The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel Page 9

  And when finally she did reach the surface, no one would be there to pound and press her chest and expel the water and breathe life back into her lungs. More and more brain functions would cease, until at last the critical ones that govern respiration and heartbeat would close their circuits forever. She would not awaken. And the next thing she would know would be whatever one knows, if anything, after one has died.

  Paloma knew her limits, and knew that to try to help the manta where it now lay was well beyond those limits. So she floated on the surface and waited. The manta did not move, did not flap a wingtip or switch its tail.

  Suddenly it occurred to Paloma that the manta was dead. Perhaps it was not hovering above the bottom but was lying on the bottom.

  No, impossible. If it were dead, other animals would already be feasting on it. That was another of the facts of life: As soon as something died, something else began to eat it.

  She recalled once seeing a goat slaughtered. The goat stood, passive and unaware, its tail and ears and lips twitching to keep the flies away. And the flies stayed away. Then the goat’s throat was cut. It stood on its feet for a moment, bleeding to death, and must actually have died on its feet, for when at last it toppled over, and before its head had hit the ground, flies were gnawing at its eyes.

  Animals knew when animals died, and as yet, nothing was feeding on the manta. So it couldn’t be dead.

  But it could be dying. Maybe right then, as Paloma watched, life was drifting away from the great animal. She felt helpless and frustrated and angry. She had to help, but she was too far away; she couldn’t let the manta die, but there was nothing she could do. Maybe it wasn’t dying. Maybe it was resting. Maybe …

  She had no choice. She had to go down and see for herself.

  She took her deep breaths and felt her lungs engage the rhythm of expansion and contraction, and when they were as empty as she could make them she slowly filled them to capacity, shut her mouth and dived for the bottom.

  She pulled herself down the anchor line until she was a few feet from the bottom, then released the line and swam over to the manta. It did not budge as she approached.

  She saw at once that the manta was not lying on the rocks. It was hovering, as she had first assumed, evidently resting in a quirky swirl of water that flowed steadily over the top of the seamount and over its huge flat wings and permitted it to remain stable.

  The manta was so still that it seemed frozen or hypnotized or in hibernation. Paloma swam beneath it—she wanted to look at its gill slits and be sure they were pulsing, however feebly, for that was the most reliable sign that the animal was passing water over its gills and extracting oxygen from it. The big round eye swiveled downward and followed her until she was out of sight beneath a wing.

  Paloma swam under the entire breadth of the manta, and it was like being in a cave, for the giant cloak shut out all light from above and cast a blanket of black shadow on the rocks.

  The manta’s left eye tracked her as she reappeared and swam up over the horn and hung above it, looking down at the deep laceration, with the skeins of rope still floating out like asps among the shreds of flesh.

  The wound did not look much different from when she had first seen it. There might be fewer ropes in it—she had removed a few, and a few might have fallen away—but those that remained were as solidly embedded as ever. There were no evident signs of healing. And the fact that the manta preferred to lie quietly, not to swim and feed, told Paloma that it was ill, and very weary. It had no way of knowing that it must eat in order to survive. Its instinctive impulses were weakening and fading.

  Left alone, the manta would languish, and left alone it would surely be. Only the whales and dolphins—the so-called higher animals of the sea—actively helped one another. Mothers helped their offspring to breathe, and protected them from predators; the well helped the sick; the young and vital helped the old and feeble; the males deferred in feeding patterns to the young and the females.

  Animals on the order of manta rays, however, were solitary in maturity, and therefore, when they were less than healthy, they were very vulnerable. They helped themselves or they died—uncontrollable natural processes either cured or killed them.

  Paloma had to surface, yet she lingered for one more moment, feeling indignation—at nature, at fate, at mankind, at fishermen, at whatever had caused this fine animal to be hurt—because the manta was triply helpless: It could not help itself, she could not help it, and nothing else in the sea would help it. At the last second before she kicked off from the bottom, Paloma impulsively wrapped her arms around the manta’s cephalic fin—the dreaded “horn”—and pushed upward: In desperation, she sought to prod the manta into rising to a depth where she could reach it and do something to help. Then, with the drums pounding in her temples and the ache beginning to sear her lungs, she sped up toward the light.

  On the surface she rested, waiting until her breathing had returned to normal and her pulse had quieted to a point where she could no longer hear it or feel it. For good measure, she waited a few minutes more until, from lack of exertion, she shivered: Her body had grown cold, and the shiver was its attempt to generate heat. Now she could dive again and exercise with no ill effect.

  She put her face in the water and looked down. The manta was gone. First she thought she must be looking in the wrong place. She lifted her head and searched for distant landmarks. Could the boat have swung at anchor, disorienting her? No. Everything was as it had been when she arrived.

  She looked again, starting with the first sector, on the far right edge of the seamount, and moving methodically sector by sector toward the left wall that ended in the abyss.

  The manta was nowhere.

  As she had risen to the surface, it must have fled. Perhaps she had frightened it by grabbing its horn in her arms. But if so, why hadn’t it bolted then? Perhaps it had behaved like an opossum—staying dead quiet while she was near and then as soon as she had left and given it what it regarded as a safe margin, it had dashed off to distant refuge.

