The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

  The eel was there, hovering in its hole, and it had to be coaxed to take the first bite of fish.

  He’s sulking, Paloma thought. He’s angry because we went away.

  Once the feeding reflex was stimulated, the eel became ravenous. More and more of it hung out of the hole, and Paloma, her confidence blooming, backed farther away, trying to bring the eel entirely out into the open.

  She did not see, and never knew, that Jobim, as he stood a foot or two to one side, had a knife clenched in the fist he held behind his back.

  She fed the eel five separate pieces of fish as it hung in the water, stabilized by barely perceptible ripples of the fins that ran along the top and bottom of its body.

  There were half a dozen pieces of fish left in the bag, and now Paloma took a piece of fish from the bag with her left hand and slowly, calmly drew it wide and back toward her shoulder. With a brief shudder, the eel followed the fish.

  Paloma drew it back around her head, where she slipped it into her right hand and continued to lure the eel around behind her. The eel’s tail was over her left shoulder, its head over her right, when she gave it the piece of fish. It swallowed the fish and stayed there, wrapped around her shoulders like a fine lady’s stole.

  She fed it two more pieces of fish, and there were three left. She glanced at Jobim and saw that his eyes were wide and the veins on either side of his throat were thick as anchor line. For a second she thought he was afraid for her, and perhaps he was, but then it struck her that neither of them was breathing, could breathe, and yet both had to breathe.

  Paloma took the last pieces of fish in her right hand, squeezed them into a ball and held them up before the eel’s open mouth. She pushed them upward so the eel would have to rise slightly to reach them, and as it did she ducked down and pushed backward with her feet and shot on a sharp angle toward the surface.

  Jobim didn’t chastise her; he didn’t have to. Each knew what the other was thinking, and mostly their thoughts were the same: Paloma had been reckless but had succeeded, had taken a risk and had won; she had the good thing, probably a lot of it, but it was something she would have to learn how to use. And she should not try stunts like this without Jobim close by.

  All the way home in the boat, they had only one exchange:

  She had said, “I think I’ll call him Pancho.”

  He had replied, “It’s not a ‘him.’ It’s an ‘it.’ It doesn’t have a name, and don’t give it one.”

  Still, she had permitted herself to think secretly of the eel as Pancho, and every day she was out with Jobim she had looked forward at the end of the day to visiting with Pancho.

  On every visit the eel would curl around her shoulders, sometimes after only a bite or two of fish. Occasionally, it would let its weight drop onto her shoulders, and it would lie there, and she could stroke its smooth skin while she fed it.

  And then one day it was gone.

  Paloma thought they had come to the wrong hole, but the landmarks underwater were too familiar. They searched every hole in that section of the seamount, then swam over the rest of the seamount, hoping that if they passed close enough to the eel’s new hole, it would come out. But it had gone.

  “You said it wouldn’t go away.” Paloma felt hurt, deceived, as if either Jobim or the eel had tricked her into believing that if she fed the eel, it would stay there, for her, forever.

  “No I didn’t. I said it would have to have a reason to move. I guess a reason came along.”

  “What reason?” No matter what her father said, she would challenge it. She wanted to prove him wrong, to show him up, to make him feel guilty by being … by being what? She didn’t care. She wanted to punish him for her disappointment.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a secret clock inside him said it was time to go somewhere else. Maybe a secret calendar said it was time to find a mate.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t a ‘him.’ You said he was an ‘it.’ ”

  Jobim smiled, and, seeing him smile, Paloma could not resist smiling, too.

  “It, then. Maybe it got foolish and tried to eat something too big, and that something turned around and ate it.”

  “What could eat it?”

  “Only a big shark. No, I don’t think that happened. He might have gotten old and gone wherever eels go to die.”

  “Do they go somewhere to die?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I mean: We don’t know. We can’t know. He was here yesterday and he isn’t here today. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “But … he liked us. I could tell.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself, Paloma.” Jobim had stopped smiling.

  “He knew us. I know that.”

  “We accustomed it to us as feeders. That’s all. It didn’t like us. It won’t miss us. It doesn’t have feelings like that. It isn’t that level of being.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I …” Jobim stopped, and looked at Paloma, and smiled again. “I don’t, not for sure.”

  “What about the good thing?”

  “You have the good thing, as much as anyone can have it with an eel. With anyone else, it would have stayed in its hole or taken a bite out of them. It trusted you. That’s what the good thing is, trust.”

  Now Paloma knelt on the dock in the moonlight and held the knotted eel in her lap. Gently, she tried to undo the knot, to reduce the hideousness of the slaughter, to erase the reminder of the eel’s last agony. She pushed the slippery tail up through the loop made by the coiled body, then pulled it through the loop and lay the body on the dock. But rigor mortis had already gripped the animal, and the flesh was set in a gnarled contortion. It would not straighten out, but rocked on the wooden dock and banged its rigid snout against the planks.

  She picked up the eel and dropped it off the dock. It fell on top of other corpses that were slowly being swept toward deeper water, and then it sank beneath them.

