Free Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez Page B

great distances—they can be found many miles into the interior. But an old sea gull, big and heavy like the one I had just seen, couldn’t fly a hundred miles from shore.I felt renewed strength. As I had done on the first days, I began to search the horizon again. Vast numbers of sea gulls came from every direction.
    I had company and I was happy. I wasn’t hungry. More and more frequently I took drinks of sea water. I wasn’t lonely in the midst of the immense number of sea gulls circling over my head. I remembered Mary Address. What had become of her? I wondered, remembering her voice when she translated the dialogue for me at the movies. In fact, on that day—the only one on which I had thought of Mary Address for no reason at all, and surely not because the sky was full of sea gulls—Mary was at a Catholic church in Mobile hearing a mass for the eternal rest of my soul. That mass, as Mary later wrote to me in Cartagena, was celebrated on the eighth day of my disappearance. It was for the repose of my soul, but I now think it was also for the repose of my body, for that morning, while I thought about Mary Address and she attended mass in Mobile, I was happy at sea, watching the sea gulls that proved land was near.
    I spent almost all day sitting on the side of the raft, searching the horizon. The day was startlingly clear, and I was certain I saw land once from a distance of fifty miles. The raft had assumed a speed that two men with oars couldn’t have equaled. It moved in a straight line, as if propelled by a motor along the calm, blue surface.
    After spending seven days on a raft one can detect the slightest change in the color of the water. On March 7, at three-thirty in the afternoon, I noticed that the raft had reached an area where the water wasn’t blue, but dark green. There was a definite demarcation: on one side was the blue water I had been seeing for seven days; on the other, green water that looked denser. The sky was full ofsea gulls flying very low. I could hear them flapping over my head. The signs were unmistakable: the change in the color of the water and the abundance of sea gulls told me I should keep a vigil that night, alert for the first lights of shore.

10

H
ope
A
bandoned
 … U
ntil
D
eath
    I didn’t have to force myself to go to sleep on my eighth night at sea. At nine o’clock the old sea gull perched on the side of the raft and stayed there all night long. I lay down against the only remaining oar. The night was calm and the raft moved forward in a straight line toward a definite point. Where am I going? I asked myself, convinced by all the signs—the color of the ocean, the old sea gull—that I would be ashore the next day. I hadn’t the slightest idea where the raft was headed, driven by the wind.
    I wasn’t sure whether the raft had stayed on its original course. If it had followed the route the planes flew, it was likely to end up in Colombia. But without a compass it was impossible to know. If it had traveled south in a straight line, it would undoubtedly land on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. But it was also possible that it had travelednorthward. If that was the case, I had no idea of my position at all.
    Before midnight, as I was beginning to fall asleep, the old sea gull came over and pecked me on the head. It didn’t hurt. The bird pecked me gently, without injuring my scalp. It seemed as if it were caressing me. I remembered the gunnery officer on the destroyer who had told me it was undignified for a sailor to kill a sea gull, and I felt remorseful about the little one that I had killed for no good reason.
    I searched the horizon until dawn. It wasn’t cold that night. But I saw no lights. There was no sign of the coastline. The raft slipped along on a clear, calm sea, but all around me there were no lights other than the stars. When I remained completely still, the sea gull seemed to be asleep. It lowered its head as it perched on the side and kept perfectly