Sea Monsters Read online

  The merman may have been married, though he wore no wedding ring; he may have been a drug addict, though he had good teeth and flawless skin; he may have been a carpenter, train conductor, or physiotherapist. All I knew apart from the sandcastle was that he had a great stillness and could sit for ages without stirring, except for when he lifted his bottle of beer to his mouth to drink, then drying his lips with the back of his hand. And that his eyes were capable of considerable depth and expression as he watched and listened, his face mostly serious, almost idle, but with traces of livelier moments like oxidized swings at a playground. Yet he smiled whenever I did, and pulled faces when my tone turned solemn. Even if he didn’t understand my words, I was reassured his concentration was such that he could read my mood and gauge my tone, that in itself was enough, and each time an atom of doubt flickered into my mind I had only to think back on the vision of him building his sandcastle. Yes, I had come to the beach, or rather run away, with Tomás, but it was clear there was no bond between us, and now the merman, I suspected, would make my journey worthwhile. It’s often the case that one person leads you to another, at least that’s what my experienced older cousin once told me, never write someone off since they may be the conduit, lead you to something more important than the original, and as the merman took quiet sips from his drink, I let the words tumble out.

  There are two kinds of romantics, my older cousin had explained, the kind who is constantly falling in love and simply needs a person into whom they can pour every thought, dream, and project, and the kind of romantic who remains alone, waiting and waiting for the right person to arrive, a person who may not even exist. It was too early to know which kind I would be.

  By the third night I stopped trying to guess which country the merman was from, or his mother tongue: there was no indication of nationality. I tried to read hints in his gestures but could only narrow it down to Europe, probably Eastern Europe, though I’d never met anyone from Eastern Europe before. And I didn’t ask myself how he’d been able to travel; according to our history teacher, most people living behind the Iron Curtain weren’t allowed to travel to the West unless they were gymnasts or chess players. And I also had no idea where he was staying, whether in a palapa or a bungalow or a nearby hotel, he would simply show up at the bar each evening and leave a couple of hours later. I didn’t know his name, so I called him the merman: mermen can hail from any country, speak any language, and look like anything, and there was something about him that rang of half land, half sea, as if he belonged to both but was hesitant to commit to either.

  At a certain point the merman would push away his empty bottle, rise from his chair, and smile, polite yet distant, distant enough to suggest it was good night rather than a suggestion to accompany him. After he left I would wait a few minutes and then stumble down the beach and, after so many drinks, collapse in my hammock. The merman was generous and always paid; the moment I’d finish a drink he would raise his hand to signal to the waiter and with a looping gesture ask for two more, and whenever the time came to pay the merman would again raise a hand and push away mine if it happened to be holding money, and from a miniature cloth bag hanging from his neck he would extract a few coins and tightly folded bills, counting too softly for me to hear in what language, furthermore the music from the bar drowned out the murmuring although we always sat at the table farthest from the speakers.

  Each time the waiter brought our drinks he would deliver the bottle of beer with a lime sliced in two on the side, and each time the merman would make a sign to say he did not want the lime, only the beer, but the very next time the waiter appeared with our order he would again bring a lime sliced in two, its halves still connected by a hinge, and then take it away again, only to bring the same lime back to the table forty-five minutes later. Though the merman seemed like a patient sort, not easily ruffled, I’d notice his mouth twitch whenever the waiter arrived with the same lime. I would try to think of something to say to distract him from this irritating repetition, but the one night it didn’t happen (there was another waiter working, who wasn’t offering limes with beer), the merman looked as if something were missing.

