Where others saw scenery, Linda Goldman saw desolation. Where others heard relaxing subaquatic silence, she heard the shrieks of life disappearing. Where others saw a gift from God, given for the enjoyment of humankind, she saw an ecosystem fallen victim to a systematic and criminal attack. When she looked at the coral reef, she felt like an oncologist standing before her patient’s body. She knew she could save it, although she also understood the disproportionate capacity of evil and its reach down to its finest detail. In order to make the miracle happen, it was necessary to have a measure of extreme optimism and critical realism that would drive anybody crazy. In the reef’s case, it wasn’t just up to Linda and her team. Salvation depended on re-educating an entire community, and on the government and its long-term protection plan. It was work that would require years, and she’d sworn her life to it. There were days she felt her commitment was irrelevant, when confronted, for example, with a local fisherman’s anchor that, in a single minute, had torn a reef hundreds of years old, destroying a valuable specimen and the fish habitat the very same fisherman needed to subsist. The guards charged with enforcing environmental laws in the Cove of Sosúa were the first to ignore them: throwing garbage, fishing with harpoons, and stealing coral to sell—they lacked a comprehensive education and adequate salaries. For their part, the fishermen had enough problems finding anything to fish to listen to those telling them where and how often they could fish.
Urgency and danger ran through her veins, they were the reason she had been brought up by this sea. In 1939, her father arrived from Austria with his parents. Back then, Sosúa was a jungle, the abandoned lands of the United Fruit Company. There, with 800 other Jews who’d managed to avoid being exterminated, they built a dairy that soon fed the entire country. As a child, she’d spent her free time collecting shells, rocks, and coral at the beach. She’d classify them by shape and color back at the gazebo in her yard. During a trip to New York, her father, Saúl, took Linda and her brothers to the Museum of Natural History. She told her father she wanted to see live animals, not dead ones filled with cotton and formaldehyde. Watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on local TV, she came to an understanding of the tragedy evolving right under their noses. The sea had been pillaged for centuries and it would soon be empty and sterile. In college, as she worked on her thesis about coral reef diseases in the Caribbean, she went a whole week without sleep. Her friends found her at daybreak, walking naked around campus and carrying a flashlight. After attending her graduation jacked up on pills, she returned to Puerto Plata with a conservation plan her father rejected and with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
When Giorgio first laid eyes on her, he was attracted to her spirited ways and her confidence, which he at first mistook for a byproduct of her parents’ money. All the men in Cabarete, Sosúa, Playa Dorada, and Playa Cofresí had tried to hit on her without success. Stung by her rejection, some of them had started a rumor that she was a lesbian, when in fact she just had no time for anybody. She gave windsurfing lessons during the day. At night, she wrote letters and proposals, trying to get international organizations to carry out preliminary investigations on which she would be able to base her conservation project. She relied on scientific articles that became increasingly more pessimistic about the reefs in the Caribbean, illustrated with photographs that showed white patches gaining more and more territory on the hard but fragile coral. Refusing to use medication, she managed her moods on her own. She’d dive into deep depressions, shutting herself up in her studio and eating only Chef Boyardee straight from the can, convinced the end of the world was irreversible and widespread ignorance would continue to prevent her from saving the ocean. Her older brother would come and dig her out of her hole, stick her in the shower, and give her the money Linda had sworn never to ask for from her father; he’d tell her not to abandon her dreams, that the world needed people like her, and other ready-made self-help phrases that had proven effective over time. When at the end of this therapy Adam would ask her to come work at the dairy for a while, she’d kick him out with enough fury to fill her with energy for days, and that would get her back on track with a kind of manic focus on her embryonic project: a compulsive search for grants and the messianic hope that had led her to fall in love with Giorgio Menicucci.
In the last few years, thanks to 500 daily milligrams of Seroquel and her husband’s luck with business, plus an inheritance, they’d been able to buy a parcel of beach and Linda was no longer a human yo-yo. The meds made it possible for her to do her work without euphoria and tragedy, but not a day went by when the vision that had been haunting her since her youth did not stop her dead in her tracks with anguish: she’d descend to the bottom of a cold and dark sea where the heavy, industrial net of a commercial fishing ship would destroy everything in its path without mercy. In the Gulf of Mexico she’d seen with her own eyes what the nets brought up after shaving the marine floor for miles at a time. Once they had removed everything useful, they’d toss thousands of dead fish too small to be consumed, dolphins, tortoises, and enough coral to build a castle back into the sea, all products of the demolition of an ecosystem that had no resources left to regenerate. She knew how many times these nets were tossed into the waters and she lived each day working against that sinister clock.
Giorgio, on the other hand, hadn’t planned on falling in love. His life on the north coast at the end of the twentieth century was going along just fine. He had what he’d always wanted: the body of a man and his own business, a chic pizzeria on a beautiful beach. The mission for which he’d been created had begun to appear on the horizon, but still hadn’t indicated a path for him to follow. Linda had left him a note at the restaurant: “Giorgio, I left my windsurfing boards in your alley. Hope it’s OK! Linda.” He liked that she felt comfortable enough to do that and the next day, when he saw her come in in her cobalt blue wetsuit, he invited her to lunch. He already knew just about everything about Linda: that she was a marine biologist, obsessive and temperamental, that her parents were filthy rich, and that she’d inherit that money even though she was the black sheep of the family. It took her about twenty minutes to feel relaxed enough to open her backpack and pull out a folder full of photos of dying coral, stained and deformed like cancerous livers in a brochure for Alcoholics Anonymous. The folder was worn in a way that gave away how often it was handled. When he saw the source of Linda’s anxieties under that pink plastic, his chest tightened and he felt an urgent need to help her solve all her problems.
In the same way he used to use the PriceSpy, Acilde now used the computer in his cell to look up words or names he didn’t recognize when they came up in conversation, or to confirm the assertions of a future business partner. Confronted with Linda’s interests, he typed the word coral into the search engine and a site listing all the coral reefs that had disappeared in the tsunami of 2024 popped up on the screen. Giorgio was then able to talk to her about her favorite ones using their names, Diploria labyrinthiformis and Millepora alcicornis, as though he’d been a fan his whole life. Thanks to this he ended up fucking her right on the shore of Playa Bo that very afternoon. And when she came, she screamed as though she were being murdered.