Found in Translation

by Frank Wynne

  Half an hour later, B goes back to the room and finds his father asleep. For a few seconds, before going to the bathroom to brush his teeth, B stands very straight at the foot of the bed, gazing at him, as if steeling himself for a fight. Good night, dad, he says. His father gives not the slightest indication that he has heard.

  On the second day of their stay in Acapulco, B and his father go to see the cliff divers. They have two options: they can watch the show from an open-air platform or go to the bar-restaurant of the hotel overlooking the precipice. B’s father asks about the prices. The first person he asks doesn’t know. He persists. Finally an old ex-diver who is hanging around doing nothing tells him what it costs: six times more to watch from the hotel bar. Let’s go to the bar, says B’s father without hesitating. We’ll be more comfortable. B follows him. The other people in the bar are North American or Mexican tourists wearing what are obviously holiday clothes; B and his father stand out. They are dressed as people dress in Mexico City, in clothes that seem to belong to some endless dream. The waiters notice. They know the sort, no chance of a big tip, so they make no effort to serve them promptly. To top it off, B and his father can hardly see the show from where they are sitting. We would have been better off on the platform, says B’s father. Although it’s not bad here either, he adds. B nods. When the diving is over, having drunk two highballs each, they go outside and start making plans for the rest of the day. Hardly anyone is left on the platform, but B’s father recognises the old ex-diver sitting on a buttress and goes over to him.

  The ex-diver is short and has a very broad back. He is reading a cowboy novel and doesn’t look up until B and his father are at his side. He recognises them and asks what they thought of the show. Not bad, says B’s father, although in precision sports you need experience to be able to judge properly. Would I be right in guessing you were a sportsman yourself? asks the ex-diver. B’s father looks at him for a few moments and then says, You could say that. The ex-diver gets to his feet with an energetic movement as if he were back on the edge of the cliff. He must be about fifty, thinks B, so he’s not much older than my father, but the wrinkles on his face, like scars, make him look much older. Are you gentlemen on holiday? asks the ex-diver. B’s father nods and smiles. And what was your sport, sir, if I might ask? Boxing, says B’s father. How about that, says the ex-diver, so you must have been a heavyweight? B’s father smiles broadly and says yes.

  Before he knows what is going on, B finds himself walking with his father and the ex-diver towards the Mustang, and then all three get into the car and B hears the directions the ex-diver is giving his father as if they were coming from the radio. For a while the car glides along the Avenida Miguel Alemán, but then it turns and heads inland and soon the tourist hotels and restaurants give way to an ordinary cityscape with tropical touches. The car keeps climbing, heading away from the golden horseshoe of Acapulco, along badly paved or unpaved roads, until it pulls up beside the dusty pavement in front of a cheap restaurant, a fixed-menu place (although, thinks B, it’s really too big for that). The ex-diver and B’s father get out of the car immediately. They have been talking all the way and while they wait for him on the pavement, they continue their conversation gesturing incomprehensibly. B takes his time getting out of the car. We’re going to eat, says his father. So it seems, says B.

  The place is dark inside and only a quarter of the space is occupied by tables. The rest looks like a dance floor, with a stage for the band, surrounded by a long balustrade made of rough wood. At first, B can’t see a thing, until his eyes adjust to the darkness. Then he sees a man coming over to the ex-diver. They look alike. The stranger listens attentively to an introduction that B doesn’t catch, shakes hands with his father and a few seconds later turns to B. B reaches out to shake his hand. The stranger says a name and his handshake, which is no doubt meant to be friendly, is not so much firm as violent. He does not smile. B decides not to smile either. B’s father and the ex-diver are already sitting at a table. B sits down next to them. The stranger, who looks like the ex-diver and turns out to be his younger brother, stands beside them, waiting for instructions. The gentleman here, says the ex-diver, was heavyweight champion of his country. So you’re foreigners? asks his brother. Chileans, says B’s father. Do you have red snapper? asks the ex-diver. We do, says his brother. Bring us one, then, a red snapper Guerrero-style, says the ex-diver. And beers all round, says B’s father, for you too. Thank you, murmurs the brother, taking a notebook from his pocket and painstakingly writing down an order that, in B’s opinion, a child could easily remember.

