The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel Page 4

  Paloma pushed off the rock and swam down a few more feet, into a thin valley between two big boulders. There, in the sand, a triggerfish was darting back and forth, frantic, its tail quivering, its gill flaps fluttering. At first, Paloma thought the triggerfish was wounded, for its movements were erratic and it was encircled by three, then five, then nine or ten other fish, all of which seemed determined to attack it.

  A Scotch parrot fish—with tartanlike scales and beaked mouth—charged the smaller triggerfish, which parried with a flurry of twisting bites. The parrot fish retreated.

  Immediately an angelfish dashed forward, feinted at the triggerfish, then banked and tried to get at the sand beneath the triggerfish, but it, too, was driven off.

  Now Paloma realized what was happening. The triggerfish’s egg deposit had been discovered by the other fish in the little valley, and they were ganging up on the triggerfish, trying to divert it long enough for one or another of them to dash in and root out and eat the cache of eggs.

  Paloma felt instinctively parental toward the eggs, and so she swam into the midst of the flurry and flashed her hands around; the invaders dispersed. But the triggerfish’s natural assumption was that Paloma was another thief, albeit a larger one, and its response was to bite her earlobe.

  Paloma moved away, smiling inside but sad because she knew that before long the triggerfish would lose out to the odds. Once an egg deposit was discovered, it was as good as gone. Still, she told herself, that was the way it was supposed to be, an example of nature in balance. If all the eggs of every triggerfish hatched, and all the hatchlings grew to maturity, the sea would be choked with triggerfish.

  Now she began to feel the telltale ache in her lungs, the hollow sensation that she imagined as the lungs themselves searching for more bits of air to consume. Her temples began to pound, not painfully but noisily. She pushed off the bottom and kicked easily toward the surface, trailing a stream of bubbles behind.

  Her rule was to rest for five or ten minutes between dives, for then she could dive again and again without pain or fatigue. If she did not rest, she found that each successive dive would have to be shorter and the ache in her lungs would be sharper.

  So she hung on the anchor line and drew deep breaths of the warm, moist air and occasionally looked underwater through her mask to see if anything new or special had arrived in the neighborhood of the seamount.

  Perhaps today she would see a golden cabrío, the rare, solitary grouper of a yellow so rich and unblemished that when it hung motionless in the water it appeared to be cast of solid gold. Or perhaps there would be a pulsing cloud of barracudas, whose silver backs caught the sunlight and were transformed into a shower of needles.

  Once she had even seen a whale shark, but that was an encounter no reasonable person could hope to have again.

  Her first reaction had been shock, and then, for a fragment of a second, terror, and then, when she realized exactly what it was, a shiver and tingle and flood of warmth through her stomach.

  The whale shark had risen from the bottom, gliding so slowly that it seemed almost to be floating, an animal so huge that in the cloudy water Paloma could not see its head and tail at the same time. But she could determine its color—a speckled, mustardy yellow—and that told her there was no danger. The whale shark ate plankton and tiny shrimps and other minute life.

  Jobim had cautioned her that she might see a whale shark out here, had tried to prepare her for the shock she would feel at her first sight of the leviathan.

  “There is one way he can hurt you,” Jobim had said without a hint of jest.

  “Tell me.” Paloma imagined stinging spines or molarlike teeth that could crush her bones.

  “If you see his mouth open, and you swim to it and you pry open his jaws and you squeeze yourself inside and force the jaws closed behind you.”

  “Papa!”

  “Even then, I don’t think he’d like you very much. He’d shake his head and spit you out.”

  Paloma had jumped on her father and wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to bite his neck.

  When she had positively identified the whale shark, she had swum down to meet this largest of all fish, and just then it had slowed its ambling pace enough so that she could touch the head and run her hand down the endless ridges of the back. It did not show any signs of acknowledging her presence, but continued its lazy cruise, propelled by gentle sweeps of its tail. And when finally Paloma’s hand reached the tail, she had hiccoughed in awe, for the tail fin alone was as tall as she was. And as it moved back and forth, it pushed before it a wave of water so powerful that it cast her away in a helpless tumble.

