Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  I now tried to access some of what I’d experienced that day on the cusp of my trip, to resummon a few particles of exhilaration, remind myself of how powerful I had felt walking toward Constituyentes, where I boarded the Ruta 100 bus that took me to the terminal, and even during mood-menacing moments while Tomás and I awaited our departure, even then I had felt indomitable, poised to leap out of myself and into another.

  AT THE FIRST HINTS OF SUNDOWN I HEADED TO THE bar, arriving at our table minutes before the merman. I saw his face appear beside a column of the palapa, survey the scene, and then break into a smile, faint yet fond, as he walked over. That evening, no cardigan: the white tank top allowed for his muscled arms to come into relief, and also highlighted the chest against which I’d pressed my head, a few hairs emerging but thankfully not too many. That evening I didn’t speak much and instead joined him in his silence, a comfortable silence eased along by drinks and music, and by the frequent exchange of glances that made me long for more. But the more I longed, the more timid I grew. As if sensing my inhibition the merman pushed aside our drinks and reached out and touched my hand, caressed it once and for no more than a few seconds, but in doing so he raised the wattage.

  At that moment a metallic-blue fly came buzzing into his face. He waved it away and took a sip of beer. Before long the insistent insect zoomed past again and landed on the table, its movements soon curtailed by the sticky residue. Tiny feet struggled to lift off, the antennae went berserk, wings fluttered anxiously. An impossible feat to detach itself from the surface. I observed the little bundle of panic and considered coming to its rescue, in fact had already removed the straw from my cocktail and just sucked out the remaining drops of tequila sunrise, when the merman’s fist came pounding down and reduced the fly to the black smudge of an instant. Then, more delicately, he picked up the remains between two fingers, opened his mouth, and flung it in. Whatever the fly had been collecting—sand, dirt, experience—was swallowed down. A queer chuckle, then back to serious. I smiled nervously, a bit horrified, and debated whether I still wanted to kiss the mouth that had just eaten a fly. In any case, there was no need for debate, since the merman wiped his lips with the back of his hand and rose from his seat, offering his usual goodbye, the half arc of a wave, and with something close to relief I watched his tall figure cut through the bar and disappear into the night.

  As usual the ocean was restless, a counterpoint of white crests and dark moving hills, and one could see, almost feel, the spray from afar. Once in my hammock I thought about the fly and its aborted journey. And of the merman’s gesture: anger, joke, or provocation? The overhead lamp burned out, its ghostly white moths departed. I say burned out but in truth each palapa was run by a woman, usually of large physique, who dictated its mood via the main lamp overhead. Wick or filament, that’d been the question, until one day I’d discovered a pile of wires, a coil of current connected to the lamps overhead, and I couldn’t help concluding that each palapa was to some extent deftly choreographed by its woman, a secret production manager who observed from behind a screen before deciding on the right level of illumination.

  I shut my eyes, opened them, shut, reopened, readying myself for an even deeper black. But each time I reopened them I could still see the outlines of items around me, Tomás’s empty hammock, the wooden beams overhead, more clearly than night usually allowed. I leaned out and gazed up at the sky, and there I discovered another light source, far more constant and powerful than any lamp. A ripe, dazzling moon, the kind I’d seen in picture books as a child. I asked myself how I hadn’t noticed it earlier, this commanding presence in the sky. Yet my grand view was soon marred by the sound of the waves, they seemed louder with every roll, why was it that people always found it so peaceful, in every shop there were recordings of waves washing over more waves, it was a mystery how that eerie disembodied sound could lead anyone to sleep, though it’s true that in the city when city noises kept me awake I would pretend the traffic was the tide, and that night in Zipolite I reversed the illusion and envisioned the waves as a steady stream of cars, coming toward me and receding.

