Sharks

The Sharks are a school that follows the Aldayas’ ship across the Atlantic in 1926. Their pursuit becomes a dark counterpoint to Don Ricardo Aldaya’s final crossing: while the crew offers an ordinary explanation for their presence, he reads them as agents of divine judgment, and their disappearance after his own vanishing leaves that interpretation unresolved.

Appearance and Pursuit

The school has been following the ship since it left Tenerife. From the stern, Don Ricardo watches the sharks as the crossing continues. An officer explains that such an escort is normal on transatlantic voyages because the animals feed on remains left in the ship’s wake. The explanation gives the pursuit a practical cause, but it does not dispel Don Ricardo’s conviction that the sharks are following him personally.

Don Ricardo’s Interpretation

As his health declines, Don Ricardo sees the sharks as devils waiting for him and takes them as the true face of God. Their presence accompanies a moment of changed dependence: he approaches Jorge Aldaya, whom he had often despised, and makes him swear to find and kill Julián Carax. The sharks thus stand beside a human demand for revenge, while Don Ricardo’s belief casts that demand in the language of judgment and fate.

Disappearance and Significance

Two days before the ship is due to reach Buenos Aires, Jorge wakes to find Don Ricardo’s berth empty. Searching the deserted, mist-covered deck, he finds his father’s dressing gown abandoned at the stern. The ship’s wake is stained scarlet, and the sharks are no longer following the vessel; Jorge sees their fins circling in the distance. No passenger sees the school again during the rest of the crossing.

The sequence does not establish why the sharks leave or what happened to Don Ricardo. Their ordinary feeding behavior and his supernatural reading remain in tension. When Jorge disembarks and says he is travelling alone, that answer echoes the isolation already present in the crossing: the sharks’ disappearance offers no explanation, only a final image bound to the Aldayas’ guilt and the loss of Don Ricardo.