by Anna Burke
“Quince means fifteen, so quinceañera is a big birthday party, right? Like sweet sixteen only sweet fifteen.”
“Yes, I had fifteen candles, instead of sixteen candles, like Molly Ringwald. There was a Mass, first, then a birthday party. My party wasn’t as fancy as some I have seen since, of course, but it was magical. That is where I had my first dance with Guillermo. I promised you a story that begins at once upon a time. I’ll tell you when this story really begins, Jessica. Not with that dance, but a few months earlier, at the moment I first set eyes on Guillermo.”
2 Once upon a time
Once upon a time, I awoke, like it was just another day. I was dreaming of the cry of gulls, begging to be fed as they circled above a harbor full of boats. Empty boats, bobbed in the safety of our small harbor, like baby birds in a nest, their mouths wide open. My mother was calling my name.
“Bernadette, get up, Mija. The sun is almost here. Your father and brothers need their lunches so they can go out fishing.”
“Sì, Mama,” I said, slipping out of the bed I shared with a younger sister. I dressed quickly, combed my hair, and put on a pair of well-worn huaraches.
My mother was packing food into three baskets for the men to take with them. The kitchen was toasty warm in the early morning chill of late September. My mouth watered at the aromas of fresh cooked tortillas, spicy beans, and cebollinas—green onions with big white bulbs that my mother roasted. I ate my breakfast quickly. Then, I set out for the beach nearby, carrying lunch baskets. It wasn’t yet shrimping season, so my father and brothers were going to fish with their pangas. They would set out in the morning and come back whenever the boats were filled with their catch later in the day.
I heard singing in the distance as I reached the beach. As the sun rose over the Sea of Cortez, the sky was coming alive with wondrous colors, large rays of sunlight pierced low-lying clouds in the distance. The glory of the morning stopped me in my tracks, more than once, as I made my way through the sand toward the gathering of pangas and men on the beach.
At first, I took almost no notice of the song, I was so enchanted by the sunrise mirrored in the waters of the harbor. I figured the singer was Father or one of my brothers, or another of the men who set out with them to fish. Many mornings the men sang while sitting on the beach beside their boats, checking their nets or mending them.
As I grew closer, to deliver breakfast to Father, I heard the voice more clearly. It came to me on a wisp of breeze filled with the salty spray of the sea. I knew then it was not my father. My father had a deep rumbling voice, that of an old man. Not that he was truly old, not old like mi abuelo before he died. I thought of Father as old just the same, although he was not yet forty. My brothers sang too, but with the lighter voices of youth. But, it could not be them. Paolo and Tomàs could not sing nearly so well as the one who sang that morning when everything changed forever.
Yo soy el marino
Que alegre de Guaymas, salió una mañana
Llevando en mi barca como hàbil piloto
Mi dulce esperanza
Por mares ignotos mis dulces anhelos hundió la borrasca,
Por eso están rotas mis penas Y traigola muerte en el alma...
The voice was melodious, sweet and sad at the same time. He sang of that doomed sailor and sweet hope, as I stood there, spellbound. Sea and sky merged with the earth below, sweeping me up into the puffs of sound that floated above it all. My feet could not move because they could not find the ground, or I might have run away. Even if I could have moved them, my heart was beating so wildly in my chest, my feet might not have carried me far.
There was a passion in the voice of the man who sang those words. It awakened something in me that I had barely glimpsed before. The singer was seated on the ground near my brothers, who had stopped their work to listen, so powerful was that song. La Barca de Guayamas was well known even before Linda Ronstadt made it popular again, recently. I knew that song, too, so I knew well that he sang of death to those who went to sea. There was a mystery in that song, but all I heard was the mystery in the man pouring out his heart.
If I had been able to run away my life might have been different. Different, perhaps, but certainly not better. In any case, I stood frozen in time and space until he finished that song. We were all freed then, to go on about our business. My brothers clapped for him, and teased him a little about his beguiling way with a song.
“That is sure to win you the admiration of women,” my brother Paolo said.
“Yes, and draw them to you like flies to honey,” Tomàs, my other brother added.
“Perhaps that is not such a good thing for a group of men about to take to the sea. What if we meet up with mermaids?” the singer asked.
“Not to worry, with you along. You could surely outwit any sirens of the deep we might encounter at sea,” my brother Paulo replied.
“Yes, and convince them to take us to the richest fishing spot or a place of underwater treasure,” Tomàs added. They all laughed, even my father, who shook his head as he continued to work the section of the net draped across his lap.
When the singer threw back his head and laughed with the others, the same sonorous tones filled the air around him. He stopped abruptly as he looked up, fixing me with his gaze, a brilliant white smile on his handsome brown face. I suddenly felt shy as he spoke.
“It seems I have already attracted my first beauty of the day. She has stepped from the sea as bright as the morning light, and even brings us treasure,” he said as his smile broadened. My father and brothers, seated with their backs to me, turned toward me.
“That’s no siren of the deep, that’s our sister, Bernadette,” Paolo laughed. “Your eyes do not work as well as your mouth.” That set off another round of laughter from them all. My shyness fled. A flush of anger filled me instead.
