Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez Page B

ahead, jumping around.
    There were coconuts all along the road. At sea I had beenable to endure the thirst, but here on the donkey, moving along a narrow, winding road lined with coconut palms, I felt I couldn’t hold out a moment longer. I asked for some coconut milk.
    “I don’t have a machete,” the man said.
    But that wasn’t so. He was carrying a machete on his belt. If I had had the strength just then, I would have taken the machete away from him by force, shelled a coconut, and eaten it whole.
    Later, I found out why the man wouldn’t give me any coconut milk. He had gone to a house located about two kilometers from where he had found me, and the people there advised him not to give me anything to eat until a doctor could examine me. And the nearest doctor was two days’ journey from there, in San Juan de Urabá.
    In less than half an hour we reached the house, a primitive structure at the side of the road, made of wood with a tin roof. Three men and two women were there. Together they helped me off the donkey, took me to a bedroom, and put me in a canvas hammock. One of the women went to the kitchen, brought back a little pot of cinnamon-flavored boiled water, and sat down at the edge of the bed to feed me spoonfuls of it. I drank the first few drops greedily. With the next few I felt I was regaining my spirit. Then I didn’t want any more to drink; I wanted only to tell them what had happened to me.
    No one knew about the accident. I tried to explain, to give the whole story so they’d know how I’d been saved. I’d had the idea that in whatever part of the world I turned up, everyone would already know about the catastrophe. It was disillusioning to realize, as the woman spoon-fed me cinnamon water like a sick child, that I had been mistaken.
    Several times I insisted on telling them what had happened.Impassive, the men and women sat at the foot of the bed, watching me. It seemed like a ceremony. If I hadn’t been so happy to be saved from the sharks and all the other dangers of the sea I had endured for ten days, I would have thought that they were from another planet.
Believing the story
    The kind manner of the woman who fed me wouldn’t permit any distractions from her purpose. Each time I tried to tell my story she said, “Be quiet now. You can tell us later.”
    I would have eaten anything. From the kitchen came the aroma of lunch being prepared. But all my pleading was useless.
    “After the doctor sees you, we’ll give you something to eat,” they said.
    But the doctor did not arrive. Every ten minutes they gave me little spoonfuls of sugar water. The younger of the women, a girl, cleaned my wounds with cloths and warm water. The day passed slowly. And gradually I began to feel better. I was sure I was in the care of friendly people. If they had given me food instead of doling out spoonfuls of sugar water, my body wouldn’t have withstood the shock.
    The man I had met on the road was named Dámaso Imitela. At ten o’clock on the morning of March 9, the day I landed on the beach, he went to the station house in nearby Mulatos and returned with several policemen to the house where he had brought me. They knew nothing about the tragedy either. No one had heard the news in Mulatos; newspapers don’t reach them there. In a littlestore where they’ve installed an electric motor, they’ve got a refrigerator and a radio. But they don’t listen to the news. As I learned later, when Dámaso Imitela reported to the police inspector that he had found me lying exhausted on the beach and that I had said I was from the destroyer
Caldas
, they turned on the motor and listened to news programs from Cartagena all day. But by then there was nothing about the accident. There had been only a brief mention the evening it occurred.
    The police inspector, all the policemen, and sixty men from Mulatos got together to help me. A little after midnight they came to the house, and their conversation woke me from