The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (5 page)

Arm up, squinting through her bubbles, fighting to suppress panic, Paloma found herself face to face with her assailant. And she laughed into her snorkel.

It was a big grouper—three or four feet long, thirty or thirty-five pounds—and it hovered a foot from her face, its lower jaw pouting out from under the upper, its round eyes staring straight at her, waiting impatiently for her to do what it assumed she had come to do—feed it.

She had fed it often before. There was no mistaking this grouper: It was the only one of its size on this seamount, and it had prominent scars behind one of its gills, mementos of long-ago narrow escapes from larger predators. Sometimes she brought it bread, which it ate contemptuously, as if doing her a favor; sometimes bits of meat or fish scraps from the dock, which it gobbled up. And sometimes she forgot to bring it anything.

She had resisted giving it a human name, but she could not resist thinking of it in human terms, so she thought of it as Bully, which was apt.

If she had food, she would hold up her fingertips with the food dangling in them; the grouper would charge and she
would drop the food into its mouth. It had no desire to bite her fingers, but it was a clumsy eater, consuming anything in its path, and though its teeth were small its jaws were extremely powerful, and a minor slip could result in crushed or shredded fingertips.

Today she had nothing for the grouper, so she held up a closed fist. The animal seemed to understand the gesture, for it made a halfhearted grab for her fist, then turned, flapped its tail in her face and moved off a few yards, there to hover in case she should, after all, produce something edible.

A shadow above crossed one of the chutes of yellow light, and Paloma looked up. One behind another, a procession of hammerhead sharks passed overhead in parade. Their silver-gray bodies were as sleek as bullets, and the sunlight touched the ripples of moving muscle and made them sparkle.

Paloma loved the hammerheads, for they seemed somehow to focus her inchoate thoughts about God and nature. They were a weird and implausible-looking animal—sinuous sledgehammers, with an eye on each end of the hammer’s head and a mouthful of teeth beneath—and since once in a great while they had attacked a human and otherwise accomplished absolutely nothing good for man or beast, they must definitely be bad: That, at least, was how Viejo had rated them as living creatures.

And yet, if ever there was an animal that seemed to Paloma peculiarly blessed, it was the hammerhead. Sharks had for so long been so critical to the island’s survival that over the generations facts about them—salted here and there with myths—had been assimilated by most islanders. It was common knowledge, for example, that hammerheads like these had survived, unchanged, for about thirty million years. Except when they were injured or ill, they had no enemies on earth, save man. They had ample food, complete freedom,
and sufficient company and kin for whatever their needs might be.

It was Jobim, however, who had given Paloma perspective to add to the facts, who had shown her how perfectly the hammerheads were suited to their lives. They were simple and speedy and efficient, and, he reminded her, unlike man they made neither waste nor war.

So to Paloma, the hammerheads were perfect, and she saw nothing in them but beauty. She wished Viejo could see them from down here, from where they lived in nature. From where he saw them—writhing in agony in a boat or clubbed to death and stinking on a broiling beach—they could only appear grotesque.

Paloma pushed off the rock and swam down a few more feet, into a thin valley between two big boulders. There, in the sand, a triggerfish was darting back and forth, frantic, its tail quivering, its gill flaps fluttering. At first, Paloma thought the triggerfish was wounded, for its movements were erratic and it was encircled by three, then five, then nine or ten other fish, all of which seemed determined to attack it.

A Scotch parrot fish—with tartanlike scales and beaked mouth—charged the smaller triggerfish, which parried with a flurry of twisting bites. The parrot fish retreated.

Immediately an angelfish dashed forward, feinted at the triggerfish, then banked and tried to get at the sand beneath the triggerfish, but it, too, was driven off.

Now Paloma realized what was happening. The triggerfish’s egg deposit had been discovered by the other fish in the little valley, and they were ganging up on the triggerfish, trying to divert it long enough for one or another of them to dash in and root out and eat the cache of eggs.