“It’s great that you have so much time to sing and chatter, oh brave men of the sea.” I had found my feet, as well as my voice, and stomped them, pointless in the yielding sand. “Here is your treasure, daring adventurers. Your bellies will be full even if your boats are not,” I said, setting their lunches in the sand not far from where my father sat. With that I turned in a huff and marched back toward home.
As I turned I caught another glimpse of the singer who was about the same age as my brothers—not quite a man at seventeen or eighteen. He had jumped to his feet and I could see that he was tall and sturdy, a bare chest already muscled by hard work. His eyes, still fixed on me, twinkled like the smile that danced across his face. I almost smiled back, despite my temper. Instead, I dashed away quickly. My father called after me.
“Gracias, daughter, and please tell your mother thank you, too. I will make sure these boats are heavy with fish before I share your mother’s fine cooking with any of them. Guillermo, for your information, she is not only a beauty, but has also learned a lot at her mother’s side in the kitchen. She soon will be as good a cook as the woman I married. I should warn you, though, that she likes to sleep in a little. That’s why she only barely appeared with our lunches before we set out to fish.” A round of laughter and more talk erupted behind me as I continued to make my way toward home, moving at a good clip.
“Guillermo,” I whispered as I slowed down a couple minutes later.
“Yes,” that voice answered from behind me as though I had called out loudly to him. I stopped, abruptly to confront him and the momentum of his pursuit caused him to nearly collide with me.
“Your ears must work as well as your mouth, even if as Paulo says your eyes are not so good,” I quipped, trying to cover my surprise. I turned again toward home.
“Bernadette,” he said, now at my side. “There is nothing at all wrong with my eyes. My vision is perfect, and so are you.” Those words sounded so sincere. The last vestige of my anger vaporized and I melted into giddy laughter.
“What is it? Why do you laugh at me?” he asked.
“Because you are too young to know much about beauty
or perfection, but I want to believe you anyway. I am laughing at myself, Guillermo.” A look of earnestness stole over him as he buttoned the last button on the shirt he must have donned in great haste, given how rapidly he caught up with me.
“Your laughter only makes your beauty more apparent, and your modesty is a testament to your perfection.”
“My, my, you do have a way with words. My sister has warned me about boys like you,” I laughed again, but my heart was pounding as he stood close enough for the heat of his presence to be felt. A rush of life flowed through me, setting all my senses on high alert. The world fell away and, for the first time I felt as though Guillermo and I were alone, suspended in a place where time no longer has meaning.
His eyes were dark, lit from within, and he wore an expression on his face that I would soon come to recognize. Guillermo had an intense passion and curiosity about life, and in that moment it was all directed at me. It made me dizzy. As if from a great distance, I heard someone calling his name, pulling me back into the present. I noticed, in his haste, he had misbuttoned his shirt. My hands trembled as I reached out to refasten the buttons on his shirt.
“There,” I said, “that’s much better.” Before I could remove them from the cloth of the buttonhole, Guillermo grasped my hands in his.
“Yes, this is much better,” he said. “Gracias, Bernadette. Tomorrow is a day off. May I call for you? Perhaps, walk you to Mass in the morning?”
What was I going to say? The possibility of putting him off never entered my mind. My sister would have urged me to be coy, make him work harder to hear me say yes. My mother might be shocked that I agreed to his request at all.
“Sì, Guillermo, if my father says it’s okay.” I saw him gulp, but there was resolve in the set of his jaw. I believed this boy would ask my father, even when he flinched, a little, at the sound of my father commanding him to get back to the boats.
“I will ask him, Bernadette, at the end of the day when the boat I’m in with Paolo is so filled with fish it rides lower in the water than the other boats.”
“That is clever, Guillermo. Now go, quickly, before my father has to call your name again.” The smile that exploded across his face split my life forever, remaking it into two lives: before Guillermo and after Guillermo. I watched him sprint all the way back to the boats before I turned again and headed home.
****
I remember, now, how enthralled I was by Bernadette’s story. At age nine I didn’t quite get all of it, but I had just finished reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Those books had loaded me for bear, priming me to hear Bernadette and Guillermo’s love story. Thanks to the Bronte sisters, I also understood that the course of true love did not always run smooth. Of course, like once upon a time beginnings, I still wanted to believe that love stories had happy endings.
I’m glad that I didn’t know, that day, what I know now, because I was able to hear Bernadette’s story as it should be heard—without cynicism, bitterness or mistrust. A bit of hindsight might have tempered the desire I had, as I grew older, to find a Guillermo of my own. Perhaps, I had rushed into marriage, too easily swayed by a smooth-talking man with a winning smile. James Harper, as it turned out, was no Guillermo.
I also did not know then, that my mother and father were struggling. My mother had begun to take to her room, stricken by pain of one kind or another. That day it was a migraine. Father was at his office, in LA, and might or might not come home, although he usually made it home to the Palm Springs area for weekends. I took all of that in stride with Bernadette at my side.
Not yet touched by the failure of my parents’ marriage, or my own, enchantment reigned that day. Even though I already knew Guillermo was no longer in Bernadette’s life, I had the hope and faith of a child that things would work out for them. God knows, St. Bernadette, as I still cannot resist calling her at times, has tried to help me see that love is complicated, but worth the effort.
