Octavio talked little and worked hard. When the week was up, J. said he was satisfied and told the man he could go and fetch his family. Elena said again that she did not like the old man, but J. did not listen. The man went off and returned three days later with his wife and five children. The eldest could not have been older than ten.
The difference in the house was immediately apparent — and did nothing to allay Elena’s fears. The wife was listless and lazy — much more so than Mercedes had been — and the children were noisy and boisterous. Since the woman had never lived by the sea, she did not know how to cook the local food and so every day they ate frijoles. And unless Elena took over the cooking — as she sometimes did — even the beans were inedible, undercooked, oversalted and sometimes full of grit. The woman managed to burn the arepas and carbonize the fried plantains.
“She’s the stupidest woman I’ve met in all my life,” said Elena.
But worse than the food were the children. The older ones crept into the shop and stole sweets and tins of condensed milk, the little ones wailed constantly and shat on the veranda. All of them stank to high heaven, and their mother did not seem to give a damn. Octavio treated them with the same indifference he might a pack of dogs; when they got in his way, he brutally beat them and they would wail for hours on end. Between the slovenliness of Octavio’s wife and the continual rains, the atmosphere in the house became stifling. But since the rest of the finca was now functioning properly, J. turned a blind eye and was careful not to complain about the food or the children, especially in front of Elena.
He simply made sure he spent as little time as possible in the house.
33
A MONTH AFTER starting work, and without consulting anyone, Octavio took down the fence that surrounded the little cove. One day, J. came home to find the rusted rolls of barbed wire stowed under the veranda. He anticipated a terrible row with Elena, but she did not say a word. J. was astonished. He did not know that she had not been swimming for several days and therefore did not know what had happened with the fence.
When J. informed the old man that he did not appreciate the fence being taken down without permission, Octavio made no attempt to apologize but simply said that there were better uses for the barbed wire. J. reminded him that he was to do nothing on the finca without authorization: Octavio was free to manage the loggers as he saw fit, as long as he could guarantee quality timber and did not fell trees unnecessarily, but in all other matters, “including that shitty fucking fence”, he was to consult J.
“All right,” the man said through gritted teeth. “You’re the boss.”
From the moment Octavio first arrived until the day that she finally left the finca, Elena’s attitude to the old man was aloof and curiously respectful. She did her best not to criticize Octavio’s wife and not to have any dealings with him. But more than once she suggested that J. try to find out where Octavio had come from; she had tried to wheedle information from his wife, who had clearly been well trained and offered only vague and unimportant details.
Though by now the rains should have been easing off, still the sky was overcast and the thunderstorms were heavy and prolonged. Elena wanted to leave, but it saddened her to think of abandoning J. here in the dark winter. Besides, now that he was drinking less, he had become more affectionate and the cold civility that had existed between them since the shotgun incident had begun to thaw. J. had even asked her to accompany him on his treks into the forest, invitations she rarely accepted since she disliked tramping through the overgrown jungle and hated the way the workmen stared at her. Also, and for no apparent reason, J. had stopped seeing his lovers — or at least he no longer visited Juan’s wife, the only mistress Elena knew about for certain. What Elena did not realize was that J. was aware of her desire to leave, of her intention to leave, and he did not want her last days at the finca to be corroded by jealousy.
In his heart, J. was unsure whether he truly wanted Elena to leave. He was afraid of being alone, afraid of discovering he loved her more than he realized, more than he was prepared to admit even to himself. But by now they had hurt each other too much, they had flayed each other body and soul and might do so again at any moment. And regardless of what they might say when they parted, both of them knew that they would never live together again.
The morning of Elena’s departure was bathed in a dazzling glow that made everything seem radiant, as though the light was emanating from within. Although this was merely a respite between downpours, J. was grateful for the fact that it did not rain that day. A few cottony clouds drifted over the sea, hugging the coastline. To the north, where they were beginning to mass on the horizon, bolts of lightning flickered — inaudibly, at such a distance — in the louring grey sky. Sitting on the beach, Elena and J. stared to the south waiting for Julito’s launch to appear at any moment. They had already said all there was to say and now tried hard not to think, simply gazing at the sea. They followed a flight of gannets far out at sea, so small that at times they were invisible. In the cove, the little islands glittered like precious stones: lush, luminous, flawless.
“I think the boat is coming.”
On the horizon, the tiny spark of the boat’s hull glittered. Anxiously, they watched as it grew brighter, trying to work out whether or not it was Julito. When J. saw the hazy reflection of the yellow hull in the water, he knew that it was.
“It’s him,” he said.
Affable and sober for once, Julito arrived with his assistant. Elena was taking only a single suitcase, having decided to leave behind the sewing machine, partly because she wanted to believe that this separation was temporary and partly because she did not want to travel with something so cumbersome.
She could not know that she would never see J. again.
The boat put out to sea and moved away, gradually getting smaller until it finally disappeared into the green. J. took off his sandals and walked along the beach. He went to the little cove where Elena used to swim and sat on a tree trunk staring at the water. There was no sign now that there had ever been a fence, nor the slightest indication that here Elena had been enfolded and suffused by the tropical sun. J. was reminded of the painting hanging in the bedroom of a woman offering herself to the waves, to the sunlight. He thought about the hard kernel of truth hidden in such artless paintings, just like the love that lived on, beyond all doubt, beyond death itself, in the hackneyed lyrics of a bolero. For some vague reason, he thought back to the time when he considered a pretentious critic at some literary magazine more truthful, more important than a taxi driver and his family washing their car and bathing in a cold, rocky stream.
“You’re on your own now, hermano,” he thought, feeling a faint twinge in his belly.
“Sorrow,” he said softly.
It had come. He had known it would.
34
HE COULD NOT bring himself to sleep in the house that night. He went to the village where he chatted for a while with Doña Rosa and then on to Gilberto’s house where he asked if he could spend the night. He slept fitfully in a hammock, constantly waking up thinking about Elena and desperate for a cigarette.
In the early hours, he headed back to the house where he was greeted by the wailing of the children and a greasy breakfast that left him with terrible indigestion. With a burning pain in his chest, he went into the shop and began going through the accounts. He was aware they had been offering too much credit, but had not realized quite how much. The loggers’ credit amounted to more — much more — than he owed in salary. “Enough of this bullshit,” he thought. “No more credit for those thieving bastards.”