by Mark Helprin
Our acceptance of an invitation for a long weekend had been carefully qualified—only three or four days, I said, and we may have to return early. I wouldn’t have accepted at all if our hosts’ villa hadn’t been on the other side of the bay, almost around the point. My wife knows of my aversion to this place. It is why we have traveled so much abroad.
I thought that half a century would have been enough, that I could simply lose myself in the indolence of the Mar Nueva—something for which it is justly famous, and something which once I knew well. After all, I’m a grown man, my children live in several foreign capitals, and now that I’m older neither delight nor sorrow come as easily as they used to. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and went to a terrace overlooking the sea to have something to drink and greet our hosts, knowing that quiet days by the sea lay ahead. It should have been delightful. We made jokes. I felt nothing.
But when I sat down and looked across the bay, my eyes went right to the unshaded northern promontory. As a child, I used to look over the dazzling sea in the middle of the afternoon as it shone brightly in a confusion of light. Now I had the north light, and the air above the sea was as clear as ether.
I excused myself, and went down a steep path to a deserted beach. The waves were strong, exactly as I had remembered. When they broke upon the sand, colors and sound bloomed from them, and when they retreated they sighed just as they had always sighed when they sought refuge in the cool blue currents. Across the bay, still sitting in a private forest of orange and lemon trees, was a huge house with a roof of red tiles. To the left, poking through the branches, its own roof no more than a dot, was our house.
MY FATHER and my father’s parents before him had come to the house on the Mar Nueva since 1880. They had been guests at first, and then rented, until 1904, when Señor Alvarado died and his sons broke his vast holdings into a dozen pieces. My family bought the beach house and a small grove of mixed citrus. Every year, we were overwhelmed with lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit. We supplied our friends and relatives, and made gift hampers for my father’s business acquaintances. For that reason we had an enormous supply of wicker baskets and excelsior. As a boy, I grew expert at packing the fruit and circling the baskets with a wide red or magenta ribbon. My sister and I learned to tie bows as symmetrical and voluminous as water lilies.
When I drove to the Mar Nueva last December it took three and a half hours to get there. Except for some broad curves where the coast bends inward, the road is now straight. We used to drive in a touring car that could not go much faster than a bicycle. If we left before dawn, we would arrive at about nine or ten at night.
The car was open, as big as a small swimming pool, and as high off the road as a reviewing platform. We always had a breeze, or crosscurrents of wind when we rounded a bend. I would stand in the back and pull down branches that hung over the road. I wasn’t supposed to do this, and I tried not to, but when a branch came winging by overhead, something vital and automatic in my legs always made me leap up. Never once was I cut as I instantaneously stripped down the vegetation, and because the leaves were crushed as they flowed through my hands, we never arrived at the Mar Nueva unperfumed by their fragrant oils. Once, by accident, I grabbed a snake. I had it right in the middle, and it started to curl around my arm. Probably just as surprised as I was, it didn’t hiss or bite. I think it must have been poisonous, since what else would it have been doing hanging in a tree? After my shock had dissipated, I screamed, and threw the snake from the car. No one else had seen it, and I was too scared to say what had happened. I screamed a few more times.
My father stopped the car under some palms. “What’s the matter?” he asked, after setting the brake. I burst into tears.
He turned to my mother. “When we return to the city,” he said, “we must take this child to a physician.”
I thought this was funny, and began to laugh. To allay his anxiety, I tried to explain what had happened, but managed only to say the word “snake.” I was then overcome by the kind of laughter that takes precedence over breathing.
Frightened that I might die of a convulsion, my father picked me up, ran from the car, and dunked me in the sea—clothes, shoes, a book in my pocket, and all. I will never forget my mother and sister, waist-deep in the waves, watching gravely, and then gradually beginning to enjoy the opportunity of standing in the ocean at midday, fully clothed.
