Sea Monsters Read online

  Whenever I felt disheartened or defeated I’d recall my father’s words, words he would repeat long after we’d stored the aquarium at the back of a closet and filled it with papers. Remember, he’d say, society is like a fish tank, only less beautiful to watch. The structure is not so different, however: here we have the shy fish who spend their lives hiding between the rocks, missing out on moments both important and trivial, then the gregarious types who crisscross the water in search of company or adventure, always on the move without knowing where they’re headed, and then the curious ones who hover close to the surface, first in line for food but also first should any hand or paw plunge in.

  Yet his words lost meaning before the ocean, here there was no visible order or structure, only one great matriarch, vast and indifferent as a cathedral. And that indifference had to be reckoned with, it had to be measured and addressed if there was to be any interaction between humans and ocean. From my first day in Zipolite I noticed the system of flags—green, yellow, and red, each signaling a different strength of current, a code imposed on the ocean’s movements: the ocean produced waves and we responded with triangles of color that mediated between us, rising up like strange pointy flowers on tall poles in the sand. No farther in than your knees, some said, because like everything dead, this beach and its waves will try to suck you under.

  I now imagined my parents plastering my image to lampposts, my face added to the missing-dog posters in our neighborhood. Se busca Azlán. Se busca Bonifacio. Se busca Chipotle. Each time I saw one I would fantasize about finding the animal—for the animal’s sake, for the owner’s sake, for the reward. But no image was permanent. These posters would start out vivid, inked with the owner’s nervous expectation, but as the days went by the hope and color would be drained from them and one morning they’d be torn down by a man in overalls who went around removing expired notices. Some of the animals I recognized but others must have spent their entire lives indoors; I had a pretty good sense of most of the dogs in La Roma, many of whom were brought to the park to run, others taken out by the neighborhood dog walker. Other sights: a pair of Rottweilers jumping up and down behind the wire mesh of their gate, two dark masses springing as if on a trampoline, fiercely guarding the only territory they knew, and our local priest, who would change into sneakers at night and walk his white Maltese through the dirty streets.

  The dogs in Zipolite may have been safe from city woes, yet all day long they wandered up and down the beach as if scavenging for something not provided by the landscape. They took the beach’s temperature, gauged its mood, sussed out every new arrival. A ragbag of breeds, none were one solid color but rather a patchwork of two or three tones. Some had faces like masks, pure black interrupted by a tan snout or a set of golden eyebrows, others resembled wolves or oversized cats. One had a splash of German Shepherd though he was much smaller in size and nowhere near as regal; these dogs were more like courtiers, but even among courtiers there must be a king, and the leader of the pack, as far as I could tell, was this unabashed Shepherd mongrel, average in height but lofty in carriage, whom the others followed around and turned to for cues.

  From early on I noticed the dogs didn’t take to Tomás. They would avoid him and snarl when he came too close. Yet he didn’t pay much attention, and when they first approached—after all, we were new scents on the beach—he yelled ¡Lárguense! and kicked the air near their heads. I’d often share my snacks with them, whatever I happened to have, which was never very much, and as a result the motley congregation would come sit by my side. How had I ended up in Zipolite preferring the company of these dogs to that of the person I’d run away with, I’d ask myself, while the sea continued to write and erase its long ribbon of foam.

  AFTER THE FIRST SIGHTING, EACH MORNING I’D EXPECTED the scene to be replayed. There was the organ grinder perched on the edge of the fountain with his rag and instrument, but he sat alone and the red rag announced nothing new, it remained a piece of worn flannel run up and down the sides of the organ. On my way to the school bus I took parallel streets but saw no one, nothing, outside the usual, nothing that hadn’t been absorbed into the daily sights and routines.

  And then finally, ten days later, I saw him a second time, near some local ruins. After the big earthquake three years ago I was constantly on the alert for what would emerge from them, and our neighborhood was a living archive of the disaster. We had ruins and we had the people in the ruins, the new inhabitants of La Roma’s twilight zones who had slowly begun to occupy the collapsed buildings and mountains of rubble. They moved in with their menagerie of strays, spectral cats with faint meows and mangy dogs who’d spend hours pawing at imaginary food in the crevices.

