Jardines de la Reina

I woke up late Tuesday morning. I pulled back the heavy curtain blocking the light from the open window and looked out. It had clouded up during the night and there was a stiff breeze, exactly as Keko had predicted the day before. He could read the weather just by looking at the sky. Yesterday, just before sunset, as we were coming back to the Avalon in the skiff, he said there would be no fishing in the morning but in the afternoon we would go for tarpon.

“Why can’t we fish in the morning?” I asked him.

He pointed towards the northeast, towards the Cuban mainland. The sky was pale blue and perfectly clear except for what looked like an orangeish haze just above where the sky met the ocean. “It’s coming,” said Keko.

“What’s coming?”

“Wind. You see?”

What looked to me like a very light fog a hundred miles away was, he said, the wind coming from the northeast.

The boys had all gone off diving. Except for Bobby who, when I came upstairs, was sitting in a wicker chair reading his book on Modernism. I sat at the breakfast table, facing him. “You didn’t go diving?” I said.

He shook his head without looking up from his book. “My ears were feeling a little squeegy,” he said. “Plus I didn’t feel like getting up early.”

“Were you up very late last night after I left?”

“A little.” He underlined some text in his book with the pencil. It was clear he didn’t want to talk. I sat there silently, waiting for Suliet to come up from the crew’s quarters and ask me what I’d like for breakfast.

“Did you eat already?” I asked.

Bobby nodded without looking up, chewing on the pencil’s eraser.

“I really shouldn’t be hungry but I am,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go and see if I can’t find Suliet.” I rose from the table.

“I think she’s sleeping,” Bobby said.

“She can’t be. It’s after eleven.”

Bobby shrugged. “I’m not sure she’s feeling well.”

“How the hell would you know?”

Bobby didn’t answer.

I sat back down at the table and looked out at the wreck across the bay in the mangroves. I wondered if any men had been on it when it floundered, if anyone had drowned. Keko had told me our first day aboard the Avalon that he could no longer take us out night fishing.

“¿Por qué?”

There had been an accident last year, he said. Two of the skiffs, coming back through the mangroves at night, had collided head on. “Era muy malo.”

“How bad?”

The Avalon captain had died, he said. The bow of the skiff had struck the captain’s head, smashing in one side. He’d died before they could even get him back to the Avalon. “He was a good boy,” Keko said, “a nice boy.”

So now there was no night fishing, which was the best time to catch tarpon as they flowed out like watery ghosts amongst the roots of the mangroves during high tide.

I stood up from the table again and headed for the door leading to the crew’s quarters. Bobby jumped up from his wicker chair. “I’ll go get her,” he said.

“I can do it. I know where her room is.”

“I’d better do it,” Bobby said, putting his hand on my shoulder to stop me. I threw it off.

“Why don’t you just finish your goddamn book. I thought that’s why you didn’t go diving.”

“No need to get all pissy.”

“Oh, go to hell!” I opened the crew’s door. Bobby grabbed my arm and pulled me back. When he did I stumbled and fell down, hitting my head against the leg of the table. I stayed on the floor rubbing the back of my head. I hadn’t hit my head very hard but I felt groggy and my mouth was dry. Bobby stood over me.

“God, I’m sorry, Dave,” he said. “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. He reached down to give me a hand up. I ignored him and got up on my own.

“Why don’t you go lie down and I’ll go find Suliet and have her bring you some coffee,” he said.

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself.”

I went downstairs to the stern of the boat. The wind was blowing and little white waves slapped against the hull. A frigate bird floated in the sky nearby. Funny thing about the frigate bird: They can’t get their wings wet. They have to scoop a fish off the top of the water or steal one from another bird. If they miscalculate and fall into the ocean, they are as good as dead. They have no oil on their feathers so become soaked and they drown. I’ve seen it.

I stripped off my shirt and took the money and keys out of my pockets and dove off the back of the boat into the ocean. The water was cool and clean and my head cleared immediately. I swam away from the Avalon. The current was much stronger than I’d imagined. Looking down on the water from the boat you noticed the small branches and leaves from the mangroves floating by and you could see the needlefish and silver baitfish moving like traffic on a congested street but you didn’t really get a sense of the strength of the current just two or three feet beneath the ocean’s surface. You didn’t realize how strong it was until you were actually in it. Even if I wanted to swim back to the Avalon now, I couldn’t. So I flipped over and floated on my back, looking back at the Avalon as it got smaller and smaller and smaller. I could see Bobby upstairs, standing by the bar, his back to me. He was talking with Suliet. She had a hand on his shoulder. I saw Bobby shake his head several times and then Suliet leaned into him and put her head on his chest, her arms around him. He kissed the top of her head.

