Photo by Sebastián Velásquez on Unsplash
THALASSOPHILIA, n.
/θə.læ.soʊˈfɪ.ljə/
A morbid, compulsive interest or preoccupation toward the sea.
Being a middle child has its perks.
For one, your older brother gets the brunt of the housework. No one expects anything from you. And you can walk around the beach long after nightfall and have nobody notice. There is nothing like the feeling of cold sand beneath your soles, of the million bright-eyed stars, the merging of the sky and the sea, the soft winds like little ghiblis, the secret colors of lightless fish: I have been chasing that sensation all my life.
I don’t know exactly when I started to avoid going home, but it must have been after Perlita was born. By the time she learned to speak, she was already acquainted with this habit of mine and would beg me to stay, stay and entertain her instead. Sometimes I’d listen. Like deserts, beaches get cold at night — at least the ones in Punta do — but I was never bothered by that. I would wade into the water, which was warmer than the sand, and feel my body split in two as if refracted by the very sea. I would feel the sizzle of saltwater on my skin and the violent gasp of the air all at once, speak and hear the sound reach the water and make ripples, then felt by my lower body. The little fish would brush up against my legs with a human vigor that I knew from nowhere else. The algae would sway to the tide, and I would follow.
I would come home clothed in a thick coat of clumped sand and slowly wash it off with our hose. The shriek of the water was ear-piercing for me, but somehow appeared imperceptible for everyone else. I would enter through the back door, which we always kept unlocked, and return to life, return to Perlita and to Diego and to my old man and the old woman and to the forever-flickering lights of the living room and to the spiders that lived in the corners of our bedroom, which, coincidentally, were also named Perla, José Luis, Diego, Matías, and Soledad.
I suppose I’ve never told you my name, old friend. I go by José now, both because it’s more professional and because it’s more anonymous. There are three million Josés and maybe three thousand José Luises — I do hope that you understand. My last name, my professional last name, is made up: I made myself forget my real surname on the beach. Changing your legal name is surprisingly easy, it’s only troublesome because it takes a long time. Capital bureaucracy, you know? Of course you do. We are the bureaucracy, my friend. But you don’t need me to tell you that.
I’ll brew us some mate, ‘kay? No sugar.
⁂
Foaming, boiling grass, the forest in a gourd, smoke and rot, greenness.
What I’m saying, my friend, is that I’ve always been an adept liar. It might be my only skill: it’s certainly the only thing I’ve ever done to make a living. My old man’s job was not the most consistent, you see, and in the summer, when tourists would turn the beaches into writhing clumps of bodies and booze, he would make much more than he did for the rest of the year. Of course, Punta del Este’s economy is all like that — three months on, nine off — but it meant that whatever we made in the summer had to last for the entire year.
So when I turned thirteen and realized that I, too, could help my family out, I jumped on the opportunity. First it was pickpocketing, but that didn’t last for very long: it left a sour taste in my mouth, like rotting or pickled cod. I realized that the only way forward was to dive into the pool of bodies, of foreigners, of endless money. At night, I would fill bags with shells, sand dollars, anything that was visible in the white light of the moon. The next morning, I would walk to the beach and offer up a precious little gem of mine to some adult. I quickly figured out that the gringos, and the yanks in particular, were the most gullible. You could easily tell them apart because they’d wear ridiculous, tacky outfits, and because their skin was paler than the sand.
I would simply walk up to them, look up with that pitiable expression that Perlita had imprinted upon me, and offer them a shell. Almost all of them would give me something in return, especially after I learned some French and English words. Please, I’d say, s’il vous plaît. J’ai quatre frères et trois sœurs. We can’t afford clothes. My thanks were the most emphatic, probably because they were genuine. My friend, I never felt bad, not for a second. Their euros and dollars were more valuable than anything else I could get my hands on, much more valuable than anything my old man ever caught. And they had thousands of them.
