The Other Side of the Dock
Friendship is an imperceptible
drama, a series of subtle insults.
— Emile Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
Through the years I’ve heard all sorts of opinions regarding True Solitude. It is a dinner conversation topic in my family, and therefore, as with other recurring dinner topics such as current events and questions of morality, it is best not to express a sincere opinion since, in all probability, one will get entangled in the inflated fibroids of misunderstandings. There are people, especially those leaning toward old age, who speak of True Solitude as a sturdy spider’s web we build as the years pass, but there are also those who refer to it as a space of whims and privilege with laws of access that are quite arbitrary. When I lose sight of good sense around all that prattle — amid those eyeglasses and the constant tea sipping, aunts with their faces caked with makeup, and some child stretching his sticky hand to grab the cookies in a little tray — I defend my own definition because I remember, not without certain nostalgia, that I sought such a paradise when I was fifteen. According to me, the only inhabitant of True Solitude had to be a girl who back then was embarrassed that her skinny-bitch pointy tits were noticeable for the first time, her body too big for her dresses and too slight for her bathing suit. Whenever I think of this I also have a big urge to smile, discreetly (lowering my head a little to avoid being seen by the family—even more impossible to accomplish), because while Clara pats the little boy’s hand filled with sweets, once again I see that summer in Santa Helena, the fishermen’s island where Toño and Clara decided to invent a house they called the House of the Orange Trees, and with this memory my smile suddenly freezes.
In that era, when instead of True Solitude there was mediocrity and an oppressive loneliness — surrounded by sarcastic laughter at the sordid secondary school in Mexico City I attended — I was the niece and Clara, my mother’s younger sister. To put her in a category all her own, apart from the others, those who wore high heels even at home and spent entire mornings in the beauty salon, I didn’t call her aunt. She was an energetic twenty-eight-year-old teacher of physical education in a primary school, and had a convertible Volkswagen no one believed could make it to the coast. She also had a boyfriend my grandmother detested — a circumstance that made Toño a precious being. Also in those days my fights with my parents began to take on really serious dimensions, so it didn’t take much to convince them to let me go with Clara and Toño to that semi-deserted island where the two of them had scored the House of the Orange Trees for an absurdly low price.
When they came to pick me up, the car was packed with several suitcases, a cooler, newly framed paintings, and a toolbox needed to get the house back into working order.
“You can put whatever you want in there,” they told me, pointing to the trunk that was crammed to the top. I tried to take as little as possible so that nothing would distract me from my search.
After several hours of driving, when the road had already turned into a construction lot overgrown with plants, sea air, and guacamayas, we left the car to get on the motorboat that took us to the dock on the island. We arrived late in the afternoon and I was overjoyed that nothing, except for the few palm trees whipped by the wind, moved. As we landed, I realized that Clara had fooled the family: there were no orange trees, the marvelous English-style house was barely the memory of a ruin, and the roof a layer of wood on the verge of collapsing.
“It’s almost perfect, the planks are going to hold up very well. If it doesn’t rain it will be good to go in two shakes,” she said with her customary enthusiasm, and she put a hand on my head as if she wanted to dissolve all my worries. Toño embraced her from the other side, rubbing his mustache against his girlfriend’s neck. But the fragility of the roof did not diminish my joy. I was sure that if ever there was a chance to have True Solitude, it was here more than anywhere else.
Half the island was a fishing village and the other part, where we spent the rest of that whole summer, an empty beach with a few homes, enormous and almost always uninhabited. Here was the house that Toño and Clara intended to fix in two weeks, and then to enjoy for the last seven days of their vacation.
The first week in Santa Helena was a long siesta under the sun. I thought that once there everything would be really easy—just a matter of waiting, of concentrating on an endless strip of sand and paradise that would surround me with its silence. It was as hot at night as it was during the day, and rain as probable as trees growing suddenly in the sand. Clara and Uncle Toño — I liked to call him that, especially in front of Grandma — spent mornings and afternoons repairing the roof of the house. Faraway, lying in the sand but always dressed, because I couldn’t stand the idea of some neighbor seeing me in a bathing suit, I’d listen to the background noise of their hammerings and brief remarks and then try to make out figures in the shape of the clouds. I’d fall asleep thinking that even if I didn’t realize it, I was entering paradise.
When night was almost falling, when the light from the sun was a faint vitamin C pill dissolving over the water, the two would go into the house to bathe and smear thick creams over their dry tanned skin. Then came the nocturnal dinner party: Clara would light candles all over the house and bring to the table a tray with cans of seafood bought in Mexico, because the roof in their case, and in mine the fear of seeing people, prevented us from going to the village to buy food. But the candlelight, the hunger and relaxation made those moments (with tin cans and all) a modest explosion of harmony.
