PROLOGUE
In the shade of the purple jacaranda in the jungle by the sea,
my son José builds a woman.
José
makes adobe bricks in the hot morning sun with red clay from the River Rojo and
straw from our fields. He rolls his hands over the wet earth. The bricks form
to the shapes he will need. Rounded for the buttocks, curved for the breasts,
sturdy for the flat toes.
While
the bricks dry in the sun, José clears a knoll of pepper trees and builds tall
scaffolding from the branches. In the center of the scaffolding, he lays dry
adobe bricks, as deep and wide as five beds. On top of the base, José builds
the woman’s feet. Her ankles are strong and slender, her shins straight, her
thighs thick with being a woman, her mound gently curved. Her torso, small
breasts, and strong neck rise gradually toward the top of the canopied trees.
Creamy, wet clay between the bricks weds them like the layers of a cake.
José
pauses to inhale the female landscape of the jungle, the hard-perfumed blossoms
of orchids, the soft scent of tendriled trees and the rich tunnels of moist
undergrowth.
He
inhales all this and breathes it into the woman he is building.
As
the woman reaches a great height, José grows until he reaches a great height as
well. He no longer needs the scaffolding.
I
look up at José’s wide back.
“My
son, your brown body grows as the woman grows.”
José
pours a gruel of wet clay over her body and polishes her skin until it looks as
smooth as the sweat on his cheeks.
“My
son, the woman is as high as one home on top of another, yet her body is
headless.”
José
strides to the bank of the Río Rojo, kneels, and scoops clay into the shape of
a head. He molds the deep inset of the woman’s eyes, the slight droop of sleepy
lids set close to a strong nose. His arms knot and unknot in light and shadow
until he completes the woman’s face.
José
picks up the woman’s head and carries it to her body in the jungle clearing. He
is the height of his creation.
He
places the woman’s head on her neck. She opens her eyes, though her feet do not
move from the foundation. Her wide face above the treetops startles two
cormorants in flight. José raises his mouth to kiss her.
“My
son, you have given the woman my face.”
José
bends over me and casts his giant dark shadow over my body. There is no escape
from the consuming fire of his eyes. His fingers, red and cracked with crimson
mud, reach for me.
CHAPTER
ONE
I am Tortugina. They call me
little turtle because I am snappish. My mouth has an overbite. Some say I look
predatory, but I am good in bed.
I was born in a two-story
house by the sea, in the village of El Pulpo, sixteen years before I gave birth
to José. The village is called El Pulpo because octopus is the only thing we
have to sell in abundance.
All houses in El Pulpo are
white, built by the rule of one because one color is good enough for everyone.
White homes built with stones from the quarry, white slate roofs, white lye
walls of the church and white dust in the breeze from shells shattered by the
sea. Our white village, high on a cliff, looks like a many tiered wedding cake
with a hundred black doors. To outsiders it may seem edible, but to me, it is
stale as old bread.
On the night I was born, Mamá
said a white dog howled in the doorway all night and a shattering storm brought
hail the size of coconuts that cracked the church bell. When the hail was
directly over our house, an albino bird dropped bloody from the sky onto the
roof and Mamá grunted like a pig.
I slid out in a rush of
liquid, small and pale like an octopus pulled from a dark cave. My bones long
to return to the safety of fluids.
“Ayee, another girl!” Papá
said, holding my streaked legs apart. “I am going to Ignacio’s Tavern to curse
in silence.”
My two sisters wept with
Mamá. I was the last child she could have. No son to bear the burden of Papá’s
store. But I did not cry.
It was my destiny to make my
family weep for not wanting me as I was.
*
Most of the time I do not
live in my white village. I live in my dreams, the only place where there is
color. Not smooth legs of rich red topsoil, or yellow cracks of the arroyo, or
tilled furrows of dark curled mud. No, my dreams are the colors of the sea, an
escape into the weightless veins of manganese, stretches of purple through
muscular green currents. A thin membrane separates the sea and the pulsing of
my dream to be an octopus diver.
With my head asleep on a
white brocade pillow, the nightly enchantment begins. A plunge into the warm,
green sea with Gabito. He is the most beautiful octopus diver in all of El
Pulpo. We dive side by side past rocks packed in foam, from clear azure to dim
greens, deeper and deeper, to ancient underwater caves. In my hands I hold a
net.
“Show me,” I whisper into
Gabito’s perfect ear.
Along the dark base of the
cliffs, there are octopus of all sizes and colors. The orange ones are closer
to the sun. The green and purple ones live deeper. Their boneless legs
straighten and disappear into the sanctuary of small caves. Gabito reaches into
a hole, and because this is a dream, the octopus rush into our nets.
“You see, Gabito,” I say.
“Nothing is a struggle when we hunt together.”
Gabito pushes my shoulders
back into the white sand. It splits with the weight of my spine and rises in
granular puffs on the soft current. My body is trapped between his strong brown
legs. He holds my arms above my head. My body is not afraid of the water, of
the sea, of liquid of any kind, any more than his is. He slides his hands
inside my nightgown.
“I want nothing more than
you,” says Gabito.
In celebration, my flannelled
hips rise off the sand toward the hard muscles inside Gabito’s goodluck yellow
swim shorts.
“At last,” he says.
“At last,” I say.
Gabito kisses me. Our lips
release two long strands of silver bubbles that become one.
“Little turtle.” Mamá’s voice
is the foghorn of my dreams. “Arise morning glory.”
I am caught in the undertow
of her voice.