I didn’t give a damn. Why should I?

The water was cool. I closed my eyes, my arms stretched out like Jesus, and just floated in the slip stream. I felt certain I could float like this for hours. And if I couldn’t, well what difference did it make? What difference at all?

I sat on one of the wicker chairs trying to read a book by Raymond Carver. I knew I was quite tight. I had read the Raymond Carver book before, but it seemed quite new. Probably I read the same two pages over several times. I was quite tight and did not want to go downstairs to my bunk because the room would go round and round. If I kept on reading that feeling would pass.

It must have been after one in the morning when Bobby came upstairs. His blond hair was messy but his eyes were clear. He seemed surprised to find me upstairs. He sprawled across one of the wicker lounges and read a book on Modernism, underlining certain passages with a mechanical pencil every now and then. His girlfriend, Francis, was an art history major and I imagined he was reading the book because of her. Why else would you come to Cuba on a fishing trip with a book on Modernism? He kept glancing up from his book and looking at me or glancing at the door that led to the crew’s quarter. He seemed nervous.

I had to take a leak. I walked carefully down the metal staircase to the level below and stood on the stern of the boat pissing over the railing and into the water. Flood lights from the Avalon shone down into the water and you could see schools of fish coming in out of the dark water and into the light and then away again. It was like a separate world down there with flickering schools of silver sardines and wary jacks and baby groupers and pointy needlefish and darting juvenile barracuda. When I was done pissing I leaned against the railing and just watched the fish swim by.

I could hear hushed voices upstairs. Bobby’s British accent a low rumble and a softer voice—Suliet. I heard them laugh. I heard the tinkle of ice cubes dropping into glasses and the soft sound of salsa music mixing with the night breeze and the burr of the Avalon’s generator. More laughing. I looked at my watch; it was after two. I did not bother to go back upstairs to get my book. I could close my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. I went below deck to my room, undressed, and laid back on my bunk with my arms behind my head. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.

I reminded myself that it had been a fine day, one of the best I’d ever had fishing. I’d come back to the boat happy and we had had a wonderful meal and some whisky and everyone had been in a good mood, myself included, and I had gotten a little tight and then Suliet had come out and listened to music with Bobby and now they were up there drinking or perhaps dancing or maybe she’d taken him back to her room in the crew quarters. What did it matter? It was none of my business. Suliet was a fine woman. Her skin was the color of café con leche, smooth as a hardboiled egg, and she smelled of night jasmine. But what was that to me?

I turned on the light again and read. I read a sad story from The New Yorker in which a man who betrays his wife. She knows about it without ever saying anything. He knows as well and doesn’t say anything. They just go on as if nothing had happened but everything had happened and that was what was so sad about the story. I knew that now, reading it in my oversenitized state of my mind after too much whisky, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was something you paid for and then had and could not escape.

My room was hot. I opened up the portal window. I could not hear any sounds coming from the top deck. Perhaps they’d gone to bed. Perhaps they were just being quiet in the dark. What did it matter?

Some time along toward daylight I went to sleep.

The fishing is always difficult on the first day. You sit quietly in the skiff as it skims over the water, feeling the wind in your face and tasting salt on your lips and admiring the white egrets who stand in the shallows motionless like palace guards but all the time you are going over in your mind what needs to be done when you are standing on the nose of the skiff, the yellow fly-line in your left hand, peering into the flickering water, looking for a dark movement crossing the white sandy ocean floor or the roiling tails of bonefish sliding through water not even a foot deep.

Keko killed the engine. “Bonefish,” he said.

“You go ahead first, Greg.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Keko reached with his left hand for Greg’s bonefish rod, pulling it easily out of the slots in the side of the boat, and handed it up to Greg who stepped up to the nose of the skiff while Keko released the long black fiberglass pole and climbed up to the platform on the back of the skiff and slowly began poling. Greg stripped out the line and passed it back to me where I coiled it at my feet inside the boat.

