The Abundance of the Infinite

by Christopher Canniff

  And this was one of the first traits I found that we had in common.

  Falling into a trance again, peering out of the windows of the bus, thinking of my past and the last time I was here decades ago, alone, I suddenly feel cognizant of, and comfortable in, my solitude.

  Rejecting dream symbolism and dream dictionaries, where compiled lists can indicate the significance of a dream (knowing, of course, that dream images only hold significance insofar as what they represent to the conscious self, as any Jungian can attest), I rebuff the knowledge that the start of a journey in dreams symbolizes death. If I did believe in such symbolism, I would have instead chosen to embrace the dream symbol of water, in the valley below, as life.

  The last thought I recall as I fall asleep, dreaming of a long, winding river with innumerable tributaries, is how the river water will soon transform to the water of the ocean once I again locate the place in which my father lived, his apartment that overlooked the sea. I wonder what emotion, if any, I will see in his reticent face.…

  ∞

  “Hola, señor,” a man says to me as I step off the bus, still drowsy with sleep. “Welcome to Manta.”

  He is short with sun-ripened skin, and stands beside a weathered taxi cab on a dirty street. I am certain I have seen him before. I suddenly realize that I haven’t spoken to anyone in days, apart from hotel clerks who seemed suspicious of me somehow, and hefty bus drivers who spoke no English and could only communicate through the names of various towns and cities, mocking my pronunciation of them.

  Being here again I feel as though I am a child once more, untroubled and carefree, as though my father is still alive and we can play on the beach and bury each other in sand, walking along the same wide expanses early in the morning to meet the fishermen with the freshest fish, some of the fish long, slender and dark, with rows of sharp teeth, and we can sit and eat ceviche, cold fish soup, in restaurants along with bottles of exceptionally sweet-tasting Coca-Cola, and encebollado, warm fish soup sold out of the sides of houses, and we can read novels together on his apartment patio and spend long nights at the parties on the beach, drinking more Coca-Cola as he imbibes cerveza after cerveza, listening without a care to music and watching as the people dance barefoot in the sand. I have reverted to my own youthful and jovial self.

  But still, not all is how I remember it.

  “Why is it so dusty here?” I ask the man before me.

  “Ah, polvo, yes,” he says, kicking at the dirt road. “It is the dry season.”

  He extends his hand upward, and looks to the sky. “No rain,” he continues. “We here are too poor. We can only afford two seasons, wet and dry. Not like your country.”

  He smiles widely, revealing some missing teeth.

  “Maletas, your bags?” he asks, eyeing my backpack.

  “I have no bags,” I say.

  He looks confused. I am not a local, and yet I have brought no luggage. I do not feel the need to explain that my only possessions are all contained in my small backpack: a few changes of clothes and some toiletries, some books—an English-Spanish dictionary and a copy of Boccaccio’s The Decameron among them—a picture of Yelena and her last letter to me, an ultrasound photograph of Annabelle, my tear-resistant ‘do not disturb’ sign for my door, pens, some writing paper and a journal, a flashlight, a passport, and a roll of money bound with an elastic band.

  As I walk away from the taxis and the bus station, past the marina and outdoor patios with plastic chairs and the smell of grilled shrimp and fish, I see an inlet in the distance.

  A single boat sits atop stilts. It must be low tide because there is a group of fishing boats lying on their sides on the muddy ground beside it. This boat constructed over a wooden frame is the only one still upright, perhaps usable only as a house. I recall how high and low tides are affected by the moon, and how I might walk by here tomorrow and see that all of these boats are floating, and that the water covering this house-boat’s stilts makes it appear as though it, too, is buoyant. A man and his family emerge from the hold of the house-boat and rise up to the deck. One of the children, his spindly arm high in the air, waves to me. I am a stranger here—a tourist, a gringo—which, judging by the appearance of this place and the stares I am noticing, they do not see often. I walk on.

  Sauntering past rows of palm trees, I proceed down to the beach. There is lemonade here and salted, unripe mangos for sale. There is music, soft and sweet. I run toward the water, dropping my backpack behind me, removing my shirt and tossing it into the sand, and I look up from a line of distant fishing boats to see the daytime moon. As I rush toward what I imagine to be the sweet sticky smell of the water, the moon seems exceptionally bright. I feel the soft sweet salt caressing my face, and the cool waves splashing against me.

  I have never felt such exquisite and invigorating water as this, and I instantly recall that in my childhood, the few times I was here, I was free to jump straight into this same ocean as my father stood on the beach playing his bagpipes onshore, the muted, complex legato—wailing emanating from the expanded sheepskin bag surrounding me as my body was immersed in warm water, the depths from which I imagined I would be content never to emerge.

