Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (10 page)

When I opened my eyes again, I was in Mobile. It was suffocatingly hot and I had gone to a party at an outdoor café with some of my shipmates and Massey Nasser, the Jewish clerk in a shop in Mobile where we sailors bought clothing. He was the one who had given us the business
cards. During the eight months the ship was undergoing repairs, Massey Nasser had made a point of taking care of us Colombian sailors, and out of gratitude we did business only with him. He spoke proper Spanish despite the fact that, he told us, he had never lived in a Spanish-speaking country.

At the outdoor café, where we went almost every Saturday, there were only Jews and Colombian sailors. Every Saturday the same woman danced on a platform. Her belly was bare and her face was veiled, like the Arab dancers in films. We applauded and drank beer out of cans. The most animated of us all was Massey Nasser, the Jewish shop clerk who sold fine, cheap clothing to the Colombian sailors.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that, in a daze, hallucinating about the party in Mobile. I only know that I jumped up, thinking it was getting late. Then I saw, about five meters from the raft, an enormous yellow turtle with a striped head and impassive, motionless eyes, like two giant crystal balls, gazing at me spookily. First I thought I was hallucinating again, so I sat down, terrified. The monstrous animal, about four meters long from head to tail, submerged itself when it saw me move, leaving a wake of foam. I didn’t know if it was real or a fantasy. And even now I can’t decide if it was real, though for a few minutes I saw that giant yellow turtle swimming ahead of the raft, with its nightmarish painted head raised above the water. I only know that—whether real or a fantasy—if the turtle had even grazed the raft, that would have been enough to cause it to turn over and spin around and around a few times.

That terrible vision rekindled my fear. But fear revived
me. I grabbed the stunted oar, sat down, and prepared for battle, with this monster or any other that might try to overturn the raft. It was almost five. Punctual as always, the sharks came to the surface.

I looked at the side of the raft where I had marked each day and counted eight scratches. But I realized I had forgotten to record this one. I made a scratch with my key, convinced it would be the last one, feeling desperate and angry at the realization that it would be harder for me to die than to go on living. That morning I had chosen death but nonetheless continued to live, with the fragment of oar in my hand, ready to fight for life—to go on fighting for the only thing that didn’t matter at all to me now.

In the midst of the metallic sun and the despair and the thirst, which for the first time was becoming intolerable, something incredible happened. In the middle of the raft, tangled in the webbing, there was a red root like the ones that they crush in Boyacá to make dye, the name of which I can’t remember. I didn’t know how long it had been there. During the nine days at sea I hadn’t even seen a blade of grass. Nonetheless, without my knowing how it had happened, the root was there, tangled in the ropes of the mesh floor, another unmistakable sign of land, which was, however, nowhere to be seen.

The root was about thirty centimeters long. Starving, but now without the strength even to think about hunger, I carelessly bit into it. It tasted like blood. But it exuded
a thick, sweet oil that soothed my throat. I thought it tasted like poison, but I kept on eating it, devouring the gnarled stick until there wasn’t a splinter left.

After I finished eating I didn’t feel any better. It occurred to me that the root might have been an olive branch, because I remembered the Bible story: When Noah released the dove, it returned to the ark with an olive branch, a sign that the sea had receded from the land. So I believed that the olive branch of the Bible story was like the one with which I had appeased my nine days’ hunger.

You can spend a year at sea waiting, but one day it becomes impossible to endure even another hour. The previous day I had thought I would wake up ashore. But twenty-four hours had passed and I was still looking only at the sea and the sky. Now I waited for nothing. It was my ninth night at sea. Nine days of being dead, I thought in terror—certain that at that very moment my house in Olaya in Bogotá would be filled with friends of my family. It would be the last night of the vigil. Tomorrow they would dismantle the altar and little by little they would resign themselves to the fact of my death.

Until that night I hadn’t lost the faint hope that someone would remember me and try to rescue me. But when I realized that for my family it would be the ninth night of my death and the last night of my wake, I felt completely abandoned at sea. And I thought the best thing that could happen to me would be to die. I lay down in the bottom of the raft. I wanted to shout, “I’ll never get up again,” but the words caught in my throat. I remembered school. I raised the Virgin of Carmen medal to my lips and silently began to pray, as I thought my family would be doing just then. Then I felt all right, because I knew I was dying.

11
O
n the
T
enth
D
ay
,
A
nother
H
allucination
: L
and

My ninth night was the longest of all. I had lain down in the raft and the waves were gently breaking against the side. But I wasn’t in command of my senses, and with every wave that broke I relived the catastrophe. It is said that the dying retrace their steps. Something like that happened to me that night: In a feverish recapitulation of that dreadful day, I was on the destroyer again, lying among the refrigerators and the stoves on the stern deck, together with Ramón Herrera, looking at Luis Rengifo standing watch. Each time a wave broke against the side, I felt that the cargo was beginning to slide, that I was heading down to the bottom of the sea, and that I was trying to swim up toward the surface.

Then, minute by minute, my nine days of solitude, anxiety, hunger, and thirst were replayed in sharp detail, as if on a movie screen. First the fall, then my shipmates shouting around the raft, then the hunger, the thirst, the
sharks, and the memories of Mobile all passed by in a succession of images. I was taking precautions against falling overboard. I saw myself again on the stern of the destroyer, trying to tie myself up so that the wave wouldn’t sweep me away. I tied myself up so tightly that my wrists, my ankles, and, most of all, my right knee hurt. But though the ropes were fastened securely, the wave still came and plunged me to the bottom. When I recovered, I was swimming upward, asphyxiating.