My old man wasn’t dumb, of course. He would accept the money without question and convert it to pesos himself. Whatever he needed to save, though, he’d keep as dollars, stashed away in a rotting wooden box in the back of the closet, clasped shut by a fresh, almost white, metal lock. Every member of the household tended, in some form or another, to the continued growth of this box, and neither I nor my siblings would dare open it, lest we unseal the worldly evils of the money within — or maybe we were just afraid of knowing how little we had. The secrets of the box brought us all closer, made us a real family. We could afford to keep more of my old man’s fish and cook it ourselves, we could afford real groceries, we could afford to take road trips to the capital. My friend, we could afford the world.
During the nine tourist-less months of empty beaches and quiet horizons, we were freer than we had ever been. The old woman — my mother — would take care of the finances, and my old man would spend his days fishing, not for money but for pleasure. Perlita would study and read for hours on end; old, yellowed books passed down the family tree, books she borrowed from school or from her friends, books I stole for her. As for Diego, he had long, busy days at the academy, and on Sundays he had his matches, which we’d all watch from right outside the fenced field. Out of the three of us, it was me who was wasting the most time learning nothing at all, and my mother made sure I knew that. Scamming tourists isn’t a valuable skill, she’d scowl — if only she knew.
The old woman didn’t seem to care much for me, not after Perlita arrived. She was a perfect daughter because, after all, babies can’t say much to piss you off. I imagine that I had been a perfect son too, but I remember little of life before Perlita. I don’t know how old I was when I started changing her diapers, taking baths with her, entertaining her whenever my mother had to run some errand or other. Sometimes she’d start crying out of nowhere, and I would try everything I could think of to console her, but nothing worked: by the time the old woman returned I’d be crying too, curled up even smaller than Perlita.
The only thing the old woman wanted me for was helping her out in the kitchen. Even back when I was too small to hold a knife, she’d make me fetch it for her, grab the pots and pans from some drawer or other, get something from the pantry, which was always half-empty yet somehow still a mess. My favorite thing to make with her were empanadas. Of course, you’re supposed to use ground beef, but most of the time we used something my old man had just caught and gutted, often before it had been bled out. Common trout. Croaker. Tararira. Snook. Tarpon. Patí.
There would be a rusty spike adorning the fish’s head, and it was by this spike that I’d hang it outside to let it bleed out as my mother fetched all the ingredients, all the tools. The dough was sometimes homemade, sometimes store-bought. Tomatoes, onions, wild garlic, oregano and paprika, boiled eggs. No olives (my old man hated olives). Fish tend to be easy to overcook, so we’d only fry the filling for five minutes, five minutes that I would time in my head and almost always nail. My favorite part, though, was crimping the dough; wetting my hands as my mother dropped a little ball of fish and vegetables atop the cut-out rounds, folding the paper-thin dough upon itself over and over to form those ridges that resemble waves. The smell of the fish and the paprika would fill my lungs as I worked, and I’d have to wet my hands again and again, as the thin film of water on my fingers evaporated almost instantly. The old woman would fill a pot with oil, then drop each empanada in, one by one, barehanded. I loved to watch them dance like fish upon a sea of grease, turn from pallid to golden and then to maroon. Some always came out with a few burnt spots, but that was fine: those were my favorite.
Do you, by any chance, have a lighter?
⁂
Kerosene ignites, the flame shimmers as it meets the air.
My old man saw fishing as something romantic, I think. Like hunting, only with a rod and requiring much more patience. He was far too bright to spend his days as he did, but the waves had already eroded half of him by the time that I was born and got to meet him. Seeing his job as a duty or an art was certainly an asset: he never seemed to tire of fishing, not even after weeks without a bite. He didn’t notice or care when the government made it so that you had to release the littlest fish back into the wild, because he had been doing that all his life; they were too bony to eat anyway, and likely full of mercury and other poisons.
