Julia Pereira de Sánchez is watering the potted hibiscus on her small back porch, when the gorrión chick falls from its nest in the apartment’s roof. It is dead on impact and cuts a forlorn picture on the lawn. Blue skin stretches over eyes still closed to the world. The orbits bulge from the meagre skull against a broken, featherless backdrop of a body. The chick’s bent wings and rudimentary tail are reminiscent of the prehistoric fossil skeletons of the archaeopteryx, that Jurassic cross between a dinosaur and a modern bird, which Julia has seen at the museum. It’s uncanny, she thinks, how closely an embryonic form can resemble that creature’s extinct ancestor. Even in humans, the stages of embryonic development (from egg to tadpole-like being, to forms resembling frogs, then lizards, and, finally—a complete, hominid foetus) repeat the sequences seen in evolution (from unicellular organism to fish, to amphibian, to reptile, to mammal). ‘Ontogeny replicates phylogeny’ was the shorthand way she described it to her biology students. It never ceases to amaze her.
Using a hand trowel, Julia collects the bird’s tiny floppy form and buries it under the single Tipas tree in the shared back garden. The mother bird is nowhere to be seen. How can she be so uncaring? Doesn’t she know her own flesh and blood is being buried? Raucous cries erupt from the rooftop nest, interrupting Julia’s thoughts. The mother bird skims overhead, her beak ajar with a fat insect. She’s feeding her surviving chicks, Julia realises. God knows there’s little time for grief when there are other young to nourish. Nature horrifies her sometimes, biology teacher or not. Using a branch of the tree, she hoists herself up from the ground and looks down at the tiny grave before going inside to console herself with a warm drink.
She takes her favourite ceramic mate gourd from the shelf and prepares the herbal tea, methodically tipping the gourd back and forth until the dried herbs are properly dispersed in the hot water. Before inserting the metal straw, she adds a spoonful of honey, her mind already elsewhere. She ruminates over the phone call she received yesterday from Francisco. He said he had had another conversation with Eduardo and been assured that the Pescador was on its way home. There had been some minor engine trouble, but fortunately all was well again.
The conversation has left Julia restless. Only another couple of weeks and Carlos would be home. Eduardo too. But the thought of engine trouble turns her stomach to water. She doubts Migiliaro would have spent one more peso on the boat than he had to. If the mechanics fail again, and conditions are bad, the Pescador could go down. Carlos, Eduardo and the entire crew would have only moments to reflect before their lives froze over. Maybe that would be the government’s preference. And Migiliaro’s too, for that matter. No scandal. No court case. Just an unfortunate incident at sea. The catch would be buried with the men, making it impossible to prove whether the vessel had been fishing illegally. Señor Migiliaro would escape fines and, through his middleman, claim insurance on his boat. The Uruguayan government, she suspects, would hide their knowledge of the Pescador’s illegal operations behind a smokescreen of fabricated concern for the tragic loss of life. It would be in bad taste to sully the dead men’s names with slanderous allegations.
Julia shakes her head. Here she is worrying herself sick, while Carlos and Eduardo are no doubt still scheming about how to sell part of the catch without Migiliaro finding out. Ever optimistic. Overly optimistic. Eduardo may have promised to keep Carlos out of those arrangements, sparing him—and her – the consequences, but she is angry at the pair of them, and at herself, for agreeing to any of this. She finishes her mate and empties out the gourd, tipping the spent herbs down the sink and swirling her finger in the plughole to help the slurry disappear. For now, she has day-to-day life to contend with. She peruses the calendar. There is an antenatal appointment at the hospital at two o’clock, and she needs to be back in time to collect María from school. With a thick black pen, she crosses off another week of her pregnancy. Today marks the beginning of week twenty-six. For the baby’s sake, she tries not to think any more about Carlos and Eduardo at sea.
The phone rings. It’s the school. María has a high temperature and is vomiting. ‘I’m on my way,’ Julia says, hanging up the phone without even saying goodbye. She checks her watch. The next bus to the school leaves in fifteen minutes, enough time to reschedule her antenatal appointment. But the receptionist at the Hospital Maciel says they are fully booked for another two weeks. Julia writes the new date on the calendar, and hopes Carlos will be back by then. She clutches the small cross that he had fastened around her neck on a fine silver chain just months ago. ‘For our baby,’ Carlos had whispered. She holds it to her lips and utters a small prayer for their unborn child, for María, and for the safe return of her husband.
It takes three days for María to regain normal colour in her face. Over the phone, Julia’s mother had scoffed at the doctor’s diagnosis of a virus. To her, a virus is a convenient label for any illness the doctor doesn’t know the cause of. There was no such thing when she was young, she insisted. How can something invisible to the naked eye wreak so much havoc? It doesn’t fit with her robust, practical, hands-in-the-dirt view of life. ‘No, it must be something María ate,’ she’d said emphatically, the fact that food poisoning is also caused by microbes apparently lost on her. Julia let her mother’s opinion lie. Sometimes it’s better not to bring biology classes home, she has learnt. It was her mother’s chicken soup she had phoned for, not an argument.
