Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez Page A

scent of blood can bite through a sheet of steel. Since its jaws are on the underside of its body, it has to turn over to eat. But because it’s myopic and greedy, when it turns belly up it drags along everything in its path. I think one of the sharks tried to attack the raft. Terrified, I threw the sea gull’s head at it and watched, only centimeters from the raft, the great struggle of those huge beasts over that morsel which was even smaller than an egg.
    The bird was extremely light and the bones were so fragile you could crush them with your fingers. I tried topull the feathers off, but they adhered to the delicate white skin and the flesh came away with the bloody feathers. The viscous black liquid on my fingers disgusted me.
    It’s easy to say that after five days of hunger you can eat anything. But though you may be starving, you still feel nauseated by a mess of warm, bloody feathers with a strong odor of raw fish and of mange.
    At first I tried to pluck the feathers carefully, methodically. But I hadn’t counted on the fragility of the skin. As the feathers came out it began to disintegrate in my hands. I washed the bird in the middle of the raft. I pulled it apart with a single jerk, and the sight of the pink intestines and blue veins turned my stomach. I put a sliver of the thigh in my mouth but I couldn’t swallow it. This was absurd. It was like chewing on a frog. Unable to get over my repugnance, I spit out the piece of flesh and kept still for a long time, with the revolting hash of bloody feathers and bones in my hand.
    The first thing that occurred to me was that whatever I couldn’t eat might serve as bait. But I didn’t have a single implement for fishing. I should have had at least a pin or a bit of wire. But I had nothing, apart from keys, watch, ring, and the three business cards from the shop in Mobile.
    I considered my belt. Perhaps I might be able to fashion a fishhook from the buckle. But my efforts were useless. It was growing dark and the fish were leaping all around the raft, crazed at the scent of blood. When it was completely dark I flung the remains of the sea gull overboard and lay down to sleep. As I arranged the oar, I imagined the silent battle of fish fighting over the bones I couldn’t bring myself to eat.
    I think I could have died of exhaustion and hopelessnessthat night. A harsh wind came up during the early hours. The raft pitched and rolled while—not even remembering now to take the precaution of lashing myself to the mesh flooring—I lay exhausted in the bottom of the raft, with my head and feet barely above water.
    But after midnight there was a change: the moon appeared, for the first time since the accident. Beneath the clear blue night, the surface of the sea once again took on a spectral look. That night Jaime Manjarrés didn’t appear. I was alone, without hope, and resigned to my fate.
    Nevertheless, each time my spirits sank, something would happen to renew my hopes. That night it was the reflection of the moon on the waves. The sea was choppy and in each wave I thought I saw the lights of a ship. Two nights before, I had lost hope that a ship would rescue me. But all through that night illumined by the moon—my sixth night at sea—I searched the horizon desperately, almost as intently and hopefully as I had on the first night. If I found myself in the same predicament today, I would die of hopelessness: I now know that no ship travels the course on which my raft was bound.
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 myfamily had been