“Listen to me, my friend,” Keko said. “Only cast when I say cast. No cast unless we see bonefish. Understand? I tell you ten o’clock, one o’clock, three o’clock…ten meters, fifteen meters. Understand? And my friend…tranquilo, tranquilo.”

The air was still. Whatever wind there had been this morning had died and now the sun reflected off the surface of the water and the white of the boat, and even covered as we were in long-sleeved shirts, long-billed hats, and polarized sunglasses, the heat and the light seemed to seep into every available inch of flesh.

“Okay…my friend. You see? Big fish is coming…eleven o’clock…you see? Fifteen meters.”

Greg released the fly and began flipping his rod back and forth, letting out line.

“Wait…wait…okay, now. Ten meters…you see?…more left…more left. Okay, now!”

Greg flicked the rod hard on his forward pump, let the line glide through his left hand, but the line puddled and dropped well short of the school.

“Again,” said Keko. “More farther. You see? To the right…to the right…more longer.”

Greg released the line again, this time dropping it directly on the nose of the lead fish and the school roiled the waters and dispersed in all directions like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pond.

“My friend,” said Keko. “Relax…relax.”

For two hours we fished, trading places, both of us clumsy with the line, our rods, our bodies, trying to remember the old tricks of double pumping or stripping the line with your body turned half towards the back of the boat so as not to bring your hand into your belly but behind your body, and as time went by slowly it began to come back, pulling the hammer, painting the ceiling, staying at ten and two, dropping the fly a meter in front of the school instead of on their heads. Greg hooked a bone, forgot to set the hook and lost it; I hooked one but the line was tangled around my reel and by the time I’d gotten it straightened out the bone had broke the line.

Late in the afternoon, the sun now nearer the horizon, the heat easing up, Keko poled the skiff in shallow water no more than twenty or thirty feet from shore. He let the boat glide to a stop, dug the pole into the muddy bottom, tied a line to an end to the skiff and told Greg to put on his shoes and get out. He handed me my number eight as Greg slid over the side of the boat.

“Okay, my friend…cast in front…short cast…five meters…twelve o’clock…you see?…a big school in front…you see?”

I saw the dark shadows—twenty, maybe thirty—moving like torpedoes towards the skiff. Keko instructed Greg to maneuver along the left of the coral, towards shore.

“Cast now, my friend,” he instructed him. “In front…you see?”

Greg made a quick cast, slowly stripped the line, and the pole bent in half, the reel clicking as the line quickly pulled away.

“Big fish!” said Keko, happily. “Very big fish. You see?”

While Greg was playing the bonefish, letting it run for twenty or thirty yards, then reeling it in as fast as he could only to let the line go when the fish began running again, I hooked my own fish. Now we both listened to our line sing, Keko telling Greg to slowly walk backwards, towards the beach so his fish would not foul my line. He brought his up first, letting out a holler, holding the long silver body in his two hands in front of his face so we could admire the size; minutes later, I did the same. We released the fish and tried again.

The school had swum into a long hole rimmed by a coral reef on three sides for about a hundred feet. Their only exit point was where Keko had positioned the Dolphin skiff and each time the school attempted to break out of the pool, he would slap the water with the flat end of his pole and the fish would turn around and swim the other direction, towards Greg.

For two and a half hours we fished the school, Greg hooking over a dozen bonefish and landing eight; I hooked almost as many and landed four. It was the most extraordinary afternoon of fishing for bones either of us had ever had. We both also caught six or seven reef fish—small red snappers, box fish, jacks. Finally, about six, the tide got high enough that the school was able to escape over the tops of the coral. Greg walked back to the skiff and we sat there, sweating, our hands shaking from the hundreds of casts we’d made, talking over the afternoon. We drank icy Cristals, legs dangling in the cool water as the boat drifted on the tide, Keko, his legs up on the seat, his arms on his chest, smiling, happy.

“You see, my friend?” he said. “Tranquil…tranquil.”

We drank a second Cristal each, the beer tasting better than any beer I’d ever had, describing the fish that were particularly large or had put up a long fight, taking so much line from our reels that we were certain we would lose them only to have them stop long enough to take in the line before they ran again. We could even admire the fish we’d lost, crediting their strength or valor or intelligence in running the line over the sharp coral until it broke.

When we got back to the Avalon, it was dark. Suliet greeted us on the stern of the boat with mojitos. “So, David,” she said, smiling at me and handing me my drink. “How was your fishing?”

“It was fine,” I told her. “It was more than fine. It was damn good actually.”