  The whale shark had then moved off into the gray-green gloom, relentlessly, seeming almost dutiful—as if programmed to follow a course, or a pattern of courses, set by nature countless millions of years ago.

  But today, as Paloma lay on the surface of the sea, with her face in the water, breathing through a rubber tube—wanting to be part of the sea but confined to the world of air—she saw below a scene of routine and undisturbed daily life. It was a life of ceaseless movement, constant vigilance, perpetual caution, and perfect harmony.

  A change of pressure told her something was happening, or was about to happen—a slight alteration in the way the water felt around her body. It felt tighter, seemed to press on her, as if something of great mass and size was moving toward her at high speed.

  Reflexively, she back-pedaled in the water, trying to get away from this thing, whatever it was, that she could feel but couldn’t see, that felt as if it was coming closer and closer, for the pressure on her body was beginning to lift her out of the water.

  Then she saw it, a black thing.

  It was larger than she was, larger even than her boat. It was soaring up at her. It was winged, and the wings swept up and down with such power that everything before and beside them was tossed aside, scattered. She could see a mouth that was a black cavern, and it was flanked by two horns, and the horns were aimed at Paloma, as if to grip her and stuff her into the gaping hole.

  It was a manta ray. And even though she knew, rationally, that she had nothing to fear, she felt a rush of panic. Why was it coming straight at her? Why didn’t it turn?

  Her body was rising higher in the water, driven by the pressure wave forced before the manta. Her breath caught in her throat. Sparks shot through her brain, impelling an action, contradicting the impulse, impelling another action, contradicting that. She was paralyzed.

  When it was no more than a few feet from Paloma, the manta tilted its wing and arched its back, changing its angle to display a belly of sheer and shiny white. Five trembling gills were on either side, crescent wings like slices of the winter moon.

  The ray rushed up through the water and broke the surface, a perfect triangle of solid flesh that should not be able to fly but was flying, as it broke free of the sea and reached for the sky.

  In Paloma’s head, sight and feeling gave way to sound, for there was a thick and deafening roar, an enveloping, infernal boom, like the sound the wind makes at the height of a hurricane.

  Paloma’s head rose with the manta, and her eyes followed it as it flew high in the air, shedding diamonds of water. At the top of its arc it hung for a fraction of a second, a titan of shimmering black against the sun that rimmed it with a halo of gold.

  Then it fell backward, showing its belly; it smashed flat against the pewter sea. The water erupted, and the sound seemed to carry the same reckless violence as a thunderclap that cracks the clouds close by.

  Now Paloma could let out her breath, a whoosh of excitement. She had seen mantas jump before—young ones especially, at twilight usually—but always from a distance. They seemed to be flipping in happy somersaults.

  But mantas couldn’t be “happy.” This was what the islanders called an “old” animal, and by “old” they meant low and primitive and stupid. Its cousins were the sharks and the skates and the other rays. The wisdom was that “ol
d” animals could not know pleasure or pain, happiness or distress. Their brains were efficient but small, their capacities limited.

  And Paloma agreed with most of this wisdom, for Jobim had taught her that it was wrong ever to think of animals in human terms. It deprived animals of what was most precious about them—their individuality, their place in nature. Jobim had special contempt for people who tried to tame wild animals, to make them pets, to train them to do what he called “people tricks.”

  It was, he had supposed, a way for people to be less afraid of an animal, for an animal that could be taught to, say, walk on its hind legs or beg for food seemed less wild, less threatening, more human. But it also made the animal seem less whole.

