I
The schooner was named the Buena Ventura. Said back on land, the name perhaps lacked significance, but once established at sea (a hatchery for superstitions of every sort), it declared her auspicious fortune. On more than one occasion, this magical title dispelled all disaster and doubt, even when the boat was held in the clutches of a terrifyingly violent storm. There was never a sailor’s prayer that could resuscitate more reassurance, nor would any incantation summon greater confidence. The sea could well have become a pair of gigantic, hungry jaws while the wind circled, tormenting us with its own violent misery; from within the dark churning waters of the sea, death itself might have unkindly come to call; a hurricane might have bellowed, yet no man aboard would have flinched. Smiling confidently in the face of danger, we would sweep worries and fears away and smile, suddenly relieved, merely because someone had said the name of our ship aloud.
Her unusual appearance along the coast complemented the Buena Ventura’s memorable name. Somewhat narrow and sixty-five feet in length, she stood out—as elegant and slender as a racehorse. Incomparable to the other slimy, clunky schooners, she was like a pedigree steed encircled by inelegant donkeys. Her stern was raised, full, symmetrical, like a woman's figure, and her violin-shaped bow cut through the water like a knife. The slightest breeze was enough for her to mark ten knots on the speedometer. And her responsiveness during maneuvers inspired the admiration of several of the captains who coveted her. She served at first as a recreational vehicle, designated for joyrides along the coastal route running from Cayo Piedra in the east to Bahia Honda in the west. From those days, she retained hints of extravagance, now concealed: her covered stern and an unusual bathroom equipped with a bathtub, a sink, and a bidet, sensational extravagances capable of filling the crew’s imagination with fantasies of women’s thighs, phantoms, and mirages that eased their solitude at sea.
Thereafter, she dedicated herself to fishing snapper, grouper, and kingfish off Women’s Island and around Cozumel until they passed the Prohibition Amendment in the United States. Then the captain of the Buena Ventura, whom we called Cornúa, suggested the idea of replacing fish with contraband rum.
I was the owner of the Buena Ventura. And I sailed her, following my doctor’s prescription that, with some sea air, sodium cacodylate, and stearic acid, I might hope to restore my nerves, worn raw by ten years of alcohol and prostitutes. Sometimes, at the end of a binge continuing for a few nights, I felt defeated, physically and morally, by an agonizing weariness. I noticed then that my feet, my shoulders, and my hands were made of lead. And those lead limbs matched the clumsiness of my ideas, disjointed and slow, like blind reptiles. I felt my muscles, flaccid, disconnected, and cold, like mollusks, made of boredom and sluggishness. And between this boredom and that fatigue something floated, like gooey seaweed in an ocean of mud: my unraveled sense of resolve. Nothing interested me sincerely, nor did any stimulus induce any pleasant responses in me. I observed myself, the emptiness within me, a dull brain, incapable of sustained effort, disoriented like a ship without a compass.
And, nevertheless, reminding me of myself, the person I had become, a nagging itch kept my nerves constantly on edge. Because of it, whatever else—minor annoyances, trivial setbacks—would trigger the most intolerable suffering. During my moments of torment and pain, only two roads presented themselves to me: the sea or suicide.
I cowardly chose the first. The good health accumulated during twenty days of self-imposed abstinence with nothing else to marvel at except for the sky and the water and the water and the sky, I squandered then into the mouths of many impure women once I had returned to land. My flesh struggled in constant mutiny, thrashing as I attempted to stifle its desires, and ending in joyless depravity that left my spirit empty.
Ten months earlier, because of an illness and a nervous breakdown, whose cause was diagnosed as “arising from sexual origins,” I quit my job as a sugar chemist at The American Sugar Company to seek my living thereafter solely from the three schooners that I had inherited from my father. At that time began my fascination with all things having to do with the sea; an infatuation, in whose ecstasies I bought books about oceanography and astronomy, pilot’s courses, and travelers’ tales that I never opened. My collection of sea maps was as spectacular as it was useless because my understanding got shipwrecked along the coastlines of those maps riddled with dots, names, shadows, and incomprehensible lines. Passing the slow hours aboard, I interrogated the other fishermen about the details of my profession. When I learned something new, not a second would pass before I tracked down another innocent listener to impress them with my naval knowledge.