On the way to the Mar Nueva we always found a beach and stopped to have lunch. Once, we saw a campesino trying to fly a kite. The peasants then had neither kites nor the time and energy to fly them, so this was unusual. Although the kite had a good tail and was properly constructed, the campesino couldn’t get it off the ground. Despite strong winds—that day the waves kicked up enormous amounts of foam that blew back over their crests—each time the kite rose it would upend and dive at the sand.
This man was about my father’s age, and my father seemed to want to join him. We got through lunch and swimming, and still the kite had not risen. As we were drying off, ready to get going again, not very happy about putting on our clothes over the salty residue of the seawater, my father took out La Prensa and opened it to the center page to read first, as he always did, the weather reports. Not only was he a cotton broker, who had to know the rainfall and humidity in Cairo and Khartoum and in Birmingham, Alabama, but he used to say that the weather was the only real information you could find in La Prensa, at least about our country. Though this was obviously a true statement, and everyone knew it, it was dangerous for him to say it out loud.
Anyway, as soon as he opened the paper an explosive gust of wind ripped it from his hands and propelled it down the beach at the speed of sound. Three or four sheets temporarily plastered themselves around the campesino, slapping him in the face, and then took off again. They curved up and were rocketed into the sky with such great speed that they became little specks faster than anyone could make a comment. They rose straight up, higher and higher, until they were buried in the clouds, at which point the victim of the newspaper attack slowly came over to us, stared into my father’s eyes in wonder and defeat, and quickly handed him the kite, as if to say, “The rich have all the luck.”
I mention these things to show that a full day’s drive then seemed faster than a three-and-a-half-hour drive now. We always stopped at least a dozen times—we had to fix the car a lot, and we went swimming whenever the sea looked inviting.
But even had we driven last December on the crumbling coastal road, I do not think it would have moved me to remember the way I did when I first saw my house—from a great distance—after half a century. I must describe it, because its physical characteristics are somehow close to the heart of the matter.
IF YOU WERE GOING SOUTH, you turned left and drove into a tight space between the dark, glossy leaves of two orange trees. Perhaps because everything these trees had was expressed in their marvelous foliage, they didn’t bear fruit. We had to trim them back every year, my father said, or they would scratch the car. My father would get up on a ladder and round them as if he were a professional tree barber, and I would do the lower parts, after which he would go over what I had done to make it even.
After lurching through the citrus trees, you pulled onto the cobblestones, where we parked the car. From there you could see right through the center of the house to the sea beyond. The sea close in was blue-green, but it had such a bright quality that it almost seemed white. And on the other side of the reef it ran dark blue. It was so inviting that I would run right through the house and sprint across the lawn to the beach, where I would stay by the water until my mother called me for dinner. She always had to call several times, for I was able to sit in the wind and watch the waves for hours. I imagined that somewhere within them, immediately close, was another world both infinitely tender and forgiving, where every doubt would be set to rest, every contradiction explained, and every fear disarmed.
I remember with much affection the details of our last summer
at the Mar Nueva. Everything was bound up with the sea. Sometimes on my way to the beach I stopped in the kitchen and took a beer from the icebox. It was hot on the Mar Nueva and as a child I drank enormous amounts of the kind of beer that has no alcohol. We were told that the United States had prohibited alcohol, and I accepted this with the same puzzlement as I would have the statement that Britain had prohibited oxygen or that France had prohibited wood. But whatever the United States had done, it resulted in shiploads of alcohol-free beer delivered to the Mar Nueva in December and January, when people here were thirsty in the heat and Americans were drinking hot cocoa as they stood on frozen lakes. Always proud to sit down with an ice-cold beer in my hand, I was ostentatious about it in town, with the object of entrapping someone (preferably a priest) into reprimanding me, so that I might point out with an air of offended innocence that all the alcohol had been carefully removed by the manufacturer before I refreshed myself. The dark-brown bottles were great objects to retrieve in diving, because they were so much unlike every other color in the sea. You could throw them far, they sank quickly because they were so heavy, and they often settled upright on the gold-flecked sands.
