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

him, throw him in a pot of boiling water, and cook him alive. The thought of that island lingered in my mind. Soon I couldn’t think about the coastline without imagining a region populated by cannibals. For the first time in five days of solitude at sea, my terror was transformed: now I wasn’t as afraid of the sea as I was of land.
    At midday I rested on the gunwale, drowsy from the sun and hunger and thirst. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I had no sense of time or of my course. I tried to stand up to test my strength and had the sensation that I couldn’t move my body.
    This is the moment, I thought. And in fact it seemed to be the most dreadful moment of all, the one the instructor had described to us: when you lash yourself to the raft. There is an instant in which you feel neither thirst nor hunger, in which you don’t even feel the relentless bite of the sun on your blistered skin. You don’t think. You have no sense of what your feelings are. But still you don’t lose hope. There is still the last recourse of loosening the ropes of the mesh floor and lashing yourself to the raft. During the war many corpses were found like that, decomposed and pecked by birds, yet firmly tied to the raft.
    I thought I still had the strength to wait until nightfall before tying myself up. I rolled myself into the bottom of the raft, stretched out my legs, and remained submerged up to my neck for a few hours. When the sun touched the wound on my knee it began to hurt. It was as if it had been awakened. And as if the pain had given me a new desireto live. Little by little, in the cool water I began to recover my strength. Then I felt a wrenching twist in my stomach and my bowels moved, shaken by a long, deep rumble. I tried to hold out but I couldn’t.
    With great difficulty I sat up, undid my belt, lowered my pants, and mercifully relieved myself for the first time in five days. And for the first time the fish, desperate, charged the side of the raft, trying to rip through the thick rope mesh.
Seven sea gulls
    The sight of fish, glistening and close by, made me hungry again. For the first time I felt truly desperate. But at the very least, I had some bait. I forgot my exhaustion, grabbed an oar, and prepared to expend the last of my strength in a well-aimed blow to the head of one of the frenzied fish that were jumping at the side of the raft. I don’t know how many times I swung the oar. It felt as if each blow had hit the mark, but I waited in vain for my catch. There was a terrible feast of fish devouring one another, with one shark, belly up, taking his succulent share from the turbulent water.
    The shark’s presence diverted me from my intentions; discouraged, I lay down at the side of the raft. But after a few moments I was filled with glee; seven sea gulls flew over the raft.
    To a hungry sailor alone at sea, gulls are a message of hope. Ordinarily, a flock of sea gulls will accompany a ship out of port, but only up to the second day of the voyage. Seven sea gulls over the raft meant land was nearby.
    If I had had the strength, I would have started to row. But I was too weak. I could barely stay on my feet for a few seconds at a time. Convinced that I was less than two days from land, I drank a little more sea water from the palm of my hand and again lay down at the side of the raft, face upward so the sun wouldn’t burn my lungs. I didn’t cover my face with my shirt because I wanted to go on looking at the sea gulls, which were flying slowly, swooping down at an acute angle to the sea. It was one o’clock in the afternoon on the fifth day.
    I don’t know when it arrived. I was lying down in the raft, around five in the afternoon, preparing to lower myself into the middle before the sharks came. Then I saw a small sea gull, about the size of my hand, fly in circles above the raft and land on the end opposite me.
    My mouth filled with icy saliva. I didn’t have anything to capture that sea gull with. No