  But what, then, was this manta doing? Why had it jumped right beside her, when the sea was empty for miles around? The island wisdom said that mantas jumped out of water only to rid themselves of parasites—small animals that attached themselves to a larger animal and fed on it. Some of these parasites were burrowers, little crabs or snails or worms, that dug holes in the manta and fed on its flesh. Then there were fish called remoras, which had sucker discs on top of their heads by which they fastened themselves to the host animal. They were not parasites but, rather, hitchhikers, for they did no harm to the manta and fed only on scraps of food the manta missed.

  According to Jobim, by leaping into the air the manta deprived the parasites of oxygen (for, like fish, the parasites got their oxygen from water, not air), and the sudden shock caused the parasite to let go. If the shock alone did not dislodge the parasites, then being slammed down on the water would surely knock them loose.

  Paloma saw the logic in what Jobim had said. But on this manta she had seen no parasites, and in its jumps there was a sense of vigor, of energy, of excitement.

  The island wisdom about manta rays had always encouraged Paloma to fear them. Careless sailors and fishermen were said to have been consumed by mantas. Disobedient children were threatened with being cast adrift amid a school of mantas.

  And then, Paloma remembered, one day a few months ago she had been diving on the seamount and had seen a manta from the surface. It had been flying through the water with the grace of a hawk, rising and falling on its wind of water. Paloma recalled now how surprised she had been that none of the other creatures on the seamount had acted afraid of the manta. They had not scurried out of its way, had not dashed for cover in the rocks. They had seemed to know that the manta would avoid them—gently lifting a wing to pass over a pair of groupers or dipping it to pass beneath a school of jacks.

  On the edge of the seamount that day, beyond a small school of fish, the water had been gray and turbid, signaling the presence of a cloud of plankton swept up into shallow water. The manta had headed for the plankton, and as it approached the cloud, it had surprised Paloma again: Its dreadful horns unfurled and showed themselves for what they actually were—floppy fins. The manta had spread the fins and used them like arms, sweeping the plankton-rich water into its mouth.

  The manta had made three passes through the cloud of plankton and then, evidently satisfied, had flown up and away.

  Now, holding onto her pirogue, feeling her pulse slow and her breathing become more regular, Paloma waited, her head out of water, to see if today’s manta would jump once more. She wanted to see it as it broke the surface, to hear the roar and experience the explosion again.

  When, after a few moments, the manta did not reappear, she put her face in the water and turned in a circle. But the manta must have gone off into the deep, for life on the seamount had resumed its routine. Paloma decided to dive back down to the bottom.

  She took deep breaths and sped down the anchor line. Finding the same rock on the bottom, she locked her legs around it. She half expected things to be different here on the bottom, as if the drama on the surface should have provoked changes below. But all was the same: The same fish patrolled the same rocks, the same eels poked their heads out of the same holes, the same jacks sped by in search of food.

  There had been one change which, inevitable though it was, made her feel wistful nonetheless. Nearby, in the little valley, the triggerfish was still darting back and forth. But now the fish was alone. Nothing was taunting it, nothing attacking. And its motion was different from what it had been, less aggressive yet more desperate. Such, at least, was Paloma’s interpretation, for she knew that the triggerfish’s eggs had finally been taken and that the fish was searching for them in hopeless frenzy.

  Another fish swam slowly before Paloma’s mask. It was a fat thing, with tiny fins that seemed far too small for its body. She waited until the fish was only a few inches away, then lashed out with both hands and grabbed it around the body. She held it very lightly, anticipating what would happen.

  The fish struggled for a second and then, like a balloon, began to inflate. The scales on its back stood on end and became stiff white thorns. Its lips pursed and its eyes receded into the swelling body and its fins, which now looked absurdly small, flapped in fury.

  Paloma juggled this spiny football on her fingers for a moment, then held its bulbous face to hers. The pufferfish could not struggle long. It had done all it could—become a thoroughly unappetizing meal—so now it simply stared back at Paloma. Gently, she released it in open water, and it fluttered quickly away. As it neared the shelter of the rocks, gradually it deflated. The thorns on its back lay down and once again became scales. By the time it reached a familiar crevice, it was slim enough to squirt through to safety.

