The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel Read online

  And so, though a squall was driving the rain in horizontal sheets and the wind was whipping around in cyclonic eddies, Paloma fought her way to her rock on the western tip of the island and stood on the rock, naked. She raised her arms to the sky, to Papa, and beamed up at him, radiant with life, and let the rain wash the blood down her legs and over the rock and into the sea.

  Paloma dried the last dish, then walked outside into the still night.

  For all her delight at being a girl—and her frequent amazement at herself for ever having wanted to be anything else—still Paloma often wished that she could abolish the differences between herself and males. For she was positive that it was this difference (in coincidence with the absence of other girls her age) that made it difficult for her to make friends.

  The slightest hint, therefore, that Jo might be undergoing some sort of shift that would make him susceptible to friendship gave Paloma an injection of hope that animated her as much as an adrenaline rush in fright.

  As she puttered around the kitchen, she had reprimanded herself for not being more receptive to Jo’s new attitude. He had been rather nice tonight, and she had responded skeptically, had put him off. He had given a little something, and she had given nothing.

  So she decided she would go to Jo’s room, and if he was awake she would tell him that she had been mistaken, that tomorrow would be a good day to teach him to dive.

  As she turned the corner around the house, she heard something that made her stop. She waited, then peered around the corner and saw Jo going into his room. He must have gone for a walk, she thought, and she started again for his room. But again she stopped, and this time she wasn’t sure why; she knew she didn’t want to go on. She was sensing a warning—nothing she could have articulated, but something very strong.

  As she stood there, she chided herself for giving in to mystical nonsense. But no matter how foolish it seemed, she could not take another step.

  After a few more moments, she returned to the house and went to bed, resolving to let sleep clear her head.

  But sleep was a long time coming, for she was an unwilling witness to a pitched battle inside her head—between the half of her mind that wanted a friend and condemned her for being suspicious, and the half that cherished her independence and was suspicious of anyone or anything that might encroach upon it.

  By morning, she had decided to give herself the day to settle the conflict in her mind, so although Jo was still being genial, Paloma did not let the mild guilt she felt change her plans.

  She accompanied Jo and his friend Indio down the path to the dock, as she did every day. As he untied his boat, Jo said casually, “You want to come with us today?”

  “What?” Jo had never invited her into his boat—not for fishing, not for fun, not to gather firewood on one of the nearby islands.

  “Manolo is sick.”

  “Sick with what? He was fine last night.”

  “I don’t know. He says it’s his stomach. If it is, I don’t want him in the boat.”

  Paloma was tempted. If she could not make a gesture to Jo, at least she might accept his gesture to her.

  But selfishly, she did not want to accept. She had never liked fishing, except with Jobim, and then it wasn’t the fishing she liked so much as the being with Papa. Fishing was boring and tiring and painful, for the fishing line always bit through her fingertips and abraded the cuts with salt. Most of all, she disliked fishing because it was killing—for a worthwhile cause sometimes, she had to admit, but still, it was killing. She could not reconcile the communion she felt with the animals on the seamount with the sense of revulsion, of horror, really, she felt on seeing those same animals lifeless and colorless, heaped in the bottom of a boat.

  But if Jo needed her help, if they were going to be friends, it would be petty of her to refuse.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Oh.” Jo seemed surprised. “I mean, only if you want to.”

  “If you need the help, I’d like to help.”

  “Yes. I see.” Jo seemed to be searching for something to say. “I don’t really need your help, though.”

  “But I thought Manolo …”

  “Sure, but … I mean … Indio and I can … Manolo doesn’t really …” Jo was blushing. “We can manage. I just thought you might … I know how you feel about fishing … I mean, all we do is kill stuff.” Jo grimaced, as if the thought of dead fish nauseated him.

  “I know,” Paloma said, “but that is what we live on. It’s time I got tougher about it.”

  “Okay,” Jo said. “Good idea. Only today’s not a good day.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. You said so yourself, remember? We’ve both got a lot of things to do.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “We can manage. Really. You do what you have to do then we’ll spend a couple of days together. Maybe more. Maybe one day you can teach me to dive and the next day I’ll take you fishing. A deal?”

  “Okay.” Paloma shrugged. She didn’t know if she should say something more. Was she supposed to? Were there customs about this? It had seemed so simple: Jo had asked if she wanted to join them today. More: He had suggested that she could help them, had seemed to be asking for her help. She had said yes, she was willing to help. And then everything had gotten complicated. He had withdrawn the invitation, or denied the request for help—whatever, he was now saying that he didn’t want her along, after all.

  Or, was he being considerate of her? That was what his voice wanted to convey—that he didn’t want to be so selfish as to take her away from what she wanted to do. If that truly was his message, if he was being kind, then perhaps she could respond with a kindness, should convince him that what she had to do wasn’t very important, that she would gladly put it aside to help him.

  But maybe he had changed his mind. If so, she didn’t want to force herself on him.

  Was this what the beginnings of friendships were like? If so, then maintaining a friendship looked like a full-time job. It was probably worth it, though. The least she could do was learn the tricks and rituals and give it a chance to grow.

