by Richard Bode
I leave the museum, the riddle still running through my mind. I lean against a parapet and look out at the city, at the red glow reflecting off the surrounding hills as the sun goes down. The city is modern, as modern as any city can be, but I am confronted with the same life-and-death sentence as a citizen of Thebes.
The riddle of the Sphinx is the riddle of man, and the question posed by the Sphinx comes from ourselves. It is the question Gauguin asked when he painted his masterpiece; it is the question that underlies all questions, and if I ask it honestly, the answer will come to me honestly, as in a prayer.
There is so much I want to do, so much I want to achieve. I want to read the works of Dostoyevsky; I want to sail the fjords of Puget Sound; I want to find a woman who brings me joy. This evening the sun sets at 7:43, tomorrow at 7:41.The days grow shorter. There is so much living to do, and so little time.
Once I was an infant; now I am an adult; soon I will be an old man. Is that how my life goes, in giant leaps from one state of existence to another, without awareness of what I am experiencing now? There was a period when I viewed my life as an inexorable progression of days, but I realize that was a waste, a way of obliterating time.
My life is a speculation, like a work of art. I begin with a simple brush stroke, not knowing where it will lead. I follow my guesses, my hunches, my instincts; little by little a portrait of myself appears. It takes a lifetime to complete the painting, but I keep at it, arranging and rearranging the parts, filling in the forms, shapes, colors, a brush stroke at a time.
Gradually, if I go with courage and wisdom, I arrive at my destination, a place called paradise. It is not a land free of struggle, a realm devoid of pain or grief. But it is the place where I feel at home, where I am supposed to be.
I drive back to my beach house in twilight. By the time I arrive, the sun has fallen below the horizon and the moon is climbing the sky. I sit on my deck, watching its flight, the riddle of the Sphinx still occupying my mind. Oedipus gave his answer and delivered Thebes; I give my answer and deliver only myself. But I am content, for I saved one man this day.
fifteen
woman fishing from a pier
The women, the women, they are everywhere, stretched in the sun, sitting on the sand, wading in the sea. But nowhere do I see the woman I am looking for.
I walk up a ramp that leads to the pier. I go into a dockside restaurant and order a bowl of red chowder and a glass of wine. I leave the restaurant and stroll down the pier.
At the end of the pier a barefoot woman fishes. Her hair, black and plaited, hangs halfway down her back in a single braid. She is wearing faded jeans and a gauzy powder blue blouse, which clings to her body from the wind and spray. The sleeves are pushed up, revealing bronzed forearms. She casts over a railing and reels in slowly, shrewdly, as if she knows what lurks on the ocean floor.
I look in the pail beside her, trying to count her catch. She sees me there, but she does not speak. After a while her rod bends. She sets the hook, reels in a lingcod, and drops it in the pail.
“How many is that?” I ask.
“Eight,” she says. “Five rock fish, three cod.”
She goes back to casting with the same naturalness as before. I ask about her rod, her reel, her bait, her line. She answers simply, telling me what I want to know.
“You’re good at this,” I say.
“I ought to be,” she replies. “I’ve been doing it since I was a girl.”
She begins to talk, not hesitatingly, as if we are strangers, but openly and easily, as if there are certain things about her I ought to know. She tells me that her name is Anna, that she is Portuguese, that she has lived here, by the sea, all her life. Her hoarse voice seems to rise from a secret place in her chest, and her words spill out with conviction and pride.
She fishes and talks at the same time, sometimes glancing back over her shoulder at me, sometimes over the water at her line. When she finishes, I tell her about myself—who I am, where I live, why I have come to Miramar. Since my arrival, I have guarded myself against the encroachment of others, but standing here on the pier, talking with a woman I never saw before, the barriers fall away and the conversation flows.
After a while I realize that a long time has passed since she had a nibble.
“The fish seem to have gone somewhere else,” I say.
“Yes,” she replies. “The tide is ebbing now.”
I watch her remove hook and sinker and snap her leader to a guide. She picks up her pail, looks across the water one last time, then turns to me.
