The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  Finding number twenty-seven renewed her hope. She closed her fist around the little pearl and looked at the sky and said, “Thank you.”

  Her thanks were directed, in a vague but concentrated way, at her father. He was dead, she knew that, but she could not accept the premise that dead meant finished forever. She was lonely for, and needed, her father, and so in her mind she fashioned a presence for him. She did not think of him as alive, exactly, but simply as existing somewhere, still available for her to talk to and ask for help and share private things with. For in all her life he had been the only person she had felt comfortable sharing things with.

  The fact that her father was out there somewhere (and it was a fact for her; she felt it strongly) was an enormous help to her. She didn’t hear his voice, but he comforted her nevertheless. A sympathetic presence who listened with patience to her problems, he never agreed or disagreed, never criticized or praised. And somehow, being able to explore events and alternatives this way seemed to guide Paloma, help her toward a direction and a solution.

  Of course, sometimes she felt foolish, and was glad no one saw her as she seemed to be talking to the sky or the wind or an empty room. But there was something there. Whether it was she who willed it there, projected it there, didn’t matter; it was there, whatever “it” was. She avoided precise definition, preferring to leave it as a concept amorphous enough so as not to be confining, a spirit, accessible, clear. And while surely she needed her father, she also felt that he needed her, and that they were working as a team.

  Shortly before he died, Jobim had recruited Paloma into a conspiracy.

  Only a few months from now, Jobim and Miranda would have marked twenty years of marriage. He had wanted to give his wife something special. Since he had no money beyond that which fed and clothed them, he could not buy her something fine. So he had decided he would have to make the gift himself. And whatever he determined to make would have to be made in secret—he could not hope to deceive Miranda as he had deceived Paloma about the pirogue. And if it must be a secret, it must be small enough to conceal.

  Yet it could not be a wood carving or a clay figure or a decoration fashioned of seashells. Anyone could carve wood or collect seashells. It had to be something that only he could do, so that for Miranda it would be a gift direct from his heart to hers.

  Once he had found the answer, it seemed obvious: pearls, a necklace of natural pearls. Of all the islanders, only he (and, through his teaching, Paloma) pursued the ancient skills of diving for and identifying and collecting and opening pearl oysters. He had maintained the skills only for his own amusement, for pearling was no longer profitable. The pearl beds had been depleted more than a generation ago, but even if they were to come back, the market for natural pearls had all but disappeared. People now preferred cultured pearls; they were rounder, had more luster.

  Jobim did not like cultured pearls. “They are prettier, and they do come from the sea, and they make a nice necklace,” he told Paloma. “But they are not natural. They are man trying to improve on nature. Nature is one miracle after another. Man can’t improve it; he can only change it.”

  Jobim had found only five pearls before he died, but he had helped Paloma refine her pearling skills. And so she had taken upon herself the task of completing the necklace. She and Jobim had begun something; he had gone away before being able to complete it; she would complete it for him.

  She thought often of how she would give the necklace to her mother. She didn’t want to seem overly sentimental, but, on the other hand, she wanted to be sure that Miranda knew the necklace was a gift from Jobim, no matter who had gathered most of the pearls.

  One of Jobim’s earliest lessons to his children was that truth was almost always preferable to lies. It was not only a moral conclusion; truth was usually easier. For one thing, it was easier to remember. But here truth was impossible, so Paloma had decided to weave the simplest lie she could. She would tell her mother that Jobim had collected the pearls and had hidden them with the intention of stringing them just before the anniversary date.

  “Thank heavens,” Paloma would say. “One day he swore me to secrecy and told me where they were, in case something should happen to him.”

  There would be happiness and sorrow and nostalgia and tears. The important thing for Paloma was that all the emotion would be directed not at her but at her father—at his memory or his spirit or whatever image Miranda still held of him.

  Paloma tucked the pearl into a narrow crack in the wood on one side of the pirogue, so it couldn’t roll around or spill out if the pirogue should tip. Then she lay back to rest for a few minutes, for she had found that to dive too soon after eating was to invite a painful knot in her side or, sometimes, to bring up bile in her throat, which could be very dangerous and was inevitably very frightening. If bile was rising, vomit would follow soon behind, and there was nothing worse than to vomit underwater. The gag reflex would force a spasmodic intake of breath, which would bring salt water into her lungs, which would force a violent cough and another breath and would drown her.

  She fell asleep. When she awoke no more than half an hour later, she recalled vividly that she had dreamed of a gull flying round and round her pirogue and laughing at her.

  It was a recollection more curious than uncomfortable, for she associated nothing whatever with any of her dreams—except those about her father, which were sometimes disturbing when she couldn’t separate dream conversations from genuine ones.

  Paloma slipped overboard and cleaned her mask. She grabbed the anchor line and took deep breaths and pulled for the bottom. Ten feet from the surface she stopped.

  Something was wrong. The seamount had changed. She was disoriented. Was it her eyes? Had more time passed than she realized? Nothing looked the same. An entire section of the seamount seemed covered in black.

  She closed her eyes and willed herself to stay calm, to sort through conflicting images. When she felt more composed, she opened her eyes and looked down again. And then she could see what had perplexed her. Not five feet away was the largest manta ray she had ever seen.

