Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  From one day to the next, a whole new layer of noise was added to our street. The workers were usually arriving when I left for school, some sitting on the sidewalk eating their tortas, others beginning to set up. From time to time a monstrous cement mixer would spend the night outside, ready to resume its rotations in the morn. And one by one the banging and hammering and drilling would commence, one bang nearby, the next farther off, followed by a drilling so loud certain rooms in our house would vibrate. It sounded as though they were destroying rather than constructing, and every now and then there’d be an unrecognizable sound, somewhere between a bleat and a bellow, like a metallic animal in rage. Every movement, every sound, on our street was feeding, strengthening, empowering the construction site. When at home I was constantly aware of it, even in the evenings when the tools lay inert. And sometimes when I looked out my window one of the men would still be there hammering, a lone worker hammering at the dusk.

  The tamalero began appearing earlier, in time for the workers to buy their tamales at the end of the day’s labor. I would hear him asserting himself over the street as if his cart were carrying all the sounds it had crossed paths with, a great magnet that gathered city sounds like filings. The pre-recorded cry would move past our house till it merged with the construction noise, and one by one the voices of the tools and machines would leave off, first the hammers and then the drills and finally the cement mixer, and after a few minutes I’d look out and see eight or ten men crowding around the cart, eating their tamales.

  My father had an office at the university but he did his writing from home, and the rectangular window in his study overlooked the construction site, providing him with a panoramic view of below. Goodbye to all those years of quiet, he said, as though the state of affairs were permanent, but he refused when my mother offered him her corner of the living room. He preferred to spend his hours staring down, tracking the workers’ movements with such scrutiny the architect could have asked him for daily reports, and settled at his desk only when they took a break or went home in the evening. Years later, my father could still count on one hand the articles he’d written, and the chapter titles of the book he had attempted to write, against that mural of noise and activity.

  On our corner in a grand colonial house lived an industrialist, one of the wealthy who stayed on after the earthquake, someone with a long name and a short CV. Whenever he was returning home he’d have his chauffeur klaxon his way down the street to announce his arrival, in time for the somber gates to slide open before he drove up. In every landscape there’s an idiot who comes to destroy the silence, my father would say, and each time he said this I would think of the industrialist, although these days it wasn’t quite silence he was destroying.

  AND THEN ONE EVENING I FINALLY HAD THE CHANCE to air my idea, the idea that had begun to gather form as I walked the circus-named streets near home, an uneasy idea for sure, yet one I couldn’t shake once it had gone somersaulting off in my head. There is no woodworm in the door hinges, someone once said, a good motto for any age, even at seventeen, and I knew it was wise to keep everything in motion.

  BODYGUARDS REQUIRED TO PURCHASE TICKETS, read a sign in the foyer of the old cinema, but ours were invisible, and Tomás and I found seats, unshadowed, in a middle row.

  Los Muñecos Infernales, The Curse of the Doll People, was a black-and-white film from 1961, with a relatively straightforward plot. Four foolish archaeologists steal an idol from a voodoo temple in Haiti and bring it back to Mexico, where they soon face the consequences. The scenes cut between them and a cavern from where a witch doctor plots his revenge, sending out his murderous dolls to punish the men. The large dolls arrive in boxes, wrapped like children’s toys, but once unwrapped they come alive to shed blood. It was hard not to cower as the little murderers advanced toward their victims holding long, poisoned pins to plunge into their necks. And each time a doll murdered an archaeologist, it would acquire his face in the form of a mask. Yet I couldn’t tell whether the actors behind these masks were children or small adults, and it was scarier not to know. The most thrilling moment was when a doctor conducted an autopsy on a doll that had been decapitated, running the scalpel down its tiny sternum. As the walls of its chest began to cave in, the eyes in the head lying on the floor started to gleam, emanating such malice that several people around us gasped. Only then did Tomás and I grab hands, I can’t remember who reached for whose, and by the time the film ended with a crucifix and a fire, the only two powers able to defeat the dolls and their voodoo, he had his arm wrapped tightly around my waist, and we continued in this clasp as we exited the theater. My thoughts were focused on the points of contact and pressure to the exclusion of all other coordinates, and only minutes later did I realize he had led us to La Casa de las Brujas, a café run by printers on Plaza Río de Janeiro, not far from the abandoned house. I live only a few streets away, I protested, let’s go somewhere else, but he asked what I was hiding.

  The interior was jovial despite the building’s famously witchy façade. Each table had a paper cloth and a jar of crayons at its center. After we’d ordered beer and quesadillas, Tomás excused himself and said he was going to say a quick hello to his friend Matías, who worked in the kitchen. While he was gone I noticed an odd scene at the neighboring table. A man with an exuberant beard and creased flannel shirt with several missing buttons sat across from two girls, probably around ten and twelve, who greatly resembled him (as far as I could tell, beneath the foliage). They were very well dressed, in pink V-neck sweaters and pleated gray skirts and penny loafers—unlike the man, whom I had seen before, napping on a bench with a coat draped over his legs. He was now tearing at a loaf of white bread in a bag from Sumesa, stuffing chunks into his mouth as he spoke, while the girls hardly acknowledged his presence. Their eyes were fixed on the drawing they were making, a maze of loops and flourishes extending across the paper tablecloth.

  This building, girls, he was saying in a fatherly tone, was designed by an architect named R. A. Pigeon. Because of course pigeons and architecture are impossible to untwine. Did you hear what I just said, girls? Untwine. One of them glanced up at him, then at her sister, and resumed her drawing. Two glasses of a reddish juice, possibly watermelon, sat on the table alongside the loaf of white bread their father was now offering them, complemented by a block of supermarket cheese still in its plastic wrapping. He kept urging them to eat, tearing off more chunks of bread, laying them on the table, now opening the cheese with a butter knife, but the girls pretended they didn’t know the man in front of them although I was quite certain it was their father. One pulled out a sparkly wallet, inside I could see several hundred-peso bills, and whispered something to her sister. They must live very comfortably with their mother and her new husband, I decided, and once a month were obliged to meet up with their father, who was estranged and lost to the streets, and sometimes when they had an appointment he would fail to show up. Yes, this was the story, I thought to myself as the man gorged on bread and cheese. I suspected he had a few conspiracy theories swirling around his head, ideas he may have wanted to share, but the girls’ minds were on other matters, among them the nice warm dinner waiting at home. They weren’t even allowed to order anything on the menu apart from juice; nothing of interest, apart from the jar of colored crayons.

  Stop staring, it’s rude. Tomás had returned to our table and was watching me, all of a sudden concerned with etiquette. I asked whether he’d found his friend. Yes, he had . . . and launched into a half-funny, half-tedious monologue about how his friend preferred the hot chocolate in the last café where he’d worked, there it was thick and full of spices, but here they followed a different hot chocolate philosophy, and . . . We had just been to the movies, had sat side by side in darkness, and were both now already distracted by other people. The waiter brought us our food just as the man and his daughters stood up to leave, the father tucking a stack of napkins into his bag, and hurried out, the girls one step ahead, as if they�
��d realized they were running late.

  What was that all about? Tomás asked. I explained my theory about the separate lives being led by the father and his daughters, the man on the street and the girls in luxury. He said he would rather be in the man’s shoes, completely free, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him. After we’d finished eating we each plucked a crayon, red and green, from the jar. Tomás drew my face, I drew his, neither of us a born artist by the looks of it, but soon we’d filled up more than half the tablecloth with our sketches.

