The Black Pearl Read online

  These scenes were tattooed on his shoulders and arms and even on his legs, so that he looked very much like a picture gallery walking around.

  We had not sailed far that night before the Sevillano began to talk about himself. He sat with his back against the mast and told a long story of how he had once dived in the Gulf of Persia and there found a pearl bigger than a hen's egg.

  "What did you do with it?" my father asked.

  "I sold it to the Shah."

  "For much money?"

  "Much," said the Sevillano. "So much that I bought a pearling fleet of my own. It was larger than yours. Today I would be a rich man if it had not foundered in a bad storm."

  The Sevillano went on to tell about the storm, which must have been the greatest ever seen in the world, and how he saved his own life and the lives of his crew.

  Before I became a partner with my father, sometimes I used to see him on the beach when the boats went out or when they came in and sometimes in the plaza. He always had a group around him, listening to his tales, but somehow I felt that he was talking to me more than to the others. Once when I questioned him in fun about one of these tales that I knew to be a lie, he turned on me.

  "You do not believe that I tell the truth?" he said, clenching his teeth. Before I could answer,

  he said, "You are the son of a rich man and you live in a big house and you eat good food and all of your life you have done little. Nor will you ever do more."

  Too surprised to speak, I was silent. He watched me for a moment and then took a step toward me and lowered his voice. "Your father is a rich man. My father was a poor man whose name I do not know. From the time I could walk I have done something and in my life I have done many things and what I have done I talk about truthfully. So guard your tongue, mate."

  I mumbled an apology and walked away, but when he thought I was out of hearing I heard him say to his friends, "That one who just left us. Have you noticed the red hair that sticks up on his head like the comb of a rooster? Well, that comes from Africa. It is from the infidel blood of Moors and Berbers."

  I was about to turn around and confront him. He was older than I and stronger and he carried a knife at his belt, but it was not this that held me back. I knew that my father would think it an insult to the Salazar name for me to start a brawl in a public place, no matter what the cause. So I swallowed my pride and I walked on as if I had not heard.

  I said nothing to my father about this encounter, and afterward when I met the Sevillano I said nothing to him. I acted as if I did not remember what he had said to me or what I had overheard. And when I became a partner in the firm and he would come to the office to get his pay, I acted no differently. Yet I had not forgotten the encounter nor, I am sure, had he.

  On this night as we sailed out of the harbor and he sat and told the tall tale about the storm and his rescuing the whole crew of his pearling fleet, I felt that he was talking to me more than to the others. I felt that he was trying to goad me into saying something as I had before, so that he could make me uncomfortable in front of my father. I therefore listened and kept silent.

  We reached the pearling beds at dawn and anchored the five boats in a cluster over a reef where the shells grew.

  Everything was new to me. I had heard many stories of the pearling beds since the time I was old enough to listen, from my father and grandfather and from my friends who were the sons of pearlers. But to be really there on the sea with the sun coming up in a coppery haze and watch the men slip out of the boats into water clear as air, was to me a part of a long dream come true.

  My father showed me how to pull up the basket when it was full and how to stack the shells in the boat. Then he took the sink stone in one hand, carefully coiled the rope that was attached to it and tied to the boat, picked up the basket and its rope, and went over the side. Down he went with the heavy stone until he reached the bottom.

  Through the clear water I watched him drop the stone, take the big knife from his belt, and start to pry the oyster shells from the rocks. When the basket was full he gave a tug at the rope and I pulled it up. A moment later he rose, trailing a stream of bubbles from his mouth, and I stacked the shells as I had been told and drew up the sink stone for the next dive.

  The Sevillano had gone down before my father and was still down as he dived again. When the Sevillano came to the surface he held onto the side of the boat and glanced up at me.

  "How does the work go?" he said.

  "I learn."

  "There is not much to learn, mate. You pull the shells up and then the sink stone and you stack the shells and then you wait a while and do it all over again. It is work for children."

  He spoke softly and smiled, but I knew what he meant. "It would be fun to dive," I answered him.

  "More fun, mate, but more danger too."

  He pointed to the arm he was resting on the gunwale. From his elbow to wrist ran a long, jagged scar, as if the arm had been pulled through the jaws of a steel trap.

  "This one," he said, "I got from a burro clam. I put my hand down deep into a crevice and snap, it was not a crevice but the mouth of a burro, the father of all burros. Señor Clam had me tight, but I did not leave my arm with him, as you can see. That was in the Gulf, yet there are many burros here in the Vermilion." He looked up at me again and smiled. "It is better, mate, that you stay in the boat."

  The Indian who was working with the Sevillano handed him the sink stone and the Sevillano went down, saying nothing more to me. Nor did he speak to me again that morning. At midday the Santa Teresa was loaded with shells and low

  in the water, because the Sevillano did the work of three divers, so my father sent him out to help in the other boats.

  From time to time during the afternoon, when he came up for air, he would call over to me, "Be careful, mate, and do not get your foot caught in the rope," or "There are sharks around, Señor Salazar, mind that you do not fall in the water."

  Such things as that I heard during the whole of the afternoon. My father also heard them, though the Sevillano usually spoke to me when he thought my father was not listening.