  It was like a black cloak, or a big blanket that, from this short distance, blocked out most of her view of the seamount.

  It was not only the proximity of the giant that had deceived her; it was also the fact that the animal was not moving at all. It was lying absolutely still in the water, as if suspended from an invisible ceiling. It did not look alive.

  But it had to be alive, for how else would it have gotten there? Dead, it would have sunk to the bottom.

  She dropped farther down, expecting the animal at any moment to shrug its wing and move away. But the manta continued to hover, motionless.

  Her toes were within inches of the manta’s back, and now she could see nothing of the seamount below. It was like landing on a black field that extended almost as far as she could see. The ray had to be more than twenty feet across, for she judged that she could have lain down four times across its wings and still not covered them tip to tip.

  This is the grandfather of all mantas, she thought. Why is it drifting around? Is it dying?

  Paloma had to go up for air. Making as little stir as possible in the water, she floated up. As the distance between her and the manta grew, she gained perspective on the whole animal, and she could see that there was a reason it was not behaving normally. Long, thin things were trailing beneath and behind it.

  Her face broke water. She breathed in and out several times, each breath a bit deeper than the last, drew one final breath that seemed to suck air down into her feet, and went down again.

  The manta had not moved. This time she approached it from the front, and immediately she saw what was wrong.

  Behind the “horn” on the left side, the animal’s flesh was torn in a broad, deep gash. Knotted ropes were embedded in the shredded flesh, their ends dangling loose, like tails.

  The manta must have become fouled in a fisherman’s net, then panicked, and fla
iling frantically to get free, driven its great bulk against the taut ropes, forcing them to bite even deeper into its flesh. Finally, it had escaped—undoubtedly, Paloma thought, leaving an angry fisherman to curse his wretched fate and declare that all mantas were devilfish that deserved to die.

  But the manta’s victory was illusory, for it was bound to die. Paloma had seen many wounded animals—cut or hooked or scraped or bitten—and she knew that in the sea there was no time of truce, there was no mercy.

  The wound had weakened the manta, and because the ropes still festered in the open sore there had been no chance for healing to begin. Unable to pursue its food, the manta could not eat as much as it should. The less it ate, the weaker it would become; the weaker it became, the less it could eat.

  Before long, the manta would begin to emit the silent signals of distress that would be received and interpreted by every animal on the seamount—especially by the larger animals, the predators.

  First would come the tiny, voracious fish, like the sergeant majors. The signals they interpreted would tell them that it was safe to ravage the bits of dying flesh in the open wound. They would swim on the wound, opening it further.

  The manta would grow weaker still. Little by little, it would appear to be, and would become, less and less formidable. Its sensory transmitters, incapable of human guile, would continue to broadcast signals of increasing vulnerability. Inevitably, the manta would be committing inadvertent suicide.

  Sharks would begin to gather, circling at a distance, their receivers assessing each new signal, until one of them—particularly hungry, perhaps, or agitated or perhaps simply bold—would break the circle and dart in at the manta and tear away a ragged bite of meat.

  The end would come quickly then, in an explosion of blood and a cloud of shreds of skin and sinew.

  Paloma could hear the pulse in her temples as she swam down toward the manta. The animal knew she was there—the eye beneath the gaping wound followed her as she drew near—but it did not move.

  Her momentum was carrying her past the manta, over its head. She put out a hand to stop herself, and her fingers curled around a hard ledge above the mouth and between the two horns. The flesh there felt firm—like a taut muscle—but slick, for it was coated with a natural mucous slime. The feeling didn’t startle Paloma, for she had touched many fish and had felt the same slime. It was a shield against bacteria and other things in the rich salt water that would cause illness or injury.

  Jobim had taught her that if a fish you didn’t need was caught in your net, and if you picked it up, intending to release it, you had to be careful that your fingers didn’t scrape away the protective coating from the fish’s skin. If the slime was removed, a sore might develop on that spot, or a burrowing creature might discover the opening and settle in and begin to gnaw away. A fish that had been handled too much before being released usually didn’t survive for long.

  Apparently, the manta was no more startled by her touch than was Paloma. It did not bolt from her; it did not twitch or shudder or shake. It didn’t move. It just lay there, floating, suspended in midwater.

  It has no fear of me, Paloma thought. And why should it? It knows no enemies. But I am a strange animal and I am touching this manta, and it is not a common occurrence in nature for one wild animal to allow another to touch like this. Still, mantas do put up with remoras stuck onto their bodies and dragging behind. Maybe, as far as this manta knows, I’m just a big remora.

  A swift flow of water was holding Paloma horizontal, her flippers fluttering like a flag in a high wind. Somehow, the manta was managing to stay perfectly still in the strong current, without seeming to exert any effort at all. If Paloma were to let go, she would be swept away.

  Now she reached with her other hand for the same ledge of muscle, and she tucked her knees up underneath her and knelt on the manta’s back. The skin was like a shark’s, not really skin but a carpet made up of millions of tiny toothlike things. They all faced to the rear, and so as Paloma’s hand stroked the skin from front to back, it felt as smooth as a greased ceramic bowl. But as her knees inched up, back to front, the manta’s skin, like coarse sandpaper, abraded them.

