Beach Part II
By Ricardo Nirenberg
Yes, today is Saturday, and Dad’s with us, and Mom should be happy, but somehow she doesn’t seem so. Dad always arrives on Fridays very late at night, but I always manage to stay awake in bed until I hear his firm, heavy footfalls and the bass-drum clearing of his throat. Then I let myself slide into sleep, knowing he is with us, Mom is glad and the world is all right. Yesterday though—or maybe it was this morning, I don’t know—after falling asleep I was awakened by their voices.
“I kept calling you, all day long I kept calling you: where were you?” Mom was sobbing.
“At the office,” Dad repeated in subdued tones.
“At midnight? At one, at two o’clock? Ten times I called you. I was going crazy; the operator already recognized my voice... you weren’t at home.”
“I was at the office, I’m telling you.”
“I tried to reach you at the office too...”
Mom was weeping, and Dad sounded very strange, peevish; he sounded like a boy; like me. I started crying too, but very softly, inside my pillow. Perhaps Mom had been trying to reach Dad on the phone to tell him about my being caught walking around the yucca pot? Or maybe she was trying to reach Dad just to tell him how much she loves him, and that she feels alone. I don’t know. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but this morning, when I woke up, I felt sad: the day, which was just peeping through the shutters, was going to be hot, muggy and dark.
But no, it turned out to be a sunny, perfect beach day. That frightening night quarrel now seems like a dream, and maybe it was a dream after all. Dad is with us, chatting with Uncle Juan; Mom is pouring maté, and altough she looks sad, it must be because she is already thinking about Monday, when we’ll be alone again.
And here is Marisol, in all the splendor of her long, blond hair. She doesn’t greet me: she almost never does. She kisses her father (Uncle Juan), she kisses Mom and Dad, drops her satchel, takes off her shirt and pants, spreads a pink velvety towel on the sand and sits down on it, left leg extended and right one flexed, holding it with hands gracefully locked under the knee. Stretching her arms taut she bends backwards, looks up to the sky, shakes her head to let all that hair fall straight, closes her eyes, and abandons herself to the sun.
Marisol thinks she’s a movie star, and although only a year older than I, she also thinks that I’m a silly little boy. She goes to a different kind of school, very expensive, Mom says, where they only speak English. She plays weird games, like field hockey, and her speech is odd: many of her vowels are out of Spanish tune, her o’s mixed with u’s; her way of pronouncing “Coca-Cola” suggests some vintage wine, and the peculiar j of her “jeans” seems to me the height of fashion.
I don’t like Marisol to see me playing with my truck, so it is now parked in the back of our tent, behind the curtain: garaged for the day. I’m considering what to do instead. Had she only seen me walking around that yucca pot, as on a tightrope! Should I try some cartwheels, there, on that empty spot? I have no idea what could impress Marisol.
A loud and prolonged rumble. It came from Dad. My cousin smiles. Dad, in a vast circular motion, rubs his belly with the palm of his hand, raises his other hand to look at his wristwatch, says: “Twelve thirty; I’m getting hungry,” and asks Mom to pass him, from the picnic basket, a mortadella sandwich. Marisol changes position: she lies down on her pink towel, facing up. She puts atop her tiny nose her heart-shaped, pink-framed sun glasses, and starts delicately running the tip of her right index finger in tiny circles around her belly button.
My cousin’s belly is like a jewel, a bronze jewel, ever so softly rounded. Uncle Juan’s belly is of course bigger, much bigger than Marisol’s, covered with frizzly hair and quite tanned by the sun, for my uncle, unlike Dad, spends here on the beach not only Saturdays and Sundays, but most of the week.
Dad’s belly is something else. Round, pale and immense, when he is sitting, like now, it begins bulking forth right below the chest folds. But I can’t really describe it, because I can’t look at it for long. I cannot help it. I’ve tried, but whenever I do, I feel dizzy, I feel scared: it’s hard to explain. I wonder if other people feel the same way, Marisol, for example. When Dad’s stomach rumbled, she smiled: I suppose that means she can look at his belly without problems. As for Uncle Juan, he’s sitting next to Dad, chatting about this and that. They look at each other some of the time; right now Dad is pulling out of his mouth a long string, the mortadella rind on which he has just choked, and Uncle Juan, lowering his eyes, brings them directly upon Dad’s belly. Apparently he doesn’t mind Dad’s belly any more than Marisol does. And Mom doesn’t either: there is a snapshot where Dad is standing next to her, and she is sitting on a beach chair, her face beaming with happiness, her cheek directly resting upon Dad’s belly, her arm wrapped around Dad’s thigh. No, I guess Dad’s bulk doesn’t affect others: it is only me, it must be something inside me.
