Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  Revived, that is, until I happened to gaze into the horizon without end and felt its vastness begin to swallow me; if I stayed in much longer I was certain I would dissolve, there were probably hundreds of dissolved bodies in the ocean, swirling around with the shells and seaweed, that’s what happens when you immerse yourself too fully in any vastness, you eventually become part of it, part of the landscape, quite literally. The undertow was growing rougher. I started back to shore, pushing against the water, which seemed to have acquired more will and density, and only then noticed the cautionary yellow flag in the distance, flapping on its stalk.

  On my way out of the ocean I encountered a fat man with satyr eyes, his parts so immense I couldn’t help staring as he waded ahead with a woman, also corpulent, in tow, her green panties clinging to her curves, her breasts like hefty church bells. As they too waded out, thighs thrusting against the water, the woman threw her arms around the man’s belly, and once ashore they trudged off leaving sensual dents in the sand, their bulk somehow undiminished by the perspective of distance.

  Sand, towel, safety. The threat of a devouring vastness was soon replaced, however, by the burden of the more concrete. As I lay there, the image of the hotel building rose to mind, and the number of telephones I must have walked past, and the call I could have made yet hadn’t. My lamentations were cut short by a presence by my head. I sat up to examine the visitor, its palette bold against the coastal tones: a long body sheathed in iridescent chain mail, a crest extending from head to tail in a ridge of spikes, a massive head like a crowned Eastern deity. Here beside me sat an iguana, its torpor undermined by the occasional blink and almost imperceptible quiver of its jowls and the dewlap under its chin as it collected the sun’s warmth. Its mouth hung open, just enough to reveal two rows of minuscule pointy teeth, and its pupils seemed fixed on me. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore its stare but could feel it through my lids. There was purpose in those eyes, something beyond mere curiosity, and I couldn’t help suspecting the iguana had been sent by my parents to spy.

  I thought back on the party at Diego Deán’s, on his three iguanas who sat dignified in their tanks observing the somewhat undignified dance around them, and now on the sand I began to feel in the grip of a similar nervous energy. Nowhere near as strung out as that night, naturally, but enough to cancel out the mood that’d started to set in. Seeing this iguana, which had in the last few minutes vanished back into its hermetic world, left me troubled. I willed time to accelerate and for the sun to dissolve into a thin fiery line. I wanted to see the merman, I wanted to have a few drinks. That was the moment when I untensed, at the bar at night, distanced from the beach and its stories, but evening was still a whole concept away. I tried to think of something neutral. The posters in my room: Siouxsie Sioux in a feathery headdress; a sepia Emiliano Zapata with saber, rifle, sash, and sombrero; the Caspar David Friedrich of two moon gazers, beside a photograph I once took of Caifanes playing at La Quiñonera. Perhaps they’d all grown discolored or were curling up at the edges. No, not that quickly. Yet surely it’s the intensity of an absence that counts, not its length. Something must have changed, the room must look different, something must complain.

  AT NIGHT THE BEACHCOMBERS WOULD EMERGE, slow-moving silhouettes entirely oblivious to the rest of us as they set out on their mission. At first I didn’t know who they were, these two dark figures roaming the shore, their flashlights directed at the stretch of sand in front of them, until I heard the woman at El Cósmico discussing them with one of her customers, an inquisitive man seated at the next table. He too had seen them, and asked her to explain. They are Horacio Gómez and Serpentino Hernández, she replied, Zipolite’s beachcombers. The sand stole but it also bestowed, safeguarding objects until the sun went down, and these men were determined to find the coins, watches, sunglasses, and other trinkets that had been left behind. Horacio was the much older man, and Serpentino therefore the younger and more successful beachcomber, with sharper vision, and each night the two would meet by a certain boulder with their flashlights and start combing the sand for treasure, rarely entering into conversation, or knowing much about each other despite being colleagues. But the woman at El Cósmico knew a few details, and couldn’t resist sharing them. Horacio had been to the city only four times in his life, and his wife had died many years ago. As for Serpentino, his wife lived up north and he saw her every Christmas; he had a handsome face, you could say classical, but was missing a considerable number of teeth, in fact his mouth resembled an empty cave with stalactites and stalagmites. His dream was to save up enough money to buy a metal detector, but the older beachcomber greatly disapproved of that idea.

