The Fish

 

Bueno, hoy me será permitido apartarme de la tónica histórica de mis anteriores páginas, espero. Aún así, son las personas las que también hacen la Historia. Una mañana fría y oscura en Irlanda ("gloomy" como dicen ellos, una palabra simpática para un sentimiento oscuro), me hallaba yo en una aula gélida rodeado de adolescentes enfundados en sus uniformes y abrigos de diversos tonos azules. Se trataba de una clase de poesía inglesa contemporánea y la profesora había elegido para aquella ocasión una poeta norteamericana, Elizabeth Bishop, de la que desconocía todo. Pero...

Cuando la profesora empezó a leer con una extraordinaria voz sensual este poema, y las luces cambiantes de la tempestad que amenazaba el exterior ondulaban por ente los cristales; cuando fui desgranando cada verso y descubriendo lo que los alumnos y alumnas eran incapaces de ver, fue entonces cuando se encendió un hogar bajo la pizarra y yo mismo balanceándome en aquella silla cóncava que mis padres tenían en la casa de La Cañada; yo mismo, pequeño, débil, acurrucándome buscando el calor y temiendo las sombras. Ése era mi pez...

THE FISH

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled and barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly-- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. --It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip --if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.