The Secret Book of Sands, Mazatlan
by Paula Sheil
How my heart pains in this latitude. There is the beach. These moments on the membrane, the slippage between earth and sea. Only beach lives this transformation. Broken down to grains like stars, like radical neutrinos, the sand puddles under my feet. Carrying me closer to discovery, if I but let the glass beads of sand roll me forward.
Mazatlan. The garbage. Blowing in the streets, flying at the wheels of the pulmonias. Lace wings floating across the broken asphalt in defiance. So is the sun. A warrior. Taking off my clothes, making me sweat. His heat begging. Hold me, sun. Locked in frying sweat, I heave and heave but nothing comes forth. For I have come empty. Along the journey, I jettisoned expectation and arrived to be filled.
Zona Dorado. How Chinese. The golden land where passions are beaded on looms, beaten hard, one strand at a time, desperate hopes. Silver, pearls, sunglasses, string hammocks, carved horses, palm frond hats. On the surf's edge, an endless cue of eager merchants.
I want something new to wear. A cloth that will wear me well. Stretching across my round belly, my housewife arms, my swelling thighs. So I buy golden cloth. A spidery web of black, gold silk to share my wealth with a woman I am just meeting. I came these thousand miles to press 100 pesos into her brown hand. Accepting this shred of cloth for which she paid 30 pesos a yard. To accept my thighs and butt as they are now. Here in the sun. (He beckons incessantly, having no war on his horizon, love is an alternative battle).
Over head, the frigatebirds. Death's black arrows. Magnificent frigatebird, Fregata magnificens — common during summer in Florida Keys; occasionally on the Southeast, Gulf, and West coasts. Plentiful in Mexico.
Prominent crook in narrow wing takes them to dizzy heights. Long, slender forked tail. Big blood‑red pouch blooms from throat during courtship. Robs gulls and terns in flight. Takes small fish and marine refuse from surface, but does not land on water. A bird that looks fearless and instills beautiful unrest. Juveniles have white heads that blacken with age.
Frigatebirds and pelicans outnumber the gulls by the thousands. Frigates — seductive. Stealth bombers. They live by stealing. Lawyers. Politicians. Compromising other's livelihoods.
And on the beach. I am almost alone, with a trickle of bodies. The corporeal existence of desire. Naked as they dare. The sun singing off pants, shirts, shoes, but not the stretchy spandex that cups breasts, balls, buttocks. How perfectly bagged and coddled our passion. Our bargaining power.
~ ~ ~
In the streets, traffic. Fuming buses. The musicians ride for a few pesos and sing. Lamenting the change from our pockets. Embarrassed, I pay him for his song. He sings for me, brings it forth from a beat‑up guitar, more cherished than wife, unless she's paid better.
He jackhammers my concrete resistance, one plucked string at a time, vibrating the air. Twisting the bougainvillea bleeding in profusion on spiked stems. The flowers shudder. The air strokes me hard. Sing. Sing. I ride the bus. My money buys me happiness. My own. I always possessed.
How diligently do beggars remind us of our own joy.
~ ~ ~
On this stretch of beach facing Malaysia are churning fish. Marlin, blue metallic as sky and just as hard to take, rifling the waters, sweeping the shrimp into brown men's nets.
I eat fish, shrimp, lobster. As often as cereal or grain. Harvested from the sea, day after day, like there is no tomorrow. And each day is filled with golden eggs, like from the ogre's goose. The goose never fails, this blue sea. The well is always full. That is our belief. As trusting as the shark. She does not fear tomorrow, that she could fail. How could she lend her belly's ear to the possibility that love alone might have to fill her?
For what is food but love? I have always thought that to be true. Offering up to the gods, we always tribute food. That we steal from earth, that we were given but took. Food, our earth's love we can return only by dying, and giving up our body and our need, and returning to her completely.
~ ~ ~
Boys, seven or eight years old, juggle lemons on the street corners. I, a mother's scream. Get out of the street! The traffic embraces one, nudges each of his delicate arms. Loves him in passing madness. And he juggles three lemons. One for birth, one for death, one for today. And tourists give him coins the size of shirt buttons.
His smile needs no encouragement. A winning bravado and gold lemons he turns to cash while his flesh evaporates. When he has given up the ghost, he sells sunglasses, or rugs, or pottery, or colorful fish hanging from threads so transparent people say they fly.
Walking these beaches, venders approach me, one at a time. I sit, a queen, with my coins. waiting. But they detest me. I am obligated to be despised. Pretty, pretty. He approaches, begging smile, hand out. This Maztalan economy will break my arrogance.
But I am not thinking of my superiority. I am thinking to possess him to understand Mexico. Now. He comes closer, smiling.
I shake my head, No.
Sun. Sun. The boy juggles. The balls, lemon coins, circle above his eyes, and he darts like a lizard to miss an errant taxi. Oh, joy, to miss death nearly every moment.
