Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  Now at point zero, it was possible the picture would come into focus, as it did when I happened to mention how kind it was of him to give the organ grinder a coin that morning. I had witnessed the event, I told him, while on my way to school, to which Tomás shrugged and said it had been an old one-peso coin, no longer in circulation, which he’d been carrying around in his pocket and wanted to get rid of. The organ grinder probably hadn’t noticed, at least not immediately, he was old and his eyes were full of cataracts, though he might have tried using it later that day to buy his lunch and the person in the shop would have returned it to him . . . I winced at his words, half wishing I hadn’t heard them, but it was too late, and in an effort to control the anger that was quietly on the rise I shook off my sandals and sank my feet into the sand and felt nearly as cheated as the man.

  The girl in the red dress returned with our food, accompanied by three sauces and two bottles of beer. I wasn’t certain they’d been part of our order but by then they were welcome. Shortly afterward her mother materialized to ask whether we needed anything further. No, we said, but she hovered, keen to enter into conversation. One could tell she was used to chatting with her customers. Expected it. Resting her hands on the back of my chair, the woman asked where we were from. Mexico City. And were we good swimmers? Yes, Tomás said. I didn’t reply. Had we been to Zipolite before? Many times, he said, with a hint of impatience. And what did we think of what was happening in the country, the presidential election and the recount and the machines and the rest? As she spoke her longest sentence she came to stand in front of us; I noticed a rather prominent gold tooth in her mouth, second on the left and larger than the others. Tomás mumbled a few words about corruption, that it was everywhere so what could you expect, and reached for his beer.

  Once the woman had delivered her questions she provided us with some local lore. After telling us about the famous people who had come through Zipolite, mainly the Rolling Stones, though she couldn’t remember whether all four had come or possibly two or maybe only the singer, she mentioned a recent incident, in fact people were still talking about it and it had happened right here on the beach, right here in front of El Cósmico, right here in Zipolite. Four Zapotec girls from a neighboring village had decided to go into the water despite none of them knowing how to swim; despite their usual modesty these girls had removed their clothes and run into the waves laughing and crying out in a language no tourist could understand, they’d taken off their bracelets and their earrings and laid them on the sand beside some trinkets they’d been selling—peculiar circumstances, it was agreed, for which there was no accounting—yet no one took much notice until their bodies washed ashore, one by one, and then there was panic, only then, and someone ran to fetch the lifeguard, but by the time the lifeguard appeared the ocean had entered everywhere.

  Now, what do you think of that? the woman asked. I laid down my fork and shook my head, uncertain of what to say. Tomás picked up a toothpick and began chewing on it, his face twisting up each time he bit down, as if concerned the story might ruin his meal. So, what do you think? the woman asked a second time. Terrible, I said insufficiently. And then, sensing a pause, though it wasn’t quite the right moment, I asked whether she had seen any dwarfs. No, she frowned, she hadn’t. Her daughter called out from another table. More guests had arrived. Once she’d left, taking her story with her, Tomás explained that this fonda was named El Cósmico because Zipolite was the center of the cosmos, or at the very least one of its centers, it had better vibes than any other beach he’d ever been to, and that’s because you could toss your baggage into the ocean and knowledge from the cosmos would wash back ashore. How could there be more than one center, I felt like asking, plus isn’t the cosmos meant to be merciful and these girls had just drowned, but he was speaking loudly and excitedly and I didn’t have the energy to raise my voice to interrupt. If there was one thing I had an aversion to, I thought to myself as Tomás took a bite of fish and carried on speaking with his mouth full, it was this use of the word cosmos, in my mind cosmos had to do with Soviet cosmonauts rather than seaside philosophy. Zipolite was part of any metaphysical map, Tomás continued. Well, who drew these maps, I felt like asking, but let him ramble on. Any metaphysical map would include this beach, he rephrased, it’s an important slice of the universe, right here where we’re sitting. He started to list the reasons, among them a certain movement of the ocean and reception of the sand, and moreover, Zipolite was one of the few nudist beaches in Mexico, he informed me since I had yet to see for myself, though nudity was optional. As he spoke I studied him through my sunglasses, his white baggy top denting in the breeze, and asked myself again whether this was the same person from the streets of La Roma. Half an hour later the girl returned with a slip of paper on which was written 26 PESOS, bringing our first cosmic visit to an end.

