Rather than meet his family as scheduled, after he landed in El Salvador Alvarenga was immediately hospitalized and given a new battery of tests. After a week of being locked up on Ebon and a second week hiding and running from the press in the Marshall Islands, Alvarenga was no longer the obliging patient. His feisty independence roared back. He was on his home turf, where everyone understood Spanish. Now he was free to think, travel and speak out as he pleased. “They wanted to put all these monitors on me but I said no. I would never let them do that to me,” Alvarenga recounted. He refused to be tethered down by tubes. “In the Marshall Islands they told me I didn’t need them [the tubes]. If I had let them hook up all those instruments I was fucked.”
Alvarenga was not interested in being interviewed by doctors. He was sick of journalists. He understood what ailed him: he needed to get back home, to escape these smocked specialists who questioned him by day, gave him pills at night and served boring meals hardly worth eating. Hospitals were for sick people. He was tired of being treated like an invalid. Mom’s food would rekindle his strength. His daughter’s presence would boost his morale.
Alvarenga believed he didn’t need a doctor to diagnose what was wrong. He was suffering from a yearlong tortilla drought. Nearly every day of his journey at sea he had imagined toasted tortillas. During his two weeks in the Marshall Islands he begged for corn tortillas but was told to wait, that no one ate tortillas in the middle of the Pacific. But here in El Salvador, he was sure tortillas were nearby. Within hours of being checked into the hospital in Santa Tecla, Alvarenga placed an order—as if he were in a take-out restaurant—for a heaping plate of hot tortillas. The nurses refused his petition. Alvarenga insisted. A doctor was called in to explain dietary restrictions to the insistent patient. “They denied me tortillas,” said an indignant Alvarenga. It was an affront to his national pride—how could a Salvadoran be denied his birthright? Alvarenga began to scream, “Tortillas! Bring me tortillas!” The nurses broke out in laughter and cheerfully brought him a tiny plate of white rice.
Alvarenga’s doctors were not tricked by the fisherman’s bravado and demands for tortillas. They suspected that he was descending into a psychological pit, not unlike post-traumatic stress disorder, in which flashbacks, nightmares and feelings of guilt wreak havoc on an already confused mind.
Finally, after hours of waiting, Alvarenga’s mother, Maria, was allowed to see her son. She prayed as she entered the room, giving thanks to God for the miracle of having her son back from the brink. She was certain that only God’s generosity explained his extraordinary survival. Maria hugged her son, Salvador, for the first time in years as they both sobbed. “I was mute, I couldn’t talk,” Alvarenga said. His mind also focused on giving thanks. While he did not pray aloud or verbalize his vigorous belief in a God above, Alvarenga felt protected. He now shared his mother’s unshakable faith. During his ordeal, Alvarenga’s religious convictions were sparked by his more religious crewmate, Ezequiel, and then internalized. After the death of his companion, Alvarenga felt accompanied by a faith he couldn’t define but rarely questioned.
For nearly an hour, mother and son quietly shared silence. She prayed; he gave thanks. Then it was time to meet his daughter. When Fatima entered, Alvarenga was still mute. Fatima massaged her father’s hands as she silently gawked at his rough skin, assorted tattoos and deep scars. “She did not pressure me about anything. I just managed a couple of words,” said Alvarenga. “I liked it when she touched my head, my feet. I felt her presence.”
Fatima was shy as she first held his hand and then hugged her father. “He had a big smile but he was not present, he was kind of sinking,” she said. She was scared by the look of her father’s “swollen and shiny” legs. But she was quietly ecstatic. “All my prayers had been answered, now I had a father.” Fatima wanted to ask her father dozens of questions. She was curious about his time at sea. What kind of food did he eat? How did he sleep? Was it scary? Had he seen mermaids?
The doctors in El Salvador were well aware that Alvarenga’s mental health was fragile so they strictly restricted visits. A policeman was posted outside Alvarenga’s room. The bedridden survivor wrote a note to the press asking to be left alone, yet cameras still flashed inside his semi-private room and a reporter dressed as a doctor made a crude effort to steal a few words from the prone but now feisty fisherman. Alvarenga was no longer surprised by the paparazzi attacks. “I remember this really tall guy, he told me he was a psychologist. But really he was trying to steal my story,” Alvarenga said. “He offered me a telephone if I told him my story. I said no; then he said he would give me a refrigerator.”
