“If we carry on like this, we might really hurt each other,” said Elena.
The words sounded strange to J.’s ears, but he sensed that she was right. Both of them felt ashamed and afraid.
December 25 was a traumatic day. They racked their brains trying to remember, but to no avail. By the morning of the 26th, after a night spent tossing and turning, J. felt better.
“Let’s not screw up our lives over this,” he said. “If neither of us can remember, then clearly we weren’t ourselves.”
26
AFTER CHRISTMAS, the loggers were once again idle and intractable. They were cutting less timber and doing it badly, something that infuriated J. The due date for the loan was looming yet again and he had not managed to save a single peso towards paying it off.
Once, he made an unannounced inspection while the loggers were working in an area he rarely visited since it was a long, steep climb. He stumbled onto a veritable bloodbath. The labourers had been cutting down trees so small they would hardly yield a single plank of wood; they were working from the wrong side so that, as they fell, the trees uprooted smaller saplings; the timber was crudely sawn, many planks were too short, others too long…
“I will not be paying a single peso for this wood,” said J.
The men looked at each other and were silent for a moment. Then, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground and never raising his voice, one of them began to protest. J. was convinced he could see the man smiling. After a moment, the other men joined in: there was nothing wrong with the timber, they insisted, J. did not know what he was talking about; they went on to rant about the high prices in the shop, about their earnings, about the quality of the food, the accommodation.
Keeping his temper, J. dealt with their complaints as best he could. He could be extremely persuasive when he needed to be. Besides, the loggers knew as well as he did that their working conditions here were much better than they would find anywhere else. Still the men tried to bargain over the timber J. had dismissed as badly cut.
“I will not pay for miscut lumber. And I’m not going to let you guys bankrupt this finca with shitty second-rate work.”
There was another howl of protest, voices were raised, someone muttered the word “robbery”.
J. stood his ground: he could not yield on this point without risking the whole venture. When one of the loggers became aggressive — a surly, broad-shouldered man named Maximiliano, who stood almost two metres tall — J., indignant and a little afraid, informed him that his services were no longer required and told him he could collect what was due to him that afternoon. At first, the astonished Maximiliano was dumbstruck; after a moment he growled that J. deserved to be hacked to pieces with a machete. He drew his blade and, without looking at J., buried it in a tree trunk. J. turned his back, insisting again that he would not pay for miscut timber, and stormed off. When he had gone some distance, he took the bottle from his backpack and gulped down two long swigs.
“You did the right thing,” Elena said when he told her what had happened. “You can’t let these people walk all over you.”
Late that afternoon, Maximiliano showed up at the house alone and much calmer. He tried to persuade J. not to fire him, but, while J. agreed to give him a good reference, he said that he could not take him back. Maximiliano took his money without a word.
That night the labourers got drunk. Someone heard them in the early hours, ominously banging the blades of their machetes against the floor and spluttering threats against J. Two days later, Doña Rosa warned him: “You need to be careful, these men are bad men.”
27
IN FEBRUARY, they had a visit from Guillermo, a cousin of whom J. was very fond. A chubby man of about twenty-five, J. thought of Guillermo as the embodiment of energy without intellect. He was a boorish lout who could eat three pounds of fried pork at a single sitting. Strangely, his greed and his gluttony were his greatest charms; he ate with a sort of intense pleasure that originated deep in his gut and arrived at his brain only with some difficultly. He had a keen sense of the comical — he was very observant — and would roar with laughter, baring dazzling white teeth with not a single filling. He had those dark, soulful eyes and long lashes that certain women found attractive.
“Fine mango tree!” were his first words as he stepped onto the veranda. He had arrived at noon while Elena and J. were having lunch. Mercedes fried more fish and Guillermo ate with painstaking relish, sucking out the eyes, pulling the heads apart to gnaw on the pieces, piling the bones up on the side of his plate. Grease trickled down his chin and his fingers as he rhapsodized about the food. There was a gently mocking twinkle in J.’s eyes as he watched Guillermo eat.
After a siesta, Guillermo pulled on a pair of shorts and went for a swim. When he came back, he was about to ask about the fence but J. made it clear he was not to raise the subject. “Best never to mention that fucking fence,” he explained later. “The little woman goes apeshit.” Guillermo felt that Elena had every reason to want to swim in private. “A pretty thing like that, guys are bound to want a taste,” he thought. “Right there on the hot sand.”
That afternoon, the three of them sat down at the dining table to drink. Guillermo had a particularly colourful way of speaking; he told them he had just taken up a job with a company named Bananos de Colombia who had posted him to a village full of starving people that smelt like an open sewer. The company had provided him with accommodation. “The fucking house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and hot and cold running mosquitoes.” The village was on the road between Turbo and Medellín and J. realized he would have somewhere to stay if he wanted to make the trip in two stages.
At six o’clock, already slightly drunk, all three went off to see the stud bull mount a cow that one of the neighbours had brought. Guillermo, clearly aroused by this startling display of copulation, stared surreptitiously at Elena’s cleavage on the way back. They carried on drinking until dawn.
A few hours later they were woken by Gilberto, who told them Salomón was on his deathbed. J. felt a sudden wrenching terror in his stomach and ran to the outhouse to vomit.
Salomón had got up at dawn to work in the forest. Though he had been carrying a machete when he felt the snake bite into his calf, in his panic he did not even think to draw the blade. With the snake still hanging from his leg like a whip, the man stumbled out of the woods, tripped and accidentally buried the machete in his stomach. He was delirious by the time he was found; his face was blue and already he smelt of rotting flesh.
When J. and Guillermo arrived at Salomón’s cabin, they found him dead. There were four candles on the ground, one at each corner of the long table on which the corpse — grotesquely swollen and purplish — was laid out. J. did not want to get too close to the body, but Guillermo, whose fascination with death was equalled only by his obsession with food, watched as Don Eduardo embalmed the corpse.
Having embraced Doña Rosa, J. headed back to the finca. Since they were all in shock, they sat on the veranda and drank. That night, J. dreamt Salomón had come into his room and was walking towards the bed. In the middle of the night, he woke up screaming in terror just as the dead man was about to speak. Elena calmed him, rocking him like a baby until he fell asleep again, his head resting on her breasts.