August 20, 2010. Issue 20.

The Beach in Nicaragua

by Matthew Zanoni Müller

We rode a large rented van up through the mountains and villages where gangs of young people would shout “Gringos, gringos,” and we’d wave and keep moving. We stopped the night at an old house and drank coffee from plastic cups that a woman gave us, her hands shaking and her face puckered by age. We descended from the mountain in an old bus stuffed with people headed for the ocean and all of us became weak by the exhaust fumes, the landscape blurring through the windows and the driver singing along to his music and waving to cars he narrowly missed on the thin roads. The beach lay like a crumpled tablecloth along the walls of rock moving up to the mountains and the ocean swayed serene and friendly in the bright sun. We unpacked and ran through the sand, scrambled on the rocks and dove headlong into the warm water’s soft arms. I snuck off with a friend and we made for a large group of rocks at the bottom of a cliff. We heard a shout and turned to see one of the girls following us, begging us to wait. We smiled at each other and waited for her to join us, panting and smiling and then walked on, the three of us together, ready to see the glistening ocean from the vantage point of those dark rocks.

We ran in small spurts and pushed each other and threw sand until we came to the rocks and ran up them quickly where the waves smattered against them and threw up large curtains of white like a mother throwing her sheets to the bed. We crept closer and closer to the water and saw it pounding up a chute, a small break in the rocks, before collapsing like a colliding army into the rock. My friend turned and smiled and then ran for the chute, telling us he wanted to try to jump over. His feet left the ground and the waves channeled in and I could feel the girl’s hand tight on my arm as the water hit his feet and dragged him in. We lost his body in the white turmoil and the sky suddenly dropped closer to us and the waves became louder and the rocks hard and black. We locked eyes for a moment and then I jumped in after him. I only felt the waves rolling and turning me. I found his body, felt it struggling against mine, and I held it tight and tried to lift. Another wave came and washed us closer and I lifted and lifted him and saw his hands grappling at the rocks but they didn’t stay. We floated back down into the chute in almost a sigh of relief, giving ourselves away to the arms of the ocean, the surrender of the end.

I saw a brown form slipping down into the water and felt her arms grappling for mine. She tried to hold us, to push us back towards the rocks and another swell carried us in. I wanted to hold her away from the rocks and her thin body was slipping from mine and then we all tumbled and fell and I could feel my friend’s body above mine, lifting and lifting and then gone and the sand in the chute ground against my face and pulled me back. I rolled in the water like a drift log and lost my place in the world. There was no up or down, no sides, only my body tumbling and reaching with nothing to hold on to and for just a moment I wanted to remain like that, tumbling in the white and blue, the horizons of life and death separating out somewhere on either side of me, holding me in.

A dark wave lifted me off the sand again tunneling me back down the chute. I found a rock and held to it. When I came up from the water I saw my friend on the rocks with his shorts around his knees, spitting, breathing more important now than nakedness, and the girl was standing and looking into the water with a trickle of blood running down her leg. With the wave receding I knew that I had tested the soft surfaces of life, the deep hard edges behind them. I knew that when I got out I would hold the girls hand like a precious stone, her soft skin always about to disappear into the sky beyond the waves, us thin as salt, and alive as brine.

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Charades with Policemen

by Leo Lichy

When we arrived at Napoli Centrale, I couldn’t seem to make out exactly where I needed to go to catch a connecting train to Sorrento. Staff throughout the station proved most unhelpful. I attempted pidgin Italian to coax them into speaking English, but it just didn’t work. They seemed intent on spewing out a deluge of Italian. I attempted English, but they refused to speak a word of it.

Eventually, I gave up trying to communicate with railway personnel. The final straw came when, in response to my desperate plea of “Doh-vay Sorrento, platform numero?” said with a embellished shrug and an apologetic face, a ticketing agent pointed to a departure board sign above my head. As neither our train nor the platform number was listed on the board, this was of no help whatsoever.

I began looking around for someone to take out my frustration on. It was at this point that Poppy’s sharp eyes came to our rescue.

“Quick, over there!” she said, twisting my head.

I gave a cursory glance across the station, my eyes resting on the platform, thinking she had somehow spotted our train.

“We should stop him before he disappears through those doors.”

I couldn’t work out what she was on about, but it little mattered. She raced off ahead of me, leaving me no alternative but to chase after her with our bags.

When I caught up to her she was having a strange conversation with a policeman. Under normal circumstances I might have found great humor in the exchange. However, at that moment I was deeply anxious and frustrated. Besides, I could see tears in Poppy’s eyes.

“Bon jaw-noh,” I said, trying to crack a friendly smile. “Par-la inglay-zay?”

The policeman shook his head.

“We want to go to Sorrento,” I tried, desperately. “What platform do we need?”

He made a series of curious gestures with his hands. At first, I couldn’t understand what he was doing, but then it all sort of began to make sense.

He pointed across the railway station. Then, in Chaplinesque fashion, he used his forefinger and middle finger to signify a pair of legs walking.

“Si,” I said, triumphantly. “I understand.’

He held out the back of his right hand at an angle, his fingers together, yet sloping upwards. Then he placed the index finger and middle finger of his left hand on the back on his right hand and these fingers wriggled up the knuckles, from the bottom knuckle to the one at the top.

“He’s climbing stairs,” I told Poppy, excitedly.

He nodded and then put his hands together, side-by-side, flapping them apart and then together again.

“I think he means we must go through a set of double doors,” I told Poppy, slightly unsure of myself now.

His two fingers scurried across the palm of his right hand. I could make nothing of it. Had this been a game of charades, at this point I might have thought about conceding.

His fingers scurried down the knuckles on the back of his right hand.

“Steps again,” I told Poppy, regaining my confidence.

The policeman dropped his hands. Our delightful conversation was at an end.

“Grat-see-ay,” I said, smiling.

He smiled also. Something about his smile made me put my hands in my pockets to make sure my wallet was still there.

Poppy thanked him and we waved goodbye. I determined then and there that never mind improving my Italian, I really needed to work on my charades.

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