Agua Amarga

1 Agua Amarga ELENA HARRISS-BAUER Wesleyan University, Class of 2019 Creative Nonfiction ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 2 SITTING under the palapa on my grandparents’ property in the town El Sargento, I watch the light. It shifts languidly on the tile, dappled by the woven palm that makes the roof. I feel myself transported. A memory of Spain comes back to me: I am eight years old, standing four floors up on the wrought-iron balcony outside our flat; it is springtime. I know this because spread out below me is the downstairs neighbor’s wide balcony, its jasmine and tritoma and bougainvillea all in bloom. It is late afternoon. I have been drawn onto the balcony by a tolling of bells from the tower of the church kitty-corner to our building, a commotion in the square below. I don’t hear it so much as feel it: displaced air, collective breathing, human warmth rising. Plaça de Sant Just, the square over which my building presides, is small and rhomboid. Justus, the proselytizing Archbishop for whom the plaza was named, means disambiguation. The crowd below me is gathered at the three shallow stone steps laid at the foot of the cathedral; I realize it is a wedding. The bells resume their cacophony, a tradition I now understand to be heraldic of a successful marriage. The heavy doors swing wide, disgorging bride and groom, the scent of lilies and candle wax. The pair, hand-in-hand, navigate the steps under a cascade of petals and white rice, cast from the hands of friends and kin. Cheers and congratulations echo off the stone. All is a chaos of white—the first flakes of a blizzard—as the petals are rent, as the rice is trampled and winnowed by the crowd. The bride and groom are swirled into a waiting car, bride’s dress disappearing like soap down a draining sink. The crowd undulates, hesitates, dissipates. Now I am allowed to descend among the birds pecking rice from the crevices of stone it has been milled upon, under many feet. This is what has been left for me. This, and the mantle of white petals fallen or thrown, made translucent by bruising and heat, still thick with fragrance. I cross the wide flagstones of the square and kneel on the lowest step. The caretaker is already at the top step, sweeping. Grains of rice flee from his strokes, falling about me. To my left, in the worn shallow of the step, I see two red rose petals settled amongst all the white. Gradually, as the caretaker sweeps, they are lost from view. This world is constantly smoothing over traces of human life, doing its best to hide, to erase, to repossess. ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 3 My family lived in Spain for two and a half years, a period spanning from 2002-2005. We had many visitors. I remember few of these people with much clarity, though many of them were members of my own family. I find this odd, as so many details from this period stand out to me with the great vividness of formative experience. Most of my memories from childhood come from the years spent in Spain. The visitor I remember most clearly was my Dědeček. Dědeček is my paternal grandfather, a Czech immigrant who came to the United States as a refugee during World War II. He was drafted by the Allies as a patrol leader, charged with training ski troops near Lake Tahoe to prepare them for alpine combat. Of his own father, mine once told me, “He was always very antiauthoritarian, which is ironic, considering his refugee status…as soon as he was granted entry by the U.S. he became a beneficiary of that authority, those institutional systems. He also benefitted hugely from American social infrastructure. There was a sense of civil unity there, especially during the 40s and 50s. Wartime has the power to do that to a place.” My grandfather was another thing the world worked quietly to hide. But of course, I don’t remember him like that. The man I recognized as my grandfather was a tall, tanned man, built thick with a hugely round stomach. He looked to me like a grotesque department store Santa Claus, complete with bald head and generous white beard. His bare scalp was a gruesome patchwork of pinks and browns, mottled from time spent in the sun. My father would complement his tan, saying he was “brown as Baked Alaska.” He had lived hard, my father told me, perhaps in an attempt to exculpate him for having little time or concern for children. I remember it was a shock when he arrived in Plaça de Sant Just by taxi one afternoon, alone. Dědeček had dementia—this was the most concrete diagnosis he would submit himself to—though my step-grandmother suspected he suffered from Alzheimer’s, a fact made emotionally malignant by his refusal to be diagnosed. The morning of Dědeček’s arrival, as we waited for him in our plaça, my mother gently reminded my brother Miles and me of these things, these distant realities of the adult world. “He might need a little time to remember who you are,” she said. I am not sure what she imagined we would make of her words, but I recognize she