The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera by J. Joaquin Fraxedas

Author:J. Joaquin Fraxedas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter Eleven

Before falling asleep, Juan had wrapped a line around his wrists to keep from slipping off the inner tube, and now he was dreaming of the wind. In his dream he saw the ripples on the water as the wind stroked the water the way a man caresses a woman. Then he felt himself lifted above the water and carried by the wind, and his dream was so vivid that he felt in his stomach as though he were truly flying and he saw the white crests of the waves pass under him at great speed. But the burning pain from the jellyfish stings awoke him before he finished his dream.

The pain annoyed him now not so much for its unpleasantness but because it did not let him sleep, and lately when he was awake he only thought about death, which he considered to have already begun and now it was only a matter of seeing it through to its conclusion. He was not sad about death and he was not frightened. Nor did the loneliness bother him. Besides, he thought that he was not truly lonely as long as someone cared for him and he knew that even now Carmen was caring for him and perhaps other people he did not know were caring for him. He also still felt connected to Raúl in a strange way, and he felt that what he thought and what he did continued to affect Raúl, the same way Raúl was affecting him now as he flowed in the current. So he did not feel lonely and he did not feel sad because he considered himself already a dead man. But he continued to think about death and wondered if dying was different from what anyone supposed, if perhaps it was a good thing, a lucky thing. He wondered if Andrés knew that death was lucky, perhaps luckier than life, and had reconciled himself to it when he said, “It’s the only way.” He thought he had. His voice had sounded strange, as if it came from another world. But maybe that was just the nature of his voice, he thought. Andrés had been a preacher of sorts, and they have voices like that.

Whether Andrés had or not, Juan could not reconcile himself to death, and since that was all he thought about now when he was awake, being awake bothered him. So he forced himself to concentrate on the swirling patterns of many-colored fish swimming around the net until he could no longer see the individual fish, but only the changing colors. The colors mesmerized him, and after a while he was asleep again and dreaming of the wind.

In his dream he was aloft once more and felt the familiar butterflies in his stomach, but this time he was over fields of sugarcane and he saw the fingers of the wind stroking the tall stalks of cane. And as the wind stroked the cane, he saw how the fields changed colors from a deep green to a lighter green where the wind passed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.