The Beam-Fishers

The reason was a certain dining room set that Mr. Hall did not yet own, and his phonograph was what served as his bait.

Candiyú saw him in the temporary office of the Yerba Company, where Mr. Hall was operating his phonograph with the door open.

Candiyú, like a good native, showed no surprise whatsoever, contenting himself with stopping his horse slightly across the path before the stream of light, and looking elsewhere. But since an Englishman, at the fall of night, in his shirtsleeves on account of the heat, and with a bottle of whisky by his side, is a hundred times more circumspect than any mestizo, Mr. Hall did not raise his eyes from the record. Whereupon, vanquished and conquered, Candiyú ended up drawing his horse close to the door, upon whose threshold he rested his elbow.

“Good evening, boss! Fine music!”

“Yes, fine,” replied Mr. Hall.

“Fine!” repeated the other. “What a racket!”

“Yes, a lot of racket,” agreed Mr. Hall, who found his visitor’s observations not devoid of depth.

Candiyú admired the new records:

“Did it cost you a lot, boss?”

“Cost... what?”

“That talker... the guys who sing.”

Mr. Hall’s turbid, expressionless, and insistent gaze cleared. The commercial accountant was emerging.

“Oh, it costs a lot!... Do you want to buy?”

“If you want to sell to me...” replied Candiyú plainly, convinced of the impossibility of such a purchase. But Mr. Hall continued to look at him with heavy fixedness, while the diaphragm bounced off the record by force of metallic marches.

“I sell cheap to you... fifty pesos!”

Candiyú shook his head, smiling at the apparatus and its machinist alternately:

“Too much money! I don’t have it.”

“What do you have, then?”

The man smiled again, without answering.

“Where do you live?” pursued Mr. Hall, evidently determined to part with his gramophone.

“At the port.”

“Ah! I know you... Your name is Candiyú?”

“That’s right.”

“And you fish for logs?”

“Sometimes, some little ownerless log...”

“I sell for logs!... Three sawn logs. I send a cart. Deal?”

Candiyú laughed.

“I don’t have any right now. And that... machinery, is it very delicate?”

“No; button here, and button here... I show. When do you have timber?”

“Some rising... One should be coming now. And what wood do you want?”

“Rosewood. Deal?”

“Hum!... That wood hardly ever comes down... Only by means of a big rise. Nice wood! You like good wood, you do.”

“And you carry a good gramophone. Deal?”

The bargain proceeded to the sound of British tunes, the native dodging the straight path, and the accountant cornering him in the small circle of precision. At bottom, and discounting the heat and the whisky, the English citizen was not making a bad deal, trading a gramophone dog for several dozen fine boards, while the log fisher, in turn, surrendered a few days of habitual work on account of a prodigiously noisy little machine.

Wherefore the bargain was struck, at such and such a term.

Candiyú has lived on the coast of the Paraná for thirty years; and if his liver is still capable of combining anything after the last fever attack, last December, he must live yet a few more months. He now passes his days seated on his wicker cot, with his hat on. Only his hands, livid claws veined with green that hang immense from his wrists, as if projected in the foreground of a photograph, move monotonously without ceasing, with the tremor of a featherless parrot.

But in those days Candiyú was something else. He then had as an honorable trade the care of someone else’s banana grove, and—somewhat less licit—that of fishing for logs. Normally, and above all in flood season, logs that have escaped from the logging camps drift down, whether they break loose from a raft in formation, or whether a joking peon cuts with a machete the rope holding them. Candiyú was the possessor of a telescoping spyglass, and spent his mornings aiming at the water, until the whitish line of a log, standing out against the wooded horizon, launched him in his flat-bottomed boat to meet the prey. The log seen in time, the enterprise is not extraordinary, because the paddle of a courageous man, leaning back or hauling on a 10 x 40 piece, is worth any tugboat.

Up there at Castelhum’s logging camp, above Puerto Felicidad, the rains had begun after seventy-five days of absolute drought that left not a single felloe on the timber carriages. The realizable asset of the camp consisted at that moment in seven thousand logs—quite a bit more than a fortune. But since the two tons of a log, as long as they are not at the port, do not weigh two scruples in the cash box, Castelhum & Co. were many leagues distant from being content.

From Buenos Aires orders for immediate mobilization arrived; the camp manager asked for mules and timber carriages; they replied that with the money from the first raft to be received they would remit the mules, and the manager answered that with those advanced mules, they would send him the first raft.

There was no way to understand one another. Castelhum went up to the camp and saw the stock of timber in the encampment, upon the bluff of the Ñacanguazú to the north.

“How much?” Castelhum asked his manager.

“Thirty-five thousand pesos,” replied the latter.

It was what was necessary to transport the logs to the Paraná. And not counting the unseasonable time.

Under the rain that united in a single thread of water his rubber cape and his horse, Castelhum considered the swirling stream for a long time. Then pointing to the torrent with a movement of his hood:

“Will the waters manage to cover the waterfall?” he asked his companion.

“If it rains a lot, yes.”

“Do you have all the men at the camp?”

“Up to this moment; I was awaiting your orders.”