  The terrible gash in the manta’s flesh was beside Paloma’s left hand. Some of the knotted ropes were buried several inches deep. Most of the flesh was whitish-gray, but some was pink and some yellow.

  Once, the year before Jobim had died, a strange organism had drifted over the seamount and attacked the schooling jacks, causing suppurating sores on their sides. Jobim had caught one of the jacks and shown it to Paloma, pointing out the different flesh tones of the ailing fish: White-gray was healthy, pink was inflamed, and yellow signaled the generation of a puslike substance that showed that the animal’s body had activated its defense mechanisms.

  A few of the ropes snaked out of the manta’s wound and trailed behind, tugged by the rushing water. Does it feel pain? Paloma wondered. It must. That’s probably why it stays so still: Movement would tug the ropes harder and make them shift and wiggle, and that would hurt more.

  Gripping the ledge tightly with her right hand, she let go with her left and reached for the rope snarled nearest to the surface of the wound. It was a jumble of knots and kinks, and it vibrated as the water flowed through it.

  Be quick, Paloma told herself, like when the doctor gives an injection. Grab it, pull it free and cast it away, all before the manta knows what’s happening.

  She threaded her fingers deep into the mess of rope and made a fist around as much as her hand could grasp. Then she yanked.

  It was as if she had thrown a switch that turned the manta on. The animal heaved both wings at once, churning up a maelstrom that threw Paloma off its back and tumbled her into a spinning somersault.

  By the time she had righted herself and cleared her mask and waited for the storm of bubbles to dissipate, the manta was flying away into the dark water, ropes fluttering behind. It did not make a sound, but Paloma imagined that she heard an outraged wail of pain.

  She kicked toward the surface, trailing some of the ropes in her hand, wishing she had had time to grab more, hoping that by removing some of them she might have increased the manta’s chances of survival.

  The sun was still high when Paloma left the seamount and started to paddle toward home. She was tired and hungry and cold. But most of all, she was lonely.

  It was a curious contradiction that the better her day on the seamount was, the lonelier she felt when it was over, and because today had been particularly exciting, she felt acutely lonely.

  The problem was not that her experiences were solitary—she liked being alone—but that there was no one on the island with whom she could share the wonder, the exhilaration, of her day when she got home. There was no friend who would understand, no sister or cousin who would care. In fact, there was no one on the island to whom she had confided the existence of her seamount or what she did all day in her boat.

  There were no other girls Paloma’s age on the island. Why, no one knew: a quirk of nature. There were plenty of females many years older—women now, with children of their own—and plenty of boys. But no girls. From the moment Paloma had been old enough to know what it was to be alone, she had been alone. Of course, she had her mother, but there were limits to what she felt comfortable talking to her mother about, and there were limits to what Miranda wanted to hear.

  Paloma paddled harder, trying to stroke away the loneliness, to erase it with sheer muscle power. And she was trying, as well, to warm up, for gooseflesh had risen on her arms and legs, and the fine yellow hairs were standing on end.

  The water never felt cold to her—and it was warm, at least eighty-five degrees—but no matter how warm it felt, it was always cooler than Paloma’s body temperature, so spending hours in it sucked the heat from her body and caused its temperature to drop. It was not a dangerous cold—“You can live for a week in this water,” Jobim had told her, adding with a grin, “if the sun doesn’t cook you or somet
hing doesn’t eat you.” But it was uncomfortable.

  She could have combated the cold, however, and eased her hunger, too, by gaining weight. A layer of fat made a fine insulator. But she was reluctant to gain weight, to grow fat, any sooner than necessary. Being fat would slow her down, take away her agility and worst of all, signal that she was just like all the other women of Santa Maria Island.

  For them, fatness seemed to be a natural progression in life. As girls they were slender; in their late teens or early twenties they became robust; in their mid-to-late twenties they were stocky, in their thirties fat and in their forties mountainous. (Paloma’s mother was about to turn forty, and over the past few years her figure had gradually disappeared, its contours absorbed into her trunk.) Those who survived into their sixties or seventies often shrank back to whippet thinness.

  Paloma saw herself as different. She hoped, prayed, knew that she was special. At least she had been special to her father.

  It had been Jobim who made her feel special, had in effect decreed that she be special. After the second of Jo’s accidents underwater, the one that finally convinced Jobim that his son would never be at home in the sea and would instead have to spend his life upon it, after Jobim had begun to tutor Paloma and had discovered how naturally and quickly she took to the sea and had determined that she would become a person of the sea, he had told Miranda that their daughter was not to be compelled to follow the normal path to womanhood, was not to be confined to the house and the pots and the washboard. He would take her with him and would teach her things about the sea and would teach her how to learn other things on her own. She would of course contribute to the household eventually, but how and what she would contribute must be left up to her.

  Miranda had tried to argue, but Jobim was a man who, when he had made up his mind about something important, tended to reinforce his decision to himself until he became impossible to argue with. And Miranda knew that it was important—even vital—to Jobim that one of his children follow him into the sea.