  "He is a troublemaker," my father said, "but let him talk. What do you care what he says? Remember that he is the best gatherer of pearls we have. And it is for pearls that we are here on the sea, not for other reasons."

  By dark the boats were piled high with cargo and we set sail for La Paz. The moon came up and a brisk wind that filled the sails. The Sevillano was in good spirits, as if he had not made dozens of deep dives that day. He perched himself on the mound of shells and once more told how he had found the great pearl in the Gulf of Persia, the same tale he had told before but longer. Again I had the feeling that his story was meant for me more than the others.

  And as I listened to him a dream began to take shape in my mind. It was a fanciful dream that made me forget the insults that I had suffered silently. I saw myself in a boat anchored in a secret lagoon somewhere on the Vermilion Sea. I put a knife in my belt and grasped the basket and the heavy sink stone and plunged to the bottom. There were sharks swimming around me in slow circles, but I gave no heed to them. I pried clump after clump of shells from the rocks, filling my basket. After I had been down for three or four minutes, I floated to the surface through the circling sharks, and climbed into the boat and pulled up the basket. Then I pried open the shells, one after the other. Nothing. At last there was only one shell left. Discouraged, I opened it and was about to toss it away when I saw before me a pearl larger than my fist that shone as if a fire burned inside...

  Right at that moment, just as I was about to clutch the pearl in my hand, the Sevillano stopped talking. Suddenly he stood up on the mound and pointed astern, along the path the moon was making on the sea.

  "Manta," he shouted, "Manta Diablo."

  I jumped to my feet. I could see nothing at first. Then the boat rose on a wave and I made out a silvery shape swimming half out of the water not more than a furlong away.

&nb
sp; Truthfully, I must say that for all its beauty the manta is a fearsome sight to those who sail our Vermilion Sea. There are small mantas, no larger when they are full grown than ten feet from one wing tip to the other. But there are some that measure twice that length and weigh most of three tons.

  Both kinds are shaped very much like a giant bat and they swim through the water with a regular upward and downward beat of their flippers. And both have a mouth so enormous that a man may easily put his head into it and on either side of this maw are large lobes like arms, which the manta pushes out and then draws in to capture its prey.

  Their prey surprisingly is not the shoals of fish that abound in our sea, but shrimp and crabs and such small things. Most of the mantas have a pilot fish that swims along beneath them. These fish swim in and out of their mouths, it is said, to clean up the pieces of food that catch in their plate-like teeth.

  And yet for all of his friendly ways, the manta is a fearsome beast. When aroused by some careless insult, it can break a man's neck with a flick of its long tail or lift one flipper and wreck the strongest boat.

  "Manta," the Sevillano shouted again. "El Manta Diablo!" His Indian helper quickly scrambled away and crouched down in the bow of the boat and began to mutter to himself.

  "No," said my father, "It is not the Diablo. Him I have seen and he is bigger by twice than this one."

  "Come where you can see better," said the Sevillano. "It is the Manta Diablo. I know him well."

  I was certain that he was trying to scare the Indian and my father was certain of it, too, for he lashed the tiller and climbed to where the Sevillano stood. He glanced astern for a moment and then went back to the tiller.

  "No," he said, loud enough for the Indian to hear, "It is not even the small sister of the Diablo."

  The Indian fell silent, but he was still frightened. And as I watched the manta swimming along behind us, its outstretched fins like vast silvery wings, I remembered that once I had also been frightened at the very sound of the name.

  At last the manta disappeared and near dawn we rounded El Magote, the lizard tongue of land that guards the harbor, and anchored our boats. As my father and I walked home in the moonlight, he said,

  "About the Sevillano, let me repeat to you. Treat him with courtesy. Listen to his boasts as if you believed them. For he is a very dangerous young man. Only last week I learned from a friend who lives over in Culiacán that the Sevillano was born there. And that he has never been in Seville nor any part of Spain nor in the Gulf of Persia nor anywhere except here on the Vermilion. Also, that he has had many fights in Culiacán, one of them fatal."

  I promised my father that I would obey him, but as we walked toward home I again thought of my dream and the big pearl I had found and how surprised the Sevillano would be when he saw it.

  4

  FOUR DAYS PASSED and I was standing at the desk, with a pen over my ear and the leather-bound ledger open in front of me. I was watching a canoe that moved around the tip of the lizard tongue. It was a red canoe and came swiftly, so I knew it belonged to the Indian Soto Luzon.

  I was glad to see old Luzon. He had sold pearls to my father for many years. He came about every three months and never brought more than one, but it always was a pearl of good quality. Soon after I began to work with my father he had brought in a beautiful pearl of more than two carats.

  As I watched Luzon beach the canoe and come up the path, I hoped he was bringing another like it, for the yield from our last trip had been poor. Five boatloads of shells had yielded no round or pear-shaped pearls and only a handful of buttons and baroques, all of them dull.

  I opened the door at his timid knock and invited him to come in and sit down.

  "I have traveled all night," Luzon said. "If it pleases you, I would like to stand."