Fishing red tails with the fly-reel, line-fishing in two kinds of water, casting into the current without weights, using three-pronged swivel hooks to catch “Saint John’s Day snappers” during the month of July, fishing for sharks with harpoons, for sea bass, for cuttlefish, for snappers off the surface, or with light tackle from the bottom—all sorts of fishing. In short, they found in me the most devoted of ideational zealots. In theory but nothing more, for, when I had a rod in my hand, I completely forgot all that I had learned, became overcome with boredom and promptly fell asleep. But that did not prevent me from continuously declaring myself to be a well-versed aficionado in the art of fishing.
I liked literature but not excessively. And when I found out that Zane Grey was the amateur fishing champion of the United States, I bought six of his books, and I set them aside to collect mold beside the volumes on navigation and oceanography. I subsequently believed that I had paid tribute to one of my kind. Later I discovered that another writer had a habit of summering, during marlin season, in Cuban waters. His name was Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway. And naturally, I also felt compelled to obtain one of his works. I went on a wild goose chase into all of Havana's bookstores. In the end, I had to content myself with two of his portraits, published in the newspaper. I pinned one of them, the largest, on the wall of my cabin. And when someone asked me about that wide and smiling face of a healthy American, I told him that he was a millionaire friend of mine.
All of this, however, did not seem to me to be enough to demonstrate my devotion to all things that were related to the sea, so I changed the pendant on my watch chain—a medal with a shining gem stone in the center—to a little gold anchor. My tiepin was also shaped like an anchor. On land I carried a walking stick fashioned from amber in the form of a manatee. In the living room of my house, in a panoply of ocean memorabilia, were two swordfish bills crossed like sabers, and there I also placed the enormous skeletons of three fish heads: from a mako shark, from a bull shark, and from a hammerhead shark, which, along with the spotted cat shark, is one of the most ferocious of its species.
The sailors thought that I was a little loopy; they used to smile, sneering and mocking me, for instance, when they saw the ship embroidered on my white flannel pants, my blue cashmere blazer, or my bright sun-visor festooned with a golden shield of metal. When referring to me, they never pronounced my real name. Instead they called me, sarcastically: The Admiral.
On the other hand, the captain of the Buena Ventura was, morally and physically, the exact opposite of me. He seemed carved from a block of copper, to create the perfect image of degradation. He was forever dressed in a pair of pants that, a long time ago, used to be brown, but had now become an indefinable color because, during the time he had worn them, sea water and large oil smudges had covered them, especially along the tops of the thighs where he had a habit of wiping the dirt off his hands. His sailor’s suit was full of patches, crudely sewed on with thick embroidery thread or thin fishing line. And his espadrilles, when their heels were not broken, were beginning to unravel along the toes. That didn’t bother him at all because underway he was always barefoot, and with his pants rolled up to his knees.
He was a man who was feared and respected even by the most courageous members of the crew, or those manning other ships. Very tall and thin, he had the solid fists of a heavyweight boxer, a face like a corner—pointed and angular—a tight, hard mouth, and merciless eyes, with a hard, metallic brightness that caused nervousness in others, one that was always close to fear. He walked with the nimble playfulness of a cat in stark contrast to the other sailors who lumbered clumsily about. His shoulders did not slump forward like those of the other men, and he did not open his legs wide to maintain his balance aboard. He made his decisions quickly, and even his moments of anger could not undermine his impenetrable serenity.
Accompanying his nerve was a marlin’s sword that he had had made into a dagger and had been known to point violently in the direction of other men’s hearts, resulting twice in his confinement behind prison bars. The first time, the jury had been swayed by his lawyer, who enjoyed overpowering political connections, in a legitimate case of self-defense. And he was sentenced to a little more than two years in prison. A while later, after his release, he again violated the law, and the jury, callously, sentenced him to the punishment reserved for first-degree murderers.
