Benito El Pelicano

(Title Page) Benito the Pelican
(Dedication)
To my Brother Manuel
To my Sisters Guillermina, Yolanda, Dalila and Mariana
To my Sister Norma (RIP)

EDUARDO CALLEJAS, SAILOR OF DRY LAND
Whoever does not know the coast, does not know the sea, and the secrets that it tosses up in its eternal rush to the shore. He will never know how to unbolt the profound porthole that leads to the blind alleyof its riddles. It’s not easy to fathom the world of the tidelands. Difficult will be the road for the one who attempts to experience the rhythm of its briny exhalations and the hidden intrigue in each one of its crests.
Eduardo Callejas, a man of terra firma and a seafarer, is acquainted with one of the nooks of this universe of wind and sand, of sudden shocks, sweat, and joy. This old“fisherman of words” is familiar with the perfect bait, the plasticity of cane. He knows how flexible and malleable a sentence can be, how to make it gentle, delicate, and sweet, but sharp-edged enough to tear away veils from forgotten memories.
To sail into reading “Benito el pelicano” is to let yourself drift along the out-jutting and receding coastline, along the ridges and dunes where coconut palmsflourish in all their pride. It’s like penetrating the wave of sorrow and the horizon of burnished hope that create the anchor weighing down the masses, the everyday people, the almost-naked, those marginalized by the wealthy.
In this story there is no misery. There is the solidarity of shared poverty, and the earthly example of the multiplication of the fishes and the loaves. Old Anselmo Mariano,a fisherman from an old line of fishermen, run aground with the heaviness of his retirement, lightens the blandness of his days by watching the life of the crowd, accompanied by Benito, his scrawny pelican, cheered up daily by the well-deserved food from the depth of the sea brought by his youthful friends, made vigorous and proud by the mysteries of heredity and the store of knowledge accumulatedthrough centuries of reading the sea every day.
Eduardo Callejas raises the sail of story-telling up to its highest point on the mast by creating a human being in balance with nature. Every day that he weighs anchor symbolically moves him towards a paramount concordance between the rational being and his milieu.
Armando Garcia
Florencia, Dia del Nino, 1997
DESPAIR
Tiny and vulnerable
Inthe immensity of the sea
The fisherman
Fish line in hand
Thinks about his large family

And of the miracle
Of the multiplication
Of the loaves
…and of the fishes.
Anonymous

(Title Page) Benito the Pelican

Old Anselmo Mariano woke up to the blast of the conch announcing the arrival of a canoe of
fisherman, and relinquished his bed with a determined effort, limbering up thestiffness of his rheumatic
bones.
The rainy season, which had arrived early that year, already seemed tired of its cold and impetuous
start, and was now drifting into sunny days with scattered showers.
He opened a window of his small, palm-bark shack and looked toward the beach. Decked out in multi-
colored dresses, the women came flocking, with short machetes to cut open the fish and rubthem
with pleasant-scented sour oranges. Frolicking after came the kids, some without shirts, all barefoot,
carrying pails of fresh water to wash the chinchorro* that they would then spread in the sun.
They all made a tumultuous and variegated throng that he loved to survey: here was the heart of
the Garifuna world that he had dwelt in since his boyhood.
The men, at the end of a hard daywhich had begun in the small hours of the morning, retired to rest,
leaving the rest of the work appropriate to the women.
Anselmo gazed on them with nostalgia: they were his comrades, with whom he had passed day after
day fishing, until old age brought rheumatic fevers, and these finally overpowered shark oil and deep
draughts of guifity*, forcing him to leave the sea.
It was a partial...