Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez Page A

stared at me again, and took off like a shot, scared to death.
A man, a donkey, and a dog
    I thought I would die of anxiety. In a flash I saw myself right at that spot, dead, picked apart by vultures. But then I heard the dog bark again. My heart started to pound as the barking got closer. I raised myself up on the palms ofmy hands. I lifted my head. I waited. One minute. Two. The barking grew closer. Soon there was only silence. Then the crash of waves and the rustle of the wind in the coconut palms. Then, after the longest minute of my life, an emaciated dog appeared, followed by a donkey laden with a basket on either side. Behind them walked a pale white man wearing a straw hat and pants rolled up to his knees. He had a rifle slung across his back.
    He saw me as soon as he rounded the bend in the road, and looked at me in surprise. He stopped. The dog, with its tail pointing straight up, came over to sniff at me. The man stood still, in silence. Then he unslung his rifle, planted its butt in the ground, and went on watching me.
    I don’t know why, but I thought I was somewhere in the Caribbean other than Colombia. Not certain he would understand me, I nevertheless decided to speak Spanish to him.
    “Señor, help me,” I said.
    He didn’t answer right away. He continued to look at me enigmatically, without even blinking, his rifle stuck in the ground. All I needed now was for him to shoot me, I thought dispassionately. The dog licked my face, but I didn’t have the strength to move away.
    “Help me,” I repeated desperately, worried that the man hadn’t understood me.
    “What happened to you?” he asked in a friendly tone of voice.
    When I heard him speak I realized that, more than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me.
    Almost choking on the words, I said, without taking a breath, “I am Luis Alejandro Velasco, one of the sailorswho fell overboard from the destroyer
Caldas
of the National Fleet on the twenty-eighth of February.”
    I thought the whole world would know the story. I thought that as soon as I told him my name, the man would be obliged to help me. But he didn’t budge. He stayed where he was, watching me, not troubling himself about the dog, who was now licking my injured knee.
    “Are you a chicken sailor?” he asked, perhaps thinking of the merchant ships that traffic in hogs and poultry along the coast.
    “No, I’m a sailor in the Navy.”
    Only then did the man move. He slung the rifle across his back again, pushed his hat back on his head, and said, “I’m going to take some wire to the port and then I’ll come back for you.” I thought this was a pretext for him to get away.
    “Are you sure you’ll come back?” I asked in a pleading voice.
    The man replied that he would. He would be back. For certain. He gave me a kindly smile and resumed walking behind the donkey. The dog stayed by my side, sniffing me. Only when the man was a little farther away did it occur to me to ask him, almost shouting, “What country is this?”
    And very matter-of-factly he gave the only answer I wasn’t expecting at that moment: “Colombia.”

13

S
ix
H
undred
M
en
T
ake
M
e to
S
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J
uan
    He came back, as he had promised. Even before I began waiting for him—only a little while after he left—he returned with the basket-laden donkey and the black girl with the aluminum can (his girlfriend, I learned afterward). The dog hadn’t left my side. He had stopped licking my face and my wounds and had left off sniffing me. He lay at my side half asleep, not moving until he saw the donkey approach. Then he jumped up and started wagging his tail.
    “Can you walk?” the man asked me.
    “I’ll see,” I said. I tried to stand up but lost my balance.
    “You can’t,” the man said, catching me before I fell down.
    He and the girl managed to lift me onto the donkey. Supporting me under each arm, they got the animal moving. The dog ran