  Luzon never sat. He had an Indian's thin legs but a powerful chest and thick arms that could wield a paddle for hours and not grow tired.

  "I passed your boats this morning," he said. "They were near Maldonado."

  "They are going to Isla Cerralvo."

  The old man gave me a shrewd look. "The fishing is not good around here?"

  "Good," I said. It was not wise to say that it was poor, when he had come to sell a pearl. "Very good."

  "Then why, señor, do the boats go to Cerralvo?"

  "Because my father wants to search there for the black ones."

  The old man fumbled in his shirt and pulled out a knotted rag and untied it. "Here is a black one," he said.

  I could see at a glance that it was round and of a good quality, like the pearl I had bought from him three months before. I placed it on the scales and balanced it against the small copper weights.

  "Two and a half carats," I said.

  My father never haggled with Luzon and always gave him a fair price and had told me to do the same. For that reason old Luzon always brought his pearls to Salazar and Son, although there were four other dealers in our town.

  "Two hundred pesos," I said.

  This sum was about fifty pesos more than my father would have offered, but a plan was taking shape in my mind and I needed the old man's help. I counted out the money and he put it in his shirt, probably thinking to himself that I was not so smart as my father.

  "You always bring in good pearls. Black ones," I said. "There must be many in your lagoon. If you permit me I will come and dive there. All the pearls I find I will pay you for."

  The old man looked puzzled. "But you are not a diver," he said.

  "You can teach me, senor."

  "I have heard your father say many times, since

  the time you were a child, that he did not raise you to drown in the sea or to give an arm or a leg to a burro shell."

  "My father," I said, "has gone to Cerralvo and he will not return for a week or more."

  "And your mother and your sister, what will they say?"

  "They will say nothing because today they go to Loreto." I paused. "You will teach me to dive and I will look for the big one and when I find it I will pay you what it is worth."

  "The big one I have searched for many years," Luzon said. "How is it found in a week?"

  "You can find the big one in a single dive."

  The old man pulled at his stubbly chin. He was thinking, I knew, about his wife and his two unmarried daughters and his three young sons, and all these mouths he had to feed every day.

  "When do you wish to go?" he said.

  "I wish to go now."

  Luzon hitched up his frayed trousers. "After I buy a sack of frijoles and a sack of flour, then we go."

  The old man left and I put the pearls away and locked the safe. I took the bundle from under the desk, my pants, a shirt, and the knife. I closed the door and locked it. As I walked down to the beach, I thought about the great pearl I had dreamed of while the Sevillano was bragging. I thought of how surprised he would be when he came back from Cerralvo and found the whole town of La Paz talking about the monster pearl Ramón Salazar had found.

  It was a dream so wild that only a very young man and a stupid one could dream it. And yet, as happens sometimes, the dream came true.

  5

  THE LAGOON where the old man lived was about seven leagues from La Paz and we should have reached it by midnight. But the currents and the wind were against us, so it was near dawn before we sighted the two headlands that marked the lagoon's hidden entrance.

  You could pass this entrance many times and think that it was only an opening in the rocks that led nowhere. As soon as you passed the rocks, however, you came to a narrow channel that wound like a snake between the two headlands for a half mile or farther.

  The sun was just rising when the channel opened out and suddenly we were in a quiet oval-shaped lagoon. On both sides of the lagoon steep hills came down to the water and at the far end lay a shallow beach of black sand. Beyond were two scraggly trees and beneath them a cluster of huts where breakfast fires were burning.

  It was a peaceful sce
ne that lay before me, much like many other lagoons that dot our coast. But there was something about the place that made me feel uneasy. At first I thought it must be the barren hills that closed in upon the lagoon and the coppery haze that lay over it, and the beach of black sand and the quiet. I was soon to hear that it was something else, something far different from what I thought.

  The old man paddled slowly across the lagoon, carefully raising and lowering the paddle, as if he did not want to disturb the water. And though he had talked most of the time before we reached the lagoon he now fell silent. A gray shark circled the canoe and disappeared. He pointed to it, but said nothing.

  Nor did he speak again until we beached the canoe and were walking up the path to the huts. Then he said, "It is well to hold the tongue and not to talk needlessly when you are on the lagoon. Remember this when we go out to dive, for there is one who listens and is quickly angered."

  Indians are superstitious about the moon and the sun and some animals and birds, especially the coyote and the owl. For this reason I was not surprised that he wished to warn me.

  "Who is it that listens and grows angry?" I asked him.

  Twice he glanced over his shoulder before he answered. "The Manta Diablo," he said.

  "El Diablo?" I asked, holding back a smile. "He lives here in your lagoon?"

  "In a cave," he answered, "a big one which you can see just as you leave the channel."

  "The channel is very narrow," I said, "barely wide enough for a canoe. How does a giant like El Diablo swim through it? But perhaps he does not need to. Perhaps he stays here in your lagoon."

  "No," the old man said. "He travels widely and is gone for many weeks at a time."

  "Then he must swim through the channel somehow."

  "Oh, no, that would be impossible, even for him. There is another opening, a secret one, near the place where you enter the channel. When he swims out to sea, it is this one he uses."