Since I was, as the old woman put it, an “overfed, good-for-nothing wastrel,” my old man took it upon himself to pass his skills down to me, as I imagine his father had done for him. Whenever he’d take me fishing, Diego would be there, too, but our unspoken understanding was that he would become much more than a fisherman. Besides, he was quite bad at it, which made me appear a bit better in comparison. I memorized my old man’s smile as he patted my back and identified whatever I had just reeled in. I knew the crease of his cheeks, the cuts and cracks of his lips, how his mustache would turn alongside him and sway as his expression changed. I knew nothing but that, really. Once, though, probably around mid-June of my fourteenth year, he took my brother and I out fishing, and, for the first time in years, I caught nothing at all.
We all sat upon a formation of tall crags, one rod between the three of us, one cooler to store the fish, ten spikes to knock them, bags of worms for bait. We chatted the hours away, Diego and I, talking about high school and football and mate, having little else in common. And every time it was my turn to fish, every time I cast my old man’s rod, nothing would bite. We went through all our worms that day, and none of us caught anything aside from one silverside that was too small to keep. Neither my brother nor my old man seemed particularly bothered — we had enough food, after all — but something about that day felt wrong to little me, I can’t say why. As we watched the sunset, I quietly lamented our luck, but neither of them responded, and we walked back home enveloped by a loud silence.
That night I returned to that same beach, saw the shadowy crags that looked so much like mountains and the crashing of the night-tide waves upon the rocky shore, which made a horrible shrill. I took off my shirt and swimming trunks and hung them on the nearest hook-like formation I could find, or at least the first I found that wasn’t covered in moss and algae. I started swimming. I could tell that I was far, far from the beach when I felt the harsh, windy air shift to a calmer air that smelled like nothing but salt. A lighthouse was the only thing between me and an empty, placid midnight pool, but it was far away and its light was dim and flickering. I kept on swimming.
There was no longer any sand under my feet, and as I floated I could feel the emptiness that was below me and threatened to swallow me whole, but I kept swimming. There they were, all the fish I hadn’t caught, right below me. I couldn’t see shit, of course, but I knew. Salmon, tuna, bass, swordfish and eel. Fish in innumerable colors illuminating the depths, crabs scurrying along the seafloor, precious jewels and minerals. I wanted nothing more than to grab everything that was down there and take it home, so I kept on swimming.
I’ve heard, my friend, that teenage boys have no fear of death, no fear of anything at all. Teenage boys are immortal, they say, and I certainly was, because I swam for forever and a little more feeling no exhaustion, only the bliss of salt on my skin and the knowledge of the treasures below. I kept swimming, watched the stars as they swum across their sky, reached the horizon, then drowned.
I don’t know if I ever returned.
The last time I saw my brother was only a few years after that. When he played for Deportivo, he still lived with us, but his transfer to Peñarol necessitated a move away — I was sixteen then, and he was the first of us three to leave for Montevideo. Even when he lived with us, though, we didn’t see him around the house often. When he wasn’t training, he’d be partying, and we’d only see him on the rare occasion where neither was an appealing option. It would always be a big day for us, so the old woman would make his favorite meals (with my help). After he moved out, my old man started taping Diego’s matches, and they’d light up our television all day, even when we dined: it was as if he had never left.
He stayed with us that Christmas, and he was the same as ever. Terse and a tad dull, without much to say, always nodding. He was more affectionate than before, though, and I think both Perlita and I knew that we wouldn’t see him for a long, long time after that. It was, I imagine, like one of those movie scenes where the marine says goodbye to his family, all teary-eyed, saying he’ll return and knowing he won’t, only Diego’s war was about fame, women, and money. Perla was bright, very bright, my friend, more than the both of us combined: of course she knew that she wouldn’t see him for many years, that she’d follow him to Montevideo, that she too would become somebody, even if she didn’t yet know who. She knew that I too would be gone before next Christmas, so her hugs were wet with tears.
So I dropped out of high school: there was nothing left for me there, aside from staring out the window at the sea-blue sky, and the whole thing felt like a tedious exercise in nothingness. Not that I learned nothing — just that I didn’t care much for what I did learn, and never found a use for any of it. If not for Perlita, I’d wager that something in my old man’s genes made him predisposed to create lazy, uneducated sons of bitches with hearts full of luck. But as it turns out, my friend, it’s quite easy to forge a degree if you know what you’re doing. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had graduated, but I always come to the same conclusion: every path leads to this very place.