  Here I can see the riches of Atahualpa, the ancient Incan emperor held captive by the Spanish Conquistadors for months before being executed by them, in every drop of water splashing against my chest and reflecting back into the sea. The largest ransom ever paid, tons of silver, gold and gems from all over the country of Peru, is now paying reverence to my presence here in the form of tiny crystals and prized stones. These thoughts are not logical, I tell myself. My life until now has been built and lived on logic and deductive reasoning. I have never imagined Atahualpa’s ransom before when stepping out of the shower, tiny droplets of gold and silver beside the drain and on the walls and floor of the shower flecked with his blood.

  These rolling, liberating waves that turn over themselves without ceasing whirl through the day that transforms itself into night.

  3

  I awaken to the sound of dogs growling on the street outside my hosteleria in Manta, a very small hotel with only three rooms. It is midnight. Tomorrow, I will go to the place where my father lived. A man and a woman are arguing loudly, in Spanish, in the hallway. Tap water is drumming incessantly on the bottom of my bathroom sink. Yelena’s last letter to me is open on the table, which is beside my thin mattress and outside the mosquito netting of the bed. I am sweating. Is this part of a dream? I can hear Yelena’s voice as I retrieve the letter and begin reading it with my flashlight:

  “... I am too cowardly, and you are too brave. I watch the clouds and see hideous dragons where you see them turning into butterflies ... you see beauty in everything ... you see life as a gift, not to be wasted ... you are like Dostoevsky’s dreamer, and I am his Nastenka—while I cling wholeheartedly to my home, my grandmother and the lodger, you perceive—in Dostoevsky’s words—one moment of bliss as sufficient for your entire life ... you need no one....”

  I put the letter down, and her voice stops. Is she right? Do I need no one? The indisputable proof of her assertion might be my presence here, alone, in a country virtually unknown to me, in a place a thousand miles from my home, in a corner of the world I have never truly known. Is she trying to convince me that, in fact, I need no one, herself and Annabelle included, and that I can feel guiltless for leaving them by setting this idea in my mind, distracting me by her subtlety, placing the last phrase inconspicuously, almost as an afterthought, while first presenting a more compelling, poignant and thoughtful image? She is wrong about me seeing beauty in everything, and seeing life as a gift. I have seen her blindly and unjustifiably attributing such noble traits before, projecting characteristics she perhaps wished she possessed herself upon others.

  The argument in the hall is growing louder.

  I get up and place my privacy sign on the outs
ide of my door, thinking I will need to make this habitual, watching as a man in shorts and a woman in a small, thin gown in the hallway look over at me, surprised, and stop shouting their incoherent phrases. I want to explain to them that Samuel Taylor Coleridge once claimed to have dreamed the entire narrative of “Kubla Khan” and that, after a tumult of frenzied writing, he was then interrupted by a knock on the door and was later able to transcribe only a portion of the remainder of the dream. My therapist Richard requires that I keep a very detailed dream journal, I would explain, so such a disgrace must never happen to me. The man and woman, still staring at me, immediately return to their room together, slamming the door behind them, and their now muted dialogue continues and echoes through the hall, the reverberation of their voices eventually dissipating.

  ∞

  Guilt may often be a substitute for other emotions, but in my case, for what?

  My dreams that night are rapid and confused. This is too early in my journey, my mind too disorderly and cluttered for my dreams to be coherent. Immediately upon awakening to silence and darkness, the only illumination a fragment of moonlight from under the curtains and the only noise from a chorus of crickets and the terrible, interminable ticking of tapwater droplets on the bottom of my sink, I remember an anchor point by which I can recall the remainder of this dream. Retrieving my journal, a pen and my flashlight, I write about the flag and the currency depicting the independence of this country born of Simón Bolivar. I recollect and transcribe that, earlier in the dream, I could see the Spanish Colonies, with the King of Spain’s spies looking for the reasons why the colonies are not producing. There were whisperings of corruption and I recall more now, going further back in time, back to Pizzaro and Almagro, the two groups of the Spanish who arrived to decimate the Incans through disease, overwork and war, who arrived to indoctrinate their religion without perhaps seeing a future of holocaust but nonetheless providing the proper conditions for it. As I see those groaning and pleading for my help, knowing somehow that I am a doctor who is cognizant of their thoughts, I explain that I am not a medical doctor but a psychologist; one who knows nothing of how to solve such immense problems, but who can only show them the world of their minds, and mostly in theory proven through sometimes sparse and dubious case studies...“I can do nothing for you,” I say, “I am powerless here....”

  4

  I have the characteristic symptoms: distorted vision and surreal sensations, my fingers and hands tingling and appearing to grow longer as I walk toward the front door of the apartment building I have come to know through visits to my father. I have not been here since long before my father’s death, and my trembling and the sense of terror I have about a need to escape, losing control, a powerlessness in the face of what I am about to experience, is palpable. I shiver as pains in my chest worsen, and I am reminded of the intensity of my recent nocturnal panic attack. I have the intuition that whoever answers the door will tell me that my father has just died. I know, I will say, that is why I am here. Whoever answers will escort me to my father’s lifeless body, and I will see in my father’s closed eyes only distant and faded memories. Knocking on that door will startle me into a state of anxiety in which I will lose control, lashing out insolently at whoever stands before me.