  Paloma began to hear anew the distant throbbing in her temples. It was still faint, not urgent; she had plenty of time to get to the surface. But by nature and Jobim’s training, she was cautious—better to have more than enough air left when she reached the surface than not enough when she was still far below. And so she kicked off the bottom and rose, facing the hill of rocks and coral.

  Ten feet above the bottom, she saw an oyster growing on the underside of a boulder. She reached behind her and slid her knife from her belt and, with a single twist of her wrist, cut the oyster away.

  The throbbing in her head was louder now, urging her to hurry up to where she belonged. Often she wished she had gills like a fish and could breathe water. But at times like this, she wanted only one thing: air. She kicked hard, and her strong legs drove her upward with a speed that plastered her hair over the faceplate of her mask.

  She popped through the surface, spat, and gulped a breath of air, then clung to the side of the pirogue and drew more breaths until her body was fully nourished with oxygen. Then she dropped the oyster into the pirogue, pulled herself aboard, and lay on the bottom, facing the sun and its warmth.

  When she was warm and dry, she used her knife to split the mango and dig out the sweet, juicy fruit. She tossed the mango rind overboard and watched, fascinated, as it was savaged by a school of tiny, yellow-and-black-striped fish.

  These sergeant-major fish were everywhere, on reefs and rocks, in deep water and shallow. They appeared suddenly, from nowhere, at the slightest trace of food of any kind. They ate fruit, bones, nuts, bread, meat, vegetables, feces, paper and—now and then—they nibbled on Paloma’s toes.

  They were daring and fearless and voracious and fast, and the nicest thing Paloma could say about them was that they were so small. A mutant sergeant major, a specimen of, say, a hundred pounds, would be a genuine horror.

  She let her imagination roam further, envisioning a sergeant major the size of a whale shark, and found herself once again admiring the precision of the balance nature had maintained, over thousands of years, among all its living things.

  She picked up the scraggly oyster and held it in one hand. With the other hand, she guided the point of her knife to the rough slit between the two halves of the shell. Oysters weren’t like clams, which you could open cleanly and easily, with a cut and a twist and a scoop. Oysters were ragged and sharp and coated with slimy growths, and if you weren’t very careful you’d stab yourself in the palm of your ha
nd. And the cut would bleed, so you couldn’t dive anymore that day, and it would probably get infected so you couldn’t go into the water for several days, and it might get so badly infected that you would fall sick and have to go to bed or even on the boat to La Paz to see the doctor.

  The point was, best to be careful opening oysters.

  Patiently, she pried around the edges of the shell until she found a place where the knife could probe inside. She felt the knife point touch the muscle that held the shell together; slowly she sawed there.

  Most people on the island would not eat oysters. They were thought to be unsafe. Some people who had eaten them became violently sick to their stomachs, and over the years a few had died.

  The truth was that the only bad oyster was an oyster left too long in the sun. They died soon and spoiled instantly, and a spoiled oyster was a ticket to the hospital in La Paz.

  But an oyster fresh from the sea was a delicacy, something cool and rich and salty and pure. Paloma cut through the last bit of muscle and prised open the shell and saw then that this oyster was the greatest delicacy of all.

  Inside, nestled in the shimmering gray meat, was the prize. It was misshapen and wrinkled, its color mottled, and it was only half the size of Paloma’s little fingernail. But it was a pearl.

  Paloma plucked the pearl from its shell and let it roll around in the palm of her hand.

  Now she had twenty-seven.

  It had taken her more than a year to find the others, but her progress had been steady: roughly, an average of two a month. It had been more than six weeks, however, since she had found the last one, and she had begun to wonder. Was it possible that on the whole seamount there were only twenty-six pearl-bearing oysters? She needed at least forty pearls, preferably fifty.