The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (10 page)

She spun, grabbed the gunwale with both hands, hoisted herself out of the water and over the gunwale, and tumbled in a heap to the bottom of the boat. She lay there for a second, breathing heavily, then realized—with a surge of adrenaline that rushed through her arms and pooled warmly in her stomach—that Jobim hadn’t followed her. Her mask was still on her face, so she leaned over the side and peered down into the water.

Jobim clung to the anchor line, and he turned with the shark as it circled. Again Paloma thought of dogs—two males, one an intruder into the other’s neighborhood, circling each other, appraising each other, searching for weaknesses.

When the shark was at the most distant point in its circling pattern, on the far side of the boat, Jobim pulled the bag of fish from his shorts and dropped it. The bag sank slowly, yawing like a leaf falling from a tall tree, and Jobim waited until he was sure the shark had seen it. Then, as the shark started down after the bag, Jobim pulled himself aboard the boat.

They ate a lunch of mangoes and bananas and a slab of
dried, salted
cabrío
, making sure to eat the fish first and the mango last so that the juice from the mango would wash away the thirst caused by the salt in the
cabrío
.

They did not speak while they ate. Paloma didn’t know what to say. She was certain she was supposed to have learned something, but she didn’t know what it was and she wanted to review everything in her mind before asking any questions. Jobim knew that Paloma was searching for the lesson she was supposed to have learned, and he wanted the experience to ripen in her mind before he explained it.

Jobim rinsed his fingers in the sea and said, “Were you afraid?”

“Yes,” said Paloma, and then, worried: “Is that bad?”

Jobim laughed. “Of course not. I don’t think there was much danger, but they’re fearsome things.”

“No danger?” Paloma felt almost disappointed.

“People aren’t their normal food. If the water’s clear and they can see you, and if you’re not bleeding or dead, usually they’ll leave you alone.”

“Usually,” Paloma repeated.

“Usually.” Jobim smiled. “Now: Do you know what you’ve learned?”

“No. I know I learned that you don’t know what sharks are going to do. I
knew
those two were going to take the needlefish from the big one, and then they didn’t.”

“Do you know why?”

“There’s a reason?”

“I told you I was going to show you something about girls.” Jobim smiled again. “The big shark was a female, a very young one. A little girl, as sharks go.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know she’s a female? It’s almost as it is on people. On the male you can see what are called claspers.
They secure the connection during breeding. The female doesn’t have any. As for how I know she’s young, she had no scars on her at all. That’s as it is with humans, too: The older you get, the more weather-beaten and cut up and scarred you are. An old shark looks like Viejo. And an old female shark has even more scars, because during mating the males prevent the females from throwing them off by biting the females’ backs.”

“How old was she?”

“I don’t know. Three or four years, I guess. Nobody knows how long they live or what kills them. It’s hard to imagine a shark dying of old age, but maybe it happens.”

“What were the other two?”

“Both males, both older. You saw the way they turned and ran when that young girl came at them.” Jobim paused, knowing what was going through Paloma’s mind.

She frowned and said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not to a human, because we’ve been taught all sorts of ideas about males and females and the natural order of things. Males are bigger and do most of the physical work and support the family and make the decisions and must be looked up to and obeyed because … because why? Because that’s nature? No. Somewhere way back, there must have been a good reason to make the males dominant. Probably because they were strong and did the hunting. And when strength was all there was, the stronger you were, the more important you were.

“And that’s true with a lot of animals—the bigger and stronger are the most important. With sharks, the females are almost always bigger and tougher and meaner. Sharks have a pecking order, just like the chickens at the house. You saw it right then. When there’s food around, the biggest eats first and eats till it’s full.
Then
the others get to feed, but always in
the order of their size and bad temper. That’s why you don’t see males and females together very often: The males would starve to death.”

“But with people,” Paloma said, “females
aren’t
the strongest or the toughest or the meanest. They’re …”

“Who says?” Jobim cut her off. “Strong doesn’t only mean biggest; the toughest isn’t just the one who can smash something with his bare hands. Strong can mean smart and clever and creative. The toughest can be the one who knows how to survive without wasting energy, or how to swim from here to there against the tide without getting exhausted and drowning.

“Animals have to be what nature made them—big or not, strong or not. That’s what sets their place. But people can set their own place. If they don’t have one thing, they can make up for it with something else, with knowledge or experience. Do you understand?”

Paloma nodded.

Jobim knelt down beside her and spoke softly. The image of his brown forehead and black eyebrows and broad shoulders framed against the sunlit sky was engraved forever on her mind, the sound of his mellow voice reduced to a hoarse whisper was one she would recall whenever, after his death, she talked to him. “All I want to tell you, all I want today to teach you, is that there are no ‘must-bes’ in life. Nothing is inevitable.

“You don’t
have
to cook the food and sweep the floor and have babies. You are a female, and that is a fine thing. You are a young female, and that is finer still. But the finest thing is that you are a person who can decide for yourself what you want your life to be. You will teach people to respect you for that. More important, you will respect yourself for that, and anyone who doesn’t is a fool, to be pitied.”

Never, after that day, had Paloma wished to be a boy. She had let her hair grow until it cascaded down her back. She had watched and felt with pride and fascination every change in her body.