  And yet I only saw these men from afar, they never came into focus, they remained patches of ink in the background, sometimes still, sometimes in motion, sometimes vertical, sometimes bent over at forty-five degrees, sometimes one wore a hat, sometimes one used a cane. I was struck by this profession driven by optimism, by the thought that there was always something to discover if you only looked, but as far as I could tell the main items to be found were smoked-down joints and cigarettes, empty bottles and marine debris, in fact a museum of debris, none of it the exciting flotsam and jetsam that might wash up on other shores.

  Meanwhile the ocean continued to write and rewrite its long ribbon of foam, changing the contours of Tomás’s drawing, adjusting and readjusting, moving them backward and forward. It was a quarter past crow, half past seagull, five to owl. I could roughly gauge time from the movement of the sun yet the hour of the day and the day of the week seemed irrelevant, one folding into the next like a collapsing accordion, and I felt no need to distinguish between them. I’d intentionally left my watch at home, or perhaps I’d forgotten it, but what purpose, anyway, would it serve here on the beach—Oaxaca ran on Oaxaca time, Tomás on Tomás time, even the dogs ran on their own time, one punctuated by hunger, naps, and observation, the metronome skipping a beat whenever there was a new sound or smell in the offing. At night I would think back on what a pious aunt once said when I mentioned I found it hard to believe in any higher power—she had gazed at me with a look of pity she didn’t attempt to hide before describing the solitude of the atheist. As an atheist you are unaccompanied, you see, at night you close the door and have no one to turn to, whereas she felt accompanied continually; wherever she was, whatever she was doing, there was always someone watching, a divine witness to her life. Not a particularly attractive thought, I remembered thinking, but instead I felt compelled to agree with her, even join in her commiseration over my barren spirit.

  There are days, indeed whole weeks, in life that seem nocturnal. Some lives could be mapped out entirely via nocturnal scenes, and once we had firmly entered evening, the bar would beckon. The bar beckoned, and the merman wore many rings. He hadn’t worn them on the day of the sandcastle, I would have noticed the glint, but he wore them to the bar each night, and often while I was speaking he would fiddle with them, three on one hand, two on the other. Four were silver bands and the fifth was the head of a wolf, its snout pointing outward as if on permanent watch; he wore this ring on the middle finger of his left hand, and I’d steal glances at it in an attempt to determine its significance. In his country wolves might have special meaning, or maybe he was a member of a wolf club, but no, I decided, the merman was a lone wolf, like this solitary ring snarling amid the nondescript bands, and if I hadn’t already named him merman I would have searched for a more lupine moniker. But in Zipolite, I now understood, one could be many things at once.

  One night, apart from the quiet miracle of the merman, there happened to be a DJ visiting from Berlin, a redhead who’d crossed the ocean with his tunes, songs I much preferred to the frolicsome beach anthems thus far. Yet most people didn’t seem as captivated by the music, and there were fewer bodies in the improvised area of the dance floor. When the DJ put on a Kraftwerk song, I grabbed the merman’s hand. At first he resisted, so ensconced in his stillness, but I didn’t rele
nt and after a few more tugs I got him to follow me to a slightly tenebrous patch of the palapa and there we began to dance, the merman tense and uncertain, so I took both his hands and led as best I could, surprised to see that the merman, so graceful and composed when seated, seemed to lack all coordination, shuffling jerkily, almost mechanically, his shoulders twitching like a cement mixer as he lurched from side to side.

