An extract from Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches

Quellón. Chiloé. A night years ago. Sometime after ten. No sky, no vegetation, no ocean. Only the wind, the hand that grabs at everything. There must be a dozen of us. A dozen souls. In a place like this, at a time like now, you can call a person a soul. The wharf is small and sloped. The island surrenders to the water in concrete blocks with a number of cleats bolted to them in a row. They look like the deformed heads of the colossal nails that pin the dock to the seabed. That’s all. I’m amazed at the islanders’ stillness. They sit scattered under the rain beside large objects the size of trunks. Swaddled in windproof plastic, they eat in silence with thermoses locked between their thighs. They wait. The rain pounds down as though cursing at them, runs along their hunched backs and forms rivulets that flow into the sea, the enormous mouth that never tires of swallowing, receiving. The cold feels peculiar. It’s possible I’ve drunk some of it myself, since I can feel it thrashing and bucking under my skin, and also deeper inside, in the arches between each organ. Impenetrable islanders. I’ve been here for three months, working as a cook at a couple of summer camps for teenagers. In the evenings I would cycle to town and drink aguardiente at the hostel bar. There were barely any women. It was a workers’ ritual. Stained teeth bared in greeting. The jet-black eyes of every family tree that’s managed to grow on this salty rock speak to me from their tables. They speak to me for all of the dead.

I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self-taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence. Food comes to us wrapped in skin, and to prepare it you need a knife. If I’ve got one skill in the kitchen, it’s carving things up. The rest is hardly an art. Seasoning, tossing things together, applying heat … Your hands end up doing it all on their own. I’ve worked at schools, nursing homes, in a prison. Each job only lasts a few weeks, they slip away from me, spots of grease that I gradually scrub off. The last boss I had before coming to Chiloé tried to give me an explanation: the problem isn’t the food, it’s you. Kitchens require team effort. I’d have to find a really small one if I wanted to work on my own and still make a living.

The ship arrives at midnight. It barrels toward us at an alarming speed. Or at least that’s how it looks, because of the light glaring in the downpour, making us blink. There’s movement behind us too; someone’s pulled up in a jeep and left the engine running. He calls us. The islanders rise. They look like enormous turtles hatched from a large egg. They plod through the rain, and as they pass me I feel like an insignificant foreigner, disease-white and sopping wet under my dark blue rain jacket. You’d need two of me to make one body as tough as theirs. But I was like them once, despite everything. I’d dug into the island with my nails and learned that the pulp of your fingers can harden, that the heart governs the body and shapes it according to its highest mandate: the will. We huddle around the driver’s door. I use my hood as a visor, rub my eyes, and try to make sense of what’s happening. Hands exchange coins, bills. From the car radio comes the sound of string music, as though in honor of the storm. I buy a ticket with pesos from my belt bag. The rest of my three months’ salary is wrapped in plastic, tucked between my undershirt and my skin.