I always thought I knew the sea until I turned eleven. Before that, for me, the sea was just a bunch of stories my parents told at Sunday breakfast. I remember, for example, that they said they became sweethearts walking along the Manzanillo seashore. They walked so far that after a few hours, they met in Barra de Navidad, a relatively nearby beach. They walked so far that they started a family of seven and a marriage that ended when my father died in 2018.
The sea, then, existed for me only in my imagination. At home, we had a black bookcase that barely stood on tiny legs that were always about to give way, which we had to prop up with folded magazine paper. We called it “the little bookcase.” On top of it, as in many homes in Mexico, a seashell served as an ornamental piece. When I played near the books, I would pick up that shell with my hands. With my fingers, I would touch its tips and the rough surface that formed strange, colorful patterns; I would examine its shape closely. I was struck by the fact that the inside was smooth and soft, and a pinkish color that shimmered when I held it up to the sunlight.
I remember my mother telling me to hold it to my ear, close my eyes, and that if I listened closely enough, I would hear the sea inside; as if someone had managed to put it there, as if all the fish in the world were inside, frolicking in saltwater.
And I would do it. I would squat near the little bookshelf, close my eyes, and hold the seashell to my ear. I would listen to the sea. The waves would come and go, one following the other, as if they were trying to nip at each other's toes. I could hear the seagulls, without even knowing that they were seagulls. In the distance, the sea salt escaped from the surface, evaporating in my imagination and mingling with the dreams just beginning to take shape in my mind, a mind connected to the universe of my childhood heart.
I could hear my parents' footsteps on the sand. They passed behind me, receding to the rhythm of that raging sea, which, by then, was beginning to swallow the sun with its watery teeth on the horizon. Finally, I could hear my father singing "Buenos días, amor" by José José to the woman inside the seashell who had just said yes to being his girlfriend; little imagining that one day—on a morning when I didn't go to school, far from that sea I hadn't yet seen and near the little wardrobe they hadn't yet bought—his fourth son would hear them. And that, twenty-seven years later, that same boy would discover that he hadn't first seen the sea at eleven, but at six, when his mother took him to find it inside that seashell.
Photography by Ilse Cabanillas
Writer and psychologist working in education. Fond of letters, cloudy skies, music, my people, coffee, and mezcal.