intended mercy. We waited in the square, playing with the soccer ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 4 ball we had tied to a rope so it wouldn’t be able to escape—soccer balls move faster when everything is made of stone. The visit had been long planned. Dědeček was to arrive with Babička, my step-grandmother and his second wife, but when the taxi was finally able to squeeze through the medieval street that bottlenecked dramatically before it fed onto Sant Just, Dědeček emerged alone. We stood in silence for a moment, my brother reeling in the leash of rope and holding the soccer ball still. Then my father held up his arm in half-wave, half-salute, and began to cross the square. ✝✝✝ During my first year of college, I spent the two weeks of spring break at my grandparents’ house in Baja; my grandmother lives there still. “He was always forgetful. But he had a few strokes after you were born, and he went downhill after that. But the best thing about him was that he was still happy. He was totally unaware that there was anything wrong with him. He appreciated everything, appreciated life.” These were the remarks Babička offered as I was leaving to return to school, in response to the hurried and belated questions I put to her about my grandfather. Leaving, I felt a sudden urgency to know him, to know what Baja had meant in the economy of his life. It was the first time I had been there without my brother and my parents, the first time I had seen that land in seven years. Besides a few new restaurants and surf shops, a few more monolithic private ranches set far back into the hills, the place seemed largely unchanged. Baja does not feel like Mexico to me, though is one of 32 federal entities that comprise the country. Maybe this is because when I was young, going there never felt like a vacation. I have always thought of it as an extension of California, an itinerant offshoot into the Sea of Cortez with the Pacific aspirations of any true West Coast state. Baja is best described as a disposition, a mood that lays claim to those parts of my personhood that were created there when I was a child. I feel I can say the same thing about Spain. In Baja, the city bus is a school bus repurposed, spray-painted in some unsteady hand with the legitimizing word URBANO. I see this as the perverted charm of a roving pioneer ethos, evidence of an unruly bohemian spirit. For much of my childhood, I saw my Dědeček in ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 5 the same terms. The things that make Baja strange and alluring—the colossal emptiness of a landscape that hides so much life, its refusal to be made smaller, to be tamed—are the same things I remember best about Dědeček. He was always itinerant. He was drawn to Mexico for its wildness and by his appreciation for the ephemeral— he savored the passing fragility of things. But Mexico’s is a landscape that endures. This land is the fact of a vast geographic dislocation, a disturbance of organizing principles on a monumental scale. Constantly, patiently, it defies. Baja is an impossible place, and my grandfather loved it for that. Babička still lives in Baja; in the years of my childhood bracketing the time spent in Spain, when Dědeček was still alive, we visited often. During these visits, my brother and I would cheer uproariously every time Babička’s Ford pickup passed off the blacktop onto vast, ungraded sand. We thrilled at coming up against the wildness, knowing we were leaving the road behind. Dědeček would sit beside her in the front seat, holding his white toy poodle in his lap and cursing her in Czech every time we hit a pothole; he was also put on edge by the wild. We would know we were close when we passed the Tropic of Cancer. I remember the sign—white lettering on green background, sunk deep into the sand. The sand here, like the rest of the landscape, is coarse, demanding, strewn with shells (broken) and fish bones (picked clean). I have memories bound up in this sand, a deep empathy for what it divulges and withholds. I cannot help regarding the Baja sand as deeply agentic; I cannot help believing in the consciousness with which it acts upon its human visitors and the things they leave behind. One time, when we were very young, I remember Dědeček removing my shoes, then removing my brother’s. We were to walk barefoot on the sand in search of a red diamond that had fallen, without him noticing, from the band of the signet ring he wore. It would feel pointy on our toes, he said (as if there weren’t many things hidden in the sand that could sting or bite or scratch). Though we walked outward in dizzying circles, all we returned to his waiting hand was a skate egg case, dried and empty, and a matrix of bleached coral. The diamond, the land took for itself. This is a land that conceals. Baja, whether it belongs to America or to Mexico or to nobody, is a place of chronic blues and browns. Desperate creatures—those with no other country— make their home here. My grandparents were creatures