Pescador's Wake Read Online Free PDF

a kitchen drawer and wipes tears from her face. She hopes this trip is worth it. She stirs the stew for another few minutes before testing that the carrot is cooked through, and then spoons out two modest helpings. With Uruguay’s skyrocketing inflation, grocery bills are getting harder to meet. If Carlos does well this time, it will make all the difference.
    â€˜Dinner’s ready,’ she calls out. ‘If you come right away, there should be time for a walk down to the harbour afterwards.’
    María is smiling when she reappears, seemingly having already forgotten about their altercation, and eats hungrily. Julia wishes she had the same appetite. After the call to Migiliaro, she feels sick to her stomach.
    It’s a five-minute walk to the Puerto de Montevideo, which is stacked high with large, foreign-owned factory ships that form a floating extension to the city. The piers are awash with poorly dressed, desperate-looking crews from China and Russia. All the local fishermen, and there aren’t many left, have been pushed up-river. They nestle together alongside refugees who have fled rural poverty only to co-habit in conventillos, the crumbling houses of the old city. Julia watches as another factory ship heavy with its cargo of stolen fish steams along the Río de la Plata. Beyond it, on the opposite shores of the harbour, is Argentina.
    Julia recognises a former neighbour, a fisherman from the days when locals caught Brótola and Pescadilla inshore off Montevideo in boats they owned themselves. He was a friend of Carlos’s father, and one of generations of coastal families who earned their living this way until the factory boats flooded the market with their mega catches and forced them out of the industry.
    María races ahead to the old man and he greets her warmly. ‘Look at the size of you, mi chica ! You’re a little Sánchez, there’s no doubt about it.’
    â€˜ Hola, Rubén,’ Julia says as she takes his proffered hand and joins him on the bench. The old man frowns at the big ships with a mixture of fascination and distaste. María takes a piece of bread from a plastic bag that he has been dipping into, and skips off to feed some gulls clustered around a stinking slurry of discarded bait.
    â€˜How is young Carlos?’ he asks. ‘Master of one of these monsters now, I hear.’
    â€˜I’m afraid so. A Spanish-owned boat: the Pescador .’
    Rubén raises an eyebrow.
    â€˜I haven’t heard from him for a few days, but I’m sure everything is fine. They’re a long way south.’ Julia looks closely for his reaction, hoping for reassurance.
    â€˜ Si. It’s not easy these days, either.’ The old man gazes out towards the mouth of the harbour where the Río de la Plata yawns brown water, heavy with fields washed away by the ploughing of soil and felling of forests, into the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I couldn’t tell you the number of times I passed through that river mouth. But then, we would set off in the morning and be home in time for dinner.’ He takes a pipe from his coat and lights it. ‘Your Carlos is away for much longer.’
    Julia agrees with a resigned dip of her head, and Rubén blows a thin stream of smoke into the coming night beforespeaking again. ‘He was always determined to make a success of himself. I warned him to take another trade, but fishing was in his blood. You can’t help that. He teamed up with another young fellow, didn’t he?’
    â€˜ Si. Eduardo Rodríguez.’
    â€˜Rodriguez. Of course. His father is still fishing at La Paloma
    Julia nods again. ‘Si.’ She thinks of the beach town, just a couple of hours’ drive north of Montevideo, where she first met Eduardo and Carlos, and laments to herself its countless changes. With the exception of Eduardo’s father’s boatshed, which is still cradled steadfastly in the lap of the dunes,