Sea Monsters Read online

  At school I’d had one close friend and a handful of semi-friends. But I tended to avoid the girls; in one way or another, the friendships were all-consuming but quickly consumed, and the moment the match was struck it hurried toward its extinction. Male friendships lasted longer, it was no mystery, there were fewer vibrations of the pendulum, and my one friend had been Etienne. Etienne was Mexican but his parents worshipped all things European. He was a hemophiliac and had often missed class, but when he was there we would always sit together in the green area by the pool, far from everyone. The son of a famous painter adored by politicians and the bourgeoisie, he would tell me stories of the famous people he’d met and the fancy places he’d been to, and spent much more time with grown-ups than with anyone his own age. Apart from me he didn’t seem interested in his peers. Every now and then he’d be summoned from class and picked up by his father’s chauffeur, or else bump into something sharp like the corner of a table and be rushed to the school infirmary for an injection. I often saw his peacock father in the newspapers, his aftershave almost rising off the page as he received honorary this and that. Yet from one morning to the next my friend was gone, sent against his will to boarding school in Switzerland.

  One day in French class Mr. Berg asked us to choose a Baudelaire poem to analyze. As he spoke and wrote Baudelaire’s name across the blackboard, starting straight but ending obliquely, I began to feel as though recently I’d been wandering under a distant star. That evening I leafed through Les Fleurs du mal, alighting on different poems, trying to decide which to spend time with, but once the book fell open at “Un Voyage à Cythère” I knew my attention would remain there. How did I know? Because Cythère was Kythera, it was one and the same place, that small legendary island off the Peloponnese that had caught the imagination of many painters and poets, and, more importantly, of my father. I didn’t know which I preferred, the cackle of Kythera or the sorceress C of Cythère, but in any case, both designated the alleged birthplace of Aphrodite, or at least one of her birthplaces, since the exact site, like so much in myth, was contested.

  In the opening verse the poet’s heart is swooping about like a bird, free and happy around the rigging, but soon that buoyant spirit gets ensnared in gloomy pessimism and the poem ends with the macabre image of the sacrificed poet hanging from the gallows. It may start with a ship setting out under cloudless blue skies but the truth, at least in my interpretation, was that the poem’s heart was a carbonized black, and Kythera a somber rocky place where dreams got dashed against its shores. When I told him which poem I’d chosen Mr. Berg said I’d made a good choice and then, cryptically, asked me to bear in mind that events were the mere froth of things, and one’s true interest should be the sea.

  The sea. Up until then, my father’s only way of interesting me in the ancient world had been through shipwrecks. That was how he drew me in, made me feel occasionally connected to the ancient. Me, I preferred the modern, whatever it was, exactly, and although I listened as diligently as I could I tended to drift before long. Aeschylus and Sophocles had failed. So had Lucretius. Descriptions of pillar and tree worship in Mycenaean times. The spring configuration in ancient Chinese locks. Even descriptions of the design of chariots in ancient Egypt, the poles and the axles, dismantled at the funerals of pharaohs in order to negotiate the narrow corridors of tombs. Facts gleaned from conferences rather than from the books in his study; print couldn’t keep up with the advancement, in his words, of historical minutiae. With my mother, conversation was open and emotional with little withheld, but with my father there was a constant search for paths of communication that led away from ourselves.

  It was only after he attended a conference on corrosion studies, the long-term interaction of materials in marine environments, that he returned home and was able to reel me in. He’d begun by telling me about a metallurgical report someone had delivered concerning a section of corroded candlestick from the Gilt Dragon, a seventeenth-century Dutch vessel that had struck a reef and gone down off the coast of Western Australia. Interesting, yet not enough to last for more than one meal. But he then moved on to something more thrilling, enlivened by much more detail.

  Shipwrecks fall prey to all sorts of appetites, he said, the appetite of salt water, the appetite of sea creatures, the appetite of time. In the Mediterranean there are three main saltwater macro-organisms that share a fondness for ancient timber: the shipworm, the wood piddock, and the marine gribble. All three contribute to the stratification and contamination of the wreck. These marine borers are able to endure even the harshest conditions and can adapt to nearly every depth. Water temperature and salinity are their main gauges.

  Marine gribbles, more sonorously known as Limnoria, tunnel into the wood in pairs, with the female forging ahead. Sharp-clawed and seven-legged, they are found in most marine and brackish waters, often present in large numbers. The channels they create run parallel to the surface of the wood and tend to communicate, rendering an infested vessel even more vulnerable to corrosion. Though they roam freely, gribbles have hermitlike instincts, and are loath to leave once they’re ensconced in the burrows they’ve created: why move home when you have a roof and an endless supply of wood, peace, and quiet?

  The shipworm, meanwhile, is a bivalve mollusk without shell or gender that changes sex as it grows. Also known as the termites of the sea, shipworms are less endearing in appearance than gribbles, with long, slender bodies and heads that resemble gaping mouths in service of an insatiable appetite that incessantly combs the water. Their bodies become longer as they burrow, leaving a calcareous deposit in their wake.

  And finally, the wood piddock. Unlike the other two, the piddock is unable to digest cellulose: it seeks out wood not for nourishment but as protection from whatever dangers the sea may present. Its burrows are shallow and spherical; it attacks in big groups. Like the shipworm, the piddock is bisexual, and similarly content to remain in its chambers once satisfactory lodgings have been found.

  The job of these organisms is made easier, and the yielding of submerged wood therefore swifter, thanks to the handiwork of two micro-organisms, fungi and bacteria, who break down the tissue before the others come to dig their channels. Along with this array of wood-boring creatures and their lesser counterparts, wave action adds to the process of demolition. The movement of water, as well as the movement of the seabed as the sand shifts and resettles, furthers the toll on the sunken vessel.

  How to ignore the tragedy of the wreck, like that of a carcass in a wildlife program, no longer breathing yet under continued assault—once the mortal blow is dealt, a host of scavengers moves in. But I also cheered for these aquatic hermits who had found a home. Listening to my father describe the scenario made me feel I had access to something vertiginously distant and mysterious and of the various wrecks he mentioned, his favorite, and soon mine, was that of Antikythera, which had lain at the bottom of the ocean for twenty centuries. For twenty centuries, the ship and its contents had remained at the mercy of tides, currents, organisms, and upwellings. For twenty centuries, they lay silenced.

  AT NIGHT THE WAVES OF THE PACIFIC WOULD GROW tremendous, swelling in height and in volume, a maritime thunder outdinning every other gesture of nature, and I’d watch as surfers materialized on the horizon like rare mammals from the sea. Dogs would bark at them from the shore with their hackles raised, and I’d wonder whether we all fell prey to some form of coastal delirium, a delirium born from the potent alignment of air, sand, and sea; after all, a mere drop of water can interact with light in an infinite number of ways.

  The first three sightings of Tomás were followed by none, so one afternoon when I was feeling fortified—three A’s at school that day—I dropped by A Través del Espejo. As much as I liked the idea of it, I didn’t go there often. The place was topsy-turvy, with erratically packed shelves and signs in different languages and piles of books rising from the floor to the height of children. Positioned at the till as if to contradict its chaos was the
owner, a stern woman with a pageboy haircut; she never smiled, never helped, and expressed annoyance whenever someone inquired into the availability or location of this or that book.

  I crossed paths with Tomás, nearly brushed sleeves, as I walked in. He was on his way out, accompanied by a couple around his age whom he introduced as the Americans. He was taking them to see an apartment, he said. Which apartment? I asked, wondering whether he was now working in real estate, too. The apartment where William Burroughs shot his wife, he said. These Americans had come into the shop asking whether someone would show them, could pay fifty pesos, and since Tomás had been there once before he volunteered, and got permission for a short break. Do you even know who Burroughs is? he asked me. Yes, I do, I said, though I’ve never read him. My mother had two books of his and every now and then, sensing they held something illicit, I’d peer inside, searching for incendiary words and scenes, but was always left feeling short-changed.

  Moments later I was walking down the street with Tomás and the two Americans, the girl chubby and snub-nosed and exuding an impressive confidence, the boy somewhat timid and half her girth. Tomás led us to the corner where Chihuahua meets Monterrey, paused, then turned right on Monterrey and stopped in front of number 122, a gray building with a black door. It opened with a push. We entered the tiled hallway and climbed a chilly flight of stairs but at the first floor our steps were cut short by a floor-to-ceiling grate that blocked access to a whole section of the corridor. A woman in a tracksuit and flip-flops emerged from one of the apartments and asked what we wanted. We’d like to see— No, no, no, the woman interrupted, aware of where the sentence was heading. Number 8 was a private residence. After moving in she and her husband had put up this barrier because people kept coming by, Americans wanting to make a television series, Americans wanting to make a documentary, Americans wanting to do a photo shoot. The young couple pleaded. They said they were students from San Francisco who loved William Burroughs and wanted to see the place where it all happened, the place that made him a writer, the place that made him a different person from when he entered. The woman seemed moved. I could see her studying the eager couple, their Converse high-tops and woven bracelets from the market, and after biting her lip and glancing over at me and Tomás to make sure we weren’t renegades, she finally said, Okay, five minutes, and unlocked the gate.

  As far as I could tell, her home contained nothing foreboding apart from the walls being decked in Christmas decorations, with pots of poinsettia on the sills; it was unclear whether these were left over from the previous year or put out a few months early. The windows of the apartment looked onto an interior courtyard whose upper tiers were crisscrossed with laundry. The woman’s husband surfaced from a side room. His jeans were fastened with a string and he spoke and moved in stutters as if he’d suffered a stroke. His wife told him why we were there, upon which he sighed, especially when the young Americans asked whether they knew where in the flat it had all happened, there seemed to be many spaces and they wanted to know which held meaning. The woman pointed to a piano in the living room, an old piano covered in doilies, nearly eighty years old, she said, no one ever played it but in its spot the lady was shot. With forensic hunger the American boy began to circle the piano as if the instrument had absorbed some of the drama from thirty-seven years before, and started taking photos from different angles, his camera clicking loudly each time he pressed down on the button and wound the film.

  As he took pictures the woman positioned herself in front of the piano and her husband stuttered over to the arch dividing living room from dining room, and solemnly announced that here was where Burroughs himself had stood, under the arch, and taken aim. Husband at one end, wife at the other. Face-to-face. All movement halted as they set up the scene. Despite their earlier protestations I had the sense they had done this before, inviting friends over to pantomime the famous incident that had taken place under their roof. The seconds passed, taut and bizarre, as each of them stood in their places. I sensed I was being watched. Tomás was staring over at me. Lips curled, eyes slightly narrowed. I wasn’t certain how to meet the expression so I smiled, but since his lips were already curled I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling back. Well, he must be, I decided; perhaps he was thinking what I’d begun to think, that this was a space of couples, first Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, then the married pair who lived here, and the young Californians. And now, Tomás and Luisa. Three couples, albeit one deceased, and us. Different portraits of modern coupledom. Story of an Afternoon with Piano and Couples. Tomás returned his attention to the husband and wife, who continued with their pantomiming as the rest of us stood quietly in our places.

  After a minute or so the American girl, now powdered-milk pale, brought the session to an end. Well, thank you, I think we’ve seen enough, she said softly, her hand tightening around her bag strap. It’d been too much, I sensed, she’d gotten more than she’d expected. Thank you, we echoed. The man waved from under the arch but his legs stayed rooted, unfreed from the spell. His wife accompanied us to the gate.