~ ~ ~
Back to top >> | “I write your name on a grain of rice." A boy passes with his folding card of cheap necklaces and the tools to inscribe my name on a single grain. How is it I could be reduced to a signifier small enough to be rolled away by an ant?
Pregnant women walk the beach, the living and yet to be. One cradles her belly in her hands, wears a demure blue suit, strides long steps on thin legs. Another wears an orange & gold bikini, her brown belly like a coconut heaving on the elastic brim of her pubic boundary. Quiet, she reeks noise, the pounding surf, the disquiet of stillborn possibility.
~ ~ ~
The music blares, white‑hot. Trumpets, drums. Some whistle — a shrill clarinet whines on the wind. Practicing for Carnaval, my friend says. A band of the red & white taxicab union. Fried fish and beer and band practice. Carnaval is in February. We came too early. But we wanted this beforehand. The quiet anticipation. Instead of the street action, we stumble upon artists in a
workshop making sparkling mosaic flowers and birds with pounds of glitter glued to two‑foot square cardboard sheets. No one stops working when we approach, but looks up and smiles. Both the doors to the street and the inner doors to the courtyard are flung wide open and a dozen people work diligently as if on a factory assembly line — all for serious fun.
But I am here on this beach to quiet myself. I could not have arrived during Carnaval to celebrate the Virgin, paraded in the streets of Old Town, passed the German Community Center and the Teatro Angela Peralta. I allow myself only the beach.
~ ~ ~
A bitch, Mar Mar, with teats dragging the dust. Her back right leg mangled. A car hit the cur. Not an unlikely occurrence in Mazatlan where in a population of half a million are 250,000 animals. There is an active protection league made of worried gringos who fund raise among themselves to spay animals and care for cripples like Mar Mar, the RV park dog at Playa de Escondido. She survived her lost limb. Three pups hidden in brush, regularly burned to control the tangled, dusty growth, died. Her teats distended, exaggerate her responsibilities.
This trip was planned from Saturday to the following Sunday, nine days, two for traveling. Only three days left before we pack. I am ready to return when I first depart and always ready to leave when I return home.
~ ~ ~
I bus into Old Town and walk the narrow streets in the district de artistas and look in people's windows. The colors, the coolness, the tiled sidewalks and broken steps. Watermelon‑colored bougainvillea and lemon hibiscus. Purple walls with orange shutters. Lime green halls and carnelian doors. And parrots whistling to the cars like cops with military precision.
The mercado — supermarket and department store in one. A pig's head on display among the meats, carcasses unnameable. Belts, sandals, sports knock‑offs and peppers ... yellow, green, red, orange ... the true national currency. I buy Mexican saffron for a friend. I promised her sunshine to heat up the Valley fog.
~ ~ ~
Traveling backward at 490 miles an hour. There must have been a head wind. When I were traveling forward into time nine days ago, I managed 550 miles per hour, the plane grabbing up sultry air, gaining tropical degrees, leaving fog and rain in San Francisco.
How was it that I transported myself from Stockton, where my reality is carved in stone, to not-reality where I flutter awhile, a monarch migrating?
“Camarones. Camarones,” a vendor calls every morning at 8. This is what I cannot take home — his tongue. For me shrimp in the blue house in the Central Valley are not the teeth‑busting sweet flesh of Mazatlan camerones. Camarones carries new experience. A new taste, next to the ocean in a wave far from Stockton, washed the length of the Pacific skirt. Camarones, the color of sunset and bougainvilleas. Bougainvillea the color of fresh, the freshest blood — before the blue‑purple oxygen. Fresh like the cracked sun spreading over the Sierra Madre.
This traveling backwards, but not to where I started from, an hour left yet to go. Maybe an hour in the air, another half to land and deplane.
The man next to me and I check our watches at the same time. Synchronizing our boredom. Three young women, two seats back and over my right shoulder laugh and laugh. They cannot talk to one another without laughing. Their laughter is in Spanish, like washing clothes in a river. It spills and covers my right shoulder. I am covered in Mexican laughter, like orchids in palms.
Only 20 minutes later, and the dignified man in a sport coat and tie on my right and I check our watches, exactly at the same moment. As if we were conducted by an unseen baton, the cello in us responding. The plane dips down through the sky. My ears pop. The pilot curls words in his mouth, marbling them under his tongue, squirreling them in his cheek. Tells me to stop my electronic devise use. But not this flow of ink.
They laugh. The girls. There is something hilarious about falling out of the sky. Ahead, Salida. Exit. A blue curtain that separates me from this stage. My story is delivered to the ground? When the slowing capricious metal butterfly welcomes its bite.
Honorable Mention, Poetry/Prose Competition, Stockton Arts Commission, Marian Jacobs Literary Forum, 2002. |
