Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  The women at the market tip an invisible flask and laugh. They’ve nicknamed her the güera, “fair-haired one,” even though her hair is dark. Squatting behind mountains of plantain and dried fish, the market women call all the tourists, light skinned or not, güera, although they don’t mean badly by it. She tries to pretend she’s Mexican and dresses like a local in A-line skirts and plastic sandals. She even brags that she is from D.F., Mexico City, when customers ask what part of the country she’s from, because she knows her accent won’t give her away unless she speaks for too long.

  She sells to tourists, but avoids getting to know them; they remind her of sheep that graze in a meadow until the grass is all eaten up. For them, Mexico is a photo opportunity, there for their viewing pleasure, like the postcards they buy of crumbling ruins and colonial buildings in elegant decay, mariachi bands and fire eaters, barefoot children and Zapatistas toting machine guns. She’s seen tourists in the market handing out souvenir pennies from home with all the benevolence of monks. Sometimes they hand out pencils made in China that the children turn around and sell. An American tourist wearing a Tilley hat buys a bottle of cold beer for a Oaxacan construction worker pouring concrete. “Gringo,” the workman says as he drinks, smiling, raising his bottle to the man who grins back, oblivious to his own arrogance. But the locals are just as alien to her as the tourists; even if they weren’t living in Spanish, hating in Spanish, or yelling this way at their dogs, the way they live would still feel foreign to her. With Chinchu at her side, however, she likes to think her foreignness fades away.

  Today, the campesinos of the mountains are once again protesting at the town plaza near the Palacio Municipal, handing out pamphlets on indigenous rights and land reforms and blocking the traffic on Calle Trujano. She wishes she was the kind of person willing to fight in a land where expectations die daily like the litters of puppies abandoned on street corners all over Mexico’s poorest neighbourhoods. Listening to their impassioned speeches, blow-horned from a turned-over orange crate, she brings the mescal bottle to her lips instead.

  She knows she is malingering. Still she consumes whatever crosses her path, gorging herself like someone used to starving. This is how you create memories, she tells herself, until she feels sickened by all the pleasure. Chinchu’s voice rings in her ear. “Semana Santa is coming. No one’s luck lasts forever.”

  Every night at eleven she stuffs a matchbox full with opium and goes to La Puesta nightclub, the most modern club in Zipolite, with corresponding prices. She keeps her eyes on the Spanish-stunted tourists who waver at the bar while they wait for their change, smiling like actors who have forgotten their lines, but the bartender does a good business not returning their money. Eventually, the cheated customers shuffle away into corners, clutching their drinks, and examining the contents of their glass, trying to hide the embarrassment of being swindled, the anger of having no language with which to protest.

  This is when she makes her approach and chats them up in one of four languages, cautioning them to pay with exact change the rest of the night, selling them her friendship and then her opium. For many of the tourists – neo-hippies, international backpackers on a shoestring budget – the main attraction in Zipolite is the party. Most of the bars are open till dawn, and when the sun is on the horizon, she sometimes sees the tourists as they leave the bar, blind drunk and stumbling through the sand, so different from when they first arrived in town. Then, they were like children in a candy store, awestruck by possibility, reluctant to choose anything for fear of making the wrong choice. But the longer they stay, the more they devour everything as a solution.

  Chinchu sings and plays guitar at a tourist restaurant called La Choza. Sometimes she watches him from the back of the bar, standing by the rough posts open to the breeze and the crashing roar of the ocean. She watches him perform; watches tanned European women cross and uncross their legs for him. She and Chinchu have never claimed sole rights to each other’s bodies: it was part of what attracted her to him, his willingness to give her amnesty to pursue new conquests just as he did, even as he crooned the love songs for which Mexico was famous.