  I decided I should tell him about Tomás, and why I found myself on the beach in the first place, though I said it was mostly because of the dwarfs, twelve Ukrainian dwarfs on the run from a Soviet circus touring Mexico, rather than the ruse it had, truthfully, been. I’d seen the note in the paper myself, I explained, there in the bottom right-hand corner of the page emitting its own radioactive glow, and it was this story that had set everything in motion. In fact the newspaper clipping was still in my bag, ready to be brought out should someone not believe me, and besides, I was prone to losing things and if one day it were to go astray the information would’ve at least been transferred to a few memories. Already the paper had become vulnerable along the lines where it had been folded, somewhere between the description of the empty trailer and the speculation over Oaxaca, marking the path that led off the page and into the wilds of Mexico. I watched as the merman’s faraway eyes ran over the words without any obvious sign of comprehension or surprise; it was possible that for him this sort of news item wasn’t of interest, maybe in his country dwarfs ran away from circuses every month, and who cared that it had happened in Mexico; different laws govern different geographies.

  As he studied the clipping I leaned closer in, my head almost touching his, and inhaled a humid union of brine and pine. I was trying to establish which scent was dominant, that of the sea or his cologne, when he returned the article, pushed away his beer, and rose from the table, reminding me of his not insignificant height, and with a semi-wave announced he was now leaving, and shuffled off in his blue plastic sandals. The first night I’d been taken aback by his abrupt departure but there he was again on the second night, and the third, and I stopped worrying about whether I would see him as he was always there, installed at the same table at the back of the bar clutching his Sol or Negra Modelo. And once he departed I would return to my hammock, Tomás nowhere in sight, and try to sleep, exposed to the elements, to snatches of conversation from passing shadows, and the whir and lull of giant insects.

  ANOTHER DAY: ANOTHER STRIP OF SAND, CLUSTER OF trees, band of waves, band of sky. The beach continued to look like a naïve composition, still waiting for a pair of scissors to come and disturb it. And there was the hut, for instance, in a new position, a modest cutout, pale blue against the other blues. At night it looked like a cardboard box a child had left behind. I never saw anyone emerge from it, but the woman at El Cósmico explained that the Zipolite lifeguard, a robust woman in her fifties, lived inside, and since the structure was on wheels she could move from spot to spot and through its windows keep an eye on the water.

  One afternoon not far from the hut I spotted a group of people lying on the sand, three on their backs and two on their stomachs. I couldn’t help but fear they were victims of some nautical calamity; their positions looked wrong, crooked, arms and legs jutting out at awkward angles as though they’d been cast out of the hut like dice, or else washed ashore by the waves, left to the chance of the ocean’s directives, a random throw that had created this perturbing configuration. I was debating whether to raise the alarm when someone’s beach ball struck one of the motionless bodies, the impact of which made the woman jump up in her black-and-white polka-dot bikini and shake a fist and start yelling in Italian, addressing an imprecise spot in the air since the owner of the ball, most likely intimidated, failed to materialize. Her yells ricocheted off the dozing bodies of her companions, two boys, a girl, and a man, who sprang up jack-in-the-box, and soon everyone was awake, and incontestably alive.

  Sometimes when I shut my eyes I imagined the dwarfs vaulting forward and backward on the waves. I couldn’t lose sight of them, at least not in my thoughts. Perhaps one of them had broken away from the group and was standing amid the buses in the terminal’s back alley, still in his makeup, with arched eyebrows and overstated mouth; or walking along
a dusty road clenching a cigarette and a bunch of flowers as trucks ten times his size barreled past; or sitting in a fonda eating tacos while drivers jeered at him from another table; or returning to the dusty road, hands in pockets, a stray dog barking at his shadow. As the beach became more crowded, voices clinking all around me, a happier picture rose to mind: that of the dwarfs in a village plaza dancing to “Dios Nunca Muere,” my parents’ favorite waltz. And then a longer-lasting scenario of happiness: that after days and days of travel, the dwarfs had arrived at a hamlet somewhere deep inland, stepping out of the cornfields and looking so sad and tired that the native women rushed to feed them. Over the course of the meal they would tell their story, primarily through gestures—the only languages at hand Spanish, Zapotec, Russian, and Ukrainian: misery in the grip of a ruthless ringmaster, flight from the circus, journey. Once everyone had finished eating, the villagers, also mainly through gestures, would extend an invitation: the dwarfs were welcome to join their community as long as they contributed however they could, either with manual labor or entertainment or ideally both, and the dwarfs would accept and remain forever in this hamlet pocketed away somewhere in the depths of Mexico.

  It was during a moment of such musing that the growl of a motor shredded my thoughts, and the sound patterns of beach and ocean. I sat up just as two lanchas, simple boats with low sides and noisy motors, were surging past a few meters from the shore. Each was steered by a lanchero accompanied by his handful of passengers, some of whom anxiously gripped the sides of the boat. A few bathers in the water quickly paddled out of their way. Once the boats clattered off, their obtrusive presence absorbed back into the greater whole, I spotted Tomás near a yellow flag, his head bobbing up and down in the waves. He seemed to be looking over. I made a sign and he began wading out, not without effort since the water was rowdy, extra swell probably added by the departing boats, but after a minute or so he was at my side, dripping and salted, his face a pinkish red, his hair like a melted helmet. Come back, jaunty figure in black, come back. But my affections had started to gravitate elsewhere so what did I care whether the person from the city was another on the coast? It was the discrepancy that came back to nag me, this rare transformation, rather than the situation itself.

  Seeing he had no towel, I offered him mine.

  I was thinking of wandering down to the nearest village, he said, patting his face dry. Wanna come?

  Sure. A change of scenery would be great. As a matter of fact, I’d give anything for a change of scenery.

  But this is what beach holidays are about, you know, soothing monotony rather than variation, each day at the beach is meant to be the same, that’s what makes it relaxing, it’s the monotony that helps you unwind.

  I shrugged, and asked him to wait while I fetched my bag and sandals. How could I explain that in my family we had never gone to a hot place to idle around on the grass or the sand—in my family, vacations weren’t about that, they always involved going to another city and taking in culture, I wasn’t used to monotony, in fact had no idea what to do with it, free time was like a useless toy in my hand.

  The journey down the dirt road was memorable not for the landscape or the conversation but because of the hundreds of two-dimensional toads that were strewn across our path. Large and haunchless, the creatures had been run over by cars and then crisped by the sun, lugubrious dots connecting beach to town, and I avoided them as we walked along. Tomás began whistling a tune. Before I could guess what it was, a silver Suburban came charging down the road. We jumped out of its way just in time. Through the rolled-down windows a cumbia blared out, the notes of clarinet, congas, and timpani left hanging in the air, and for a split second I thought I caught sight of several heads low in the seats. But the vehicle sped past too quickly for me to be sure, angry clouds of dust in its wake.

  Once the Suburban had faded in the distance my attention was brought back to the toads. The sight of them continued to unnerve me, made worse by the crackling each time Tomás stepped down on one, for every now and then he went out of his way to do so. The sound reminded me of the mummies of Guanajuato, where I’d been the year before with my parents. After a visit to the Don Quijote museum we’d gone to see the mummies from an abandoned mining town—more than a hundred of them, condemned to wear their death in public after being exhumed in the nineteenth century owing to a burial tax few families could afford to pay. The particular condition of the subsoil had preserved them, and once above ground the dry mountain air had continued the job. They were a horrific sight, with their void eyes and frozen screams, and now that I listened to Tomás trample the toads, I felt certain that treading on a mummy from that museum would have sounded similar.

  The village was small. Shriveled, almost, by the sun. One central building combined bank, post office, police station, doctor, hairdresser, and grocery—basic services any community would require, according to a sign. Next door crouched a two-story hotel, its coarse pink stone pocked as if by years of affliction. According to Tomás the place was crawling with drug dealers who did business on the beach by day and returned there after dark. I peered into the lobby half expecting to find a shady foursome bent over a deck of cards but all I saw was a young bellhop in sandals. I was seized by the impulse to call my parents and let them know I was fine, that I was fine and would be heading home before long, I didn’t know when, exactly, but certainly before the end of the month. As I stalled outside, composing the conversation in my head, Tomás nipped my arm and asked why I’d stopped.

  I want to make a quick call and tell my parents I’m okay.

  You’re crazy.

  Just a few words.

  Luisa, it’s a terrible idea. They’ll be able to trace it . . .

  And so I walked on, though part of me remained outside those two buildings imagining their instruments of communication, instruments that could have reconnected me to my parents however briefly, a few instants to transmit my voice and with it some sort of reassurance, and even once I was sitting with Tomás at a table at La Tortuga, a lone restaurant at the intersection of two sloping streets, even once we’d crossed its outer mantle of hanging plastic beads, entered the room furnished rustic-style and ordered from the showcase exhibiting the dishes of the day, for the most part silver-streaked corpses whose flowing sea had recently been turned into a bed of rice, and I’d asked for every vegetable dish on the menu, which amounted to three, even then I felt tugged back to the hotel and the offices beside it.

  Tropical music piped out of two corner speakers as we waited for our food. The curtain of plastic beads made a commotion as a fat woman with shopping bags lumbered in and plunked herself down at another table, joined minutes later by two noisy families, their presence announced by raucous children and the smoke of exotic cigarettes. By the time our food arrived, even the afternoon breeze had entered.

  As Tomás ate his fish, noisily punctuated by suction sounds whenever he paused to drink from his beer, I considered mentioning how he had run off the other day. I could have asked whether it was the cosmos exerting its pull, pulling him in another direction, toward people who also responded to its call. But each time I was on the verge of saying something I held back; there was no point in reproaching him for acting out interiors.

  My father has always said that most photographs taken in public contain a ghost, that unknown person who crops up seconds before the button is pressed, a foreign body that floats in and binds its image to yours for eternity. Toward the end of the meal I turned to see that the mother of one family was photographing her two girls and I happened to be sitting directly behind them, in the camera’s line of vision. Now that I thought of it, I’d most likely appeared in some of the pictures taken at the Burroughs house by the boy from San Francisco, upon developing the roll back home he’d found me there in the background with my head full of daydream, my image now linked forever to his documentation of that space.

  I asked for the bill and told Tomás I felt like returning to the beach. H
e too seemed ready. This time we took a shorter route, yet similarly littered with dried toads. The road also happened to be dotted with squashed fruit that had fallen from the trees, each piece mobbed by excited ants that made the lifeless toads seem even more lifeless.

  Once back at the beach Tomás introduced me to his new friend Mario, a Zipolitan with long white hair tied back in a straggly ponytail and a voice that suggested he’d smoked every herb in the vicinity. They had met over a bonfire, Tomás said, and got along instantly. Mario had a dubious air about him, I couldn’t help thinking, yet Tomás hung on his every word, especially when he began speaking of a tropicalization of the spirit, that’s what Mario called it, at the beach you just had to tropicalize, he had said to me when we’d been introduced, as if to suggest I was guilty of resisting. The man talked and talked, he talked without filters, letting the words pour out without ever stopping to consider what he was saying, and yet he spoke so much that every now and then he would say something meaningful, the words simply aligned themselves in such a way that even he seemed surprised by the profound declaration he had just uttered, and this spontaneous wisdom was what probably impressed Tomás.

  After watching them walk off I decided, despite my reservations, that the time had finally come to obey the ocean’s call. Nudity was optional, I reminded myself, yet that afternoon I surprised myself by conceding halfway. I never expected to but found it oddly natural; after all, the only way of becoming someone else was to ignore the voices that spoke up, alarmed and protesting, as I pulled off my T-shirt, unwrapped my skirt, and unhooked my bra. If I deliberated I would reverse, so without giving it another thought I ran into the water, the sea as warm as the air, and let myself wade in up to my waist. I closed my eyes, slightly aroused by the water’s embrace, its invisible arms wrapping around my legs, and asked myself where the merman was at that hour. Maybe he too was in the ocean, at a different point along, and we were connected by the same waves that brushed my body and then his. I thought of the homeless woman bathing in the fountain, such a strange sight, half troubling, half magnificent, the water adding ripples to her age; who knew whether the water in Zipolite added or subtracted, but either way, I felt revived.