Praise for Chloe Aridjis
Guggenheim Fellow
Prix du Premier Roman Étranger Winner
“A young writer of immense talent.”
—PAUL AUSTER
“Chloe Aridjis is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today.”
—GARTH GREENWELL
“Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis is destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective, and mesmerizing novel set in Mexico.”
—XIAOLU GUO
“[A] young writer who see[s] the world with a fresh, original vision.”
—WENDY LESSER, The New York Times Book Review
“Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange… this is deft and shimmering fiction.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“Hypnotic. . . . Aridjis’ novel has the power of dreams and still hasn’t left me.”
—JUNOT DÍAZ, Salon, on Book of Clouds
“A post-Sebaldian, post-Benjamin peripatetic meditation. . . . One of my favorites this year.”
—ALI SMITH, The Times Literary Supplement, on Book of Clouds
“Exquisitely written. . . . A perfect story for our unsettled times.”
—FRANCISCO GOLDMAN on Book of Clouds
“Chloe Aridjis writes with a fine-tuned sensitivity and a captivating charm. Her universe is offbeat, rich, and disturbing in equal measure—but always utterly compelling.”
—TOM McCARTHY
“Chloe Aridjis’s gifts for narrative, description, and detail signal the arrival of a promising new writer.”
—FRANCINE PROSE
“I am very excited by Chloe Aridjis.”
—JEANETTE WINTERSON
“Chloe Aridjis writes about sensations at the edges of perception, capturing experiences rarely included in fiction. A surprising sensibility and an effortlessly original voice.”
—EVA HOFFMAN
“Brilliantly exact and disconcerting. . . . Reading [Aridjis] is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination.”
—DIANA ATHILL
ALSO BY CHLOE ARIDJIS
Book of Clouds
Asunder
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Chloe Aridjis
First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-936787-86-9
Jacket design by Strick&Williams
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950155
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène.
I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims.
GÉRARD DE NERVAL
Nocturno mar amargo
que circula en estrechos corredores
de corales arterias y raíces
y venas y medusas capilares.
Bitter nocturnal sea
that flows through narrow corridors
of corals arteries and roots
and veins and capillary jellyfish
XAVIER VILLAURRUTIA
Contents
IMPRISONED ON THIS ISLAND, I WOULD SAY, imprisoned on this island. And yet I was no prisoner and this was no island.
During the day I’d roam the shore, aimlessly, purposefully, and in search of digressions. The dogs. A hut. Boulders. Nude tourists. Scantily clad ones. Palm trees. Palapas. Sand sifting umber and adrenaline. The waves’ upward grasp. A boat in the distance, its throat flashing in the sun. The ancient Greeks created stories out of a simple juxtaposition of natural features, my father once told me, investing rocks and caves with meaning, but there in Zipolite I did not expect any myths to be born.
Zipolite. People said the name meant “Beach of the Dead,” though the reason for this was debated—was it because of the number of visitors who met their end in the treacherous currents, or because the native Zapotecs would bring their dead from afar to bury in its sands? Beach of the Dead: it had an ancient ring, ancestral, commanding both dread and respect, and after hearing about the unfortunate souls who each year got caught in the riptide I decided I would never go in beyond where I could stand. Others said Zipolite meant “Lugar de Caracoles,” place of seashells, an attractive thought since spirals are such neat arrangements of space and time, and what are beaches if not a conversation between the elements, a constant movement inward and outward. My favorite explanation, which only one person put forward, was that Zipolite was a corruption of the word zopilote, and that every night a black vulture would envelop the beach in its dark wings and feed on whatever the waves tossed up. It’s easier to reconcile yourself with sunny places if you can imagine their nocturnal counterpart.
Once dusk had fallen I would head to the bar and spend hours under its thatched universe, a large palapa on the shores of the Pacific decked with stools, tables, and miniature palm trees. It was where all boats came to dock and refuel, syrup added to cocktails for maximum effect, and I’d imagine that everything was as artificial as the electric-blue drink; that the miniature palm trees grew fake after dusk, the chlorophyll struggling and the life force gone from the green, that the wooden stools had turned to laminate. Sometimes the hanging lamps would be dimmed and the music amplified, a cue for the drunks and half-drunks to clamber onto the tables and start dancing. The shoreline ran through every face, destroying some, enhancing others, and at moments when I’d had enough reminders of humanity I would look around for the dogs, who like everyone else at the beach came and went according to mood. A curious snout or a pair of gleaming eyes would appear on the fringes of the palapa, take in the scene, and then, most often, finding nothing of interest, retire once more into darkness.
Before long, it became apparent that the bar in Zipolite was a meeting place for fabulists, and everyone seemed to concoct a tale as the night wore on. One girl, a painter with