Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank M Sheldon

CHAPTER 61

  After a dreamless sleep, Andrew Thorssen awoke in the early morning hours to stand his watch on the bridge. The sky was already coming light with dawn. It was the summer solstice, and in these latitudes, the mornings came early and the evenings late. From his bunk, he could see a faint beacon on the shores of British Columbia, one he had passed many times before, and a light he could count on. It had been there when he had gone to sleep, and it was still there now. Good. As he had ordered, they hadn’t moved during the night.

  His gaze came to rest on the photo of his wife mounted on the cabin wall. As always, he found himself remembering Valentina as if he had only just been with her….

  This time, it was when they had first been at her mother’s place in Rosario. As it was where she had grown up, she had wanted him to see her home and, of course, meet her mother. They had been together less than three months. The ferry had taken them all the way up the river from Buenos Aires, but the day had been rainy, so visibility was limited. As it was, they had spent most of the journey inside, sipping maté and talking.

  The skies had cleared on their arrival and now, at the end of the day, they were out on the patio of her mother’s guest suite high above the city. The tiles still gleamed from the rain, and the potted palms were vibrant enough to attract a few birds in spite of being twelve stories up. This was the top floor, so there was plenty of space. The laundry, just hung up in the warm breeze, waved gently to all the other towels and shirts that blossomed across the rooftops. Cooking smells from everywhere mixed together and wafted up from below.

  There were buildings like this one all around. Just boxes, some higher, some lower, all a warm off-white, but somehow no two the same shade. The overall effect was unexpectedly soft, the complementary shapes like baked bread in the lowering sun. Buildings and streets, with only the occasional bit of vegetation, covered the land up to the river, so it was startling to look across the other side and see nothing but a flat green expanse of marshy wildness with some low hills in the distance. Not a bridge in sight. The city just stopped, as if to say ‘enough.’

  Valentina pointed to a man fishing with a pole down on the causeway by the River Paraná. People strolled by him in the late afternoon, as the river flowed to the east. It was then that she told him the story of what inspired her to begin her study of the great whales.

  As a child, she had been walking one day down by this river. It was her ninth birthday. And it was on this day that she had received a gift she still had, and it was the one that even now she held most dear.

  Sola, her nanny, had been with her. She was an older woman with hair long gone gray, but who still seemed as beautiful in Valentina’s eyes as she was kind. After some of her mother’s friends had made comments that Valentina didn’t understand, her mother had tried to explain to her about Sola being an Indian, what that meant in their history, and then showed her pictures in a book, but Valentina only knew that she loved Sola. Years later, her mother told her that they had had misgivings about Sola at first, but in spite of them they had taken her on to care for Valentina because she had been recommended by the Father of the little church they went to every Sunday.

  On this day, when she had just turned nine, Valentina and Sola were walking along the causeway by the water. There they came across a man fishing, not unlike the man she and Andrew were watching now. This man had been straining at the line, however, and just when they went by, a fish, huge and grotesque, emerged as if pulled from a dream. A girl on the arm of a boy coming the other way looked aghast at the sight of the bony monstrosity, but her young man was pleased, as he now had an excuse to hug her more closely. Valentina, however, was fascinated by this fish and, in a way, fell in love with this creature as if by some fairy tale enchantment. Everything about this fish was of another world, and she wanted to know that world.

  “Sola, I wish the man would let him go.”

  “Then you ask him.”

  Valentina glanced up, but Sola’s face betrayed nothing, yet there was something in the way she had spoken the words.

  “Señor?” Valentina said to the man.

  “Si, Senorita?”

  “I would like to buy your fish.”

  “Ah, would you?”

  “Yes. I have this.” She took out the pesos her uncle had given her for her birthday.

  “Hmm. I’m not sure that is enough. This fish will feed many.”

  “I don’t want to eat him, I want to let him go.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “It’s my birthday!”

  “Oh, I see a tear coming. Well, if this is because of me, a price too high to pay! So, here, off he goes.” And the man tossed back his catch, the fish flipping back and forth in the air before hitting the water. With one surge of his tail, he immediately vanished from sight. She pushed the pesos toward the man.

  “No, no, he’s a fish for free today. But I hope he learned something, or he’ll taste the grill soon enough. Hey, a joke.” He frowned suddenly. “What a stupid thing. You best be off.”

  But it was he who turned, gathered up his gear, and walked away along the causeway toward the war memorial.

  Valentina and Sola continued in the opposite direction, going in silence among the strollers.

  “Sola,” Valentina finally asked, “how does such a fish come out of our river?”