Our inner courtyard had a small fountain. Though the bedrooms and the winter living room were off the courtyard, we spent most of the time on a veranda that overlooked the lawn and the sea. Here we had placed awnings so that even in heavy downpours or blistering sun we could eat our meals, talk through the afternoon, or read. Here also we had a radio that played classical music and static. I have always associated the two, and a Beethoven symphony seemed to me neither authentic nor profound if it did not carry the sound of the nocturnal winter lightning storms over which the radio waves from central Europe had to rise before gliding into our warm summer daylight.
Each bedroom had a bed, a chair, a ceiling fan, and mosquito netting (though the veranda was just windy enough to keep away the insects, the inside of the house was not). I had been given a butterfly net. Mistaking a Latin word for an English phrase, I was enthusiastic about chasing “leopard opera” and having a collection of their jewel-like wings, but I could never pin them. I tried to get my father to do it, and he refused, saying, “If you want butterflies, you have to pin them yourself.”
We played croquet and badminton, we swam and dived, and I climbed trees even when they had no coconuts. I skinned my knees and elbows, and learned that no matter how tired you get near the top of a palm, you can’t let go, because, if you do, you fall. Most often there was a reward, too—coconuts. At age nine or ten, I was a happy blond monkey.
There are a few other things I must mention about the Mar Nueva before I tell what happened there. About two hundred meters down the beach, just at the border of our land and a much larger citrus plantation, was a short wooden pier. It was able to withstand the sea in winter because it was made of joined and bolted lignum vitae, and the columns upon which it stood were tapered to cut through the waves passing underneath. I fished and (when my father was there) dived off this pier. It was so solid and high that in all but the worst weather I was allowed to go there alone.
The sea was warm and buoyant. You could stay in it for hours at a time, and when you did you forgot everything but the bands of color in which you floated, the grace and speed of the rainbow fishes, the rhythmic laxity of the sea fans, and the surging of the water to and fro over the reef. You became part of the sea after just an hour. You thought like a fish, you hardly thought at all. I have never forgotten the small waves that lapped at my back, the wind and spray that caught and broke the light, and the contrasting smoothness and consistency of the deep swells. I have never forgotten, and I will always retain my confidence in the sea as a place to rest, if need be, forever.
Although today to have a villa the size of our house on the Mar Nueva would mean that you were able to fly around in your own jet, and play polo, we were not rich. As a cotton broker, my father had his ups and downs. It was a matter of the weather not just in our country but everywhere in the world. Perhaps because he was completely dependent upon the elements he did not have the false pride of someone who imagines that he has broken from nature and is not subject to its laws.
OUR LAST SUMMER at the Mar Nueva started out much the same as any other. I managed to escape my part in unloading the car (there was nothing in it anyway but groceries and clothes), and ran through the house to the beach. I remember how elated I was to stand at the edge of the breaking waves and watch the wind twirl and depress the water. This was in early December, and every day until March the sea would do the same thing and I would be in it. I imagine that no general ever felt as satisfied or vindicated, no matter what his conquests, as I felt then looking over the sea.
I went down the beach toward the pier. When I was halfway there I stopped as surely as if I had seen a saint suspended in the air before me, glowing like the peephole in a blast furnace. I ran back to the house and cornered my father.
“What is it this time?” he asked.
“A wall,” I said.
“What wall?”
“On the beach. By the pier. It runs back into the trees, and it’s tremendous. It must be bigger than the Great Wall of China. It’s at least five meters high. Maybe thirty. It’s made of stone, and it stops at the beach and then it goes on. It goes into the trees. I don’t know where it stops. I didn’t look.”
My father took both my shoulders and gave me one of his piercing looks. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’ll look again,” I said.
“Claudia, why don’t you go with him?” my mother suggested to my sister.