“Good,” said Castelhum. “I think we are going to get out of this well. Mister Fernández: This very afternoon reinforce the hawser at the bar, and begin to haul all the logs here to the bluff. The stream is clear, as you told me. Tomorrow morning I go down to Posadas, and from then on, with the first storm that comes, throw the logs into the stream. Understand? A good rain.”

The manager looked at him opening his eyes as wide as he could.

“The hawser is going to yield before a hundred logs arrive.”

“I know, it doesn’t matter. And it will cost us many thousands. Let’s go back and we will talk longer.”

Fernández shrugged his shoulders and whistled to the foremen.

During the rest of the day, without rain but drenched in a calm of water, the peons stretched from one bank to the other at the bar of the stream, the chain of logs, and the felling of timber began in the encampment. Castelhum went down to Posadas on floodwaters that were running nine miles, and which upon leaving the Guayra had risen seven meters the following night.

After a great drought, great rains. At midday the deluge began, and for fifty-two consecutive hours the mountain thundered with water. The stream, turned into a torrent, became a roaring avalanche of brick-colored water. The laborers, soaked to the bone, their thinness brought into relief by their clothing clinging to their bodies, hurled the beams down the ravine. Every effort wrung out a unison shout of encouragement, and when the monstrous beam rolled clumsily and plunged with a cannon shot into the water, all the laborers let out their triumphant “yee-haw!” And then, the efforts wasted in the liquid mud, the slipping of the levers, the heavy tumbles in the torrential rain. And the fever.

Abruptly, at last, the downpour ceased. In the sudden surrounding silence, the thundering of the rain was still heard over the immediate forest. Duller and deeper, the rumble of the Ñacanguazú. A few drops, spaced and light, were still falling from the exhausted sky. But the weather continued heavy, without the slightest breath. Water was breathed, and scarcely had the peons rested a couple of hours when the rain began anew—the plumb, massive, and white rain of the floods. The work was urgent—wages had valiantly risen—and while the storm lasted, the peons continued shouting, falling, and felling beneath the cold water.

At the bar of the Ñacanguazú, the floating barrier held back the first logs that arrived, and resisted, arched and groaning, many more; until at the irresistible push of the logs arriving like catapultas against the hawser, the cable yielded.

Candiyú observed the river through his spyglass, considering that the current rise, which there in San Ignacio had gone up two meters more the day before—taking away his flat-bottomed boat into the bargain—would be, beyond Posadas, a formidable flood. Timbers had begun to drift down, but all of them, judging by their high flotation, were cedar or little less, and the fisherman prudently reserved his strength.

That night the water rose another meter still, and by the following afternoon Candiyú had the surprise of seeing through the end of his spyglass a raft, a veritable raft of loose beams rounding the point of Itacurubí. Wood of whitish backs, and perfectly dry.

There was his prize. He jumped into his guabiroba, and paddled out to meet the catch.

Now then, in a flood of the Alto Paraná many things are encountered before reaching the chosen beam. Entire trees, of course, torn up by the roots with their black roots in the air, like octopuses. Dead cows and mules, in the company of a good batch of drowned wild animals, shot or with an arrow still planted in their bellies. Tall cones of ants heaped upon a stump. Some tiger, perhaps; water hyacinths and foam at discretion,—not counting, of course, the vipers.

Candiyú dodged, drifted, stumbled, and capsized many more times than necessary to reach the prey. At last he had it; a slash of the machete exposed the bloody grain of the rosewood, and leaning against the beam he was able to drift with it obliquely for some stretch. But branches, trees, passed incessantly, dragging him along. He changed tactics; he lassoed his prey, and then the mute and relentless struggle began, silently pouring his soul into every stroke of the paddle.

A beam, drifting with a great flood, carries a momentum large enough for three men to hesitate before tackling it. But Candiyú combined with his great breath, thirty years of piracy on high or low river, desiring—furthermore—to be the owner of a gramophone.

The night, black, provided him with incidents to his complete satisfaction. The river, almost level with the eye, ran swiftly with the unctuosity of oil. On both sides dense shadows passed and passed without stopping. A drowned man bumped against the guabiroba; Candiyú leaned over and saw that his throat was slit. Then uncomfortable visitors, attacking vipers, the very ones that in floods climb up the paddle-wheels of steamers into the staterooms.

The herculean labor continued, the paddle trembled beneath the water, but he was dragged along in spite of everything. At last he yielded; he closed the angle of approach, and mustered his last strength to reach the edge of the channel, which brushed the rocks of Teyucuaré. For ten minutes the beam fisherman, the tendons of his neck rigid and his pectorals like stone, did what no one will ever do again to get out of the channel in a flood, with a beam in tow. The guabiroba finally smashed against the stones, capsized, precisely when Candiyú had just enough strength left—and nothing more,—to secure the rope and collapse face down.

Only a month later did Mr. Hall have his three dozen planks, and twenty seconds later,—neither more nor less—he handed Candiyú the gramophone, including twenty records.

The firm of Castelhum & Co., notwithstanding the fleet of steam launches it sent out against the beams—and this for considerably more than thirty days—lost many. And if Castelhum ever comes to San Ignacio and visits Mr. Hall, he will sincerely admire the aforesaid accountant’s furniture, made of rosewood.