Julia opens María’s bedroom window and lets the afternoon light spill inside. María wastes no time in leaning out over the sill to take in the view of the back garden. The mother gorrión snatches an insect from the Tipas tree and María twists her head around in the direction of the chicks’ hungry calls. ‘The nest’s too far away. I can’t see,’ María complains, squinting into the sunlight.
‘Watch out or they’ll make a nest in your hair,’ Julia teases. ‘It’s such a mess. Come and I’ll fix it.’ She taps the bed beside her and waves the hairbrush. María eventually obliges and Julia forms two straight plaits with practised hands. ‘It always makes you feel better to have your hair done, mi chica.’
‘Can Sofía come over and play?’
‘Let’s give it a couple more days,’ Julia answers. The last person she feels like seeing now is Cecilia. ‘Just to make sure you’re all better. Here, I’ll read you a story. Which one would you like?’
María reaches for El Pez (The Fish), which Eduardo wrote and illustrated for her when she turned two. It’s still her favourite.
It makes Julia laugh as well. Laugh and cry. It reminds her of all the things about Eduardo that she can’t share with another living soul. In the book, Eduardo has drawn perfect line-illustrations of his father’s boatshed at La Paloma. The boatshed’s back window shutter is open to the breeze, and there are footsteps, two sets, in the sand. The pictures, Julia knows, were drawn for her. A secret code.
María turns the page and Julia thinks back to her holidays as a teenager at the small fishing and surfing town just a few hours’ drive from Montevideo. She is transported back to the long summer days of sand and swimsuits, of sipping soft drinks on La Paloma’s shores. She remembers, too, the hours spent with Eduardo in the boatshed.
As she touches the pages of the book that his hands made, Julia feels again the deep ache in her womb that would build as her parents drove the family car along the Atlantic coast towards her favourite headland, kissed by the ocean on both sides. As the beaches grew whiter and the ocean clearer, she recalls how the flame in her heart rose up into her neck, warming her face until she could see it in the rear-vision mirror—her cheeks red at the thought of seeing her young lover again. Eduardo would let her know if his father was out fishing by leaving the boatshed’s shutters open. (Eduardo’s father always kept his shed closed tight like a clam, even if he was busy repairing nets inside. Julia supposed it was a relief for him just to be out of the wind, having spent so much of his life braced hard up against it at sea.) Seeing Eduardo’s secret sign to her as they passed in the car, Julia would quickly help her parents unload the luggage, stacking it neatly against the wooden walls of the small rented bungalow. Then, announcing that she was going for a walk to stretch her legs, she would make her way down to the boatshed, shrouded by windswept pines, and to Eduardo.
They would climb in behind an old dinghy and lie together on a pile of salty, dry netting. She would feel his ropecalloused hands under her blouse, first on the small of her back, then on the sensitive skin of her stomach until, finally, with her silent encouragement, they brushed against her breasts. She liked the roughness of his palms and fingers worn from fishing nets, and projected onto her young lover a physical maturity beyond his years. They kissed and talked, dreamed and touched, but they never made love. Julia was terrified of becoming pregnant, a fact that sits uncomfortably with her now. Instead they discovered other ways to satisfy their young ardour. Ways that wouldn’t result in a baby, but that, she realises now, would be the envy of many a staid and married couple who had run out of time, ideas and passion. Afterwards, the shutters would be closed, and Julia would leave the boatshed, her face glossy with its thin veil of sweat as if she had, indeed, just been for a walk.
Julia’s family, devout Catholics, would never have approved of such a love before marriage, and so, at Julia’s insistence, the young couple kept their holiday romances a secret. Not even Carlos—who Eduardo introduced to her as his best friend—knew.
Every school holiday for two years, Julia returned to La Paloma, her heart beating hard to see Eduardo, her face flushed in anticipation. It was on the first day of one such vacation that she learned their love affair was abruptly over, their future undone, torn apart and cast aside like an unravelling, old fishing net. Eduardo had become involved with another young woman and she was expecting his baby.
Virginia had moved to La Paloma with her parents only four months before. She was tall and tanned, and difficult to ignore. Julia later found out from friends in La Paloma, who knew nothing of her own love for Eduardo, that Virginia had sat beside him in class from her first day. On weekends she had sunned herself near his father’s boatshed. It was love at first sight, they had said.
Julia hid her devastation well. She had no choice. Virginia was pregnant. Eduardo was to marry her.