  I was considering getting up again, even returning to the bar for one more drink, when I heard a high-pitched voice, a voice speaking a language I didn’t recognize, remote from the cadence of Spanish and the indigenous tongues of Oaxaca. The words had a gentle ring to them, soft vowel sounds each cushioned by a sshh, and the hum of a dzzz here and there like a bee pollinating the sentence. I strained my ears to catch every syllable. A second voice, in the same language and nearly as high, joined in. I quietly sat up and tried to keep my hammock from swaying. Standing a few feet away, their silhouettes poignant against the moon, were two small figures, about as tall as children, in baggy garments. They had come to a halt and one of them was pointing up into the sky. A gush of admiration, more words uttered in the strange tongue, and then they vanished.

  Tomás didn’t believe me the next morning. For once he was there, curled up in his hammock, immobilized by a hangover. When I told him what I’d seen, that I’d seen two of the dwarfs, he mumbled something, threw an arm across his face, and rolled over. I stood by his hammock and shook the cords, repeating what I’d said, how could my words not produce more of a reaction, but he only groaned. I had no choice but to search for them on my own. What else was there to do, and besides, the only reason I’d wanted Tomás along was because he was familiar with the geography and four eyes are better than two. I was certain I had seen them, a full moon is nearly ten times brighter than the quarter phase, and my ears hadn’t fooled me either, I’d viewed enough news clips and movies to recognize the sound of Russian or something akin.

  After a quick visit to El Cósmico, the coffee unexpectedly bitter that morning, I scoured the beach for signs, finding meaning in a set of hammocks hanging unusually low to the ground and a procession of mini-footsteps that led toward the sea. Down by the rocks I spotted three blond figures in old-fashioned swimming trunks, but when I ran over they turned into European children with their nanny. More figures hunched over a chessboard turned out to be twin brothers enjoying a game of checkers. In other words, the dwarfs were everywhere and nowhere, and after a few hours my energy began to wane.

  That evening I could hardly wait to meet the merman, to tell him what I’d seen, two figures speaking a language that was foreign to me but possibly not to him, two small figures, staring up at the moon in joint contemplation, scarcely a vision one would anticipate at the beach, especially glimpsed from one’s hammock. I arrived at the bar with the first striations of dusk and claimed our table at the back, people starting to trickle in as the music gradually mounted in beats and volume, but no sign of the merman. A pair of dogs entered, looked around, and left. I fetched a drink and eventually a second, scanning each face. One hour went by. Another. I decided to pace my drinking but soon gave in and tried the local blue cocktail. The fabulists from my first few nights had all left, either migrated to other beaches or gone off to carry out their missions, and the new conversations around me sounded too dull to pursue.

  By ten o’clock I was running out of cash and patience, and the blue cocktail with its disintegrating olives had tasted like aquarium. When a man with thin lips and curly hair offered to buy me a drink, I accepted. What was I doing on my own, he inquired, to which I replied I was waiting for my boyfriend. After bringing me my drink he fetched his from another table and helped himself to the free seat by my side. He then asked what I was doing at the beach. I replied that apart from being on holiday with my boyfriend I was searching for a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. Did you say Ukrainian? Yes, they defected from a Soviet circus that had been touring Mexico. I gave no details, only the headline, but the headline alone was enough to send the man into a tizzy, and in this sudden state of agitation he informed me that he worked part-time at the Trotsky House in Mexico City, soon to be turned into a museum on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. A deep flush that had begun in his face quickly extended to his words as he
explained how shaken he was by the thought of Ukrainian nationals at large in our land, who knew where the situation might lead, and after three attempts at lighting his cigarette he told me that Mexico had been the very first country on the American continent to establish relations with the USSR in 1924, and then President Cárdenas had welcomed Trotsky in 1936; well, that was fine, but then Mexico entered World War II by declaring war on the Axis powers and cozying up to the Soviet Union, was I even aware of that, and then continued without waiting for a reply, so who knew what might happen now that these Ukrainian nationals were on the loose, Mexico was surely a haven for Soviet spies because of its location, so close to the United States and so far from everywhere else, in fact he’d heard that Mexican officials allowed the KGB to carry out its operations in our country, indeed many of the personnel at the Soviet Embassy were agents working undercover as chauffeurs, clerks, and diplomats, did I know what the KGB was, the man asked. Yes, I nodded, and he paused for a moment to finish off his drink and his cigarette before offering some final thoughts. Who better to go around collecting confidential information, prying their way into people’s innermost worlds, than circus performers? He wondered whether they’d been preparing for years, whether they secretly knew Spanish. Whether they were, or could become, significant pawns in a larger political game. Whether they had anything to do with the 17,000 tons of powdered milk contaminated by Chernobyl fallout that was on the verge of being distributed across Mexico earlier that year before the whistle was blown. Whether . . . ¡Jorge, qué haces, ven aquí! His speculation was cut short by a woman in a flowered dress. The man excused himself and slunk off.