“Do you know the Chamarita?”
“The Chamarita? No. What is it?”
“I will take you to the Chamarita,” she said. “Then you will understand.”
I stand on the pier, looking after her, the husky lilt of her voice rising through the empty space of my life long after she disappears.
When I reach my beach house, I take a magazine from a top desk drawer. I have carried this magazine with me for years. I open it to an earmarked page and look for perhaps the thousandth time at the photograph of a woman in a semisheer shirtwaist dress fishing from a pier. She is standing barefoot, with a surf rod in her hands, casting into the sea. Although I never put her picture on display, she is my pinup girl.
I think of Anna at the moment I saw her, standing at the end of the dock in her powder blue blouse, casting her baited line. Was she all she appeared to be, or merely a product of my imagination conjured up out of my longing and need? I will take you to the Chamarita. Then you will understand.
The air is crystalline as Anna and I head down the beach toward the heart of town. She is wearing a white shirt and a purple skirt that billows softly in the morning breeze. Overhead the gulls are fluttering through the sky. Anna chants, “Chama Rita! Chama Rosa! Qué bonita! Qué formosa!”
She tells me the Chamarita is the traditional song and folk dance of the Portuguese. Today the Chamarita and the Festival of the Holy Ghost are joined. “This is our Thanksgiving,” she says, “our way of expressing our thanks for the blessing the people of the Azores received five hundred years ago.”
She tells me that in the fifteenth century a volcano erupted on the islands, causing famine and drought. The people came together and prayed, asking the Holy Ghost for help. On the morning of Pentecost there was a great rising sun, and in the sunrise the people of the Azores saw a ship laden with food coming into port.
When Queen Isabel heard of this providence, she ordered a solemn procession in honor of the Holy Ghost. Accompanied by her maids, she carried her crown through the streets of Lisbon to a cathedral, where she left it on the altar as an offering of thanks. The people of the Azores vowed that they, their children, and their children’s children would celebrate Pentecost by expressing their thanks to Queen Isabel for the sacrifice she made.
Anna and I enter the town. The streets have been closed to traffic. The people are already present in large numbers, sitting on the curbs, standing on the corners, the children spilling into the streets. Everyone knows Anna, and Anna knows everyone: the mechanic and his children, the waitress and her fiancé, the beautician and her husband, the bank teller and his wife. She finds a place to watch, an opening in the crowd across from Our Lady of the Pillar, where the parade will end.
The procession moves slowly, fraught with symbols, filled with surprise, totally unformed. A fife and drum corps files past playing the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, the musical about Jewish life in czarist Russia. The players are wearing red jackets, white pants, and broad-brimmed military hats with red and white plumes.
There are bands from Miramar, Pescadero, San Gregorio, Santa Cruz, and San Jose, girls in white capes, mothers in flowered dresses, old men in suits of gray. A boatload of bread goes by, flanked by boys in white shirts and red scarfs. Another boy holding a diaphanous parasol escorts a little girl in a white gown. The girl supports a pillow in front of her on her arms, and on the pillow sits a dove.
T
hree teenage girls appear, walking slowly along the route of the parade. The one in the middle, framed by a rectangular garland of flowers, carries a silver crown. She wears a white dress and a dark blue cape that trails behind her along the macadam road. When she reaches the church, the procession dissolves. Anna takes my arm. We mingle with the swirling throng. All about me, people are speaking Portuguese. The men are upright, the women direct.
We enter the church together to witness the blessing of the crown. A priest reads from the Gospel According to John. I am drawn to the stained-glass portraits in the windows, illuminated by shafts of light: Santa Barbara, San Fernando, San Antonio, Santa Ines, San Diego, San Buenaventura, San Luis Rey. The worshipers, of many faiths, sing “Come Holy Ghost” and “Amazing Grace.”
As we leave the church, a small girl runs up to Anna, throws her arms around her neck, gives her a hug, and runs off again.
“That is my niece,”Anna says. “One day she will be the queen and carry the crown.”