  Along with the beers, the ex-diver’s brother brings them some savoury crackers to nibble and three rather small plates of oysters. They’re fresh, says the ex-diver, putting chilli sauce on all three. Funny, isn’t it. This stuff’s called chilli and so’s your country, says the ex-diver, pointing to the bottle full of bright red chilli sauce. Yes, intriguing, isn’t it, admits B’s father. Like the way the sauce is the opposite of chilly, he adds. B looks at his father with barely veiled incredulity. The conversation revolves around boxing and diving until the red snapper arrives.

  Later, B and his father leave the premises. The hours have flown without them noticing and by the time they climb into the Mustang, it is already seven in the evening. The ex-diver comes with them. For a moment, B thinks they’ll never get rid of him, but when they reach the centre of Acapulco the ex-diver gets out in front of a billiard hall. When he has gone, B’s father comments favourably on the service at the restaurant and the price they paid for the red snapper. If we’d had it here, he says, pointing to the hotels along the beachfront boulevard, it would have cost an arm and a leg. When they get back to their room, B puts on his bathing suit and goes to the beach. He swims for a while and then tries to read in the fading light. He reads the surrealist poets and is completely bewildered. A peaceful, solitary man, on the brink of death. Images, wounds. That is all he can see. And the images are dissolving little by little, like the setting sun, leaving only the wounds. A minor poet disappears while waiting for a visa to admit him to the New World. A minor poet disappears without leaving a trace, hopelessly stranded in some town on the Mediterranean coast of France. There is no investigation. There is no corpse. By the time B turns to Daumal, night has already fallen on the beach; he shuts the book and slowly makes his way back to the hotel.

  After dinner, his father proposes they go out and have some fun. B declines this invitation. He suggests to his father that he go on his own, says he’s not in the mood for having fun, he’d prefer to stay in the room and watch a film on TV. I can’t believe it, says his father, you’re behaving like an old man, at your age! B looks at his father, who is putting on clean clothes after a shower, and laughs.

  Before his father goes out, B tells him to take care. His father looks at him from the doorway and says he’s only going to have a couple of drinks. You take care yourself, he says, and gently shuts the door.

  Once he’s on his own, B takes off his shoes, looks for his cigarettes, switches on the TV, and collapses on to the bed again. Without intending to, he falls asleep. He dreams that he is living in (or visiting) the city of the Titans. All there is in the dream is an endless wandering through vast dark streets that recall other dreams. And in the dream his attitude is one that he knows he doesn’t have in waking life. Faced with buildings whose voluminous shadows seem to be knocking against each other, he is, if not exactly courageous, unworried or indifferent.

  A while later, just after the end of the programme, B wakes up with a jolt, and, as if responding to a summons, switches off the TV and goes to the window. On the terrace, half-hidden in the same corner as the night before, the North American woman is sitting with a cocktail or a glass of fruit juice in front of her. B observes her indifferently, then walks away from the window, sits on the bed, opens his book of surrealist poets, and tries to read. But he can’t. So he tries to think, and to that end he lies down on the bed again, with his arms outstr
etched, and shuts his eyes. For a moment he thinks he is on the point of falling asleep. He even catches an oblique glimpse of a street from the dream city. But soon he realises that he is only remembering the dream, opens his eyes and lies there for a while contemplating the ceiling. Then he switches off the bedside lamp and goes back over to the window.