  In my psychology practice, I have helped those with such anxiety by utilizing various techniques for relaxation, while gradually increasing their exposure to the situations which initially caused their apprehension and angst. For me, from an early age, standing before closed doors through which I have no access has always caused me to experience a sense of powerlessness and panic, and although I often stand for long durations in front of locked doors for this reason, until now, this effort, along with varied breathing exercises, has been to no avail.

  I have traced the root of my nervousness back, along with my therapist, to when I was here to visit my father as a young child of twelve or thirteen. I had arrived upstairs, in front of the door on which I had always knocked, only no one was there. I discovered later that my father was at the beach and had simply forgotten the time. But in the duration between when I had first knocked on the door and when I had finally resorted in frustration to aimlessly wandering the streets, later roaming across the wide beaches, I had knocked louder, and then pounded and pounded on that door, cursing and detesting that door for being closed and locked, slinking down to the base of the painted metal and crying as though he had died, longing to smash one of the windows infuriatingly barred to prevent unwanted entry, shifting my backpack up over my shoulder, wanting to do anything to get inside, to bring him back to life.

  I arrive at this front door now, sweating, my fingers numb, shifting the backpack, which has slipped, back over my shoulder. This heavy, white painted metal, windowless door that drags on the floor under its own weight when opened has not changed since my arrival here when I was twelve or thirteen. There is not even a different colour of paint, or a plant beside it now, or any sort of decorative border. All is the same. My mouth is dry and I feel myself lifting my hand, my movements slow, my mind longing to convalesce to its normal state, and I am fighting against the sensation of heaviness in my hand with the longing to pound at this door with my closed fist, to combat this door and to fight my way inside so that my father might somehow still be alive. I also have the sudden urge to escape, though, to run away from this place and to regain control of my heart’s rapid pulse, to relinquish the dizziness and nausea, to wander the streets again as though I am a child, crying and crying and calling out, over and over again, for my father.

  I knock once, then twice, then again, lightheaded now, and as I prepare to slink away, a woman opens the door leading into her oceanfront apartment. My anxiety, fears and pain subside at the sight of her. It is Señora Modesta, my self-professed “Ecuadorian mother,” who is shorter than I remember. She has the same round belly and the same wet towel draped over her apron that I recall, the towel the same as her right hand, covered in paint. I am much taller than her now.

  I have the impression, from the scowl on her face, that she is suspicious of me as a stranger; for a moment, somehow, she does not seem to recognize me. She has not seen me, or perhaps any strangers, for decades. She looks confused, and as she holds on to the door, I wonder if she is preparing to force it shut. I clench my fist and notice the smell of frying plantains and baking fish from within. I feel my anxiety returning and, along with it, my desire to flee.

  “Samuel!” she suddenly says with a smile, startling me. I am unaccustomed to hearing the Spanish pronunciation of my name and the associated accentuation of the final consonant.

  Without waiting for a response, she wipes her hand with the towel, and then uses a cloth to wipe paint from the door handle. She still manages to keep her left hand on the door.

  “Buenos dias, Señora Modesta,” I say.

  She grabs my face with both hands, kissing each of my cheeks which are now burning.

  “I am sorry for your father,” she says, her smile transforming into a frown. “We have not seen you for so long. You have grown into a man....”

  Then, after a moment, there is a woman’s voice from inside. “Mami, who is it?”

  “Enter, enter,” the Señora says to me, and I feel my disquiet, frustration and panic slowly beginning to drift away again.

  She struggles to pull the door open, and she invites me inside. Two women, distinctly beautiful, one with long, dark brown hair, and the other with short, black hair, both of them slender and wearing form-fitting and colourful clothing, are sitting at the table, smiling.

  “Samuel, you remember my daughters Inés and Yolanda,” the Señora says.

  “The last time I saw them, they were babies,” I reply.

  They take immediate notice and begin staring at me, at my freckles, ruddy cheeks and red hair that are so different from anyone else’s appearance here. They rise and we exchange kisses.

 
The smell of fish and plantains frying in oil is strong now. There is also another odour lingering here, not quite as strong: the smell of new paint.

  The Señora urges me to be seated and I pull out a chair, set my backpack on the ground, and sit down. As I do, her daughters rise from their seats and hurry to pile rice, cheese, breaded fish and oily plantains on a plate, handing the steaming food to their mother.

  “Aquí está,” she says, placing the full plate before me. She pours a small glass of juice, which looks freshly blended, and a cup of instant coffee. After putting them on the table in front of me, she sits down.

  “Gracias, Señora,” I say.

  As I eat, I look around to see that her apartment is the same as I remember, small but seemingly comfortable. Their dog is barking behind the wooden door at the back. There are painted statues of various sizes, among them a large number of statues of saints I don’t recognize. There are statues of the Virgin Mary, statues of dogs, a black cat, even a dragon. The Señora notices that I have taken an interest in them. She reaches over, retrieves a statue and hands it to me.