“Were you ever the queen?” I ask.
“Yes, I was the queen.”
I will take you to the Chamarita. Then you will understand. She belongs to this place; she is part of it and it is part of her. But she is herself, her distinct self, too. She has her own way of listening, her own way of speaking, her own way of blending her present with her past. She is at one with herself, at peace with all the aspects of her life.
The crowd disbands; the traffic starts to flow again. We wander through the streets of the town. Anna touches my hand and points to the coastal range, lush from spring rains; it rises to the north and east, sloping upward at the end of every avenue. It is a wordless gesture, eloquent for its simplicity, but I know at once what she means to say and how she feels, because I feel that way, too.
A fragrance, light as the breeze, sifts through the air. We stroll through the flower market, the sidewalk awash with color, as if Pierre-Auguste Renoir himself had come to town and painted the scene. Men, women, children wander under the canopied booths, make their purchases, and carry off their bouquets. Anna points to the flowers and says their names as we pass by: baby’s breath, anemone, larkspur, yarrow. I buy a yellow tea rose and she puts it in her hair.
Across from the flower market there is an alley; halfway down the alley, a vintage clothing shop. We pause, look in a window, and step inside. The shop is small, barely big enough to move around in. The merchandise is stacked on counters and tabletops. In front of me lies a black velvet evening bag lined with ivory satin and lace. I pick it up and finger its rhinestone clasp. It looks like something my grandmother might have carried with her to a formal dance—if my grandmother had ever gone to a formal dance. I fish around inside and pull out a collapsible tortoiseshell comb with a narrow, oddly shaped handle at one end.
Anna takes the object from the palm of my hand and flips it open. “Women would comb their hair like so,” she says, “then use the rat-tail end to make a curl.” She tries to show me, but her hair is too tightly bound. She hands the comb back to me.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
I drop the comb in the bag and put the bag back on the table.
“No,” I reply. “I don’t like evening bags, and I don’t like curls.”
“Do you know what you like?”
“Yes, I know what I like.”
“And what do you like?”
I turn slowly, letting my eyes roam the room. A straight chair stands in a corner, with a triangular mass of material draped over the back. It is black—black as her hair. I run my hand across its filigreed border and through its long, silky fringe.
“I like this,” I say.
“Do you? It’s a fine wool shawl, and it’s very old.”
She lifts it from the chair and arranges it over one shoulder, then over both shoulders, then over her head and shoulders. She flips the loose ends over her arms. Finished, she folds it neatly and puts it back on the chair.
“And I like this,” I say, picking up a straw hat with a broad brim. She puts on the hat, tilting the brim first to one side, then the other, and finally turning the brim up and back off her face. It is dark in the shop, but I can imagine the hat with sunlight filtering through the swirls of woven straw.
“If I could paint,” I say, “I would paint you in that hat.”
“I will paint you in it,” she says. Before I can reply, she goes to the register, buys the hat, and hands it to me. It fits perfectly.
We leave the shop and meander through the streets of the town, returning home the way we came, walking slowly along the beach, pausing from time to time to share a thought.
Later, alone in the gathering darkness, I ponder a question that has been haunting me. Why didn’t I meet Anna ages ago, when I was young? I didn’t meet her because I didn’t see her, even though I probably passed her, or someone like her, many times without ever knowing she was there. Like an infant just out of its mother’s womb, my eyes were not yet fully opened.
After all these reflective days combing the sands of Miramar, I understand that we see only what we are ready to see when we are ready to see it. There is a perpetual dawn rising within us. If we are awake to it, it continues to rise gradually, imperceptibly, throughout our lives. With each passing day we shake the sleep from our eyes.
I came to Miramar seeking an end to my isolation and my loneliness. But before I could find Anna, I had to discover myself. I had to locate the swift, sure current that courses through my life and stay with it straight through to the end. Once I found the courage to do that, the woman I was looking for appeared, not as apparition but as flesh and blood, right before my eyes.
