Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (7 page)

The shark’s presence diverted me from my intentions; discouraged, I lay down at the side of the raft. But after a few moments I was filled with glee; seven sea gulls flew over the raft.

To a hungry sailor alone at sea, gulls are a message of hope. Ordinarily, a flock of sea gulls will accompany a ship out of port, but only up to the second day of the voyage. Seven sea gulls over the raft meant land was nearby.

If I had had the strength, I would have started to row. But I was too weak. I could barely stay on my feet for a few seconds at a time. Convinced that I was less than two days from land, I drank a little more sea water from the palm of my hand and again lay down at the side of the raft, face upward so the sun wouldn’t burn my lungs. I didn’t cover my face with my shirt because I wanted to go on looking at the sea gulls, which were flying slowly, swooping down at an acute angle to the sea. It was one o’clock in the afternoon on the fifth day.

I don’t know when it arrived. I was lying down in the raft, around five in the afternoon, preparing to lower myself into the middle before the sharks came. Then I saw a small sea gull, about the size of my hand, fly in circles above the raft and land on the end opposite me.

My mouth filled with icy saliva. I didn’t have anything to capture that sea gull with. No instrument except my hands and my cunning, which was sharpened by hunger. The other gulls had disappeared. Only this little one remained, brown, with shiny feathers, hopping around on the gunwale.

I kept absolutely still. I thought I felt, against my shoulder, the sharp fin of the punctual shark, who would have arrived at five o’clock. But I decided to take a risk. I didn’t dare look at the sea gull, so as not to scare it off by moving my head. I watched it fly very low over my body. I saw it take to the air and disappear into the sky. But I didn’t lose hope. I was hungry and I knew that if I remained absolutely still the sea gull would come within reach of my hand.

I waited more than half an hour, I think. It came and went several times. At one point I felt a fin brush past my head as a shark tore a fish to pieces. But I was more hungry
than frightened. The sea gull jumped around on the edge of the raft. It was twilight on my fifth day at sea: five days without eating. Despite my emotion, despite my heart pounding in my chest, I kept completely still, like a dead man, while I waited for the sea gull to come closer.

I was stretched out on my back at the side of the raft with my hands on my thighs. I’m sure that for half an hour I didn’t dare to blink. The sky brightened and irritated my eyes, but I didn’t close them at that tense moment. The sea gull pecked at my shoes.

After another long, intense half hour had passed I felt the sea gull sit on my leg. It pecked softly at my pants. I kept perfectly still when it gave me a sharp, dry peck on the knee, though I could have leaped into the air from the pain of the knee wound. But I endured it. Then the sea gull wandered to my right thigh, five or six centimeters from my hand. I stopped breathing and, desperately tense, began imperceptibly to slide my hand toward it.

7
T
he
D
esperate
R
ecourse of a
S
tarving
M
an

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it’s different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they’re very cocky.

I lay so still that the playful little sea gull perching on my thigh probably thought I was dead. I watched it. It pecked at my pants but didn’t hurt me. I continued to extend my hand. Suddenly, at the precise moment the sea gull realized it was in danger and tried to take flight, I grabbed it by the wing, leaped to the middle of the raft, and prepared to devour it.

When I first hoped it would perch on my thigh, I was sure that if I captured it I would eat it alive, without stopping to pluck its feathers. I was starving, and even the thought of the bird’s blood made me thirsty. But once I
had it in my hands and felt the pulsing of its warm body and looked into its shiny, round dark-gray eyes, I hesitated.

Once, I had stood on deck with a rifle, trying to shoot one of the sea gulls following the ship, and the destroyer’s gunnery officer, an experienced sailor, said, “Don’t be a scoundrel. To a sailor, sea gulls are like sighting land. It isn’t proper for a sailor to kill a sea gull.” I remembered that incident, and the gunnery officer’s words, as I held the captured sea gull in my hands, ready to kill it and tear it apart. Even though I hadn’t eaten in five days, those words echoed in my ear, as if I were hearing them all over again. But hunger was more powerful than anything else. I grabbed the bird’s head firmly and began to wring its neck, as you would a chicken’s.

It was terribly delicate. With the first twist, I felt the neck bones break. With the second, I felt its living, warm blood spurt through my fingers. I pitied it. It looked like a murder victim. Its head, still pulsating, hung down from its body and throbbed in my hand.

The spilled blood stirred up the fish. The gleaming white belly of a shark grazed the side of the raft. A shark crazed by the scent of blood can bite through a sheet of steel. Since its jaws are on the underside of its body, it has to turn over to eat. But because it’s myopic and greedy, when it turns belly up it drags along everything in its path. I think one of the sharks tried to attack the raft. Terrified, I threw the sea gull’s head at it and watched, only centimeters from the raft, the great struggle of those huge beasts over that morsel which was even smaller than an egg.

The bird was extremely light and the bones were so fragile you could crush them with your fingers. I tried to
pull the feathers off, but they adhered to the delicate white skin and the flesh came away with the bloody feathers. The viscous black liquid on my fingers disgusted me.

It’s easy to say that after five days of hunger you can eat anything. But though you may be starving, you still feel nauseated by a mess of warm, bloody feathers with a strong odor of raw fish and of mange.

At first I tried to pluck the feathers carefully, methodically. But I hadn’t counted on the fragility of the skin. As the feathers came out it began to disintegrate in my hands. I washed the bird in the middle of the raft. I pulled it apart with a single jerk, and the sight of the pink intestines and blue veins turned my stomach. I put a sliver of the thigh in my mouth but I couldn’t swallow it. This was absurd. It was like chewing on a frog. Unable to get over my repugnance, I spit out the piece of flesh and kept still for a long time, with the revolting hash of bloody feathers and bones in my hand.

