The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (6 page)

On the edge of the seamount that day, beyond a small school of fish, the water had been gray and turbid, signaling the presence of a cloud of plankton swept up into shallow water. The manta had headed for the plankton, and as it approached the cloud, it had surprised Paloma again: Its dreadful horns unfurled and showed themselves for what they actually were—floppy fins. The manta had spread the fins and used them like arms, sweeping the plankton-rich water into its mouth.

The manta had made three passes through the cloud of plankton and then, evidently satisfied, had flown up and away.

Now, holding onto her pirogue, feeling her pulse slow and her breathing become more regular, Paloma waited, her head out of water, to see if today’s manta would jump once more. She wanted to see it as it broke the surface, to hear the roar and experience the explosion again.

When, after a few moments, the manta did not reappear, she put her face in the water and turned in a circle. But the manta must have gone off into the deep, for life on the seamount had resumed its routine. Paloma decided to dive back down to the bottom.

She took deep breaths and sped down the anchor line. Finding the same rock on the bottom, she locked her legs around it. She half expected things to be different here on the bottom, as if the drama on the surface should have provoked changes below. But all was the same: The same fish patrolled the same rocks, the same eels poked their heads out of the same holes, the same jacks sped by in search of food.

There had been one change which, inevitable though it was, made her feel wistful nonetheless. Nearby, in the little valley, the triggerfish was still darting back and forth. But now the fish was alone. Nothing was taunting it, nothing attacking. And its motion was different from what it had been, less aggressive yet more desperate. Such, at least, was Paloma’s interpretation, for she knew that the triggerfish’s eggs had finally been taken and that the fish was searching for them in hopeless frenzy.

Another fish swam slowly before Paloma’s mask. It was a fat thing, with tiny fins that seemed far too small for its body. She waited until the fish was only a few inches away, then lashed out with both hands and grabbed it around the body. She held it very lightly, anticipating what would happen.

The fish struggled for a second and then, like a balloon, began to inflate. The scales on its back stood on end and became
stiff white thorns. Its lips pursed and its eyes receded into the swelling body and its fins, which now looked absurdly small, flapped in fury.

Paloma juggled this spiny football on her fingers for a moment, then held its bulbous face to hers. The pufferfish could not struggle long. It had done all it could—become a thoroughly unappetizing meal—so now it simply stared back at Paloma. Gently, she released it in open water, and it fluttered quickly away. As it neared the shelter of the rocks, gradually it deflated. The thorns on its back lay down and once again became scales. By the time it reached a familiar crevice, it was slim enough to squirt through to safety.

Paloma began to hear anew the distant throbbing in her temples. It was still faint, not urgent; she had plenty of time to get to the surface. But by nature and Jobim’s training, she was cautious—better to have more than enough air left when she reached the surface than not enough when she was still far below. And so she kicked off the bottom and rose, facing the hill of rocks and coral.

Ten feet above the bottom, she saw an oyster growing on the underside of a boulder. She reached behind her and slid her knife from her belt and, with a single twist of her wrist, cut the oyster away.

The throbbing in her head was louder now, urging her to hurry up to where she belonged. Often she wished she had gills like a fish and could breathe water. But at times like this, she wanted only one thing: air. She kicked hard, and her strong legs drove her upward with a speed that plastered her hair over the faceplate of her mask.

She popped through the surface, spat, and gulped a breath of air, then clung to the side of the pirogue and drew more breaths until her body was fully nourished with oxygen. Then
she dropped the oyster into the pirogue, pulled herself aboard, and lay on the bottom, facing the sun and its warmth.

When she was warm and dry, she used her knife to split the mango and dig out the sweet, juicy fruit. She tossed the mango rind overboard and watched, fascinated, as it was savaged by a school of tiny, yellow-and-black-striped fish.

These sergeant-major fish were everywhere, on reefs and rocks, in deep water and shallow. They appeared suddenly, from nowhere, at the slightest trace of food of any kind. They ate fruit, bones, nuts, bread, meat, vegetables, feces, paper and—now and then—they nibbled on Paloma’s toes.

They were daring and fearless and voracious and fast, and the nicest thing Paloma could say about them was that they were so small. A mutant sergeant major, a specimen of, say, a hundred pounds, would be a genuine horror.

She let her imagination roam further, envisioning a sergeant major the size of a whale shark, and found herself once again admiring the precision of the balance nature had maintained, over thousands of years, among all its living things.

She picked up the scraggly oyster and held it in one hand. With the other hand, she guided the point of her knife to the rough slit between the two halves of the shell. Oysters weren’t like clams, which you could open cleanly and easily, with a cut and a twist and a scoop. Oysters were ragged and sharp and coated with slimy growths, and if you weren’t very careful you’d stab yourself in the palm of your hand. And the cut would bleed, so you couldn’t dive anymore that day, and it would probably get infected so you couldn’t go into the water for several days, and it might get so badly infected that you would fall sick and have to go to bed or even on the boat to La Paz to see the doctor.

The point was, best to be careful opening oysters.

Patiently, she pried around the edges of the shell until she found a place where the knife could probe inside. She felt the knife point touch the muscle that held the shell together; slowly she sawed there.

Most people on the island would not eat oysters. They were thought to be unsafe. Some people who had eaten them became violently sick to their stomachs, and over the years a few had died.

The truth was that the only bad oyster was an oyster left too long in the sun. They died soon and spoiled instantly, and a spoiled oyster was a ticket to the hospital in La Paz.