  Paloma felt remorse, condemning herself for driving the manta away, when suddenly the giant was soaring toward her, up from the depths like a black bomber flying from the edge of the gloom.

  It passed fifteen or twenty feet beneath her as she hung on the anchor line, its wings rising and falling in lazy symmetry. It made a wide, banking circle to the right, ropes fluttering behind, and returned. Then it stopped, directly under Paloma’s boat, no more than ten feet beneath her toes.

  The pressure wave from the movement of the enormous body through the water made Paloma and her boat bob like toys in a tub.

  Paloma did not know why the manta had left the bottom, why it had come into shallow water, why it had stopped beneath her boat. She was tempted, but refused, to settle for the easy answer she knew to be wrong—or, if not absolutely wrong, at least implausible and silly: that is, that the manta knew she was trying to help, that her gentle gesture on the bottom had somehow communicated something, and that the manta had responded like a pet or a child.

  But while Paloma did know that all those reasons were not reasons so much as wishful thoughts, she determined to conclude nothing: The manta was there, and she had to try to help it.

  She slid her knife from her belt, took a deep breath, and dropped down onto the manta’s back.

  She braced herself, prepared for the manta to burst to life and speed away, but it did not move. She gripped the lip of solid flesh between the horns and bent to the wound.

  One long tail of rope fed out of the wound down the manta’s back. The end in the wound was snared in a mess of knots. Gently, Paloma tugged on the rope. A foot or two more came free, and then it pulled tight. The hand that held the lip of flesh felt a shudder course through the manta’s body—like a mild electric shock or a series of tiny tics. The shudder subsided, and the manta lay still.

  Carefully, with the knife’s razor point Paloma cut the rope away and probed the wound, snipping knots
and snares, casting away bits of rotten flesh and pieces of soft and flaky rope.

  Then, one by one, the alarms in Paloma’s body began to sound.

  She tried to ignore them all, for she feared that she was causing the manta such discomfort that when she left this time the animal would depart permanently. She did not want to pass out, but she was not afraid that she would: She could make it to the surface in two or three seconds, and she knew she would have much warning before she lost consciousness.

  She received that last warning—a tingling in her fingers and toes, a dullness in her shoulders and thighs, a thick feeling in her mouth and throat. She swept down with her arms, scissor-kicked twice with her flippers, and broke through to sunlight.

  She held onto the side of the pirogue and gagged and gasped and cursed herself for taking such a chance. But she was unhurt, and she had cut away a lot of the rope. If the manta was gone—well, she had done what she could do, and she hoped that that had been enough so the manta could survive on its own.

  When she had rested, she looked down into the water. She expected to have to search for the manta, but it had not moved. It lay still at ten feet.

  Paloma breathed deeply and held her breath and was about to plunge back down to the manta, when a new sensation registered in her brain.

  At first it was a feeling—a weak vibration—but then, as she concentrated on it, it became a sound. It was a high, very faint buzzing or humming. Still holding her breath, she listened carefully, to make sure she wasn’t hearing a sound from within her own head. Then she breathed, to let the sound of her breathing break the monotone of the buzzing, and held her breath again. It was still there; if there was any difference, the sound was a bit louder now.

  Paloma knew that even though water was not a particularly good conductor of sound, underwater certain sounds were sharper, more audible, more emphatic than they were on the surface. Knocking two stones together, for example, was used as a signal, because if one diver shouted at another underwater, the voice died in his mouth, but if he clicked two stones together, the sound traveled clearly and far.

  Whale sounds also traveled vast distances underwater. They were varied, high-pitched clicks and whistles, and when you heard them you often found that the chatty whales or porpoises were so far away that not only could you not see them underwater; you couldn’t see them when you raised your head out of water, either.

  Certain engine noises could be heard from a long way away. The big, deep-throated diesel engines—called “growlers”—sounded like an army of bears marching across a wooden floor. Usually, you felt a growler coming before you heard it. The turning of the huge propeller would affect the water pressure, and you would feel a thumping on your eardrums or a light tapping on your arms and back. Smaller engines that turned faster made high, buzzing whines.

  Paloma did not know the science of why certain sounds traveled underwater and others didn’t. She assumed it had to do with the quality of the sound, the kind of sound it was. A human voice made a sound that was weak and unfocused. Water dispersed it instantly. A whale’s voice was sharp and precise, and it seemed to pierce the water.

  Of course, how a sound registered depended a lot on who was listening to it. Jobim had once told Paloma that a human ear was about as efficient as a crystal-set radio he had put together from a kit when he was a boy. It received a very small portion of the signals that were racing through the air all the time.

  “We think there is a great silence underwater,” he had said, “but the sea is really a very noisy place.”

  “It isn’t noisy,” Paloma had insisted. “It’s the quietest place in the world.”

  Jobim had not argued, but on his next trip to La Paz he had bought a dog whistle. He had blown it for Paloma; it made no sound.

  “It’s broken,” she said.

