The Last Watch on the Pilar

Gregorio Fuentes was one of those old sea wolves the tropics bake into leather and salt, a man who came out of the Canaries and let Cuba finish the job. He didn’t talk much because the sea had already said everything worth saying, in its hoarse whisper at dawn and its iron laughter when a squall walked in on stilts.

Fuentes was no torcedor. He was a man of salt and blood, a captain who read the sea as easily as another man might read a newspaper. His fingers carried the memory of nets heavy with fish, of ropes stiff with brine, and of a cigar packed perfectly…never hurried, and never slighted. He wasn’t bent over benches in factories; he didn’t wear gloves. He rolled cigars for Hemingway the way men once poured whiskey for each other…without commerce or ceremony. Only for the bond, the weathered friendship…to make the ordinary into ritual. holy.

And he knew boats the way some men know their own failings, by touch and by the small sounds that happen before catastrophe. On the Pilar, he stood easy as a heron on a piling, mind married to wind and current, the lines singing their thin songs. There was rum and there were fish the size of arguments, and sometimes there were Nazis somewhere beyond the blue curve of the world, but mostly there was the long plain of water where a man could remember who he was when he was young enough to be hungry for everything.

People said he was the old man from the book, and perhaps he was, though books are made from more than one body and a few stubborn ghosts. What matters is that he endured. He outlasted the writer and the wars and the loud talkers at the Havana bars, sitting later in Cojímar with the gulls strafing the light and the smell of nets the way bread smells when you’re poor and it’s hot out. He lived past a hundred, which is its own literature, and kept that private republic men build from work, loyalty, and the occasional miracle of a hooked fish tearing a blue wound through the sea. If he had a religion, it was tide and charts and the clean authority of a well-tied knot. When he finally went under, the water closed over him as neatly as a page being turned.