  A STRIP OF SAND, A CLUSTER OF TREES, A BAND OF waves, a band of sky: the beach looked like a naïve composition, the stock motifs laid out, ready for a pair of scissors to come and create a gap, a boundary, where there failed to be one, to separate water from sky. Yet there were a few objects that disturbed the horizon, such as a blue hut on wheels that seemed to change location depending on the tide. Primitive and compact, it perched near some boulders, somehow in disagreement with the mood of the beach, the sort of dwelling one might expect to find in the depths of a forest rather than on the coast. At moments I simply sat and stared at the hut, waiting for it to speak.

  It was day three, or four, and the light wind that nipped at the shore soon dropped to a mild breeze. Most people were wading in the water or sprawled out like freakish crabs at its edge. Even as a child, I would notice how silly beachgoers always looked, lolling on their backs or losing their poise as they tried to advance in the sand, and all those adults who dozed off like possums and woke up burned into varying shades of red.

  Every now and then I’d catch Tomás watching me in silence.

  What are you thinking?

  Nothing, he’d say, and turn away.

  And then, moments later:

  And what, exactly, will we do once we find these dwarfs of yours?

  They’re not mine.

  What will we do when we find them?

  Let’s find them first and then see.

  It was after one of these exchanges that he pointed to a cluster of palms and said, I’ll race you to those trees. I wondered for a moment why he had suggested it. In order to alleviate the silences, I assumed, or to appease a mounting agitation. Despite weekend cigarettes I was one of the fastest runners at school, even faster than most boys, and I sensed I’d outrun him. But I was quite comfortable where I sat, was beginning to embrace the lethargy, and didn’t feel like moving. I heard myself say yes. No sooner had the word left my mouth than Tomás shot off full speed, and I right after. I saw him in my peripheral vision. There he was in front of me. Alongside. Somewhere behind. A moment of elation—before I sensed I was running alone. I slowed down to check by how much I had outstripped him and saw, to my total surprise, Tomás running in the opposite direction. Entirely, diametrically, opposite. He was shrinking in size, soon impossible to distinguish from the other dots around him. For a few moments my heart did a little jump but soon returned to its place, and I looked around to see whether anyone had witnessed what had just occurred: a boy running from a girl, off and away in a burst of white.

  I retraced my steps to the spot from where we’d set off and tried to understand what had just happened. Tomás had proposed a game of sorts and then used it to run in the other direction. The tears and creases in the picture, had he been seeing them too? Or perhaps he was preempting me, rushing to become the one who broke things off, words smothered like a nascent fire, one of countless I think it’s best if . . . guillotined by pride. Theory three: he had caught sight of someone he knew, or realized he’d forgotten something, and hurried off to that person or thing. No, it was almost certainly theory number one or two.

  I went over moment
s in the city and their particulars. The fact, for instance, he’d simply walked past the émigrés and their ancient dog—surely a more gallant individual would’ve had the impulse to stop and offer his assistance? And his macabre stare in the Burroughs flat. And the disconnect at the luchas and the cinema, a poor match I was for the wrestlers and murderous dolls. Not to mention the latest revelation of the organ grinder’s coin.