For nine days, Alvarenga was hospitalized. He was diagnosed with anemia and doctors suspected his diet of raw turtles and raw birds had infected his liver with parasites. Alvarenga believed the parasites might rise up to his head and attack his brain. Deep sleep was impossible.
When he managed to fall asleep his mind erupted in nightmares, flashbacks to his fear of returning to his small village in El Salvador, where he had been badly beaten years earlier. “I dreamed I was being chased by people who wanted to kill me. I’m not sure who or why, just that they wanted to kill me.” His dreams were also filled with images of birds. “I would imagine that I was talking to the birds, then eating them and then getting sick.”
The vision of eating raw birds and falling ill was a flashback to Córdoba’s tragic death. Alvarenga thought often about the young man. It was the part of his story that everyone wanted to hear and the most painful to dredge up. Their relationship was born of mutual suffering. It was forged by smashing waves, freezing rain and slow starvation. Alvarenga felt no guilt for the young man’s death, yet he longed to have Córdoba by his side. If only the young man had learned to eat seabird ceviche. Alvarenga imagined their joint celebration. It was not the same to celebrate alone. Alvarenga acknowledged Córdoba’s key role in his own survival. He had learned to pray from Córdoba and the storytelling tools he employed to keep his own sanity while adrift and alone for ten full cycles of the full moon were fruits of his earlier efforts to motivate his dying shipmate. He was anxious to complete the promise to deliver a message to Córdoba’s mother, Ana Rosa. Alvarenga had vowed to visit her in El Fortin, the small village just north of Alvarenga’s former home in Costa Azul, Mexico. As soon as he was strong enough, he would travel to Mexico and deliver those final words directly to Córdoba’s mother.
On February 19, Salvador Alvarenga finally arrived home as reporters snapped photos, party music blared and relatives lined the entrance to his family’s five-room cinder block home. Arely Barrera, his former girlfriend and Fatima’s mother, appeared nervous and unsure of her role in his new life as folk hero. They shared a timid hug. When he saw Fatima, Alvarenga grabbed his daughter and announced, “I love you, and I am not going to let you go!” Fatima hugged him even harder.
But Alvarenga did not adjust well to life at home. “I turned on the shower and ran away from the water. I was so traumatized that I preferred to use a bucket,” Alvarenga said as he described the difficulty of assimilating to simple routines. When his bathing bucket mixed with a handful of red dirt, Alvarenga screamed and went running from the sight. His brain confused the murky red water with a bucket of fresh turtle blood.
During the first days, he spoke barely a word to Fatima. She would sit on his bed and look into his eyes, wondering how he survived more than a year adrift at sea. He smiled at her but for weeks delayed his first talk. Finally he gathered the energy and clarity to open his heart to his daughter. “I know I didn’t raise you and that all those years are lost,” he said. “But Dad is here to give you advice, to help you learn right from wrong.”
Fatima was dubious. “Why didn’t you ever come back for me? You forgot me!”
Alvarenga explained that she was the reason he survived at sea, how he fought to stay alive in order to see her, to help raise her. “I asked God to be with you, that he let us be together.”
Fatima countered that before his ordeal, he had been safe on land for years and made no effort to find her or reach out. “Why did you leave me?”
“I was a party guy, I was drinking and using drugs. I had big problems.” Alvarenga gave her the straight truth, though he did not detail the near-fatal beating that had also influenced his decision to leave town.
The new father and teenage daughter hugged. It was not the magical moment of bonding that either had imagined, but at least it was no longer a fantasy. Despite the difficult questions and painful answers, they each felt a deep relief at being united. “I called him ‘Dad,’ ” said Fatima, who could see that her parents’ breakup was imminent. She would soon have to choose between living with her mother, who was moving to Guatemala, or remain with her father in El Salvador. She had already decided. She was staying with her dad.
Alvarenga was in a stupor for weeks, barely able to communicate. “He was very strange,” Fatima said. “His legs were swollen and he could hardly walk. He was always tired. He would just sit in bed with the fan running in his face. Even talking made him tired. You had to speak really slowly and some words he didn’t understand. I never saw him cry. I think he did that at night.” Fatima’s initial elation at having her father home was complicated by her fears that “he might stay like that and then I was going to be alone again. But bit by bit, he got better.”
