Do you know what betrayal is? Betrayal, real betrayal, is when you feel so ashamed you wish you were somebody else. I wished I’d been somebody else when I went to say goodbye to my father and his eyes followed me about as I wrapped my harpoon in oilskin and hung it on a nail in the kitchen, then slung the viola he’d given me for my twentieth birthday over my shoulder. I’ve decided to change jobs, I told him quickly, I’m going to sing in a bar in Porto Pim, I’ll come and see you Saturdays. But I didn’t go that Saturday, nor the Saturday after, and lying to myself I’d say I’d go and see him the next Saturday. So autumn came and the winter went, and I sang. I did other little jobs too, because sometimes customers would drink too much and to keep them on their feet or chase them off you needed a strong arm, which Denis didn’t have. And then I listened to what the customers said while they pretended to be on holiday; it’s easy to pick up people’s secrets when you sing in a bar, and, as you see, it’s easy to tell them too. She would wait for me in her house in Porto Pim and I didn’t have to knock any more now. I asked her: Who are you? Where are you from? Why don’t we leave these absurd people pretending to play cards? I want to be with you for ever. She laughed and left me to guess the reasons why she was living the way she was, and she said: Wait just a little longer and we’ll leave together, you have to trust me, I can’t tell you any more. Then she’d stand naked at the window, looking at the moon, and say: Sing me your eel song, but softly. And while I sang she’d ask me to make love to her, and I’d take her standing up, leaning against the windowsill, while she looked out into the night, as though waiting for something.
It happened on August 10. It was São Lourenço and the sky was full of shooting stars, I counted thirteen of them walking home. I found the door locked and I knocked. Then I knocked again louder, because there was a light on. She opened and stood in the doorway, but I pushed her aside. I’m going tomorrow, she said, the person I was waiting for has come back. She smiled, as if to thank me, and I don’t know why but I thought she was thinking of my song. At the back of the room a figure moved. He was an old man and he was getting dressed. What’s he want? he asked her in the language I now understood. He’s drunk, she said; he was a whaler once but he gave up his harpoon for the viola, while you were away he worked as my servant. Send him away, said the man, without looking at me.
There was a pale light over Porto Pim. I went around the bay as if in one of those dreams where you suddenly find yourself at the other end of the landscape. I didn’t think of anything, because I didn’t want to think. My father’s house was dark, since he went to bed early. But he wouldn’t sleep, he’d lie still in the dark the way old people often do, as if that were a kind of sleep. I went in without lighting the lamp, but he heard me. You’re back, he murmured. I went to the far wall and took my harpoon off the hook. I found my way in the moonlight. You can’t go after whales at this time of night, he said from his bunk. It’s an eel, I said. I don’t know if he understood what I meant, but he didn’t object, or get up. I think he lifted a hand to wave me goodbye, but maybe it was my imagination or the play of shadows in the half dark. I never saw him again. He died long before I’d done my time. I’ve never seen my brother again either. Last year I got a photo of him, a fat man with white hair surrounded by a group of strangers who must be his sons and daughters-in-law, sitting on the veranda of a wooden house, and the colours are too bright, like in a postcard. He said if I wanted to go and live with him, there was work there for everybody and life was easy. That almost made me laugh. What could it mean, an easy life, when your life is already over?
And if you stay a bit longer and my voice doesn’t give out, I’ll sing you the song that decided the destiny of this life of mine. I haven’t sung it for thirty years and maybe my voice isn’t up to it. I don’t know why I’m offering, I’ll dedicate it to that woman with the long neck, and to the power a face has to surface again in another’s, maybe that’s what’s touched a chord. And to you, young Italian, coming here every evening, I can see you’re hungry for true stories to turn them into paper, so I’ll make you a present of this story you’ve heard. You can even write down the name of the man who told it to you, but not the name they know me by in this bar, which is a name for tourists passing through. Write that this is the true story of Lucas Eduino who killed the woman he’d thought was his, with a harpoon, in Porto Pim.
Oh, there was just one thing she hadn’t lied to me about; I found out at the trial. She really was called Yeborath. If that’s important at all.
Postscript
A Whale’s View of Man
Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don’t have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. They’re silent for long periods, but then shout at each other with unexpected fury, a tangle of sounds that hardly vary and don’t have the perfection of our basic cries: the call, the love cry, the death lament. And how pitiful their lovemaking must be: and bristly, brusque almost, immediate, without a soft covering of fat, made easy by their threadlike shape which excludes the heroic difficulties of union and the magnificent and tender efforts to achieve it.
They don’t like water, they’re afraid of it, and it’s hard to understand why they bother with it. Like us they travel in herds, but they don’t bring their females, one imagines they must be elsewhere, but always invisible. Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn’t a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad.