Drowning Lessons (16 page)

She's not from around here, he told himself. No way.

Clarke hadn't wanted to vacation in Mexico. He hated Mexico.
He couldn't decide what he hated more: the crass commercialism, the package tours, the inauthentic strip hotels, or the authentic poverty. He hated the food, the monotony of rice and beans doctored with powerful spices. He had never been a beer lover, but he reserved an especially dark place in his heart for that which went by the name cerveza. And how could any nation that offered but one generic kind of cheese call itself civilized? The sun was too hot, the music too loud, the streets too dusty. As for what the Fodor guide touted as Mexico's “ancient cultural heritage,” Clarke had seen enough jungle-spangled ziggurats to last him a lifetime. He ached for civilization in the present tense. So far, only the country's beaches had survived his condemning scrutiny.

The trip had been Lewis's idea. Lewis, Clarke's adopted brother and traveling companion. Lewis, whose recent success — a series of documentary films on the westward expansion and the routing of Native Americans (“a milestone in documentary filmmaking” —
USA Today
) — had made it possible for him to pay for both their trips, while Clarke's earnings as a freelance graphic designer barely covered his overhead. Since sixth grade, when Mrs. Decker, their social studies teacher, pointed out the historical significance of their joined names, fate had united them like an ampersand. They summered together at Lake Winnipesauke, where Lewis's family had a cabin. When both of Clarke's parents died in the
MGM
hotel fire in Las Vegas, the Bigelows adopted Clarke. Since then they'd been like brothers, odd ones, with Clarke six feet two to Lewis's five feet six and weighing fifty pounds more. Still the ampersand held.

Done talking to the bus driver, the woman turned and, walking in the shadow of her parasol, made her way to the ice-cream
stand, a wooden lean-to festooned with Christmas lights. Clarke watched her stand at the end of a line of mothers and noisy children, a marble pillar of serenity amid their hysteria. Flicking a strand of seaweed from his clothes, Clarke crossed the street and joined them, standing behind her in line, imagining the molecules of his foul breath reverberating off the delicate bones of her vertebrae. He hadn't brushed his teeth; his clothes, hair, and skin were full of sand. He'd elected to sleep on the beach as opposed to staying in the increasingly smelly room at the Blue Parrot, where Lewis lay sick in bed. Lewis had been lying there for four days, since their arrival in Playa del Carmen, where they'd come to catch the ferry to Cozumel. He had been running with his backpack toward the dock when he suddenly collapsed.

“I think I've just had an incident,” he told Clarke, his face yellow and coated in sweat. A local doctor diagnosed
la tourista
, travelers' diarrhea, and prescribed bottled water, bismuth, and bed rest.

“You don't have to stay here,” Lewis told Clarke in their hotel room. “Go on to Cozumel, enjoy yourself. I'll be fine.”

“Right. And leave you here.”

“I would if I were you.” (Not true; Lewis wouldn't have left Clarke, and Clarke knew it.)

Four days later Lewis's condition hadn't improved. Clarke suggested he see another doctor, an American one, preferably.

“There you go again with your bigotry,” said Lewis. “You think all Mexican doctors are shamans and voodoo priests.”

“I think you should get a second opinion, that's all.”

“I'll be fine.”

That night Clarke found a smooth, flat patch of sand by an
overturned fishing boat, spread out a hotel blanket, and lay there, looking up at the stars, wondering why people read significance into a spattering of cosmic debris, however lovely. He saw odd lights combing the shore, biologists with flashlights looking for turtle hatchlings. Volunteers (he'd read) came from all over to rescue the hatchlings. To the firefly-like dancing of flashlights Clarke drifted to sleep.

From the frosty display case the woman chose an ice-cream bar that matched her dress and her parasol, then returned to the sidewalk, where she stood licking it with a tongue as pale as the rest of her. Clarke was overcome by a sudden, urgent need to speak with her, as if he were a parched plant only her voice could water. Still he kept his distance, the shipwrecked feeling enforcing his silence. A drop of ice cream fell on his shirtfront. What would he say to her, anyway?
How do you like your ice cream? What flavor did you get? Really, me too!
He wondered if she'd purposely chosen her ice cream to go with her outfit.
What a charming parasol, by the way. Where did you get it? You don't say? Excuse me, but I couldn't help noticing, I couldn't help but notice …

The woman tossed away what was left of her ice cream, folded her parasol, and got back on the bus, which grumbled off in a cloud of purplish dust.

On the way back to the Blue Parrot, Clarke stopped at a grocery store and picked up a bottle of Seven-Up. In their room Lewis shivered under a flimsy sheet. The ceiling fan squeaked. The room smelled like an outhouse in bad need of cleaning on
a hot summer day. Clarke filled the foggy bathroom cup with warm soda.

“I asked for ginger ale,” Lewis said.

“You're in a primitive society. No ginger ale.”

The morning sun splashed palm-frond shadows across the rattan shades, which were lowered. The floor's ceramic tiles, where visible under scattered clothes, guidebooks, and backpacks, looked like they had been grouted with shit. Clarke pressed the cup to Lewis's lips.

“You look like hell.”

“Bless you and keep you for saying so.”

Clarke put a hand to Lewis's forehead. “You're feverish.”

“I want you to do me a favor,” said Lewis.

“And I want you to see another doctor.”

“Get me a stone from Tulum.”

“A what? From
where
?”

“From the ruins down there. A stone. For my collection.”

Back in New York, Lewis kept a ceramic planter in the living room filled with crumbled bits of ruins from the world: from the Pyramids, the Parthenon, the Forum, from Stonehenge, from the Temple of the Winged Lions at Petra, from the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China, from archeological digs where he had volunteered in Turkey, Egypt, and Spain, the crumbs of civilization. The planter weighed over a hundred pounds.

“You want me to travel seventy miles through a swamp for a stone?”

“Tulum is one of the most beautiful of the ancient cities,” said Lewis. “It sits on a cliff overlooking the sea, with temples dedicated to the honeybee god.”

“Christ,” Clarke said.

“The bus leaves at noon. Take your bathing suit. I hear the beach is lovely down there.”

Clarke wore his sunglasses and the last of his clean shirts, a yellow madras. Locals filled the bus: shoeless teenagers, toothless old men, and mothers bouncing babies in their laps. Clarke was the only gringo. The driver's rosary hung from his mirror. He fingered the beads, crossed himself, and jammed the bus into gear.

The trip took two hours. The sun burned Clarke's face through the opened window; the wind whipped his hair. He thought of the woman with the parasol, pictured her walking alone along the parched, barren highway. The image stayed with him for most of the trip. By the time the bus pulled up to Tulum, Clarke was hot and sticky. He longed for a dip in the sea. A second bus arrived and unloaded its cargo of tourists, who, armed with cameras and guidebooks, swarmed the ruins. To save his life he couldn't imagine what they all saw in a bunch of rocks. He headed for the beach. He'd get the damn stone later.

The sun shone brutally. Clarke put on his sunglasses. Close up the sea was a pale green color, like the verdigris on bronze. To get away from the tourists, he walked nearly a mile, shedding his shoes, inviting the wet sand between his toes. Isolated at last, he stripped down to his Speedo, slathered sunscreen over his wintry skin, then stood there, the surf's tongue licking his feet, thinking maybe Mexico wasn't such a bad place after all. He dove in, came up splashing, and looked around, amazed to have such a place all to himself.

While drying himself he noticed, in the jungle growth just
beyond the beach, the remains of a seaside taverna. Sections of thatched umbrella lay scattered like the tails of huge, rotting fish. Mixed with the bones and wood scraps were strings of colored lights like the ones decorating the ice-cream stand.

Before heading back to the bus stop, Clarke stopped for lunch. Chicken “ala Venezuela”: tomatoes, onions, chili sauce, and the requisite rice and beans. At four o'clock the place was deserted. An indigenous organ-grinder serenaded him with an up-tempo version of “Moon River.” At the table next to him a monkey — a smelly creature with flamboyant genitals — made faces at him. Clarke had the waiter remove it.

He was about to catch the next bus when he remembered Lewis's stone. He bent down and picked up the first stone he saw, a blue gray specimen that fit neatly into his palm. He pocketed it just as the bus arrived in its dust cloud.

As the bus growled through orange, low-angled sunlight, he saw the woman with the parasol again, walking alone down the highway, her parasol high, its shadow forming a cool puddle at her feet, her bleached colors in sharp contrast to the vivid greens and ripe browns of the surrounding swamp. Clarke's memory of her felt ancient, like he'd known her from somewhere before, in a past life or in a dream. With his eyes closed, he saw her more clearly, an ivory odalisque emerging from an endless sea of sapodilla and mangrove as he drifted off to sleep, and dreamed a series of dreams. In one dream he and the woman walked side by side down a sandy strip of beach. As they walked, the woman's pale skin took on the colors of the surrounding landscape. In the last dream she sat beside him, holding a small notebook open in her
lap. Using a red ballpoint pen she sketched a series of figures that, for all their strangeness, looked familiar. In the dream Clarke asked, “What are you sketching?”

“Time,” the woman answered. “I'm sketching time.”

The angle of the sun had sharpened considerably, coming in straight and bloodred through the bus window from the horizon as the bus grumbled on. Then Clarke realized — with the sluggishness of a patient coming out of anesthesia — that he hadn't been dreaming. The woman with the parasol was there, sitting next to him, having boarded the bus (apparently) while he slept. With her red pen she sketched what looked like a cross between an eye and a lemon.

“And that?” asked Clarke pointing, his voice still groggy with sleep.

“This is kim, the sun,” said the woman.

She had a deeply feminine voice that she kept to a whisper. “It stands for one of twenty-four hours,” she explained, her English delicately accented. “Twenty kims equal one uinal. Eighteen uinals — or three hundred and sixty kims — equal one tum.”

“A tum — that's a year?” said Clarke, still half in a dream.

“Perhaps. However,” said the woman, “when dealing with the Maya one can never be sure of anything.”

She smiled. She had large, healthy teeth. Clarke pointed to another drawing in her notebook: a fat, recumbent figure balancing a saucer-shaped disc on his belly.

“That is Chacmool, the god of sacrifice.”

“What's that thing he's holding?”

“A plate — for the heart.” She smiled. “Human sacrifice was important to the Maya. Four village elders known as
chacs
would
hold the arms and legs while the chest was opened by the
nacom
using an obsidian knife.”

“Charming,” said Clarke.

“Civilizations are strange. One moment they astonish you with their beauty; the next they astonish you with their cruelty. Like people, yes?”

She snapped the little notebook shut. Despite her efforts to shield herself from the sun, her skin had been ravaged by it, turned leathery where it had been most exposed. She had to be thirty-five, maybe forty. Her skimpy nose was at odds with her sensuous lips and large, deep-set eyes (the same verdigris shade as the sea Clarke had bathed in that afternoon). She spoke more of the Maya, about how while Europe slept through the Middle Ages the Maya charted the heavens, mastered mathematics, evolved one of the earliest forms of handwriting, invented the calendar, and built vast, beautiful, and elaborate cities without metal tools or wheels. “And the most amazing thing of all is that their ancestors are still with us today, riding on this bus as we speak.” She nodded toward a teenager asleep across the aisle, his feet propped on the seat in front of him. Clark was less impressed by the history of the Maya than by the woman, by her beauty and sophistication.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“From Mexico. Why?”

“You don't look like a local.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I mean you could almost pass for an American,” Clarke said and instantly realized his mistake.

“You mean a gringo?” she said, smiling. “I was born in Mérida,
two hundred miles away. But yes, I suppose I could pass for a
nordamericano
. I once lived in your country, in fact.”

“Did you?”

“I did. I was a student at the University of Arizona. I studied theater there. But I had to come back,” she said, looking suddenly sad. “The man I married hates
nordamericanos
. He is suspicious and prejudiced, my husband.” She smiled. “But I was also in love back then, and he insisted that I come home. He lives in Mexico City. He does not like it here, by the sea. Where are you from in America?”

“New York,” said Clarke.

“New York!” She clapped her hands. “It must be so marvelous! How I'd love to go back to the States, but my husband will never let me. He is a builder. He hates your country as much as he hates the sea, and he hates the sea. I have never known a man to hate the sea as much as my husband does. What is your purpose here?”