Gabito slips sadly away,
riding a dark current to the deeper safety of the sea. Mamá pulls back the
quilt. A quick movement like a bird’s dry wing. The chilled air shrivels my
nipples.
“Mamá,” I moan.
“Hush before you wake your
sisters,” whispers Mamá.
She wraps her fat arms around
me. Mamá’s blue robe has the sour smell of sleep. She slips her cold hand under
my nightgown and pulls off my underwear. She holds it up to the crack of light
at the door.
“No blood yet, Tortugina,”
says Mamá. “If you delay being a woman this long, you are bound to have bad
dreams.”
She pats my cheek too hard. I
snap my overbite at her wrist. Mamá shuffles toward the bedroom door in her
crushed slippers.
“Hurry, hurry, little
turtle,” she says.
Mamá’s world turns too fast
for me.
CHAPTER
TWO
The blue shutters are half
open in Mamá’s yellow kitchen. She stands over the tin sink washing her face
with rainwater. She rubs her gums and teeth with a slice of lime and spits into
the sink. Mamá’s blue robe hangs so loose it could be the curtain for a
traveling show.
She turns toward me, sweeping
her long peppered strands into a big bun, and pierces the bulb of her hair with
an abalone comb.
“You are the slowest thing on
earth!” she says. “Go!”
I snatch the straw tortilla
basket off the table. Since my sleep must be sacrificed, I slap my sandals
loudly across the floor to wake my dreaming sisters and snoring father. Jumping
down the back stairs, and off the last uneven step, I hear my loud echoes
through Papá’s store. His open barrels of grains and stacks of dried roots
smell like old people’s shoes. I skip past the cellar door where Papá makes his
intoxicating aguardiente, fire water, that burns the throat with happiness.
I grab a stem of red
licorice from the open jar on the counter. Stolen candy is the taste of
morning.
My last revenge is to slam
the front door shut so hard it rattles our neighbors’ shutters. Villagers sleeping
in the white buildings lining our quiet Plaza de Allende know when Tortugina
has been unbedded.
Calle del Mar is my street.
Anything named “street of the sea” should have gray waves curling down the
cobblestones, sweeping the youngest ones who run for morning tortillas into a
quiet place where dreams are never interrupted.
Gabito’s white shirt is a
distant sail across the plaza. The heavy leather of his sandals rudders by habit toward the soft chugging of the
tortilleria.
I have loved Gabito since I
was six and he was eight and he beat me senseless on the black sand when I
stole a kiss. I would willingly follow him through the most dangerous shoals.
He passes the small church
with one white spire. Saint Assisi by the Sea, administered and swept by fat
Padre Abstensia and horse-faced Mother Mary Inmaculada, who runs the nunnery
that was once a stable. When Gabito and I marry, it will be in this white
church.
At this hour, the plaza is
barren of footsteps and covered in a light mist. Fat grackles chirp in the
trees trimmed square as green boxes. Curled at the base, Salsa, the
three-legged street dog, raises his patient brown head that is white from the
birds’ night droppings. al
Gabito sees me coming and
sprints past wooden shutters closed as sleep. It is our running game. I have
always chased him, believing that I could catch him. We fly past the cast-iron
bandstand covered in flaking black curls from centuries of painting and
repainting. Magicians, fat políticos, troubadours, all left their echoes under
the pointed roof. Here the village band plays the same sour notes every
Saturday. The old tunes inspired generations of calloused feet to dance, to
court, to wed. I am the result of so much footwork.
I follow Gabito through the
vegetable market, dodging between the empty stalls sheltered from the sun by
bolts of colored canvas. In an hour, the vendors will be shouting their poems
of produce.
“Caaa-caaaa-hueee-te!
Peanuts! Naaaraaanjaaa! Oranges!”
Up ahead, Gabito runs past
Señora Grosera. Under her faded red umbrella, the tiny vendor waves first at
Gabito then at me. Her family has a lifetime claim to the coveted space in
front of the Office of All Public Concerns.
“Carne caliente! Hot meat!”
shouts toothless Señora Grosera.
The
old witch divines weather and predicts who should marry. She winks at us.
“Gabito!
Tortugina! Hot meat!”
Señora Grosera shoves a
slender stick into a marinated strip of beef. She drops it onto the grill. Her
frying rooster-chilies sting my eyes. I hold my breath and hurry past her stand.
Outside the Chicken Palace,
Señor Aves picks up the buckets of marigolds he feeds to the chickens so the
yolks of their eggs will be bright yellow.
“Tortugina, what plague have
you brought today?” he says.
Señor Aves has never forgiven
me for accidentally killing his rooster with my slingshot.
I hurry past him up the
winding street.
“Assassin!” he shouts after
me.
As I follow Gabito around the
last winding corner of upper Calle de Serpiente, his broad shoulders fill the
street in front of Señora Porcion’s tortilleria. Our hearts beat from the
morning run, faster than the chugging of the old tortilla machine inside.
A breeze ruffles Gabito’s
hair, and I wish it were my fingers in his curls. Gabito is not the youngest
and does not need to run for tortillas every morning. He is here so that we may
stand side by side, arms barely touching in the tortilla line. As he enters
through the low door of the tortilleria, he looks back over his shoulder and
smiles at me. I slap the straw basket against my hip so he will notice my
figure and follow Gabito into the dim warmth. In line, we stand close, elbow to
elbow, and I breathe in the sweetness of baking corn and his diver’s sea scent.
It is my shame that at fifteen years of age my blood has not come so we cannot
marry.