Asked what it was like to have a father after so many years without, Fatima paused. “At first he felt like Daddy number two. My grandfather Ricardo was like my first father and he [Salvador] was like my second father.” Week by week, her father migrated out of the zombie phase and was able to focus on day-to-day life as the two began to share more time. “Then we laughed a lot,” Fatima said, describing long sessions hunched over a cell phone watching YouTube videos together. “My favorite game is to ambush him. I hide behind the dresser or in the corner and make sounds. Then I jump out and he starts shaking.” Fatima never understood the absolute panic she caused her father with her innocent pranks.
“I have a lot of questions but I’m not sure if he will answer them,” Fatima admitted. “When I ask him about his trip, he looks like he is tranquil, but I can tell that on the inside he is suffering. He looks down, he turns tense and his face changes color.”
Fallout from his trauma at sea was constant. Alvarenga remained hyper-vigilant to the most basic environmental changes. When he heard objects bump together, he thought of turtles. “I still imagined that I smelled like fish,” he admitted. But he no longer feared the sea and was contemplating the challenge of heading back out. “I could be a shrimper, they only go out twelve miles,” Alvarenga confessed. “Even if my motor died I could still make it back in.”
Fatima rejected the idea. “I told him no. What if he got lost again and did not make it back?”
Walking along the beach with Fatima, he beamed with pride when a photographer snapped pictures of them together. “I love it and she can’t believe it,” said Alvarenga as he hugged Fatima.
Having a famous father made life at school easier for Fatima. Classmates constantly asked her to explain how her dad ate raw birds, caught sharks with his hands and fought off the shadow of suicide. “I have more friends now,” said Fatima. “I am kind of shy but people thought I was stuck up so they didn’t talk to me. Now they talk to me more even though I am the same as always.” Her classmates called her Naufraga (“Castaway”) in honor of her dad.
As Fatima described life with her father, a workman at the family home in El Salvador poured cement from a bucket, while a second worker used a wooden 2x4 to smooth out the surface. Alvarenga watched with care: this was not just any floor. This was the dance floor. Soon the house would be filled with partygoers, flowers, catered food and music. Fatima was turning fifteen, which in Central America can require an event as extravagant as a wedding. She had the dress, was practicing the waltz and best of all counted on a prized guest: her dad.
Of all his worldly possessions there is probably nothing more cherished by Alvarenga than his first car, a 2005 Chevrolet Aveo sedan. He washed it frequently. Made plans to paint it and enthusiastically described slick racing stripes or gaudy color combinations. Although he had no license, he drove hours every day. He didn’t drive fast or far, often slumbering along at 5 mph, the window down, radio blaring as he chatted with childhood friends or flirted with admirers. His pace was slower than a bicycle. It was not speed he sought but movement. As if he’d become addicted to drifting, Alvarenga had a need to move. The drive around town was four miles and then he looped back outside his parents’ flour mill. It was his therapy. Fatima sometimes accompanied him, proudly riding shotgun and laughing at her dad’s repeated circles and repeated jokes.
In many ways Salvador Alvarenga was overly protective of Fatima. He didn’t like her talking or texting with boys her age. When these teenage boys came by to visit, Alvarenga gruffly ran them off, despite Fatima’s assertions that they were only friends. But he also endowed her with some of his vaunted survival skills. Her favorite food is “turtle heads with salt” and her main after-school activity driving lessons with her dad. In macho El Salvador, where the roles available to women are limited, many women still don’t know how to drive. Alvarenga broke tradition and taught Fatima the value of independence. On the rocky roads around town, he invited Fatima to take the wheel.
As Fatima started up the automatic transmission, her father smiled. The engine was running but Fatima still cranked over the key, eliciting a grinding howl of protest from the ignition. She shifted into drive and jammed the accelerator. Gravel whipped out like buckshot and a cloud of dust briefly eclipsed the cornfields across the street. Fatima smiled as she corrected a wide left arc to avoid whacking a fence post. “I feel confident. Really confident,” she announced. “I like to drive fast but Dad is worried that if a cow crosses I won’t be able to stop.” Her father turned to admire his daughter’s plucky confidence. She stalled on a rocky patch of unpaved road, and then shredded the ignition again. Salvador, who babies his car, seemed unfazed by the violent shriek. What did it matter if his daughter couldn’t drive on land? His world was at sea, battling the wind, steering a course through the waves and savoring the distance from the furies of life on land.
