Cahuita

Much like the rabbits pulled out of tophats, there is a magically undeniable, muscular vivacity of the mind that paints itself out of trauma. I know this modus operandi well and have perfected my stage act, and so I pertinaciously pinch my own cancerous lumps, waiting for a tufty-puss of clouds to emerge. I was always thumb-up, tirelessly caravanning from one Latin American town to the next. Even so, there comes a point for even the most resolute wanderer, the soles of whose feet have calcified densely from sharp rock and sun, when she becomes weary of new beginnings, when she craves nothing more than a pillow that bears the intimate imprint of her own settled skull. For those of us luckless, unsettled phantoms however, again, again, and again, the stag will shed his antlers.

Although I come by it honestly, I should say now that I am a difficult person. The kind of girl that walks barefoot on hot asphalt and never quits an argument. I am a traveller, unabashedly myself, and I never felt strange being “other”, tall and different, with my cartoonishly large, blue eyes that the local children wondered at, mouths agape at my stature and coloring, spritzed with freckles. So how had I come into 20,000 American dollars? I was still a bit woozy. I opened my eyes slowly, carefully. As the unexpected shards of bright, turquoise sky quickly sliced through the oppressive, condensation-saturated clouds, I found that it was early Sunday morning, the beginning of the last day that I was condemned to be somebody agreeable to others. I had been up for quite some time, but had lay with my little, black book resting upon my chest, meditating broodingly in an uncaffeinated-sort-of-way, my nebulous memories entertaining my consciousness tracelessly, like the fallen lashes from the eyes of dreams. I had a bleak vision in particular that wove in and out of the fabric of these spectral impressions, a foreshadowing of the many sets of faces that would, later today, surely encircle my intent, wringing the qualities of my character out like a holed dish towel, watching and weighing me with thick, gluttonous fingers. They wanted the money too. Knowing this, I did my best to silence the voices of my subconscious that bred with each other, incestuous and shameless in the echoing chambers of my guilt. Today at least, I could not be my own enemy. Distantly, and not for the first time, I wondered if the dense, oceanic air that suffocated my ego would finally surrender. I could feel a palpable shift coming, but for better or for worse, I couldn’t say. I am hopeful that the afternoon rains clear the air.

--

“What are you doing?”, says Nathalie, in a delicious sort-of French accent that makes me feel like she can taste her own words. Her hair was long and fiery red, and as always, she was direct.

“Just thinking.... and drawing.”, I replied without really answering, offering up a qualification for neither. I propped up an eyebrow and looked her directly in the eye, raising the corners of my mouth with a slow, dramatic effect, as if tugging down the forlorn pull chords of a hefty, dust ridden curtain. As was usual, Nathalie didn’t mind my strangeness and utter lack of detail and specificity.

She held out her hand, and scrunching my face, I bit into the sweet mango that she offered me whole and without reservation. I attempted lackadaisically to catch the juice as with each bite it burst and dribbled down my chin, onto my shirt.

Some of the local boys had taken to writing the young güera love musings in their sweetest, best English. Out of the heaping, disorganized pile in front of me, I plucked one out that read, “I want to meet you, and maybe talk”, followed by a phone number. The word maybe struck me, and I chuckled darkly, pulling back out my pastels and proceeded to doodle the message into oblivion.

“Why do you do that, Jazz?”, she cooed, “Humans don’t learn in isolation.” Even through her powerful lack of pretense, I felt strongly that she was quoting some book, as she tried to understand me. “You speak well-enough to me.”

“Well.” I paused stoically. “You’re not a puller of teeth.” My eyes were sharp as they narrowed into a wry smile.

In reply, Nathalie tugged boyishly at the right side of her upper jaw and winked. She left her shoes at the door and crossed the yard to the little kitchen, and after a while I smelled the unrushed, warm aromatics of her fresh bread baking in the stone oven.

Nathalie’s one-room shack was hidden in the jungle of Cahuita. The space itself was somewhat disheveled by nature, filled with a few whimsical odds-and-ends and one, ovular mirror that opened into a small cabinet, it’s dingy glass beset with numerous brackish age spots. The once crisp, white paint, after years of soggy jungle air, had begun to shed from the walls like the bark of a bog tree. It came away from the underlying brick in moist strips, and these peelings littered the tacky, tiled floor, which was a broken pattern of white, yellow and blue rectangles that cracked like stone crumbs into the dirt underneath. The water pipes were woefully unclothed, and the nearly prehistoric-sized insects that bumbled into the shack were our constant houseguests. To them the shack was just another tree - to me, it was my first home. It wasn’t an idealistic life in terms of creature comforts, but I didn’t need them, and somehow Nathalie knew that when she took me in, sharing with me good wine and conversation, and the other fruits of her tropical garden. She lived without apology in paradise, and as for her relative poverty, it was her greatest asset as it had served to secure her freedom, since, in her mind, the complacency of possession was the strongest fetter of the Western World that she had left behind. Thinking about it now, unrestraint may have been what she saw in me. A girl dispossessed. I myself was a somewhat feral creature, and wandering down the dirt path past her home she took me in, offering me a cup of strong coffee during a particularly tumultuous, seasonal downpour. From then on Nathalie was my moral barometer and the maternal, human instrument that always sheltered me from the storms.