Paloma felt instinctively parental toward the eggs, and so she swam into the midst of the flurry and flashed her hands
around; the invaders dispersed. But the triggerfish’s natural assumption was that Paloma was another thief, albeit a larger one, and its response was to bite her earlobe.

Paloma moved away, smiling inside but sad because she knew that before long the triggerfish would lose out to the odds. Once an egg deposit was discovered, it was as good as gone. Still, she told herself, that was the way it was supposed to be, an example of nature in balance. If all the eggs of every triggerfish hatched, and all the hatchlings grew to maturity, the sea would be choked with triggerfish.

Now she began to feel the telltale ache in her lungs, the hollow sensation that she imagined as the lungs themselves searching for more bits of air to consume. Her temples began to pound, not painfully but noisily. She pushed off the bottom and kicked easily toward the surface, trailing a stream of bubbles behind.

Her rule was to rest for five or ten minutes between dives, for then she could dive again and again without pain or fatigue. If she did not rest, she found that each successive dive would have to be shorter and the ache in her lungs would be sharper.

So she hung on the anchor line and drew deep breaths of the warm, moist air and occasionally looked underwater through her mask to see if anything new or special had arrived in the neighborhood of the seamount.

Perhaps today she would see a golden
cabrío
, the rare, solitary grouper of a yellow so rich and unblemished that when it hung motionless in the water it appeared to be cast of solid gold. Or perhaps there would be a pulsing cloud of barracudas, whose silver backs caught the sunlight and were transformed into a shower of needles.

Once she had even seen a whale shark, but that was an encounter no reasonable person could hope to have again.

Her first reaction had been shock, and then, for a fragment of a second, terror, and then, when she realized exactly what it was, a shiver and tingle and flood of warmth through her stomach.

The whale shark had risen from the bottom, gliding so slowly that it seemed almost to be floating, an animal so huge that in the cloudy water Paloma could not see its head and tail at the same time. But she could determine its color—a speckled, mustardy yellow—and that told her there was no danger. The whale shark ate plankton and tiny shrimps and other minute life.

Jobim had cautioned her that she might see a whale shark out here, had tried to prepare her for the shock she would feel at her first sight of the leviathan.

“There is one way he can hurt you,” Jobim had said without a hint of jest.

“Tell me.” Paloma imagined stinging spines or molarlike teeth that could crush her bones.

“If you see his mouth open, and you swim to it and you pry open his jaws and you squeeze yourself inside and force the jaws closed behind you.”

“Papa!”

“Even then, I don’t think he’d like you very much. He’d shake his head and spit you out.”

Paloma had jumped on her father and wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to bite his neck.

When she had positively identified the whale shark, she had swum down to meet this largest of all fish, and just then it had slowed its ambling pace enough so that she could touch the head and run her hand down the endless ridges of the back. It did not show any signs of acknowledging her presence, but continued its lazy cruise, propelled by gentle sweeps of its tail. And when finally Paloma’s hand reached the tail,
she had hiccoughed in awe, for the tail fin alone was as tall as she was. And as it moved back and forth, it pushed before it a wave of water so powerful that it cast her away in a helpless tumble.

The whale shark had then moved off into the gray-green gloom, relentlessly, seeming almost dutiful—as if programmed to follow a course, or a pattern of courses, set by nature countless millions of years ago.

But today, as Paloma lay on the surface of the sea, with her face in the water, breathing through a rubber tube—wanting to be part of the sea but confined to the world of air—she saw below a scene of routine and undisturbed daily life. It was a life of ceaseless movement, constant vigilance, perpetual caution, and perfect harmony.

A change of pressure told her something was happening, or was about to happen—a slight alteration in the way the water felt around her body. It felt tighter, seemed to press on her, as if something of great mass and size was moving toward her at high speed.

Reflexively, she back-pedaled in the water, trying to get away from this thing, whatever it was, that she could feel but couldn’t see, that felt as if it was coming closer and closer, for the pressure on her body was beginning to lift her out of the water.

Then she saw it, a black thing.

