[Trigger Warning: Childhood sexual abuse]
I woke up earlier than usual. Little sunbeams filtered through tiny cracks in the blinds, announcing a beautiful summer day. I slid down from my top bunk and, not wanting to wake up my brothers, dressed up quietly. Just my swimsuit, a T-shirt and beach slippers.
I was thirteen.
The sun was still low over the pine trees. The bay was calm, an incipient breeze changing its color from silver to deep blue. It was going to be a hot day. Nobody was up yet, so I decided to go for a stroll.
I wandered through fields of cabbage and corn till I came to the rocks on the shore. Not far on the water, in his wooden boat brightly painted white, brown and blue, was the octopus fisherman.
Octopus is a delicacy in Galicia, sort of a national dish. It is served boiled on thick wooden plates, seasoned with olive oil, coarse salt and spicy paprika. I loved to eat it but was also fascinated by the animal itself. I had learned to catch it. With my mask, snorkel and fins, I would swim over the sandy bottom looking for odd objects: an old rubber boot, a pot, a tire. Then I would dive down and check inside for octopus. More often than not I would find one, which then I would wrestle to the shore, kill and proudly present it to my mother to cook for lunch.
The old fisherman used completely different methods to catch octopus. He would never get in the water; like most Galician fishermen, he probably didn’t even know how to swim. He carried long poles with a hook at the end. When he spotted an octopus in the bottom he would quickly get one on his poles, hook the octopus and haul it into his boat. Sometimes the octopus would get into a crack in the rocks and stubbornly held to it with all the considerable strength of its tentacles and suction cups. Then a fight would ensue, the fisherman pulling with his pole this way and that and the octopus holding on for dear life.
* * *
One day I witnessed one of these struggles while lying lazily on a towel on the beach. The fisherman fought for over half an hour and still couldn’t get the octopus. I grabbed my mask, snorkel and fin and got in the water, wanting to take a closer look at the struggle. There was a large rock on the bottom and the hook of the fisherman’s pole keep going under it. There must be an octopus under there. I asked him if he needed help, but he just muttered something incomprehensible in Galician. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I took a deep breath and dove toward the rock. Bracing with my knees on the bottom it was a simple matter for me to turn over the rock. The octopus came out and took off swimming at full speed, opening and closing its tentacles, looking like a little ghost. I went back to the surface for air. “Now I’ve done it!” I thought, “I have lost this poor fisherman his catch.” Desperately, I swam on the surface following the octopus, which was heading for deep water. I dove again. If the octopus were as smart as some people think it is, it would have just keep on swimming and I would have not been able to catch it. Instead, it opened its tentacles on the bottom and waited for me. I grabbed it and head back to the surface. It was a big one. It wrapped its tentacles around my arm all the way to my neck, pulling hard to slide between my fingers. I knew it just wanted to get away, but I started to get scared. Then I looked up and saw the fisherman in his boat. He grabbed the octopus and peeled it off me.
“I’m glad I could get that octopus for you,” I told him after I climbed into his boat.
“That’s your octopus, not mine,” he said. “Take it home and ask your mom to cook it.”
* * *
I used to ride with the octopus fisherman in his boat, watching him peer into the water to see an octopus where I could see just rocks. Another way he had to catch his prey was to drag a line to which he had attached a small rock with a crab and hooks tied on top. The octopus would try to get the crab and get hooked. He taught me the names of all the beaches in the bay and a lot of things about the sea. At the end of the morning, he would pull his boat to the beach and the beachgoers would gather around and bid for his catch.
So when that morning he called me and rowed his boat backward to the rocks to let me in, I didn’t think twice. I went and sat of the prow as he rowed back out on the bay.
I was starting to ask something about octopus when something really weird happened. The fisherman pulled the oars in and came to where I was. Then he started touching me over my skimpy swimsuit. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Whoa, you have a big one!” he said.
That was completely ridiculous. I haven’t reached puberty yet, I had the penis of a child. It didn’t even care if it was big or small.
“Do you want to touch mine?”
I couldn’t imagine anything more repulsive than to touch that old man’s cock.
“No! Stop! Leave me alone!”
“Do you want to go to shore?” He said in Galician. But he wouldn’t stop touching me.
Go to shore and do what? Go to a hiding place so he could continue touching me? Anybody looking out from the beach could have seen us. But there was nobody.
“Stop! Stop, or I’ll jump in the water!”
He took a step back, considering what I had said. Then he started again.
I quickly took off my T-shirt and my slippers and dove head first in the sea. The water was cold. I come to the surface and looked at him. He could row his boat much faster than I could swim. Would he fish me out of the water like I was an octopus? But he just stood there, looking at me with apparent indifference. I swam in a perfect crawl straight to the beach.
I wanted to slip quietly back into my room and change, but my mother saw me walking in, barefoot and wet.
“You have been swimming already?”
“Yeah, the water is nice,” I muttered and went upstairs.
* * *
What was that old man thinking? How could he dare? He was just a poor man, my father was a local authority. If I told, I could get him into a lot of trouble. He would probably wind up in jail. But I couldn’t stand the thought of that free spirit in jail. For me, he symbolized the freedom and wildness of the sea. Even what he had done to me represented that wild freedom. Those were still the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. I didn’t know anything about sex, nobody had told me. Obscure desires had started to awaken inside me, like the strange excitement I felt when I watched my classmates getting a spanking. I didn’t understand any of that. It scared me. The priests told us something about it, but it was always unclear. It was shrouded in secrecy and sin. Perhaps the old fisherman could explain it to me, the same way that he explained the way of the octopus. But not if he was going to touch me like that again.
It slowly dawned on me that I could never ride in the old fisherman’s boat again.
* * *
While the bid over the catch started, I quietly grabbed my slippers and T-shirt from the boat and walked away.
* * *
He must have done other boys. One day, I was walking on a beach that could only be reached by hiking through thorny gorse and blackberry bushes, or from the sea. Then I saw him, walking out of a shack with a teenage boy. I pretended that I didn’t see them.
The locals never talked much about him. He had no wife, no children, no family that I knew of. He seemed content and self-sufficient. He looked as old as the world, with his short white hair and his wrinkly face, but there was no way to know how old he really was. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. I saw him once dancing at a local fiesta, alone. He jumped and pranced with a vitality and abandon that I almost envied.
* * *
I may have been already in college when I heard that the octopus fisherman was dying. Stomach cancer, they said. I made discreet inquiries and found the way to his place. It was an old stone house surrounded by an unkempt garden, but there were peach trees and fig trees and plum trees, the fruit still green in the early summer days. I knocked on the door, called, then walked in.
The inside of the house was just a large single room, with a high ceiling, a wooden floor and walls of naked granite. There was a large bed in the middle. The old fisherman was laying on it, his belly swollen.
I sat by him and asked him how he was. He knew he was dying. I asked him if he was afraid of death. He said he was afraid of the pain. We must have said other things, but that’s all I remember. I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention the incident in the boat.
A few days later my father told that the octopus fisherman had died. He asked me if I wanted to go to his funeral. I said no. I had already said my goodbyes to the old man.