One horrifyingly brutal detail complicated his case: after slaying his adversary with a bullet, Cornúa stabbed him in the heart with a swordfish’s bill. Seeing that he fit the conditions precisely for aggravated circumstances—premeditation and malice—all chances of building him a case based on “legitimate self-defense” evaporated. Thus, scolding him, his own lawyer interrogated furiously, “But why did you shoot him? That’s murder! First with the revolver then with the swordfish’s bill? Were you out of your mind? You are crazy.”
Cornúa responded coldly, “Crazy? I’m not crazy. As crazy as you are! Any way you look at it, I’d have killed him, but I was sure he didn’t wanna fight me, so I shot him first so that he couldn’t get away.”
Even so, Cornúa was a lucky man, protected by a member of Congress. It was thanks to him, and an unexpected pardon that, after three years, he was back to the coast. That was where my father went to find him and offer him command of the Buena Ventura. Prison life had hardened the expression on his face, his words had become more cautious, and his nickname was more appropriate than ever. What’s more, in prison, they had shown him the usefulness of discipline, with which he now ran the ship with the severity of a galley-slave driver. Usually he remained silent and observant. And watching him, one might have supposed certain things that nobody dared to speak aloud.
What people spoke of, whenever they had the opportunity when resting in port, was something Cornúa did that seemed utterly selfless. He did it in a sleazy café on San Isidro Street at a time when that street was a place where one could always find prostitutes, pimps, homosexuals, drunks, and teenagers, who would go there to display their manliness, like their first pair of long pants, wearing it proudly like their first credential of virility.
A large and brutish boy, so drunk that he was behaving like an animal, was becoming quite aggressive with a dejected flower girl, and forcing her to drink a big glass of cognac. He was clutching one of her wrists, and in his vice-like grip, the poor child, was wriggling about like an eel on a fishhook. She was a pale, scrawny girl with lean shoulders whose sharp blades looked like someone who had contracted tuberculosis, and dark circles under her eyes, from some sin practiced in solitude, perhaps smoking or drinking. The floor was carpeted with crushed roses, trampled beneath the young woman’s feet as she fought to free herself. Cornúa, who was at the bar, went towards the couple, and warned the man, “Let her go!”
Stunned by the interruption, he instinctively obeyed before looking up in a state of shock. But his acquiescent state of mind lasted only a second. Afterwards he must have realized that he made himself look ridiculous by meekly obeying a stranger’s order. Then galvanized by an impulse within, he threw the glass in his hand violently towards this disrespectful intruder. Reflexively, Cornúa ducked, casually dodging the incoming projectile, which came to a crash and shattered the mirror behind him. As he stood up straight, Cornúa raised a chair and brought it down hard, striking a blow to the drunkard’s head. The bleeding man fell to the floor, coming to rest finally at Cornúa’s feet. Four friends who had witnessed his demise came at Cornúa immediately with full intent to punish him for the transgression. Three were beaten with a chair, and the fourth sprinted out of the café, pursued by Cornúa, holding his swordfish bill tightly in his hand.
Otherwise, he knew his profession well. Nobody could have evaded a cyclone more ably, nor have found in twenty days a school of wreckfish yielding thirty thousand pounds, at a time when lesser captains required a month and a half of forced labor to catch just fifteen thousand pounds. The Bay of Campeche, from Cape Catoche to the western limits of Tabasco, was as familiar to him as that old pair of pants he wore. He knew the depth and the seafloor—here, sand or mud; there, rock—of every inch of the Gulf. When he gave the order to drop anchor, a sailor would ask him, “How far down, Cornúa?”
And according to the place, he would respond, “forty fathoms,” or “twenty-five fathoms,” or “sixteen fathoms.” And if some skeptic needed to be convinced, he had only to measure the bay, manually, for himself. When the lead plummet touched the bottom, the sounding line, without fail, confirmed Cornúa’s answer.