After I dropped out, it didn’t take me too long to secure a job and a place to stay. The old woman received the news with relief, but my old man was quite proud. Only seventeen and already independent, he’d boast, as if I was the first to leave the house still a boy. It had been a particularly bad year, economically speaking — I’m sure you remember — so my feat was even more impressive, considering that I had no skills at all. Neither the job nor the apartment were particularly luxurious, but they were good enough, and I wanted to make something of myself.
The day I left was nothing special. I had been visiting my favorite beaches nightly, waving goodbye to every fish and every seagull and every star in the sky, and I made sure that they’d all be fine without me. Neither my parents nor Perlita needed my help anymore. So while my goodbyes were, I’m sure, long and elaborate, my heart was already in Montevideo. All I remember is the image of my sister’s eyes as she looked up at me, seeming the size of dinner plates. Her irises were brown, the rich, dark brown of good coffee, and her expression was sour and puckered.
I love you too, Perlita, I said as I held her tight against me. Be good for Mom. Not that she needed the reminder, meek and kind-hearted as she was. I felt an urge to cry, which only strengthened the more I looked into her wet eyes, but all I did was close mine and hold her tighter. Eventually, I had to leave. I’ll see you soon, Perlita, I said.
As for the trip itself, it was uneventful; nothing but a thick blur of greens that turned into grays as I felt the seawater on my body evaporate for the very first time and readied for it to never return. Come, come — I have another pack, if you’d like.
⁂
Smoke floats like rainclouds, wisps like sparks, stained paper curls.
The Milo Beretta Building, it was called. Apt. 201, 6525 Lezica Ave., 12500, Montevideo, Montevideo. Separated from the coast by 9.41 kilometers of tar and concrete.
Do you know Milo Beretta, my friend? He was a painter, a landscape painter. The building, which was otherwise devoid of any art, had a replica of one of his paintings hung up in the atrium: “Sunset,” it was called, and it was maybe the only thing about that place I liked. I had never seen a sky so golden, a sea so teal, and I wondered what in the eye of the artist would make such colors manifest. I always wanted to buy that painting — I might own it now, but I don’t remember. At the time, the only thing occupying my mind was money, or rather, my lack of it. I was a clerk at a local inn, but I was made obsolete rather quickly, and left with still nothing to my name. It took me months to find another job, months I spent pickpocketing, shoplifting, stealing, and panhandling to get by. Months where the only thing I’d eat was canned tuna, which turned my stomach but was cheap and reminded me a little of the ocean. Then I became a bouncer at a nearby nightclub, then a used car salesman, then a petty thief again.
I can only count myself lucky; lucky to never have pissed off the wrong cop, lucky to have lived in the times where poverty meant hunger rather than death, lucky to be alive still. I must have been about twenty when I decided to leave the Milo Beretta Building and find employment somewhere else. Every peso I saved would help me encroach upon Montevideo, beautiful Montevideo, move further and further in, past the glass walls and wire fences that split the haves and the have-nots, that separated me from myself. Hm … would you like to get some fresh air? Stretch our legs a little, you know. Besides, I have a lot to tell you still.
⁂
Sharp, bladed air, wind laced with minerals, salt in the rain.
I did manage, eventually, to make it closer to the center of the capital, to the old city and to the bay. I lived in Buceo for a good few years, and I was only a short walk from the local port — it was a walk I made often, up and down the sloping, hilly streets, to sit on the pier and watch the sun set and shine upon the still and sweet waters of the river. The little bay on which the port was built was closed off by concrete walls, leaving only a thin mouth through which ships entered and left. There was little movement, though: almost every boat parked there was a recreational sailboat, most of which belonged to a local academy, and as such went unused almost every day.