Soon after, Carlos innocently asked Julia out, his invitation made casually in front of Eduardo. It was clear that Carlos still hadn’t the faintest suspicion that she and Eduardo had been anything more than friends. Even if her first love had not remained faithful to her, he had at least kept his promise to keep their relationship a secret. And, from the sadness in his eyes, Julia knew that he still had feelings for her. Perhaps he even regretted his situation—bound to a new girlfriend forever by a child. Nevertheless, she punished him for his infidelity and accepted, on the spot, Carlos’s invitation to see a film: a love story.
But she couldn’t sustain her anger. She still cared for Eduardo and, it had to be said, respected his commitment to the mother of his unborn child. And there was something else that softened the hurt. In the months that followed, Carlos persisted in his attempts to woo her, and she began to enjoy his attention. He found fishing work in Montevideo and invited Julia for long walks along the riverfront and cheap meals in the Ciudad Vieja. He was solid and dependable, and seemed incapable of causing her the hurt that Eduardo had inflicted. The physical side of their relationship was slow to develop, but perhaps that was a good thing.
When she turned twenty, a marriageable age, both sets of parents approved of the union. Carlos asked Julia to be his wife and, on the same day, asked Eduardo to be best man. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Julia tortured herself with a Catholic’s guilt about her secret first love. In truth, part of her still yearned for him, a sentiment that was only heightened by Eduardo’s speech on the day she and Carlos married. Julia was sure that Eduardo had been talking to her when he told the gathered guests that ‘real love only happens once’.
As the years passed, there were other times when she felt tempted to tell her husband the truth about Eduardo. Times when their marriage felt so strong that nothing could rock the boat, and times when the motivation was completely different: when Julia felt that Carlos was taking her for granted and spending too long at sea. But to admit the truth would change everything: Carlos’s friendship with Eduardo, Eduardo’s relationship with his wife, and Julia’s relationship with all three. It would also draw a line through her intimacies with Eduardo forever, and they were not all ancient history.
Just six months ago, when Eduardo casually mentioned that he had almost finished restoring his father’s old wooden dinghy, the one they used to lie behind, Julia found herself asking if she could come and see it. She told him she could catch an early-morning bus to La Paloma and be home in time to put María to bed. She’d ask a neighbour if they could take María to school and mind her afterwards, she’d said out loud as she thought it through.
When they met at their teenage hideaway—their bodies older, their smiles complicated by thoughts of spouses and children—what followed was no accident.
Eduardo had replaced the old nets behind the restored dinghy with a mattress and a sea blanket. Perhaps it was spare bedding for the boat, but Julia suspected they were new additions. She wore a soft sandalwood perfume and a white, knee-length dress dotted with red flowers. Thin straps dropped easily from her shoulders, and the zip at the back was loose from wear. It was all too easy. Neither one of them held back their desires, instead letting years of suppressed passion and curiosity carry them forward to the natural conclusion for the first, and probably final, time.
Part of Julia had hoped the encounter would settle her physical longing for Eduardo once and for all, perhaps even be an anticlimax. That would have been easier. But he was the relaxed and natural lover she had always suspected he would be. They moved together without haste or anxiety, savouring the chance to uncover the treasure they had been searching for all their lives.
Afterwards, Eduardo had convinced Julia to let him take her photograph. ‘You look so beautiful today,’ he had said.
They left the boatshed separately, just as they had when they were teenagers, before returning home to their families, this time as the parents. Julia had told Carlos she was going to La Paloma for a day trip and that he would need to collect María from the neighbour. He hadn’t questioned her for a second.
A week later, Eduardo’s photograph had arrived in the mail. For six months she kept it hidden in a book under the bed she shared with Carlos until finally deciding she should send it to her parents. It was too dangerous having such evidence in the house. When Carlos found the photograph the day before he left for the Southern Ocean she had panicked, yet he regarded the picture with the same trust in his eyes that was always there for her. She thinks of that photograph now on the ocean with Carlos and wonders if Eduardo has seen it in her husband’s hand.
It isn’t that life with Carlos is without passion. They remain intimate after all their years together, their losses and their joys, but in a stop-and-start kind of way. Marriage has allowed her to fall in love with her husband many times over. Their best moments are the homecomings, when Carlos returns after weeks at sea.
She longs for such a reunion now, and remembers when his boat last docked, just two months before he left port aboard the Pescador. María had been at school and Julia had watched her husband walk up their street with his fishing jacket and overpants slung over his shoulder—his hair hard with the sea. He had smelt raw and real and she allowed him only the briefest of showers before welcoming him onto newly washed sheets. They lay together, fanned by the afternoon breeze through the apartment’s billowing bedroom curtains, making love with a fresh sense of urgency. The physical reconnection came as a relief—a transfusion of intimacy that gave their marriage vital blood and reassured her that she had married the right man. She had let Carlos push Eduardo from her mind, and surrendered into their rolling, lilting unison. It felt, she thought at the time, as if the sea was still flowing in Carlos’s blood and entering hers.