With similar accuracy, he forecast fishing conditions. He looked up first and found his bearings on the sky then on the water. “There are large snapper here,” he then said. And you could bet that the first victim on the end of the line would be a throbbing mass of pink fish meat, weighing ten or twelve pounds.
He was, otherwise, an excellent shipmate. He was always ready to lend a hand to his subordinates, during any job, no matter how difficult. When it was time to fish, the instant that the ship had arrived in position, he would never be the last to settle in at the gunwale, put on wool fingerstalls, bait a hook and cast the tackle trolling, even though as skipper he had no obligation to do so. His first fish always caused him to pronounce, as informed by the halfhearted or ferocious way that it had bitten, the fish’s weight and worth. At the end of the afternoon, when the men’s arms had weakened, and their lower backs were aching from the exhaustion of twelve or fourteen hours of work, standing straight up and fishing in the same spot, Cornúa could be found eagerly asking the Chinese cook to taste the seasoning of his soup.
On land also, he radiated a spirit of camaraderie. If any of his fishermen fell upon a financial problem, they could count upon the captain’s pockets for ten or twelve pesos, because they were always available to his crew. And if he did not have the money, he went looking for it, requesting an advance from the owner or by taking his own property to the pawnshop. Sometimes his loans came with rough, griping, or bitter, even obscene, words. But, after they knew him, nobody felt any spitefulness, because that, they all later perceived, was just his ploy for stifling any displays of gratitude in return.
All of that gave him an aspect of a rare esteem, composed of respect, admiration, and fear, bestowed upon him by the people along the coast, one that kept him in an uncommon confidence, an allure, that was steadfast, unquestionable in the face of one’s intimates, or even in love.
II
Pablo Alonso filled a box to the top with the last wreckfish, which flipped two of three times in the air before being quieted by a club to the head. Then two men lifted the box by rope handles, and after weighing it, put it on the truck. A parenthesis opened, heavy with hope and fear. All eyes looked out along the coast, then across the sea, and finally back to land. And as the transport began to move, a sigh of relief escaped every chest. We had unloaded the fish ahead of schedule, weighed according to regulations, as they had compelled us last night, and the knowledge that we had put one over on the authorities filled us with pleasure.
The afternoon, as serene as a shallow bay, rowed slowly towards the horizon. The sun, very low, bobbed like a float, bleeding at the end of a long fishing line—an immense line made to catch stares—and another float was the moon, sinking into the bottom of the bay, between a forest of masts. The sunset was red and as silky as a Kingfish mackerel’s gills, and in some spots resembled the shell belly of mother-of-pearl. A transatlantic liner with a German flag was passing through the canal. Along its side, as was the practice in the port, the ship towed a dark whaling boat, which looked like a suckerfish attached to the body of a shark. Behind the stern, the great ship left a wide wake, like pure, freshly-cut wool, and swarms of people were congregating on the main deck as well as on the bridge at the prow where the third-class passengers berthed. From its chimneys, painted with red, black, and white stripes, billowed thick grey columns. And its portholes, obstructed by curious heads, looked like ancient medallions. The propeller screw suddenly began to undulate the still waters of the bay, causing the fishing schooners, skiffs tied up near the seawall, and police boats to sway in time.
The last rays of the sun stole silver and golden reflections, like shad scales, from the trembling water. The steamship crossed the line at the entrance of the harbor in front of the fortress, El Morro, and, pushing through an arc of wake as wide as a bishop’s cane, sailed off toward the endless horizon. A few minutes later, the reverberation of waves in the channel subsided.
“I really wanted to be on that one,” sighed Manuel Fileiro, a well-built, easy-going, and wistful Galician, who seemed to make his constant homesickness worse by playing tunes about his native land, overflowing with longing, on an accordion.
Manuel raised his head, revealing the innocent, clear-eyed expression of an agreeable ox, “If only it were headed for the wine shop, cassom’em Deus.”
The cabin boy, with his hands and knees on the surface of the ship’s deck, lifted his head and tried a joke, “Y’ shud be used t’ that, Manuel. Didn’t they bring y’ from Spain in a box full’a bacalao?”