“Oh my, Bernadette, that was like love at first sight, wasn’t it?” I raved.
“Yes, at least it turned out that way. Not every story that starts like mine ends in marriage to a man like my Guillermo. It’s easy to get carried away, I suppose, and think it’s love at first sight even when it’s not. Otherwise why would there be so many divorces, Chica? When I got to know Guillermo better, I might have discovered he was not the kind of man I could love for a lifetime and beyond. And love, even when it starts out strong, can’t always make it through all of the troubles that come. Troubles can forge a stronger bond between sweethearts, but can also come between them, Jessica. Not everything went smoothly for us after that first meeting.”
“Oh no, didn’t he show up the next day?”
“Yes, he did, but that was just the beginning of the next chapter in our story. My Guillermo was full of surprises.”
“I love surprises, Bernadette. Please tell me about them.”
“I will, but let’s go get lunch, first, okay?”
“Sure, can I help you in the kitchen like you helped your mother? If I run into my Guillermo I don’t want him to worry about having an empty belly. I don’t know anything about cooking.” Bernadette smiled at me as she tucked that rosary she had been holding into a pocket of the slacks she wore and bounced to her feet. That was so like her. An everyday saint who could go from mystic to woman of action in a split second. A no nonsense woman of action. Bernadette did not suffer fools or foolishness, as I so often found out.
“You’re not alone. There’s way too many burger this and burger that, everywhere you look! Ay yi yi, it’s a crime what people eat, even when they have plenty of money. What shall we cook?” She asked as I skittered down the hall behind the energetic woman who was on the move.
“Frittata,” I replied that day, because I liked the word, at least as much as the dish. Even now, frittata is comfort food to me, especially as we made it that day. A potato, chorizo frittata, with chopped cibollinas added to her usual recipe. I insisted, since that was among the items that Bernadette had taken to the pangas the morning she met Guillermo.
3 A Surprising young man
“My Guillermo came from another place, Jessica. Not from Baja, or Mexicali, where he was living before he came to San Felipe, but from Chihuahua, originally. That is where his family still lived.”
“Oh, like the little dog?” I asked.
“Yes, Jessica, the same word, that’s where the little dog gets its name. The state of Chihuahua in Mexico is not at all small like the dog. It has mountains and large trees. I only saw it once, when I went to meet Guillermo’s family. It was almost overwhelming to a girl who had spent her whole life at sea level. The mountains and the trees were grand, Jessica, but so tall I wondered how they didn’t fall on us. The space was vast as I searched to find the point where the land and sky met. So like the endless horizon on the Sea of Cortez. The distance between places that Guillermo and his family travelled was remarkable. Even the time it took to explore the edges of their ranch was amazing to me then.” She stopped for a moment.
“If I close my eyes I can still see it as it was in their valley surrounded by rolling hills leading up into mountains and forests. Golden, green and lush, compared to my desert town next to the sea. The fragrance of the place, too, Chica, is still with me—good, clean dirt, and filled with a different kind of dampness than the sea air carries. I rode up into the mountains where I saw snow for the first time and vistas that opened below into deep canyons with a river that cut through the valley far below. I shared a horse with Guillermo. My first time on horseback, Jessica, I held on to that poor horse’s mane for dear life.”
“I understand, Bernadette. I still get scared sometimes when I ride. Why didn’t you hold onto the reins?”
“Guillermo held onto those, as tightly as he held the reins to my heart, by then. I learned that he came from Chihuahua the same night we met, but I did not see it for myself until sometime later. That was only one of the surprising things about this young man.” As I
stood on my tippy toes, next to Bernadette, I cleaned the vegetables for our frittata in a sink set into the enormous granite kitchen island. I listened, with continued fascination, as Bernadette went on with her story while chopping and cooking our lunch.
****
All of the men in my family arrived home late Saturday evening, long after my meeting on the beach with Guillermo. They were tired, with a thin layer of salt encrusted on the creases in their skin, and smelling of fish, of course. They had brought the boats back into harbor in the afternoon. The tide was lower than it had been when they set out that morning, as it often is in San Felipe. They had to haul their boats, and their catch, across the wet sand to moor the boats on higher ground. There the tide would find them, Monday morning, when they were ready to set out again. Then they had to sort their catch and load it into chests on the back of my father’s worn out old pickup truck.
From there, they drove it a short distance to delivery trucks waiting near the dusty downtown area. The trucks carried the day’s catch to Mexicali or Ensenada, two or three hours away. It would go to local markets, in the border towns, or would be taken across the border into San Diego. Some might even have been sent here to the Coachella Valley.
When they had sold whatever fish they could they paid the helpers, including Guillermo. They also divided up the catch that remained so those who fished could take some home to their families. That still was not the end of their day, though, since the back of the truck and those chests had to be cleaned out.
As long and busy as their day had been, it was shorter than when they were all at work on the commercial trawler during shrimping season. They were often gone before dawn, sometimes for two or three days before the holds of the trawler were full and they returned to harbor with their catch. Panga fishing was almost like a vacation by comparison.