  Unable to settle the question in my head, I swapped my growing confusion for hunger, theoretically easier to address, and inquired at two fondas. Both offered the usual quesadilla, nothing more, and I couldn’t handle another slab of cheese and tortilla. Beyond a cluster of rocks I finally came upon a fruit seller with a green apron that came down to his knees. He’d set up a tiny stand and was busy cleaving his fruit in half with a machete, first the cantaloupe, then the coconuts, the skull-cracking sounds reverberating off the rocks, and I stood mesmerized as he split each sphere into two and then four and then eight and so on, and I could have continued standing there watching the transformation, perfect spheres rendered into irregular squares, when I caught sight of six brawny men approaching like a troop of macaques as they eyed the fruit from a distance. I quickly stepped forward and asked for a cup of diced coconut, another of cantaloupe, and a third of mango with lime and chili.

  I would remain collected when I saw him again, pretend all was fine. I’d pretend it hadn’t rankled, hadn’t rankled at all, that he’d run in the opposite direction. I could even blame it on a greater force, make as though he were acting on orders from someone higher in command who dictated his movements, but no, he was responsible for his actions, and I, for that matter, for mine. And now that I thought about it, Tomás had simply accelerated a process that had already been set in motion. Perhaps it had started on the bus. I had fixated on the Joy Division songs and the languishing battery rather than the more pressing issue at hand. It was impossible to recall how those four syllables, Tomás Román, had once felt like an incantation, strong enough to hex school and city, the initials TR evoking the promise of something, two consonants awaiting a vowel awaiting an act. I finished my fruit while watching the bathers in the water, the curious way in which their legs disappeared into the waves until they became nothing but torsos, torsos afloat on the surface of the sea.

  The bathers were exiting the water, each body gradually recovering its state of wholeness, when Tomás reappeared, dripping, at my side, his bathing trunks threatening to slide off his narrow hips. He raised an arm to shield his eyes from the reddish light of evening, from the reddish light or from anticipated anger or reproach. As casually as I could, I joked about his rusty inner compass, how it couldn’t tell north from south and had set him, lightning speed, on the wrong course. He laughed nervously and said, No, no, no, without elaborating, then looked beyond me into the distance.

  There in Oaxaca, dusk was announced not by the tamalero, nor by cobalt blue ceding to molten orange, but by the coral man, who would come into view just as the sun was departing. He was thin and malnourished as if plucked from the sea like his goods, all color and vital signs draining from him the longer he spent out of water. For sale were several black coral necklaces, twenty pesos apiece, and an assortment of polished chunks. More than once Tomás and I scanned the pieces and said no thank you, neither of us drawn to what lay in front of us. Neither of us was drawn to what lay in front of us, and after that day we began to go our separate ways.

  NIGHT DOESN’T FALL, IT RISES, AND TWILIGHT IN Zipolite was marked by a surge in activity. Some sought the bar, others the bonfire. Tomás liked the bonfire, its mellow tenor and roving guitar. For that reason and various others, I gravitated toward the bar. After so many hours on the beach I welcomed a change in location, and furthermore, the flames reminded me of the fire-eaters at traffic lights in the city. These men would gulp down diesel and once fueled up tilt back their heads, raise a lit torch to their mouths, and roar out long, trembling flames, then stumble over mutely to the car window and hold out a hand for coins. I was reminded of them each time I saw a bonfire, even when in the company of friendly Europeans such as the Spanish merchant from Valencia who, when I told him about the dwarfs, said his brothers were clowns who had a double act, Polilla and Alcanfor, Moth and Mothball. Yet in the city, even when stopped at a traffic light, my thoughts would remain on green, and it was only in front of the fire, thrown into contemplative mode, that I’d think of these silent men, the flames like speech bubbles their only language.

  Once the air cooled and the sun cast new patterns of glimmer on the water, I would head to the bar. I’d slip on my short dress or wraparound skirt and amble down the beach, past the bohemian glow of the bonfires, toward the lights and music. And it was at the bar one night, just as I was two-thirds through my second drink and debating what next, that I met the merman. It didn’t take long for me to notice him in a corner, a ring of silence around him, his sharp Slavic features bringing a new geometry to the scene, and slanted eyes, almost reptilian, that drank in but didn’t give out. His clothes seemed from elsewhere; snug black trousers of thin polyester that rode high at the waist and a white tank top and, even more oddly, a green cardigan, worn open—the temperature dropped a few degrees at night but never enough to warrant a sweater—topped off by navy-blue plastic sandals with one thick band across the top.