Everyone else was already back. They were sitting upstairs in the lounge area, drinking beer or mojitos, recounting the afternoon. Everyone had caught at least a couple of bonefish. Nick, who had never caught a bonefish before, got three as well as a barracuda. Hardy put on some Cuban music. Suliet came up from the galley with pizza, cut into squares, for appetizers. I felt I had never been so hungry or so thirsty in my life. I drank the mojito as if it were water and Suliet made me another. Around nine we sat down to dinner—lobster with garlic butter, jack crevalle in a spicy salsa, chicken baked with soy sauce, white rice, roasted garbanzo beans in red sauce, tomatoes, cucumbers, pineapple, guava, and papaya. We drank a Chilean sauvignon blanc and then a merlot and after dinner, Hardy put two bottles of whisky on the table and passed out Partagas cigars from a black canister. We drank the whisky and smoked the cigars and listened to Eliades Ochoa and Bebo Valdes and Compay Segundo, the pumpkin-colored full moon rising over the mangroves, talking about fish and fishing and being on the water and drinking more of the whisky while trying to describe what it’s like to watch an osprey carry a fish, nose first, low over the trees just when the sun is going down and the sky is purple-orange. Sometime after midnight everyone but me stumbled off to bed.

When I woke in the morning I went topside and stood on the stern of the boat looking out over the water. It had cleared and there were no clouds over the sea. The Avalon had anchored in a narrow bay protected with mangroves on two sides. Across from us was a wooden boat, sunk to the bowline, that had floundered during the last hurricane. On top of what was once the wheelhouse was a jutia, the large, brown, rat-like rodents that are almost extinct in Cuba. The jutia stood up on his hind legs and stared at me for a moment before scampering down the side of the sunken boat and jumping in to the water. He paddled slowly, his nose towards the sky, like a dog retrieving a bird, to the mangroves and climbed up a branch and disappeared.

It was still cool outside in the early morning and the sun had not yet dried the dew on the deck making it slippery. There was a light breeze. I hunted around in the upstairs galley looking for the coffee and milk. The table had been cleared from breakfast except for one spot. Everyone else had gotten up hours ago, had breakfast, and had gone out diving with Idelvis. I couldn’t find the coffee but I poured myself some orange juice from a pitcher in the chest-high fridge that contained mostly beer and plastic bottles of water. I was in no hurray for breakfast. In fact, if I didn’t have breakfast, that would be just fine. There were always three very large meals on the boat, with eggs and bacon and cold cuts and cheese and fruit in the morning, and multiple courses of fish and chicken, rice and beans, tomatoes and pineapple both in the afternoon and in the evening. And, of course, there was always lobster. At least once a day. So there was no shortage of food and one had a tendency to drink and eat too much simply because it was there.

Just when I was thinking of going back to bed, Suliet came up from the crew quarters. She was surprised to find me at the breakfast table. “You did not go out diving this morning, David?” she asked.

“No. I slept.” I liked the way she said my name: Dah-veed. It sounded pleasant coming out of her mouth.

Suliet is 27 and has brown hair which she wears mostly tied back, off her smooth, white neck, and dark, liquid eyes and a crooked smile. She is one of those women who can wear khaki shorts and a clean t-shirt and look better than the average woman in a little black dress. Her ears are small and pinned close to her head and the only jewelry she wears is a simple pair of gold hoop earrings. Suliet’s husband works on one of the other boats but she seldom talks about him. She seems happy to be the only woman on a boat with eight male crew members.

I asked Suliet for one egg, over-easy, and two slices of bacon and some toast. She took the order down to the cook, Eduardo, and then came back up with a carafe of coffee and a pitcher of hot milk. When she brought back my breakfast she sat down in the teak chair across from me.

“How old is your boy now?” I asked.

“He just turned two,” she said. “Would you like to see?”

She disappeared in to the crew’s quarters and came back with a small digital camera and searched through it until she found a photo of her son kicking a soccer ball.

“Es muy grande para dos años,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “He’s much bigger than other boys his age.”

“Like his dad?”

She shrugged and lost her smile.

“¿Cuál es su nombre?”

“Ricardo,” she said, smiling again.

She asked me if I had any children and I told her I did and that they lived in San Francisco.

“And a wife?”

“Yes.”

“Is she very beautiful?”

“Yes.”