There were sloops and catamarans, as well as some single-occupant motorboats, all white as marble and distinguishable only by their tattered flags and washed-out names. Orange buoys filled the rest of the surface, which was blotted black by the shadows of everything upon it, and hardly looked like a pleasant place to fish or swim. Few ships would ever enter or exit the bay, and those that left would invariably return within the hour, having only been borrowed to sail or fish or race just outside the walls of the port. If I closed my eyes and listened to the pulse of the sea, it could pass as home, but I knew it was nothing of the sort.
It was a sad sight, my friend, such a beautiful bay choked by concrete and filled beyond capacity with sleeping ships. Hardly worthy of the imagination. I worked at one of the nearby hotels for a while, till I was finally transferred to their Cerro location, a few blocks from the cemetery and from the park, but, more importantly, less than a kilometer from Montevideo Bay. That was a walk I made every day, too, and a walk I’ve made every day since. Every moment I wasn’t working, eating, or sleeping, I spent at the beach. Here, there was always movement, always a ship treading upon the horizon, another sailing away, a third coming home, its flag waving with pride.
The beach that I frequented then — the one farthest from here, I think — was, in fact, the closest to where the Graf Spee sank, or rather was scuttled. I never learned what such a battleship would have looked like, but I imagine it was quite similar to the cruise-sized commercial vessels that left the port every day. I’ve heard that they still haven’t salvaged the ship, which makes sense, because there’s no reason to do so aside from curiosity. Another thing I’ve heard is that the captain shot himself three days later, which just makes me wonder why he didn’t just go down with the ship in the first place.
Of course, almost all of our industry goes through this port, and went through it back then, too. It was through Montevideo Bay that foreign ships would enter Uruguay, and through it all our ships would exit, taking with them meats, leathers, fish, wool, soy sauce, and our flag. Hundreds if not thousands of brightly-dyed plastic cargo boxes would pass by me, and often the crewmen who carried those boxes would appear on the beaches and in the bars, smelling of salt and sweat. Never had I seen a collection of people so eclectic, not even in Punta — each day I’d see hundreds of new faces, almost all with the vacant eyes of those hypnotized by the sea.
The hotel where I worked had one of those tacky where’re-you-from maps where visitors would place pins on their hometowns, though, more often than not, the pins came from drunk and bored hotel staff. Oh, how they loved to talk about their places of origin. If you couldn’t tell by the flag of their ships, they’d make sure you knew that they were Yanks or Germans or whatever else, that they came from a moneyed nation, that they were better than you. I could talk for hours, my friend, about the things that our customers did there. I could tell you about the University boys that trashed their rooms, or the old, saggy creeps that harassed our waitresses with broken Spanish, or the gringos in suits whose voices could be heard from the hallway as they berated their wives or their children, or —
I digress.
I worked at that hotel for many years: it was a decent place, and the pay was decent, too. I had leased the cheapest apartment I could find, right beside the cemetery. I suppose that’s why it was as cheap as it was, because it was otherwise a respectable and spacious place, at least for my standards at the time. Of course, there is no such thing as a ghost, so it was a solid proposition. My neighbors, both within that building and without, were mostly retirees from deep within the country, people who spent their days at the cemetery or at the park, or people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. The only thing that building lacked, in my mind, was a view of the sea and a Beretta.
I rapidly settled into a routine: getting up early to walk to the beach and back, working for four hours, eating, working again until the evening, walking home, sleeping. I checked my mailbox every weekend, filled out whatever forms were in there, and walked up to Apt. 316, where I lived. So you’ll imagine my shock, my friend, when I saw an envelope addressed to me and claiming to come from Italy. Italy! I had no idea what the Italians wanted from me — for a second, I thought I might have offended their consulate, who was, for all I knew, a guest at our hotel. I was never taught the proper etiquette to deal with those people, you see, and I suppose that my demeanor might not have been very pleasing to them. Inside the envelope was a hand-written letter, and, although I didn’t recognize the name, I did recognize my brother’s handwriting, shoddy as it was. I was quite impressed that they had sent the letter to the correct address: as far as I was aware, neither my parents nor Diego knew where I lived, so they must have gotten help from the post office or something like that. I suppose three thousand José Luises isn’t a lot. Anyhow, it was accompanied by a thick wad of European bills, which, the letter claimed, came from his first big paycheck after leaving Peñarol, and totaled ten thousand euro. At our current exchange rate, how much would that be?