It was larger than she was, larger even than her boat. It was soaring up at her. It was winged, and the wings swept up and down with such power that everything before and beside them was tossed aside, scattered. She could see a mouth that was a black cavern, and it was flanked by two horns, and the horns were aimed at Paloma, as if to grip her and stuff her into the gaping hole.

It was a manta ray. And even though she knew, rationally,
that she had nothing to fear, she felt a rush of panic. Why was it coming straight at her? Why didn’t it turn?

Her body was rising higher in the water, driven by the pressure wave forced before the manta. Her breath caught in her throat. Sparks shot through her brain, impelling an action, contradicting the impulse, impelling another action, contradicting that. She was paralyzed.

When it was no more than a few feet from Paloma, the manta tilted its wing and arched its back, changing its angle to display a belly of sheer and shiny white. Five trembling gills were on either side, crescent wings like slices of the winter moon.

The ray rushed up through the water and broke the surface, a perfect triangle of solid flesh that should not be able to fly but was flying, as it broke free of the sea and reached for the sky.

In Paloma’s head, sight and feeling gave way to sound, for there was a thick and deafening roar, an enveloping, infernal boom, like the sound the wind makes at the height of a hurricane.

Paloma’s head rose with the manta, and her eyes followed it as it flew high in the air, shedding diamonds of water. At the top of its arc it hung for a fraction of a second, a titan of shimmering black against the sun that rimmed it with a halo of gold.

Then it fell backward, showing its belly; it smashed flat against the pewter sea. The water erupted, and the sound seemed to carry the same reckless violence as a thunderclap that cracks the clouds close by.

Now Paloma could let out her breath, a whoosh of excitement. She had seen mantas jump before—young ones especially, at twilight usually—but always from a distance. They seemed to be flipping in happy somersaults.

But mantas couldn’t be “happy.” This was what the islanders called an “old” animal, and by “old” they meant low and primitive and stupid. Its cousins were the sharks and the skates and the other rays. The wisdom was that “old” animals could not know pleasure or pain, happiness or distress. Their brains were efficient but small, their capacities limited.

And Paloma agreed with most of this wisdom, for Jobim had taught her that it was wrong ever to think of animals in human terms. It deprived animals of what was most precious about them—their individuality, their place in nature. Jobim had special contempt for people who tried to tame wild animals, to make them pets, to train them to do what he called “people tricks.”

It was, he had supposed, a way for people to be less afraid of an animal, for an animal that could be taught to, say, walk on its hind legs or beg for food seemed less wild, less threatening, more human. But it also made the animal seem less whole.

But what, then, was this manta doing? Why had it jumped right beside her, when the sea was empty for miles around? The island wisdom said that mantas jumped out of water only to rid themselves of parasites—small animals that attached themselves to a larger animal and fed on it. Some of these parasites were burrowers, little crabs or snails or worms, that dug holes in the manta and fed on its flesh. Then there were fish called remoras, which had sucker discs on top of their heads by which they fastened themselves to the host animal. They were not parasites but, rather, hitchhikers, for they did no harm to the manta and fed only on scraps of food the manta missed.

According to Jobim, by leaping into the air the manta deprived the parasites of oxygen (for, like fish, the parasites got their oxygen from water, not air), and the sudden shock
caused the parasite to let go. If the shock alone did not dislodge the parasites, then being slammed down on the water would surely knock them loose.

Paloma saw the logic in what Jobim had said. But on this manta she had seen no parasites, and in its jumps there was a sense of vigor, of energy, of excitement.

The island wisdom about manta rays had always encouraged Paloma to fear them. Careless sailors and fishermen were said to have been consumed by mantas. Disobedient children were threatened with being cast adrift amid a school of mantas.

And then, Paloma remembered, one day a few months ago she had been diving on the seamount and had seen a manta from the surface. It had been flying through the water with the grace of a hawk, rising and falling on its wind of water. Paloma recalled now how surprised she had been that none of the other creatures on the seamount had acted afraid of the manta. They had not scurried out of its way, had not dashed for cover in the rocks. They had seemed to know that the manta would avoid them—gently lifting a wing to pass over a pair of groupers or dipping it to pass beneath a school of jacks.