  The North American woman is still there, motionless. The shadows of the urns stretch out and touch the shadows of the neighbouring tables. The reception area, fully lit, unlike the terrace, is reflected in the swimming-pool. Suddenly a car pulls up a few yards from the entrance of the hotel. His father’s Mustang, thinks B. But no one appears at the hotel gate for a very long time and B begins to think he must have been mistaken. Then he makes out his father’s silhouette climbing the stairs. First his head, then his broad shoulders, then the rest of his body, and finally the shoes, a pair of white moccasins that B, as a rule, finds profoundly disgusting, but the feeling they provoke in him now is something like tenderness. The way he came into the hotel, he thinks, it was like he was dancing. The way he made his entrance, it was as if he had come back from a wake, unconsciously glad to be alive. But the strangest thing is that, after appearing briefly in the reception area, his father turns around and heads towards the terrace: he goes down the stairs, walks around the pool and sits at a table near the North American woman. And when the guy from reception finally appears with a glass, his father pays and, without even waiting for him to be gone, gets up, glass in hand, goes over to the table where the North American woman is sitting and stands there for a while, gesticulating and drinking, until, at the woman’s invitation, he takes a seat beside her.

  She’s too old for him, thinks B. Then he goes back to the bed, lies down, and soon realises that all the sleepiness weighing him down earlier has evaporated. But he doesn’t want to turn on the light (although he feels like reading); he doesn’t want his father to think (even for a moment) that he is spying on him. He thinks about women; he thinks about travel. Finally he goes to sleep.

  Twice during the night he wakes up with a start and his father’s bed is empty. The third time, day is already dawning and he sees his father’s back: he is sleeping deeply. B switches on the light and stays in bed for a while, smoking and reading.

  Later that morning B goes to the beach and hires a paddle board. This time he has no trouble reaching the island opposite. There he has a mango juice and swims for a while in the sea, alone. Then he goes back to the hotel beach, returns the board to the boy, who smiles at him, and takes a roundabout way back to the hotel. He finds his father in the restaurant drinking coffee. He sits down beside him. His father has just shaved and is giving off an odour of cheap aftershave that B finds pleasant. On his right cheek there is a scratch from ear to chin. B considers asking him what happened last night, but in the end decides not to.

  The rest of the day goes by in a blur. At some point B and his father walk along a beach near the airport. The beach is vast, and it is lined with numerous wattle-roofed shacks where the fishermen keep their gear. The sea is choppy; for a while B and his father watch the waves breaking in the bay of Puerto Marqués. A fisherman tells them it’s not a good day for swimming. You’re right, says B. His father goes in for a swim anyway. B sits down on the sand, with his knees up, and watches him advance to meet the waves. The fisherman shades his eyes and says something that B doesn’t catch. For a moment the head and arms of his father swimming out to sea vanish from his visual field. Now there are two children with the fisherman. They are all standing, looking out to sea, except for B, who is still sitting down. A passenger plane appears in the sky, curiously inaudible. B stops looking at the sea and watches the plane until it disappears behind a rounded hill covered with vegetation. He remembers waking up, exactly a year ago, in Acapulco airport. He was returning from Chile, on his own, and the plane stopped in Acapulco. He remembers opening his eyes and seeing an orange light with blue and pink overtones, like the fading colours of an old film, and knowing then that he was back in Mexico and safe at last, in a sense. That was in 1974 and B had not yet turned twenty-one. Now he is twenty-two and his father must be about forty-nine. B closes his eyes. Because of the wind, the fisherman’s and the boys’ cries of alarm are almost unintelligible. The sand is cold. When he opens his eyes he sees his father coming out of the sea. He shuts his eyes and doesn’t open them again until he feels a large wet hand grip his shoulder and hears his father’s voice proposing they go and eat turtle eggs.

  There are things you can tell people and things you just can’t, thinks B disconsolately. From this moment on he knows the disaster is approaching.

  In spite of which the next forty-eight hours go by in a placid sort of daze that B’s father associates with ‘The Idea of the Holiday’ (B can’t tell whether his father is serious or pulling his leg). They go to the beach, they eat at the hotel or at a reasonably priced restaurant on the Avenida López Mateos. One afternoon they hire a boat, a tiny plastic rowing-boat, and follow the coastline near their hotel, along with the trinket vendors who peddle their wares from beach to beach, upright on paddle boards or in very shallow-bottomed boats, like tightrope walkers or the ghosts of drowned sailors. On the way back they even have an accident.

