Sea Monsters
Page 14
Resembled me?
Well, yes, at that moment I wasn’t certain of anything. You seemed like another person. But one act does not change the unity of a human being. When you turned to look at me I didn’t know what to say. So I walked away. And I was standing by one of the palm trees trying to collect my thoughts when Mr. Román appeared and asked whether I had seen you. They’re over there, he pointed. And, well, you know the rest. Your friend Tomás was very defensive—I suppose he was aware that you being seventeen and he being nineteen, he could be charged with kidnapping a minor—and lost no time in informing me, as if I didn’t know already, that his father was a lawyer. He said he was responsible for his actions and his actions alone, and that it had been your idea to run away.
I wasn’t certain how to address that final comment and now that my father had come to the end of his chronicle, I realized I’d finished all the food in front of me, forks and spoons laid across the plates, the mug and the glass, even the jug, empty. And although he had reached the end I sensed he didn’t want me to speak, was afraid of what I might say, and kept talking to fill the space. I felt like reassuring him that nothing had happened, though of course something had happened, however with someone else, not with the person he assumed, and I now wished to tell nothing but the truth, though I was no longer even sure what that was.
Once we’d left the hotel with its candelabra and bougainvillea and invisible bird we fell into a hush that lasted the entire taxi ride to the airport in Huatulco, as well as the plane journey home. The engines vibrated beneath our seats accompanied by a collateral roar outside, and with something close to vertigo I gazed down at the coastline, at a landscape similar to the one from which I’d recently withdrawn, the ocean’s strips of blue like gradations in a color chart. I imagined Tomás perched on a boulder with his father and Mario, and the dogs dozing beneath a palm nearby, and Gustavo in his lancha, while the merman sat at our table in the bar—in the past twenty-four hours they’d split into separate entities—and the so-called lifeguard in her pale blue hut, on the lookout for drowners and, beyond the hut, the sea-monstered waters I hadn’t properly explored. And as I stared down, superimposing my aerial view onto my recollection of Tomás’s drawing on the tablecloth, it occurred to me that shipwreck or no shipwreck, most voyages end in failure, and from the start we had set out for the wrong island, bypassing our destination, or at least the destination we thought we were aiming for, although perhaps we never really were, since the reality must be that most boats destined for Kythera end up at the island opposite, or for every boat docked in Kythera there is one that travels onward to the smaller island whose geography also works against the machinations of Cupid. From the moment we set out, Tomás and I were heading toward Antikythera, armies of woodworm working their way through the mast, I thought to myself as the plane climbed higher and higher, the land and water below slipping away until finally eclipsed by a layer of cloud.
Why, Luisa? A question, an event, compressed into a fist, like a sentence compressed into an apostrophe that when released springs back to its original form. The divers from Symi went down looking for sponges and returned to the surface with bronze and marble castaways from another time. Compression and decompression of the lungs, history decompressed from a shipwreck, the movement of the ocean compressed into a sponge.
Upon disembarking from the plane in Mexico City we were greeted by a team of wheelchaired airport employees, part of a new scheme to offer employment to the disabled, well coiffed and ceremonial in their navy blue uniforms, smiling, waving, signaling the way to the luggage carousel. They were much friendlier than the upright individuals one usually encountered, and their waving arms segued into the rotating math instruments of the giant BACO sign on the Periférico. Towering over the flow of cars, the neon instruments continued to act out their functions, the scissors opening and closing, the compass going around and around, the ruler, the lead pencil, each taking their urban measurements, the lengths and widths of days, directions taken and untaken.
Before long our taxi became gridlocked in rush hour. From motion to slow motion to standstill, punctuated by a chorus of car horns: one would begin and the others would follow, repeating the same howl of impatience. And then along complicated loops and laterales, parallel side streets with indecipherable graffiti, language turning to dialect when straying from the main. My father had just rolled down his window—the air-conditioning wasn’t working—when an army of Volkswagen Beetles closed in around us. They too struggled toward movement, these yellow and green dots between the longer vehicles, a Morse code of frustration from the road. Yet why should I be surprised, everything was rehyphenating, after all, that’s what cities did, hyphenate and rehyphenate, but I couldn’t help being amazed by how quickly my view had gone from crowded waves to automobiles; twenty-four hours ago I was still on the beach and now here I sat, returned to the center.
A little before six—released, finally, from the traffic’s grip—our taxi pulled up outside our house. I brought our bags to the door and dropped them on the sidewalk while my father negotiated with the driver, who didn’t have the correct change. I gazed at our doorbell and hesitated, then looked over at the house beside ours. The roof had been completed, the façade painted a shark gray. The crooked bars from before had been replaced by a forbidding metal door that now marked the entrance. Grilles had been set over the ground-floor windows and an electric fence buzzed over the outer wall. It seemed the workers had advanced in great strides while I was gone. Despite all the camaraderie, did their friendship last beyond each construction site, I wondered, or would it taper off once a house was built and they each moved on to new ones? Once something is constructed it is easier, perhaps, to walk away.
As I stood outside our house contemplating this important matter, I had the sense I was being watched. My mother’s face, in an upstairs window. The pane was too clouded to gauge her expression but I could see the waxy circle of her face tilted down toward where I stood. I raised an arm and called out—the balcony door was open—but at that moment a truck full of old bicycles rumbled past, and while I debated whether to ring the bell or wait for my father to finish with the driver, I realized I wanted to prolong this moment for as long as possible, to remain in that suspended state between the voyage and the return. As I listened to the taxi drive off and my father’s footsteps behind me, I decided I wouldn’t tell them a thing, would not tell anyone, what had transpired, I would store it away in some deep chamber, yet even as I promised this to myself I knew it was futile, for regardless of how hard you try to keep memories at bay, after a while even bays erode, sandcastles collapse, and drowned mermaids resurface.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its generous support.
And a great thank you to my editors Poppy Hampson and Jonathan Lee, and to Suzanne Dean, Wah-Ming Chang, Greg Clowes, and all the other fine people at Chatto & Windus and Catapult who worked on this book. Thank you to my agent, Anna Stein. And to Karolina Sutton and Morgan Oppenheimer. And, of course, to Parisa Ebrahimi.
It would be impossible to list all the friends to whom I am grateful, so I’ll limit myself to those who formed part of the ongoing dialogue: Josh Appignanesi, Devorah Baum, Michael Bucknell, Andy Cooke, Vincent Dachy, Carlos Fonseca, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Jennifer Higgie, Stewart Home, Mary Horlock, Juliet Jacques, Andrew Kidd, Darian Leader, Helder and Suzette Macedo, Claire Nozières, Neil Porter, Simon Schama, Lorna Scott Fox.
Had this been memoir, my sister Eva would have featured in nearly every city scene. But even in fiction, she is ever present. Above all, I wish to thank Eva and my parents and little Josephine, to whom this book is dedicated.
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