—crunched under the soles of his feet. On the floor, the flashlight lit up a V shape of dust and grime, over which a rust-colored millipede was crawling. Joanes remembered the chronicles he’d read of the conquistadors, which told of flies that bit people inside their noses and ears, bites that would later become infected and swell up terribly, and of worms that crawled onto sleeping people at night and burrowed through their eyelids and eyes.

He shook these thoughts from his head.

“It’s not so bad,” he replied. “I’d imagined some shed that the wind would rip apart piece by piece. This seems solid, at least.”

He took off his rain jacket and patted himself dry with one of the blankets.

“We should have stayed at the hotel,” said the professor’s wife. “Whatever the cost.”

Joanes said nothing.

“You don’t think a tree could fall on us?” she asked.

“Not windy enough.”

When the professor came back from the bathroom, he was carrying a metal bucket, which was swinging by its handle from one of his fingers.

“I found this. Whoever was here before used it to make a fire. We could do the same.”

He had a point. The hurricane had made the temperature drop. The woman, who was wrapped up in one of the blankets, was shivering.

“Here, indoors?” she asked. “Won’t the smoke asphyxiate us?”

“There are too many air currents for that,” answered her husband.

Someone had pierced holes in the bucket to help the fire catch. It was black with soot, and the base was covered in a dark, gritty residue. Joanes and the professor surveyed the trash around the cabin, searching for something that would burn. They decided on the boards that were strewn across the floor. They propped them up diagonally, resting one end on the floor and the other against the wall, and then stamped on them so they snapped in the middle. They kept going until they had a decent amount of firewood.

Joanes placed the bucket near the bed and added the smallest pieces of wood to it.

“It’s too damp,” said the professor. “It’ll need something else if it’s going to catch.”

There was nothing suitable in the cabin. Joanes opened his backpack and pulled out the notebook where he’d made his notes about the reduction to the hotel offer the night before. He tore off a few blank pages, scrunched them into balls, and put them inside the bucket, under the sticks of wood. He held a lighter to them. The wood resisted. Joanes was forced to go on tearing out pages until he reached those where his notes were written. He tore them out, too. At last, the wood caught fire. It let off a load of smoke, and the residue at the bottom of the bucket gave off an acrid stench as it melted. But the fire gave them light and heat. The professor turned off the flashlight.

The three of them watched the flames in silence.

In spite of the cabin, the hurricane, and the exhaustion, Joanes was pretty pleased with himself. He’d shown conviction. He was sure that nobody expected that when the hotel owner told him get out, his response would be a cool “fine by me.” He felt a certain degree of pride at spending the night in that place, in the middle of the wilderness and a Category 2 or even Category 3 hurricane.

He thought about the telephone call he’d been waiting for all day. There in the cabin, in the thick of night, surrounded by the whistling wind, all of that seemed a million miles away. And then, as he watched the fire, he realized with absolute certainty that the call was never going to come, that he would never supply air conditioning to that hotel. To his surprise, it didn’t bother him in the slightest. He told himself that his business would survive. And if that wasn’t the case, well, that didn’t matter, either, because he’d find a way to keep going.

As soon as he’d warmed himself up a bit, he moved away from the professor and his wife. With the intention of catching a few winks, he sat down on the floor with his back against one wall, stretched his legs, and closed his eyes.

He imagined himself adrift in the waters of the Caribbean, lying on a piece of driftwood, a fragment of some vessel or another. He was exhausted, on the brink of passing out. He’d spent hours at the mercy of the waves and currents. He could hardly keep his head above the surface.

Then an island appeared. It was very close, but until that moment he hadn’t been able to see it. The current gently drove him toward it. He was escorted by a flock of shrill seagulls flying above him.

The waves left him on a deserted beach. His legs could barely support the weight of his body when he set foot on the sand. He stumbled a few steps forward, just enough to reach the shade of a jungle of coconut trees, where at last he could collapse to the ground and give in to his tiredness. Coconuts thumping against the sand as they fell from the trees were the heartbeats of his sleep. Red crabs scurried around with pincers raised, like frightened Lilliputians, not daring to touch him.