The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez

Author:Gabriel García Márquez
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 0517699389
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1986-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I was a dead man

I don’t remember the dawn of the next day. I have a vague idea that during the entire morning I lay prostrate, between life and death, in the bottom of the raft. I thought about my family and imagined them doing precisely what they later told me they had done during my disappearance. I wasn’t surprised when they said they had held a wake for me. On that sixth morning of solitude at sea, I guessed that all those things were happening. I knew that my family had been informed of my disappearance. Since the planes hadn’t come back, I was sure they had abandoned the search and declared me dead.

All of that was so, up to a point. Yet I tried to take care of myself every moment. I kept finding ways to survive, something to prop myself up with—insignificant though it might have been—some reason to sustain hope. But on the sixth day I no longer hoped for anything. I was a dead man in the raft.

In the afternoon, thinking about how soon five o’clock would come, and with it the return of the sharks, I tried to lash myself to the side. On the beach in Cartagena two years earlier I had seen the remains of a man who had been mangled by a shark. I didn’t want to die that way. I didn’t want to be torn to shreds by a mob of voracious beasts.

It was almost five. The sharks arrived and circled the raft. I struggled to rouse myself to untie a rope from the mesh floor. The afternoon was cool, the sea calm. I felt slightly stronger. Suddenly I saw the sea gulls from the previous day, and the sight of them reawakened my desire to live.

At that point I would have eaten anything. Hunger gnawed at me. But the pain in my ravaged throat and in my jaws, hardened by lack of exercise, was worse. I needed to chew something. I tried in vain to tear off pieces of the rubber sole of my shoe. Then I remembered the business cards from the shop in Mobile.

They were in one of my pants pockets, nearly disintegrated from the dampness. I tore them up, put them in my mouth, and began to chew. It was like a miracle: my throat felt a little better and my mouth filled with saliva. I chewed slowly, as if it were gum. My jaws hurt at the first bite. But eventually, chewing the cards I had saved without knowing why since the day I went shopping with Mary Address, I felt stronger and more optimistic. I thought I would keep chewing them forever to relieve the pain in my jaw. It seemed terribly wasteful to throw them overboard. I could feel a tiny piece of mashed-up cardboard move all the way down to my stomach, and from that moment on I felt I would be saved, that I wouldn’t be destroyed by the sharks.

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