As soon as his health permitted, Alvarenga made plans to return to Mexico. His trip was a fusion of two missions. First, he needed to complete his promise to his dying mate, Córdoba. Lost at sea he had sworn to bear witness and explain the circumstances of young Ezequiel Córdoba’s death to his family. Second, he needed to visit his former colleagues at the fishing community. Although Alvarenga could barely walk, he felt obliged to fulfill his commitments.
In March 2014, six weeks after he washed ashore, Alvarenga was back on an airplane, this time a short flight to Tapachula, Mexico. His fisherman friends turned out en masse, but after initial greetings Alvarenga wanted to move on. He was in an urgent rush to meet Córdoba’s mom and deliver the young man’s dying words. Alvarenga had no transportation, so he crowded into a van filled with reporters. The journalists drove him to the meeting with Ana Rosa, Córdoba’s mourning mom.
The ramshackle village of El Fortin sits just north of Costa Azul. It is a dusty hamlet where electricity and freshwater are still luxuries. Few residents own cars and except for a twice-a-day van, there are few opportunities to drive out of town. But like many villages in this coastal section of Chiapas, life and work are centered around the sea.
Protected by thick walls of mangrove forests, El Fortin is home to several hundred brave fishermen who either throw nets in the lagoon or risk the commute into the wild open ocean. Córdoba’s brothers were fishermen, pulling manta rays from the calm waters of the lagoon or heading over the horizon on full-day deep-sea ventures to catch sharks.
As Alvarenga awaited his audience with Ana Rosa, the other Córdoba brothers puffed their chests in a clear provocation toward the last man to have seen their brother alive. Alvarenga was in no mood to fight. Even smiling was difficult. He was there as the bearer of bad news, a messenger of death. He needed to complete his vow to his deceased companion. He needed to speak alone with Córdoba’s grieving mom.
For two hours, Alvarenga sat with Ana Rosa, answered her questions and explained Ezequiel’s slow death. Doña Rosa asked for more details. Did her son suffer? Alvarenga explained that her son Ezequiel had died in peace. “Then she couldn’t listen anymore. She cried so much and asked me what I did with the body. I told her.”
Córdoba’s brothers were not convinced. They had doubts and continued to question Alvarenga. He invited them to ride along on the hour drive to the fishermen’s headquarters in Paredón. If they wanted to know the details of their brother’s death they were invited, but no one took up the offer. Alvarenga was eager to leave the tense scene. He had answered all their questions, delivered the message to Ana Rosa and, most important, received her blessing. “She listened and said she did not blame me, that my conscience should be free,” said Alvarenga. “She said she would never think that I had killed her son.”
Having completed his obligation to Córdoba, Alvarenga now focused on his personal objective: to investigate why his buddies had not found him on the first day of the fateful storm. He doubted they had really looked. His last radio call came when he was just twenty miles offshore. Why hadn’t they rescued him during those first hours?
As he traveled to Paredón, a deep anger rose up. If they had mounted a proper search-and-rescue operation he would never have gone adrift. When Alvarenga arrived in the fishing village of Paredón, Willy and Mino, his boss and his supervisor, were smiling and ecstatic to see their lost colleague. Alvarenga was angry. He met his former bosses not with a smile or a hug, but a direct accusation.
“You think I am worthless?” Alvarenga targeted his hostile questioning at Mino, his former supervisor.
“Hey, Chancha,” said Mino. “Don’t be saying that. I know what you are thinking.”
“Okay, explain it to me,” said Alvarenga. “I’m listening.”
“We went out for three days looking for you,” said Mino as he described how a total of four boats had patrolled the sea and found not a single piece of wreckage or gear. Mino detailed the entire rescue. The boats. The airplane. Alvarenga was skeptical so Mino went to his home and returned with a file of the search report, complete with official papers and even the name of the pilot who had come down from the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez to fly the search plane.
Alvarenga now felt guilty and made a confession to Mino and Willy. “I gave your boat away,” Alvarenga told Mino. He explained how he had gifted the boat to Emi and Russel on the other side of the world. “Don’t talk to me about boats,” said Mino, who even in hard times was known as a generous supervisor. “You’re alive. That’s all that matters. Boats we have.”
The fishermen organized a small get-together at Mino’s house. They had music, friends and a steady stream of rum, grain alcohol and beer. Alvarenga skipped the booze—he was dizzy enough being on land. He didn’t down a single drink, smoke a cigarette or joint. He was looking for ways to slow down, not agitate his already rattled mind.