  And no matter how confusing she found this morning’s conversation with Jo, the important thing was that they were being civil to one another. That demonstrated that both of them were willing to try.

  Paloma uncleated the bow line and held the bow of the boat away from the dock while Jo and Indio climbed aboard. Then she held the bow from swinging in the tide while Jo tried to start the outboard motor. He pulled the starter cord, and the wheels and gears inside the housing made a purring sound like a feeding cat. He pulled again, and the purring sounded more anxious, then stopped abruptly. Jo cursed the motor and banged on the housing with his fist. Then, with a sigh, he removed the housing and began to tinker with the insides of the motor.

  Before, Paloma had watched Jo’s rages against the motor with amusement. Now, for the first time, she felt sympathy for him. He knew motors as well as she knew fish—was at home with them, could understand them and talk to them and cajole them into cooperating. But while Paloma’s friends flourished in the Sea of Cortez, Jo’s friends, the motors, withered and died. This was as hostile an environment as any on earth to an internal-combustion engine. Salt corroded its innards, the sun burned out gaskets and hoses, sand clogged filters and destroyed lubricants.

  And there were no expert mechanics, no replacement parts. When a motor broke, you either fixed it yourself, rebuilt the ailing part, or dismantled and cannibalized it for parts to fix some other motor. Paloma remembered seeing Jo spend endless hours with a knife and a piece of truck tire—the tire had been a fender that fell off the boat from La Paz. He had carved and created from the thick rubber a tiny impeller for the outboard motor’s water pump.

  No wonder Jo wanted to go away to school. He had a gift that was little more than useless here. There were a couple of outboard motors for him to work on, but nothing of size or scope or genuine challenge. He had no way of d
eveloping his gift, of honing his skills, of letting his talent earn him money and appreciation. He was like a wonderfully gifted surgeon with no one to practice on.

  He took something off the motor, cleaned it, blew on it, screwed it back in and replaced the housing. Then he caressed the motor, said something threatening to it, turned the choke up high, and yanked on the cord. The motor gagged and protested its way to life with a belch of blue-gray smoke.

  On other mornings, she would have tossed the bow line loose into the boat, leaving Indio to unsnarl it from the fishing gear. Today she coiled the line carefully and knelt on the dock and handed it to Indio and pushed the bow of the boat around the end of the dock into open water.

  Jo headed east, and soon he and Indio and the boat were black silhouettes against the pumpkin sun. Jo waved, Paloma waved back. Then Jo appeared to speak to Indio, and Indio waved, too, which Paloma found curious.

  Paloma went back to the house to fetch some food and a jar of fresh water. Today, for no good reason except to avoid an argument, she let her mother wrap a slice of salted cabrío and a tortilla in a piece of paper for her to take along with her mango.

  Then she returned to the dock and got in her pirogue and pushed off and paddled westward.

  She did not look back, but even if she had, it was unlikely that she would have seen the figure squatting in the bushes at the top of the hill, who was tracking her through a pair of binoculars.

  Manolo, supposedly writhing with stomach cramps in his bed, had taken several precautions not to be seen. He had removed his silver sacred cross and his brass pinky ring so they would not flash in the sunlight. He had covered himself with leaves and branches. And the pocket mirror he had brought he placed face down in the dirt, until the time came when he would need it.

  Now he watched as Paloma paddled toward the west. The heat of the day had not yet arrived, but there was still enough tumult in the interaction of air and water so that, when magnified by his binocular lenses, the atmosphere around Paloma’s hat and paddle when she moved emitted a shimmer.

  Paloma paddled for a while, then checked her landmarks, dropped her anchor, and held the line in her hands until she felt the iron set in the rocks. Then she put on her mask and fins and snorkel, slid her knife into her belt and slipped overboard.

  Not until then did Manolo feel confident enough to step out of the bushes and hold the mirror to the morning sun and flash it twice toward the east.

  Paloma cleansed her mask and blew through her snorkel to clear it. Then she settled down, with one hand on the anchor line, to survey the seamount from one end to the other. With her vision restricted by the sides of her mask and by the turbidity of the water, she could not see a large area at a single glance. In air, with her peripheral vision unhampered and the distances crisp and clear for miles, she could see about 140 degrees. Down here, she could see about 40 degrees with each look, and if she tried to see more, she was certain to miss something.

  In practical terms, the difference was that, on the surface, she could see everything in the entire circle around her, all the way to the horizon, in a bit more than two looks. Down here, she needed nine full and distinct surveys to see the same circle, and the distance she could see was never more than fifty or sixty feet.

  In the first section she concentrated on, she saw nothing but rocks. In the second, a few quickly flickering shadows told her that hammerheads were cruising near the bottom, the colors of their backs melded by the monochromatic seawater into the same mottled green-brown as the stony top of the seamount.

  On a conscious level, Paloma was not looking for anything specific; she was doing what she did every day, looking over the seamount to see what was there. But a half-step deeper in her mind, Paloma was looking for the injured manta, hoping—not daring to voice the hope—that it had found its way back to the seamount.

