Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez Read Free Book Online

him, without a start.
    Undoubtedly Jaime Manjarrés was there. Undoubtedly he had always been there.
    If this had been a dream, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I knew I was fully awake, completely lucid, and I could hear the whistling of the wind and the sounds of the sea. I felt hungry and thirsty. And I hadn’t the slightest doubt that Jaime Manjarrés was with me on the raft.
    “Why didn’t you drink enough water on the ship?” he asked me.
    “Because we were about to dock at Cartagena,” I answered. “I was resting with Ramón Herrera on the stern deck.”
    It wasn’t an apparition; I wasn’t afraid. It seemed ridiculous that I had felt lonely before, not realizing that another sailor was on the raft.
    “Why didn’t you eat?” Jaime Manjarrés asked me. I clearly remember answering, “Because they didn’t want to give me food. I asked them to give me apples and icecream, but they didn’t want to. I don’t know where they were hiding the food.”
    Jaime Manjarrés didn’t reply. He was silent for a moment. He turned to show me the way to Cartagena. I followed the direction in which he was pointing and saw the lights on shore and the buoys dancing in the harbor. “We’re there,” I said, continuing to look intently at the lights of the port, without emotion, without joy, as if I were arriving after a normal voyage. I asked Jaime Manjarrés if we could row a bit. But he was no longer there. I was alone in the raft, and the harbor lights became the rays of the sun. The first sunshine of my third day of solitude at sea.

6

A R
escue
S
hip and an
I
sland of
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annibals
    At first I kept track of the days by going over the dates. The first day, February 28, was the day of the accident. The second was the day of the planes. The third was the most difficult: nothing in particular happened. The raft moved along, propelled by the breeze. I had no strength to row. The day clouded over, I felt cold, and I lost my bearings because I couldn’t see the sun. That morning I wouldn’t have been able to guess where the planes had come from. A raft has no bow or stern; it’s square and sometimes it floats sideways, imperceptibly turning around. Since there are no points of reference, you don’t know whether it’s moving forward or backward. The sea is the same in every direction. So I didn’t know if the raft had changed course or if it had turned itself around. After the third day, something similar happened with time.
    At midday I decided to do two things: First, I securedan oar to one end of the raft, to find out if it always moved in the same direction. Second, using my keys, I made a scratch on the gunwale for each day that passed and marked the date. I made the first scratch and a number: 28. I made the second scratch and added the number 29. On the third day, next to the third scratch, I wrote the number 30. That was a mistake. I thought it was the thirtieth, but it was actually the second of March. I realized that only on the fourth day, when I wondered whether the month just ended was thirty or thirty-one days long. It was only then that I remembered it was February, and though it now seems like a trivial mistake, the error confused my sense of time. By the fourth day I wasn’t very sure of my tally of the days I had spent on the raft. Was it three? Four? Five? According to my marks, no matter whether it was February or March, it was three days. But I wasn’t very sure, just as I wasn’t sure whether the raft was moving forward or backward. I preferred leaving things as they were to avoid further confusion. And I completely lost all hope that I would be rescued.
    I still had not eaten or drunk anything. I didn’t want to think anymore, because it took effort just to organize my thoughts. My skin, burned by the sun, hurt terribly and was covered with blisters. At the naval base the instructor had advised us to make certain, at all costs, not to let the lungs be exposed to the sun’s rays. That was one of