Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  I woke up earlier than usual and walked on autopilot over to El Cósmico, the beach’s power source, I’d concluded, rather than its center. Oddly enough, I was the only customer. The young girl wasn’t there that day, only her mother. After she brought me my coffee I asked what she thought had happened to the Zapotec girls, why they had run into the water if they knew they couldn’t swim. Sometimes people are seized by a mad impulse, the woman replied immediately, an impulse that seems to come from nowhere, that’s what happened to these girls. They were walking along hoping to sell their jewelry when some mysterious impulse grabbed hold of the four of them and they threw off their clothes and ran into the ocean. The same thing happened to the drowned poet: he too was seized by an impulse no one could understand.

  What drowned poet? I asked with a little trepidation. Oh, that was last year, it’s old news now. The man, well, they said he wrote verses though there’s no bookstore here to prove it, he ate and drank a lot at lunch and then entered the water and swam very far out and began to wave and wave. People who saw him from the shore couldn’t tell whether he was saying goodbye or asking for help; his friends had apparently warned him of the dangerous tide so it’s not as if he was unaware of the danger. In any case, after waving he soon disappeared into the waves and one hour later the fishermen found him farther along the beach. They hauled him out and laid him on the sand, everyone ran over to have a look, and the fishermen’s wives rested his head on a bed of herbs and one of them recited a prayer. He looked peaceful, and not bloated at all, and three children from the village laid flowers and leaves on his body. Usually when people drown they’re carried off without ceremony, but on this occasion there was a beautiful scene, yes, it was beautiful, and we were all part of the stranger’s farewell. There hadn’t been much sun that morning, the day had started overcast, that’s what happens when someone is going to die, and then came this man who swam out too far, well, it seems no one will ever know what his intentions were, but it happened here, not far from El Cósmico.

  The woman seemed to revel in tragic stories, a kind of fascination with misfortune. I drew my eyes away from the gold tooth but there was no ignoring her voice, as melodious and disquieting as recorded birdsong. My appetite more or less dashed, I asked for the bill. As I walked along the shore speculating where the merman might be found that morning, and, more importantly, whether I’d once more be filled with longing or whether something had been laid to rest, I happened to spot the hut. There it sat, blue and peculiar, a few meters from the ocean. I tried to recall its last location, and how this might be indicative of recent movements of the tide. It always looked so motionless, an oversized hermit crab hoping to go unnoticed, and I was about to move my gaze onward when the door sprang open and out stepped Tomás. Squinting in the sunlight, he did a morning stretch before moving aside for an older woman behind him. The lifeguard, presumably. Even at a distance I could see her sharp cheekbones and long lashes, her thick eyebrows ancillary to a mane of black hair. She wore an old-fashioned bathing suit with a low neckline and a short flared skirt. I would’ve never imagined her profession was saving drowners. Where had she been on the days of the Zapotec girls and the poet?

  Overcome with curiosity I began to follow, but my attention was soon drawn away by loud male voices shouting to each other at the water’s edge. Two lanchas were being pushed off into the sea. They’d rarely congregate here, usually just howl past over pleated sheets of water, and halt farther down the beach at a spot with fewer sunbathers. Yet that morning they’d come ashore here. And these boats, though peeling, were both painted a deep regal blue, I noticed, as one of the men waded out and threw a coiled rope into the second boat, and yelled a command, informing the boat operator, whose name appeared to be Gustavo, of two gringas who wanted to be taken on an excursion to a neighboring beach. The man seemed to protest. The other man insisted. The one named Gustavo gave in. His voice wasn’t noteworthy but his bathing trunks certainly were: green, high-waisted, with a blue stripe down the side. With something like vertigo I looked up at the face, half refuged in the shade of a cap. Gustavo. The merman was a lanchero named Gustavo. No, it couldn’t be. And yet my eyes were telling me it was.