When they got the joke, coarse cackles came—from men who were usually gloomy yet whose poverty had not kept them from learning how to laugh.
In his typical dialect, which was a mix of Spanish and Galician, Fileiro replied, “That’s right, kid, they delivered me like a present for the pleasure that me and your mother enjoyed last night.” Another round of laughs briefly filled the air with waves of joy. Then a deep, sad silence returned to hover over the boat, and the anguish of the poverty they had disguised showed itself like a cancerous tumor that was still unbearably alive.
The ambience they created aboard overcame the stench of gently-flowing, repugnant sewers. On the surface of the water floated thick splotches of gasoline, heaving and glistening along the edges, like living creatures. They looked like gelatinous shellfish that moved forward slowly, propelled by their own contractions. Surrounding the Buena Ventura, the smell of dozens of rotten wreckfish infested the air. Just a few meters away from us, the triangular fin of a shark broke the surface, before his dark back emerged. The shark pounced unsteadily on a dead wreckfish, swollen like an engorged balloon, to swallow it whole. A shad leaped into the air like a living bar of silver. The ferry that connects Havana with Casa Blanca crossed along the far side of the bay. In a low, sad wail, the siren of a steamship pierced the evening air. And, as if it were replying, a shrill whistle came from the resupply docks of Havana Coal where a ship was being loaded.
“If this keeps up, I am going to leave this business.”
Cornúa, who had started to trim his toenails with a knife, did not bother to answer me, but instead limited himself to shrugging his shoulders noncommittally. A sailor, with his back against the foremast, stared distractedly at the seawall, el malecón, gazing with such extreme disinterest that he appeared to be blind. With his hands in his pockets, his passive face, and his submissive air, the picture of him was the essence of indifference. Above his head like a halo shined the coppery glare of a passing afternoon. Another one, the cabin boy’s assistant made his rounds on deck with soapy water, cleaning up wreckfish slime. Pressing his thighs against the tack-mast for support and bending at the waist, he tossed a pail into the sea before hoisting it up again, overflowing with water, then finally poured it out in a gesture that seemed to vent his frustrations considerably. With a semi-circular movement of his arms and his torso, he opened the water, like a fan, so that he could cover as great an area as possible. Then he returned to fill his bucket while the cabin boy, on his knees, scrubbed the deck with a brush, sweeping the water to the gutters.
“. . . and anyway, I’ve gotta move,” Monolo Puig explained to Onofre.
“Never liked that slum anyway.”
“Nah, it’s not cuz’uh that. They evicted me. Now, all I kin do is move. Cuz they’re bout t’ toss me n’tah dah street. But I can’t pay no-more. They’ll just have t’ deal with it, right? After all, it ain’t my fault.”
At end of the malecón, the yellow walls of the old prison could be seen, full of windows with their thick bars; formed by the tops of a few colonial buildings made of stone was a dark green skyline and set into a vacant lot were a circus big top and a carousel. To the right, was the silhouette of the memorial to the students who were gunned down by the Spanish colonial government. To the left, painted grey with a wide red stripe in the center, was a small stand exhibiting public works projects. A bit farther down, a crane and a steamroller. Towering over the buildings stood the belfry of the Iglesia del Ángel; there where two small towers of the ancient cathedral and the stature of Mercury eternalizing the runner’s pose atop the dome of the chamber of commerce. In the distance, a column of smoke rose straight up into the air, like a magician’s wand, supporting the inverted goblet of the sky. Several children there were swimming naked by the pier that belonged to the Fishing Company.
Four days before, we had arrived from the Gulf of Campeche, with twenty thousand pounds of wreckfish. And along with us, the Carmina, the Julito, the Flor de Mayo, and the Caimán landed with more than seventy thousand pounds all together. On top of that, two transport ships had brought eighty thousand pounds of snapper from Florida. The town of Casilda had been sending a lot of lane snapper to Havana while Caibarién was flooding it with red snapper, and yellowtail snapper from Batabanó had been arriving by the ton. Grey snapper and Coney fish was then listing at five cents a pound, and demanding a lot effort to fish them at a depth of three hundred fathoms, while black spotted and red sea bream were now only bringing in seven cents per pound.
