Collected Stories (23 page)

‘Listen,’ Tobías warned him, ‘only the dead know what’s down inside there.’

‘Scientists know too,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘Beneath 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 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.

‘Praise the Lord,’ they sighed, ‘he’s ours!’

The men thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of the difficult nighttime inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother
of the newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid, windless day. They improvised a litter with the remains of foremasts and gaffs, tying it together with rigging so that it would bear the weight of the body until they reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo ship to him so that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish are blind and divers
die of nostalgia, and bad currents would not bring him back to shore, as had happened with other bodies. But the more they hurried, the more the women thought of ways to
waste time. They walked about like startled hens, pecking with the sea charms on their breasts, some interfering on one side to put a scapular of the good wind on the drowned man, some on the other side to put a wrist compass
on him, and after a great deal of
get away from there, woman, stay out of the way, look, you almost made me fall on top of the dead man
, the men began to feel mistrust in their livers and started grumbling about why so many main-altar decorations for a stranger, because no matter how many nails and holy-water jars he had on him, the sharks would chew him all the same, but the women kept piling
on their junk relics, running back and forth, stumbling, while they released in sighs what they did not in tears, so that the men finally exploded with
since when has there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse, a drowned nobody, a piece of cold Wednesday meat
. One of the women, mortified by so much lack of care, then removed the handkerchief from the dead man’s face and the men were left
breathless too.

He was Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat it for them, to recognize him. If they had been told Sir Walter Raleigh, even they might have been impressed with his gringo accent, the macaw on his shoulder, his cannibal-killing blunderbuss, but there could be only one Esteban in the world and there he was, stretched out like a sperm whale, shoeless, wearing the pants of an undersized
child, and with those stony nails that had to be cut with a knife. They only had to take the handkerchief off his face to see that he was ashamed, that it was not his fault that he was so big or so heavy or so handsome, and if he had known that this was going to happen, he would have looked for a more discreet place to drown in, seriously, I even would have tied the anchor off a galleon around
my neck and staggered off a cliff like someone who doesn’t like things in order not to be upsetting people now with this Wednesday dead body, as you people say, in order not to be bothering anyone with this filthy piece of cold meat that doesn’t have anything to do with me. There was so much truth in his manner that even the most mistrustful men,
the ones who felt the bitterness of endless nights
at sea fearing that their women would tire of dreaming about them and begin to dream of drowned men, even they and others who were harder still shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban’s sincerity.

That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could conceive of for an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to get flowers in the neighboring villages returned with
other women who could not believe what they had been told, and those women went back for more flowers when they saw the dead man, and they brought more and more until there were so many flowers and so many people that it was hard to walk about. At the final moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and aunts and
uncles and cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen. Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens. While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware
for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look
at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban’s memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad,
the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban’s memory
eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high sea, and the captain would
have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it’s gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun’s so bright that the sunflowers don’t know which way to turn, yes, over there,
that’s Esteban’s village.