Dona Selsa or ‘why metaphors are embarrassing’

San Jeronimo is a sleepy collection of houses south of Acapulco. I walked into the hut that had an OPEN sign on it, looking for some information and something to eat. A woman eyed me up and down. Behind her loomed the display of lollipops and cigarettes and behind that were the private dwellings – open in the middle and quite empty except for a stove that stood directly on the dirt floor under the sun. There was corrugated roofing around the sides, part of it which made up the panel of a double bed which doubled as a wardrobe. A man was slouched in a torn armchair and some children were playing silently in the shadow under the roof.
After I had paid for a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits, I cleared my throat and said, "I'm looking for a writer. Julio Cortázar, you know him?" The woman was fanning away the flies from the lollies in silence. "He's a famous person," I added.
"No famous person here," the woman chuckled.
"What about the turtles?" I asked, remembering that there had been a mention of them in some text or interview with the author. "Do you know where I can find the turtles?"
"Ah yes, the turtles – not many left. They are very hard to find, very hard. But my husband will help you. Enrico! Enrico! Come here!" she called to the man in the armchair. "This lady wants to see turtles!"
For a small fee Enrico promised to drive me to the coast in his van. One of the young children came running after us and demanded to be taken along. The child slumped beside me on the passenger seat and after a short time of bumpy, hot driving on dirt roads he fell asleep on my lap as Enrico and I talked about the countryside while we passed villages smaller even than San Jeronimo. Most of them seemed completely deserted apart from a few forlorn-looking donkeys and some hens scattered here and there. Enrico stopped to talk to some men who stood in the shade of a tienda. When he was finished he informed me that the turtles had moved to another part of the beach further north. Since it was too long to drive there now, he said he'd take me someplace where I could stay the night.
We left the villages and the rainforest behind and Enrico let me off at the beginning of a small paved road. He pointed towards the direction of the water at the end of the road and said, "Just ask for Dona Selsa."
I extricated myself from the hot arms of the sleeping child, looked to where Enrico had pointed and said "hasta lluego."
The air was hot and sticky, but luckily I only had my small bag to carry. A couple of people were standing outside the sheds along the road. They were talking amongst themselves and didn't acknowledge their obvious surprise at seeing a foreigner in their village. Then a whistle blew and children stormed out of a building tucked away under the leafy trees. With the children it was different. They made no attempt at hiding their curiosity. A group of the more daring ones even trailed behind me, giggling and shouting things I didn't understand. At first I ignored them, feeling self-conscious and targeted but when they wouldn't give up, I at last turned around to face them. They cheered and, pointing to my face, started chanting ojos verdes.
A little girl broke out of the crowd and came over to me. "Dad will take you over the river," she said and pointed in the same direction that Enrico had pointed.

The little girl's father bared a toothless mouth and helped me with my bag. He rowed us over to a part of the beach where there were tables and hammocks and a roof made of straw. It was a strip of land that had broken off from the shore so that it now lay surrounded by water on both sides. A freshwater river divided it from the mainland and on the other side laid the Pacific. While the river was gradually pushing the land further away from the mainland, the ocean was chewing off bits from the other side, forcing more people to pack up and move inland.
A woman emerged from the shade. She was wearing a red scarf on her head, a soiled apron wrapped perfunctorily around her waist, and a blouse which had once been red but the sun had bleached pink.
"Bienvenida. Soy Dona Selsa."
She held my hand. Her skin was hardened by the salty air and her grey hair reflected in the sun. Behind her I glimpsed the ocean. I complimented her on her beautiful place, the peace and quiet. Apart from myself and Dona Selsa, there were only two other people – the man in the boat who, as I found out later, was her husband, as well as their young daughter. Dona Selsa showed me a hammock under the straw roof and after leaving me a mosquito net for the night, she retreated to her hut. Later, as I was walking along the ocean-side of the beach, I ran into her husband who was carrying a basket full of fish. Stray dogs were trailing behind him, undernourished and flea-ridden. He threw a fish at them which was caught by two of the less weak ones.
As a sign of hospitality, Dona Selsa had let me know that she could get hold of a chicken from the village, but she made the offer in such a way that left me no choice but to refuse. That night after a dinner consisting of tortillas and fried fish, I watched the silhouette of the man raking the sand against the moonlit sky. Dona Selsa was cleaning fish by the river and the little girl was pulling the tail of a skinny dog in the distance. I listened to the waves folding over the sand while watching the tall rainforest trees of the mainland sway gently in the night.

And so the days came and went. I was putting off leaving, suspecting that when I did, it would be for good. I wrote a lot and dozed in my hammock. Once or twice I thought about going for a swim in the ocean, but I only got as far as wetting my legs. No one else did any swimming there and so I stayed under the roof of El Capitan and resigned myself to watching the waves hammer down on the beach. The only times I ventured out of the shade was to accompany Dona Selsa on her walks to collect seaweed. She would then first apply a thick fruity mash on my skin to protect it against the sun, slapping it on my back in the same brusque manner that she rubbed the dirty clothes against the rocks by the river with red soap. In the evenings I ate fish, skin and bones and all, together with the tortillas that Dona Selsa rolled out with a Coca-Cola bottle.
When Sunday came the villagers gathered on the other side of the river and Dona Selsa's husband was hustling for customers. Dona Selsa herself had been preparing for the onslaught all morning with the assistance of her other daughters who had arrived the night before. One of them gossiped that they were getting a lot more guests than usual because everyone wanted to take a look at me, the foreigner.
"Don't you get a lot of tourists then?" I asked her.
"Well, once we had a bunch from the capital, but they didn't stay long. Mum doesn't like to have too many people here," said the young girl.
"But she must like the business?" I insisted.
"She wants to make a little money to pay for our education, but she doesn't want too many people to come. She says when we get electricity there'll be many more tourists and she doesn't want that. She says it's bad."

