A BEAUTIFUL DAY

A BREEZE BLEW THROUGH THE mosquito net. Samuel looked up from the Fabio Martinez novel he was reading on the bunk bed, far from the reach of the cucarachas, army ants, and scorpions. At the window stood the ghost, like an emanation from the iridescent saline spatter that rose from the unending ocean. Lavoie was wearing a small sky-blue cotton hat and an open Hawaiian shirt. Around his neck, a flower collar had replaced the ichorous furrow the religious chain had left in his flesh. He carried a golf bag over one shoulder.

Sam pushed the mosquito net out of the way.

“Would you please tell me . . .”

“I thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

“And where are you going, exactly?”

“I heard there’s a twenty-seven-hole course that isn’t too bad at Barra de Navidad, near Manzanillo in the Colima. I’ll start there. After that . . . I might try Brazil. I hear that even Amazonia has a few courses now. I met some golfers who’d been bitten by venomous snakes while looking for their ball on the woods. Jaguars are another hazard . . .”

“You’re pulling my leg . . .”

“How have you been?” Lavoie asked, after a pause, pointing to Sam’s arm in a sling.

“Except for the fact that I’ve got to hold the book and turn the pages with the same hand, not too bad. You? How are your hands?”

“Good as new, more or less,” the ghost replied, showing his scars. “I just need to find my putting form.”

Steps sounded on the wooden ladder that led to the room, and the ghost was startled.

“Well, then. I’ll let you get back to it . . . You know what we should do? Toss the old pigskin around one of these days. When your arm is better, I mean.”

“Around here, people go more for frisbee . . . But sure, that’d be fun . . .”

“In any case . . . thanks,” Lavoie said.

Sam opened his mouth, but the cat seemed to have got his tongue.

“No, no . . . It’s me who . . .”

As the door opened, Lavoie lifted a friendly hand, thumb up, before flying out right over the coconut trees with a light clacking of woods and irons. The golf bag seemed to be as light as a feather.

Marie-Québec, in her short cotton dress of whatever colour, came in with a coffee, black, very sweet, in a small white cup. In her other hand, papaya pieces set on a plate.

“Marie . . . Am I dreaming?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“You’re up and out of bed before me. And you don’t even look as if you’re in a coma!”

“Must be Mexico. What are you reading?”

“A Colombian . . . Marie?”

“What?”

“Do Dora for me, please.”

“Stop it!”

“Dora Dora Dora.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

Dora

Perhaps. It’s sublime love, solitary and pure, he’s the one who burns me clean. Sometimes, for a moment, I ask myself if love is something altogether different, if it can cease to be a monologue, and if there isn’t an answer, sometimes. I imagine this, you see: the sun shines, heads bend softly, the heart loses its pride, arms open . . .

Climbing down the path toward the sea, she met a young Mexican, dark brown face, very white teeth, holding an orange. His face turned toward her as if she were an apparition.

“Hola,” she says.

He offers her the orange without a word, as if this gesture were the only thing that came to his mind, the only possible thing to do. She took the fruit, thanked him with a nod, and continued on her way.

“This is where I want to live,” she told herself. The orange smiled in her hand.

She had just removed her sandals and was beginning to walk toward the sea when, from the corner of her eye, she saw the old Indian woman on the edge of the beach, bent under her daily burden, her lower back crushed under the weight of the enormous pile of wood tied to her forehead.

Marie-Québec walked toward her; she’d been preparing her sentence for a long time.

“Con permiso, señora . . . Déjame ayudarla.”

The woman turned to her, and god only knows what she saw. Marie-Québec dropped the bag filled with her belongings to the sand at her feet. To lessen the friction of the rope, the old woman tied her own sweat-stained scarf around the young woman’s forehead. She then helped her slip under the weight, balancing it on her back. And as Marie-Québec began to rumble forward, the old woman bent down behind her and, one hand on her ruined back, held up the multicoloured cotton bag.

And the weight, on her back, the weight of the wood, the weight, felt good. As Marie-Québec bent forward, sand to her ankles, and walked, it was as if the weight had always been there. Like the heat of the sun, and the cool breeze on her face, coming from the sea to rise against the cliff face and keep rising, keep rising up toward the heavens, where the magnificent frigate birds circled slowly on the thermals, effortlessly, on invisible highways of warm air, where vultures also flew, the carrions eaters, light as air. A beautiful day.