of just this sort, tenuous ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 6 tenants of the land. Their occupancy was for a long time precarious; they made their home in a camper van parked among Tecate cans and the tattered black plastic that nests deep in the brush bordering the highway, choking out the roots. Here, wind tyrannizes the land, acting as a force of displacement and entanglement. Baja, like the northern Californian deserts my grandparents left behind, trades in the prosody of its landscape. These are cathedrals of space capable of making themselves important by their sheer size, a stylistic tactic favored by my grandfather as well, even late into his life. Baja and the north of California are terrains of mottled pinks and browns, made raw from time spent in the sun. They each support geographic extremes—desert and ocean—in startling proximity to one another. Desert dominates the mountains that darken at the ocean’s brim; the ocean itself is chaos. But desert, unlike ocean, does not get deeper. It only ever gets more vast. Like my Dědeček, I find myself compelled by landscapes like these (their ferocity, their extremity). Perhaps this is the residue of a childhood marked by presences—both human and inanimate— that were continually at variance with themselves. Dědeček, like the landscape in which he made his home, was constantly contradicting the logic set out by own existence, testing the presiding knowledge of what is and is not possible in the economy of the desert and over the span of a human lifetime. Now, years after Dědeček’s death, I see man and territory reflecting each other. I realize my grandfather must have sat with this awareness for a long time. Land that finds itself near ocean has a particular resilient quality that I am drawn to. Perhaps it is its increased capacity for light, its greater tolerance of the dark. The ocean, in its engulfing totality, absorbs and amplifies both. On clear nights, my Dědeček and I would sit out by the water and wait for the night to roll in. Over land near the sea, night takes on a hugeness, a disquieting dark. The only thing to offset this infallible night, once the lights of the beach shacks and caravans had been extinguished, was the brief moment of luminosity as Dědeček’s signet ring caught the last of the light. Then, the darkness would close around us. Side-by-side and surrounded by this night, we were allowed to surface in the vast oceans of our own consciousness in a brief, quiet moment of grace. This landscape, as much as it takes away, also returns. ✝✝✝ There is a place near my grandparents’ house in San Cosme called Agua Amarga. There is nothing there but a few low shacks, a corrugated fruit stand, ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018 7 stray dogs panting in the shade. Driving by on Federal Highway 1, you could easily miss it. The houses rise out of the land like a mirage, whipping past and fading quickly back into desert. It seems that the dust might soon claim these few structures, made spare and bleached by the sun. There a single street in town, running perpendicular to the highway, called Cale de la Quemada—Street of the Burned Woman. Agua Amarga is not in sight of the ocean, making it an anomaly, as the strip of peninsular desert that is Baja is constantly suffering erosion, eaten away by wind and changing tides. With no water visible, I am at a loss for how this place got its name, though I do not suspect misnomer; there is far too much tradition and deliberacy in the Mexican cultural landscape to make room for a mistake like that. In the resource economy of the desert, a place that has lost its water has lost its life. Perhaps, then, this is what is meant by Agua Amarga, a malediction meaning “bitter water”—it is a place that has earned its name, a place made lifeless and small by the land that surrounds it. Agua Amarga, Bitter Water. Like so much entrenched and inscrutable history, Agua Amarga is left behind, lost to the desert plane, that impartial country that accepts all abandoned things. The few buildings that comprise my grandparents’ complex are always well lit after sunset, to forestall the onset of a heavy night. Just outside this bright circle of existence is splayed the vast darkness of the desert. San Cosme quickly comes to an end; sandy roads become highways leading out and away to airports and ranches and larger resort towns. Cell towers rise up, outlined in blinking red, humming sentinels on the hills outside of town. A smell, brief and sweet, is blown down from these hills. Looking out past the lights, one might look up and wonder what is out there, beyond the glow of human life. Like my grandfather, the desert remains untamable, ese bestia bárbara y destacada. Like all things vast and wild, it is ruled by an autonomous energy, a secret flowing cadence. It is a dynamic and self-contained existence, unmovable, a stoic silence. This desert supports its own life. ——————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume I, Issue I, 2018