I’M DOWNSTAIRS.
It was eight o’clock in the morning. The phone had awakened me and I had to get out of bed and stumble over to the desk to answer it. It was Tamara. She told me that she was downstairs. That she knew me — laughing, teasing, alluding to the past — so she knew she’d have to come and get me. That she wanted to spend the day with me, take me to see a few sights. My brother was still in bed, in a deep sleep. I thought momentarily of the lunch and the prayer service we had scheduled with my sister and her fiancé and all of their friends and ultra-Orthodox rabbis from the yeshiva. I shuddered. Be right down, I said, and hung up.
As I got off the elevator, I saw Tamara sitting in an armchair in the lobby, her legs crossed and long and bare. I motioned to her to give me a minute and walked over to reception. She walked slowly up to meet me, and stood waiting in silence beside me as I greeted the same old man (I’d begun to view him not as receptionist but as owner, one of those cantankerous owners who don’t trust anybody but themselves, or who are too stingy to pay anybody but themselves) and asked him for a yellow memo pad so I could leave a note for my parents, excusing myself. The old man looked worse than ever. His face more greenish and shriveled. His eyes red. His clothes wrinkled. His hands seemed to tremble. He was staring at Tamara beside me, still serious, still grumpy, and murmured something in Hebrew that sounded disdainful. Tamara ignored him, or perhaps she didn’t hear him, or perhaps his comment wasn’t that disdainful after all. She was wearing a pair of very short, old, torn khaki shorts, leather sandals, a flowing, almost see-through white linen blouse that showed the top of her freckled shoulders, and a bra that might have been red. And that was it. No makeup. Her copper hair was wild and matted, as if she’d just awakened. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered. When I finished and handed the old receptionist the note, Tamara immediately gave me a hug, an urgent hug, and this time there was no Lufthansa uniform and it wasn’t awkward at all. And though part of that hug might have been retaliation for the old man’s disdainful comment, I liked that she held me so tightly and so absolutely. I liked seeing her few strands of gray. I like your gray, I said, and she smiled at me with her big Mediterranean eyes. Then she took a step back and held my hands in hers, our fingers entwined, and I noted with satisfaction that she wasn’t wearing a ring. But for a second, I thought I could make out a very faint circle of pale skin on her left ring finger. Perhaps I had imagined the wedding ring, in the confusion and heat of the airport. Perhaps she had taken it off that morning. Perhaps she had left it at home, hidden in some drawer or case or jewelry box. I looked up. Best not to know.
Come on, she said, tugging me outside.
Bamboo
I was drinking café de olla from a rusty blue pewter cup. Doña Tomasa had put down a matching blue pewter kettle beside me, on the sandy ground of the shack. There were no tables or chairs. The palm-frond roof was already black and full of holes. What little breeze there was stank of rotten fish. But the café de olla was strong and sweet and helped to perk me up a bit, to loosen my legs from the two-hour drive to the port of Iztapa, on the Guatemalan Pacific coast. My back felt damp, my forehead sweaty and sticky. As the heat increased, it seemed, so too did the fetidness of the air. A scrawny dog was sniffing at the ground, in search of scraps or crumbs that might have fallen onto the sand. Two barefoot and shirtless children were trying to catch a gecko that chirped above, hidden amid the palm fronds. It was not yet eight in the morning.
Here you go, said Doña Tomasa, and she handed me a tortilla with cracklings and spicy chiltepe, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. She leaned on one of the supports of the shack, rubbing her plump hands on her apron, burying and unburying her feet in the warm volcanic sand. She had salt-and-pepper hair, a leathery complexion, a slightly cross-eyed gaze. She asked where I was from. I finished chewing a mouthful, my tongue stunned by the chiltepe, and said I was Guatemalan, just like her. She smiled politely, perhaps suspiciously, perhaps thinking the same thing I was thinking, and turned her eyes up toward the cloudless sky. I don’t know why I always find it hard to convince people, to convince myself even, that I’m Guatemalan. I suppose they expect to see someone darker and squatter, someone who looks more like them, to hear someone whose Spanish sounds more tropical. And I never pass up any opportunity to distance myself from the country either, literally as well as literarily. I grew up abroad. I spend long stretches of time abroad. I write about it and describe it from abroad. As though I were a perpetual migrant. I blow smoke over my Guatemalan origins until they become dimmer and hazier. I feel no nostalgia, no loyalty, no patriotism — despite the fact that, as my Polish grandfather liked to say, the first song I learned to sing, age two, was the national anthem.
I finished the tortilla and the café de olla. Doña Tomasa, having taken my payment for breakfast, gave me directions to a patch of land where I could leave my car. There’s a sign, she said. Ask for Don Tulio, she added and walked off without saying good-bye, dragging her bare feet as though they were weighing her down and muttering something bitter, perhaps a little tune.
I lit a cigarette and decided to walk awhile along the Iztapa highway before returning to the car, a classic Saab, sapphire-colored, which a friend often loaned me for traveling around the country. I walked past a stall selling cashews and mangoes, an abandoned gas station, a group of dark-skinned men who stopped talking and just looked at me askance, as though resentful or perhaps bashful. The earth wasn’t earth but little bits of paper and wrappers and dry leaves and plastic bags and a few discarded green almonds, crushed and rotting. In the distance, a pig wouldn’t stop squealing. I kept walking, slowly, unconcerned, noticing a mulatta woman on the other side of the road who was too fat for her black-and-white-striped bikini, too chubby for her high heels. All of a sudden, I felt my foot touch something wet. Maybe because I was looking at the mulatta, I had stepped in a red puddle. I stopped. I looked left into a dark and narrow warehouse and saw that the floor was covered in sharks. Small sharks. Medium sharks. Blue sharks. Gray sharks. Brown sharks. Even a couple of hammerhead sharks. All of them seemed to be floating in a mire of brine and guts and blood and more sharks. The stench was almost unbearable. There was a girl on her knees. Her face shone with water or perhaps sweat. She had her hands deep inside a big gash in the white belly of a shark and was pulling out organs and entrails. In the back, another girl was rinsing down the floor with the weak stream of a hose. It was the fishermen’s cooperative, according to a badly painted placard on the wall. Every morning, I presumed, the fishermen of Iztapa brought their catch there and the two girls cleaned it and cut it up and sold it. I noticed that most of the sharks no longer had fins. I remembered having read somewhere about the international black market. They called it finning. I’ll have to be careful later, I thought, in the sea. It seemed to be a day for sharks.
I TOSSED THE CIGARETTE BUTT nowhere in particular and returned to the car, hurrying, almost running away from something. As I drove, I noticed that I had already started to lose the image of the sharks. It occurred to me that an image, any image, will inevitably start losing its clarity and its strength, even its coherence. I felt compelled to stop the car right there in the middle of the town and try to find a notebook and pencil and write it down, capture it, share it through words. But words are not sharks. Or maybe they are. Cicero said that if a man could go up to heaven and from there contemplate the whole universe, the wonder that such great beauty caused him would diminish if he had no one to share it with, no one to tell it to.