  Sola said nothing for a moment, but then bent down and looked closely into the eyes of Valentina. “Not from our river, little one. From the sea. Where these came from.” Sola lifted out the necklace she always wore, a string of silver and small translucent shells. “These have a power for us, we who come from deep in the land. A shell is like your bones, like the stone of the land we come from, the home you will leave someday.”

  She took the necklace off and rolled the shells gently in her hand.

  “Sometimes my people are called and make the journey to the sea before they die. My grandfather brought these back to me when I was your age. They connect to everything through your bones. Here.” She placed the necklace around Valentina’s neck. “It is yours now. You have been called. You will never be truly happy until you go.”

  “To the sea?”

  “Si.”

  “Now?”

  “Oh no, not now. Another day, when you are ready. Preparation is for now.”

  “Sola, how do I—”

  “You begin by not worrying, little fish! Stay in your day, in this time. Be as you are. See, look around, where are your feet? Feel them. Here.” Sola bent down and placed her brown hands on Valentina’s feet. A moment went by without time until Sola stood up, saying, “Now enough. Look over there! Is that not Danino’s? We go now for some lemon ice.”

  Sola had dropped the subject, and Valentina knew better than to belabor it, and the lemon ice from Danino’s was the best in Rosario, perhaps in all of Argentina.

  “It was the day it all began for me,” Valentina said. “I have no doubt. Soon after, I started collecting shells and books. Everything to do with the sea was all I was interested in. Then later came the whales, the Patagonian coast, and Golfo Nuevo where, it seems, I was destined to meet you! All from a fish out of the River Paraná where people stroll in the early evening and have lemon ice.”

  “The fish you let go,” Andrew said. “Was it from the sea?”

  “We have some migratory species here. Dorado, for instance, like a salmon. For years, I accepted what Sola told me as truth, and when I found out that the fish I saw that day hatches, lives and dies in this river, yes, I was sad, but I excused Sola because she was not educated as I was.”

  “But later, when studying at the university, I was on a field trip on the coast. I was daydreaming at a tide pool, when my professor happened by and stopped for a moment. He said, ‘A little world in the making, your pool. You almost can see it, can’t you? All life begins in the sea,’ and he walked away. This hit me like a cool wave on a burning summer day. I looked and it was like time stopped. I saw it so clearly, past understandi
ng, you know? I saw it all in a moment, everything. Sure, I knew this information, ‘life evolved from the sea’ was already in my head, but somehow in that moment of gazing into that tide pool, it became real for me in a way that it never was before. More real than real. I felt life, all life, stretching backward and forward. I felt the life in me and the life in that pool as the same.”

  “When I told this to people, they laughed, so I don’t tell it anymore, but only to you now because you have this too, I know. And Sola! Sola’s eyes and voice came back to me then. Her soul was so strong. She was there that day by the pool. It was true what she told me. It’s all right in front of us. Everything will sing you its song if you listen. And all the stories go back to the same place and time, and in my heart I am sure they all go forward to the same place and time. Ah, you know what I mean, don’t you? I know you do. Yes?”

  When she spoke these words to him, it was as if the unblinking light of the polestar had come down to stay in his heart and burn forever.

  All he could say at the time was, “Sometimes I know. Not as often as I wish.”

  She sighed and gave a little laugh. “How I know! Still, worth it when it happens, yes?”

  “No regrets,” he said. “It’s my life. I want it to be our life.”

  “It will be! Sola saw this for me, my whole life ahead of me, what was possible. I know she did.”

  “What happened to Sola?”

  “The day after the adventure with the fish on the causeway, we found a note from her. She had learned to write while she was with us, which she did as slowly as if engraving tablets. The note said it was time for her to return to her people. She was needed. We never saw her again. I cried for days.

  When I was older, I finally found her. She never really told us where she came from, so it took some time. As it was, she had died two years before I got there. Her people showed me where she was buried. Her grave is a special place for them and on it are placed many small white shells….”

  Valentina’s eyes were gleaming, and as her hand came up to the open neck of her blouse, the necklace she always wore caught the light of the setting sun. “She is still with me. A life is never lost.”

  Valentina turned and linked her arm with his. “The lemon ice, you must have one now. Danino’s is still the best. Come, we go.”

  His eyes opened. The light from the porthole was brighter now, the sun tearing through the few clouds on the horizon, gleaming the sea into a wide expanse of dancing light. As he let his breath out, the last of a great burden left with it. Ever since the appearance of the whale, the old sadness that lived deep inside him had begun to leave. Now he finally understood Valentina’s last gift. He dressed in the early light of this new day and silently made his way to the bridge where the string of shells and silver suspended above the compass waited for him as true as the North Star.