I adapted peacefully to Caribbean life. When in town, Nathalie and I would hop from lane to lane as the cars passed, something that we referred between each other to as “froggering”. I had my own mini-adventures wandering around the small square talking shop with the artist-vendors, and haggling intently over the price of the few necessities that we sought out. Sometimes on a whim I caught a bus out to learn the flavor of the nearby towns, but I always came back to Nathalie. I had never before delighted in the advice of matriarchs, but Nathalie had a verbal undress that caught even me off my guard. I listened thoughtfully to her often eccentric but apt observations. That is until one week ago when she disappeared, only to be found without ceremony, lifeless, deep in the jungle. There was no explanation offered. Life in Cahuita unfurled as it had every day before.

--

“Dot your I’s and cross your Ts -- now isn’t the time to screw-up”, I told myself. I sucked on the soggy dregs of used up coffee grounds that had now settled into the bottom of my cup, and scratched away at my inner forearm with a blue pen, staring at Nathalie’s eulogy and the pink envelope that held her pricy will. I couldn’t focus. My expectations were disparate and distorted as I played a game of legos with my thoughts, stacking them into abstract shapes. Though I always had something quick witted to say the book was truly a mess, a guessing game of proper punctuation, exclamation points and commas. The right words weren’t there for me like they usually were, waiting to be plucked. They hid, and so I had to search for them, dutifully patronizing my mangled palaver on paper. How can I tell a dead woman that I loved her? I had never before owned the easy, well-worn sentiments, the commonplace expressions of a purpose, of place, of home in the vernacular of my experience, and with the villagers now at my throat, this was no lighthearted task. “What are you going to do with your life?” These were the words that dangled around me that I couldn’t shake, and they hung there, as real as the viscous air around me, or like the mango pulp still stuck between my teeth. Movement would be my savior.

I ran with increasing furiosity away from the shack, and then the jungle, tears abandoning the flesh of my cheeks. I fled with little regard down the craggy shore, gaining in elevation, and my sandal swiftly slipped as it hit the unlevel surface of a slick boulder. I fell before I could adjust, and tumbled over the edge of the cliff, tossed toward the large rocks that peered violently out of the tumultuous tides. Before I could think I curled my body protecting my neck and head with my forearms, casting aside my handful of possessions - I felt the cool sting of the water’s sheath, and then it was quiet. I was suspended by the dense solitude as I was drawn further in. The angry liquid sifted without purchase between my fingers as did the quiet fill the unguarded spaces of my mental state. I felt comforted - suddenly unimportant to the world above - I went limp. As I travelled further, so was I pushed away from painful memory. Suddenly an undeniable sharpness made itself known, settling in my stomach, ripping apart my lungs. Like an act of duty my hands began to tug at the water, to pull me upwards, in necessary repetition, they strove toward the violent bright above until my head finally pierced the surface of the bullying mass. Exhausted, I rode along with the waves, battered into the rocky seawall until I encountered a crevice kind enough to allow me to pull myself out, crawling onto the shore.

I leaned on a palm tree, coughing out the billow of the water, salt in my eyes, burning up my lungs. I collapsed onto my knees, and then to my side, digging my toes deeper and deeper into the grout of the warm sand. The tide’s swell came and went as my breaths emerged, and I knew them intimately then, as they fought their way in-and-out-and-in. The sound of the wind and the water was something akin to a clean promise, brushing me repetitiously like a chalkboard eraser, sweeping away the scarred marks made by youthful error. For a few seconds as I lay there, my mind hollow, I forgave myself everything. I had nothing but my breath and my bruised body left to claim, so I let go, and for a time allowed the sea to swallow whole the loneness that I had sworn in my embittered heart to be true. I closed my eyes and I saw the pink envelope peeking out of my little, black opus as they both sunk slowly, quietly like liberated sediment, past the reef, through the bustle of the fleeting, colored fish, and onward towards the intangible dark of the ocean floor. I stood up again, barefoot and panting, sopping wet, and, compass soused, I set myself forth without hesitation, authoritatively disoriented, tramping through the sand. I had always implicitly accepted that to have direction you had to have a destination, to have motivation you had to have a purpose, but I felt sacreligious to the literal world as I went onward, destination unknown. Wherever I was, here I am. Whoever I am, other lives lived, I am something else now. Some Frankenstein-made-whole, some groundless home.