The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  So one day Jobim had taken Paloma fishing. She was quite young then and had never before been taken to sea. In fact, she had rarely been in Jobim’s boat, except for holiday excursions to visit the sea-lion rookery and a few trips to La Paz.

  They were alone in the boat, and Paloma was thrilled. She did not ask why she had been excused from her household chores, or where they were going. She was to be on the sea with Papa, and that was enough. The last thing she could have imagined was that Jobim intended the journey to alter Paloma’s view of herself.

  The sea was oily calm, so flat that the soft swells looked like bulges in a jelly, and Paloma had been able to kneel on the forward thwart and hang out over the bow of the boat. The sharp wooden prow sliced through the water like a fine blade through flesh. She thought of the surface of the sea as the skin of a huge fish, and of the bow as a knife that was filleting it for market.

  Jobim had anchored the boat in what seemed to Paloma to be the middle of the sea. Actually, the boat was directly over the seamount, but Paloma had never yet been underwater, so she had no idea that the sea bottom was a landscape of different terrains. As far as she knew, the bottom was distant and dangerous, an unknown country, like death.

  Jobim had baited a big hook with half a needlefish, but he did not throw the line overboard. Instead, he handed her a face mask and snorkel and told her to put them on. Then, with his own mask propped up on his forehead, he told Paloma to jump overboard and hang onto the anchor line.

  “Here?” Paloma was shocked. In the middle of the sea? “Why?”

  “I want to show you something about girls,” Jobim had said, and though what he said made no sense to her, she obeyed and slipped over the side.

  Jobim jumped into the water and hung beside her, holding the anchor rope in the crook of an elbow so as not to drift away in the current. Slowly he fed the fishing line through his fingers, dropping the baited hook down toward the seamount.

  Paloma’s first sight of the seamount was breathtaking, a discovery as miraculous as if she had been given a secret glimpse of heaven, for here was a world she had not known existed. It was strange and very active and very silent and (she was surprised when she recalled it later) not at all threatening. It was almost like watching a film, for although the living that was going on down there was not far away, it was somehow separate from her world, unquestionably real but wonderfully new, enchanted.

  They lay together on the surface, their faces in the water, breathing through the rubber snorkel tubes. Jobim spoke to Paloma by rotating his head a quarter turn, until his mouth was out of the water, and Paloma could hear him clearly without moving: She couldn’t tell whether she was receiving the sound of his voice down her snorkel tube and through her mouth or filtered through the few inches of seawater that covered her ears. Neither way made any sense to her, but she didn’t care: His words came through distinctly, though they did sound hollow and far away.

  The nylon fishing line was soon invisible in the water, but the bait was unmistakable—a white morsel that dangled provocatively just above the bottom and moved, not with its own rhythm like a living thing in harmony with the current, but like a dead thing caught and held.

  Small fish approached the bait and hovered around it, seeming to appraise it for delicacy and danger. Jobim had made no attempt to hide the hook, and now and then a glint of steel would flash in a ray of light. Whether the fish were not enticed by the needlefish, or were scared by the hook, Paloma could not tell, but none of them went for the bait.

  Then they were gone. The small fish vanished. The bait hung unattended, swaying in the current.

  “Where did they go?”

  “Watch,” Jobim said. “Just watch.”

  For a moment or two, nothing happened. What had been a bustling community was now a barren plain. Paloma half expected to hear a clap of thunder or see a bolt of lightning, for such a change had to be the result of a natural drama.

  And then, from the darkness at the edge of the seamount came the sharks—hammerheads, three of them, one half again as large as the other two: silent searchers moving with a relentless arrogance that broadcast their sovereignty over the seamount. Their bizarre, T-shaped heads swung slowly from side to side, gathering signals from the sea, interpreting them and sending out signals of their own. These soundless impulses preceded them everywhere, giving fair warning of their arrival, allowing all but proper prey to depart in safety.

  Jobim jigged the bait, and though Paloma heard nothing new, she could see that the sharks received the message clearly, for they swung, in formation, toward the dancing piece of meat. They circled it once, then again, and then one of the smaller sharks broke the circle and darted in at the bait. Jobim jerked the line, and the bait popped up and away from the shark’s mouth.

  The three sharks circled again, faster now, each in turn shaking its head with a brusque, annoyed motion. They were perplexed, because something was not as it should be: They were receiving signals that reported dead meat, but the prey was not behaving as if dead.

  The second of the two smaller sharks shot forward, and once more Jobim jerked the bait away. This time he did not let it down; he pulled it up toward the surface, challenging the sharks to follow it. Only one did, the largest. The other two hung below, angrily circling nothing.

  The big shark did not attack the bait. It followed patiently, with sinuous grace. As it drew near, Paloma saw that this animal, which on the bottom had looked like a good-size fish, was enormous—bigger than she, bigger than Papa, almost as big as Papa’s boat.

  Paloma was terrified. She trusted Papa totally, knew that she would jump off a mountain or swallow needles if he said she should, but to play games with a big man-eating shark …

  Unable to take her eyes from the advancing shark, she flailed with her free hand, desperate to grab the gunwale of the boat and pull herself to safety.