The few boats that came to Santa Helena would leave the coast at seven a.m. and return in the late afternoon. Most of the time, the only passengers were merchants with baskets of fruit and bread to sell in the village. Every day they went by the house noisily shouting and playing their portable radios, but only for a few minutes. Then the beach went back to being the same as before, the same strip of sand isolated from everything, where there was no place for high school, for the trouble of talking with people my own age, particularly with guys, and for the earsplitting rudeness of my parents. Only once in a while, small groups of tourists arrived on the island probably following the advice of some tour guide with too much information, capable of describing the abandoned homes and the fruit peels that decorated the entrance to the village as if this were all a picturesque landscape. Those days it was better to stay indoors, far from uncomfortable stares and mincing little smiles — those gringos start a conversation with anyone who will let them. But in the house I was overcome by the temptation to stand before the mirror to look at the damages of acne and my budding breasts which, besides being ugly, were sometimes sore — almost immediately I would recall the remarks at school, my uncontrollable blushing in front of any person of the opposite sex, and the door to True Solitude, little by little, would melt away.
Very early, almost every morning, I’d wait for the boat on the dock, consulting the vague smell of gasoline and seafood to know how the day was going to turn out. Looking at the sea too long made me nauseated, thinking inevitably of biology classes, of the teacher’s amphibious hands, explaining the cycle of life and of all those fish reproducing themselves so close to me, in a lukewarm salty broth. Did Clara and Toño intend to reproduce themselves at some point? Several times I found them kissing at the front door, from where one could see the moon drowning in the water. But I didn’t think they would go that far — and if and when it did happen, I would stop calling Clara’s boyfriend uncle. The only way to save myself, to avoid similarities with them, was to concentrate on my search for paradise: “I need to forget everything,” I’d tell myself, “leave behind all memories of the city in the landscape of this island.” But True Solitude arrived concealed in a boat, and did not make its presence known to me until it had been on our beach for several days.
On one of those noisy crossings, together with the fishermen and the baskets of fruit, Michelle arrived in Santa Helena. I saw her at a distance in the sea, way before the boat docked, and realized immediately that my project would have problems: she didn’t look like someone coming to sunbathe, rather she was a girl my age — the blonde with heavy periods in high school who was coming to the island in a tight little dress—but that wasn’t the worst part. Resting against her bare feet, an enormous suitcase seemed to me as definitive as an anchor. Michelle let everyone take their merchandise off the boat, the women tuning into their portable radios amid the fruit, the men whipping their octopus against the wooden planks again and again, before she placed ten red nails on the swollen wood rail of our dock.
With her arrogant blue eyes she surveyed the landscape, then looked at the house, the roof that Clara and Toño were hammering, the broken-down palapa, the remains of a chair in the sand, and a mangy chicken that most probably had escaped from the village and was now stepping among the peels of fruit. Then she looked at me, and at the towel decorated with little animals that I was carrying on my shoulder, with the same indifference. Without a word, not even a gesture, she dragged her suitcase toward one of those huge homes that loomed over the cliff, and she didn’t reappear for the whole rest of the day, so that a few hours later I almost felt free to behave as if no one had arrived. What worried me was that there might be more people in her house. I didn’t think that the new arrival was the type to spend her vacations alone, and the idea of being surrounded by her brothers or cousins was frankly unbearable. I was thinking, alarmed, that maybe they hadn’t arrived yet but, let’s face it, the island would be filled with girls in bathing suits playing volleyball on the sand. I didn’t ask at the house: denying Michelle’s arrival was a silent ritual to prevent any possibility of closeness.
One night, while trying as hard as I could to renew the search at the far end of the living room, Clara entered the dining room wearing a recently unpacked red apron and bringing a wooden tray filled with shellfish.
“They’re little oysters,” she said. “I bought them in town this morning; we went for a walk while you were on the dock. By the way, did you see anybody on the beach?”
“Nobody,” I answered, trying to pretend to be surprised, but Clara continued:
“In town they told me that a few days ago the daughter of Madame Neuville who lives in the house on the cliff, came from France—her name is Michelle, or something like that. The mother is very sick and that’s why she lives here most of the year; I met her when I came to make the arrangements for the house.”
I didn’t say anything further and focused on pursuing with my fork the drivel sliding inside the shell. Soon the wind began to pick up over the fronds of the palm trees, and the conversation returned to the same topic as always:
“Only a little more hammering,” said Toño, “and soon we’ll be doing the same thing as you, looking up at the sky from a towel.”
The calm didn’t last long. Amid the gusts of wind, several times I heard a knocking on the window, with definite urgency, but I said nothing. The knocking persisted, getting louder and louder until they also noticed it above their chitchat and decided to peer outside. It appears that my intuition was well founded: to speak of the intruder was to invoke her. Outside the window, Michelle’s hair was like the top of a palapa shaken by the wind. Clara opened the front door and invited her in to dinner with her lively teacher’s tone of voice.
