8

For a few moments Fermín remained stuck like a limpet to the ship’s hull as he recovered his breath. A marker buoy floated about twenty meters away. It resembled a small lighthouse: a cylinder crowned by a lantern, set on a circular base with a cabin. It was painted white with red stripes and swayed gently, like a metal island running adrift. If he managed to reach it, Fermín worked out, he could hide inside the buoy’s cabin and wait for the right moment to risk gaining dry land unseen. Nobody seemed to have noticed him, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He inhaled as much air as his battered lungs could take and dived underwater again, making his way toward the buoy with uneven strokes. As he did so he avoided looking down, preferring to think he’d suffered a hallucination and the ghoulish garden of corpses swaying in the current below him was nothing more than a pile of fishing nets trapped in rubble. He emerged a few meters from the buoy and swam hurriedly around it to hide. After checking the deck of the ship, he assured himself that for the moment he was safe and that everyone on board, including Fumero, presumed him dead. But as he scrambled onto the platform, he noticed a motionless figure observing him from the bridge. For a moment Fermín held his gaze. He couldn’t identify the man, but judging from his clothes, he assumed it was the ship’s captain. He rushed into the tiny cabin and collapsed in a heap, shivering with cold and imagining that in a few seconds he would hear them coming to get him. It would have been preferable to drown inside that box. Now Fumero would lock him in one of his cells and take his sweet time with him.

He’d been waiting for what seemed like an infinity, resigned to the fact that his adventure had finally come to an end, when he heard the ship’s engines start up, and the blare of the foghorn. Peeping fearfully through the cabin window, he saw the ship move away toward the docks. He lay down, exhausted, in the lukewarm embrace of the sun that seeped through the window. Perhaps, after all, Our Lady of the Unbelievers had taken pity on him.

9

Fermín remained on his tiny island until evening tinted the sky and the streetlamps in the harbor cast a sparkling net over the water. After scanning the docks, he decided that his best bet was to swim up to the swarm of boats clustered in front of the fish market and use a mooring rope or a trawling pulley attached to the prow of one of the anchored vessels to climb up to dry land.

Just then he noticed a shape outlined in the mist that swept across the inner harbor. A rowboat was approaching, with two men on board. One of them rowed, and the other sat in the stern, scouring the shadows with a lantern that tinged the fog with an amber light. Fermín swallowed hard. He could have jumped into the water and prayed that the mantle of twilight would conceal him so he could escape yet again, but he’d reached the end of his prayers and didn’t have a breath of resistance left in his body. He came out of his hiding spot with his hands up and faced the advancing boat.