  As for our modest house, its simple anatomy had saved it. Other houses on our street, ones with more complicated structures, had tumbled within minutes, casualties of the quake that had its epicenter in the Pacific Ocean near the coast of Michoacán. Far away, a tectonic plate had decided to shift and with its shifting that Thursday morning it dispatched a telegram that swayed, toppled, and razed all we’d taken for granted. Yet our house had remained standing. The pictures went crooked, as did several pots in the kitchen, but the only permanent mark was one fissure that appeared along the living room wall like a fallen lightning bolt.

  The pile of ruins on Chihuahua was one of the most dramatic expressions of collapse, its massive concrete slabs and shattered glass seeming to multiply and mosaic over time, and it was there that I saw Tomás again. I’d been on my way to the stationery store when I came upon two aging émigrés. Our local enigmas, they had fled a Europe in ruins to live, later, among our slightly more humble ones. I’d often see them at the VIPS diner on Insurgentes bent over their coffee and molletes, the woman with a hand on her purse and the man with a hand on his cane, as if ready to leave at the slightest prompting. That day they were accompanied by their ancient dog, whom they’d take on walks around the neighborhood, the man in his black beret—the street kids called him Manolete—and the woman in gray with her hair swept into an irreverent bun. Yet it seemed that this trio, dignified and decrepit, had run into trouble, for they’d come to a standstill and the dog lay with his hind legs splayed behind him. What was the problem, I asked, to which the woman pointed and said in a thick accent that he was having trouble finding his footing. No worries, I replied, and despite my hesitation I lifted the dog from the rear and held him up so the paws could find traction, not an easy task since even in the fanciest of neighborhoods the pavement was remarkably uneven, the result of our sinking city and the roots of trees battling out their subterranean existence.

  As I crouched there assisting the dog, whose fur was short and bristly, a boot stepped down centimeters away, one boot and then the other. Ankle boots, turquoise blue with a black heel. I glanced up and saw with astonishment that this somewhat unconventional footwear was attached to the young man from the fountain. He was looking straight ahead and didn’t pause, nor slow his pace, as he stepped around our little ensemble.

  Again, I had a strong urge to follow but the dog was still relying on me to stand—I released him for a second but he immediately began to cave—and as the paws continued to resist traction I saw the figure nearing the corner, but what could I do, I’d embarked on a good deed and couldn’t depart halfway. After several more minutes of struggle the dog finally managed to stand on his own. Once he was back on all fours the émigrés thanked me, though not as profusely as they should have considering what I had just sacrificed in stopping to help them.

  JULIÁN WAS WITH ME WHEN I SAW TOMÁS A THIRD time, on an afternoon when the sky was uncommonly clear. A few factories must’ve been napping, or half the city’s cars on holiday, and even the trees seemed aware of the change and looked more expansive, easing into relaxed forms before the air reverted to its grim chemistry. Instead of staying in the Covadonga, Julián grabbed his camera and tucked a couple of beers into his bag and we headed over to Álvaro Obregón. We loved the avenue’s camellón, a
long public walkway that bisected the traffic, its green wrought-iron benches and eloquent trees, their branches twisted into unlikely shapes as if from daily conversations with the wind. Up and down we’d stroll, taking stock of changes like city surveyors. A new record shop here, an intricate balcony renovated over there, further elevation of the pavement here and there and there, a rightward tilt and a shift in contours at the ruins on Chihuahua, and the only features that remained the same were the wide angles of street corners left over from the days when carriages needed to comfortably turn them. Sometimes in the early morning the émigrés would also visit the camellón, I’d see them on my way to school and sense they’d been awake for hours, as if still on a European clock. But what I loved most were the fountains inhabited by bronze sculptures of classical figures solitary or interlocked, caught up in dramas from long ago, blind to the thousands of cars speeding past.