When the villagers left and took the rowdiness with them, El Capitan lay deserted once again and the sand was littered with bottles, cigarette butts and fishbone. The dogs were scavenging for pieces of leftover fish with their noses in the sand. Dona Selsa lit a paraffin lamp and sat down at one of the tables to count her money. The girls left one by one after a quiet chat with their mum who handed over carefully folded notes. I watched their father row them across the river, until I could see no more, only hear the splashing of the rows as they broke the surface of the black water. Dona Selsa murmured something and came over to my hammock, cigarettes in hand. We smoked in silence until her husband pulled up the rowing boat and returned to us. When she bossed him around about something or other, he playfully flicked the lit cigarette from her mouth and they laughed when it broke in half. While he cleaned up, she went to lie in the hammock beside mine. She put a pair of huge glasses on the tip of her nose and unfolded an old newspaper in front of her face. The fact that the paper was up side down was of no concern to her.

The girls returned only a couple of days later, in the middle of the week. This time they wore their best clothes because they were going to a wedding in the village and they offered to take me. My hair was in knots, I had sand all over my body and nothing good to wear, but one of the girls offered to apply make-up. We went into Dona Selsa's hut where she said there was a mirror we could use. As I was sitting on the ground in front of the mirror I noticed a small table with its legs burrowed deep into the sand in the corner of the hut. The table had been made into a shrine with a candle burning in front of an enlarged photograph of a man and a dozen figures of Virgin Maria in cheap plastic. It was one of those theatrical portraits that Mexicans love with an artificial background and various props surrounding the person. It was plain to see that the theme of the sea had seeped into the photographer's mind because gazing out of the photograph was the brown, serious-looking face of a man on a sailing boat. He was wearing a sailing cap and a blue marine costume a shade darker than the cloudless sky behind him.

Dona Selsa's husband took us over the river and we walked along a dirt road into the village. I barely recognised it although it was the same way I had arrived only some days ago. The girls bought soft drinks at the drinking stalls along the way and let themselves be admired by the drinkers who congregated there. I asked one of the vendors for a beer, but he shook his head and gave me a plastic bag with a clear liquid in it that burned my throat: mescal.

In the middle of the town square sat the bride in white looking as if she would burst into tears any minute. The bride sat against a tableau of clouds and thunder on a throne that was meant to look like it came straight out of the ocean. A large sheet of blue silk had been placed underneath her and children on either side were shaking it to make it look like waves slapping against her gown. There was a line of people queued up to pay their respects. I joylessly danced a couple of numbers of salsa with some of the village men. The mescal tasted inoffensive enough as it settled inside my skull like cotton wool. "The sea is everywhere," I thought as I watched the bride sink and rise in front of me.

Rather than wake up Dona Selsa’s husband who was crouched down and asleep in his boat, I swam across the river. It was only when I had got half-way between the mainland and El Capitan that I realised I couldn't tell what direction I was going. It was as if I was swimming away from the other side and out towards the ocean into nothingness. I panicked and stayed in one place, kicking my legs frantically to keep myself afloat. Then something long and slimy wound itself around my ankle and I yelled out. A voice called from the dark and I saw a small flicker of light ahead of me. I swam as fast as I could until I noticed that the light was coming from Dona Selsa's cigarette.

Dona Selsa later said that she heard my splashing and panting long before I had reached the beach. She called me a fool and a daredevil. Didn't I know there were crocodiles and drunken villagers around? She made me take my wet clothes off and wrap myself in blankets while she continued to scold me. She only paused to ask, "Where are you from, child?" as if the thought had just occurred to her that I wasn't a local because a local would never do something that silly.
I didn't know what to say. I thought about Mamma and Pappa. How could I explain to her where home was? How would she understand? What would the North mean to her?
"Oh, from far away," I said warily.
"From the city?" she queried.
I pointed to the ocean and further beyond to where the ocean and the sky meet, "from over there."
"But where's your home?" she wanted to know with the insistence of someone for whom home is everything.
"On the other side of the ocean," I specified.
She looked at me with amazement. Her eyes filled with tears and that's when she told me about the man in the photograph.

"One day," she began, "tough men from Mexico City came to the village. They liked my son. They made jokes with him and he laughed. He was just a village boy. He laughed at everything they said and in return they gave him drugs, made him feel like them, like city boys. Then one night, it was a night just like this after a fiesta in the village, he disappeared. My son walked straight there," she indicated with a nod behind her towards the ocean, "and he never came back."
I watched her lips move and the tears welling up in her eyes. I turned to look out at the black ocean to which I had only moments ago pointed. I wanted to curse it, hate it, but then I realised I had only myself to curse – my cruel, careless words. What did I know about what lay on the other side? What did I know about lighting a candle for my dead son? About keeping hope alive?
Dona Selsa pointed first at me and then at the photograph of her son and when she spoke, her face was turned to the ocean, the enemy.
"Now I know he must still be alive somewhere," she tenderly touched my cheek with the palm of her hand.