  Still kneeling on the dock, Paloma let her glance travel along the path of gold cast on the water by the moon. It did not begin or end, but seemed simply to happen, magically, somewhere out there in the blackness this side of the horizon, and to disperse, spent, somewhere in the blackness behind her.

  If ever she thought of trying to place her father, to locate him where he was now (and she avoided doing this often, for her mind could not cope with it and it made her uncomfortable and stretched her belief so far it seemed it must break), she located him there, between the sky and the sea, at the source of the path of the moon.

  “What can I do?” she said aloud, to Jobim. “Don’t say Nothing, because that’s what I’ve been doing, and look what’s happened.” Paloma gestured at the water. She didn’t wait for a response she knew would never come. “They’re going to kill our seamount, and when they’ve killed ours they’ll move on to another one and kill that, too, and they’ll get richer and richer, and because they’re blind, they won’t see where it has to end. And I can’t do anything about it because I’m alone and nobody will listen to me and even if they did they wouldn’t do anything. Mama doesn’t know anything about it, and if she did, she’d say it was God’s will and that’s that.” Paloma paused, fearing she had given offense. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth and you know it. Viejo says anyone can do anything he wants, and if all the fish are gone one day, well, that’s the way of the world.”

  Now she shouted into the night. “But it’s not! I won’t let it be!” Her words echoed across the water.

  “All right. I’ll be calm. But we can’t just let it happen. It’s yours, too, you know, not just mine. It’s everybody’s. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know what to do! I can’t go blow them up, like you did. I couldn’t kill them. I couldn’t.”

  She was gazing at the spot where the gold seemed to begin. She did not expect a response, and she did not receive one, not in the sense of an answer: No words rang in her head, no solution sprang into her breast. Nor was she “visited,” the way people said they
felt when they had a religious experience, where an angel touches your life and changes you. And certainly she did not sense the presence of a deity. There were no thunderclaps or great winds or deep voices.

  But something did begin to happen inside her.

  It was a warmth that started at her fingertips and seemed to creep up her arms and over her shoulders and down into her chest and through her stomach and into her legs. For a second she recognized it as the same kind of sensation she had when she was about to faint, but there was no faintness, no lightheadedness at all. It was, rather, a fullness, as if something missing had finally been put into place.

  And that missing something, now that it had been found, seemed to impart an order to things, for she felt a purpose and a sense of confidence and a sure knowledge that there was an answer and that she would find it if she obeyed her natural instincts instead of bending to the whipsawing of conflicting emotions and impulses.

  What those instincts would tell her to do and what the answer would be and what any of it would mean for her or for the seamount or for anything, she had no idea.

  But so suffused was she with this feeling, and so positive was she that it meant something, that once again she gazed at the spot in the sky where the gold began, and she nodded.

  Supper was over by the time Paloma returned to the house, and the plate of food Miranda had left for her on the table was cold, but the new feeling that was running through her was consuming energy, so she was hungry and she sat down to eat.

  Jo was there. Normally by now he would have been in his room, but he had lingered.

  “Did you have a good day?” he asked Paloma.

  Paloma’s mouth was full, and she did not respond right away.

  Jo said, “I had a fine day.”

  Miranda said, “That’s nice,” to cover the fact that Paloma had not replied. She was determined that there would be civility in the house, even if she had to fabricate and maintain it herself.

  “Many more days like this, I’ll have enough money for school.”

  “So,” Miranda said, “you will leave me, too.”

  “Too? Papa didn’t leave you.”

  “No? Where is he, then?”

  “He didn’t go away on purpose.”

  “If he had lived a normal life,” Miranda said, and Paloma was surprised at the bitterness in her voice, “like a normal person, he would be here today.” She looked at Paloma, her eyes urging her to learn the lesson.

  “We don’t know that,” said Jo. “But that’s what I want to do—live a normal life.”

  “In some stinking garage in Mexico City?”

  Jo ignored his mother’s remark and said to Paloma, “I think Papa would have wanted it for me, too, don’t you?”

  Paloma looked at him but said nothing.

  “Sometimes I think that’s why I found the seamount. I think maybe he led me there.” Jo smiled. “Don’t you?”

  Paloma clenched her teeth and kept silent.

  Jo spoke this time to Miranda. “This seamount of Papa’s is very rich. By the time I’m through with it, it will give me enough money to take care of all of us. You won’t have to worry about money again, Mama.” His eyes shifted to Paloma. “Viejo always says that the sea exists to serve men, and I know Papa would agree. Yes, this seamount is what he left us, and I will see that his will is carried out.”

  Now it took all Paloma’s strength to keep her mouth shut. It outraged her that Jo was summoning their father’s spirit to justify ravaging the seamount. But she knew Jo was trying to enrage her, to goad her into a discussion in which she had to be the loser: If she agreed with him, she would be sanctioning the destruction of the seamount in Jobim’s name; if she disagreed, she would appear selfish, short-sighted, and unconcerned with Miranda’s welfare.