  Today the only free bench was across from the hospital, and we sat and took clandestine sips from our beers until the traffic began to thicken. Afterward we resumed our walk, neither of us paying much attention to where we were headed, and before long we ended up in front of the abandoned house on Plaza Río de Janeiro.

  The earthquake had also left many mansions empty and in disrepair. Some were being squatted and others had a resident guard camping out in one of the rooms, the light of his candle visible from the street at night. Directly next door, meanwhile, showing more signs of life despite existing in similar limbo, would be a ruin. This particular house had lain abandoned long enough for anyone curious to have gone in to explore. I’d been inside several times with friends, it was the perfect place to smoke cigarettes and pose for imaginary album covers, and once someone had thrown a party and the entire house with its dozen rooms had glowed and crackled with life, until the police arrived, tipped off by the music and candlelight, and drove everyone out. There were plans to develop it, some said, grand plans drawn up by the municipal director general of Caos y Desarrollo Urbano, but for now it still belonged to us.

  I followed Julián as he cut a path through the tall weeds that rose around the house like the soil’s unbrushed hair and we paused only briefly at the open lock, corroded by countless rainy seasons and impossible to close. Yet it added to the thrill of trespassing, and we stuck to silence as we stepped into the front room. Clawlike branches groped their way through the broken windowpanes. Shafts of light entered through gaps in the walls, creating checkered patterns on the floorboards. On a rafter overhead, the resident doves, alarmed by our entrance, murmured nervously among themselves, and a few puffed out their feathers to look larger.

  Julián had borrowed the camera from his father when he’d left home; at some point he would return it, or perhaps not, depending on whether they spoke again. A compact rectangle of stainless steel, it looked more like a long, thick finger than any device for recording images. The sort of gadget spies might use, or Cold War villains. Minox was its brand name, Julían informed me, as he began to document the beams, the doves, the cracks in the walls, even the dead flies that lay in tiny heaps on the floor as if someone had swept them up and then abandoned the task.

  After capturing most of our surroundings Julián went to pose on the edge of a windowsill and asked me to photograph him. I thought of a Russian film I’d once seen—characters in a crumbling house, water dripping in from a punishing sky—and searched for redemptive angles within the surrender and neglect. At first he was tense, I kept telling him to relax, and only after humming to himself was he able to loosen his jaw and drop his shoulders into a more natural position. Through the viewfinder I allowed myself to admire him, his long lashes and craggy nose, and couldn’t help lamenting the orientation of his romantic preferences.

  The film was advanced by sliding the camera shut and then back open, a pleasing movement that presented the danger of compulsive picture taking; I had to control my fingers. Julián went to stand by the stairway and rested a hand on the banister. As I began to photograph this new pose, sleeves and trousers growing dustier after every encounter with a surface, his figure seemed to double. At first I thought it was his shadow but the contours didn’t match up. I lowered the camera and there he was, the young man in black, standing on the stair behind him. Sensing a presence, Julián jumped aside.

  We didn’t hear you.

  No, even after all this time the stairs don’t creak.

  He’d been upstairs, he said, his voice a bit deeper than I would have imagined, but heard movement and had come to investigate. At first he thought it was the doves, they seemed to be multiplying, but he then heard humans, too. He glanced at me, fixed his hair, then down at the Minox in my hand.

  How did you get in? Julián asked, commenting that the lock, though broken, had still been in place. There are many secret entrances, he said, without explaining why one would need them. They discussed the state of the house, wondered how much longer it would stand without any sort of intervention. And while they spoke I casually studied him, deciding that the portrait from up close was even better than from afar: grayish eyes and tufts of hair in all directions, and a gap between the front teeth, surely excellent for whistling. He seemed older than me, by two or three years, and was unusually pale, not in the synthetic manner of the blond stars of Televisa but rather like a güerito de rancho. His face was very round, almost lunar, and more than anything he reminded me of someone handsome I’d once seen in a music video, not the lead singer but someone in the periphery, on a parallel plane. His clothes, a medley of black, were made of thick cotton, and gave off a strong smell of pot. What brings you here? I asked, realizing I had yet to say a word. He’d recently dropped out of school, he said proudly, and was now working part-time at a bookstore. Which one? A Través del Espejo, on Álvaro Obregón.

