Читать книгу Sea Monsters - Chloe Aridjis - Страница 14

AFTER THAT AFTERNOON, I BEGAN WALKING PAST the abandoned house often. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in, not on my own, and Julián didn’t feel inclined to visit again, explaining that none of our photos had come out, the film hadn’t been loaded properly, and he was too superstitious to return. So what could I do but walk past in the hope of a chance encounter, and during the hours at school add Tomás Román to the margins of my notebooks. I wrote TR in all its variations, the name blowing up genie-like as I tried out different scripts, cursive, feral and humdrum print, but after so many hours I’d tire of seeing those ten letters in the same order, ten letters with the same two vowels, ten letters that with repetition should have worked some manner of spell, yet instead lay silent, coffined, on the page.

Each class had its notebook, the teacher’s words at the center and my own thoughts gargoyled in the margins. Center, margins, center, margins, my focus traveled between the two. Stay at the center, I told myself, stay at the center, but my eyes and hand would gravitate outward. In calculus class Mr. Rodríguez asked me what I was writing so intently, and laughed his sinister laugh when I quickly hid the scribbles with my arm. Rail thin (childhood polio) and famously short-tempered, Rodríguez taught various levels of mathematics. The more difficult the class, the more exalted he’d become, thrilled by the infinitesimal twists of calculus and how they made us suffer, and the moment we grasped something he would take it further, pushing our green minds as far as they would go, although few of us, he knew, would be able to accompany him to the end of the journey.

Mundane voices kept trying to anchor my reverie, gravity struggling against the flying carpet, and I resented them all, even that of Mr. Berg, my favorite teacher, who, sensing my distraction, began calling on me more often. I had studied French with him since ninth grade, when I’d learned the first words of the language, and had now moved with him into level four. He never revealed much about his past, only that in France he’d been a lecturer, had met his wife and emigrated to Mexico in the sixties. His face was from another continent and another era, with hooded wide-set eyes and thick lips and sloping eyebrows. And even more like my favorite actor, Peter Lorre, his expression could go within seconds from gentle to glowering to broken and forlorn, the face of someone historically haunted, a face that seemed to carry in it several chapters of European history.

I clung to him, or to the idea of him, more than he ever realized. I sensed he knew how hopelessly adrift I felt there among the sons and daughters of industrialists and politicians, and the transient Americans whose parents worked for transnational companies. Mr. Berg represented something beyond them all. Our school, the Colegio Campus Americano, or COCA for short, was a fortress in the middle of Tacubaya. Long ago Tacubaya had been a rural idyll, the home of rich people and viceroys, we were told, but the colonial village had been urbanized, and eventually replaced by streets lined with stores selling car parts and horse feed. From the bus window I’d often see men sitting on barrels drinking soda while children and dogs played tag in empty lots nearby.

Now in the autumn of 1988 the final countdown had begun and each hour drew us mercifully closer to that June day of the crimson gown and quadrangle. Once I graduated I would never have to see the likes of Paulina again, clad in her Guess and Esprit, who said my Doc Martens were construction worker shoes—zapatos de albañil, she’d called them—nor her boyfriend, Jerónimo, whose father was a PRI politician who took him to see bulls being tortured to death every weekend. I preferred Chucho and Ximena, whose father had won the lottery; in most eyes, their money didn’t count, so they remained humble. As for me, most people knew that my father taught at a university, even if his subject and salary remained subjects of discussion, but few were aware of my mother’s translation agency, or of my scholarship.

At school I’d had one close friend and a handful of semi-friends. But I tended to avoid the girls; in one way or another, the friendships were all-consuming but quickly consumed, and the moment the match was struck it hurried toward its extinction. Male friendships lasted longer, it was no mystery, there were fewer vibrations of the pendulum, and my one friend had been Etienne. Etienne was Mexican but his parents worshipped all things European. He was a hemophiliac and had often missed class, but when he was there we would always sit together in the green area by the pool, far from everyone. The son of a famous painter adored by politicians and the bourgeoisie, he would tell me stories of the famous people he’d met and the fancy places he’d been to, and spent much more time with grown-ups than with anyone his own age. Apart from me he didn’t seem interested in his peers. Every now and then he’d be summoned from class and picked up by his father’s chauffeur, or else bump into something sharp like the corner of a table and be rushed to the school infirmary for an injection. I often saw his peacock father in the newspapers, his aftershave almost rising off the page as he received honorary this and that. Yet from one morning to the next my friend was gone, sent against his will to boarding school in Switzerland.