  So she busied herself with her food until Jo had yawned and stretched and left the house to go to his room.

  Preparing for bed, Paloma knew that Miranda was looking at her and was worried. Miranda had felt the mute fury in Paloma’s silence, and had taken more alarm in Paloma’s lack of response than she would have in a fiery argument.

  Miranda sensed that something was afoot, and she was right. She didn’t know what, of course. But then, neither did Paloma.

  Paloma stood on the hill and watched Jo and his mates prepare their boat for sea. Again they waited for the others to depart, for they were determined—especially now that they knew how rich the seamount was—to keep its location their secret.

  Paloma guessed that the evening before they had been questioned by other fishermen about their formidable catch, and they must have mumbled or evaded or lied outright, for today they started out in the wrong direction and changed course toward the seamount only when they were confident they were being neither followed nor observed.

  Paloma returned to the house and puttered around for a while. She was not upset about accomplishing nothing, for she had no intention of doing anything specific. She had no plan. She did not know why she had returned to the house, though it seemed as good a thing to do as any other.

  She was coasting, riding the day, letting it take her where it would, and she felt as if she were outside herself looking in, watching with a detached interest. It was not that she felt guided by something or someone else, it was more an inner assurance—based on nothing rational at all—that whatever was going to happen would happen.

  Miranda eyed Paloma nervously from time to time but made no comment. She suggested things for them to do—move this bed and sweep under it, take that mat outside and beat the dust out of it—and Paloma agreed instantly and worked diligently. But Paloma was not really there.

  At midday, Paloma said she was going for a walk, and Miranda nodded. As far as Paloma knew, she was going for a walk; she had no fixed destination. But once she neared the top of the hill that led down to the dock, the sea summoned her so powerfully that she could not possibly resist.

  She went to the dock and pulled her boat out from beneath it and noted that her fins, marks, snorkel, and knife were in the pirogue and that her patch had sealed the hole in the bottom. She climbed aboard and paddled toward the seamount.

  Their backs were to her as she approached. They were setting their net, letting it catch the tide and billow and sink in a wide, deep arc. When it had settled, they would pull an end of the net into each end of the boat, tightening the purse, forcing the mass of fish into a ball of panic. Their boat sat high in the water, which meant that so far they had made no good casts or, perhaps, had not yet tried, waiting instead for the big schools to come by. This cast alone, if it were good, could fill their boat.

  They would go home richer but unsatisfied, knowing that if one cast could produce a catch worth so much money, two or three could double or treble their reward. So tomorrow they would probably tow a second boat, maybe a second and a third. Their secret would be harder and harder to keep, and soon the entire fleet would be there.

  They did not see her or hear her, and she knelt in the pirogue up-tide, adjusting her position with little flicks of her paddle, watching. If they had turned around and asked what she was doing, she would not have had an answer. She was there; that was all she knew.

  After a while, Indio did chance to turn and he nudged Jo, whose head snapped around, eyes narrowed.

  They eyed each other for a long moment, until Jo turned back to his net and said casually, over his shoulder, “Come to watch?”

  She did not respond, but stayed where she was, a dozen or so yards from their boat, looking at their backs. Jo made sure he was elaborately occupied with the net, but his mates were obviously distracted and unsettled by her presence. As they paid out the net, they muttered to one another, and though Paloma could not discern who was saying what, she grasped the sense of the conversation.

  “What does she want?”

  “You think she’ll do anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “She wouldn’t dare.”

  “She better not.”
r />   “I don’t like it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “What about the net? We said …”

  “Forget it. She’s beaten. She’s given up.”

  “Then what’s …?”

  “Forget it, I said. Watch this.” Jo scooped a handful of rancid fish guts from the pool of oily water at the stern of the boat below the motor and cocked his arm and flung the mess toward Paloma. It fell several feet short of the pirogue. Instantly, a pack of sergeant majors materialized and devoured it.

  Paloma did nothing, said nothing, in no way acknowledged the gesture.

  “See?” Jo said to the others. “She won’t do anything. We’ve talked. She knows what’s what. Now: Look through the glass and tell me if they’re still there.”

  Manolo put the viewing box on the surface of the sea and looked down. “Right there. They haven’t moved. God! Look at them all! We won’t get ’em all in this boat.”

  “Then we’ll tow ’em home in the net. Tomorrow we better bring a barge out here. This is too good.”

  Though Jo did not look at Paloma as he spoke, she knew he was speaking for her ears, taunting her.

  But still she said and did nothing, for she didn’t know what she could say, or what she could do. If her silence annoyed any of them, that was fine; speaking could only strip away the mystery about why she was there. Perhaps if they became genuinely angry they would make a mistake and lose their net or stagger clumsily and capsize their boat … But these were fantasies, idle wishes, hopeless hopes.

  Their net was cast and was sinking, and they were concentrating on each foot of fiber to make sure it didn’t foul against anything or snarl itself into a tangle. When it was all the way out, they would let it sit for a few minutes before hauling it in—to give ample time for masses of fish to wander into the trap.