  She had left the life of an environmental activist behind in Vancouver and had arrived in Mexico City eager for a fresh start. Then she’d been groped on the subway. On a bus bound for Puerto Escondido on the coast, she had stared out the window, feeling hopeful once again. Bandy cactus spread their limbs as if begging for rain, and as the bus neared the coast the hills became as lush as mango ripening in the hot sun. By the third morning she had arrived in Zipolite, the ocean tumbling before her, begging her to dip her toes in. At La Choza, French girls sat around a table, their backs audaciously arched, their cigarettes elegant at the end of limp wrists. They sat with men whose tanned shoulders sweated as their hands pounded furiously over resounding djembes. Other travellers smoked joints and gazed at her, lizard-eyed, as she entered with her backpack.

  She noticed Chinchu right away. He was an Aztec god, his carved muscles like those ancient statues she’d seen long ago in the Museo Nacional. She walked toward his table and set her pack down on the ground. His guitar was leaning against his thigh.

  “You have crazy eyes,” he said in heavily accented English.

  She reached between his legs and strummed the guitar. “I’ve been on a bus for days. I haven’t slept well.”

  “To get to Zipolite as fast as you can?”

  “I’m leaving in two days.”

  “No, you will grow roots and get stuck here like the coconut tree.”

  “I have the address of an orphanage in Chiapas,” she said, and on some impulse, she touched his thigh. And still his voice, lingering in her ear, challenged her to defy his prediction.

  Now, six months later, there is still something about him that makes her want to swallow him whole, make him belong to her. But tonight her appetite pulls her in another direction, away from him and toward the endless belt of thatch huts, bars, and restaurants that line the beach. She’s looking for someone new, someone who will lash out at her with a hidden strength.

  She scans the crowds in a rainbow of beach wear before asking a tourist eating corn on the cob with mayonnaise if he wants to buy some opium. When he grins at her, kernels of corn fall from his mouth and down the front of his mesh tank top. “I might buy some.” He winks. “But only if you’ll do some with me.”

  He has pink zinc ointment on his nose and short fingers like sausage ends. He’s not her type at all, and she’s not willing to play this game with him tonight.

  “A hundred pesos,” she says, asking for twice what she often charges the men she likes.

  “Oh, really,” he says. “Someone else was selling it for cheaper.” His breath smells like garlic.

  “Take it or leave it.” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She gets up and leaves the restaurant. She walks along the beach before she visits another bar and passes a pack of dogs that wander through the streets, belonging to no one but calling everywhere home.

  Every two weeks she goes to the mountains alone to rescore, having convinced Chinchu that someone needs to stay behind on the beach to look after their customers while she makes the fourteen-hour journey north to the Teotitlán District by bus. The opium her friend Dashon sells her is cultivated from the poppies he grows in a hidden field a short distance from his shack, which he hand-built from red clay and roble branches. From where the bus drops her off on the highway, his property is a half an hour’s walk up steep, winding trails, and a one-hour hike away from the nearest town of Huaulta de Jiménez, where she stays with Chinchu’s uncle. Dashon calls these highlands where he lives with his family tejao, the Mazatec word for “eagle’s nest.” It is something she’s reminded of whenever she stands at the edge of the mountain, six thousand feet above sea level, where she can see everything, and even look down on the clouds.

  Dashon’s daughter, Juana, is nine years old; she has wide red cheeks and eyes sharp as jet shards. Juana “irons” her dresses by s
moothing them out between the floor and her straw petate where she sleeps so her weight will press out the wrinkles. She sleeps in the same shack as her father, mother, her brother Miguel, and her grandmother.

  If Juana was her daughter, she would to take her out for ice cream every day. She remembers with a physical ache of happiness her last visit, when she and Juana had run along the steep slopes covered in pine needles behind the shack and over the white stones of dry riverbeds, playing hide and seek in the trails that snaked through the ragged hillside. When Juana’s grandmother had rustled through the oak and seen her, fallen on her rear end and laughing, she had clucked dismissively, as though deriding her for being a childish outsider who had lost her way. She had wanted to say she had been born with a bad sense of direction to make the grandmother laugh, but the old woman spoke only Mazatec, and such a comment would have only revealed how lost she was most of the time.