  When the next song came on, Camouflage’s “The Great Commandment,” the merman placed his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him. Without a second thought I rested my head against the ribbed cotton of his tank top, closed my eyes, and breathed in the heady scents of sea and cologne. We stayed in this position for the duration of the next track as well, enormous arms enfolding my torso as guitar riffs vibrated off his chest. Eyes still shut, and completely engulfed, I let myself be carried back to nights at El Nueve, to its grotto of European moonlight, and imagined we were there, the merman and I, moving in circles around the DJ booth, everyone from Adán the Aviator to the Scottish Goth making way for us, the regal couple who cut a swath across the room, silencing everyone with our great romance. My thoughts transported us so fully to Londres in the Zona Rosa that I began to fret over what I would do with the merman once the night was over. I couldn’t bring him home just like that, nor could I release him into the city, especially if he didn’t speak our language; yes, it was going to be a problem once the night ended. This imaginary dilemma began to occupy my thoughts, burrowing deeper as the song wore on, until I opened my eyes and saw Tomás.

  He was standing in front of me, in front of us. Floppy hair and baggy white shorts, a rip in the shoulder of his T-shirt. Stock-still amid the dancing figures, in every way looking deflated, he stood and stared, at me, at the merman, then back at me. Merman, meet Fantômas. The merman frowned and released me, cocking his head as if to ask who this was. This is the friend I mentioned, I said above the music, and whispered to Tomás to go away. He didn’t so much as blink an eye so I pulled him aside and asked him again to leave, couldn’t he see we were immersed in conversation, to which he gave me a baffled look, aware, possibly, that we hadn’t been speaking and if we had, it would have been one-way and in a language only one of us could understand. He glanced over at the merman, who had left the dance floor and was on his way back to our table. I only came to check on you, Tomás shrugged, I wanted to make sure you were okay. Of course I’m okay, I replied coldly. For a few seconds we stood staring at each other without exchanging a word. And then he shrugged a second time, and walked off.

  The merman’s manner grew even more reserved now that someone had adjourned our moment of intimacy, and back at the table I clarified yet again, in case he’d missed it, that this was the friend with whom I’d come in search of the dwarfs. I confessed I’d been interested in him at first, initially it had been some sort of romance . . . But that was the problem with mysterious people, I explained, once you spend time with them they’re not so mysterious after all, and as I said this the merman smiled, as if promising, no matter what, to remain a mystery.

  The Hyades set in the evening, and

  Taurus begins to rise.

  Vega rises in the evening, and

  in the morning the Pleiades and the Hyades start to rise.

  The Antikythera Mechanism had charted what appeared at sunset, what withdrew from the dawn sky. Despite the electrical currents provided by the merman and the more or less tacit understanding I’d arrived at with Tomás, there were reminders that my nerves remained raw. Regardless of how hard I tried, I couldn’t ignore the occasional mirage of my parents hovering in the background, because that’s what parents do, they hover, whether in person or from a distance, and even when freed of giant math instruments you will always have, at the back of your thoughts, hovering parents, and no position can entirely shake them off. I’ll be home before long, I told them in my mind, despite having no idea as to how long. I did not want to travel on my own, nor did I want to abandon the merman.

  Often I’d lie restless on a towel or in the hot shallow grave of the sand, keeping an eye on the flag—green, yellow, or red. I would think of the Zapotec girls, wondering on what stretch of beach, exactly, their corpses had been laid out. In front of El Cósmico, isn’t that what the woman had said, but I could no longer remember more. Sometimes I’d try the come-and-go shade of the palm trees, avoiding the hammock by day as I would my bed in the city. All my life I’d shunned naps, they only brought empty feelings and disorientation, and as for the hammock, suspension is a dubious state, stability impossible if nothing is touching the ground. So I let my nerves be frayed, at times probably indulged them. I just couldn’t imagine relaxing one hundred percent, and just to guarantee I kept a grip on things and didn’t let down my guard or allow matters to get too picturesque, I held on to the one book I’d brought with me, Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror.