On the market platforms, we were seeing lower quality fish normally only sold during hard times. Tasteless mud grunts with yellow stripes; fifty pound cuberas which, once quartered, could be falsely presented to unsuspecting customers as snapper; scad, herring, and croakers, spiny red squirrel fish, hogfish resembling a caricature of the animal that gives them their name; angelfish that tasted like mud; green parrotfish, lookdown fish, blue runners, and even black jacks and big horse-eyes, prone to carry ciguatera disease, and whose sales were prohibited by the local health board.
Bad luck! Supply was greater than demand, resulting in lethal disproportions for the fishermen. The chino Achón, the most powerful fish trader in the Unico Market, who had always bought from us, refused to name a price for the fish we had brought in. And the others, whom we never asked, took advantage of the opportunity to make themselves feel important. When we offered them our cargo, they stood there thoughtfully and attentively, allowing us to speak; they casually made it seem as if we were persuading them with our arguments. From time to time, they responded with half-hearted objections, against which our ardor intensified. Then they softened. They seemed to be close to caving in. After all that, they coolly turned away, to give preference to their usual suppliers. We could not see how it would be possible to sell anything there. And in the Plaza del Polvorín there did not seem to be any a single stand-owner with enough money to make a deal; however small it might be, it seemed beyond their financial resources. Almost all of them got their stock from the fishermen from La Punta, Casa Blanca, Cojímar, and Guanabo, buying their pitiful assortment of daily merchandise on credit.
We decided to wait to see if the market would improve. But the dirty water, polluted by the muck from rum distillation plants and the diesel fuel emitted from the boats anchored in the harbor, destroyed the cargo in the Buena Ventura’s hold. By the third day anchored at the dock, we had dumped four thousand pounds of dead wreckfish into the sea, which signaled to us, if we continued that way, in a short while, we would lose all the fish in the boat.
Fortunately, we were able to strike a deal with the china man, Achón, who agreed to pay us two and a half cents per pound. A terrible price that did not even cover costs. The men worked without interest, thinking only about their poverty at home. Having invested in what we had brought in, as is the way among seamen, they carried the weight of that cargo upon their shoulders, and the failure of that trip seemed to blacken their future. Because the worst part of it was that our situation showed no sign of improvement. Every trip swept them further out to sea, drowning them in their own hopes as they followed an increasingly desperate faith that when they returned, the fish’s value would increase. On land, their children went without shoes, naked, and with little food, and their debts grew, with a grocery store owner who charged an unfair amount of interest and gave them provisions only because I signed on their behalf as a guarantee that they would pay him back.
They stayed for thirty days in the Gulf of Campeche, near Florida, working like slaves from dawn to dusk, a labor that—when the fish were plentiful, or the tackle split their skin—was literally making their hands bleed. And when they got back, they found out that that the price of fish, instead of having risen, as they had hoped, was lower than the time before. Then the cycle returned. That’s why, unloading the last wreckfish, they now appeared silent and somber, crucified and desolate.
Abruptly Cornúa’s voice awakened me from the daydream where I had wandered off.
“Of course, if I were you,” he told me, “I would change your course.”
“Change course? For where?” I asked.
“Change your business. Did you think I was talking about something else?”
I understood what he was referring to, something he had been thinking about for quite some time, because of something that I had said to him a while ago but almost forgotten. Now he was forcing me to think about it again and making me regret ever having mentioned it. I didn’t know what to tell him. Finally, to get out of it, I explained, “Yes, I have been thinking about it for a while, but for what, if that won’t take me anywhere. I could sell the three boats. But after, what would I do? Go back to working as a chemist in a sugar factory? No, I don’t like that idea at all. Just thinking about the four-month-long sugar cane harvest, enslaved by the bell that punctuates the work shift, horrifies me. I could never go back to those fields. Besides, I would go through the money made from the sale of the three boats in a year’s time; I am sure of it. Feast today . . . famine tomorrow.”