  Now her eyes are watering as she watches Dashon’s wife prepare soupy beans and strips of deer meat over a cooking fire, the acrid smoke hanging in thick screens, blackening the walls. She knows this woman only as “Dashon’s wife,” and she is too intimidated by the way the woman reaches into the fire, seemingly moving the coals with her bare hands, to feel she deserves to know her name.

  Juana and Miguel bring her their battered homework books. They have never seen the ocean so she draws them pictures of the strangest sea creatures she can imagine: eels, manta rays, and jellyfish.

  Miguel is always the one with the questions: “Why are only some parts of the ocean wavy? Is a current also a monster? Would a shark eat your goats if you weren’t paying attention?” Juana just giggles and twirls a strand of hair in her mouth.

  After supper she sits outside, where Dashon joins her, smoking a pipe. Once again she invites him to bring his family down to the beach, for a vacation, the way she does every time she visits. “Maybe your children would like to see the ocean for themselves?”

  He nods slowly, thoughtfully, as if it is a decision not to be taken lightly. “Yes,” he says, finally. “This is a good idea.”

  But she knows the truth is that he says only what he thinks she wants to hear, whatever that may be. He will never bring his family to visit her. And she’ll never be Mazatec. Not even Mexican. Güera. She would always be the güera, even when no one says the word.

  Miguel and Juana cajole her into playing a while longer in the trails behind the shack before bed, their bodies casting moonlight shadows on the furrowed ground. Juana’s plastic shoes slip off her feet, but even so she remains as sure footed as the goats that she leads daily to the river so they can drink. Miguel runs into the house and lights a stick with a flame from his mother’s dying cooking fire, now almost entirely reduced to embers. He torches one of the prickle bushes that riddle the fields and are as flammable as any kindling, and under the light of the moon and the dancing flames, he plays his favourite game. “Come closer to the fire, women,” he says, “it will protect you from the coyotes. Now, wait here while I shoot us a deer for dinner.” Then he rushes into the blue darkness with his toy rifle. As they sit in front of the fire, waiting for him to return, Juana asks, “What colour is a jellyfish?”

  “It has no colour. It’s like a raindrop.”

  “Can you bring me back one? The next time you come?”

  “No, nena. You don’t want a jellyfish. It can’t live here, not without the ocean.”

  “Mande?”

  “Dried jellyfish are ugly. How about a necklace made of shells?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If I brought you one it would have changed into something different by the time it got here. It would be hard and shrivelled.”

  Juana pauses. “My grandmother has never left these mountains, either.”

  “But you’d like to see the ocean?”

  Juana eyes her and then looks away, suddenly coy. “That’s a silly question.” She knits her arms around her chest. “Do you know that the lake here has piranhas in it?” Then she starts laughing and making snapping motions with her hands.

  It’s almost midnight by the time she finally stands up and prepares to walk back to Huautla. Dashon shakes his head. “It’s too late tonight.” He tells her there’s no need for her to return to Chinchu’s uncle’s house, and unexpectedly he begins rearranging sacks, moving bowls and pans, sweeping the kitchen with a corn broom.

  “What are you doing?”

  “He’s clearing the kitchen so you can sleep there,” Juana says, grinning.

  Dashon has never invited her to stay with his family before. Perhaps now they’ll ask her again – invite her to visit them more often, even. She could look after Juana and Miguel while their parents work. She could teach them how to play Twister. She could lead the goats to the river while they play. She would have so much to do she’d never be lonely. And then at bedtime, she’d tuck them in and tell them stories: Haida myths, Coast Salish legends.

  “Hey,” she says to Juana. “We can tell each other stories until we fall asleep.”

  Juana and her father exchange words in Mazatec. The smile falls from Juana’s face. “I have to sleep outside,” she says.

  “Why?”

  Juana looks at her feet. “So you have enough room.”

  She doesn’t even look at Dashon. She sees a flat clearing in the middle of the courtyard by a mound of corns. “Stop tidying up,” she says to Dashon. “I’d rather sleep over there.”