A few months after Jobim’s death, a big storm blew through, a
chubasco
as big, if not as sudden, as the one that had killed Jobim. (That one had given no warning at all. He had surfaced from a dive to find his boat bucking and heaving in mountainous seas. He must have tried to board it and been knocked unconscious by the motor or the boat, for when he was found dead on the beach, there was a big blue dent in his forehead.) This storm knocked every bush and shrub flat against the ground and lashed the island with blinding, stinging rains.

The first rumblings began in her body almost simultaneously with the onset of the storm, and the cramps seemed to her to be echoing the thunder. She was frightened briefly, for her first thought was that she was becoming violently ill. Then her fear melted into a vague apprehension. Miranda had not warned her about what would happen when the woman change began inside her, had mentioned it only in vague, embarrassed generalities, and had, finally, turned it over to God to deal with. Jobim had done what he could to prepare her, but he could not know what to expect, how she would feel, what exactly would happen to her.

He had prepared her well enough, though, so that soon she felt the comforting conviction that everything that was happening was natural and healthy and—she remembered his word—fine.

She wanted him to know what was happening to her, and how she was responding to it, that she was becoming a woman and was proud of it.

And so, though a squall was driving the rain in horizontal
sheets and the wind was whipping around in cyclonic eddies, Paloma fought her way to her rock on the western tip of the island and stood on the rock, naked. She raised her arms to the sky, to Papa, and beamed up at him, radiant with life, and let the rain wash the blood down her legs and over the rock and into the sea.

P
aloma dried the last dish, then walked outside into the still night.

For all her delight at being a girl—and her frequent amazement at herself for ever having wanted to be anything else—still Paloma often wished that she could abolish the differences between herself and males. For she was positive that it was this difference (in coincidence with the absence of other girls her age) that made it difficult for her to make friends.

The slightest hint, therefore, that Jo might be undergoing some sort of shift that would make him susceptible to friendship gave Paloma an injection of hope that animated her as much as an adrenaline rush in fright.

As she puttered around the kitchen, she had reprimanded
herself for not being more receptive to Jo’s new attitude. He had been rather nice tonight, and she had responded skeptically, had put him off. He had given a little something, and she had given nothing.

So she decided she would go to Jo’s room, and if he was awake she would tell him that she had been mistaken, that tomorrow would be a good day to teach him to dive.

As she turned the corner around the house, she heard something that made her stop. She waited, then peered around the corner and saw Jo going into his room. He must have gone for a walk, she thought, and she started again for his room. But again she stopped, and this time she wasn’t sure why; she knew she didn’t want to go on. She was sensing a warning—nothing she could have articulated, but something very strong.

As she stood there, she chided herself for giving in to mystical nonsense. But no matter how foolish it seemed, she could not take another step.

After a few more moments, she returned to the house and went to bed, resolving to let sleep clear her head.

But sleep was a long time coming, for she was an unwilling witness to a pitched battle inside her head—between the half of her mind that wanted a friend and condemned her for being suspicious, and the half that cherished her independence and was suspicious of anyone or anything that might encroach upon it.

By morning, she had decided to give herself the day to settle the conflict in her mind, so although Jo was still being genial, Paloma did not let the mild guilt she felt change her plans.

She accompanied Jo and his friend Indio down the path to the dock, as she did every day. As he untied his boat, Jo said casually, “You want to come with us today?”

“What?” Jo had never invited her into his boat—not for fishing, not for fun, not to gather firewood on one of the nearby islands.

“Manolo is sick.”

“Sick with what? He was fine last night.”

“I don’t know. He says it’s his stomach. If it is, I don’t want him in the boat.”

Paloma was tempted. If she could not make a gesture to Jo, at least she might accept his gesture to her.

But selfishly, she did not want to accept. She had never liked fishing, except with Jobim, and then it wasn’t the fishing she liked so much as the being with Papa. Fishing was boring and tiring and painful, for the fishing line always bit through her fingertips and abraded the cuts with salt. Most of all, she disliked fishing because it was killing—for a worthwhile cause sometimes, she had to admit, but still, it was killing. She could not reconcile the communion she felt with the animals on the seamount with the sense of revulsion, of horror, really, she felt on seeing those same animals lifeless and colorless, heaped in the bottom of a boat.

But if Jo needed her help, if they were going to be friends, it would be petty of her to refuse.

“All right,” she said.

“Oh.” Jo seemed surprised. “I mean, only if you want to.”

“If you need the help, I’d like to help.”

“Yes. I see.” Jo seemed to be searching for something to say. “I don’t really need your help, though.”

“But I thought Manolo …”

“Sure, but … I mean … Indio and I can … Manolo doesn’t really …” Jo was blushing. “We can manage. I just thought you might … I know how you feel about fishing … I mean, all we do is kill stuff.” Jo grimaced, as if the thought of dead fish nauseated him.

“I know,” Paloma said, “but that
is
what we live on. It’s time I got tougher about it.”

“Okay,” Jo said. “Good idea. Only today’s not a good day.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. You said so yourself, remember? We’ve both got a lot of things to do.”

“Yes, but …”

“We can manage. Really. You do what you have to do then we’ll spend a couple of days together. Maybe more. Maybe one day you can teach me to dive and the next day I’ll take you fishing. A deal?”

“Okay.” Paloma shrugged. She didn’t know if she should say something more. Was she supposed to? Were there customs about this? It had seemed so simple: Jo had asked if she wanted to join them today. More: He had suggested that she could help them, had seemed to be asking for her help. She had said yes, she was willing to help. And then everything had gotten complicated. He had withdrawn the invitation, or denied the request for help—whatever, he was now saying that he didn’t want her along, after all.