  “Stop it,” Jobim said. “Lie still.”

  Paloma lay still, but she was sure the shark could hear her heart. Were they like dogs, could they smell fear? She held her breath, hoping to mute the timpani in her chest, but that only made her heartbeat seem louder.

  The bait was six or eight feet away, and the shark a foot beyond it. Jobim kept pulling, but now the shark stopped coming. It circled instead, the black eye on the end of its fleshy white “T” watching as Jobim reeled in the bait and, with a single twist, removed the hook from it.

  Paloma turned with the shark, rotating like a flower petal in a tidal eddy, panicked that she might lose sight of the circling hunter: There was something unbearable about knowing that the animal was there and not being able to see it.

  A movement below caught her eye. Now the other two sharks were rising. They kept their distance from the larger one, seeming to defer to it, but they were growing bolder. And though they were definitely smaller than the other shark, relativity was the only comfort: Her father was six feet tall, and each of these sharks was at least as long as he was tall.

  Jobim held the half-needlefish out to the big shark and wiggled it with his fingertips. The circling pattern grew tighter. Now the shark was missing Paloma by only three or four feet as it swept by. The head was shaking actively, the crescent mouth opening and closing in expectant cadence.

  Jobim pushed the needlefish out into open water, released it, and quickly drew back his hand. The shark passed by, and the fish disappeared. There had been no snapping, no biting, no shaking of the head. The shark had simply inhaled the needlefish.

  It made two more tight turns around Jobim and Paloma, then gradually loosened its pattern, like a spring unwinding. Its black eye never left them, but there was no urgency to its behavior. It was waiting.

  Jobim reached inside his shorts, undid a knot and came out with a whole needlefish. Paloma had not seen him do it, but in the boat he must have stuffed a plastic bag of needlefish inside his pants—out of sight of the sharks and, because the neck of the bag was tied off, out of their range of smell.

  I
mmediately, the shark once again swept close by and resumed its tight circling pattern.

  This time, Jobim broke the needlefish in two and shook both halves and then dropped them. As they fell, trailing bits of meat and puffs of oil, Jobim tapped Paloma’s arm and motioned her to watch.

  The smaller sharks sensed the food and rose toward it eagerly, hungrily, their heads shaking quickly. At the same time, the large shark dropped its head and raised its pectoral fins and snapped its tail back and forth, which drove the body downward like a spear.

  For a moment, it seemed that the sharks must collide. All three raced toward the pieces of fish, which continued to fall together.

  Paloma saw that the small sharks were bound to win, for the needlefish was falling toward them and away from the bigger shark.

  When the pieces of needlefish were no more than a foot from the mouths of each of the smaller sharks—when their victory was inevitable—both, simultaneously and inexplicably, turned away. The big shark soared down upon the pieces of fish, sucking in the first piece then turning away and making a wide circle and letting the second morsel fall—utterly casual, confident that there was no hurry, that the food would be there for the taking—then banking and descending in a dive and gobbling the last bit of food.

  The smaller sharks continued downward, away from the large one, away from the food, away from conflict. They shook their heads and hunched their backs and flailed their tails.

  They’re like puppies, Paloma thought. They’re angry and upset and there’s nothing they can do about it, so they’re running around yapping and chasing their tails.

  The big shark returned and began once again to circle. Jobim motioned to Paloma to climb back into the boat. She didn’t hesitate. Keeping her eye on the shark, she reached up and gripped the gunwale and pulled herself to the side of the boat. She took a deep breath and tested the firmness of her grasp on the wood. When Jobim had first taught her to swim, he had told her always to get in and out of the water quickly, for it was in the marginal moments—half in, half out of the water—that a person was most vulnerable to shark attack: It was then that the person looked truly like a wounded fish; most of the body was out of the water so it appeared smaller, and what remained in the water (lower legs and feet) kicked erratically and made a commotion like a struggling animal.

  She spun, grabbed the gunwale with both hands, hoisted herself out of the water and over the gunwale, and tumbled in a heap to the bottom of the boat. She lay there for a second, breathing heavily, then realized—with a surge of adrenaline that rushed through her arms and pooled warmly in her stomach—that Jobim hadn’t followed her. Her mask was still on her face, so she leaned over the side and peered down into the water.

  Jobim clung to the anchor line, and he turned with the shark as it circled. Again Paloma thought of dogs—two males, one an intruder into the other’s neighborhood, circling each other, appraising each other, searching for weaknesses.

  When the shark was at the most distant point in its circling pattern, on the far side of the boat, Jobim pulled the bag of fish from his shorts and dropped it. The bag sank slowly, yawing like a leaf falling from a tall tree, and Jobim waited until he was sure the shark had seen it. Then, as the shark started down after the bag, Jobim pulled himself aboard the boat.

  They ate a lunch of mangoes and bananas and a slab of dried, salted cabrío, making sure to eat the fish first and the mango last so that the juice from the mango would wash away the thirst caused by the salt in the cabrío.

  They did not speak while they ate. Paloma didn’t know what to say. She was certain she was supposed to have learned something, but she didn’t know what it was and she wanted to review everything in her mind before asking any questions. Jobim knew that Paloma was searching for the lesson she was supposed to have learned, and he wanted the experience to ripen in her mind before he explained it.