The first thing that occurred to me was that whatever I couldn’t eat might serve as bait. But I didn’t have a single implement for fishing. I should have had at least a pin or a bit of wire. But I had nothing, apart from keys, watch, ring, and the three business cards from the shop in Mobile.

I considered my belt. Perhaps I might be able to fashion a fishhook from the buckle. But my efforts were useless. It was growing dark and the fish were leaping all around the raft, crazed at the scent of blood. When it was completely dark I flung the remains of the sea gull overboard and lay down to sleep. As I arranged the oar, I imagined the silent battle of fish fighting over the bones I couldn’t bring myself to eat.

I think I could have died of exhaustion and hopelessness
that night. A harsh wind came up during the early hours. The raft pitched and rolled while—not even remembering now to take the precaution of lashing myself to the mesh flooring—I lay exhausted in the bottom of the raft, with my head and feet barely above water.

But after midnight there was a change: the moon appeared, for the first time since the accident. Beneath the clear blue night, the surface of the sea once again took on a spectral look. That night Jaime Manjarrés didn’t appear. I was alone, without hope, and resigned to my fate.

Nevertheless, each time my spirits sank, something would happen to renew my hopes. That night it was the reflection of the moon on the waves. The sea was choppy and in each wave I thought I saw the lights of a ship. Two nights before, I had lost hope that a ship would rescue me. But all through that night illumined by the moon—my sixth night at sea—I searched the horizon desperately, almost as intently and hopefully as I had on the first night. If I found myself in the same predicament today, I would die of hopelessness: I now know that no ship travels the course on which my raft was bound.

I don’t remember the dawn of the next day. I have a vague idea that during the entire morning I lay prostrate, between life and death, in the bottom of the raft. I thought about my family and imagined them doing precisely what they later told me they had done during my disappearance. I wasn’t surprised when they said they had held a wake for me. On that sixth morning of solitude at sea, I guessed that all those things were happening. I knew that my
family had been informed of my disappearance. Since the planes hadn’t come back, I was sure they had abandoned the search and declared me dead.

All of that was so, up to a point. Yet I tried to take care of myself every moment. I kept finding ways to survive, something to prop myself up with—insignificant though it might have been—some reason to sustain hope. But on the sixth day I no longer hoped for anything. I was a dead man in the raft.

In the afternoon, thinking about how soon five o’clock would come, and with it the return of the sharks, I tried to lash myself to the side. On the beach in Cartagena two years earlier I had seen the remains of a man who had been mangled by a shark. I didn’t want to die that way. I didn’t want to be torn to shreds by a mob of voracious beasts.

It was almost five. The sharks arrived and circled the raft. I struggled to rouse myself to untie a rope from the mesh floor. The afternoon was cool, the sea calm. I felt slightly stronger. Suddenly I saw the sea gulls from the previous day, and the sight of them reawakened my desire to live.

At that point I would have eaten anything. Hunger gnawed at me. But the pain in my ravaged throat and in my jaws, hardened by lack of exercise, was worse. I needed to chew something. I tried in vain to tear off pieces of the rubber sole of my shoe. Then I remembered the business cards from the shop in Mobile.

They were in one of my pants pockets, nearly disintegrated from the dampness. I tore them up, put them in my mouth, and began to chew. It was like a miracle: my throat felt a little better and my mouth filled with saliva. I chewed slowly, as if it were gum. My jaws hurt at the first
bite. But eventually, chewing the cards I had saved without knowing why since the day I went shopping with Mary Address, I felt stronger and more optimistic. I thought I would keep chewing them forever to relieve the pain in my jaw. It seemed terribly wasteful to throw them overboard. I could feel a tiny piece of mashed-up cardboard move all the way down to my stomach, and from that moment on I felt I would be saved, that I wouldn’t be destroyed by the sharks.

The relief I felt while chewing the cards spurred my imagination to look for things to eat. If I had had a knife, I would have cut up my shoes and chewed slices of the rubber soles. They were the closest thing at hand. I tried to pry off the clean, white soles with my keys. But I couldn’t pull off a piece of the sole, it was glued so tightly to the fabric.

Desperately I gnawed at my belt until my teeth hurt. I couldn’t even tear off a mouthful. I must have looked like a fiend then, trying to rip off pieces of my shoes, belt, and shirt with my teeth. At twilight I took off my clothes, which were now soaked with sweat, and I was down to my shorts. I don’t know if it was the result of chewing the cards, but I fell asleep almost immediately. Perhaps because I had grown accustomed to the discomfort of the raft, perhaps because I was so drained after six nights of keeping a vigil, I slept soundly for many hours. At times a wave would awaken me. I would start up, frightened that the force of the wave would throw me into the water, but immediately afterward I would go back to sleep.

Eventually I woke to my seventh day at sea. I don’t know why I was sure it wouldn’t be my last. The sea was calm and the day cloudy, and when, at about eight o’clock, the sun came out, I felt reassured by the good sleep of the previous night. Against the low, leaden sky, the seven sea gulls flew over the raft.

Two days before, I had been cheered by their presence. But when I saw them the third time, I felt terror again. They’re seven lost sea gulls, I thought in despair. Every sailor knows that sea gulls sometimes get lost at sea and fly for several days without direction, until they find a ship to point the way to port. Maybe the gulls I had been seeing for three days now were the same ones each day, lost at sea. That meant my raft was drifting farther and farther from land.

8
F
ighting
O
ff the
S
harks for a
F
ish