Another Shore

Alma Tetto
Work in progress (2021)

Deeper and deeper into the dream.

1. In the beginning //
   
   
2. A hillside patio in San Agustinillo: I sit in the shade looking out from my vista. Striped yellow & green fronds climb the silk cotton tree with pods bursting at the seams, the sea in the distance. The same sea— is it ever the same sea? Is it possible for a sea to remain itself? Its waters are constantly reconfigured, rearranged, changed. Even the sea isn’t eternal.


3. Only a few years have passed since we were here together, on this stretch of the Pacific coast, languishing for a week in a tiny concrete cabin along a dirt road near Casa Wabi. We were in the throws of nascent marital bliss, our insides turned outward, our hearts burst open like the pods on the trees. We were reborn, something of the ritual of ceremony having opened us to some new dimension—higher or deeper, or both. We both felt it so viscerally, that portal. We were like children, our eyes open to the world, curious and free.
   
   In those days we spent our mornings making love with the slatted windows folded open to the sacred, spindly tree branching wide & perfect (as if it was made for us, from us, for that very moment). A small vintage metal fan turned up all the way to keep the mosquitos from touching down on our sweaty sticky bodies. The sea was at a near distance, some hundred meters, but we could hear no waves—only the loud hum of the fan and rhythmic lull of cicadas in the hot sun and a new kind of bird song. We alternated positions, you on top and then me, both came again and again until we finally climbed down those beautiful alternating concrete stairs down to the kitchen. I kept you on my skin in the mornings as I prepared breakfast: fresh tortillas, stringy Oaxacan cheese, sliced cold radishes, something ground in the molcajete. You’d admire the shape of my silhouette in my transparent cotton smock as I stood over the counter cooking, grab my hips from behind, slowly caress and kiss the back of my neck, your breath soft and gentle and hot. We’d put on borrowed straw hats and wander over to Hotel Escondido before the sun burned too brightly, order our first round of mezcal. Nothing to do but you.


4. Everything was sacred in those days. Those days with you.
   
   
5. The Oaxacan sun bleached my fine hair, tanned my fair skin, deepened my eyes. We swam nude in the small concrete pool in the late afternoons. I posted silly things like, When you don’t want to get out of bed (this as a caption to a post of our lofted postnuptial bed in that small cabin on an edge of the jungle).  
   
   
6. Persephone on the banks of Lago di Pergusa, frolicking among the narcissi. At navel, a center.
   
   
7. Venture inward from an edge and you meet the other side.
   
   
8. Lucia and I drive along the coast here to avoid that same insufferable midday sun. The sun must be the same sun, no? We claim we are on an adventure. But where are we going, she inquires. I had a loose idea that we might drive down to Puerto Angel for lunch, and I am steering our rented pearly white Nissan in that direction. I see eagles spiraling above us—circumambulating, unmissable. I’m following the eagles, I say. She begins to watch out the window with me, pointing out each one she sees. It becomes a game. Together, we speculate over the many which ways they might be pointing us. I recall the one that had dipped down low over our car the day before. We had made what felt like eye-contact, the eagle and I.
   
   
9. We are led to a series of tiny coves, three that glisten stark blue-green in the intense early afternoon light. A man with dark skin and bright eyes offers us parking for the day for 100 pesos. We follow him to a lot—a single spot on a steep dirt hill. I sense a gentle nature, something genuine and soft. I thank him, ask him his name. Oscar. I’m Alma and this is Lucia. Please, come see—he waves us to follow him up another hill, wants to show us the small bar he runs with his family situated above one of the coves. It is a small wooden shack with a simple, clean kempt wooden rail overlooking the bright coral bay below. A source of pride, this sort of home  open to strangers, perched above the beautiful mother sea. He makes a kind introduction to his brother whose head is hung to one side, mouth agape. The brother is quite far gone, sleeping but wide awake.


