Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Read Online Free PDF Page B

watch every minute. It was torture. In desperation, I swore I would stop doing it and I’d stow the watch in my pocket, so as not to be so dependent on the time. I was able to resist until twenty to nine. I still wasn’t hungry or thirsty, and I was sure I could hold out until the following day, when the planes would arrive. But I thought the watch would drive me crazy. A prisoner of anxiety, I took it off my wrist to stuff it in my pocket, but as I held it in my hand it occurred to me that it would be better to fling it into the sea. I hesitated a moment. Then I was terrified: I thought I would feel even more alone without the watch. I put it back on my wrist and began to look at it again, minute by minute, as I had in the afternoon when I searched the horizon for airplanes until my eyes began to hurt.
    After midnight I wanted to cry. I hadn’t slept for a moment, but I hadn’t even wanted to. With the same hope I had felt in the afternoon as I waited for airplanes, that night I looked for the lights of ships. For hours I scrutinized the sea, a tranquil sea, immense and silent, but I didn’t see a single light other than the stars.
    The cold was more intense in the early hours of morning, and it seemed as if my body were glowing, with all the sun of the afternoon embedded under my skin. With the cold, it burned more intensely. From midnight on, my right knee began to hurt and I felt as though the water had penetrated to my bones. But these feelings were remote: I thought about my body less than about the lights of the ships. It seemed to me, in the midst of that infinite solitude, in the midst of the sea’s dark murmur, that if I spotted the light of only a single ship, I would let out a yell that could be heard at any distance.
The light of each day
    Dawn did not break slowly, as it does on land. The sky turned pale, the first stars disappeared, and I went on looking, first at my watch and then at the horizon. The contours of the sea began to appear. Twelve hours had passed, but it didn’t seem possible. Night couldn’t be as long as day. You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day. But soon dawn begins to break, and then it’s wearying to know it’s another day.
    That occurred to me on my first night in the raft. When dawn came, nothing else mattered. I thought neither of water nor of food. I didn’t think of anything at all, until the wind turned warmer and the sea’s surface grew smooth and golden. I hadn’t slept a second all night, but at that moment it seemed as if I’d just awakened. When I stretched out in the raft my bones ached and my skin burned. But the day was brilliant and warm, and the murmur of the wind picking up gave me a new strength to continue waiting. And I felt profoundly composed in the life raft. For the first time in my twenty years of life, I was perfectly happy.
    The raft continued to drift forward—how far it had gone during the night I couldn’t calculate—but the horizon still looked exactly the same, as if I hadn’t moved a centimeter. At seven o’clock I thought of the destroyer. It was breakfast time. I imagined my shipmates seated around the table eating apples. Then we would have eggs. Then meat. Then bread and coffee. My mouth filled with saliva and I could feel a slight twisting in my stomach. To take mymind off the idea of food, I submerged myself up to my neck in the bottom of the raft. The cool water on my sun burned back was soothing and made me feel stronger. I stayed submerged like that for a long time, asking myself why I had gone with Ramón Herrera to the stern deck instead of returning to my bunk to lie down. I reconstructed the tragedy minute by minute and decided I had been stupid. There was really no reason I should have been one of the victims: I wasn’t on watch, I wasn’t required on deck. When I concluded that everything that had happened was due