Cornúa shook his head firmly back and forth, “Who said anything about selling? Huh! I wouldn’t sell a thing, especially not the Buena Ventura.”
He moved his hand softly, tenderly, along the ship’s rail, his face glowing as if he were caressing a woman. “Who would ever think of selling the Buena Ventura? Here in Havana, no ship is finer . . .what am I saying?! None even comes close to her!”
“Then I don’t know. It doesn't make any difference if we carry mackerel, wreckfish, or snapper . . . the competition has got us beat. All the fish brought in from the coast can no longer fit into the market square, without even counting the ones brought in by the Americans.”
Bitingly, throwing a bit of scorn into his words, Cornúa muttered, “Humph, I would just carry something else.”
“I don’t see what. Not a clue . . . sponges? First, we would have to find experts and learn about that business, which, I suppose, not even you know anything about. And even then, after all that . . . As, I believe, things are not going very well in Batabanó. Seems that they are doing a better business with lobster and crab. And what a business! In it, you can never count on the profits that might come. It’s a mess.”
Cornúa remained quiet for a few moments. The splashing water that lapped against the hull of the Buena Ventura reached us like the echoes of a faraway conversation. The night had fallen completely. The moon was falling asleep over some masts in the distance. And its image reflected upon the sea. Remnants of a southern breeze freshened the swelter of summer. A star shot across heaven’s immense bay like a fiery fish.
Then, Cornúa, like someone tugging after sensing the vague nibbling of a fish at the other end of the line, let this word fall, “Alcohol.”
Without understanding his intentions completely, I repeated the word in the form of a question, “Alcohol . . . ?”
“Yes, alcohol. Alcohol for Americans,” Cornúa clarified.
Having restrained the words in his mouth, he now pronounced them syllable by syllable: con-tra-band!
The unexpected proposition astonished me. Irritated, I snapped back, “Are you crazy, Cornúa? How can you even suggest that to me?”
Cornúa shrugged his shoulders slightly, “Who? Me . . . suggest? I’m not suggestin’ nothin’. I’m only sayin’ that if I were owner of the Buena Ventura, I’d carry contraband, ain’t I? Of course, that don’t mean you’ve gotta do it. But ain’t it a hell of a business for us folks who’ve gotta sell wreckfish at two and half cents a pound. There’d be no comparing that with wreckfish, and we wouldn’t be hurting anybody. A solid trip lastin’ twenty days might give us thirty thousand pounds of fish, which’d bring, in th’ best case scenario, ’bout four cents, twelve hun’red pesos. S’tracting the costs for the crew, and what’s left over? Let’s say two hun’red-n-fifty, three hun’red? Sweet business! Now grab your pencil and add in all that you gotta do to maintain the boat, repairs n’all the rest. There is no comparing that with an alcohol trip. Rum can be bought in Havana for four pesos per flagon. And could be sold up north for twenty. You do the math! That’s if wreckfish are being sold at four cents a pound. But let’s figure three. And what? Not even enough to smoke with.”
I inspected Cornúa thoughtfully. He seemed completely transformed. He had been raising the tone of his voice such that, by the time he finished, it had become as sharp as a knife. And his morals seemed to have become intoxicated under the influence of his own words, which were visible in the metallic gleam of his eyes, in the tension of his fists, and in the stony rigidity of his face. A disdainful half-smile spread across his lips, parting them, revealing his teeth, white and cold as those of a shark. His inner ecstasy, whose impulses seemed to quiver like a steel band, transformed him into a primal being, tense from his wild aliveness, from his savage energy. The force of his passion was so intense that I felt my senses and my soul becoming a medium conducting the current. I wanted to seek protection from his influence in a hypocritical lesson in ethics, “But even so, Cornúa, that way? There are things that just aren’t done, or even thought about, for all the gold in the world. What would I do then, after they’ve thrown me in jail? You seem to think that money is everything, but it isn’t!”
