The Old Man and the Sea

The only thing I know for certain about Pangasio Valverde is that his name is not Pangasio Valverde. He’s an older man, probably sixty, and worn beyond his years. The dark creases in his leather skin reflect a life full of emotion. He has deep-set ashen eyes like storm clouds, though there’s nothing particularly gloomy about the man. He has a thick, black licorice mustache that he waxes meticulously. It shines against the backdrop of his weathered face like a brand new bumper on a junk car. A brick-red flannel shirt clings loosely to his thin, muscular frame. He looks like he might have been a fisherman but he’s never made mention of his vocation and I’ve never asked. Perhaps it’s the name. He tells me to call him Panga, which means a type of fish. I don’t know if the fish is any good but I like the name. Or perhaps it’s the frayed knot of salt and pepper hair that curls and slumps off his head.

We play cards together every week. He sits on a crate beside his beachfront cabaña and pours sugarcane alcohol into two glasses on top of the table between us. All I can smell is the booze. The sweet and harsh aroma triggers a waterfall of saliva. The stuff could take the paint off your car and the lining off your liver. Panga doesn’t own a car and, as I look down at the crate of empty bottles below him, I doubt whether he owns a liver either. Out of courtesy and against my better judgment I always drink with him. He usually beats me and I usually take a few steps sideways when I rise from the table. Whenever I look up from my cards to try to read what he’s thinking, I can’t help but stare at his hands. They are enormous. His fingers curve upward like the roots of some ancient tree. His cards are tiny shreds of paper between his fingertips, which he bunches uncomfortably close together in order to hold on. He’s not a very large man, and age has dried him out even more, but his hands look as though they could each strangle someone at the same time. I wonder if they ever have. He lets out a long, wheezing cough and it’s the unconscious cue for his hands to lay the cards down and steal an unfiltered cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He holds it up between three fingertips like a toothpick and twists it back and forth in a brief moment of peculiar and studied admiration. He takes a deep breath in between his cracked lips and exhales a stream of smoke the color of his eyes. I watch and wonder who this man is and why I’m sitting with him loosing a card game.

Two young girls walk by. His gaze is inimitably fixed. Such concentration is hard to believe. Our games are routinely interrupted by the passing of women. Their age and physical appearance are irrelevant. Often he will look behind himself without warning, as if he can smell them coming. The girls are out of sight before he turns back around. He looks at me in a surprisingly relaxed manner and begins to speak very casually in Spanish, but the intensity is still frozen in his eyes. He says that when he was younger, the girls could never resist such a gaze. They would forget where they were going and stop to talk to him. They could not stop talking to him until he looked away. They were caught in the spotlight of his stare, he says, and when they were about to fall swooning into his arms he would release them. He says they were all beautiful, and when they walked away they were as wet as the ocean. I think he must have been a fisherman.