Since then, no ship dares to change her name in these southern waters. The sea is free, but its daughters are not.
The Sea
Rafael Alberti has been in the world for almost a century, yet today he contemplates the Bay of Cadiz as if for the first time.
Lying in the sun, he follows the unhurried paths of seagulls and sailboats, the azure breeze, the ebb and flow of foam on the water and in the air.
He turns to Marcos Ana, who sits silently at his side, and giving his friend’s arm a squeeze he says, as if he has just found out, “Life is so short.”
Punishment
The city of Carthage was queen and master of the African coast. Her warriors reached the doors of Rome and came close to crushing the rival, the enemy, under the hoofs of their horses and the weight of their elephants.
A few years later, Rome took revenge. Carthage had to surrender her arms and warships and accept the humiliation of conquest and the obligation of tribute. Carthage hung her head in resignation. But when Rome ordered the people of Carthage to abandon the sea and move inland, far from the source of their arrogance and daring, they refused. Not that, never that. So Rome cursed Carthage and condemned her to death. The legions closed in.
Besieged from land and sea, for three years the city resisted. Not a speck of grain was left in the granaries; even the sacred monkeys of the temples had been devoured. Forgotten by her gods, inhabited only by ghosts, Carthage fell. For six days and six nights fires raged. Then Roman legionaries swept away the smoking ashes and sowed the land with salt, so that nothing and no one would ever flourish there again.
The city of Cartagena on the coast of Spain is the daughter of old Carthage, and the granddaughter is Cartagena de Indias, born much later on the shores of America. One night, in quiet conversation, Cartagena de Indias told me her secret: if some day they oblige her to move from the sea, she said, she too will choose death, just as her grandmother did.
Another Punishment
Not only through banishment do coastal people lose their seas.
At the end of 2002 an oil tanker split in half and spewed its poison over Galicia and beyond. Day after day, a lethal sticky tide laid siege to the waters and the coast.
The blackened shoreline was a graveyard. Dead fish and dead birds floated in the putrid rot on the waters.
The authorities? Blind. The government? Deaf.
But the local fishermen, boats anchored, nets stowed, were not alone. Thousands upon thousands of volunteers stood with them to battle the enemy invasion. Armed with shovels and buckets and whatever they could find, day after day, week after week, they painstakingly stripped the sand and stones of their oily mourning garments.
Those many hands made no speeches. But they were not mute. By doing, they said, “Never again.”
Downpour
The sky parted and dumped its water, raining as if it intended to pour out every last drop, extending from one horizon to the other, and all that rain fell into the sea.
Over the whitecaps came a battleship. On deck, lying flat on his back, hands behind his head, a young soldier was letting himself be drenched. And asking himself questions.
Though he was in the service, science was his thing. He’d never seen the rain at sea, and he was trying to find an explanation for such a ridiculous phenomenon. As a good scientist, the soldier believed, or wanted to believe, that although Nature might act crazy and pretend to dementia, it always knows what it’s doing.
Isaac Asimov spent hours and hours lying there, getting pelted with bullets from the sky, and he found no answer. Why would Nature pour water into the waterlogged sea, when so many thirsty places on Earth are begging the clouds for a little relief?
Drought
Lamin Sennah and his brothers had stopped playing. Since the beginning of the drought, they’d done nothing but vainly scratch at the ground bombarded by the sun.
Their mother stripped her ears and neck, sold her jewelry and then her clothes and then the housewares.
Every day, at the center of the barren house, she lit a fire under the scrap swimming in the bottom of the pot.
They ate the last few kernels.
Their mother continued lighting the fire so the neighbors would see the smoke.
A long siege: hemmed in by drought, Lamin and his brothers spent their nights with their eyes open and their days yawning and shivering as if it were cold. Sitting around the fire, skinny arms around their knees, they no longer even begged the sky for rain.
Then their mother left and returned without the silver spoon she had always kept hidden under the floorboards.
The little spoon, her secret treasure, her only inheritance, had belonged to the grandparents of her grandparents, long before her country, Gambia, was a country.
That final sale provided them with a morsel.
“But the life went out of her,” Lamin says.
Their mother never got up again. The fire at the center of the house went out.
The Desert
When the world was still becoming the world, the mountain Tunupa lost her son. She got even by showering the earth with sour milk from her breasts and the Andean steppe turned into an infinite desert of salt.
The salt flats of Uyuni, born of that rage, swallows up travelers. Roman Morales nonetheless set out across this place where llamas and vicunas never venture.
He soon lost sight of the last signs of the world.
Hours passed, days, nights, while salt crystals crunched under his boots.
He wanted to turn back but didn’t know how, and he wanted to go on but didn’t know where. As much as he rubbed his eyes, he failed to see the horizon. Blinded by white light, he walked seeing nothing but the bright nothingness of glowing salt.
Every step hurt.
Román lost track of time.
Several times he collapsed. Each time he was kicked awake by the ice of the night or the fire of the day, and he got up and continued walking, with legs that were no longer his own.
When they found him, crumpled in a heap near the village of Altucha, the salt had long ago taken big bites from his boots and not a drop of water was left in his canteens.
Bit by bit he came back to life. And when he was sure that he was neither in Heaven nor in Hell, Roman wondered, “Who was it that crossed the desert?”
The Peasant
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, born and raised on a tiny plot of land, shed no tears of nostalgia when he recalled his childhood there.
“Men,” he said, “have three ways of ruining their lives: women, gambling, and farming. Of the three, my father chose the most boring.”
But every day he climbed the Tower of Wind, the Vatican’s highest spire, and settled down to look. Spyglass in hand, he’d quickly scan the streets, then search for the seven hills on the outskirts of Rome where the land was still land. He’d spend hours contemplating the distant greenery, until duty obliged him to end his communion.
Then Angelo would put on his white cassock, and, with his pen in his pocket and his cross on his chest, the only things he owned in this world, he’d return to the throne where once again he’d become Pope John XXIII.
Relatives