  Jobim rinsed his fingers in the sea and said, “Were you afraid?”

  “Yes,” said Paloma, and then, worried: “Is that bad?”

  Jobim laughed. “Of course not. I don’t think there was much danger, but they’re fearsome things.”

  “No danger?” Paloma felt almost disappointed.

  “People aren’t their normal food. If the water’s clear and they can see you, and if you’re not bleeding or dead, usually they’ll leave you alone.”

  “Usually,” Paloma repeated.

  “Usually.” Jobim smiled. “Now: Do you know what you’ve learned?”

  “No. I know I learned that you don’t know what sharks are going to do. I knew those two were going to take the needlefish from the big one, and then they didn’t.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “There’s a reason?”

  “I told you I was going to show you something about girls.” Jobim smiled again. “The big shark was a female, a very young one. A little girl, as sharks go.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know she’s a female? It’s almost as it is on people. On the male you can see what are called claspers. They secure the connection during breeding. The female doesn’t have any. As for how I know she’s young, she had no scars on her at all. That’s as it is with humans, too: The older you get, the more weather-beaten and cut up and scarred you are. An old shark looks like Viejo. And an old female shark has even more scars, because during mating the males prevent the females from throwing them off by biting the females’ backs.”

  “How old was she?”

  “I don’t know. Three or four years, I guess. Nobody knows how long they live or what kills them. It’s hard to imagine a shark dying of old age, but maybe it happens.”

  “What were the other two?”

  “Both males, both older. You saw the way they turned and ran when that young girl came at them.” Jobim paused, knowing what was going through Paloma’s mind.

  She frowned and said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not to a human, because we’ve been taught all sorts of ideas about males and females and the natural order of things. Males are bigger and do most of the physical work and support the family and make the decisions and must be looked up to and obeyed because … because why? Because that’s nature? No. Somewhere way back, there must have been a good reason to make the males dominant. Probably because they were strong and did the hunting. And when strength was all there was, the stronger you were, the more important you were.

  “And that’s true with a lot of animals—the bigger and stronger are the most important. With sharks, the females are almost always bigger and tougher and meaner. Sharks have a pecking order, just like the chickens at the house. You saw it right then. When there’s food around, the biggest eats first and eats till it’s full. Then the others get to feed, but always in the order of their size and bad temper. That’s why you don’t see males and females together very often: The males would starve to death.”

  “But with people,” Paloma said, “females aren’t the strongest or the toughest or the meanest. They’re …”

  “Who says?” Jobim cut her off. “Strong doesn’t only mean biggest; the toughest isn’t just the one who can smash something with his bare hands. Strong can mean smart and clever and creative. The toughest can be the one who knows how to survive without wasting energy, or how to swim from here to there against the tide without getting exhausted and drowning.

  “Animals have to be what nature made them—big or not, strong or not. That’s what sets their place. But people can set their own place. If they don’t have one thing, they can make up for it with something else, with knowledge or experience. Do you understand?”

  Paloma nodded.

  Jobim knelt down beside her and spoke softly. The image of his brown forehead and black eyebrows and broad shoulders framed against the sunlit sky was engraved forever on her mind, the sound of his mellow voice reduced to a hoarse whisper was one she would recall whenever, after his death, she talked to him. “All I want to tell you, all I want today to teach yo
u, is that there are no ‘must-bes’ in life. Nothing is inevitable.

  “You don’t have to cook the food and sweep the floor and have babies. You are a female, and that is a fine thing. You are a young female, and that is finer still. But the finest thing is that you are a person who can decide for yourself what you want your life to be. You will teach people to respect you for that. More important, you will respect yourself for that, and anyone who doesn’t is a fool, to be pitied.”

  Never, after that day, had Paloma wished to be a boy. She had let her hair grow until it cascaded down her back. She had watched and felt with pride and fascination every change in her body.

  A few months after Jobim’s death, a big storm blew through, a chubasco as big, if not as sudden, as the one that had killed Jobim. (That one had given no warning at all. He had surfaced from a dive to find his boat bucking and heaving in mountainous seas. He must have tried to board it and been knocked unconscious by the motor or the boat, for when he was found dead on the beach, there was a big blue dent in his forehead.) This storm knocked every bush and shrub flat against the ground and lashed the island with blinding, stinging rains.

  The first rumblings began in her body almost simultaneously with the onset of the storm, and the cramps seemed to her to be echoing the thunder. She was frightened briefly, for her first thought was that she was becoming violently ill. Then her fear melted into a vague apprehension. Miranda had not warned her about what would happen when the woman change began inside her, had mentioned it only in vague, embarrassed generalities, and had, finally, turned it over to God to deal with. Jobim had done what he could to prepare her, but he could not know what to expect, how she would feel, what exactly would happen to her.

  He had prepared her well enough, though, so that soon she felt the comforting conviction that everything that was happening was natural and healthy and—she remembered his word—fine.

  She wanted him to know what was happening to her, and how she was responding to it, that she was becoming a woman and was proud of it.