  As her eyes moved methodically on through the third, fourth, and fifth sections, hope gave way to resignation: The manta was not there, would not be there, and she had been foolish even to think that it might be there. Mantas were open-sea animals. They cruised ceaselessly, following the food, making their home, like petrels, on the wing. They were not territorial, had no reason to return to a particular area. And even if this manta contradicted the rule and happened to be territorial, Paloma reminded herself, the treatment it had received from her the day before would surely have driven it away.

  In the eighth section she saw a manta ray, but it could not be the same one. It was smaller; from here, it looked like a discarded black tricorn hat. She was about to shift her gaze to the last section of the seamount, but her eyes lingered, and then suddenly the scene beneath her took shape and she realized that the ray below was the injured manta.

  It was distance that had deceived her. The ray was down very deep, and perspective that had told her the truth: Now she could see that small as the manta looked from up here, it dwarfed the terrain around it. Sea fans, half as tall as a man and much wider, looked like postage stamps beside the manta; a passing hammerhead looked no bigger than a spaniel. Also, as she stared down on the animal’s back she could see a white slash behind the manta’s left horn.

  She guessed that the manta was hugging the bottom because there was less current there; the surrounding rocks and valleys would disperse the massive flow of water. And where there was less current there was less tug on the ropes that tore at the manta’s already battered flesh.

  The manta was hovering in a temporary shelter, where the sea did not aggravate its pain.

  That presumed—Paloma checked herself—that a manta felt pain. Jobim had told her that some animals have no sensation similar to what people call pain. They sense, by instinct, danger, shock, loss of a limb or of a vital fluid—but not pain. For pain was only a human word for a human feeling. Yet Paloma knew for certain that this animal felt something akin to pain, something that signaled alarm and distress, because yesterday when she had tugged at the ropes in the wound the manta had behaved like a dog that has stepped on a bee.

  Paloma also guessed that it was instinct that told the manta it could find shelter in a place of less current and that there was less current near the bottom. Like any animal in pain, humans included, the manta would seek a path of least discomfort. It would move everywhere, into deep water and shallow, close to the seamount and far from it, and where it was most comfortable it would stay.

  All of which was fine, Paloma thought, but the manta’s quest for comfort posed a problem: She could not possibly help the animal if it was determined to stay at sixty-five or seventy feet. She could make a breath-hold dive that deep, but she could not hope to stay long enough to accomplish anything.

  On the surface—but more dramatically underwater—it is a basic truth that the more you attempt to do, the more oxygen you consume. A runner breathes harder than a walker because the runner is using oxygen faster and needs to replenish it faster. Underwater, there is no such thing as breathing harder: You have the oxygen you came down with, and there will be no more until you return to the surface.

  The first time Jobim had explained that basic truth to Paloma, she had responded with a weary sigh, as if she felt he was insulting her intelligence. After all, it didn’t take a genius to realize that there is no air underwater; that is why you take a deep breath and hold it when you put your head underwater.

  Later, however, after she had dived many times to many depths and experienced the different ways her body responded to different activities and exertions and pressures and sensations, she knew what her father had meant. You had to know before you dived how far you were going and what you wanted to do. To change your mind at the last minute, far underwater, was to invite confusion, exhaustion, panic, and death.

  Paloma knew, for example, that she could easily dive down to sixty or seventy feet if all she intended to do was wrap her legs around a rock and observe the creatures of the seamount—or, at the very most, kick or swim calmly from perch to perch. She knew how to read the signals her
body sent her, knew when to respond by starting for the surface. But if she were to go to sixty or seventy feet and were, say, to see a bed of oysters ten feet deeper still, and were to force herself down and begin to hack the oysters free and stuff them in a bag, the signals for immediate ascent would come right away. Because she had gone deeper and exerted herself more than she had intended and had consumed oxygen that should have been left in reserve for the trip to the surface, the signals would already be too late.

  She would start up—not in the relaxed, oxygen-efficient way she knew to be best, kicking gently and allowing her body’s natural buoyancy to take her up, but struggling frantically, flailing with her arms, scissor-kicking, wasting even more precious oxygen. Long before she would near the surface, the ache in her lungs would change from a dull tightness to a sharp, stabbing flame. Her temples would stop throbbing and would instead thrum in an incessant screech of pain; she would be at the threshold, near explosion.

  She would look upward and see a slab of water dozens of feet thick, and at some unknowable moment would realize that she wasn’t going to make it.

  Starved for oxygen, her brain would begin to shut down. She would lose consciousness. The next thing she would know would be determined entirely by luck.

  If she was lucky, she would pass out close enough to the surface so that her head would pop free of the water before the breathing reflex commanded her diaphragm to draw a breath. And if she was even luckier, she would rise on her back with her mouth turned upward toward the air instead of on her stomach with her face in the water, so that when her head did pop free and the reflex did command a breath, she would breathe air. After two or three breaths, her brain, like an engine refueled and reprimed, would reignite her consciousness. She would awaken, and though there would be a blank in her memory, she would soon be fit again and able to resume swimming and diving.

  If she was unlucky, her body would try to breathe underwater. Her lungs would expand and inhale salt water. She would cough and gag and inhale and cough and gag and inhale. She would drown.