on a beach in Aruba, a mother turtle’s nest had burst the cool wet earth, the small animals like wind-up toys propelled along their dark rotor fins into a wave. Tourists marvelled and took pictures with cameras large as their brains, obsidian boxes that relaxed their memories forever, memory was once a muscular faculty. An American man, I detected maybe a Chicago or New York Italian accent, with a gray head, muscular under his gray chest hair and gold necklaces that glinted in the faint sun, stood behind his daughters to make sure they saw this wondrous procession, the little caravan of shell-reptiles eking into the water, abandoning the island forever. Some foreigners, mostly conscientious Dutch expats, thronged in a protective circle, wearing shirts declaring themselves soldiers of Dana, environmentalist centurions who sat vigils, up at night to prevent the Arubians, the natives from breaking into these buried treasure-nests to steal eggs for their soups. The women stood with crossed arms forming an octagon around the birthplace, the descent of the little shell-bearers to the sky-coloured sea, their hair –brittle but also blonder from exposure to sea-water –ribboned in the gale, their faces smiled slightly at the corners at seeing the birth of new hatchling life; their beach sarongs twisted in the wind like lost kites.
Someone announced there were crushed eggs, some of the seaturtles had been killed by the weight of bare feet, stillborn. Luckily none of the new special, paralegal units of Aruban anti-immigrant police had rode by on their whirring All Terrain quad Vehicles policing for the arrivals of illegals at night, in their neo-police pink uniforms showing muscular brown arms as they sped their four-wheeled heavy motorcycles–glorified go-karts–across the famous sand. These cops patrolled because the beach lures trespassers, who instead of departing into the waves at daybreak, came floating and swimming inwards, over the black roiling sea at night, after the unmaternal speedboat of the smuggler king-fisherman dropped them with their land-clothes and Bogota-leather luggage all soaked. They would swim ashore to this Aruban Aztlan, mythical island where the majority of the population were Latinos who spoke a magical rhythm-patois like the one in San Andres and Palenque but who had Dutch passports, wearing them luminous like tongue-red velvet talismans in their pockets, under their necklaces and rosaries. The newcomers from the mainland also wished to acquire the expensive velvet of the Kingdom document. Some of them drowned, either unable to swim and not having expected this skill was necessary in the difficult art of migration, or because they did not have time to take off their shoes, clothes, remaining jewels, or their suitcases did not float. Do the smugglers warn to travel lightly? Do the mama sea turtles whisper this to their future hatchlings under the cool sand that nourishes with the moonlight that penetrates seeping through aluminium rooftops? Do old Dutch crones, lesbians and vegans whisper advice and caress the fine sand under which the children they will midwife dream of another, better Aztlan Atlantis destiny?
Some hotel-goers made sad choral moans at seeing the aborted amphibian-eggs. The Dago tourist noticed his daughters nearing the radial circle of danger where they might find out or witness the scene of where the egg-ceilings had caved in on the unborn. “They don’t need to see that,” he shouted. His hands, immense with rings squeezed onto thick muscly fingers, pushed gently at his beautiful daughters’ shoulders– the latter seemed to have soft little blue and pink phosphorescent feather-down stuffed under their tanned, sea-water purified skin; his hardworker-ethic mittens guiding them away so softly they’d think they were animated by their own will in footsteps, away from seeing suffering. His daughters did not need to see or know that death is, they were already thirteen years old. I thought of Alida’s bad bat mitzvah. I wanted closeness, contact with these women, in the water swirling us, in the sea air shivering us.
There had been an attempt to create a new world without death or sans risks of mortality. But what was this beautiful white sand but death, that in its grip so finely crushed and processed millions of years of corals and shells more intricate and prettier than any Tsar’s fabergé eggs for haemophiliac princes? The attempt to eclipse dying was not the work of scientists in their nanotech firms that I’d read about in the popular science magazines they still sold at gas stations and giftshops back then when off-phone literature was available on Aruba. This was the conspiracy of middle class parents. My parents’ sin, I realized, was in their not having conspired, or having wrought lousy, half-assed conspiracies, unlike these loving and dedicated parents who really made an effort. Instead they’d taught me to make counterfeit, to hustle, to notice the machinations, behind-the-scenes and spot the forgeries of others.
But how could this man try to counterfeit the world for his children? To make them believe there is no death, no separations? He had seen some of it, I could tell. An ex marine, a meathead with money who cheered blood on the field during Superbowls in that game as complex as nuclear physics which the visitors funnily called “football”, in which the ball they chased looked like a baby still wearing its mothers’ placenta. The girls in their pink and blue swim shorts and black hair wet against their backs, still not wet enough to cool where the sun had visited, they had been sitting in the sand and their asses where uncovered by swimsuit nylon were sand-speckled, in need of a boy’s shadow, which their dad, vigilante, wouldn’t permit, lest they ruin their new braces biting and fumbling around. Their toes were at the edge of the rim of the loosened nest that had given orphan birth, a lair with hatched empty eggs. They didn’t need to see those who had forgotten to wake up.
beach scene by Arturo Desimone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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