Right. And the peso was worth less back then, so let’s say it would have been somewhere around 5,000,000. The first thing I did was write a succinct response. Thank you, it read, from Lucho. I wondered if he had sent equivalent sums to everybody else. I was aware that footballers’ paychecks were often huge, yes, but twenty million pesos? And that was only the money he’d set aside and sent home! I placed my response into a new envelope, which I kept at my desk for a few days. Every morning, I’d consult the ships that passed by as I visited Montevideo Bay. The letter occupied my mind at work, too, and my performance suffered. It felt wrong, somehow — I suppose something in me, some nagging voice, told me that I hadn’t earned that money, that it therefore couldn’t belong to me. Eventually, I placed the money into that same envelope and sealed it, then sent it back.
I wondered what my parents would do with Diego’s gift. I wasn’t sure whether they’d hide it away in their safe or display the letter and the money as another souvenir of their son’s success. Would he have sent one letter home, or two? And what about Perlita? The last time I saw her, she was about to start university, so I imagined that those 5,000,000 pesos would be quite useful for her. Somehow, I was certain that she would keep the money and send back a letter much more eloquent, much more gracious than mine could ever be.
Shortly after all this, I decided to change my name. It took me a few months to decide on a new surname: eventually, I chose Clemente, having seen it a few times in our guest list. It had a foreign sound to it, but not enough to be incongruous, and it was short and easy to remember. The new name meant I needed a new job, and my connections and experience made it easier to get a job at one of the more prestigious hotels — they also took care of housing. There was so much paperwork, so much red tape … but, eventually, I was no longer me. I was José Clemente.
Nice name, eh?
⁂
Ouroboros roundabouts, streets that flow like rivers.
Finally, we have reached the point where our stories intersect. It was inevitable that of all the glitterati I met, at least one would become a friend. But you didn’t make it easy, did you, you old sack of shit? You came in, I noted your wear — maroon suit, textured white shirt, red tie, tidy beard, hands in pockets — and put you down on the guest list. There was a line, so I waved to send you off to your room, then attended to the next person. Black suit, light-blue tie, lighter-still blue shirt, and so on. The day went on as usual; you were one of sixteen guests to wear a maroon suit that day, one of seven to eat both lunch and dinner at the attached restaurant, and, the next morning, one of eighty-three guests to come in for complimentary breakfast. I was helping out around the kitchen, and, busy as they were, I offered to bring some orders to their respective customers. I set a few plates and cups upon your table, then heard a shout of garçon as I walked away, maybe the first time I had heard that word spoken aloud after a decade in Montevideo. The kitchen did fuck up your order, yes, but that was on whoever wrote it down, not on me, so I do remember feeling that your anger was unjustified, or at the very least misdirected.
And that was that, of course, until the very next morning, when I sat on my favorite bench near Montevideo Bay — a bench much like this one, in fact — and saw you on the beach, too, wearing a beige linen suit as if it were a costume. I still don’t know why you walked over to me and introduced yourself. I don’t think I’ll ever know. I do know why I responded: you were blocking my view of the sun and the sea, and I wanted you out of my way. Do you remember our first conversation, my friend? Probably not, but it’s etched in my memory, so I suppose I can remind you of it.
You told me your name, your hyphenated, over-long, Englishman’s name, and said that you were a “financial advisor.” So I asked you to explain what that meant, and your response elicited a thin laugh. Like Robin Hood, only I keep the money I take for myself, I think you said, you understand? Of course I understand, my friend. Then you told me that you were there for a conference, but planning to move to Montevideo in the future due to the great financial prospects of the city. I didn’t know that our little capital was at all noteworthy, economically speaking. Such serendipity, I thought. Then you handed me a business card before vanishing into the shadowy streets of the city. I thought it was an odd interaction, but I didn’t think much of it. I had to get back to work.