I was about to resent that, but Claudia had already disappeared into the kitchen. I ran like crazy through the citrus trees, thinking that I had imagined the wall and that I might go all the way to the point and not see anything. Then I would have to come back, though if I walked slowly it might all be forgotten. I remember that I wished I had imagined it, even at the cost of my own embarrassment.
I nearly ran right into it, for it was in a place that had once been perfectly open. It was five meters high, and it was made of stone. I ran along it, inland, until I no longer felt safe, and then I ran all the way back to the beach. There I checked to see that it came almost down to the pier, as I had reported, and I looked around it. On the other side were now three or four little houses, booths, lined up along the beach. Back from them were the orange trees that had always been there, and the beach grass.
“There are little houses,” I reported breathlessly to my father.
“Bungalows?” he asked.
I didn’t know what a bungalow was, but it sounded right, so I said, “Yes, bungalows, lots of bungalows all over the place, everywhere you look.”
My father was downcast. “People from the bungalows will be walking all over our beach. Maybe it’s for the better that they have a wall. But why such a big one? And how could they have put it up so fast? Let’s go see.” I darted ahead of my father, and when he reached the wall I was already standing on the pier.
When he joined me, he shook his head. “That wall must have cost twice as much as the land itself.” Then, as we stood over the waves coursing between the pilings, he turned and said, “Those aren’t bungalows. They’re sentry boxes.”
For the next few nights the wall and the sentry boxes were a main topic of dinner conversation. At first we thought they were part of a military base. But why a military base? My father said there was no possible reason for a military base there. A prison? No. The wall of a prison would go all the way around.
A few days later, when we had had to go into town to get more groceries, we stopped on a high point on the road and my father pointed to the enormous tiled roof. “It’s just a private house,” he said, and we started off again, wondering what kind of private house had risen so quickly and so splendidly right next to us in a single winter while we had been in school and my father had been trading cotton. No one in town knew anything about it, which was hard for us to believe, because those people s
eemed to know the name and life story of every lizard on every rock in the Mar Nueva.
On the way back, my father told us that it was a villa, just like ours, but that it belonged to someone very important. “I could scout around inside,” I volunteered.
“Don’t you dare,” he ordered. “I absolutely forbid you even to cross over onto their beach.”
“But the pier is half on their property and half on ours,” I protested.
“You can go to the pier,” he said, “but don’t go beyond it. Sentry boxes mean sentries, and sentries have guns.”
“Maybe they’re swimming houses,” I speculated.
“Swimming houses,” my father said, looking at me with disdain. “Stay out of there. The place belongs to someone very important, someone close to Santos-Ott.”
CHILDREN THESE DAYS do not understand—not even my children in their day knew—what it is like to live under a caudillo. All life is a contest between the caudillo and everyone else, and the caudillo must win. He must successfully intimidate every walker on every street; every sitter in every café; clerks at their desks; lovers in hotel rooms; skiers on mountain slopes; peasants in the fields; and children in their classrooms, ever mindful of his stern portrait next to the flag.
You must fear even to think in opposition, lest you talk in your sleep or carelessly insult him in the presence of one of his agents. When I was six years old, a shopkeeper on our street in the city lost his wife in an automobile accident, and fell into despair. In a democracy he might have had to shoot himself or jump off a bridge, but under Santos-Ott he merely brought a phonograph to his shop and played the music of an exiled composer. We were at lunch on a spring afternoon when we heard the music. The moment my father recognized it he ran to the window and pleaded with the shopkeeper, for his own sake, to turn it off. As the music played, the street emptied. The shopkeeper, who sold vegetables and eggs, had put the phonograph on a table and pointed the horn into the air. He sat on the stone step leading to his little shop, with a glass of wine in his hand and tears in his eyes. My father put on his jacket so he could go downstairs and see what he could do, but by the time he got to our front door the music had stopped and the store was shuttered. Within a week a shoemaker had moved in. Once, I mentioned the name of the man who used to sell vegetables and eggs, and my father said, “Just forget him. Put him out of your mind.”
