The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (2 page)

“Who says you must understand everything?” Viejo said. “For a human being to try to fathom all of God’s works is a waste of time.”

Paloma tried to retreat. “I didn’t mean …”

“What is, is. And one of the things that is, is that there are good things and bad things.” He paused. “They tell me you have been interfering with the fishermen again.”

“No! I only …”

“They say you shout and make a fool of yourself.”

“They can think what they please. All I did was ask Jo and
Indio and the others why they can’t be more careful. They catch everything; they bring back fish they have no use for. They don’t kill just for food. That I could understand. The way they fish, someday there will be nothing left.”

“No. The sea is forever. And you must learn that man will hunt what he wishes for whatever reason he wishes. His judgments are his own. For example, it has been judged that some animals are good alive
and
dead, like the bonito and the tuna and the grouper. Alive, they feed other animals; dead, they feed people and still more animals, useful animals. Some animals are bad, like the sea snake and the stonefish and the scorpion. All they do is cause pain and death.

“And then there are animals both good and bad, like barracuda—which one day feeds a man handsomely and the next day poisons him—and like sharks. Sharks bring us food and money, true, but now and again they kill people.”

“What about an angelfish?” Paloma asked. “What could be good or bad about an angelfish? Or a pufferfish? Indio caught a pufferfish the other day, and you’d think he had caught a marlin. Why? We don’t sell them. We don’t eat them.”

“The fishermen make their living from the sea,” said Viejo, “and so they must become one with the sea and all its creatures. Sometimes, the only way to come to know a creature is to catch and kill it.”

Because Paloma did not want to distress or offend her grandfather, she did not argue further: His truths were unshakable. So, all she said was, “Well, I hope nothing ever wants to get to know me that well.”

O
utside Paloma looked to the western sky. The sun hovered over the horizon, as if about to be sucked beneath the shiny gray water.

She hurried to her rock, a narrow shelf of stone that jutted out over the western tip of the island. She came here at this time every day, and she loved both the place and the time of day, for this was where she felt at peace, close to nature, to life.

There were a few clouds overhead, and the setting sun painted them pink, but the horizon was cloudless, a blade beneath the red fireball that was slowly sliding downward and seeming to squash oblong.

Tonight might be a night for the green flash, she thought, and she steadied her chin in her hands and forced herself not to blink as she fastened her eyes on the vanishing sun. You almost never saw the green flash: The evening had to be clear and almost chilly; no waves of heat could be shimmering up from the water; the horizon had to be sharp and without even a wisp of cloud. And, of course, you had to be there and alert, and you couldn’t blink, because the green flash lasted only that tiny bit of a second as the last infinitesimal rim of sun dipped below the horizon. Many times she had missed it by blinking, and in all her life she had seen it only twice—the first time the evening long ago when her father had led her by the hand and shown her this special place.

The bottom of the sun touched the horizon, and Paloma half expected to hear a hiss as the water quenched the fire, or see a cloud of steam explode from the sea. But smoothly and without a sound, it slipped faster and faster out of the sky.

Paloma held her breath and opened her eyes as wide as she could. The last of the sun dropped away and then, as Paloma was beginning to think there would be no green flash tonight, there it was—a shining pinprick of brilliant green, gone so fast that it became a memory at almost the same instant it registered as a sight.

Paloma watched the sky for a moment more, enjoying the
changes that happened with such speed only at the beginning and end of the day. The yellow light was fading, following the sun to other parts of the world. The sky overhead was darkening quickly and soon was speckled with stars, and only the faintest splash of pink still touched the clouds.

Paloma felt suddenly calm and happy. Seeing the green flash was supposed to be an omen of good fortune, and though she didn’t really believe in omens, surely it was better to have seen it than not to have seen it.

She rose to her knees and was about to leave the rock when a flicker of movement made her look back at the water. What she saw made her stop and stare and catch her breath again.

