As they approached Acapulco, the sailors began to suspect that Diego was doing a little double-dealing, and they threatened to throw him overboard when the captain wasn’t looking; fortunately along came the whales and distracted them. They came by the dozens, colossal creatures whispering in a chorus of love and stirring up the sea with their impassioned leapings. The whales would swim so near the Santa Lucia that the men could count the yellowish crustaceans on their backs. Their skin, dark and slightly textured, told the complete story of each of those giants and that of their ancestors from centuries back. Once in a while one of them breached, falling gracefully back into the water. Their spouts sprinkled the ship with a fine, cool spray. In the effort of dodging the whales and the excitement of reaching port in Acapulco, the sailors forgave Diego, but they warned him to be carefuclass="underline" it is easier to die from being a card shark, they said, than being a soldier in war. Furthermore, Bernardo, with his telepathic scruples, would not leave him alone, and Diego had to promise that he would not use his new proficiency to make himself rich at the cost of others, as he had been planning.
The best thing about life on shipboard, aside from being taken to their destination, was the freedom the boys had to attempt athletic feats that only tried-and-true sailors and freaks in the fair could perform.
As children they had hung upside down from the eaves by their feet, a sport that Regina and Ana vainly tried to discourage with swipes of their brooms. On the Santa Lucia there was no one to forbid the boys to take risks, and they seized the opportunity to develop the latent abilities they had had since childhood, talents that would serve them well in the world. They learned to swing like trapeze artists, swarm up the rigging like spiders, keep their balance eighty feet in the air, descend from the top of the mast holding onto the ropes, and slide along a tightrope to furl sails. No one paid the least attention to them, and in truth no one cared if they did fall and split their heads open. The sailors gave them some basic lessons. They taught them to tie seamen’s knots, to sing in chorus when more strength was needed, to knock their biscuits to loosen the weevils, never to whistle under sail, because it would cause the wind to shift, to sleep in short snatches, like newborn babies, and to drink rum laced with gunpowder to prove their manliness. Neither of them passed this last test; Diego nearly died from nausea, and Bernardo wept all night after he saw his mother. The first mate, a Scotsman named McFerrin, who was much more expert in matters of navigation than the captain, gave them their most important counseclass="underline" “One hand for sailing, the other for you.” He told them that at every moment, even in calm water, they should hold on to something. Once when Bernardo had gone out on the poop deck to see whether sharks were following, he forgot. He could not see them anywhere, but he had the feeling that as soon as the cook threw the scraps overboard, they would appear. He was thinking about that, distractedly scanning the surface, when the ship unexpectedly lurched and threw him overboard. He was a good swimmer, and by luck some one had seen him fall and raised the alarm; if they hadn’t, that would have been the end of it, because not even in those circumstances could he get out a sound. His dunking gave rise to a disagreement. Captain Jose Diaz thought that in view of the nuisance and the loss of time, it was not worth the trouble to stop and lower a dinghy to look for him.
If it had been the son of Alejandro de la Vega, perhaps he would not have been so hesitant, but this was only a dumb Indian in both senses of the word. He would have to be stupid to have fallen overboard, he argued. While the captain hesitated, pressed by McFerrin and the rest of the crew, for whom rescuing anyone who falls overboard was an inalienable principle of sailing, Diego dived in after his brother. He closed his eyes and jumped without thinking, because from the ship the distance down to the water looked enormous. He also remembered the sharks, which, if not there at that moment, were never too far away.
The shock of the cold waves left him dazed for a few seconds, but Bernardo reached him in a few strokes and held him with his nose above water. Given that his prize passenger ran the risk of being gobbled up if he didn’t act soon, Jose Diaz authorized the rescue. The Scotsman and three other men had already lowered the boat by the time the first sharks appeared and began their eager dance around the two bobbing figures. Diego yelled until he choked and swallowed water, while Bernardo calmly held him with one arm and stroked with the other.
McFerrin fired his pistol at the nearest shark, and immediately the sea was tinged with a brush stroke the color of rust. That caught the attention of the other predators, which fell upon the wounded killer with the clear intention of having it for lunch, giving time to the sailors to help the boys. The applause and whistles of the crew celebrated the maneuver,
Between lowering the boat, locating the boys, beating off the boldest sharks with their oars, and returning to the ship, a lot of time was lost. The captain considered it a personal insult that Diego had jumped in after Bernardo, forcing his hand, and as reprisal he forbade him to climb the masts but it was too late, because by then they were off Panama, where he was to leave his passengers. The youths sadly bid the crew of the Santa Lucia farewell and went ashore with their luggage, armed with the dueling pistols, the sword, and Diego’s whip as deadly as a cannon as well as Bernardo’s slaughtering knife, a weapon useful for everything from cleaning fingernails and slicing bread to hunting large game. Alejandro de la Vega had warned them to trust no one. The natives had a reputation for thievery, and so they would take turns sleeping and not let their trunks out of sight for a minute.
Panama City seemed magnificent to Diego and Bernardo compared to the small Pueblo de los Angeles, anything would have. For three centuries the riches of the Americas had passed through there, destined for the royal coffers of Spain. From the port goods were transported in mule trains through the mountains, and then in boats down the Chagres River to the Caribbean Sea. The importance of that port, like that of Portobelo on the Atlantic coast of the isthmus, had declined at the same rate that shipments of gold and silver from the colonies dwindled.
It was possible to go from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by sailing around the extreme southern tip of the continent at Cape Horn, but a mere glance at the map illustrates what an endless journey that was.
As Padre Mendoza explained to the boys, Cape Horn lies where the world of God ends and the world of ghosts begins. Trekking across the narrow waist of the isthmus of Panama, a trip that takes only a couple of days, saves months of sailing, which was why Emperor Charles V, as early as 1534, had dreamed of digging a canal to join the two oceans, a preposterous idea, like so many that occur to certain monarchs. The major drawback in Panama was the miasma the gaseous emanations rising from rotten jungle vegetation and the quagmires of the rivers, sources of horrifying plagues. A sobering number of travelers in that country died from yellow fever, cholera, and dysentery. Some also went mad, it was said, but I suppose that applied to fanciful people little fitted for wandering around in the tropics. So many died in epidemics that the grave diggers did not shovel dirt over the common graves piled with corpses because they knew that more would be added in the next hours.
To protect Diego and Bernardo from such dangers, Padre Mendoza gave each of them a medal of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers and sailors. Those talismans gave miraculous results, and both survived. A good thing, too, because otherwise I would not be telling this story. The stifling tropical heat took the boys’ breath, and the mosquitoes were so big they had to swat them with their boots, but everything else went well. Diego was enchanted with the city, where no one was watching them and where there were so many temptations to choose from. Only Bernardo’s sanctimoniousness saved his brother from ending up in some gambling den or in the arms of a woman of goodwill and bad reputation, where he might have perished from a knifing or some exotic illness. Bernardo did not close his eyes that night, not so much to defend them from bandits as to look after Diego.