cO-WINNER OF THE 2025 LEWIS EDWARDS MEMORIAL PRIZE

 

 

Tzipitíos

 

For a brief period of my youth, I picked up the habit of going for bike rides around Marina in the afternoons. Always at around four-to-five, always after lunch, always when the sky would begin to turn purple, and the leaves, grass, and trees —doused in the golden sigh of a drowsy sun—  glowed all the more green.

They used to call Marina a “Residential Area.” The title is reductive and ill fitting. “Residential Area” is a soulless “I love you” that flees from the mouth and hides from its meaning: it’s an awkward excuse, it’s noisy silence. Nobody “resided” in Marina; a house does not make a home. Whenever I describe it to people, I fail to build it as an aggregate; my thoughts come undone and crumble into discrete mementos of an experience, of a place. I’m left with shattered mortar and bricks, not the edifice. Marina was a strip of villas near Puerto San Jose. It was a freshwater canal kept alive by a rickety barge, one that quietly pumped out the ocean’s sand as it seeped in, lest the canal drown. It was a club-house with two bars and roaming peacocks. It was a wave-breaker and the docile, defeated, neutered ocean that broke through it. It was the cleanest beach in the country. It was the place during long-weekends, New-Years, and Semana Santa. It was a place surrounded by barbed wire.

I liked going out after lunch because of the quiet. No cars, no dogs, no one to awkwardly say “buenas tardes” to. You could hear the salt-laced breeze graze the swaying palm trees high above, as birds sang and sprinklers chirped, as clouds floated by without making a sound. You could hear in the distance how the ocean fell in waves, how it spread itself lovingly over the beach, how it melted into black sand. I used to think that I biked in the afternoons because I lacked the discipline to run at dawn; I don’t think that way anymore. I think I just liked the afternoons better: I liked how full my stomach felt then, how it grounded me to my bike, and how my bike would sail through the concrete streets, rocking gently with the soothing wind. I liked how even the sun, which raged vengeful and opulent in the midday, succumbed to the same temperate lethargy that beset my parents after lunch. If I came upon anyone, it would be workers on their worn and rusting motorcycles, speeding away homebound and tired. One tended to see the stray security guard as well, lazily patrolling the marina fence, clad in a grey shirt far too tight for the heat and his fatty-corpulence. I sometimes saw them lying beneath the shade of the conacaste trees, with drowsy looks upon their faces, with beads of sweat on their bronze foreheads, with wrinkles around their eyes. They seemed happy to breathe in the air. I would nod to them as I rode past.

I did not bring much with me. I wore only shorts, boxers, and a backwards-facing baseball cap. I brought with me my airpods and thermos. My shoes would be unremarkable. A lap around Marina lasted a little more than an hour at a slow, languid pace; I’m sure I could’ve done it in less, but I never had a reason to try. The sun would kiss my skin over that hour, slowly warming its ghastly white into a nascent gold. The best spots along the route demanded time as well: the vacant lots before the beach that bared the ocean pure; the bridge over the canal at twilight; the parts of the fence from where the cattle farms could be seen.

I liked the latter ones the most; I’ve always had a thing for bucolic quaintness. I remember staring out at the vast emptiness of those grazing fields as I rode past, at the faint outlines of rusted sheet-metal shacks in the distance, the tiny silhouettes of workers tilling the rugged fields by hand. Muddled by the distance, the landscape was almost impressionistic. Sometimes, the cows would approach the fence themselves. They would come under the shade of the Marina palms, staring at me through the hexagonal holes made by the fence’s wires as I passed by. I was always very pleased to see them there, sheltering in the same cool as me. I would photograph and record them. I would moo at them in vain and would laugh when they mooed back. They would never move; their eyes were black and empty.