  Name: Tomás. Tomás Román.

  After a few minutes he ended the conversation, said he’d been in the middle of something and had to return to it. An unfinished joint, perhaps, unless there was someone upstairs with him. A dead end within an abandoned house—well, who would have expected the dialogue to run on for hours—yet it now felt as though we were the only ones intruding. Julián said, See you around, and I waved mutely, and we walked toward the door as the doves fluttered up and resettled into new configurations.

  AFTER THAT AFTERNOON, I BEGAN WALKING PAST the abandoned house often. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in, not on my own, and Julián didn’t feel inclined to visit again, explaining that none of our photos had come out, the film hadn’t been loaded properly, and he was too superstitious to return. So what could I do but walk past in the hope of a chance encounter, and during the hours at school add Tomás Román to the margins of my notebooks. I wrote TR in all its variations, the name blowing up genie-like as I tried out different scripts, cursive, feral and humdrum print, but after so many hours I’d tire of seeing those ten letters in the same order, ten letters with the same two vowels, ten letters that with repetition should have worked some manner of spell, yet instead lay silent, coffined, on the page.

  Each class had its notebook, the teacher’s words at the center and my own thoughts gargoyled in the margins. Center, margins, center, margins, my focus traveled between the two. Stay at the center, I told myself, stay at the center, but my eyes and hand would gravitate outward. In calculus class Mr. Rodríguez asked me what I was writing so intently, and laughed his sinister laugh when I quickly hid the scribbles with my arm. Rail thin (childhood polio) and famously short-tempered, Rodríguez taught various levels of mathematics. The more difficult the class, the more exalted he’d become, thrilled by the infinitesimal twists of calculus and how they made us suffer, and the moment we grasped something he would take it further, pushing our green minds as far as they would go, although few of us, he knew, would be able to accompany him to the end of the journey.

  Mundane voices kept trying to anchor my reverie, gravity struggling against the flying carpet, and I resented them all, even that of Mr. Berg, my favorite teacher, who, sensing m
y distraction, began calling on me more often. I had studied French with him since ninth grade, when I’d learned the first words of the language, and had now moved with him into level four. He never revealed much about his past, only that in France he’d been a lecturer, had met his wife and emigrated to Mexico in the sixties. His face was from another continent and another era, with hooded wide-set eyes and thick lips and sloping eyebrows. And even more like my favorite actor, Peter Lorre, his expression could go within seconds from gentle to glowering to broken and forlorn, the face of someone historically haunted, a face that seemed to carry in it several chapters of European history.

  I clung to him, or to the idea of him, more than he ever realized. I sensed he knew how hopelessly adrift I felt there among the sons and daughters of industrialists and politicians, and the transient Americans whose parents worked for transnational companies. Mr. Berg represented something beyond them all. Our school, the Colegio Campus Americano, or COCA for short, was a fortress in the middle of Tacubaya. Long ago Tacubaya had been a rural idyll, the home of rich people and viceroys, we were told, but the colonial village had been urbanized, and eventually replaced by streets lined with stores selling car parts and horse feed. From the bus window I’d often see men sitting on barrels drinking soda while children and dogs played tag in empty lots nearby.

  Now in the autumn of 1988 the final countdown had begun and each hour drew us mercifully closer to that June day of the crimson gown and quadrangle. Once I graduated I would never have to see the likes of Paulina again, clad in her Guess and Esprit, who said my Doc Martens were construction worker shoes—zapatos de albañil, she’d called them—nor her boyfriend, Jerónimo, whose father was a PRI politician who took him to see bulls being tortured to death every weekend. I preferred Chucho and Ximena, whose father had won the lottery; in most eyes, their money didn’t count, so they remained humble. As for me, most people knew that my father taught at a university, even if his subject and salary remained subjects of discussion, but few were aware of my mother’s translation agency, or of my scholarship.