I was in a small fishing village in Mexico some time ago. It can be dated by the dusty old American pop that was fluffed behind the counter, under: glass, neglect, and bewilderment. The store was not a 7-11 and the town had only one paved road that was now hopelessly lost under Pacific sand. There were little municipal services and the white confetti from everyday trash was caught and ripped, then strung out among the cactus in the adjacent land. Driving south along the coast to this village we rose and fell with the desert hills, in the distance the mountains soared inland. To the west were the smaller coastal hills. Enormous Saguaro cactus rose elongated like exaggerated Dr. Seuss characters.
I met another American there and fell in love as much with her as with the moments we were sharing, adjacent to everything. I now feel as if anyone in that place would have elicited such feelings. She was a scholar and I was a nomad. Each of these personalities we claimed reassured and intrigued the other. She studied my nomad behaviour and I used her as a prop.
We met, rather clumsily and obviously, in one of the two bars in the sandy village and embraced each other as an easier way to get by. She was studying the villagers’ way of life and I was participating in it. Heading out to sea and netting fish in long wooden boats. At night almost the entire village would gather around in the central playground park and we would play futbol (I now confidently call it). I’d been All-Big-Ten in my collegiate days and I was a local celebrity I invited her to one of our pick-up games and she sat in the concrete bleachers as the village drunk hung about her ankles in envy. I scored four goals and we won by two.
That night we walked about the sand beaches and shared everything we could in eager confidence and solidarity. There was an instant comfort as we were the only two alike there, exiles, so to speak. One from learning and the other by choice. We both seemed to quickly and casually resign to the fact that we’d be special friends for some time.
Time that night wouldn’t keep still and too soon it was over. I invited her for a swim and a picnic the next day across the bay on a small chain of islands in the pacific. She agreed, after telling me she had interviews scheduled for the late afternoon and would need to be back. So that day I took our Pango out and we buzzed noisily across the bay, stopping twice, once for a pod of dolphins and the other for sea lions lazily perched and fighting on a clanging buoy in the centre of the bay. Each time we sat in silence, observing the animals.
I took her south around the rocky end of the island, entering the Pacific and rolling with the large swells gently lifting and setting us. Large birds were perched in the vertical rock and we’d watch them watch the horizon, then dive down and circle then perch. I took her close to the rock and she shivered.
I then buzzed around the island again and we shored. I pushed the boat onto the earth with a heave from the powerful engine and took her hand as she dropped from the bow. We then hiked the half mile over the hot sand dunes and came to the beach. It was desolate and far to the south I could see the carcass of a sea lion. To the right there was a burgundy coloured mountain rising baselessly from the mist. Deep into the ocean there was a black peak rising.
We laid out towels and I rubbed sunscreen on her back. I took off my straw hat given to me by my fellow pescadero and nodded with my head out into the surf. She followed me into the ankle deep water and we splashed our way out onto the long flat. She soon took the lead and we began swimming – the water well over our heads now. We seemed to be miles out as I turned to look across the long fetch of water directly below my eyes. The close detail of the water made the shore seem that much further away.
There was a lull in the waves and I noticed we’d swam past the break point. A pelican soared between us and the shore and I began to side-stroke closer to her. The colours were brilliant and crisp. The ocean blue was distinct from the deep blue of the sky. And the sand and each bright mountain puncturing the grey mist was unique.
I wasn’t a very strong swimmer and I told her this after I felt lured out. Several minutes of smiling and treading I tiredly made for the distant shore. I turned and paddled a good 20 feet before noticing she was heading back too. I watched her, waiting, when an intense panic overtook me. She must have seen this too because she turned around. She had her head turned and I began swimming, hard, away from her. I turned again to gauge the distance of the giant wave. There was nothing I could do as I prepared with a lungful of air.
The giant fell on top of me and I felt my body being shoved violently down. I counted three tumultuous summersaults and straightened out as my body surfed under like a torpedo. The wave’s energy was gone and I was rising. My lungs burned and I kicked once I found Up. I felt a difference in the water’s density and figured I was safe. Another wave of panic hit as the water refused to release me. I opened my eyes and it was white. I felt on the verge of losing control and breathing water when I broke the surface and gasped violently.
Another wave hit me and I battled it. If it had been a wave like before I wouldn’t have made it. I was brought nearly to the shore and with a few strokes was able to walk and dragged heavily, coughing, to the shore.
My body slugged onto the towel and I passed out. I woke up in what felt like hours.
“I was worried about you for awhile.” I could tell by her face that she was.