I go to bed early and sleep deeply. In my dreams, I am at the Chamarita. Anna is with me, and we are standing side by side, watching the parade. All through the night, I wake and dream, wake and dream, and the dream is always the same. I am at the Chamarita with Anna, watching the boy with his parasol, the girl with her dove, the queen with her crown. Awake, the dream remains: Anna and I standing together on the edge of the sidewalk, two separate people sharing the same space at the same precious moment in time.
In the morning, I go out on my deck and sit, content to do nothing. It is late in the afternoon when I see a patch of washed-out purple far down the shore. Anna is strolling along the water’s edge, one hand holding a canvas bag, the other lifting her skirt as the waves wash over her legs. When she reaches a point below the beach house, her head disappears behind a dune, then bobs up again at the bottom of the deck. She climbs the stairs. When she reaches the top rung, she puts down her bag and looks at me.
“So,” she says, “are you ready?”
I nod.
She positions a rattan chair at the far end of the deck and slumps into it at an angle to the sea.
“Sit here,” she says, “like so.”
I sit as she says, my arms folded across my chest. She unlocks my arms; they fall loosely onto my lap. She picks up the straw hat and fixes it on my head. I reach up to help and she lightly slaps my hand.
“Don’t touch,” she says.
She keeps urging me to hold still, but she doesn’t seem to mind if my eyes roam. I shift my gaze from Anna, sitting in a chair with a drawing board on her lap, to the beach, then back to Anna again. What she doesn’t know is that while she is painting me, I am painting her.
How is it, how is it, I wonder, that love can come this way? It is a blessing that falls of a sudden, like rain out of a summer sky. One moment I am walking a lonely stretch of beach; the next I am talking to a woman fishing from a pier. She invites me to the Chamarita. I buy her a flower; she buys me a hat. Now she is on my deck, looking at me carefully, her head tilted, her lips pursed, a pastel crayon poised between the fingers of her hand.
It is late when she finishes. The sun has dropped behind the evening clouds. Flashes of burnt crimson fill the sky. I rise from my chair and move toward her cautiously, afraid of what I might find. She lifts the drawing board from her lap, turns it, and shows it to m
e. I am amazed at what I see. She has painted me in my own image.
sixteen
the beachcomber of miramar
Quietly, without fanfare, a sculptor has come to Miramar. I see his handiwork, one stone heaped upon another along the rocky shore. Now, for the first time, I come upon the artist himself, a slim, slightly stooped man with thick tinted glasses, a red bandanna wrapped around his head. Absorbed in his task, he moves easily, methodically, amid the riprap dumped beside a seawall, carefully selecting boulders and stacking them so they resemble human forms.
I watch him rearrange rock and rubble, transforming the chaos along this stretch of coast into a sculpture garden. He lifts an oblong chunk of concrete and lugs it twenty feet to an open area, places a sloping concave rock on top of it, and a rounded smaller rock on top of that. Three rocks chosen at random, that’s how they appear to me. But the sculptor sees them in the aggregate. Assembled, they become a woman in an ankle-length, deeply pleated skirt carrying a bread basket in her outstretched arms.
The female figure, so perfectly proportioned, has the seductive grace and charm of ancient Buddhist idols I have often admired in museums. I approach it cautiously, afraid that if I get too close it will tumble down. I want to touch it, but the structure seems so precarious that I don’t dare.
The sculptor, who has ignored my presence until now, turns toward me. “Blow on it!” he says.
I take a deep breath and blow as hard as I can several times on all sides. The sculpture withstands the blasts of air from my lungs.
“If it doesn’t fall over when you blow on it,” he says, “then the chances are good that only the incoming tide or a strong wind will knock it down.”
“And when that happens?” I ask.
“When that happens, I come back another day and set it up again.”
Gently, I touch the structure; its stability surprises me. It seems to be defying gravity. I ask the sculptor if he notches the rocks, applies an adhesive, or joins them with a hidden wire. He empties his pockets to prove that he uses no tools, employs no artifice beyond the intuition lodged in his dexterous fingers and roving eyes.