“We’re eating oysters, would you like some?”
The girl answered in very correct Spanish, tinged ever so slightly with a nasal tone.
“No, thanks so much. I actually came over to ask a favor.”
Clara sat down again with the back of the chair between her legs and made an affected gesture as if paying special attention to her.
“Go right ahead and tell us.”
Another of her lively attitudes the French girl didn’t seem to notice, because at that moment her blue eyes were focused on me with unmistakable annoyance, the same, surely, I had felt upon seeing her in the house. Clara repeated the invitation to speak up.
“I would like to climb up on your roof,” said Michelle.
This time no teacher-like remark could hide our stupefaction.
“Are you sure?” asked Toño, coming to the rescue. “I don’t think that would be much fun.”
“I’m not trying to have fun,” she said, almost offended. “Your roof is the only place on this island where someone is making an effort to repair the decay.”
There was a silent exchange of glances in which Toño and Clara consulted each other as if I wasn’t there, and after whatever they decided without even consulting me, they gave Michelle permission to go up on the roof of the house for a while with the sole condition that I go with her.
I swore to myself to be unfriendly; I swore to myself not to say a word unless I was asked a question. I climbed up to the roof first, and as soon as I was there I pulled up the ladder, so that the French girl had to climb up the wall, taking twice as long. She never asked for my help or for me to lower the ladder. When she finally sat on the roof edge she took two thick cigarettes out of her skirt pocket.
“Do you smoke?” she asked, aggressively friendly.
I shook my head no.
“Why?” she asked, the smile still on her face.
“I want to avoid lung cancer.”
Michelle accorded me a few minutes of silence before resuming the attack.
“You have quite a personality! From the way you act, I’ll bet you don’t have many friends.”
Then I was the one who remained quiet for a while.
“Do you have many?” I asked.
“Yes, and I also have a boyfriend: his name is Philippe. When he comes I’ll introduce you.”
My stomach balled up in a knot around my belly button. I didn’t want to meet anyone, certainly not another surly French person, and if either of the two began to hang out on the beach, the purpose of my vacation would be condemned to be a resounding failure. Nevertheless, I didn’t ask any questions, letting Michelle do the talking while she finished putting out the second cigarette. Afterward I put the ladder in place and announced that it was time for us to go back to our houses.
I didn’t see her again for several days. But I had to make a big effort to renew my search for True Solitude; Michelle’s voice was the kind that reverberates in your head. Without realizing it, I began asking myself questions about her: How old was she? How did she get to know Philippe? One night, while we were opening tin cans in the kitchen, I asked Clara if she knew the French women’s house.
“Is it pretty?”
“Yes, but too modern for my taste,” she answered proudly, looking at our damp walls. “I prefer the House of the Orange Trees. You’ve seen the girl again, no? The poor thing must barely go out, with her mother an invalid and all.”
“What does she have?” I asked, surprised, as I had forgotten that detail.
“I’m not sure, something serious, lung cancer, I think.”
I finished setting the table but couldn’t eat a thing at dinner. Before Clara and Toño went outside to look at the moon as they did every night, I went to my room and stayed there for hours, trying to sleep, until I heard the knocking on the window.
“Can you come out for a second?” said Michelle from the other side of the glass.
I said to myself that probably her boyfriend had arrived on the evening boat and she wanted to introduce him to me, so at first I curled up under the covers and pretended to be fast asleep, but then I looked more carefully and saw that she was alone.
“Do you want to go up on the roof?” I asked.
“Yes, but I didn’t ask permission.”
“There’s no problem, it’s almost finished,” I said. “Besides, at this hour it’s impossible to bother them. At night Toño and Clara are unbearable, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
We climbed up. The moon seemed like a tangled ball of radiant clouds and the sea was rougher than ever. When we sat down the planks of wood emitted a long creak ending with a crack.
“Why did they bring you here?” Michelle asked, hugging her knees close to her chest. Her red nails were ten mouths smiling on top of her bare feet.
“They didn’t bring me. I came because I wanted to be alone.”
“You never talk to anybody, not even at school?”
“I hate school. During recess I stay in the classroom; sometimes I take out a book to make sure nobody bothers me.”
“And nobody does of course,” she said.
“How did you know?”
“Everywhere it’s the same, people realize that deep down you’re dying to talk to them and you’re playing hard to get. It’s like you with me the other night.”
“It’s not true,” I answered, turning away.
“On the other hand your parents definitely want to talk and want you to participate in their conversations. That’s typical: they realize you’re not interested. Families only talk about what’s going on with them. Here, luckily, my mother barely talks.”