As his colleagues drank, Alvarenga raised another sensitive topic. Was it true they had all attended his funeral? Alvarenga felt betrayed. How could they hold a funeral for him if he was alive? Why hadn’t they maintained faith?
“They told me how they threw flowers at sea and drank coffee [a tradition at fishermen’s funerals],” said Alvarenga. “I was waiting for them to say they had kept hope that I was alive but they coffeed me. I started to shake. I went into a trance thinking about that. ‘They coffeed me.’ ”
Alvarenga was incredulous. “I was suffering,” he told his colleagues, “and you guys were enjoying a coffee here? I was begging for food and you smoked pot!”
“Yeah, we coffeed you, Chancha,” admitted Trumpillo.
“You should have sent me food,” responded Alvarenga.
“We smoked, we drank,” admitted Trumpillo. “We were thinking about you.”
“Instead of thinking, you should have saved me,” said Alvarenga.
Alvarenga’s unruly accusations masked his deep relief at rejoining his colleagues. Here in the fishing shacks, the slapping of the ocean sounded not like a tortured reminder of his nightmare at sea but an invitation to return home. Although they cultivated the image of outlaws, these fishermen were governed by a strict set of rules, but not the kind of guidelines that would ever be written or published. Alvarenga’s funeral ceremony had followed that same logic. Los Tiburoneros (The Sharkers) failed to understand Alvarenga’s anger over the fact that they had honored his life with flowers, candles and coffee. That was tradition. It was greater than any one man.
Eating plate after plate of mahimahi ceviche, Alvarenga’s trademark bravado surged. Physically he was shuffling like a disabled war veteran, but he had been onshore for six weeks; his mind was now better able to sort friend from foe. Here with his buddies, he began to share the details of his lessons from survival at sea. “I don’t waste food now,” he told his colleagues. “I used to throw a kilo of tortillas in the sea, for the fish. When I was lost I thought a lot about that. Now I find someone who is hungry and give it to them. I know what it means to be suffering from hunger or thirst.”
Several Sharkers insisted that they too could have survived what Alvarenga endured. His response was laden with warning: “I hope for your sake you never have to try. You will cry; you will suffer. You don’t want to suffer as I did.”
While his friends smoked marijuana, sipped tequila and piled up empty beer cans, Alvarenga held forth. He had always been able to keep his audience’s rapt attention. Now he was a storyteller with a world-class adventure. Here there were no taboos. And no landlubbers. If any crowd could appreciate his epic struggle at sea it was The Sharkers. And if anyone was likely to be lost at sea as a castaway it was the men in this room. Alvarenga knew this was a tough crew who could handle the exhausting physical challenges of being lost at sea, so he explained a less obvious facet of survival: his mental health. “Don’t give up hope, remain calm,” he urged. “What could be worse than what happened to me? I always thought that everything would work out. What further suffering could there be than what I lived through? I didn’t give up.” His friends cried, toasted and hugged their beloved Chancha. It was as if a ghost had stepped from their past and brought them stories from the afterlife. As they celebrated and drank, Alvarenga listened again and again to the details of his own funeral as his overjoyed friends opened bottles of tequila in his honor and shouted their joy.
Chancha was alive!
The Sharkers cultivated a bad-boy rebel image that was only partly fiction. They were accustomed to living on the cusp of sudden death. As they killed sharks and tuna, butchered bait and measured the weather, their world was a mix of death, danger and beauty. They were the last of a centuries-old tradition of men and the sea. A final generation condemned to fish ever more distant from shore, in an ocean that had been nearly fished out. Many of them realized that within ten years they too would be hanging up their hooks and finding jobs on land. There simply weren’t many fish left in the sea. Few of the men wished this life upon their sons. But for now they were Sharkers, a wayward tribe of men who spent more time at sea than on land, savored the rough beauty of life at sea and reveled in a deep tribal loyalty.
Willy and Mino and a close friend known as Pulga pulled Alvarenga aside and assured him the loss of the boat was insignificant. They showered him with compliments and stuffed his pockets with orange 500-peso (US$35) notes. “Come back,” they urged. “You always caught more than anyone else.” Alvarenga considered the offer. A boat. A job. His old life back. In his pocket 15,000 pesos (US$1,200) tempted him to jump back into his Wild West life. Mino, Pulga and Willy wanted him back. The call of the sea was magnetic. It would kill his mother if he did. It might kill him if he didn’t. He was a man of the sea. But he was also a father; for now he’d try his luck on land.