The Mermaid Vanishes (2)
And so it was in this way, listening to the conversations, taking a bite of cake and a sip of brandied espresso that he happened to glance at the television and a news report about the Mermaid at the aquarium. He couldn’t hear the news anchors above the din of the cafe but the pantomime of banter appeared cheerful. Not bad news, then. And he hoped they’d show a recent photograph. According to the Patrão, her rescuer, her keeper and the owner of the aquarium, mermaids age slowly. A hundred human years equaled more or less her ten. She would be in her twenties. By this time her fish tail would have regrown in the same manner as a lizard’s tail.
And now a black and white film, pocked and stuttering, the camera panning slowly along the sheltering rocks of a cove. It telescoped wide on a sliver of horizon then narrowed and lingered on the drama of the breakers, spume tossed into the air, runlets of water seeding tide pools and then paused on a lizard sunning then startling and scurrying away. The camera then circled the cove’s calm blue-green water, found the aquarium’s grounds, the Patrão’s cottage, the cantina and a crowd milling around a fish tank and a stage. The stage—wood pallets on sawhorses its backdrop an old sail and painted on this sail an angry Neptune and a bewildered school of fish. And the fish tank—four glass panes with metal fittings resembling an ordinary tank for lobsters at a fish market yet high and wide and long enough to allow the mermaid to climb the ladder, dive, choose a shell from the bottom, and rise with one graceful movement. And there! The mermaid emerging, grasping the edge of the tank, waving. And there! A boy in the crowd. Himself! The old man could smell the ocean and pipocas. He licked his lips expecting salt.
The mermaid was not beautiful. The old man would never forget his first shock. Her sallow skin with its psoriasis of yellows and welt reds and bruise purples. Her webbed feet. Her thin knock-knee legs. The hump—what remained of her tail after it had been ripped away from the root of her spine by a shark. The oily black prosthetic rubber fluke she depended on. Her eyes were a poached pea green, wide and red-rimmed. And her nose flat. Her mouth—a frowning grouper, her teeth, white pearls like that of a child. Lips pale and thick, lips when kissing the algae streaked glass left grotesque imprints.
And now random film clips the mermaid striking the water with her prosthetic tail, splashing the audience. The Patrão, crop in hand, pacing the stage giving an impassioned lecture on both the virtues and the wanton urges of mermaidkind. And now the mermaid on the stage perched on a high stool, singing. Her two small breasts hidden by scallop shells. Hips wrapped in a billowing sarong. And lying on the stage, like a thick black slug at her feet, the rubber fluke. She swayed, she clutched her hands to her heart, her voice like a yowling cat.
He had caught a shell she had tossed in his direction. He had pressed his hand to the tank’s glass and she had stared into his eyes and smiled revealing her small white teeth. She had spit a jet of water so accurately and fiercely that it hit his cheek like a slap. And one night he had stood in the dark outside the Patrao’s cottage looking through the kitchen window watching her bathe.
The hand shaking his shoulder was light yet persistent.
Very rich and well drawn visual narrative throughout, here.
: "Her mouth—a frowning grouper,"