  I’d seen him already, earlier that day, and witnessed something intimate enough that when I spotted him at the bar I felt I knew him just a little, although he clearly hadn’t noticed me, so absorbed was he in his thoughts, so withdrawn from the general mood of the beach. All I could do was throw myself into his line of vision. After a slightly awkward approach, a few drops of cocktail splashed onto his table, I sat down, introduced myself, and asked his name, a question to which he simply smiled without providing an answer, clutching his bottle of beer and breathing calmly, evenly, at a different rhythm somehow from the rhythms around him. Each time he drank he’d wipe his mouth with the back of his hand and make a low guttural sound, and each time he did this I felt a sharp rise in desire, and after two or three minutes, possibly less, I knew I had found the person I wanted to be with, or at least the person to whom I would tell my story, here in Zipolite.

  My eyes had initially been drawn that afternoon to his bathing trunks—high waist, mid thigh, green with a blue stripe down the side—which stood out from the other beachwear. I could tell the man had a handsome foreign face, at least through my sunglasses, at least from a distance. He was significantly older than me, in his mid to late thirties, or even early forties, and had light brown hair, longish at the front and shorn at the back, and a bit of a belly. Yet what interested me more than his pleasing appearance was that the man was building a sandcastle. Without drawing attention to myself I sat down about a meter and a half away, near a row of people spread out on towels, and from behind my sunglasses I began to observe the various stages that went into the construction.

  Armed with a flat knife, bucket, and shovel, the man seemed oblivious to everyone on the beach, like a child in its sandbox he kept his focus within the parameters of his kingdom, and as he dug deep, setting the foundations, and piled high, hand stacking, patty-cake style, the great mound of wet sand, I couldn’t help but feel that by the mere act of watching I was intruding on a childhood fear or fantasy, there in the design, as if one could read a person’s past and future, homes real and imagined, in the way someone built their sandcastle.

  Despite these thoughts, or because of them, I found it impossible to avert my eyes. After laying the foundations he smoothed out the surfaces with his knife, then packed and shaped, carved and smoothed some more, moistening at intervals. With large gentle hands he then built a tower and an arch, maintaining the knife at the same angle while cutting, always working, I noticed, from the highest point downward. And then came a bridge, and stairs spiraling around the tower and various doors and windows, some with ledges. Columns came next, creating wonderful shadows, and finally the roof, with inverted cone shap
es like those in fairy tales. And the more the man worked on his sandcastle, the more sophisticated its architecture, the more I sensed the presence of the waves, rows of muscular men with interlocking arms that came closer in with each roll, as if they wanted his castle.

  Every now and then the man would step away from his creation, presumably for a more panoramic view of the work in progress, and only at these moments would my eyes be drawn away from the castle to him, standing tall and casting a shadow, and from where I was sitting I could admire both the handsome profile of the man and the handsome profile of the castle against the horizon, its tones starting to deepen as people began their migration from beach to bar or hotel. Soon the structure was complete, just in time for the setting sun to lend it a preternatural glow, and the man brushed the sand off his legs and circled his creation. I could almost read his pride from afar as he studied it from every angle, occasionally leaning in to adjust one last detail, but then, then—I would never forget the sound of a sandcastle collapsing, the whoosh and the cry as the fine engineering work was erased within seconds—for, only minutes after finishing, he tripped over his shovel and fell into the castle, not into its center but into its right side, enough to topple the foundation. The towers went first, then the ramparts, the sculpted arch crumbled back into grains of sand, and with an air of defeat the man gave the bucket a kick, still unaware he was being observed, and trudged off, heels heavy in sand; it wasn’t long after that the tide came in to finish the job and soon there was no trace whatsoever of either man or castle.