Читать книгу So Long - Lucia Berlin - Страница 7

The sun set with a hiss as the wave hit the beach. The woman continued up the checkered black and gold tiles of the malecón to the cliffs on the hill. Other people resumed walking too once the sun had set, like spectators leaving a play. It isn’t just the beauty of the tropical sunset she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.

She walked onto a platform above the cliffs. The magenta sky reflected iridescent in the water. Below the cliffs a vast swimming pool had been built of stones into the jagged rock. Waves shattered against the far walls and spilled into the pool, scattering crabs. A few boys swam in the deeper water, but most people waded or sat on the mossy rocks.

The woman climbed down the rocks to the water. She took off the shift covering her bathing suit and sat on the slippery wall with the others. They watched as the sky faded and a new orange moon appeared in the mauve sky. La luna! people cried. Luna nueva! The evening grew dark and the orange moon turned to gold. The foam cascading into the pool was a sharp metallic white: the clothes of the bathers flowed eerie white as if under a strobe light.

Most of the bathers in the silver pool were fully clothed. Many of them had come from the mountains or ranchos far away; their baskets lay in piles on the rocks.

And they couldn’t swim, so it was nice to lie suspended in the pool, for the waves to rock them and swirl them back and forth. When the breakers covered the wall it didn’t seem that they were in a pool at all, but in their own calm eddy in the middle of the ocean.

Street lights came on above them against the palms on the malecón. The lights glowed like amber lanterns on their intricate wrought-iron poles. The water in the pool reflected the lights over and over, first whole, then into dazzling fragments, then whole again like full moons under the tiny moon in the sky.

The woman dove into the water. The air was cool, the water warm and salty. Crabs raced over her feet, the stones underfoot were velvety and jagged. She remembered only then being in that pool many years ago, before her children could swim. A sharp memory of her husband’s eyes looking at her across the pool. He held one of their sons as she swam with the other in her arms. No pain accompanied the sweetness of this recollection. No loss or regret or foretaste of death. Gabriel’s eyes. Her sons’ laughter, echoing from the cliffs into the water.

The bathers’ voices ricocheted too from the stone. Ah! they cried, as at fireworks, when the young boys dove into the water. They swayed in their white clothes. It was festive, with the clothes swirling, as if they were waltzing at a ball. Beneath them, the sea made delicate traceries on the sand. A young couple knelt in the water. They didn’t touch, but were so in love it seemed to the woman that tiny darts and arrows shot out into the water from them, like fireflies or phosphorescent fish. They wore white clothes, but seemed naked against the dark sky. Their clothes clung to their black bodies, to his strong shoulders and loins, her breasts and belly. When the waves flowed in and ebbed out, her long hair floated up and covered them in tendrils of black fog and then subsided black and inky into the water.

A man wearing a straw hat asked the woman if she would take his babies out into the water. He handed her the smallest one, who was frightened. It slipped up through the woman’s arms like a skittish baboon and climbed onto her head, tearing at her hair, coiling its legs and tail around her neck. She untangled herself from the screaming baby. Take the other one, the tame one, the man said, and that child did lie placidly while she swam with it in the water. So quiet she thought it must be asleep, but no it was humming. Other people sang and hummed in the cool night. The sliver of moon turned white like the foam as more people came down the stairs into the water. After a while the man took the baby from her and left then, with his children.

On the rocks a girl tried to coax her grandmother into the pool. No! No! I’ll fall! Come in, the woman said, I’ll take you swimming all around the pool.

“You see I broke my leg and I’m afraid I’ll break it again.”

“When did it happen?” the woman asked.

“Ten years ago. It was a terrible time. I couldn’t chop fire-wood. I couldn’t work in the fields. We had no food.”

“Come in. I’ll be careful of your leg.”

At last the old lady let her lift her down from the rock and into the water. She laughed, clasping her frail arms around the woman’s neck. She was light, like a bag of shells. Her hair smelled of charcoal fires. Qué maravilla! she whispered into the woman’s throat. Her silver braid wafted out behind them in the water.

She was seventy-eight and had never seen the ocean before. She lived on a rancho near Chalchihuitles. She had ridden on the back of a truck to the seaport with her granddaughter.

“My husband died last month.”

“Lo siento.”

She swam with the old lady to the far wall where the cool waves spilled over them.

“God finally took him, finally answered my prayers. Eight years he lay in bed. Eight years he couldn’t talk, couldn’t get up or feed himself. Lay like a baby. I would ache from being tired, my eyes would burn. At last, when I thought he was asleep I would try to steal away. He would whisper my name, a horrid croaking sound. Consuelo! Consuelo! and his skeleton hands, dead lizard hands would claw out to me. It was a terrible, terrible time.”

“Lo siento,” the woman said again.

“Eight years. I could go nowhere. Not even to the corner. Ni hasta la esquina! Every night I prayed to the Virgin to take him, to give me some time, some days without him.”

The woman clasped the old lady and swam out again into the pool, holding the frail body close to her.

“My mother died only six months ago. It was the same for me. A terrible, terrible time. I was tied to her day and night. She didn’t know me and said ugly things to me, year after year, clawing at me.”

Why am I telling this old lady such a lie? she wondered. But it wasn’t such a lie, the bloody grasp.

“They’re gone now,” Consuelo said. “We are liberated.”

The woman laughed; liberated was such an American word. The old lady thought she laughed because she was happy. She hugged the woman tightly and kissed her cheek. She had no teeth so the kiss was soft as mangos.

“The Virgin answered my prayers!” she said. “It pleases God, to see that you and I are free.”

Back and forth the two women flowed in the dark water, the clothes of the bathers swirling around them like a ballet. Near them the young couple kissed, and for a moment there was a sprinkle of stars overhead, then a mist covered them and the moon and dimmed the opal lamplight from the street.

“Vamos a comer, abuelita!” the granddaughter called. She shivered, her dress dripping on the stones. A man lifted the old woman from the water, carried her up the winding rocks to the malecón. Mariachis played, far away.

“Adiós!” The old woman waved from the parapet.

“Adiós!”

The woman waved back. She floated at the far edge in the silken warm water. The breeze was inexpressibly gentle.