After breakfast I felt groggy and went back down to my room and opened the portal window to let in the fresh sea breeze and laid on my bunk reading a book. I was just about ready to fall back to sleep when the door to my room opened suddenly.

It was Suliet. “Lo siento,” she said. “I came to make up the bed. I thought you were still upstairs.”

I sat up in bed. “No, please,” she said. “Do not get up. I can do it later.”

She stood at the doorway looking at me and not moving. “If you have clothes you would like washed, just leave them on the floor.”

“Gracias.”

Still, she did not move. Her eyes were moist and her face pale.

“Do you feel all right?” I asked her.

“It is nothing,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “I am sorry I disturbed you.” She closed the door behind her.

When the boys came back around ten-thirty, I had fallen asleep again. Fletch knocked on my door and then came in. “Have you been sleeping this whole time, you slacker?”

“No. I’ve been reading. How was the diving?”

“Excellent. We saw a six-foot-long lemon shark and Nick ran out of air returning to the surface. Lots of adventure. But we’re getting ready to go out fishing now. Are you coming?”

I told him I was. I was feeling rather rotten and would have been happy to just stay in my room but I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I did. I took a cold shower and gathered up my fly case and tackle bag and went topside. Greg was waiting for me. The others had already gone out. Keko got my number eight fly-rod and an extra tarpon rod Hardy had brought as well as Greg’s rod and put them all in the Dolphin skiff. Jorge, the spy, handed down a bucket of ice which I dumped over the beer and water in the hold in the middle of the skiff. The beer, Cristal, was already icy cold. I took one and sat down on the bench in the back next to Keko. “Jesus,” said Greg, climbing into the skiff. “What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “Five until eleven. Want one?”

“I think I’ll wait,” he said, “but you go ahead. Maybe it will help your fishing.”

Jorge untied the line in the front and pushed off and Keko started up the outboard and we flew through the mangroves, banking left and right to keep the propeller out of the turtle grass in water no more than two feet deep, as the water went from pale green to cerulean to a dark blue and we were beyond the reef, speeding along the glassy water to an island miles away.

We’ve made this journey to the Jardines de la Reina three years in a row but it seems to be the general consensus that we won’t be back again next year. Which adds a little poignancy to our last evening in this pristine paradise. I think one of the things I’m going to miss most is the time spent with our guides, particularly Keko and Jimmi.

The Halcon at sunset in the Jardines de la Reina. Photos by David Lansing.

At the end of the trip the first year we handed out the tips for the guides and each of us gave a little speech, thanking them for being so patient with us and for teaching us so much about not only fishing but about life in this little Garden of Eden. When we were finished, it was Jimmi, I think, who stood up and told the story of how, after the first morning of fishing, the guides had gotten together and tried to figure out what they were going to do with us.

“You were the worst fishermen we’d ever had on the boat,” Jimmi said, laughing. “But you have learned quickly. And now you are not so bad.”

High praise.

That year we spent most of our time spin-casting and also did a fair amount of trolling—activities the guides hate. They only take you trolling if they know there’s no other way you’re going to catch a fish.

This year there was no trolling and maybe a half-day, at most, of spin-casting. The rest of the time we were fly-fishing. And not doing too bad of a job. The total count included 65 bonefish, 12 tarpon, and 28 assorted fish included barracuda, red snapper, jacks, and a few other species (although I’m not sure we should really have included Pedro’s accidental parrot fish or the itty-bitty jack Fletcher caught since the lure was almost bigger than the fish).

Fletcher showing off his itty-bitty jack.

At dinner Pedro gave me a bleached conch shell as an award for being “El Rey de los Pescados.” He was being generous. You’d have to say the real king of the fish was Pedro himself who, although he only caught a single red snapper in the first two days of fishing, made an incredible comeback and actually ended up having caught the most fish. Or you could make a case for Geiser who, having never saltwater fly-fished before, still managed to catch a tarpon every day for the first four days of the trip.

Nonetheless, I’m going to treasure my conch shell. As well as my time spent on the Halcón with the boys.

And now it’s time to head back to Havana. The girls arrive late tonight. After a weekend showing them around, we’ll hop aboard Unplugged for another week cruising along Cuba’s northwest coast.

But before that adventure begins, here’s a video of some of our time spent fishing in the Jardines de la Reina. 

 
Fishing in the Jardines de la Reina, Cuba from David Lansing on Vimeo.