  “Outside?” Juana says.

  “You’ll be eaten by wolves,” Miguel says.

  She picks up her backpack and heaves it across the courtyard, toward the corn, away from them. “I like wolves,” she yells over her shoulder. Dashon throws his hands up with a look of parental confusion. Let them think she is crazy.

  Her muscles tense with the anger and helplessness of a child as she watches Dashon gather wood and build her a campfire. Even the blanket the grandmother brings out and puts around her shoulders does not stop her body from shivering, though more from sadness than from the cold. She sits on the ground and begins to cry, but then the old woman snaps her fingers at her and, before disappearing into the shack, shakes her head at the foolishness of the outsider once again.

  Chinchu’s ponytail hangs down his back like a snake. Her own hair is not silky like his; she has to struggle with it every day, pick it free of knots. But she can run her fingers through his hair for hours, braiding it, until in annoyance he shakes his head free.

  She feels safe when he lifts her in his arms and places her like a doll in his lap; his arms are brown and carved the way a river carves through stone. She lightly fingers his tattoos and asks for the story behind each one as she traces them up his arm: depictions of Chaac, the Maya rain god, who saved crops for the ransom of virgins; other ancient Maya symbols; sea creatures in honour of the ocean he loves. His shoulders swim with fish, sharks, and octopus that flick up and around his bronzed back.

  “Will you marry me?” Chinchu asks her in jest, not for the first time.

  But today, for the first time, she doesn’t answer “Maybe on Thursday” or “On Tuesday.” Instead, she says, “You already have a wife. And two kids in Veracruz. You haven’t seen them in a year.”

  “Ah, yes. It would never work between us anyway,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “The language would get in the way.”

  She likes that Spanish sets the rules of engagement, that their arguments are curbed by her simple vocabulary. She doesn’t have the words to tell him “I love you”; they don’t exist for her in Spanish. Yet they can dance the salsa as if connected at the hip, breezing through drunken tourists, unaffected by obstacles. And so they continue on in the way they always have.

  She steps toward him, suddenly nervous, and slips her hand around his slim waist and down his narrow hips. Suddenly he bites her lip and then kisses her on both cheeks. Then he laughs, as if surprised at himself. And all she can think is, “This is how it will always be with me and Chinc
hu.”

  His hands are thick and callused, strong as knots. They astonish her with their lithe, sinewy strength. Kneading her flesh, he can sometimes console her. But even as the sweat of her body mingles with his, she feels a surge of boredom begin to surface, rising fast.

  Every now and then, when she is swimming in the ocean to get away from it all, she can almost see herself settled in the world, happy and alone. Then the waves continue to tumble and her body begins to ache, her heat drained by a cold current she hadn’t noticed before that leaves her shivering.

  The ocean never stops moving. Left to itself, the ocean is restless, as turbulent as it is deep. She used to believe there was no better cure for her ills than movement – the silver bullet for indisposition. Now, just watching the rolling waves and the people scattering then gathering again on the beach makes her sick with the sureness of it all. If the world stopped spinning, would the sea follow?

  But the waves continue to fall forward and backward simultaneously, the undertow pulling away from the shore even as the white caps push forward, crashing onto the beach. And this display of warring desires reminds her again of what she’d rather not think about.

  She’s added to the Spanish she learned in first-year university. Spanish, French, German: she can make a go in all of them now. The thatch bars still twinkle as tantalizingly as eyes, promising more than they can give, and the beach hugs the bay like a pink pair of arms. But she’s been here too long. She should move on.

  The door to their cabaña is open. As soon as she enters she feels weak, not because Chinchu is in the hammock with a peroxide blond, whispering in Spanish to each other words she doesn’t understand. Not because the woman is wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt over a wet bikini top, the water soaking through the thin fabric and outlining the shape of her breasts. She swallows hard because it’s not these things at all. He is feeding the woman the rest of his tamal, sliding it piece by piece into her mouth.