There’s no need for that. I’m leaving.
The old man quickly reaches to one side and turns out the gas lantern.
He manages to grab his arm in the dark but feels the knife nick his waist. He hears Beta lunge at the old man’s leg. He shouts for him to stop, but it is obvious that he won’t. The girls all scream at the same time and then play dead. He and the old man fall onto the rocking chair and then the kitchen shelves. The embers in the stove are the only source of light in the cave, and he tries to push his grandfather in that direction. The old man doesn’t make a sound, just keeps his bony body tensed and keeps attacking tirelessly like a banana spider trying to catch its prey so it can fill it with venom. He manages to shove him onto the hotplate, breaking free of his clutches for long enough to charge toward what he believes to be an exit. He gropes the walls of rock but can’t find the opening he came through. A sliver of lightning illuminates the other two openings in the cave, and he throws himself through the closest one. He finds himself on a small promontory, which must offer a view of the valley during the day but is now no more than a parapet to nothing. Afraid the old man will come after him and attack him at any second, he takes off running and tripping down the slope without seeing anything in his path until he runs into the fence and jabs his hands and thighs on the barbed wire. He cries out in pain and is relieved at the same time because from there he can run to the bottom of the valley, to the creek, to the beach.
After putting some more distance between himself and the cave, which makes him feel a little safer, he stops to get the knife with the armadillo-leather handle out of his backpack but realizes that he’s left the backpack behind along with the dog. Her name sticks in his throat. Calling out will reveal his whereabouts. The adrenaline is slowly metabolized, and his instinct to flee is replaced with paralysis. He wants to go back to find Beta but doesn’t know where he is anymore. The sound of the sea reverberates against the walls of the valley. He touches the place where he felt the knife tear his skin, on the right side of his stomach, and has the impression that it hasn’t done too much damage. But it hurts. He starts walking, heedless of the direction, so as not to stay still while he tries to decide what to do, and slips down a small bank and falls into the creek. The direction of the small current allows him to deduce the approximate location of the sea and the sides of the valley. The couple in the tent have a gas lantern. They must have a knife, another flashlight, maybe even a cell phone. He clambers up the slope, praying for more lightning, tugged at by reason on one side and fear on the other. He has the constant impression that the dog has caught up with him, and it is only now, as he reaches the trees on the ridge, that his companion’s absence starts to sink in. Finally he works up the courage to shout.
Beta!
He shouts a few times with his hands on either side of his mouth. His calls are lost in the invisible valley.
He keeps looking for the tent among the trees. He can see better with his eyes closed, as if surprised at night by a blackout in his own home. The baby’s crying has stopped, or maybe he isn’t where he thinks he is. He calls the couple’s names, but there is no reply. The trees start to thin, and he picks up his pace in the hope of finding some reference point under the open sky.
A flash of lightning illuminates the cliff, his foot stepping into the void and a stormy sea that is chaos itself extending out on all sides. When everything goes dark again, he is still beginning to fall, and it is only in the middle of the descent that he realizes what is happening. He thanks the lightning. He almost died unseeing, like a blind man. Or perhaps the vanity of death knows no limits, he thinks, and even to the blind, it reveals itself at the last instant so that they’ll think about it as it happens. On his way down, the vision of the vortex of waves and foam that will swallow him is emblazoned in his mind with hyperreal clarity, the ocean that he so adores showing its most private and destructive facet, revealed to few men. When he is about to hit the water, he closes his eyes tightly, as one inevitably does when diving.
In the water there is no indication of the ferocity he had glimpsed on the surface. His body is already decelerating when he arrives at the slippery-smooth rocks on the seafloor, and he becomes aware that he is suspended in the muffled murmur of the cold sea, softly rocked by the current. He had learned from his older brother how to duck under the big waves to get past the wave break. No matter how big the wave, Dante had taught him, dive down close to the ocean floor, and swim toward it as fast as possible. The wave will suck you under it, and you’ll come out the other side when it breaks. If you try to swim back, it’ll come crashing down on your head. If you try to dive into it too near the surface, it’ll pick you up and toss you into the blender. You’ll break your back or get sliced up by the corals. His brother was already a good surfer as a kid, but he didn’t like surfboards himself. He preferred swimming. The first thing he does now, instinctively, before trying to return to the surface, is study the forces of the water until he can say with some certainty in what direction the waves are breaking. He swims a few strokes in the opposite direction to the waves, comes up for air, and returns to the bottom, trying to avoid being dashed against the rocky headland.