10. Down by the bay, we set ourselves up at a hollow plastic table under a faded red branded umbrella in the sand. Lucia runs wildly toward the shore, seduced by the palm-sized oyster shells shining in the sunlight where the tide has receded. They seduce me too—their rough edges bright pink and purple so distinctly particular to place, their pearly undersides glistening like the sea itself—treasures. I step toward the gentle waves, still wearing a loose crisp linen blouse to protect my sunburnt shoulders. I sink into the brisk water, feel it soaking my shirt. I take in the vividness of its color, the strumming vitality the shore invokes in me. I look up to see a group of eagles on the hillside near the bay. I turn to see Oscar swimming with family nearby—he is smiling at me. Happy? he asks. Eagles, I say, pointing above us. He nods. Messengers, I say reciprocating his smile. He nods, looks at me with a bit more intensity—What did you say your name was, he asks. I remind him, and he nods again. We exchange one of those knowing looks.
    
    
11. We alternate dipping in the sea and sipping agua de coco in the sand, me with our daughter. I notice Corona etched into the hillside. I think of the king of beers, the strangeness & irony of that ruling image of our time. Its preconceived reign. What would you think of all this, our new era? I imagine your dismay but also your humor and lightness.
    
    
12. Float downstream, you’d say.
    
    
13. Lucia tells me she loves the coral bay, that she is happy.
    
    
14. It’s all coming to a head, here. Why here, now?  I’ve wanted to tell our story for so long. So, this is how it goes.


15. A place is thought to hold a certain intangible quality that reveals itself in visible and tangible ways. In Latin it is the genius loci, the spirit of a place. It casts its spells in its particularities—its shapes & curves of form, distinct variations of color & taste—and translates into its architectures and culture at large. The spirit of a place is felt through its physical impressions, the way it has shaped space over time.
    
    The particularities of the spirit as they relate and connect are often beyond exacting words, out of our linguistic reach. Poetry can venture to touch on this spiritual nature of a place, yet only in the metaphor. Only in images.
    
    
16. Images reach places beyond us. Point us to places we can only imagine.
    
    
17. The colors here tug on my heart strings. The particular arrangement and architecture of the organisms, the leaves & flowers, the curves of the rocks & hills: all beg me to implore them.
    
    
18. Other places I’ve felt this tug—
    
    Porto Covo—when I told you my soul was born from that earth, from that shore & those colors, shaped from that rock. You didn’t feel the same, in fact it surprised you, and the fact that you didn’t feel the same surprised and slightly bothered me.
    
    Merida—not surprising since its nearby. (Does the genius loci radiate outward, encompassing more than a concentrated point?) —Where we were married & where you died.
    
    Ragusa—the shapes of the vessels in that hillside garden at the edge of town felt like the shapes of my soul, like the Garden of Eden if Eden was already cultivated from the very beginning (impossible, I think). 
    
    Stromboli—the constant eruptions and rumbling, the bombs of my dream, deep blue of the sea, Strombolini in the distance, an ancient memory. 
    
    
19. So that tug on the soul vis-à-vis the heart perhaps isn’t exactly rare. 
    
    
20. Perhaps it is rather a thing more constant, a guiding thread. Like Ariadne and the golden string with which she guided her lover out of complex sin. 
    
    
21. Places we can only imagine. 
    
    
22. This morning we skip breakfast at the hotel, make our way to the shore. It is early, and the village is quiet, shuttered. We descend a yellow stairwell to a beachside restaurant where the small fishing boats are docked on the sand. Coffee & hot chocolate. The coffee is too stong: mas leche, por favor. I take my time with my coffee, mostly forgetting about it as I make my way through a novel: Call Me By Your Name (I wonder now, was that the last film we saw together?). Lucia is eager to pull me out toward the large rocks above the waves. I leave paper money in a woven basket covering the bill, take her hand, and allow her to lead. We pass a boat called Influenza. We climb the rocks until she’s had enough, walk along the shore’s edge. Only a few other humans are scattered within view—out on a morning stroll, swimming, fishing. We keep our eyes (& hands) mostly down toward the sand, collecting remnants of shells. The waves lap at our calves and thighs, my pants becoming heavy with water but I could care less. We alternate between arranging the shells in shapes in the sand, together, then separating to perform our own excavations. When I am alone, my mind wanders to the vivid and neutral colors of the shells, their pull on something deep inside me. I imagine I am excavating the tattered remnants of my own depths, pulled to outer edges by the tides where they might be seen at last. I marvel at the unspeakable secrets they hold. 
    
    
23. The tides are gentle, but I see the way the shells are piled at an edge, in a steep but shallow shelf. With each wave, the shelf transforms, transmorphs. Changing in a dance with the water, with my hands. With each undulation, I reach in and grab a handful to take back to the shore. 
    
