Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (12 page)

He came back, as he had promised. Even before I began waiting for him—only a little while after he left—he returned with the basket-laden donkey and the black girl with the aluminum can (his girlfriend, I learned afterward). The dog hadn’t left my side. He had stopped licking my face and my wounds and had left off sniffing me. He lay at my side half asleep, not moving until he saw the donkey approach. Then he jumped up and started wagging his tail.

“Can you walk?” the man asked me.

“I’ll see,” I said. I tried to stand up but lost my balance.

“You can’t,” the man said, catching me before I fell down.

He and the girl managed to lift me onto the donkey. Supporting me under each arm, they got the animal moving. The dog ran ahead, jumping around.

There were coconuts all along the road. At sea I had been
able to endure the thirst, but here on the donkey, moving along a narrow, winding road lined with coconut palms, I felt I couldn’t hold out a moment longer. I asked for some coconut milk.

“I don’t have a machete,” the man said.

But that wasn’t so. He was carrying a machete on his belt. If I had had the strength just then, I would have taken the machete away from him by force, shelled a coconut, and eaten it whole.

Later, I found out why the man wouldn’t give me any coconut milk. He had gone to a house located about two kilometers from where he had found me, and the people there advised him not to give me anything to eat until a doctor could examine me. And the nearest doctor was two days’ journey from there, in San Juan de Urabá.

In less than half an hour we reached the house, a primitive structure at the side of the road, made of wood with a tin roof. Three men and two women were there. Together they helped me off the donkey, took me to a bedroom, and put me in a canvas hammock. One of the women went to the kitchen, brought back a little pot of cinnamon-flavored boiled water, and sat down at the edge of the bed to feed me spoonfuls of it. I drank the first few drops greedily. With the next few I felt I was regaining my spirit. Then I didn’t want any more to drink; I wanted only to tell them what had happened to me.

No one knew about the accident. I tried to explain, to give the whole story so they’d know how I’d been saved. I’d had the idea that in whatever part of the world I turned up, everyone would already know about the catastrophe. It was disillusioning to realize, as the woman spoon-fed me cinnamon water like a sick child, that I had been mistaken.

Several times I insisted on telling them what had happened.
Impassive, the men and women sat at the foot of the bed, watching me. It seemed like a ceremony. If I hadn’t been so happy to be saved from the sharks and all the other dangers of the sea I had endured for ten days, I would have thought that they were from another planet.

The kind manner of the woman who fed me wouldn’t permit any distractions from her purpose. Each time I tried to tell my story she said, “Be quiet now. You can tell us later.”

I would have eaten anything. From the kitchen came the aroma of lunch being prepared. But all my pleading was useless.

“After the doctor sees you, we’ll give you something to eat,” they said.

But the doctor did not arrive. Every ten minutes they gave me little spoonfuls of sugar water. The younger of the women, a girl, cleaned my wounds with cloths and warm water. The day passed slowly. And gradually I began to feel better. I was sure I was in the care of friendly people. If they had given me food instead of doling out spoonfuls of sugar water, my body wouldn’t have withstood the shock.

The man I had met on the road was named Dámaso Imitela. At ten o’clock on the morning of March 9, the day I landed on the beach, he went to the station house in nearby Mulatos and returned with several policemen to the house where he had brought me. They knew nothing about the tragedy either. No one had heard the news in Mulatos; newspapers don’t reach them there. In a little
store where they’ve installed an electric motor, they’ve got a refrigerator and a radio. But they don’t listen to the news. As I learned later, when Dámaso Imitela reported to the police inspector that he had found me lying exhausted on the beach and that I had said I was from the destroyer
Caldas
, they turned on the motor and listened to news programs from Cartagena all day. But by then there was nothing about the accident. There had been only a brief mention the evening it occurred.

The police inspector, all the policemen, and sixty men from Mulatos got together to help me. A little after midnight they came to the house, and their conversation woke me from virtually the only sound sleep I had had in the last twelve days.

Before dawn the house was filled with people. All of Mulatos, men, women, and children, came to get a look at me. That was my first contact with a crowd of curiosity seekers, the kind who in subsequent days would follow me everywhere. The crowd carried lanterns and flashlights. When the police inspector, together with almost all his companions, moved me from the bed, it felt as if they were tearing away my sunburned skin. It was a real scramble.

It was hot. I felt I was suffocating in the crowd of protective faces. When I walked out to the road, a sea of lanterns and flashlights spotlighted my face. I was blinded in the midst of the murmuring throng and the loud orders of the police inspector. I couldn’t imagine when I might reach some destination. Since the day I fell off the destroyer, I had done nothing but travel an unknown route. That morning I went on traveling, not knowing where, unable even to imagine what that diligent, friendly crowd was going to do with me.

The road to Mulatos from the place where they had found me is long and arduous. They put me in a hammock supported by two poles. Two men at the ends of each pole carried me along a narrow, twisting road lit by lanterns. We were in the open air, but it was as hot as a closed room, because of the lanterns.

Relays of eight men traded places every half hour. Then they’d give me a little water and bits of soda biscuit. I wanted to know where we were going and what they were going to do with me. They talked about everything but that. Everyone spoke except me. The inspector, who led the crowd, wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to talk to me. I could hear shouts, orders, and conversation in the distance. When we reached the main street of Mulatos, the police couldn’t handle the crowd. It was about eight o’clock in the morning.