Marisol gets up from her towel and announces she’s going for a swim. Uncle Juan says: “Beware of the sharks,” and Dad says: “Beware of the Portuguese men-of-war,” and both laugh. After a minute or two, I grab my pail and shovel: I’m going to build a castle by the water’s edge. Choosing an empty spot where the sand is just damp enough for building, I start tracing with my big toe the outlines of the moat. I dig looking at Marisol. Standing in water up to her knees, she gathers her long, blond hair in a pony-tail, while holding a barrette between her teeth. Then, her left hand still holding her hair, with her right she fetches and fastens the barrette, all in one graceful, uninterrupted motion. She bends down, splashes water on her thighs, rubs them a little, shakes her pony-tail as in a proud good-bye to the air and the sun, and dives into the surf.
The moat is dug out and the spadework completed. I take a break and go looking for sticks. Not far along the festooned foam I reach for a splinter which will do fine as a flag staff, when I notice a jelly-like gob, purple-streaked, lying on the sand. Carefully, for it might attack, lash out with a tentacle, or it might sting, or bite, I poke it with a stick to see if it’s alive. It seems dead. As I am about to return to my castle, I see Dad and Uncle Juan standing at the water’s edge, close by.
They haven’t noticed me. I advance on all fours until I am at Dad’s feet. I shall force myself to look at his belly without blinking until I get used to it, until I see it as everybody else sees it. “Look at that!” says Dad suddenly, which makes me jump back. I imagine there’s been a bathing accident; maybe somebody who drowned is just being pulled out (it has happened before), or maybe Dad has detected in the waves the fin of a shark. I peek at Dad’s face and Uncle Juan’s. They are not looking out toward the sea. They are both following with their eyes a lady who has just walked by, a red bag hanging by a strap from her shoulder. As she walks, the red bag bounds and rebounds off her hip. The look on Dad’s eyes is like when he watches the earthen pot with the chupín, as the waiter lifts the lid and starts serving.
They haven’t noticed that I’m here, crouching by their feet. I look again at Dad’s stomach, determined to get used to it no matter what. I try to keep on it a steady gaze, to concentrate on the ascending hairline and the horizontal elastic mark, on the archipelago of moles, on the lone wart… but I cannot. I try to follow the ebb and flow, the rhythm of Dad’s breathing, but all kinds of things pass before my eyes, as if carried by a gale, and disappear inside Dad. Shells, crabs, octopuses, tangled squids, whole schools of shrimp, fish and more fish, toothy sharks, followed by long strings of sausages, of rope, of mortadella rind. A cow standing in the middle of the road, mooing to the moon, a red bag hanging from her horns, is swallowed; and then the car itself, the road itself, the trucks on it, the rocks and the trees by the side, a helicopter hovering overhead, the telephone poles, the railroad tracks. Houses, lakes, mountains, valleys, bags of warm peanuts and smoking locomotives: all get sucked in, crushed, mashed, mixed into a monstruous mass; it all becomes a whirl, dizzying, overpowering, until I myself am about to be swallowed...
When I open my eyes again, Dad and Uncle Juan have walked away. I look out to the sea. People say it’s immense; somehow, it seems to me smaller and less frightening than Dad’s belly. I get up and step into the water. I feel much better now. The waves are not high, gently rolling, gently crashing, and at my feet, the advancing and receding foam, ever soft. There, coming out of the surf, is Marisol.
A million droplets spangle on her skin. Unfastening her barrette, she shakes her hair and the light that was trapped in it sparkles out with the joy of sudden hummingbirds. She walks towards the tent stepping like Cinderella among the umbrellas, the beach balls, the spread towels and the arms and legs. I see her finger tugging at the bottom of her bathing suit. I have a strange feeling, unlike anything I felt before. Or maybe yes, when I was six, when my cat died and Mom told me that she herself, some far-off day, and that Dad too. That even I... It was appalling. Now, watching Marisol walking away, I feel it again, appalling: a void that wants to howl and to be filled, a heavy void under my heart, at the top of my stomach.
Ricardo Nirenberg