One day I found two boys at the fence. One was taller and older and the other still fragile and young, their shirts hung huge and tattered and dirty and their designs faded and they had hair the colour of coal and their skin was caked with dirt and sand and the younger one had a cleft lip which revealed a disparate line of irregular teeth and a yellow stain ran down the corner of his mouth and he cowered beneath his brother’s legs holding onto an emaciated doll that had turned grey with age which had been starved and ripped and never had been cleaned and that was handed down and never bought so that it looked more like a rag, and his older brother had his fingers on the fence and they clutched at the holes and they curled around the wires and they held them with jealousy and they were crooked and thin like the claws of a carrion bird and their nails were broken and full of grime and they were pointed at me. Their mouths their hands their eyes their eyes their eyes. They were staring at me and wouldn’t stop.

I did not look at them. I pedalled hard when they came into view, and soon left them behind; they did not say a word. I would not look at them. It was just so unseemly to see them so close: It was hard enough with the help— their dirty hands, their coastal sluggishness, their unabating lack of gratitude and drive. My mother spent years trying to teach them to organise the kitchen, to store the kitchenware neatly, to not simply throw all of the pots and pans into a cupboard and to doom them to an eternity of dirt and oblivion. They always wore glazed, lost expressions. The women were exceptionally ugly, and the men hopelessly effete. But even despite all of that, at least they weren’t deformed. At least they did not reek of sweat and shit. They were domesticated; they hid behind the dullness of their character and did not clutch at our walls with a greedy hunger, one that yearned to run amok. You could see it in the way they grabbed things— clutching, inward, jealousy, an awkward vice grip. They did not know what it was to own things and care for them, and so their grasp was one of brusque ignorance. You could see it in the way the boy held onto his rag, how tortured and bent the poor thing was in his smeared fingers. Who had let them come up so close? My sister wanted to go to the beach later; women ran past that spot. The thought of that boy’s filthy fingers crumpling clean linen made me writhe.

The security guard was leaning on a coconut tree. The grimace he wore told me that he could smell my age; he knew that it didn’t matter. I told him that there were two men who were trying to sneak in. I told him that they were clawing at the fence. I told him that they were trying to climb it. He looked at me for a while, in silence. My words stumbled forth in a limp-wristed echo into the emptiness of the afternoon. He didn’t believe me, but he knew it didn’t matter. He wore the same blank stare that the boys wore, but his was not empty. His black vacancy was nothing but a painted wall that hid blood and loathing— that or sadness, I couldn’t tell. I would have respected him if he hated me; he knew that it didn’t matter. I told him that they had spat at me as I rode past, that they had hurled rocks at my face: my forehead bore no scars, my cheeks were unscathed. He knew it didn’t matter; his solemn seriousness could not hide how defeated he looked.

I hung back as he opened a door in the fence and began to approach them. “Tst!” He whistled. “Vayese pa’ ‘ya! No sea shute!” His Spanish was dreadful; I could not imagine theirs.

Though they had turned to face the guard, neither moved any further. They looked petrified, mouths agape, eyes wide. The younger one’s cleft lip made it look like his mouth was locked in a shriek. The guard had to shout at them twice before they moved; the older brother lowered his gaze, and yanked at the younger to follow as he stumbled down back towards the fields. But the younger one wouldn’t budge. His eyes glistened in the dying day, beaming with life, staring blankly back at me. I don’t think his mind could yet articulate feeling betrayed. The older one yanked him again, this time with anger. Caught off guard, the younger one dropped the rag-doll. He jerked back to reach for it, but the older one dragged his flailing arms away, leaving it folded upon a dusty stone. The younger one began to wail. Tears cut paths through the dirt on his face; his cries bled into the air, into the murmurs of waves crashing on the horizon, into the sea with the sun as it sank, into the years, into memory. I heard them in my bones.

I still hate that boy now, as I hated him then. I feel his fingers at my throat, curling around it like the rag he soiled, crumpling it down until there is nothing left to kill, crushing my spine. He still fills my mouth with bile. I still hear his cries. I hate him just the same.

I don’t know why.

 

 

May 7, 2025

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