  So, what else have you been up to apart from school, Goths, and shipwrecks, he asked, what keeps you busy the rest of the time? I mentally ran through the images of my life; nothing seemed exciting enough to mention, until it occurred to me to tell him about the dwarfs. I’d been meaning to, and there in La Casa de las Brujas, as we sat fending off awkward pauses with the crayons in our hands, seemed like an ideal moment. Unable to recall the details, I invented a few along the way—some dwarfs excelled at the tightrope, others at the trapeze; in their trailer they found overturned powder jars, ribbons cascading from the sink, and a half-eaten apple; the acrobat from Tbilisi was heartbroken, she had been engaged to the most handsome dwarf, never without his pipe, and they’d been planning to have many children. I watched with satisfaction as Tomás leaned forward in his seat, it was magnificent to command all his attention, and I tried to come up with more details but before I could throw in another handful he interrupted.

  So where are they now?

  The circus people say they ran off to Oaxaca.

  Oaxaca?

  Yes, somewhere along the coast.

  He reached for the blue crayon and began to draw a coastline, his hand wandering this way and that until it trailed off at the table’s edge.

  I love Oaxaca.

  You do?

  Especially Zipolite.

  He added stick figures, trees, and a hut.

  Zi-po-li-te, I repeated, adding that it sounded like an incantation.

  Yes, lots of towns in Oaxaca sound like excerpts from magic spells. Juchitán, Tlacolula, Yalalag, Yanhuitlán . . .

  The blue crayon spelled them out.

  When were you last there?

  Last year. Autumn’s the best time to go.

  I tried to build on that but the words caught in my throat.

  He added tall waves to the drawing.

  Yeah, autumn’s the best time. There are still tourists but not as many. At the beach, anyway.

  And then I aired the idea that had, until that instant, only been an idea, dipping in and out of other thoughts, destined to perhaps remain nothing more:

  Why don’t we go? Let’s go to Oaxaca and find the dwarfs.

  Tomás stared at me, wide-eyed, and drank from his beer.

  Are you serious?

  Yes, let’s go.

  A brief silence.

  But will your parents let you? Don’t you have school?

  I listened to myself speak.

  Well, yes . . . I do have school but it’s probably okay if I miss a few days. And I probably shouldn’t tell my parents since I’m not sure they’d give me permission.

  Tomás studied my face without speaking, the crayon motionless in his hand. I couldn’t tell whether he was shocked, impressed, or both.

  Okay, Luisa, let’s do it.

  We can start at the top of the coast and work our way down.

  Let’s start in Zipolite.

  But it doesn’t make sense to start in the middle of the coast.

  We can start anywhere we like.

  I wanted to throw in a caveat, some sort of clause, but none came to mind.

  Don’t worry, you’ll love Zipolite. And if they know anything about anything, your dwarfs will be there.

  Zi-po-li-te. Mouthing the four syllables, I finished off what was left of my beer and smiled uncertainly at the map he had drawn, its tall waves and trees and stick figures, an unfinished sketch of the place we might occupy. Before leaving La Casa de las Brujas I tore off the section of the paper with the landscape and rolled it up, and once home I hid it behind a coat in my closet, just in case someone might be able to identify the exact bend of the coastline.

  ZIPOLITE HAD AN ASTRONOMY THAT BLAZED ACROSS the night sky but by morning it would dissolve into constellations of somnambulist men and women traipsing across the sand, some of them aware, possibly, that in Spanish resaca means both hangover and undertow. As I roamed the beach I thought back on my favorite sign on the Periférico, which featured enormous neon math instruments made by BACO. It had been there since I was a child, the instruments all acting out their functions with their rotating arms, the scissors opening and closing, the compass going around and around, the ruler, the lead pencil, each measuring the lengths and widths of days, directions taken and not taken. In Oaxaca I was beyond the perimeter, far beyond, I could take whatever route, choose whatever distance.

  Each time I’d passed the BACO sign hovering over the streams of cars, measuring something greater than the traffic, I’d felt invigorated, and certain of my decision. Yet the days leading up to the trip were haunted by loud daydream and silent debate, by second thoughts and moments of panic. For the most part, however, daydream defied guilt, a guilt toward my parents that at times grew to colossal proportions, especially over dinner, hanging over the table like a clunky chandelier, but once I’d returned to my room it would shrink back to something more tolerable.