  So this was how he spent his days, half on land, half on water. He hadn’t seen me, was too busy revving the motor in preparation for passengers, his arms now looking plump rather than muscled in the Pumas T-shirt stretched tightly over his chest. Was it definitely him, well, maybe not, I was starting to think, until he removed his cap to wipe the sweat from his brow and revealed an unequivocal face. His features were much more rounded than they appeared at night. Unlike the afternoon of the sandcastle, the sun now erased all Slavic accents and geometry. There he was, Gustavo, aka the merman, unsteady on his feet as his blue boat rocked from side to side. The motor emitted its loud rat-tat-tat, though to my ears the sounds merged into one long whoosh as the vessel and its operator, now crouching over the motor, careered out into the open sea, carving a big V into the waves.

  The rest of the afternoon passed by in a haze. I found a spot beneath a palm tree and felt time surge upward through its base. I chose a young palm, its fronds green to the tip as opposed to the others that tapered into yellow. In general I preferred plants with branches, they were more expressive, but I couldn’t help feeling affection for these armless trees, simply a long trunk ending in fireworks of leaves. Gusts of wind stirred up the sand, blowing two plastic cups down the shore. A group of young men set up a volleyball net and began their game. One of the dogs came to scratch at his fleas beside me. Every now and then I’d check the horizon but no more boats, no motors sounding in the distance. Green flag: calm water. All so calm and harmonious, and yet I could feel the distress of the landscape. The beach didn’t want to hold these people, it didn’t want to be a stage, it wanted to go back to being a pure arrangement of stock motifs. Sitting there against the base of the palm tree, I could perceive a defeated silence beneath the layers of noise and activity.

  Tomás materialized in the evening as I stood in a corner of the palapa wrapping a skirt around my waist. He was no longer accompanied by the black-maned woman yet smelled faintly of rotting algae. Where had I been all day, he asked, he’d been looking for me everywhere. Zigzagging, I replied, up and down the shore. I see, he said, as if zigzagging were the most natural form of movement, and asked whether I’d like to join him at a bonfire. I accepted without hesitation: the moment had come for other company and distraction.

  Once we’d located his bonfire, one of many, a fiery necklace along the beach, we took our place in the ring of people. Two Swedish tourists, a young man from Malmö with a pencil mustache and a young woman with a Hello Kitty tattoo on her forearm, stoked the wood and then set to work fashioning a four-inch joint. They had just been to Escobilla to watch the sea turtles lay their eggs, they said, and swore that nothing in life would match the experience. The joint was passed around. Someone else hadn’t seen any turtles, but mentioned a pair of broken dentures they’d found at the foot of a tree. One less treasure for the beachcombers. A Chilean youth sat down among us; he was very tall and had a cataract in one eye, visible in the light of the flames. Someone should paint the landscape of your cataract, the Swede said in seriousness as the joint neared its end.

  I tried to enter the scene but a deep melancholy of the kind that sometimes freights sunset had begun to close in. I still found it hard to process what I had seen that day. Gustavo. Local, rather than from overseas. Spanish, rather than some unfathomable tongue. But after a drag on the joint, maybe two, I slowly began to convince myself that perhaps I had imagined it, somehow the act of imagining seemed more likely than the extravagant vision I’d seen, and after another drag in the presence of the crackling fire that moved the light back and forth across people’s faces, I decided it was possible, very possible, that my eyes had deceived me. Yet it remained difficult to connect with the good humor, in fact I had no desire to, I wasn’t cut out for bonfires and never had been, bonfi
res or picnics, actually, I could only vaguely see the allure, had never liked the idea of sitting casually and lazily around a center. I stared into the fire, at the different fragments of driftwood, I stared at the grains of sand clinging to my feet and my skirt, and as if under the spell of the stage magician who asks us to imagine an object’s inner life, I began to feel that every little thing was in some way animate, harbored its own anxieties and desires that existed alongside our own, and that these grains of sand, for instance, were hoping to be transported elsewhere, if they just hung on long enough to my feet and my skirt they’d be taken to new places, could begin a new life, a better life, far from Zipolite. At least the flames no longer reminded me of the fire-eaters, in fact few sights now reminded me of the city, that was a lifetime ago, or rather a parallel life, of another Luisa who lived in La Roma, housed, schooled, and parented, and I preferred to confine my thoughts to the present. Yet before long, they were thrown back to the city.