Days before, I had thought of tying myself to the raft. That night I would have done it, but I didn’t have the strength to look for the ropes of the mesh flooring. I couldn’t think. For the first time in nine days I didn’t know where I was. In the state I was in, it’s a miracle the waves didn’t drag me to the bottom that night. I wouldn’t have known what was happening. I couldn’t distinguish between hallucination and reality. If a wave had overturned the raft, I might have thought it was another hallucination, that I was falling off the destroyer again—as I felt many times that night—and in an instant I might have dropped into the sea and become food for the sharks that had waited patiently by the side of the raft for nine days.

But my good luck protected me again that night. I had lost my senses, reliving my nine days of solitude minute by minute, but I know now that I was as safe as if I had been lashed to the raft.

At daybreak the wind turned icy again. I had a fever. I was shivering, chilled to the bone. My right knee began to hurt. The salt from the sea had kept the wound dry but it was still raw, as on the first day, though I had taken care not to injure it further. As I lay face down, holding my knee against the floor of the raft, the wound throbbed painfully. I now believe that the wound saved my life. As
if through clouds, I began to feel the pain. It forced me to take notice of my body. I felt the icy wind against my burning face. For several hours I talked a lot of nonsense, speaking to my shipmates and eating ice cream with Mary Address in a place where raucous music was playing.

After countless hours I thought that my head was about to explode. My temples throbbed and my bones ached. I could feel the rawness of the wound in my knee, which was paralyzed by swelling. It was as if my knee were immense, even larger than my body itself.

I realized I was on the raft as dawn began to break, but I didn’t know how long I had been there. With great effort, I remembered I had scratched nine lines on the gunwale of the raft, but I couldn’t recall when I had put the last one there. It seemed to me that a lot of time had passed since the afternoon I had eaten a root I found tangled in the webbing. Had that been a dream? There was a thick, sweet taste in my mouth, but when I tried to recall what I had eaten I couldn’t remember. It hadn’t given me any strength. I had eaten it all, yet my stomach was empty. I was totally spent.

How many days had passed since then? I knew day was about to dawn, but I couldn’t say how many nights I had lain exhausted at the bottom of the raft, waiting for a death that seemed even more remote than land. The sky turned red, as it had the night before. That added to my confusion: I didn’t know if it was dawn or twilight.

Miserable from the pain in my knee, I tried to change position. I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t do it. I
was so weary that I didn’t think I could stand up. So I moved my injured leg, lifted my body by bracing my hands on the bottom of the raft, and let myself fall on my back with my head resting on the side. It seemed to be dawn. I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. Each day at that hour I would search the horizon. But I had lost all hope of sighting land. I went on scanning the sky, watching it change from bright red to pale blue. The air was still icy; I felt feverish, and my knee throbbed in excruciating pain. I lamented the fact that I hadn’t died. I had no strength at all, yet I was completely alive. That made me feel lost, for I had thought I wouldn’t survive the night. But I had made it and I was there as before, suffering on the raft and beginning a new day—still another day, an empty day with its intolerable sun and a pack of sharks around the raft from five o’clock on.

When the sky began to turn blue I looked at the horizon. The water was calm and green on every side. But ahead of the raft, in the half-light of dawn, I could make out a long, heavy shadow: against the bright sky I could see the outlines of coconut palms.

I was in a rage. The day before, I had been at a party in Mobile. Then I had seen a giant yellow turtle, and during the night I had been at home in Bogotá, at the La Salle de Villavicencio Academy, and with my shipmates from the destroyer. Now I was seeing land. If I had had such a hallucination four or five days earlier, I would have been wild with joy. I would have sent the raft straight to hell and leaped into the water to reach shore faster.

But now I was prepared for hallucinations. The palm trees were too distinct to be real. Moreover, they weren’t
at a fixed distance. Sometimes they seemed to be beside the raft; other times it looked as if they were two or three kilometers away. That was why I felt no joy. And that was what made me want to die, before I went mad from hallucinations. I looked toward the sky again. Now it was high and cloudless and an intense blue.

At a quarter to five the sun rose on the horizon. Earlier I had been frightened by the night, but now it was the new day’s sun that seemed like my enemy: a gigantic and implacable enemy that came to tear up my blistered skin and drive me crazy with hunger and thirst. I cursed the sun. I cursed the day. I cursed my luck at having survived nine days adrift instead of being allowed to die of hunger or be devoured by the sharks.

Since I was in such extreme discomfort, I looked for the fragment of oar in the bottom of the raft in order to lie down on it. I had never been able to sleep on a hard pillow, but now I was searching frantically for a piece of wood half demolished by a shark.

The oar was still entwined in the rope mesh. I untied it and delicately placed it under my painful back and rested my head on the side of the raft. That was when I saw, very clearly against a rising red sun, the long green shoreline.

It was almost five. The morning was crystal clear. There couldn’t be any doubt that the land was real. All the frustrated joys of the previous days—the planes, the lights of the ships, the sea gulls, the changing color of the sea—instantly came alive again at the sight of land.

If at that moment I had just finished eating two fried eggs, meat, coffee, and bread—a full breakfast aboard the destroyer—I probably would not have felt as strong as I
did when I saw land. I leaped up. Ahead I clearly saw the shadow of the shoreline and the outlines of coconut palms. I didn’t spot any lights. But to my right, about ten kilometers away, the first rays of the sun shone with a metallic brightness against the cliffs. Mad with joy, I grabbed my fragment of oar and tried to row toward shore in a straight line.

I calculated that the distance between the raft and shore was about two kilometers. My hands were raw, and getting up made my back hurt. But I hadn’t held out for nine days—ten, counting the one just beginning—only to give up now that I saw land ahead of me. I began to sweat. The cold wind of daybreak dried my sweat and chilled me to the bone, but I kept on rowing.