  At times I thought of the distress it would unleash on them, and at times it made me sick, yet never sick enough to call off the trip. Well, more than a trip it felt like a fugue, a melody consisting of opposing elements that interweave, two independent tunes that eventually join up and once merged turn into fugitives, fugitive notes that escape through the bars of their musical stave. I was seventeen, and the time had come to assert my independence—look at Tomás, who had left home and gone to live with an uncle, and Julián, who lived in unusual circumstances of his own design; for long enough I’d accepted life just as it was, and before Oaxaca I worked harder than ever, completing my homework hours before bedtime, and listened attentively to my father’s impromptu lectures. Open doors, reminders of all those days you could have left your room and didn’t. And of the times you did leave and wish you hadn’t. Open doors kill the promise of focus and finality, never trust anything that can change angle so cleanly.

  Little did my father know that whatever he spoke about now seemed relevant to the plan, whether it strengthened my resolve or fed my indecision. And yet it remained the case that ships on the ocean floor were far more interesting than those on its surface, and I couldn’t help peering into the books in his study that contained turquoise-green photographs depicting ghostly masses lying aslant on the seabed, great silhouettes once propelled by wind, then by water.

  At dinner he continued to speak of stormy seas and overloaded boats, of cargo being taken places against its will. In the Antikythera shipwreck, for instance, there was one lost horse, a great marble statue that proved too difficult to heave out, and it tumbled back into the depths, choosing the sea, and was there to this day, the horse that gave them the slip, galloping along endless banks of seabed, kicking up whole paragraphs of sand.

  Every shipwreck was a story sealed and unsealed, my father would say, and vulnerable to modern intrusion. Intrusion by looters and prospectors and amateur marine archaeologists, but also intrusion by the octopus, a well-known scrambler who rummages through wrecks in search of objects with which to furnish its garden, and in its pursuits it contaminates, or scrambles, the information. It too can ruin the chronological harmony.

  Chronological harmony.

  Accounts of the octopus lightened matters. Whereas any mention of the sponge divers of Symi tended to darken the picture. The men dived vertically, twenty meters down, holding their breath as they cut free as many sponges as they could from the seabed. Even if I’d been a good swimmer I would have found the image unsettling, and the thought of the pressure on their lungs as they
scavenged till the last possible moment and then rushed back up for air, and upon returning to the surface often succumbed to narcosis or the bends, reminded me, as if one needed reminding, of our dramatic contract with the ocean.

  ON ONE AFTERNOON OF PARTICULAR INDECISION when even the map in the closet didn’t have the power to sway, a torrential rain began to fall. It was the sort of rain that hardened into hail, and the kind of storm that killed the electricity for hours. Sometimes our Mexican tempests were truly biblical. Our last big storm had claimed the lives of nearly sixty horses at an equestrian club in Tecamachalco. Trapped in their stables and unable to escape the three-meter deluge, most had drowned and the rest were dragged away by currents of mud and water. We’d seen it on the news. Their elderly keeper had tried to free them but died in the attempt, later found buried under a mausoleum of bricks. They showed footage of the horses’ limp bodies being hauled out by pickup trucks, their heads dangling and coats caked in mud, while jockeys and families gazed tearfully from the sidelines. That had been the last intense storm and then came this one, one afternoon in late October; the rainy season had ended but something took hold of the sky.

  I’d been home from school for over an hour. My father was still at the university, my mother out giving a translation workshop. A steady rain drummed at the windows as I stretched out on the sofa in the living room. From where I lay, my head propped up by two pillows, I could see the piano inherited from my grandparents, with the same musical score gathering dust for as long as I could remember, it was all my mother wanted to play, this “Rage Over a Lost Penny” by Beethoven, in fact I associated it so much with this piano I would have been startled had anything else emerged from its innards. And there draped over the piano stool, my father’s olive-green jacket, the grooves of the corduroy too eroded to still be distinct; it was his favorite jacket and he wore it far more often than my mother played the Beethoven, yet that day he’d left home in something else.