When I finished, I tried to look away because despite everything, I felt ashamed of my behavior. But, mesmerized, my eyes would not submit to my own will. I kept looking at Cornúa, who sunk his relentless pupils into my own, like those of a cat ready to leap into the attack. Then, I stuck out my chest, rigid with indignation.
“Uh-huh, well sir, if that’s what you think’ve me! Then listen to what I’m about t’ tell yah: money don’t mean shit to me. Less, much less, than it means to you. I ‘make money,’ as th’ expression goes, because when I need it, ah can figure out where to find it. For that I’ve got two arms and a heart in my chest. I say that about money because really you seem to think about nothing else. Every moment of every day, your wheels seem t’ be turnin’, huntin’ money here, and money over there. But what do you want it for? To wander about with whores on your arm from party to party, to get drunk, to dress well? WHAT do y’get out-a that? If you’re gonna live like that, you’d might as well be a shark: filling his gut with sardines, with all the women you’d ever want? But not me. I could not live that way. I like contraband because of the pleasure I’d feel in doing it. It might be just for that feeling of what it’s like to ride out the danger. Y’oughta know that to me money don’t mean nothing cuz I hardly need any of it to survive. Because I ain’t got family, not even a wife, or a dog to feed. I am a lone wolf. I think about money sometimes a bit more when I see how the families of my crew live. Look at ’em! Their houses look like a cyclone had blown ’em all to pieces. You know why? What would you know about it! You would never know: because you have never set foot in their shacks to see how they live. A lot of them have families, but working like mules, they can’t even make enough to eat. For them maybe, I’d like to make money.”
I took stock of Cornúa, surveying him keenly out of the corner of my eye, with sly, attentive glances, the fleeting glimpses of a secret agent, nevertheless capable of taking everything in. His torso upright and his chest inflated, he held his head high as his lips pressed firmly together. He seemed very sure of himself, with an insolent air, like a carnivorous animal clutching a humiliated victim in its claws before releasing a roar of victory. Without intending to, I began to compare him with myself. And a faint feeling of inferiority depressed me. I felt almost sick, disoriented, like my determination was crumbling within me, and my nerves were becoming numb. Cornúa’s potent vitality, beside me, made my weakness seem even more noticeable, and he knew it. He knew it well! Because of it, he had assumed an arrogant tone, unfair and almost hateful, as he spoke with me. The same tone that I might have assumed with him, perhaps, if we had been in a receiving salon among well-dressed, cultured people. It was just a question of the place and the circumstances. But here, where only essential, primitive virtues mattered, such as courage and virility, Cornúa seemed better than me. “Humph, primitive qualities, animal virtues!” But something in me struggled to free itself, with sharp sarcasm, from the trap that had been set for my wounded pride. “But even so . . .” I bit my lips in a gesture of helpless rage. Afterwards, I felt humiliated, my self-esteem deeply wounded. And then I realized that I hated my flabby flesh, the weakness of my arms, my clumsy hands, incapable of striking someone or using a weapon. The precariousness of my resolve and my education that did not help me in any way. All that was useless, the intolerable burden of a frustrated man! An unfulfilled man who hardly dared to admit such anger in the intimacy of his own consciousness and that, nonetheless, suddenly hated himself and was struggling like a squid in his own ink, in the spitefulness and contempt he unexpectedly felt for himself. And all the while, a sensation was gnawing at me: I also hated Cornúa bitterly. I despised his untamable, animal energy. I loathed his virile vitality, and the metallic gleam of his eyes, and his shabby clothes, and his strength he had with which to confront life. I hated his self-sufficiency and the power of his will. I hated the perceptiveness with which he seemed to have examined me and discovered my weaknesses. I hated him, in a word, because he possessed everything that I seemed to covet at that moment.
I came to my feet, impulsively, seeking relief from my private affliction. I did not validate his suggestions, his attitude, or his ideas; yet I was afraid to argue with Cornúa. Considering that, I decided that the best course of action for me at that moment was to return to land. I ordered them to lower the sails and take us into port. While they were carrying out these orders, I descended into my cabin to change clothes.