  I was thinking about how one never sees the same flame twice, each form unique and never to be repeated, in the same way that a person is never repeated, nor does a person ever repeat themselves in the exact same way at any two given moments, when our circle widened for a couple who joined us, the young man in a green T-shirt and the young woman in a tank top that showed the outline of her nipples. As soon as their faces became visible I knew I had seen them before. I asked where they were from. California, they replied, they’d just arrived in Zipolite that night. The girl adjusted the strap on one of her sandals.

  You’re from the Burroughs apartment, I said.

  What?

  From the day we went to see the place where Burroughs . . .

  Who’s he?

  William Burroughs.

  We don’t know him.

  Yes, on Monterrey.

  We’ve only been to Mexico City and Oaxaca.

  Monterrey Street, in the city.

  I tried to further explain but the girl hissed and the boy had eyes for nothing but the joint. But . . . No, they had arrived that night and had never met my friend Burroughs, they said again, their voices rising a note. I looked to Tomás, who had been following our exchange, but instead of insisting on my behalf he leaned forward and placed a shell on my head, a rather flattish one, and clasped his hands into the shape of a gun.

  Pow! he cried, as the boy from Malmö laughed uneasily.

  I closed my eyes to him and to the scene, imagining for a brief moment a spider positioned at four o’clock on her web. When I reopened them Tomás was taking aim a second time, grinning in a way that lacked all playfulness.

  Something made me look up.

  The shell slid off as I raised my head.

  And saw my father.

  Or at least a man who looked incredibly similar to my father.

  Through the quivering flames, a face familiar, beloved.

  Without a word he glanced at me, his expression impossible to read, and then walked away.

  I grabbed Tomás’s arm.

  My father is here!

  The sideshow grin quickly fell.

  You’re hallucinating.

  No, I really saw my father.

  Where?

  I don’t know—he looked at me and walked off.

  Why would he come all this way, look at you, and walk off?

  I shook my head.

  First you see the dwarfs, now you see your father!

  The others laughed.

  I’m sure it was him.

  In that case, go find him and bring him back so you can introduce us.

  The sounds of the ocean swelled to a deafening clamor, senses thrown into relief as I ran from the fire and into the night, but my nerves drove me to the wrong palapa, where I came face-to-face with a man with bloodshot eyes. He leapt out of his hammock and brandished a bottle in the air, several more scattered on the sand, and yelled ¿Sí? in a hoarse and wretched voice.

  At my palapa there was no one, nor at the ones nearby, an eerie absence, everywhere, as if apart from the drunkard everyone had decided to vanish. The only beings I saw, in the distance, were the bowed silhouettes of the beachcombers absorbed in their mission, indifferent to any dramas unfolding on the beach.

  Back at the bonfire Tomás was waiting. He took hold of my arm and pulled me toward the shoreline. Even in the dark I could see, or rather sense, his expression, somewhere between panic and anger. They’re here, he muttered, they’re here.

  What do you mean? I asked, though I knew, at least partly, what he meant.

  Still gripping my arm, he pointed to an inky spot that lay in the indeterminate space between sea and bonfire. And there stood my father, for now I was certain it was him, and beside him a man in a beret who looked like Tomás but older, and farther to the right, several other men, I was too bewildered to count, some in uniform and others in civilian dress. Everyone was turned in our direction, with not a smile between them. The ocean holds the most everlasting night of all, in its depth night is perpetual, a thick and total darkness untouched by the sun, light can penetrate water but only so far, and much of the ocean remains forever opaque; at thirty meters, night lasts nineteen hours, at forty-five meters, night is unrelenting for all but fifteen minutes of a solar day, and those fifteen minutes offer a fleeting twilight, nothing more.

  My father approached, his gait tired and disheveled. Why, Luisa?

  A question for which I had no answer.