That night, me and a few coworkers went to a local bar. I wasn’t a drinker at all, but I promised to go with them, and, besides, I enjoyed their company. The lights came in a harsh violet tone that accentuated the shadows of the place — intentionally, I’m sure — and made the liquor bottles behind the bar glisten as if they were made of silver. I was having a good time, half-listening to the music and to the voices around me, exchanging the occasional word with a coworker or with the barkeep. I ordered a double shot of espresso. After a while (it could have been three hours or thirty minutes), everybody I had come with was far too drunk to carry on a real conversation, and I could see in the barkeep’s eyes that he was exhausted, so I turned to the woman next to me. She was maybe a decade younger than me, quite short, with dark-brown hair and similarly dark eyes. Her skin was quite pale, like a foreigner’s, but aside from that, she didn’t look the part. Anyhow, I introduced myself:
“My name’s José Clemente. It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
“Perla. Perla Lozano.”
“I see. You from around here?”
“From Montevideo? No, no. But I’ve been living here for a while.”
Don’t worry, my friend, I won’t bore you with the details. We hit it off and talked for a good while — she asked me why I was drinking coffee, and I made up some long-winded explanation about my family’s history of alcoholism. To be truthful, I just don’t care for the taste of booze. Eventually, the conversation shifted to work. I told her that I was a hotel clerk, pointing to my coworkers, who were, by that point, well and truly wasted. She let out a quiet laugh and told me that she was a researcher at the University of the Republic, which was 3.61 kilometers from the Bay. From the sound of it, it was quite the prestigious position, and as she spoke about her most recent work, isolating causal bacteria for a then-unidentified outbreak, I could see a glimmer of pride in her eyes. I nodded as if I understood the intricacies of her work, but, to tell you the truth, I felt quite stupid that night. I guess that’s why people drink in the first place …
When I returned to work the next morning, I couldn’t shake that feeling of smallness. It was sort of like a hangover, only it was psychological in nature, and refused to go away even as the days passed. I would pass the time by observing the guests’ outfits, as always, but as I did so I felt overcome with jealousy. I returned to the bar the following night, but she wasn’t there, so I went to the beach instead — there, I felt too anxious to sleep, and remained awake through the night. I watched the sun rise over sleepy Montevideo and knew that I had to change something, anything.
I decided that contacting you would be the way to go: whatever your business was, it certainly sounded easier than out-and-out robbery and much more lucrative than being a hotel clerk could ever be. It was your secretary that picked up the phone, and I asked her two things — when you would be moving your business to Montevideo, and whether there were any open positions for a young, ambitious financier such as myself. Of course, I had no real experience in the field, but I had a knack for such things, so I didn’t feel like I was lying about my credentials: I was only embellishing them.
Let’s sit down, shall we? My legs hurt …
What was it that convinced you to hire me, anyway? You sure you weren’t just bored?
⁂
Wet wood, chipped paint, brine scoured chassis.
Not to say that I don’t appreciate the opportunity, my friend. I do. I’m indebted to you, really, which is why I’m telling you all this in the first place. I’d like to thank you for your patience, too: I know I’m not easy to work with. Hopefully it was a good investment.
I remember my first client, his round cheeks, beady eyes, and ill-fitting suit, alongside a portfolio valued at over a hundred million pesos. You know as well as I do that he had no chance of doing anything worthwhile with all that money tucked away in empty vacation homes and meaningless stocks, so the slices I took grew as I learned your work. As you said — like Robin Hood. If I remember correctly, my first title was “Junior Associate,” no? Right. Then came “Associate” and “Junior Investment Manager” and “Estate Manager” and “Certified Public Accountant” and “Wealth Manager” and “Senior Private Wealth Advisor” and then, finally, “Vice-Chief Financial Officer.”
After a few raises, I had earned enough to move to a nicer place; a house in the outskirts of Ciudad Vieja, close to the Buquebus dock and mere steps from the port, closer to the homes of the wealthy and to our offices. I believe that’s when we started to meet up for lunches and dinners, just the two of us. Like brothers.