Rising clear of the water, outlined against the lapis sky, twisting in a spasm of pure pleasure, was an enormous marlin. Its saber blade sliced through the air, its sickle tail arched upward, and then, in graceful slow motion, the huge body slammed down upon the water.

It was a full second before Paloma heard the heavy, resonant boom, and by then all that remained as testimony to the acrobatics was a spreading ring of ripples on the sea.

That, Paloma thought, was definitely something special. Maybe nature is telling me I
should
believe in omens.

With a feeling of privilege, of being witness to nature reveling in itself, Paloma started for home. As she walked along the path, she looked down and saw her brother, Jo, and his two friends approaching the dock in their skiff.

Paloma could see from the top of the hill that they had had a good day. The bow of their boat was heaped high with fish, a kaleidoscope of glistening colors in the fading light. And Paloma could see, even from where she stood, that they had taken fish indiscriminately: Whatever they could catch they had killed. There were angelfish and rockfish, bonitos
and jacks, pufferfish and stingrays, and even one of the rare and strange and furtive creatures called guitar sharks—harmless and, to fishermen, useless. Those fish that would not take a hook had been harpooned. Those that had eluded the harpoon had been netted.

As Paloma watched, Jo shut off the outboard motor and guided the wallowing skiff toward the dock, while his mates culled the piles of dead fish with their fingers, throwing overboard those that were not worth selling.

When Paloma had first seen them do this, she had erupted in fury, screaming at Jo, demanding to know why, if they intended to throw back the fish, they didn’t do so as soon as they caught them, when the fish still had a chance to live.

If Jo had been startled at her anger, he had nevertheless been forthright in his response. “Early in the day, before we know the size of the catch, any fish is a good fish. By the end of the day, if the catch has been rich we can afford to keep only the good ones. So then we throw the bad ones back.”

Paloma had tried to argue, but Jo had walked away, saying that was the way things had always been, and that was the way they would remain.

Now, she watched as the one called Indio picked up a small fish by its eye sockets and waved it at the other mate, Manolo. Though she was still a distance from them and the twilight was deepening, she could tell them apart by the color of their hair. Indio always wore a hat on the boat, so his hair had remained black. Manolo kept his head cool by pouring salt water on it, so his hair had been bleached to a light brown, just as Paloma’s own long auburn hair had been bleached nearly blond by salt and sun. Indio said something now and threw the fish at Manolo, who picked up another fish by its tail and whacked Indio on the head with it.

Yowling and cursing, the fishermen flung fish at one another.
Most missed their targets and landed in the water, to float there belly up.

To Paloma, striding down the hill, the fight was nauseating, the waste obscene. It offended something deep inside her to see dead animals treated as if they had never been live beings.

She bent over and picked up a rock and called out, “Hey!” The three in the skiff looked up. “If you have to throw things at each other, throw these.” And she cocked her arm and threw the rock as hard as she could, hoping it would strike the skiff and knock a hole in it. But the rock flew wide and plopped in the water, and Jo responded by laughing and ticking his thumbnail off his front teeth and pointing at her—the coarsest, most insulting, and most contemptuous gesture he could make.

Paloma turned away.

Her father had explained the problem to her many times, during those early days when she had first complained about the young men who fished without care, taking everything and wasting much. “The sea, this sea, is too rich,” he had said. “It has too much life.”

She had not understood.

“If fish were in short supply here, fishermen might fish with care, in self-defense, for fear of killing off their livelihood. But here,” Papa said, “nature seems to be showing off, proving to us how rich it can be. There is so much here, people see no reason to be careful. One day they will, but by then it may be too late. For now, it is all there to take.”

Paloma had loved the sea since the time of her earliest memories. Her father, Jobim, had recognized the affinity between his first-born child and the sea, and had determined to nourish it. When she was a baby, he had bathed her in the sea
and taught her to float, and then to swim, and to fear few living things but to respect them all.