*
I skimmed us back across the bay, a little embarrassed by the near-death, and she went off to her interviews. I went to the city park and kicked a ball with some children. We met at one of the restaurants and I followed her home. There we made a slow and tender love. It was the first time I’d been intimate since arriving in Mexico and it was nervous.
Soon I abandoned my shack and we strung up another hammock in her cinderblock room. We shared our lives more like roommates than lovers but this seemed fine. We made plenty of love in various odd positions, without a bed, standing up, leaning, kneeling, laying on the small kitchen table. We both seemed content. Three months more in that village and she had to return to the city south along the coast. She invited me and I had no reason not to. Our lives seemed genuine and unique. We were both content and more than compatible.
In the city she was able to find an extravagant room. The sickening number of white tourists seemed to diminish the responsibility we had for each other. It was here that two contentious conversations arose. One, responding to my history and philosophy of living. The other because of political events there in Mexico. The second, upon remembering, was mostly unspoken, but for me, it opened the largest rift in our façade.
She knew my history, I had told her there on the beach that day before we kissed a touch and I took off her top. I didn’t need to work and worked little. When she happened to catch me living as a fishermen on the Pacific, that was an exception.
“I started ahead, stayed ahead, and can now perpetuate that position.” I said to her poetically on the beach. She questioned and I explained. I came from a little bit of money, left college with no debt, and like many directionless students, a generic degree in business. I had family connections and worked in Chicago for 6 years. Lived extremely humbly and was given raises and promotions. Soon, I’d accumulated a large sum of money which was working well for me in a high yield account in the states. I made 10,000 a year on interest and a few calculations led me to the third world along the coast. I said to her and shrugged.
She asked no more questions and we let the conversation sink deep behind our words. She, on the other hand, was accumulating massive amounts of debt to be where she was; slaving over her doctoral thesis day and night. And my ever-presence in her flat was not helping her psyche. She was doubting herself and me and everything in between.
In retrospect, as I sit on a bus with peasants and farm animals, heading further south, our break-up shouldn’t have come as any surprise. We’d coasted along at a steady rate for some time and I didn’t see any reason for it changing.
The day before the protests she’d said infuriating things like: “What are you going to do with your life?” and “don’t you feel ashamed you’re contributing nothing to society?”
I let her vent and went out. The next day there were massive, nation wide protests over the presidential election. The challenger was calling ‘fraud’ and calling the people to the streets. I knew nothing of the political climate nor whom the challenger was or what he stood for. I viewed all politicians with genuine distain after living in the states and experiencing the filth we had to display.
She wouldn’t hit the streets for this protest and it was dumbfounding. All the effort she did to abstractly belong, studying the culture and the people and their ways of life and she wouldn’t venture into the sunny Mexican streets and alleys to cackle with them and shout slogans into the air. She’d rather sit in her third floor, well-ventillated, and spacious loft and view it in safety as the masses passed underneath.
This refusal opened a gulf between us and said more about her personality that all the words we’d thus far mentioned. I left her in a dejected and depressed mood and wandered with a small disposable camera I’d bought a week before when we climbed a mountain together.
I was lost in the marching mass of people. I let myself be pushed and dragged around with the sweaty bodies, holding my fist in the air when they did and chanting as they did, gaining a strong solidarity with the men who were protesting – without ever having a decent idea of their qualms.
Like a broom sweeping dust into an ocean breeze, I found myself across-town in a central plaza as the crowd finally dispersed into bars and homes.
I never wanted to return to that corner apartment building. Everything would be anti-climatic after this and I wanted to leave her with nothing but my poetic absence. I thought of sneaking in then out at night. Never to return. But I didn’t, I went home and we lied to each other one more time. Only I knowing my intentions. We had a bitter-sweet love that night as I pulled her in front of my face and she responded in like. The next day I stood in front of her with my military sack I’d gotten from a younger brother in the navy.
“I’m leaving.”
She didn’t seem surprised and turned away from me, toward the sink. “Where will you go?”
“Costa Rica, first. Eventually to Argentina.” I said simply, sounding more confident than I was.
“Will I see you again?” She asked.
“I’d like that.” I looked away as she turned.
“I love you, you know?” She said and I reached out to her.
“I know. I love you too.” I said as she rested her hands on my waist and her head on my chest.
Now, on the bus, why? I ask but it was obvious. This distance now from her, however, reveals things according to desired truth as opposed to actual truths. I had to leave that comfort. It was best for her. We both needed air to breathe and room to flex. We had needed and bonded over a dependence; and now that dependence was suffocating. I wanted to see her again but I knew, in the long run, it made little difference.
