The Mexican and my father took a ship that was returning to the green neck of the world with a cargo of rotten bananas. The shipment had been refused at the Spanish port, owing to a vendetta. The captain dumped the bananas not far out to sea — my father said that they fell like absurd black fish into the clear water. On deck, he and the soldier played poker and dreamed bilious dreams, fought with other passengers, threw cigarette butts into the wake behind them, watched them fizzle out in the air, charged the sailors for portraits taken down in the engine room, making a little bit of money together. The Mexican walked around on deck, staring at the photo of his sister, promising my father great things: a house on the edge of the Rio Grande, a grove of tamarisk trees, twelve very healthy chickens, a motorbike that wouldn’t sputter.
He lost the soldier in a dockside crowd in Veracruz when the boat pulled into the Gulf of Mexico.
A Friday afternoon, the day of some festival, and people shoved gigantic bottles into my father’s hands as he roared out for his friend over the heads of the crowd. Fish were being cooked over fires, women in shawls guided donkeys, a fashionable car beeped its way through the market, where parrots and snakes were on sale. Fights and songs were full of mescal. He searched for two days but there was no sign of the soldier. So he walked through the town and out along the coastline paths. Walking was holy — it cleared the mind. He wandered northwards, through small towns full of fishing boats and people bent over nets. They took him into their homes, bedded him down for the night, fed him frijole beans, woke him with coffee, ground corn on metate stones for the going. At other times men spat at his feet — to some of them he was nothing more than a gringo fool, a fuereño in a derisory hat. But I can imagine him sauntering through the sun-yellow streets, wiry and broad-stepped, stains on the underside of his shirt, his money still pinned into his waistband, the brim of the hat casting a multitude of shadows on his face, thin red streaks of tiredness in the whites of his eyes, chatting to women in his broken Spanish, gesturing to men, drinking, cavorting, constantly struck by the rivers of moments that were carrying him along, slamming him from one bank to the other, ferrying his way ferociously to no particular place.
He took photos as he moved his way up and down the country, along the eastern coast — a prostitute in a blond wig, leaning out of a window; a boy playing soccer alone in a laneway; a man on a boat dumping a dead child, covered in lime, into the sea; men in cotton trousers; boys in the rain flinging stones up at birds; political slogans on the walls; a pig slaughtered at the rear of a church; a woman in an adelita dress moving very precisely under a parasol. Colour seemed to exist in his black and white shots, as if it had somehow seeped itself into the shade and the shadows of his work, so that years later — when I sat in the attic — I could almost tell that the parasol was yellow, it had that feel about it to me. His photos spoke to me that way. Many other things were yellow in my ideas of Mexico at the time — the leaves of plants, the leftovers of malaria, the sun pouring down jonquil over the land.
He spent a couple of seasons with fishermen close to Tampico, living in a palm-fronted hut down near the water. One of the men, Gabriel, inhabited his photographs. On the far side of his sixties, with a patch of hair on the front of his forehead, Gabriel tucked bait in his mouth to keep it warm. Worms, or sometimes even maggots, were held between his gum and lip, causing the lower lip to bulge out. It was as if he carried an extra tongue with him, jutting out over a cleft in his chin. Even when he was fishing with nets or lobster pots Gabriel kept the bait in his mouth. It was a trick he had learned as a child — warm bait, he claimed, made for a better catch. He would lean over the side of his boat and let some foul-looking spit volley out over the water.
He taught my father about nets and reels, hooks and flies, carried a note in his pocket that read, in Spanish: ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a day, kill a pig; if you want to be happy for a week, get married; if you want to be happy for a lifetime, go fishing.’
Gabriel had developed an aversion to land. His legs wobbled when he walked on dry soil, so he stayed in his boat most of the time, feet propped over the edge of the deck, taking his worms from an old tobacco can, shoving them down in the pouch of his mouth. He visited his wife in town occasionally, preferring to sleep with her in a hammock because of its rocking motion. Gabriel and his wife had eight children together. Gabriel had called his youngest son ‘Jesus’ with the idea that he would one day walk on water. But Jesus had walked elsewhere, along with other sons and daughters, leaving Gabriel with nobody to take to sea — his wife got seasick in the bath.
Every Sunday, Gabriel brought my father out on the boat instead of going to mass. While church bells rang, my father left his hut and went down to the dock and out to sea. The old Mexican would kneel in between two small shrines he had erected on either side of the rowlocks. Wooden saints were nailed into the boards. They hovered above the blue, pellucid sea. Gabriel said prayers while the boat bobbed out on the ocean, maintaining that on Sundays his shrimp nets were fuller than ever. My father saw him every day, but there weren’t as many photos of Gabriel as he would have liked — film was becoming scarce. Gabriel was almost like a father to him. They filled a void in one another. Gabriel wanted to teach my father ballads, but he soon found out that he had a voice not unlike the ravens that came down to feed on discarded fish heads. So the old Mexican insisted that he just listen, not sing. Raucous tunes rolled from Gabriel, songs that he made up as he went along, eyes cast to the sea. He sang of other days when he was able to dive to great depths and take up precious things from the ocean floor, of traditions, of curious motions that arose from waves. The two of them rowed together through bays and inlets, season piling into season, my father’s face reddening at first, then darkening in the reflected sunlight, his accent improving as he learned Spanish from Gabriel, who rolled his vowels around the parasites in his mouth.
Gabriel’s wife came down to dockside with plates of food, the plates covered with an old cloth to keep them warm. She brought only enough for her husband to eat and seldom even gave a nod to the gringo with the cameras. Sometimes she hung around to listen to the mournful sound of her husband’s four-stringed guitar.
My father knew then that it was time to head on but before he did, a strange thing happened. A group of landcrabs made their way up from the shore to invade the shacks of the seafront. They scuttled in unison, a barrage of them, almost in formation, clambering over stones, a wash of movable eyes. Gabriel was on land at the time, the bait between his gum and lip. The sea had threatened storms, and he was out mending nets on a pier and securing his boat when the invasion happened. He ran home, towards his wife, but found himself surrounded by the creatures. In the photograph Gabriel is perched on a fencepost, much like a bird, scared, looking down, staring at the crabs as they go past, his lip jutting out, letting gobs of maggoty brown spit down upon them. His shabby jacket hangs around him. An old black glazed sombrero with a large brim and steeple crown sits precariously on his head. A perplexed look on his face. The crabs look bizarre and out of place, a bit like my old man, moving crabways through people’s lives, bound to incongruity.