  If the conversation had gone in another direction I might have told him that I’d glimpsed two of the dwarfs the night before, but I was in no hurry to send the man off on their trail. In addition, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take his words. That said, I had been to Trotsky’s house myself, twice, once on a school trip and once with my parents, and could see why he got so worked up. It was the sort of place that made you mistrust everyone, and those watchtowers didn’t even serve their purpose since Trotsky’s assassin walked in through the door in a thick overcoat, sweating profusely in the Mexican summer yet raising no suspicion, and along with the towers I remembered the rows of empty hutches in the garden, their green wooden frames and rusty wire mesh, in which Trotsky kept his pet chickens and rabbits, rising early each morning to tend to them, an activity that according to his wife brought him tremendous calm. One could trust rabbits and chickens more than any human being, you didn’t have to be a revolutionary to know that. And for several moments I was back at the house on Viena in Coyoacán, there in the garden with its variants of green, including the cacti Trotsky had collected on various expeditions and carried back and planted himself. As I sat there on the bench in the garden I tried to work out, or at least fathom, the continuum between this secluded place and the present, aware that Trotsky was murdered before the beginning of the Cold War, before Soviet circuses toured Mexico, before an age when cosmonauts were catapulted into space, carving paths in the firmament while equipped with sleeping masks to shield them from a succession of sunrises in orbit, in other words, before the Soviet Union of my imagination.

  I was startled from my thoughts by the abrupt appearance of the merman, summoned, I couldn’t help feeling, by my reverie. With a grunt of acknowledgment he sat down, clutching his cold bottle of Negra Modelo, his breathing altered and irregular, the rhythm of a system that had overheated and was still cooling down. I couldn’t imagine what had kept him away until now, the clock read 10:40, but refrained from asking. As soon as he’d settled in and taken a few sips of beer I told him about the dwarfs, how I’d glimpsed them under the full moon after we’d said good night, had he seen this moon, I asked, hanging over the beach in dejected incandescence, and as best I could I described the scene I had witnessed, the tiny duo, the sound of their language, the way they’d pointed up at the sky and then wandered off. But the merman’s face remained impassive, even when I repeated that the figures were almost definitely two of the Ukrainian dwarfs, full-moon vivid, he simply wasn’t impressed, in fact he began to yawn and his hands started to undress his beer, peeling off the label that was draped across the bottle’s chest like a sash. Perhaps for him it was a matter of little consequence and in his country the news was full of such stories of defection and reappearance, who was to know, and that night he seemed distracted, for the first time since we’d met his eyes weren’t fastened on me and kept roaming the bar.

  We’d just replenished our drinks, or rather the waiter had brought us two more, when the overhead lamps flickered, first once and then several times more and then, much to the dismay of everyone present, they went out altogether, plunging the palapa into night, the real night we’d been ignoring. The music stopped too. One of the barmen tapped a spoon against the side of a glass and called for silence. Silence took a while to achieve, but once most of the voices had dropped off he announced there’d been a short circuit, but not to worry—we just had to wait for the Zipolite electrician to arrive, and soon all would be back to normal.

