Diluvium

by Mariana Dávila Moreno

Imagine one of the invisible cities of Calvino, where the traveler Marco Polo describes to the emperor, Kublai Khan, the improbable places he’s been: cities that float in the sky, mobile cities in the shape of a caravan, cities that resemble a spiral. Or imagine Pedro Páramo’s Comala, so old and inhabited by ghosts and maybe then you can begin to see Mérida with its old, colonial houses—architecture that’s been compared to that of Cuba. Moss on the walls because of the humidity, 45ºC in summer. Not much better in winter. A heat that frizzes hair, makes sweat drip off backs, requires three showers a day, unbearable.

Imagine the cathedral—exactly the same as any cathedral in any Latin American town, replicas of themselves, colorful. And on the piazza, the people: marquesitas vendors, hawkers of helium balloons with cartoon designs and soap bubbles in florescent bottles, children playing soccer with an empty bottle of water. And of course, the rain.

Imagine the serenity of Santorini, the calming effect of all that white and blue. Or the Spanish siesta, especially popular in Andalusia, where life is paused for two hours every afternoon. Then maybe you can begin to understand the concept of time in Mérida. The endless waiting it takes to get anything done: one hour to buy groceries, two and a half to pay the electricity bill at the bank, five for eating out. The slow pace of small places, nothing at all like the big cities that are pure chaos and movement and speed. But in the thousands of minutes of dead time that the yucatecos waste each year there is nothing unusual, because in Mérida barely anything happens. Día de Muertos in November being the exception. Not much else.

If the world were to end tomorrow, only Mérida will remain standing, forgotten even by Armageddon. This last statement of course is a lie, because the end of the world has come to Mérida before. Once: the time of the never-ending rain. Can you imagine it? Water dripping from walls, flooding houses, schools, parks. Rivers flowing through concrete roads, carrying trash, furniture, clothes, people. The surreal city. Dalí looking from the sea back at the giant egg standing at the roof of his house on Port Lligat one afternoon.

*

There was José Luis and there was Clara. There was a José Luis before Clara, and now there was just this broken man after her death. But after the wake he thought it wouldn’t be so bad, that perhaps, against all odds, he was made of a stronger matter than he had believed: ebony, not ash. He had been wrong.

He didn’t really cry much the first two weeks after Clara died. He had been too tired. But grief is sleek; it crawls and wraps the body like a snake that bites unexpectedly. Suffocating. Poisoning. That’s why José Luis was surprised when on a Saturday morning, in his third week as a widower, he broke down over a pot of overcooked beans. He was trying to recreate the ones Clara used to make, always perfectly seasoned and cooked. He spent sixty years eating them and never stopped to ask for the recipe. Why had he never asked her for the recipe? Why had he taken the most ordinary things for granted? Clara’s beans on his breakfast plate every morning had come so naturally, one of the small certainties of his life. He would never again be able to taste them, the flavor of the beginning of his days since he was twenty-three years old. He threw the pot to the ground violently and kneeled, crying. The overcooked beans scattered across the tiles; they resembled a plague of sowbugs taking over the kitchen.

Later that day, the rain started. From Monday to Thursday a soft drizzle, and during the weekend, big fat drops. No thunder. José Luis slept through it all. He slept through the first flooding of the avenue, Paseo de Montejo, full of tourists tucking their phones into their backpacks, seeking shelter in stores and cafes. He wasn’t there to see the damage the water did to the museum of the Spanish conqueror, Francisco de Montejo, which had been standing, unblemished, at the center of the main piazza since 1549. He was still sleeping when the first cars began to float through the currents of water, like oversized buoys.

When he finally woke, it was still raining. Days turned to weeks, turned to months. José Luis accepted with resignation this altered world as the normal progression of his life without Clara. She, who loved the rain. And how could she when it made the humidity so much worse? José Luis asking. Clara answering: yes, but that’s only one part of it. What about its calming sound: a lullaby, tap, tap, tapping on the roof? Or the smell of wet dirt the morning after the rain? What about the freshness of the walls on stone houses, which seem to store water like camels, like cacti. José Luis replying: Of course, mi chaparrita, there’s no point in arguing because you are always right.

José Luis was also awake to see the deterioration of his city. The way the water took away houses, furniture, and lives. He was awake to hear about the closure of the picturesque boutique hotel, Rosas & Xocolate, where he and Clara had brunch every other Sunday for thirty-five years. Chilaquiles for him, cochinita pibil for her and a big pot of the blackest coffee for both. No milk. No sugar. Thank you. He was present to see the discoloration of his house, where he had lived since childhood. Orange bleached to pale yellow bleached to dull green, the saddest palette of colors spreading through every neighborhood. He learned to concede space to water, accepting it in his living room, around the mint couch where he and Clara had sat every night to watch old movies—Pedro Infante and María Félix. Clara arguing because Cantinflas was overrated and José Luis annoyed because he had always liked him better than Tin Tan. These little arguments harboring playfulness, nested from love.

