On the boat trip back, J. had been happy and talkative, chatting to Julito and listening for the hundredth time to the same hoary old stories. Now, before the boat had even begun to slow, he spotted the barbed wire from the distance.
“What’s with the fence, jefe?” asked Julito.
The stakes looked tall and sturdy, the strands of wire were close together. A neat section of sand and sea had been carefully carved out of empty tropical space.
“No idea,” said J.
When J. got to the house, he noticed that the barbed wire under the veranda — ten new rolls he had bought a month earlier to fence the paddocks — were missing. Elena was in the shop, standing on a chair, arranging things on a high shelf.
“What’s up?” she said, without getting down. “I didn’t even hear the boat. Did Julito come back with you?”
“What’s up?” J. repeated with cold fury. He was in shock.
He tossed his backpack into a corner, stalked out and went to inspect the fence. The wires were taut and firmly nailed in place. It was a fine piece of workmanship. Rolling up his trousers, he waded into the sea. The posts were thick and sturdy.
He went to find Gilberto.
“Are you out of your fucking mind, Gilberto?” he said, dispensing with a greeting.
Gilberto launched into a rambling explanation so confused and contradictory that it left J. speechless with anger. Gilberto babbled that he assumed Señora Elena was in charge in J.’s absence; that he had tried to persuade her to wait until Señor J. came back before doing anything about a fence, but she had threatened to fire him; that he would take down the barbed wire if that was what J. wanted.
“You know what Señorita Elena is like when she’s angry,” he said finally.
“Who put up the fence?”
“Me and Roberto.”
“I’m not going to pay you a peso for the work, Gilberto,” said J. “And you’ll have to pay Roberto out of your own pocket, that’s all there is to it.”
“Whatever you say, Don J.”
“And this is the last time you do anything without my permission, you got that? When I’m not here, you do whatever jobs we agree on before I leave, no more, no less.”
“OK, Don J.”
J. turned on his heel and left. His mind was still shrouded in a seething black fog and he decided it was best not to go back to the house straightaway. He walked on the beach for a while, careful to head north, then he sat down and waited for his anger to subside. Eventually, he decided to have the fence taken down.
When he told Elena, she hit the roof. She was not going to be treated like some nobody, she told him, this was her finca as much as his and she had rights, besides why was he making such a big deal about a few rolls of barbed wire, swimming was her only pleasure in this godforsaken shithole and she was not about to let him take that from her.
“You take that fence down and I’m leaving,” she said.
It was no idle threat, and so J. did not remove the fence. Nor did he go swimming with her any more. The next time Don Carlos came by, he innocently asked about the wire fence.
“It’s Elena’s Country Club, Don Carlos,” said J.
Elena called him every name under the sun and locked herself in the bedroom. Don Carlos left soon after.
Since the wire cut across the dirt road, the villagers were forced to make a detour through the forest and rejoin the path farther on. In general, however, they only did so when Elena was on the beach; if she was not there, they simply lifted the wire and squeezed through the gap. Elena would often find the barbed wire held apart by lengths of rope or fabric, sometimes it was ripped from the posts. Every week, with J.’s authorization, Gilberto repaired the gaps, a never-ending task made all the more absurd since Gilberto and his family were the ones who most often damaged the fence on their way to and from the village.
25
NEITHER OF THEM felt like going to Medellín for Christmas. The weather here was cool, the nights were long and they were once more happy in each other’s company. Sometimes, J. would make a little jibe about the barbed-wire fence which would trigger a minor squabble; over time it became a sort of game.
On December 24, they were invited to the Christmas Eve ball in the village. Since Elena did not want to go, J. dropped by during the afternoon. When he got there, everyone was happy and excited. Salomón was the first to greet him. He was clutching a bottle of whisky and cradling his baby daughter in his arms, but when he saw J. he set his daughter down and ran over to hug him. One arm still around J.’s shoulder, he offered him a drink of whisky. At Doña Rosa’s house, J. was plied with food and more drink. Primped and powdered and wearing bright red lipstick, the old woman looked jovial. She was pleased that J. had come to visit, but disappointed that he could not stay for the party. She effusively thanked J. for his gifts — a bolt of fabric printed with yellow daisies and several bars of imported turrón.
He left, happy and grateful to the villagers, and arrived back at the house at six o’clock to find Elena waiting for him wearing a beautiful dress.
“Did you put the wine out in the sink to chill?” he asked.
She had, she said, it should be perfect now.
“Go fetch a bottle, hermana. Let’s drink a toast before dinner.”
Mercedes had prepared two large lobsters with lemon and onions and there was a platter of oysters on the half shell which they ate with lemon and salt. From the village, they had been sent two bowls of arroz con camarones.
“An aphrodisiac Christmas,” said J.
The wine was better than they had expected; only the last bottle was a little vinegary but they drank it nonetheless.
When they had finished off the wine, they started on the whisky.
J.’s Christmas presents to her were a blue bikini all the way from Italy and a copy of the Diccionario de la Real Academia. Whenever Elena read, she liked to jot down unfamiliar words on a piece of paper — in her case, there were a lot of unfamiliar words. Later, in a naïve attempt at self-improvement, she would look up the words in a battered old dictionary with missing pages they had picked up somewhere. Elena gave J. a History of Erotic Art with illustrations ranging from Pompeii to Picasso. Months later, one of the police officers involved in the investigation would slip the book surreptitiously into his backpack, and when his wife found it later it ended up being sold to a textile merchant in Turbo who would use it as cheap pornography.
“There’s nothing like sophisticated pornography,” said J.
They spent the evening listening to the strains of vallenato drifting from the village. Just before midnight, Elena and J. launched a huge paper lantern. Since there were only two of them, they had to use fine threads to hold the lantern open while it filled with hot air from the candle. They managed to succeed. The lantern soared and, carried on a gust of wind, drifted over the forest.
“I bet it floats all the way to Panama,” said J.
Until about 3 a.m., J. remained calm, but clearly the whisky did not agree with them and both he and Elena foundered. They had a terrible argument, though neither of them quite understood what triggered it. It had clearly been a vicious quarrel because the following morning Elena had a black eye and bruises on her thighs and J. had long, deep gouges across his face. The books had been pulled down from the shelves and the shotgun was under the bed; one barrel had been fired.