Wish You Were Here(106)
A Gordian knot of iguanas untangles and scatters when the wheels of my bag get too close. I check my phone for the address of Casa del Cielo, but the hotels are all arranged in a neat line, like sparkling white teeth along the edge of the ocean. Mine is small—a boutique. Its stucco reflects the sun, and a blue mosaic sign spells out its name.
It looks nothing like the hotel I dreamed.
When I walk up to the front, there is a couple leaving. They hold the door for me, and I pull my bag inside and approach the front desk.
The air-conditioning blows over me as I give my name. The clerk, a college-age kid, has dyed white-blond hair and a nose ring. He speaks perfect English. “Have you ever visited before?” he asks, when I hand him my credit card.
“Not really,” I tell him, and he grins.
“That sounds like a story.”
“It is,” I say.
He gives me a room key, affixed to a little piece of polished coconut shell. “The Wi-Fi code is on the back,” he says. “It’s a little unreliable.”
I can’t help it; I laugh.
“If there’s anything you need, just dial zero,” he says.
I thank him and reach for the handle of my bag. Just before I get to the elevator, I turn around. “Does someone named Elena work here?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not that I know of …”
“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I must have been mistaken.”
I wrote my master’s thesis on the reliability of memory, and how it fails us. In Japan, there are monuments called tsunami stones—giant tablets on the coastline that warn descendants of earlier settlers not to build their homes past a certain point. They date back to 1896, when two tsunamis killed 22,000 people. The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades. To the survivors of a tragedy, that’s unthinkable—what’s the point of living through something terrible if you cannot convey the lessons you’ve learned? Since nothing will ever replace all you’ve lost, the only way to make meaning is to make sure no one else goes through what you did. Memories are the safeguards we use to keep from making the same mistakes.
In my art therapy practice, I started working with people whose lives had been affected in different ways by Covid—those who’d lost jobs or loved ones, or those who’d survived the virus and (like me) were left wondering why. Over the course of the past three years, my patients and I have created three pandemic stones—ten feet high by three feet wide, painted and carved by survivors with images and words that call forth the wisdom they have now, which they didn’t have back then. There are pictures of stick figure families, some grayed out by death. There are mantras: Find your joy. No job is worth killing yourself for. There are images of Black fists raised in solidarity, of a globe in the shape of a heart, of a syringe filled with stars. The first one that we finished was installed in the lobby of the MoMA on the most recent anniversary of the pandemic.
The obelisk sits three floors below one of my mother’s photos.
Exploring Isabela is a little bit like revisiting a city you toured when you were high as a kite. Some things look exactly the way I remember—like the flat black of the pahoehoe lava and the elbow of beach beyond the hotel. These must have been photographs I saw when I was planning my trip there that embedded themselves somewhere in my subconscious, enough for me to call them up with legitimacy. But other pieces of the island are startlingly different, like the place the pangas come with their daily fishing catch, and the architecture of the small houses that freckle the road leading out of town. Abuela’s little home, with the basement apartment, simply does not exist.
Tomorrow, I will arrange to take a tour of the island. I want to see the volcano and the trillizos. But right now, because it’s been a long flight and I want to stretch my legs, I change into shorts and sneakers and a tank top, pull my hair into a ponytail, and walk down to the water’s edge. I take off my shoes and wade up to my knees, watching Sally Lightfoot crabs polka-dot the rocks. I put my hands on my hips and look up at the clouds, then across the ocean at a small island that never existed in my dream. I breathe deeply, thinking that last time I was here, I couldn’t breathe at all.
I sit on a rock with an iguana that is completely unbothered by the company and wait for my feet to dry before putting on my sneakers again. This time, I start jogging away from town. Another thing that looks nothing like it did in my imagination: the entrance to the tortoise breeding ground. It’s touristy, with signs and maps and cartoon pictures of eggs and hatching tortoises.
There’s a couple leaving; they smile at me as I pass them on my way in. “It’s closed,” the woman says, “but you can still see the babies in the pens outside.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I walk toward the horseshoe of enclosures. Beneath cacti, tortoises huddle together, stretching their old-man necks toward whatever danger lies six inches ahead. One unhinges his jaw and sticks out a triangular pink tongue.
The tortoises are arranged in size order. Some pens have only two or three, others are crammed. The babies are no bigger than my fist, and they are clambering over each other, creating their own obstacle course.
One of the little ones manages to get its feet on the shell of another, double-stacked for a breathtaking moment before it topples over onto its back.