Juan Narciso Ucañan’s disappearance is the novel’s first intimate sign that the ocean’s anomalies reach beyond isolated scientific observations: an overlooked fisherman encounters a vast, coordinated shoal off Huanchaco and vanishes, leaving no explanation behind. The episode begins on 14 January as a private struggle over work, family, and a fishing life, then turns into an encounter whose scale Ucañan can perceive but cannot report. Its consequence is not only his absence; it is the loss of the one witness who might have connected what happened to the disturbances later seen elsewhere.

Setting and circumstances

The episode takes place off Huanchaco on the northern Peruvian coast, where Ucañan fishes from a Caballito de totora. His familiar waters are neither empty nor entirely safe: submerged rocks and a volcanic reef shape where he can set his net, while the shore remains a point of reference and a route back to his companions. Yet the sea also offers the possibility of independence. Ucañan follows a trawler away from the flotilla, pushing toward deeper water where tuna, bonito, and mackerel are available to small-scale fishers as well as industrial boats. His departure is forceful and deliberate. He knows the conditions are favorable and believes that if he does not take the risk now, he may never do so.

That choice carries a personal cost. A hotel job among the tourist businesses looming over the old town represents an alternative future, but one at odds with his established life and work. The same day he breaks from the past will be his father’s last, and the old man’s loss of reason does not erase his ability to recognize a breach of faith. The episode therefore places Ucañan between competing claims: the chance to move beyond an inherited life, his responsibility to his father, and the practical need to make a living from fishing. His disappearance occurs at the point when that ordinary decision to venture farther from shore becomes irreversible.

The fishing boat and the first disturbance

At first, the danger appears to be a familiar occupational mishap. Ucañan lets his line slacken as the Caballito de totora drifts along the underwater rocks, watching for lighter patches that mark where the lava approaches the surface so he can keep his net clear. A tug jerks the buoy out of sight; it reappears in frantic movement, then is pulled under again. The line tightens, the boat tilts, and whatever has caught the net draws it stern-first toward the seabed. Ucañan considers a large fish, but the force and direction of the pull do not fit the behavior he expects from a swordfish.

The boat is soon pulled beneath the surface. Its catch is lost, and Ucañan must choose between pursuing his equipment and saving himself. He secures the possessions he needs to dive, including his mask, and enters the water intending to recover the net. He does not treat the dive as an encounter with the extraordinary: he believes the reef offers relative protection from sharks, thinks the loss may have resulted from his own carelessness, and is prepared to make repeated attempts rather than return without his gear. Underwater, the reef is clearly visible in the sunlight, but fish are scarce. He searches for the buoy and spots it, still focused on the practical task that brought him down.

The shoal and the disappearance

The change begins as a loss of color and light. Ucañan sees a great mass of shimmering fish assembled just below the surface, stretching beyond his field of view. Each fish is roughly as long as his arm. The shoal seems nearly still, though tails flick and individuals flash silver; then the whole mass shifts course and closes its gaps together. The movement resembles ordinary schooling, but its immense scale and disciplined unity make the familiar behavior seem wrong. Ucañan has never seen a shoal like it, and he realizes there are simply too many fish for the scene to make sense as an ordinary gathering.

He decides he must get out. Ascending carefully, he finds the shoal between himself and the surface, a dense barrier that appears to watch without responding. His fear becomes focused on escape: the boat, the damaged net, and the buoy cease to matter as he tries to reach the light and safety above. Then the shoal parts. Something moves out from its midst toward him. The account supplies no identification and does not show what happens to Ucañan in that final underwater moment. Instead, it breaks away to the wind rising over the sea. The day remains clear, the swell has increased but is not beyond what a boat could manage, and there is no one for miles. Only his Caballito de totora drifts on the open water.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The narration establishes the disappearance’s importance through the contrast between its later implications and its immediate obscurity. Ucañan goes to his fate without anyone noticing. Weeks later, the circumstances around his sudden disappearance will send shockwaves around the globe, but his name will not be mentioned; he will be counted among many missing people. The account stresses that similar events have been occurring elsewhere, though their parallels become visible only after the fact. Ucañan alone had experienced this first encounter, and without his evidence the mystery remains unsolved.

His absence thus creates a gap at the beginning of the wider crisis: the reader is shown a striking anomaly, but the witness who might have explained or connected it cannot speak. The episode also makes social neglect part of the event’s meaning. Ucañan was not widely attended to even before he vanished, and the later rush of graver events leaves no time to ask where he has gone. The sea’s silence and the fisherman’s silence converge, not as proof of what took him, but as the condition that lets the incident pass from an individual experience into an unexplained statistic. The shoal’s coordination foreshadows the possibility that apparently separate disturbances belong to a larger pattern, while the unresolved ending preserves the central limit of human knowledge: an encounter can be witnessed, feared, and lost without becoming evidence anyone can use.