Mulatos is a fishing hamlet and has no telegraph office. The nearest town is San Juan de Urabá, where a small plane from Monterílands twice a week. When we reached the hamlet I felt I had arrived somewhere. I thought I would receive news of my family. But Mulatos was barely the midpoint of my journey.

I was put in a house and the whole town lined up to get a look at me. I thought of a fakir I had seen for fifty centavos in Bogotá about two years earlier. You had to stand in line for several hours to get a look at him. You moved about two feet every half hour. When you reached the room where the fakir was displayed in a glass box, you
no longer wanted to look at anybody, you just wanted to get out immediately, stretch your legs, and breathe fresh air.

The only difference between the fakir and me was that the fakir was in a glass box. He hadn’t eaten for nine days. I had been ten days at sea and one day in bed in a room in Mulatos. I watched the faces parade before me—black faces, white faces—in an endless line. The heat was terrible. Then the appropriate response came to me—a sense of humor about it all—and I guessed that someone might even be selling tickets to see the shipwrecked sailor.

They took me to San Juan de Urabá in the same hammock in which they had carried me to Mulatos. But the crowd accompanying me had grown: there were no fewer than six hundred men. There were also women, children, and animals. Some were on donkeys but most were on foot. The trip took almost all day. Carried by that crowd, by six hundred men taking turns along the way, I felt my strength returning. I think Mulatos was left depopulated. From the early hours of morning, the motor had been turned on, and the radio had filled the hamlet with music. It was like a festival. At the center of it all, and the reason for the festival, I had lain in bed while the whole town streamed by to look at me. That same crowd couldn’t bear to send me off alone, but had to go with me to San Juan de Urabá in a long caravan as wide as the winding road. I was hungry and thirsty during the whole trip. The little bits of soda biscuit and the minute sips of water brought me around again but had also stimulated my hunger and thirst. Entering San Juan reminded me of a village feast. All the inhabitants of that picturesque little town buffeted by the sea winds came out to meet me. The town had taken
precautions against the curiosity seekers. The police managed to contain the mob that elbowed one another in the streets trying to get a look at me.

This was the end of my journey. Dr. Humberto Gómez, the first physician to give me a thorough examination, passed on the great news; he didn’t tell me anything before finishing his examination because he wanted to make sure I could handle it. Cuffing me lightly on the cheek and smiling amiably, he said, “There’s a plane ready to take you to Cartagena. Your family is waiting for you there.”

14
M
y
H
eroism
C
onsisted of
N
ot
L
etting
M
yself
D
ie

It never occurred to me that a man could become a hero for being on a raft ten days and enduring hunger and thirst. I had no choice. If the raft had been outfitted with water, vacuum-packed biscuits, a compass, and fishing gear, I surely would have been as alive as I am now. But there would be a difference: I wouldn’t have been treated like a hero. So, in my case, heroism consisted solely of not allowing myself to die of hunger and thirst for ten days.

I did nothing heroic. All my effort went toward saving myself. But since salvation came wrapped in a glow and with the title of hero as a prize, like a bonbon with a surprise inside it, I had no choice but to accept my salvation as it came, heroism and all.

I have been asked how it feels to be a hero. I never know how to respond. So far as I’m concerned, I feel the same as I did before. Nothing has changed internally or externally. The terrible burns from the sun have stopped hurting. The
knee injury has become scar tissue. I am Luis Alejandro Velasco again, and that’s enough for me.

It’s other people who have changed. My friends are now friendlier than before. And I imagine that my enemies are worse enemies, although I don’t really think I have any. When people recognize me on the street, they stare at me as if I were some strange animal. For that reason I dress in civilian clothes, and will do so until people forget that I spent ten days on a raft without food or water.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself. I learned that at the Cartagena Naval Hospital, where they assigned me a guard so that no one could speak to me. After three days I felt completely normal again but I couldn’t leave the hospital. I knew that after I was discharged I would have to tell my story to the whole world, because, as the guards had told me, newspaper reporters from all over the country had come to the city to interview and photograph me. One of them, with an impressive mustache about twenty centimeters long, took more than fifty photos, but he wasn’t permitted to ask me anything about my adventure.

Another one, more daring, disguised himself as a doctor, fooled the guards, and slipped into my room. It was a great coup for him, but short-lived.

Only my father, the guards, and the doctors and nurses at the naval hospital were permitted in my room. One day, a doctor I had never seen before came in. He looked very
young in his smock and eyeglasses, with a phonendoscope hanging from his neck. He turned up unannounced, saying nothing.

The corporal of the guard looked at him in perplexity and asked him to identify himself. The young doctor searched his pockets, stalled a little, and said he had forgotten his papers. Then the guard told him he couldn’t talk to me without special permission from the director of the hospital. So they went off in search of the director. Twenty minutes later, they came back to my room.

The guard entered first and told me that the man had been given permission to examine me for fifteen minutes and that he was a psychiatrist from Bogotá. The guard, however, thought he was a reporter in disguise.

“Why do you think so?” I asked him.

“Because he’s very frightened. And psychiatrists don’t use a phonendoscope.”

Nonetheless, he had talked to the director of the hospital for fifteen minutes. They would have spoken about medicine and psychiatry in complicated medical terms and quickly reached an understanding.

I don’t know if it was because of the guard’s warning, but when the young doctor came back to my room I no longer thought of him as a medical man. He didn’t seem like a reporter either, although I had never seen a reporter until that moment. He looked to me like a priest disguised as a doctor. It struck me that he didn’t know how to begin, but in fact he was trying to figure out how to distract the guard.