    
24. We return to the hotel before the heat & rays of the sun intensify. I realize we have lost the keys. Again. The sun is at peak height and heat and I’m bursting. I am always searching for the key. 


25. I recall making a copy of an old key in Buenos Aires, one of those barrel keys that have become rare in more industrialized time. I was scolded by the artist, a character in her late sixties, who was renting Ginger and me a couple rooms in her home, that charming house I loved with the open inner courtyard where we would sit and pass around a gourd of steaming hot maté, our lips sharing a straw. Those days when I was reading Virginia Woolf and going to the Cemetaria Recoletta to write. Writing in the cemetery—something pulling me toward it. The romance of it all. 
    
    
26. I could never get very far with my notes in those days. I’d write a few striking phrases, a turning play of words. I’d mostly sit and wonder about the mystery that lay before me—always evasive, slipping away. I longed to become intimate with that which was beyond me. 
    
    
27. The Argentinian artist lived alone, renting rooms on occasion to passersby to help pay the bills. She told us of her husband who was also an artist, who had left her with only her paintbrushes and canvases in Paris when they were young. I had only my tools, she lamented. 
    
    
28. The artist and her lover had just arrived in Paris when he left her. He didn’t say goodbye.
    
    
29.   I craved expression in all of its forms, I had written in an email to Chantal & Brian in Sicily that first summer after you were gone. I longed to get lost in music, to experiment with sound and color, to paint and dance. I wanted to somehow make an image that captured a woman turning inside out.


30. C & B were on their own volcano, on residency at Sterna on Nisyros during those days. They wrote to me that they understood. They were in the midst of recording an album for their new project Petra. 


31. Petra: stone; a lost city in Jordan.


32.  I go down to reception to ask for a spare. Back in the room, we settle in—to escape the midday sun, but also I have the deep urge to write. To release what’s been swirling & building heat within me all this time.
    
    
33. The alchemic vessel of soul. A caldron within which that thick magma flows, gathers and collects in the deep, hidden chambers of being. Vents and fissures a channel for terrible & beautiful steam, releasing through hardened skin to finally erupt as bombs.
    
    A form made of ash.
    
    
34. You rarely wrote while we were together, I told Chantal the night before we left for Oaxaca. She was shocked—really? It bothered me some, but how could it—I demanded a sort of presence within you. For the time we had.


35. Building heat, putting it away in the dark of womb so that it may one day feed & serve.
    
    
36. And time, time bleeds backwards. The strange unconscious knowing of what is in store.
    
    
37. There was one poem I remember—church bells ringing in the distance, on the hillside on Micheltorena. They rang every daylight hour. You worked over such few lines for weeks, sitting sometimes in the hammock in our garden, reclining, sometimes slouched over at the narrow white breakfast nook table in our small Silverlake bungalow. Working it towards perfection. It delighted me to witness your process, the way you devoted yourself to such simplicity.
    
    
38. That little house, the first home we shared together. The place we learned our love was made pregnant.
    
    
39. We hide indoors from the midday sun, and I try to force a nap. It feels good to lounge in the middle of the day, our place perched just high enough on the hillside to catch a strong coastal breeze through the slatted folding doors. I run my fingertips along the skin on my thighs, feel the places where my edges meet, take a few long deep breaths. I close my eyes for only a moment before I have to leap up to capture some passing thought. I surrender to my restlessness, pop up again to write. 
    
    
40. I remember that Allison was here with a lover a few weeks back. She was working on her manuscript—some historical fiction about a modern witch in Los Angeles and a portal. Beach Allison was funny, she told me. She sounded inspired, on a roll. Does this shore’s genius loci call us to express our own hidden sorcery, I wonder. 


41. She told me witchcraft is the power of will. 


42. But what does the portal look like, a lover had asked her. Give me an image.


43. I realize I long to express a sort of inexpressible magic that your spirit impressed upon my being. The way your spells continue to cast their power over me. How they bring to light what might otherwise go missed & pull me somewhere deep within and so, without. 


44. While on Stromboli trying not to make too much of it, I played with my longing. The eruptions below & around me, I explored the tension between chaos & form, frenzy & containment. 


45. Stromboli had called me to it, summoned me in a dream. A dream: a portal into something else, or somewhere else, however linked.