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

my worries. I had taken off my shirt, still wet, and tied it around my waist. Since I hadn’t had any water for three days, it was now impossible to sweat. I felt a deep pain in my throat, in my chest, and beneath my shoulder blades, and so on the fourth day I drank a little sea water. It doesn’t quench your thirst, but it’s refreshing. I had heldoff drinking it for so long because I knew that the second time one should drink less, and only after many hours had passed.
    Every day at five, astonishingly punctual, the sharks arrived. Then there was a banquet around the raft. Huge fish would jump out of the water and, a few moments later, resurface in pieces. The sharks, crazed, would silently rush up to the bloody surface. So far, they hadn’t tried to smash the raft, but they were attracted to it because of its white color. Everyone knows that sharks are more likely to attack things that are white. Sharks are myopic and only see white or shiny objects. Then I remembered another of the instructor’s recommendations: “Hide all shiny things so as not to draw the sharks’ attention.”
    I didn’t have anything shiny—my watch is dark, even its face. But I would have felt better if I had had white things to throw overboard, away from the raft, in the event the sharks tried to jump up over the edge. Just in case, from the fourth day on, I held my oar poised after five each evening, ready to defend myself.
A ship in sight
    During the night I placed one oar across the raft and tried to sleep. I don’t know if it happened only when I was asleep or also when I was awake, but I saw Jaime Manjarrés every night. We chatted for a while, about everything, and then he disappeared. I grew accustomed to his visits.
    When the sun rose I thought I must have been hallucinating, but at night I hadn’t the slightest doubt that Jaime Manjarrés was there on board with me. He tried to go to sleep, too, at dawn on the fifth day. He rested insilence, with his head on the other oar. Soon he began searching the sea. He said, “Look!”
    I looked up. About thirty kilometers from the raft, moving in the same direction as the wind, I saw the intermittent but unmistakable lights of a ship.
    It had been hours since I had had the strength to row. But when I saw the lights I pulled myself together, grabbed the oars firmly, and tried to row toward the ship. I watched it slowly advance, and for an instant I saw not only the lights of the mast but also its shadow moving across the first light of dawn.
    The wind put up stiff resistance. Even though I rowed furiously, with abnormal strength after four days without eating or sleeping, I don’t think I managed to divert the raft even one meter from the direction in which the wind was blowing it.
    The lights grew more distant, and I began to sweat. I was exhausted. After twenty minutes, the lights disappeared completely. The stars began to dim and the sky was tinted a deep gray. Desolate in the middle of the ocean, I let go of the oars, stood up, and, lashed by the icy wind of dawn, screamed like a lunatic for a few minutes.
    When I saw the sun again, I was resting on the oar. I was completely spent. Now I saw no chance of being rescued and I began to want to die. But then I thought of something dangerous, and that thought strengthened my will to go on.
    On the morning of my fifth day I was determined to change the course of the raft, by whatever means I could. It occurred to me that if I stayed on the course set by the wind, I would reach an island inhabited by cannibals. In Mobile, in a magazine whose name I’ve forgotten, I read a story about a shipwrecked sailor who was devoured by cannibals. But I was thinking more about
The RenegadeSailor
, a book I had read in Bogotá two years earlier. This is the story of a sailor, during the war, who, after his ship collides with a mine, manages to swim to a nearby island. He stays there for twenty-four hours, eating wild fruit, until the cannibals discover