“What does she talk about when she does?” I asked.
“About nothing, death. And your family?”
“About True Solitude, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on with them. When is your boyfriend coming to visit?”
“Philippe? He’s not coming. I said that to impress you. And he’s really no longer my boyfriend; he broke up with me when he learned I was going away for so long. He says that in Mexico you catch rare diseases.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come.”
The roof cracked again, so we decided to climb down immediately; besides, it was getting late.
“I have to go home. My mother has insomnia almost every night and wants me to be with her,” she said before adjusting the ladder. “I think she’s afraid.”
“And you’re not?” I asked, almost regretting I’d said that as I helped her get down.
“Yes, but it’s different. When your mother is afraid it’s as if suddenly she can no longer feed you, as if, right this minute, she’d take her breast out of your mouth, get it?”
I didn’t understand a damn thing, and preferred not to answer.
“Come over whenever you want,” I said, when we were at the door. I noticed she was sad and I felt like hugging her but didn’t dare.
Two days later the day began cloudy, so I spent the morning indoors without going out to the dock or to the palapa. For the first time since we’d left for vacation, I didn’t think at all about True Solitude.
In the afternoon it began to rain. It was a harsh drizzle, driven by the wind. Clara called to Toño, concerned for him when she saw the drops on the window.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Our roof will withstand it perfectly.”
“I’m not referring to that,” she explained. “In the kitchen all we have left is a box of Havana cookies: we need to buy some food. If this turns into a storm it could last all week.”
“I can’t stand those cookies,” Toño said.
I thought it was a good moment to go looking for Michelle, but before I could prepare for this expedition they had left without saying goodbye. I was a little scared of being left there with a storm brewing and the risk that Clara and Toño wouldn’t be able to return. “If they had been my parents, they would have taken me,” I thought angrily, before collapsing on the cushions in the living room. Not a single light was on anywhere around the house. I wanted to turn on the radio, but the rain had cut off the electricity. It was the perfect moment to accomplish what I had come for: the thunder, the house in the dark, raindrops growing thicker and more constant. Besides, I was thinking only about what surrounded me—but now, on the threshold, I found paradise frightening.
I ran to my room to look for something to throw on so that I could catch up with them in town. I couldn’t open the door and right then the part of the roof that covered my room fell down. Instead of a drizzle what was falling on my bed and clothing was a heavy downpour. Absurdly I tried to rescue a sweater that until then had been in my suitcase, but the only thing I managed to do was to get all my clothes soaking wet, so I returned to the interior part of the house and covered myself with the terrycloth robe Clara used after her shower. It was then that I saw Michelle’s shadow in the doorway. The expression on her face was all that was necessary to understand what she was going through: I led her into the living room, where there was still a little heat, and I made her sit next to me on one of the cushions on the floor.
“My mother died this morning,” she said, and for the rest of the night she didn’t say another word.
At that moment I knew that the longest hug would not have been enough. I didn’t find anything to say, but I didn’t want her to interpret my silence like the other times, when I refused to answer her when we were on the roof. That’s why I opened the part of the bathrobe that covered my left breast, my pointy skinny bitch’s tit, and I let her come close to me. She took it in her mouth, a thin cold mouth, a fish mouth, as if she were trying to suck from there all the strength she needed to rid herself of fear. For many hours her tears were wetting the part of my body I most hated.
Clara and Toño arrived later, when in the box of Havana cookies only a few crumbs were left. They had heard about it in the town, so when they came in they gave Michelle — who was no longer crying — a couple of hugs and a few pats on the back. The storm didn’t last several days, but it rained again the next morning. During the morning Toño went into town to call Mexico. From what he said when he returned I found out that he had spoken with the embassy, and that same night there would be someone waiting for Michelle at the port. While he was away, the three of us packed clothing and rescued some of the things from my room. Clara prepared at least fifteen servings of tea and between the three of us we finished off the teabags of linden with chamomile and Michelle’s last cigarettes.
The French girl left Santa Helena almost in the same way she had arrived. She stepped onto the dock alone and barefoot amid the clamor of the vendors. We returned home shortly after, with all the things we had brought for the house and without Toño and Clara having finished the repair of the roof above my room. During the whole summer I never gained entrance to True Solitude, that undesirable paradise, but I saw it close at hand, in Michelle’s blue eyes, while from the other side of the dock the boat taking her to the port moved off into the distance. I watched her for several minutes until all one could see was the wake of the boat, and I continued to see her for years whenever I’d remember Santa Helena. Now, amid the chatter and clatter of the aunts and teaspoons — everyone shouting hopelessly — I sometimes recognize her in some of the faces, but I don’t say a word, because when you deal with these topics at dinner with my family, it’s best not to single out anyone.