Not A River, originally written in Spanish, is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. Read an extract from the opening chapter here
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?
Enero Rey, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, stares hard at the surface of the river and waits, revolver in hand. Tilo, the kid, aboard the same boat, leans back, the rod butt at his hip, turning the reel handle, tugging the line: a glittering thread in the waning sun. El Negro, fifty-something like Enero, alongside the boat, water up to his balls, leans back as well, red-faced from the sun and hard work, rod bent as he winds in and lets out the line. The spool spinning and his breath a kind of wheeze. The river pancake flat.
Pump and reel, pump and reel. She’s hugging the bottom. Get her up, get her up.
After two, three hours, tired and almost through, Enero repeats the instructions in a murmur, like a prayer.
He feels dizzy. Pickled by the wine and heat. He looks up and his red eyes, sunk deep in his puffy face, are blinded and everything goes white and he’s lost and reaches for his head and ends up firing into the air.
Without stopping what he’s doing, Tilo grimaces and yells.
What the hell, you moron!
Enero comes to.
Selva Almada
All good. You guys keep going. Pump and reel, pump and reel. She’s hugging the bottom. Get her up, get her up.
She’s coming! She’s coming up!
Enero leans over the side. Sees it draw closer. A stain beneath the surface of the river. He takes aim and fires. Once. Twice. Three times. The blood rises, gushing, washes away. He sits up. Puts back the gun. Tucks it in the waistband of his shorts.
Tilo from the boat and El Negro from the water lift the creature out. Grabbing it by the fleshy grey frills. Throwing it on board.
Watch the stinger!
Says Tilo.
He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.
Enero sits down with a thud on the seat in the boat. Sweaty-faced, head buzzing. Drinks a little water from the bottle. It’s warm, he drinks anyway, long gulps, then tips the rest over his head.
El Negro climbs in. The ray takes up so much space there’s almost nowhere to put his feet without treading on it. Must be some two hundred pounds, maybe two hundred twenty.
Christ she’s ugly!
Says Enero, slapping his thigh and laughing. The others laugh as well.
Fought us pretty hard.
Says El Negro.
Enero picks up the oars and rows into the middle of the river and then turns and carries on, following the shore around to where they’d set up camp.
They’d left town at dawn in El Negro’s pickup. Tilo in the middle brewing the mate. Enero with his arm resting on the open window. El Negro at the wheel. They watched how the sun slowly climbed above the asphalt. Felt how the heat began to burn from early on.
They listened to the radio. Enero took a leak by the roadside. At a petrol station they bought pastries and filled up on hot water for the mate.
All three of them pleased to be hanging out together. They’d been planning the trip for a while now. With one thing and another it kept getting called off.
El Negro had bought a new boat and wanted to try it out.
While they were crossing to the island in the brand-new boat they remembered, as usual, the first time they’d brought Tilo, who was still only tiny then, barely even walking, and how they’d got caught in a storm, the tents blown to shit, and the kid, little pipsqueak that he was, wound up sheltering in the boat propped on its side among some trees.
Your old man had hell to pay when we got back.
Said Enero.
Again they told the story Tilo knows off by heart. How Eusebio smuggled the kid along without a word to Diana Maciel. He and Diana’d been split up pretty much since Tilo was born. Eusebio had him at weekends. And of course, that would be the weekend she realizes she’s forgotten to pack, in the bag with his clean clothes, some medication Tilo was taking. Diana stops by the house and there’s no one there. A neighbour tells her they’ve gone to the island.
And then the storm that tore through the whole area. The town as well. Diana with her heart in her mouth.
We were lucky, all of us.
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Enero leans over the side. Sees it draw closer. A stain beneath the surface of the river. He takes aim and fires. Once. Twice. Three times. The blood rises, gushing, washes away. He sits up. Puts back the gun. Tucks it in the waistband of his shorts.
Said Enero.
Diana Maciel had laid into the three of them hard and for weeks they were banned from seeing Tilo or setting foot in her house.
On reaching the camp, they unload the ray and run a rope through the slits behind its eyes and hang it from a tree. The three bullet holes merge with its mottled back. If their edges weren’t paler, kind of pinkish, they’d look like part of the pattern.
Reckon I’ve earned myself a beer.
Says Enero.
He’s sitting on the ground, his back to the tree and the ray. The buzzing in his head has stopped, but there’s still a kind of knot there.
Tilo goes and opens the cooler and takes a bottle from the water, from among the last few floating ice cubes. He pops the cap with the lighter then passes it on, so that it’s him, Enero Rey, the one who’s earned it, who first brings the bottle to his lips. The beer hits his mouth, all foam that goes streaming over his lips, painting white lace on his jet-black moustache. Like rinsing his mouth out with cotton wool. Only with the second swig does the cool, bitter liquid come.
El Negro and Tilo sit down as well, all three in a row, the bottle moving from hand to hand.
Too bad we don’t have a camera.
Says El Negro.
They all turn their heads to look at the creature.
It’s like an old blanket hanging in the shade.
Annie McDermott