Other than that, I never got along with my coworkers, and didn’t make much of a fuss either way. I always pictured our work as a game of chess, and myself as a grandmaster of putting myself into the right positions and reaping my due compensation. Aside from the house, though, and the expenses related to it, I used very little of what I made. I never acquired a taste for high-caliber wines or for expensive ingredients, never had the eye for fine paintings and sculptures. My only frivolous expenses were a few small paintings, mostly replicas, football kits, and empanada shells from the grocery store, the expensive kind. In that sense, I suppose I’m no better than the misers, eh?
The most I ever spent was on a vacation in Europe, which I took with a client. We wrote it off as a business expense — a trick you taught me — and spent a week in Barcelona and another in Milan, doing everything but business. I was embroiled in the nightly festivals of European cities: the drunken fights and dances, the women, the ever-loudening music. I found this excess, this debauchery deeply fascinating. I couldn’t hope to understand or tolerate the Mediterranean weather; it was mid-summer in the northern hemisphere, so my body and mind expected winter, and I felt trapped, suffocated by the heat.
I spent most of my days there like many tourists do, walking around historic boulevards, on Roman roads, walking until my legs gave out. I saw, with my own two eyes, the ruins of ancient Rome and of the Tuscans, which resembled the half-built skyscrapers that populate Montevideo. At night, I’d rest my legs by lounging on the beach, counting the stars and watching the fish. Not to say that I was alone — both cities seemed even busier at night, and they never turned their lights off. The street lamps were like a thousand little suns, the cars like screeching seagulls. I tried to swim into the quiet Mediterranean, but the water was too still and too sweet. It seemed, somehow, devoid of life, and the sea’s surface reflected every light that touched it like a blinding mirror. And as I returned to the hotel, I noticed a few gray hairs, made moon-white by the streetlights.
I came back to Montevideo with nothing to report. I can’t remember how long ago that was, but I’m sure you could find the date of my return somewhere in the company records. I’m quite diligent when it comes to recording such things. From then on, I didn’t leave the country again, aside from a few smoke breaks in Buenos Aires, and kept a cordial distance with all my clients. On occasion, a pang of light in my vision would temporarily blind me, as if I had just looked the sun straight in the eye.
And even after all these years, I still feel dizzy at the sight of the numbers in our clients’ portfolios, numbers that they’d cite as nonchalantly as you or I would refer to the weather. I couldn’t — and still can’t — stop that dumb old habit of mine, of seeing a lavish building and imagining it empty and dark, under the jurisdiction of someone who had never taken a step in it. Someone who never would.
And then, I realized what I had been saving my money for all this time.
There’s a beautiful beach-side home in Punta del Este, you see. It’s near Piriápolis and close to the city center, and instead of a trimmed-grass front yard or a marble patio, the front door opens to an expanse of sand and sea. Its walls are pure marble, and shine like glitter under the summer sun. You can climb onto the roof and watch the sun set from there, watch its oranges and purples splatter onto the canvas of the sea, see the rippling tides and the thick, foaming waves, observe the tango of the stars and the moon. The perfume of salt and algae reaches through the windows and fills each and every room. Outside, there’s a hammock, hung between two lonely trees, and its ropes weave together to form an intricate, multicolored design. It sways gently with the wind.
I bought that house, my friend, and a one-way bus ticket, from the station in Ciudad Vieja to the one in Punta. The cash in my suitcase should be enough to last me twenty, thirty years, if I’m frugal about it. Everything else has been converted to dollars and left behind. My safe has been left ajar, and inside it is all the paperwork for the old house, which, as far as I’m aware, is in order. There’s a spare set of keys hidden under the far-left corner of the hedge. The shrubs obscure it, but if you poke around in there, you’ll find it in no time.
As for the main set of keys, here it is. The one with the octagonal bow opens the basement door, and the one with the square bow is for the car. The circular key opens the front door.