The bottom is silence. The water is protective and slows time.
But the surface is hell. Trails of foam appear on all sides, covering his head, and salt water runs down his throat. He grows breathless, freeing himself of the running shoes and jacket that are restricting his movements. He can’t see the moon or stars or anything else that might help him get his bearings. His body is lifted up to the crest of waves and then sucked down to the bottom of troughs, and he can’t make much out beyond this rise and fall. The clash around him involves familiar natural forces, but there is no easily perceived arena for it. He is an insignificant piece of meat, adrift.
The first flash of lightning after the fall doesn’t illuminate anything besides a large uniform cloud that covers the entire dome of the sky and contrasts with the black horizon. He needs to choose a direction and swim parallel to the coast until he comes to a beach. The salt stings his eyes. The strength of his arms seems useless against the violence of the waves, but he knows it isn’t true and that if he takes the right current and swims in the right direction, he’ll be able to get away from the headland and make it to the sand, even though it may take hours. For the first time he is calm enough to detect the cold that is working its way deeper and deeper into his body. He needs to establish the right pace, which will keep his body warm and allow him to continue swimming for however long is necessary.
Terror rises in him when he imagines reefs and sea creatures or entertains the idea that he might be swimming in the wrong direction, moving away from the beach, with firm, regular strokes, into an overwhelming vastness from which there will be no return.
The rest of the time he focuses on swimming, breathing, signs that might help him keep going in a straight line that will take him somewhere. He reaches a point where he doesn’t believe he is in any more of a predicament than the other times he has swum long distances in Olympic swimming pools or participated in ocean races with hundreds of other athletes. It all feels quite familiar, like those two miles of the Tapes Open Water Swim that he completed with cramps in his thigh, or the hypothermia he had in the middle of the bike ride that almost got him eliminated from the Ironman in Florianópolis. There’s a right cadence for every race, and an athlete must pace himself and pay attention to style, the path of his strokes, and the rhythm of his kicking, and above all, he must focus and stay focused on the swimming until his mind and body are one, which enables him to become one with the water and there is no longer any need to focus. Everything he has experienced previously seems to have prepared him for this. It is the race he has trained for his entire life. The imagination can be an ally at times like this. He imagines competitors beside and directly behind him. Only the best swimmers in the world. The leader, whom he wants to pass, is kicking his legs right in front of him. All he has to do is swim in his wake. His mind believes it, and his made-up opponent becomes real in no time, a man of flesh and blood who feels the same cold and the same weariness, a companion. He can almost touch his feet with his fingertips. And when this particular fantasy dissipates, he imagines other things. That he is being chased by giant sharks or leviathans the likes of which no one has ever seen before. That if he pauses or slows his pace, he will be zapped by lightning. That he is leaving death behind. That a quiet, loving woman is waiting for him on the sand of the beach, a woman who doesn’t look like anyone he has ever been with but has nothing extraordinary about her. She greets him without surprise, lets him lay his head on her sand-covered thighs to rest for as long as he requires, and says that they need each other, that they will always want to fulfill each other’s wishes and will be able to, without exception. He can tell she is speaking the truth. She brushes his temples with her fingertips and asks what he wants. He babbles that he doesn’t want much, just that her legs be warm to the touch in the winter and cool in the summer, and that they have a runny-nosed little girl who scrapes her knees as she tears around the house, and that there be a view of a lagoon that turns golden in the late afternoon, even if from afar. Above all that she remain warm when he is cold. That’s all. Then it’s her turn. Tell me what you want. She tells him, and he says yes to everything and asks what else, what else? It is an interminable list of things, and promising her each of them brings him infinite pleasure, no matter what they are. He gives her everything, one thing for each stroke of his arms, begging her not to stop, obtaining from this the strength he needs.