  Every now and then I would dip in, as I would in the city, and each time its angry spume jumped out and spat in my face, but I felt stronger having it in my hands. After all, Mr. Berg had given him especially to me, he hadn’t assigned him to the rest of the class—too savage, he’d said, for the others—Lautréamont was mine, and mine alone, and I was closer to him than anyone else on the beach, of that I was certain. Isidore Ducasse was my ally in Zipolite, and everything I knew about him made me like him even more. There was a shortage of biographical facts, Berg had warned me, yet I savored those he mentioned. Lautréamont/Ducasse was cranky and taciturn, and kept his distance from everyone. He hardly ate but drank vast amounts of coffee and suffered from migraines. During the day he would wander up and down the banks of the Seine and then stay up all night writing as he pounded the keys of a piano in search of phrases and rhythms. The flora and fauna of his native Montevideo, where he’d spent his childhood, crept into many a frame. In Paris he lived in a hotel and was so anonymous that when he died, aged twenty-four, the death certificate was signed by the hotel manager and valet. And, of course, the fact of only one surviving photograph, a final act of defiance. I would open Maldoror and imbibe a few words—certain ones in particular were good for the arsenal: foul, lewdness, torture, vampire, ignominious, blood, saliva, sinews—and continue with my day; even a quick visit to the pages was enough to set my nerves on edge, but also steel them.

  The other students at COCA had their bodyguards. And I, courtesy of Mr. Berg, had Lautréamont. With him I had no need for anyone at school, once Etienne left it was parched land, and I kept the book in my bag at all times. It might’ve been a case of the howler monkey imitating the jaguar’s roar, but with this sort of ally I felt more powerful than the bodyguards, an absurdity of daily life that at the beach seemed even more absurd. It was probably true that whenever one looked back at life in the city, particularly from a place lacking in city features, a great deal would seem absurd. But few details, from the vantage point of Oaxaca, seemed as ridiculous to me now as the bodyguards, or guaruras, particularly those that gathered around our school, a mass of black circling the campus like dense planetary rings, the density reiterated by the cars they drove, faceless black and platinum SUVs with windows as tinted as the sunglasses they wore.

  The men added local color, or rather shadow, to the street, and the last time I saw them was right before I left for Oaxaca. After class I had exited through the main entrance rather than walking to the parking lot to catch the school bus, and not only that, but a few minutes before the bell since PE had ended early. And there they were, fanned out by the gates awaiting their charges. Some were puffing on cigarettes, others had gathered around the taco stand that had been set up for them. I was off their radar, however, subsumed into the hectic panorama, and their eyes passed over my being the same way they’d pass over a tree or a gate. I always felt so insignificant when in front of these men, not only the ones at school but others throughout the city, although bodyguards elsewhere at least registered my presence with a microgesture, whereas the ones outside school showed no sign whatsoever of ackno
wledging I was there.

  But that day had been different. I no longer felt diminished by the guaruras or the world they represented, soon I would be far from it, and as I stared into the tinted glasses of one man by the sizzling taco stand, I was convinced he was staring back at me. Someone had noticed that here was a female student exuding a burlier kind of energy.

  An old shoe shiner arrived with his son. I’d seen them before, these humble entrepreneurs who would materialize with wooden crates that folded out like concertinas, their music an arrangement of rags, brushes, and jars of polish. The son also carried a stool. As soon as they’d settled in, there would always be one watchdog who’d break off from duty to have his shoes shined, five minutes of feeling solemn and important while a man knelt at his feet.

  At two thirty, the bell—a sign for the shoe shiner and his son to put away their implements, and for the taco man to turn off his griddle and draw the shutter. From that moment onward, all attention was directed elsewhere, every head turned in the direction of the gates, and through the sea of black I noticed a ripple of nervous tics, guaruras were prone to them, as the kids began to pour out. I couldn’t help thinking of how differently each of us inhabited the pavement, as we would no doubt inhabit the world beyond. That day I no longer felt inferior. Well, I had never truly felt inferior yet sometimes found myself acting as though I did, that was the effect these people had on you, even if you existed outside their sphere you still formed part of the hierarchy, were somehow implicated. That afternoon I threw a quick glance, impervious, as the hulking men went up to the little people and relieved them of their bags before ushering them into the haughty vehicles.