And he had captivated her with his descriptions of the things that made their sea, the Sea of Cortez, unique.

The Sea of Cortez itself, he said, existed because of an ancient accident. Ages and ages ago, the peninsula known as Baja California had been part of the Mexican mainland. Then, at some point in prehistory, the plates that fit together to make the earth’s surface had realigned themselves and caused what must have been the most spectacular earthquake of all time.

“You know how you take an old, ratty shirt and tear it up the back to make rags?” Jobim had said. “That’s what happened to Mexico. It split along its main seam, the San Andreas Fault. And when the seam split there was a big space, and the Pacific Ocean rushed in, and a new sea was born.”

The sea had had no name then, of course. Jobim read to her from a book that said it was not until 1536 that the sea was named for the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez, who discovered Lower California and the sea that separated it from the Mexican mainland.

“Isn’t that funny?” he had said. “Doesn’t that make you laugh?”

“What?” Paloma wanted very much to share the laugh, but she didn’t understand. “What’s funny?”

“That they say some Spaniard discovered this place. Your ancestors were here, living and farming and fishing, when the Spaniards were still living in caves and eating bugs. All Cortez did was kill people and go on his way.” Papa shook his head. “And for that they named the sea after him.”

One book even credited Cortez with naming all of California. According to the story, as they cruised north along the
west coast of the American continent, the Spaniards suffered badly from the heat. At one point, Cortez was supposed to have remarked, in Latin, to one of his officers that he found the region to be stinking hot, as hot (
calidus
) as a furnace (
fornax
).

“Nowadays,” Jobim had said, “some people don’t call it a sea anymore. They call it a gulf, the Gulf of California. But it doesn’t need a name. It is the sea. There are three things that make up life here: the sea, the land, and the people. They don’t need names to separate them.” He had smiled. “If you can’t tell the difference, life won’t be easy for you.”

So to Paloma, it was, simply, the sea—provider and friend but also tormentor and enemy. For if it gave her most of what she loved in life, it had also taken from her the one thing that she had cherished most in life.

Because of its peculiar combination of mountains and water, extreme dryness and extreme humidity, Pacific Ocean winds and high sierra winds, the Sea of Cortez was a breeding ground for sudden, violent low-pressure weather systems. With no warning at all, a fine day on the sea could turn mean. Over the horizon would race a black swirl of clouds. Beneath and before the clouds, the calm sea would begin to churn. At first, there would be a sound like a distant whisper, but soon it would swell into a horrid, wailing roar.

They were called
chubascos
, and unlike hurricanes and typhoons, they did not come from anywhere: They were created right there, and they lived and died right there. So, even if you had a radio, you could not hear a weather forecast about a
chubasco
approaching.

If you were lucky and were on land, you could fling yourself into a ditch or into the lee of a hill.

If you were unlucky and were on the water, you hoped to be able to notice a few early signs—even one sign, like a subtle
shift in the wind or the sudden formation of a tower of black clouds—that would give you time to run for a lee or, at least, to reach open water, where you could face the pounding waves without fear of being driven onto a rocky shore.

If you were so unlucky as to be underwater when the first signs formed, and did not see them until the storm had made up and was almost upon you, and were forced to scramble aboard your boat and start your motor and free your anchor—then all that was left to you was prayer. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t.

Two summers before, after the terrible “
chubasco
of the full moon”—the moon was full and the tides were very high, which meant that the storm-driven water rose higher and did more damage—he was found, drowned, washed up on the beach of a nearby island.

That was one reason Paloma tended to question the acceptance, by Viejo and others, that everything mysterious was somehow an integral part of God’s master plan.

If anyone or any thing or any force had deliberately willed or caused her father’s death, that something would be the focus of her hatred till the day she died. She believed, rather, that Papa’s death was an accident, a random blow, something that nothing had ordained or could have prevented. She had conditioned her mind not to think beyond that, about what might lie behind randomness or luck.