The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [59]
I called Gabriel. “Hey, what’s the name of that place in Uruguay? I think you’re right, I need to go away and think.”
Part III
twenty
It took pretty much a whole day to get there. I took a midnight ferry across the Río de la Plata, the brown water transformed by night and the movement of the boat into a black sheet scattered continuously with white diamonds. We arrived at three in the morning in the port of Colonia. Then a six-hour bus drive across Uruguay into the dawn. It was a small country—I’d looked it up—roughly the size of my home state, Washington.
I was sitting in the very front of the bus and watched the sun come up through the slanted windshield. The landscape was soft and green, with reddish roads, stands of eucalyptus, comforting clumps of sheep. Just looking out at it made me feel quieter. I had my iPod on and drifted in and out of sleep. Finally, we pulled in at an outpost where there were several jeeps parked around a wooden ticket booth. After I waited for an hour or so, a jeep took me and a few other passengers across the dunes to the fishing village that was my destination.
I was glad to get away, to have my mind filled with new impressions. I made a point of not thinking about the things I’d come away to think about, at least not at first. I wanted to flood my mind with this other world, so that by the time I did think of them, it would be a different mind thinking.
As Gabriel had said, there was no running water or electricity here. I had a little wooden cabin set back from the beach, a bucket, a well. During the day, I wandered down to the beach. The sand was packed hard. The waves were long. At certain points, they looked especially turbulent, as if currents were meeting, and could suck you right down. There were people here and there, not many. I walked along. A woman was selling crushed whale bones in little vials, which she claimed were aphrodisiacs. In the distance were high dunes, scaling, plunging. Every now and then, a dark tiny figure appeared on top of one of them, looked out, paused and then started to descend, stick-like legs sinking deep into the sand. There were dolphins in the water. Farther along were seal carcasses washed up on the shore, sometimes just the bones, sometimes the whole body, giving off a putrid smell.
Back in my cabin, I lay down on the floor. Sometimes when I lay there, I felt a sensation in my chest, a sort of pressing feeling. It was oddly soothing, as if there were a hand resting there. Occasionally, I could summon the feeling, usually not. But if the feeling was there and I kept my awareness on the spot, the sensation grew. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it felt nice.
The days melted into one another. I began waking up much earlier than I ever would. In the early mornings, the sky was a deep crazy pink. I thought about things I wouldn’t have thought about otherwise, the way the water curves down the drain in one direction in the northern hemisphere and in another in the south. Consequently, rivers also carve different paths, the high bank on one side in the north, on the other in the south.
I noticed the way the long grasses, swirling in the wind, left their own form of hieroglyphics, grass writing, circles in the sand. I stared down at the imprints left by tidal streams, those wavy patterns, like the form of the branches of trees, the shape of neurons, blood vessels, the shape of everything. From a certain spot on the dunes, you could see the sun and moon at the same time. I remembered things I had learned years ago. Sand actually consists of sea shells crushed tiny. Tides are the moon pulling water toward itself. To this day, no one understands why.
It’s true that sometimes when staring at a tidal imprint in the sand, Leonarda in her various incarnations would come into my mind. At times I felt revulsion, especially when