One day in French class Mr. Berg asked us to choose a Baudelaire poem to analyze. As he spoke and wrote Baudelaire’s name across the blackboard, starting straight but ending obliquely, I began to feel as though recently I’d been wandering under a distant star. That evening I leafed through Les Fleurs du mal, alighting on different poems, trying to decide which to spend time with, but once the book fell open at “Un Voyage à Cythère” I knew my attention would remain there. How did I know? Because Cythère was Kythera, it was one and the same place, that small legendary island off the Peloponnese that had caught the imagination of many painters and poets, and, more importantly, of my father. I didn’t know which I preferred, the cackle of Kythera or the sorceress C of Cythère, but in any case, both designated the alleged birthplace of Aphrodite, or at least one of her birthplaces, since the exact site, like so much in myth, was contested.

In the opening verse the poet’s heart is swooping about like a bird, free and happy around the rigging, but soon that buoyant spirit gets ensnared in gloomy pessimism and the poem ends with the macabre image of the sacrificed poet hanging from the gallows. It may start with a ship setting out under cloudless blue skies but the truth, at least in my interpretation, was that the poem’s heart was a carbonized black, and Kythera a somber rocky place where dreams got dashed against its shores. When I told him which poem I’d chosen Mr. Berg said I’d made a good choice and then, cryptically, asked me to bear in mind that events were the mere froth of things, and one’s true interest should be the sea.

The sea. Up until then, my father’s only way of interesting me in the ancient world had been through shipwrecks. That was how he drew me in, made me feel occasionally connected to the ancient. Me, I preferred the modern, whatever it was, exactly, and although I listened as diligently as I could I tended to drift before long. Aeschylus and Sophocles had failed. So had Lucretius. Descriptions of pillar and tree worship in Mycenaean times. The spring configuration in ancient Chinese locks. Even descriptions of the design of chariots in ancient Egypt, the poles and the axles, dismantled at the funerals of pharaohs in order to negotiate the narrow corridors of tombs. Facts gleaned from conferences rather than from the books in his study; print couldn’t keep up with the advancement, in his words, of historical minutiae. With my mother, conversation was open and emotional with little withheld, but with my father there was a constant search for paths of communication that led away from ourselves.

It was only after he attended a conference on corrosion studies, the long-term interaction of materials in marine environments, that he returned home and was able to reel me in. He’d begun by telling me about a metallurgical report someone had delivered concerning a section of corroded candlestick from the Gilt Dragon, a seventeenth-century Dutch vessel that had struck a reef and gone down off the coast of Western Australia. Interesting, yet not enough to last for more than one meal. But he then moved on to something more thrilling, enlivened by much more detail.

Shipwrecks fall prey to all sorts of appetites, he said, the appetite of salt water, the appetite of sea creatures, the appetite of time. In the Mediterranean there are three main saltwater macro-organisms that share a fondness for ancient timber: the shipworm, the wood piddock, and the marine gribble. All three contribute to the stratification and contamination of the wreck. These marine borers are able to endure even the harshest conditions and can adapt to nearly every depth. Water temperature and salinity are their main gauges.

Marine gribbles, more sonorously known as Limnoria, tunnel into the wood in pairs, with the female forging ahead. Sharp-clawed and seven-legged, they are found in most marine and brackish waters, often present in large numbers. The channels they create run parallel to the surface of the wood and tend to communicate, rendering an infested vessel even more vulnerable to corrosion. Though they roam freely, gribbles have hermitlike instincts, and are loath to leave once they’re ensconced in the burrows they’ve created: why move home when you have a roof and an endless supply of wood, peace, and quiet?

The shipworm, meanwhile, is a bivalve mollusk without shell or gender that changes sex as it grows. Also known as the termites of the sea, shipworms are less endearing in appearance than gribbles, with long, slender bodies and heads that resemble gaping mouths in service of an insatiable appetite that incessantly combs the water. Their bodies become longer as they burrow, leaving a calcareous deposit in their wake.

And finally, the wood piddock. Unlike the other two, the piddock is unable to digest cellulose: it seeks out wood not for nourishment but as protection from whatever dangers the sea may present. Its burrows are shallow and spherical; it attacks in big groups. Like the shipworm, the piddock is bisexual, and similarly content to remain in its chambers once satisfactory lodgings have been found.

The job of these organisms is made easier, and the yielding of submerged wood therefore swifter, thanks to the handiwork of two micro-organisms, fungi and bacteria, who break down the tissue before the others come to dig their channels. Along with this array of wood-boring creatures and their lesser counterparts, wave action adds to the process of demolition. The movement of water, as well as the movement of the seabed as the sand shifts and resettles, furthers the toll on the sunken vessel.

How to ignore the tragedy of the wreck, like that of a carcass in a wildlife program, no longer breathing yet under continued assault—once the mortal blow is dealt, a host of scavengers moves in. But I also cheered for these aquatic hermits who had found a home. Listening to my father describe the scenario made me feel I had access to something vertiginously distant and mysterious and of the various wrecks he mentioned, his favorite, and soon mine, was that of Antikythera, which had lain at the bottom of the ocean for twenty centuries. For twenty centuries, the ship and its contents had remained at the mercy of tides, currents, organisms, and upwellings. For twenty centuries, they lay silenced.