  B’s father takes the boat too close to the rocks and it overturns. In itself, this is not dramatic. Both of them can swim quite well and the boat is built to float when overturned; it isn’t hard to right it and climb in again. And that is what B and his father do. Not the slightest danger at any point, thinks B. But then, when both of them have climbed back into the boat, B’s father realises that he has lost his wallet. Tapping his chest, he says: My wallet, and without a moment’s hesitation he dives back into the water. B can’t help laughing, but then, stretched out in the boat, he looks down, sees no sign of his father, and for a moment imagines him diving, or worse, sinking like a stone, but with his eyes open, into a deep trench, over which, on the surface, in a rocking boat, his son has stopped laughing and begun to worry. Then B sits up and, having looked over the other side of the boat and seen no sign of his father there either, jumps into the water, and this is what happens: as B goes down with his eyes open, his father, open-eyed too, is coming up (they almost touch), holding his wallet in his right hand. They look at each other as they pass, but can’t alter their trajectories, or at least not straight away, so B’s father keeps ascending silently while B continues his silent descent.

  For sharks, for most fish in fact (flying fish excepted), hell is the surface of the sea. For B (and many, perhaps most, young men of his age) it sometimes takes the form of the sea bed. As he follows in his father’s wake, but heading in the opposite direction, the situation strikes him as particularly ridiculous. On the bottom there is no sand, as he had for some reason imagined there would be, only rocks, piled on top of each other, as if this part of the coast were a submerged mountain range and he were near the top, having hardly begun the descent. Then he starts to rise again, and looks up at the boat, which seems to be levitating one moment and about to sink the next, and in it he finds his father sitting right in the middle, attempting to smoke a wet cigarette.

  Then the lull comes to an end, the forty-eight hours of grace in the course of which B and his father have visited various bars in Acapulco, lain on the beach and slept, eaten, even laughed, and an icy phase begins, a phase which appears to be normal but is ruled by deities of ice (who do not, however, offer any relief from the heat that reigns in Acapulco), hours of what, in former days, when he was an adolescent perhaps, B would have called boredom, although he would certainly not use that word now, disaster he would say, a private disaster whose main effect is to drive a wedge between B and his father: part of the price they must pay for existing.

  It all begins with the appearance of the ex-diver, who, as B realises straight away, has come looking for his father, and not the family unit, so to speak, constituted by father and son. B’s father invites the ex-diver to have a drink on the hotel terrace. The ex-diver
says he knows a better place. B’s father looks at him, smiles, and says OK. As they go out into the street, the light is beginning to fade. B feels an inexplicable stab of pain and thinks that perhaps it would have been better to stay at the hotel and leave his father to his own devices. But it’s already too late. The Mustang is heading up the Avenida Constituyentes and from his pocket B’s father takes the card that the receptionist gave him days ago. The nightspot is called the San Diego, he says. In the ex-diver’s opinion, it’s too expensive. I’ve got money, says B’s father; I’ve been living in Mexico since 1968, and this is the first time I’ve taken a holiday. B, who is sitting next to his father, tries to see the ex-diver’s face in the rear-view mirror, but can’t. So first they go to the San Diego and for a while they drink and dance with the girls. For each dance they have to give the girl a ticket bought beforehand from the bar. To begin with, B’s father buys only three tickets. There’s something unreal about this system, he says to the ex-diver. But then he starts enjoying himself and buys a whole bundle. B dances too. His first dance partner is a slim girl with Indian features. The second is a woman with big breasts who, for a reason that B will never discover, seems to be preoccupied or cross. The third is fat and happy, and after dancing for a little while, she whispers into B’s ear that she’s high. What did you take? asks B. Magic mushrooms, says the woman, and B laughs. Meanwhile B’s father is dancing with a girl who looks like an Indian and B is glancing across at him from time to time. Actually, all the girls look like Indians. The one dancing with his father has a pretty smile. They are talking (they haven’t stopped talking, in fact) although B can’t hear what they are saying. Then his father disappears and B goes to the bar with the ex-diver. They start talking too. About the old days. About courage. About the narrow coves where the ocean waves break. About women. Subjects that don’t interest B, or at least not at the moment. But they talk anyway.