Carlos Sánchez is roused from sleep by the brutish young South African, one of the three armed South Africans assigned to the Pescador for the two-week journey back to Fremantle.
‘There’s an email from your wife, with a picture of your baby. Doesn’t look too flash,’ the South African says provocatively, looking for a reaction from the inert fishing master who has barely spoken since the Pescador was apprehended.
Carlos feels his heart race. He spoke to Julia just yesterday and their baby was okay. A week old, she said. ‘You opened my email?’
‘Of course. What did you expect?’
‘¡Pendejo!’ Carlos curses, throwing back his sleeping bag and filling the small cabin with the smell of stale sweat and unwashed skin.
‘There’s not much to see anyway. It’d fit in my boot.’ The South African holds up his foot.
‘¡Vete al infierno!’ Carlos rises stiffly from his bunk, and makes his way to the computer at the corner of the mess. Before the boarding, all the crew had been able to send and receive emails from a communal address, but an unspoken rule dictated that no one would stoop so low as to read the personal messages of their crewmates.
Carlos opens the email, the South African still at his side like a vulture clawing at its injured prey. He reads the short message from Julia and opens the attachment, his index finger shaking as it hovers over the mouse. The picture emerges line by line from the top of the screen. There is a faint spray of very short dark hair, not the mop that María was born with, but then she was born full term. He makes out a rounded forehead, eyes squeezed shut against the world, and a nose largely covered with sticky plaster, which appears to be holding in place a small plastic tube. Scrolling down he sees his son’s delicate mouth, the tiny red lips parted as if yawning or gasping for air. He hopes it’s the former.
When the whole picture has downloaded, Carlos sits back in the plastic seat and stares at the screen. The baby’s head is partly turned to the left, revealing a crumpled right ear that is folded over, as if glued down, at its outer rim. Carlos feels an immense rush of love and a need to protect this tiny creature. A pen has been placed beside the baby for scale. It is half his son’s length, he realises with a start. The baby would fit in a man’s boot. What chance does his son have?
He re-reads the first part of Julia’s message: ‘Little Eduardo still weighs less than one kilogram, and is just thirty centimetres long.’ It hadn’t meant much until he had seen the comparison of his baby with the pen.
‘Looks like a skinned rabbit, doesn’t it?’ the young South African taunts, just as his superior arrives at the door.
‘Give the man some peace!’ the older man orders.
‘I was just making sure—’
‘Making sure of what? That this man isn’t allowed an ounce of human dignity? That he knows, without a doubt, that you’re a pathetic excuse for a man? What’s he going to do, dispose of his illegal catch via email? In any case, he’s innocent until proven guilty.’
‘Shall I go then?’
‘Your powers of perception astonish me. Yes, go. As far away from me as this boat will allow.’
The young South African leaves the room like a scolded child.
‘I apologise,’ the senior naval officer says, seeing the picture on the screen. ‘Some of these lads still have a fair bit of growing up to do.’ He shakes his head. ‘Your son will pull through. They work miracles these days, the doctors.’
‘I hope so,’ Carlos says in stilted English.
‘There’s nothing you can do from here. There’d be nothing you could do even if you were there.’
‘I could touch him. I could hold my wife.’
‘Yes. Of course. Well, let’s hope this illegal-fishing matter can be resolved swiftly in the Australian courts.’
‘Gracias.’ Carlos prints out a copy of the picture and tries to imagine the tiny form, his son, growing into a sturdy man who will accompany him on fishing trips. It seems impossible.
No longer permitted to remain in the wheelhouse, and with no desire to be there anyway, Carlos returns in silence to the crew’s quarters.
He closes his eyes, but doesn’t sleep. Obsessive, anxious thoughts engulf him. How can Julia deal with all of this on her own? How can she have anything left emotionally for María? ‘¡Me jodí!’ Carlos swears out loud at himself, taking the blame for the entire mess—the disastrous expedition, Eduardo’s death and his baby’s premature birth, brought on, he fears, by the stress this chase has caused his wife. If he was at home now, he would hold his wife and daughter and only let go to take María outside to play in the back garden, where he could pretend, for just a moment, that life was still good. He wonders if it will ever feel good again. He imagines Julia smoothing his brow, kissing his eyelids closed. He imagines stroking her long hair and consoling her in return. At least his mother-in-law is there now, he thinks. Julia will be able to drop her guard from time to time. Keeping a lid on this level of emotion would poison his wife.
Carlos imagines their baby in the humidicrib, struggling for oxygen. He pictures his miniature face, with its squinted eyes, and slightly misshapen ear, no doubt bent from lying too long on one side. The ear’s crêpe-like skin appeared so thin in the picture that it was transparent. He could almost see the tiny veins transporting their cargo of bright red blood – his own blood.
Carlos finds himself talking with God, uttering a prayer for the first time since he was a boy. At the end, he asks what he has done wrong to deserve this ultimate of punishments – the potential death of his child. Is he a bad person? Why is Julia also being forced to suffer? But there is no answer.
He feels betrayed. Betrayed by God and angry at life for what it is asking of him. If his son dies, he doesn’t know if he has what it takes to survive. What does it take? Would he even want to go on living? For the sake of María and Julia, the answer must be yes, but he suspects such sadness would turn him into a different man.
He looks out through a porthole and prays to the sea instead. He asks it to lull him to sleep, to numb his mind and ease his pain. He contemplates the photograph—taped now to the hull wall beside the porthole—of Julia at Eduardo’s father’s boatshed. He takes it from the wall, again studying the handwriting on the back. It’s odd, he thinks, that she didn’t mention going to the boatshed, but then what was there to tell? He wishes he had alcohol with him to deaden the answerless ache in his soul.
He dreams he is again visited by Eduardo. This time the first mate’s face is gnarled and worn away by the ocean. His once-handsome friend teases him with his newfound ghoulishness. Eduardo opens his mouth and a small fish swims out in a trail of black filth that stains the water like squid ink. Eduardo reaches out his hand, but it’s not for him. It is for his tiny child.
‘No!’ Carlos wakes with a start, shocked by the loudness of his own voice. He doesn’t understand the dream. He doesn’t understand reality. The space between the two seems infinitesimally small.
Manuel brings him food, but he rejects it, taking only a sip of warm, over-sweetened tea. The effect is nauseating. He has dealt with much in his life at sea: enormous waves, extreme weather, ice and injury. He pleads to be dealt another challenge like that. Something he can recognise and fight. Instead fate is toying with the most vulnerable member of his family, and tying his own hands at the same time.
Hope, Julia wrote in her email to him, is a powerful force. At the moment, Carlos realises, it is all he has. He dares to dream again that one day he will take his son fishing. He would give his right arm to have the chance to teach the boy how to read the clouds, the sea, and the birds that speak of fish. How to tie ropes and fix salt-encrusted engines; to work with men on the most levelling platform on Earth. He rolls onto his side, re-attaches the photograph of Julia to the hull wall that separates him narrowly from the ocean, and, with his fingers gently touching the image of his wife’s face, lets the tears come.