  It occurred to me to tell the merman about the time of the storm. The dash through the typewriter rain. The Covadonga. Julián and his shadow play. Once I’d finished we sat listening to the restlessness of people around us whose revelry had lost its momentum, and after fifteen minutes or so the lamps came back on, tentative at first and then full glow, and the light revealed an intriguing sight: the merman on the edge of his seat, a feverish look in his eyes, so fevered, clammy, and intense, I worried for an instant he’d been bitten by a malarial mosquito. Before I could ask whether something was wrong, though I sensed it wasn’t, he leaned forward and took my face between his hands and brought it gently to his. There and then the language stopped, and without finishing our drinks we rose and found the nearest way out of the palapa, into shadow and across more shadow while somewhere in the distance a lantern gave off an orangey glow and the sea roared in my ears as if I could reach out and run my fingers through the water, and more than ever I sensed that in Zipolite anything was possible. Once in my hammock his strong hands grabbed at my clothes and began pawing at my body, the same pair of hands that had patted and moistened and shaped the sand, but also, how could I forget, the same hand that had pounded the fly. A current surged through me as though the ocean and its waves had entered, an oceanic force pushing farther and farther in, and the merman murmured something in his language, and I in mine, as the hammock sagged closer to the sand, its cords stretching and threatening to unravel, a drop in pressure, a rise in pressure, a riding of the waves, a journey to the seabed, a thrust back up to the surface, and something within me coiled tighter and tighter until it could coil no more and then sprang undone. The merman remained with me until the early hours of the morning, when the beach was starting to awaken. I watched him rise from the hammock, slip on his clothes and sandals, and after a final kiss he crept off, just as the sky began to soften from bruised purple to blue. In his canto to the ocean Lautréamont calls it a vast bruise on the body of the earth, yet I couldn’t help feeling as though the bruise was left, rather, on those who came into contact with the ocean, and not the ocean itself.

  MORNING TOSSES NIGHT’S ACTIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS out the window, and the morning light confirmed that the merman was gone, evaporated like the top layer of mist from a dream. After a visit to El Cósmico, the coffee as bitter as the previous day, I roamed the shore. There were fewer tourists than usual; large swaths lay empty apart from clumps of seaweed and the occasional bird prodding the ground with its beak. And where were the shells, I asked myself, I couldn’t understand why Zipolite wasn’t studded with nacre, hardly any ornamentation beyond the glitter of the sand itself, and only in a certain light. And what about the creatures within shells, surely there should be more of those too, creatures who lived half exposed and half secluded, the hidden half lost in its own geometry, tenanted shells and untenanted, cast off by waves or wi
ly predators, and in my overcaffeinated state I envisioned the merman as one of their human equivalents, a creature with a conflicted relationship to the sun who sought at certain hours to retreat.

  In the evening I sat at our table and faced the empty chair. I caught the waiter looking over, intrigued to see me on my own. But the merman did not show up, not at ten or eleven or midnight. He was probably on his way home, soaring over the ocean, back to his unnamed country, with all my stories. At midnight I returned to the palapa. In the distance I saw the beachcombers. And the ocean that threatened to devour everything in its sight. An emptiness, expanding. I returned to the bar and spent the last of my money on a cocktail, keeping a futile eye on the corner from where the merman would usually emerge, his serious face beside a column, but no, he’d been removed from the beach’s conversation. The space filled with vagabonds but I no longer felt part of it. Even the dwarfs had ceased to concern me. And with the merman gone, the buffer, the ballast, was stripped from my senses, allowing for a gloomy monotony to set in. I felt the ocean intruding, salt water in what I drank, sandy grains in what I ate, a rippling in most surfaces. The shoreline ran through every face, destroying some, enhancing others. Someone offered me their joint. I took a few drags and passed it on . . . Beach of the Dead, the name rang in my ears, Beach of the Dead . . . Well, all manner of things came to die here. That night I longed for one of Tomás’s white pills but discovered he’d taken his bag with him, nothing left but the shed cocoon of his hammock.