But an oyster fresh from the sea was a delicacy, something cool and rich and salty and pure. Paloma cut through the last bit of muscle and prised open the shell and saw then that this oyster was the greatest delicacy of all.

Inside, nestled in the shimmering gray meat, was the prize. It was misshapen and wrinkled, its color mottled, and it was only half the size of Paloma’s little fingernail. But it was a pearl.

P
aloma plucked the pearl from its shell and let it roll around in the palm of her hand.

Now she had twenty-seven.

It had taken her more than a year to find the others, but her progress had been steady: roughly, an average of two a month. It had been more than six weeks, however, since she had found the last one, and she had begun to wonder. Was it possible that on the whole seamount there were only twenty-six pearl-bearing oysters? She needed at least forty pearls, preferably fifty.

Finding number twenty-seven renewed her hope. She closed her fist around the little pearl and looked at the sky and said, “Thank you.”

Her thanks were directed, in a vague but concentrated
way, at her father. He was dead, she knew that, but she could not accept the premise that dead meant finished forever. She was lonely for, and needed, her father, and so in her mind she fashioned a presence for him. She did not think of him as alive, exactly, but simply as existing somewhere, still available for her to talk to and ask for help and share private things with. For in all her life he had been the only person she had felt comfortable sharing things with.

The fact that her father was out there somewhere (and it was a fact for her; she felt it strongly) was an enormous help to her. She didn’t hear his voice, but he comforted her nevertheless. A sympathetic presence who listened with patience to her problems, he never agreed or disagreed, never criticized or praised. And somehow, being able to explore events and alternatives this way seemed to guide Paloma, help her toward a direction and a solution.

Of course, sometimes she felt foolish, and was glad no one saw her as she seemed to be talking to the sky or the wind or an empty room. But there
was
something there. Whether it was she who willed it there, projected it there, didn’t matter; it was there, whatever “it” was. She avoided precise definition, preferring to leave it as a concept amorphous enough so as not to be confining, a spirit, accessible, clear. And while surely she needed her father, she also felt that he needed her, and that they were working as a team.

Shortly before he died, Jobim had recruited Paloma into a conspiracy.

Only a few months from now, Jobim and Miranda would have marked twenty years of marriage. He had wanted to give his wife something special. Since he had no money beyond that which fed and clothed them, he could not buy her something fine. So he had decided he would have to make the gift himself. And whatever he determined to make would
have to be made in secret—he could not hope to deceive Miranda as he had deceived Paloma about the pirogue. And if it must be a secret, it must be small enough to conceal.

Yet it could not be a wood carving or a clay figure or a decoration fashioned of seashells. Anyone could carve wood or collect seashells. It had to be something that only he could do, so that for Miranda it would be a gift direct from his heart to hers.

Once he had found the answer, it seemed obvious: pearls, a necklace of natural pearls. Of all the islanders, only he (and, through his teaching, Paloma) pursued the ancient skills of diving for and identifying and collecting and opening pearl oysters. He had maintained the skills only for his own amusement, for pearling was no longer profitable. The pearl beds had been depleted more than a generation ago, but even if they were to come back, the market for natural pearls had all but disappeared. People now preferred cultured pearls; they were rounder, had more luster.

Jobim did not like cultured pearls. “They are prettier, and they do come from the sea, and they make a nice necklace,” he told Paloma. “But they are not natural. They are man trying to improve on nature. Nature is one miracle after another. Man can’t improve it; he can only change it.”

Jobim had found only five pearls before he died, but he had helped Paloma refine her pearling skills. And so she had taken upon herself the task of completing the necklace. She and Jobim had begun something; he had gone away before being able to complete it; she would complete it for him.

She thought often of how she would give the necklace to her mother. She didn’t want to seem overly sentimental, but, on the other hand, she wanted to be sure that Miranda knew the necklace was a gift from Jobim, no matter who had gathered most of the pearls.

One of Jobim’s earliest lessons to his children was that truth was almost always preferable to lies. It was not only a moral conclusion; truth was usually easier. For one thing, it was easier to remember. But here truth was impossible, so Paloma had decided to weave the simplest lie she could. She would tell her mother that Jobim had collected the pearls and had hidden them with the intention of stringing them just before the anniversary date.

“Thank heavens,” Paloma would say. “One day he swore me to secrecy and told me where they were, in case something should happen to him.”

There would be happiness and sorrow and nostalgia and tears. The important thing for Paloma was that all the emotion would be directed not at her but at her father—at his memory or his spirit or whatever image Miranda still held of him.

Paloma tucked the pearl into a narrow crack in the wood on one side of the pirogue, so it couldn’t roll around or spill out if the pirogue should tip. Then she lay back to rest for a few minutes, for she had found that to dive too soon after eating was to invite a painful knot in her side or, sometimes, to bring up bile in her throat, which could be very dangerous and was inevitably very frightening. If bile was rising, vomit would follow soon behind, and there was nothing worse than to vomit underwater. The gag reflex would force a spasmodic intake of breath, which would bring salt water into her lungs, which would force a violent cough and another breath and would drown her.

She fell asleep. When she awoke no more than half an hour later, she recalled vividly that she had dreamed of a gull flying round and round her pirogue and laughing at her.

It was a recollection more curious than uncomfortable, for she associated nothing whatever with any of her dreams—except those about her father, which were sometimes disturbing
when she couldn’t separate dream conversations from genuine ones.

Paloma slipped overboard and cleaned her mask. She grabbed the anchor line and took deep breaths and pulled for the bottom. Ten feet from the surface she stopped.