  I SLEEPWALKED THROUGH IT ALL, PATERNAL ORDERS and long-range maternal ones, two searchlights trained on me, and was too tired to have any thoughts of my own, relieved to have my trip, what was left of it, in someone else’s hands, no more decisions, no more nights in the hammock, I would be fed and looked after and not have to worry. Have you eaten? my father had asked, before locating a fonda that agreed to serve food at midnight. Four painted blue chairs and a square table were set out on the sand, meters from the ocean. The waves of the Pacific were tall, white, electric. I sat across from Tomás, and our fathers across from each other. An oil lamp was placed at the center of the table, our faces turned into masks. My father requested a plate of potato tacos for me, and some rice. The others had shrimp and fish. Tomás ordered a Corona and then three more, making loud suctioning sounds each time he drank, his father watching him out of the corner of his eye.

  After our dinner, during which very few words were spoken, I fetched my bag from the palapa. The overhead lamp glowed brightly but there was still no one to be seen. In the meantime my father had asked to use the phone in the fonda to call my mother and tell her I had been found. She wanted to speak to me, but they got cut off and it had been impossible to reestablish the connection.

  A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Román said to my father, extending his hand, I’m glad we found what we were looking for. He then said a more formal goodbye to the driver and the policemen. Everyone lingered for a few moments under a cloud of This is it? until one of the policemen turned away. As for the farewell with Tomás, it was as halfhearted as what had come before. At most it was one half cleaved in two, left there in the sands of Zipolite. And when he said, You knew this would happen, you knew, what could I say but that of course I hadn’t, I never expected anyone to come looking for me, the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, and those were my last words to him before my father and I climbed into the car.

  The driver took us down unlit roads framed by unidentifiable foliage, the night creatures stopping in their tracks as we passed, and I thought back on the Baudelaire poem and what it seemed to say, how to imagine travel is probably better than actually traveling since no journey can ever satisfy human desire; as soon as one sets out, fantasies get tangled in the rigging and dark birds of doubt begin their circling overhead.

  The roads grew less discernible, given substance by nothing but the lights of our car, and although there weren’t any visual indications I sensed from the air and the murky forms that we were driving away from the coast, inland. My father seemed on the verge of sleep and I too was drifting off
when we turned into a road that turned into a street that turned into a plaza and at the far end of the plaza the driver came to a halt in front of a colonial building.

  Our hotel, a former sixteenth-century convent with carved doors, high ceilings, and muscular candelabra, was called Parador del Mar. A man clearly roused from slumber showed us to our room, trudging down the corridor as if his ankles were in chains. Parallel beds at opposite ends, a wooden chest holding a television, two armchairs on either side of a tiled fireplace, a wardrobe with thick confessional doors. I took it in without feeling part of it. My father settled into one armchair and I into the other, the fireplace between us a safe referee. The room was chilly, all stone and shadow, the ceiling traversed by wooden beams. I glanced at the pile of logs by the fireplace but feared they’d be full of spiders. At first we sat without speaking, each locked into our thoughts, into the forked path of recent experience. But I wouldn’t be able to rest until I’d asked the question.

  How did you find me?

  It’s a long story.

  I’m ready.

  Tomorrow . . . I don’t have the energy. This is the first moment I can relax since leaving home. You must be tired too.

  When did you leave?

  It feels like a long time ago.

  I just want to know how you found me.

  Let’s go to sleep now. We’ll speak tomorrow, he said, and closed his eyes.

  The distance to his bed was too great, I imagined, as was the thought of any further conversation, and as I watched my father drifting off, a man in an armchair who looked older and wearier than his fifty-six years, I was overcome by emotion, how could I not be, when I considered how the whole time I’d been wandering Zipolite fixated on matters that, looking back, had already diminished in importance, my father had been wandering another Oaxaca with one objective in mind. After who knows how many days it had been met, whereas my objective, well, it was harder to say where it stood in the spectrum of fulfillment, but I wasn’t going to worry about that now, the bed was calling, a solid steady four-poster that wouldn’t sway or engulf or serve as a landing strip for large whirring insects, and after removing my shoes I switched off the lamps but even then I could see my father’s silhouette there in the armchair thanks to the illumination seeping in from the plaza. And it was a thoroughly calming sight.