  On our way out I noticed it was the rest of the building, rather than the apartment itself, which seemed to hold something of that unfortunate past. The hollowed steps, the cold, blue shadows of the stairwell. I was eager to return to the street but Tomás insisted we have a quick look at the patio at the back, an outdoor space enclosed by four high walls, home to a Cal-o-Rex boiler and a black door lying horizontal. It wasn’t the original from 1951 but one of many reincarnations, Tomás explained; the past ten doors had been documented over the years by a fan. Up above I glimpsed a patch of blue beyond the hanging laundry and walls of blistered plaster, beyond the pleated curtains flapping in the windows like women’s nightgowns pressed against the sills, restless and billowing and ready to leap out into this domestic void of the inner courtyard. In silence we headed back toward the street, through the corridor where light bled around the rim of the front door and pooled into long white bars on the floor tiles, and it was there, in these communal spaces, that one felt captive to the building.

  Once back on the street the Americans handed Tomás a fifty-peso bill and disappeared into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle taxi. The last time he’d gone to the apartment, he told me with a note of disappointment, there’d been three sisters living there with their five parrots, as you can imagine it was a bit noisier … Well, anyway, thanks for coming, he added, he had to get back to work but I knew where to find him, and off he went, hands in pockets, reverting to a black streak.

  Yes, he was intriguing, but he wasn’t the only one. Later in my room I ran through my list. From nights out there’d been Tiburcio Pérez, an artist from La Quiñonera with long hair and amber jewelry who attached reddish brown scorpions, our city’s native Vaejovis mexicanus Koch, to thickly painted canvases. La Quiñonera was an artist’s colony in La Candelaria, through the rusted gate you’d step into a vast unruly garden and there, at the end, beckoned a large stone house with four entrances. It was always cold at night and many of the artists wore ponchos, ponchos and some manner of pendant, often a silver cross or an animal tooth. And of course there was pulque, a lot of pulque, buckets brought fresh from a faraway town, and we’d gather round and dip in our cups, the air pungent with the heady scent of copal, and the copal would merge with the smell of unfiltered Alas and Faros and Delicados, those were the cigarettes of choice at La Quiñonera. Someone would always be painting while someone else would be playing the guitar, others would be arguing over politics or philosophy in the kitchen, and there were dogs, dogs everywhere. After Tiburcio came Alfonso, an anesthetist by day and drummer by night. My father’s greatest fear was that I would end up with a rockero, so this one time I stepped out with a musician set his hair on end, especially when I accompanied Alfonso to concerts to see howling monkeys, that’s what my father called them, howling monkeys, although my drummer would never howl, he’d sit serious and tight-lipped, sweating profusely as he banged out his rhythms. I’d also liked o
ne of the Swedes on the bus, by the name of Lars Karlsson. There were probably 100,000 Lars Karlssons in Sweden but only one, or a few, in Mexico. Lars appeared gentler and more approachable than the other Swedes yet I found it impossible to speak to him, and on the few occasions he ended up sitting beside me I’d spent the entire ride trying to think of something to say. And then there was Andrés, who liked kicking boxes, he’d kick any box he found lying on the street; because of his deranged expression my mother had him drive her around the block a few times before allowing him to take me to the movies. There would also be the random boy from school I would dream about and the next day in class feel a connection to; after all, if he had gatecrashed my dream there must be a reason, especially when I’d hardly noticed him before. It would always be an individual from whom I would never have expected interest in either direction, usually preppy, with brown loafers and light pink button-up shirts; whereas I dressed almost entirely in black and would pin up my hair in extravagant ways. Yes, it would’ve been a shock if one of them had turned around and asked me out, indeed shattered all preconceptions, and yet my dream, so vivid, had introduced a thin crack in an otherwise impenetrable surface, and at first I’d wait for some sign of acknowledgment. But no, there’d be none, not even a glance, and over time I would have to accept that the dream bore no message, there was no connection, and once more the random boy would fade into the background, to become simply another face in the classroom.