  Jobim took her hand and led her next door. Their neighbor’s mongrel had had a litter of puppies three weeks earlier. There were six of them, and they were curled in a pile beside the exhausted mother. Jobim handed Paloma the whistle and said, “Blow it gently. They’re just beginning to hear, and you don’t want to hurt their ears.”

  Paloma thought this was a joke, and she took a deep breath and was about to blow on the dead whistle with all her might, when Jobim suddenly snatched it from her.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Watch.”

  He put the whistle to his lips and let a feeble wisp of breath escape through it. Paloma heard nothing. But for the heap of drowsy puppies, it was as if a pack of cats had fallen on them from the sky. They struggled to their feet and scrambled over one another, whimpering furiously. They fought to wriggle underneath their mother, whose head was cocked, whose ears were up and whose throat rumbled with a growl of confused menace.

  Jobim stopped blowing the whistle, and immediately the puppies relaxed. The mother looked around, decided that the high-pitched alien had departed, and dropped her head to the ground.

  “The point is,” Jobim had said as he took Paloma home, “just because we can’t hear things underwater doesn’t mean there aren’t sounds underwater.” Jobim paused, as if considering whether or not to say what he was about to say. Then he smiled to himself and shrugged. “The same is true with vision.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The eye is a receiver, too, like the television sets you see in the store windows in La Paz. They receive a kind of signal. Your eye sees a kind of light. But there are kinds of light that your eye doesn’t see.”

  “It doesn’t see them, you mean, but they’re there?”

  Jobim nodded. “Yes. Good for you.”

  “You mean there are things out there,” she waved her arm, “things that are, and maybe things that are happening, and I can’t see them?”

  “Well … yes … I suppose … but no one really knows what …”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Paloma had said flatly.

  Jobim was about to laugh, but he saw that Paloma’s jaw was set and her brow was furrowed and she was almost painfully grave, so all he said was “Are you sure?”

  Paloma nodded. “It’s like infinity. I don’t want you ever to talk about infinity again.”

  “Why not?”

  “It scares me and makes me cry.”

  “All right,” Jobim said, and he had squeezed her hand.

  Lying on the surface of the water now, listening to the high, buzzing sound, Paloma tried to recall if Jobim had taught her any tricks for judging how far away a sound was. Either he hadn’t taught her, or she couldn’t remember them, and in any case it didn’t matter. She assumed the noise was coming from a boat, probably an outboard, passing in the distance, and if so, it would surely keep on going.

  Paloma checked to make sure her knife was secure in her belt, then took her breaths and dropped down to the manta. She saw the big round eye swivel up as she approached and follow her until she had passed out of its range and settled onto the broad black back. As she let herself down slowly, she noticed that her knees were smudged with black. She touched the manta’s flesh and looked at her fingers: It was black, too. The manta’s protective mucous coating came off on her skin like a black stain.

  She turned to the wound; there were very few ropes left, and she was able to reach them with the point of her knife. She removed them all and then, with her fingertips, swabbed at the bits of debris left in the wound. She had to force herself not to think of what it would be like to have someone poking fingers into an open sore of hers, for when the thought first crossed her mind, she nearly fainted.

  But the manta did not give any signs of pain, did not flinch or shudder. Either the wound was so deep that it was beyond superficial nervous sensation, or such sensations didn’t exist in the manta. Whatever the reason, Paloma was able to clean the wound and cut away all the dangling shreds of putrescent flesh.

  The feelings in her head and in her chest told her that she still had some time—half a minute or more—before she would have to surface, so, using
her hands as trowels, she began to pack the torn flesh together into the cavity of the wound, pressing it down as if to encourage it to adhere to itself and grow again.

  It should have been a silent task, but the flesh as she slapped it sounded like THUCK, and her moving around caused her to emit squeaky streams of bubbles, and the pulse in her temples drummed ever more insistently. And all these sounds, when added to her intense concentration, obliterated the noise of the outboard motor as it approached overhead.

  Now she had to surface. She pushed off the manta’s back and swept once with her arms and kicked a few times. It was only habit that made her look up: Jobim had taught her always to look up as she ascended from a dive, to avoid knocking her head on the bottom of the boat.

  When she did look up, she expected to see the surface or the sky. Instead, all she saw was Jo’s face, peering down at her from the surface through a glass-bottom bucket, his grin distorted by reflection into a gargoyle’s leer.

  She recoiled, shocked, and looked again to make certain she hadn’t imagined it. Then she saw Jo’s fingers creep around the edge of his homemade viewing box and wave to her.

  Paloma broke through the surface and reached up for the gunwale of her boat. Jo had put a line around her anchor rope, so they were moored together.

  He was still looking through the glass-bottom bucket. “Mother of God! What a monster! How did you catch him?”

  Indio said, “Let me see.”

  Paloma’s heart was stuttering. She could hear it beat in her chest and feel it in her throat. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, for she had to be in control of herself before she could hope to deal with Jo and Indio and—looking so smug, sitting in the bow—the miraculously recovered Manolo. Her first impulse was to shriek at Jo, to lash out at him, for she felt betrayed, even violated.

  There were three of them, however, and but one of her, and nothing would be accomplished by a display of rage, except that Jo and his mates would laugh, and she would feel even more humiliated.