Soon, the kitchen too was underwater. Plates and pans circling the surface like unconcerned ducks. The silverware sunk to the bottom like a pirate’s hidden treasure. If Clara could have seen it, she would have died again. All her kitchen supplies—imported from Switzerland—ruined.

On the second month of the rain, José Luis began to save the clippings from the local paper, announcing a never-before-seen catastrophe in Mérida. He memorized the headlines, quoted the mayor’s speeches calling out for national help. He read aloud, almost with a certain elation, the news of something happening at last. Oh, how you would have loved it, mi chaparrita, you with such a soft spot for the tragic!

At the end, the water engulfed the house completely, until the only safe space that remained was José Luis and Clara’s bedroom. He spent his last days trapped in there, docked on the bed that still smelled like Clara (a scent between ginger and cardamom). He spent the last days of his life contemplating the photographs on his nightstand: Clara with her two sisters at the beach when she was twenty-five. Their wedding day. Clara wearing a dress that had been her mother’s, crocheted and lined with buttons (how he had struggled to take it off later that night, and all the time both of them laughing, laughing at the uselessness of beautiful things). José Luis holding his first nephew just before he was baptized. The image of Clara inside of a classroom, teaching her eighth-grade students how to embroider. A picture taken two years earlier of José Luis kissing Clara on the cheek at a restaurant in Cancún, their faces full of wrinkles and happiness. Pieces of a life that, when placed together, had been mostly fulfilling.

Finally, after six months of living without Clara, and five of rain, the water finally made its way into José Luis’ bedroom. He sat naked on the damp carpet watching it leak slowly at first, and then faster, and faster like a horse race. Like time. Like love. He looked at his body, contemplating all of its marks. On his index finger he had a small scar, courtesy of Clara’s Swiss serrated knives and his inability to stop looking at the television while cutting cheese. Two parallel holes adorned his right knee, his souvenir from a surgery required after a decade of running. A fungus infection on his big toe nails, unyielding despite the endless house remedies Clara provided over the years to combat it. At last, he observed his wrinkles, the hundreds of lines spread out across his body telling him another version of his life. The pronounced lines on his forehead, attained from years of furrowing his brow at Clara’s demands: Gordo, keep the music down! No wonder why I’m going deaf. And his counterargument: But chaparrita, it’s Agustín Lara! Her intense stare, Don’t chaparrita-me. The creases at the corners of his mouth, which came to be after sharing thousands of smiles with Clara over the years, their inside jokes, their loud farts, their impersonations of each other. It had taken José Luis their two shared lifetimes to learn that clichés are true, sometimes.

When he was a boy, six or seven years old, he liked to spend hours in the bathtub. He watched, fascinated, how his hands, so smooth and even, wrinkled after only minutes of being submerged in the water. He wondered if now, at the end of his life, the opposite would happen. Of course, deep down, he knew this thought was absurd. Despite knowing this, José Luis couldn’t help but hope for the improbable or a small miracle. Like he had hoped throughout the eighty-one years of his life. He had hoped that Clara would say, yes, the day he asked her to be his girlfriend, after three months of walking her home after school. She did. He had hoped for children, but they were never able to conceive. He had hoped they would stay together forever, despite their silly arguments, the, why did you leave dirty plates in the sink, and the, you never fold my shirts properly. The last time he had dared hope was after the diagnosis: Melanoma, forty percent chance of survival, and why couldn’t Clara be a part of those statistics? After three rounds of chemotherapy: metastasis. And yet, José Luis believed until the very last day that she would still outlive him.

He read once that drowning is one of the most agonizing deaths. The desperation of the lungs to grasp for one last breath is excruciating. As the water enveloped his body, José Luis remembered one of his last memories of Clara: her frail body glued to the bed, her scalp with no trace of the cocoa hair he had loved, her once round cheeks completely gone. This is what cancer does, it disintegrates the people we love into ghosts, automatons who are not fully there, mere sketches that will never come to be. And how can drowning be more excruciating than this?

With his last rush of air, José Luis thought about Virginia Woolf, how she filled her coat with pebbles and then walked into the river. Who knows, maybe the last seconds of her life were indeed excruciating, but there is a slight chance that they were also peaceful. José Luis dove.