The Vigil of La Boquilla

At daybreak on Friday, the beach at La Boquilla presented the grim aspect of a collective wreck.

Fifty dugout canoes of wild cedar lay stranded high upon the gray sand, gill-nets piled in wet tangles along the high-water mark. No crews put out to sea. The young fishermen crouched beneath palm-thatch ramadas with empty palms between their knees, while the village elders stood beside mangrove driftwood fires, staring out into the sea fog that refused to burn away beneath the Caribbean heat.

Soledad and Leovigildo pulled up in the university's battered jeep.

At the entrance to the lane, a heavy, cloying stench hung upon the salt air: not the honest reek of salted fish drying on drying racks, but that same metallic, sulfurous vapor Soledad had drawn into her lungs in the underwater trench.

An aged fisherman with skin cured like caiman hide, Leovigildo's elder cousin, awaited them beside a wooden packing crate draped in wet burlap.

—Look upon this, Polo —the old man said, flipping the cloth back with the tip of a broken oar.

Inside the crate lay no sea-bass, nor red snapper, nor spiny lobster. There lay an amorphous cluster of black coral polyps coated in a gelatinous, frigid slime that throbbed with a faint, imperceptible tremor. Tangled among the branches rested three colonial bronze hooks and a tarnished silver devotional medal bearing the likeness of Our Lady of Mercy, dated 1698.

—Our drift nets sank no deeper than four fathoms upon the shoals —the old man explained—. And when we hauled the windlass, not a single scale came up. Only this reeking rot that scalded the flesh off our palms.

Soledad knelt, drawing a glass pipette from her field kit. The gelatinous substance dissolved clear water on contact, fizzing into a microscopic froth that smelled of acid lime.

—How long has this occurred in the lagoon, sir? —she inquired.

The old man turned his gaze southward, where the high-rise needles of Bocagrande pierced the haze like brittle glass shards.

—My grandfather recounted that in the year of the great tremor of 1834 the sea behaved in this exact fashion —the fisherman murmured in a hollow cadence—. The fish hurled themselves onto the sand fleeing the deep, the well water turned to brine, and upon dead-moon nights a hollow wailing rose through the gutters of the walled city. The old folk said it was the Master of the Sunken Breakwater, turning in his bed of stone because men were driving pilings into his crown.

—Ceballos's dredge begins excavating tomorrow morning at Bocachica —Soledad warned.

The elder spat into the sand and folded his knotted arms over his breast.

—Tell your gentleman in the necktie that if he drops the bucket into the eighteenth step, he will bring up no sand for his wharves. He will bring up the salt that swallows cities whole.