The resort staff are turning off the light at the poolside bar. The iron gate around the pool clanks shut loud enough to wake the kiddos whose sleep their mothers toiled to obtain. This Saturday night is uniquely music-less, the usual spate of sounds drowned out — rough and slick alike, proclivities and druthers. Even the band abandoned their tunes when the downpour came. Unwelcome guests, clouds clash though you can’t see the colors — damson, plumbago, where the swimmer prunes and lightning in a soft synaptic burst suggests the heavens had a thought, which sank in the rollers. In the morning another worker’s come. He brushes off the leavings of a palm tree from the cushions with a pillow. He cranks taut the skirts of the umbrellas, so the colors resolve into a dome of crisp stripes. He loops the ropes expertly out of the reach of children, though the overall look, from above, is of bulls-eyes. Slashed fronds, slats, louvers, wickerwork — whatever breeze can be gotten, everything’s sieving. Housekeeping the outdoors is an enterprise: raking sand each morning like a Zen monk so that the guests can say, “This is living.” And the protected marsh is nodding, no surprise. He puts the TV, she her jewelry on. A divorceé, with her teenage son who mutters, almost immediately, that all the songs are about pair-bonding. Each song, she might reply, is a repetition before it’s a departure. But he’s gone — he notices the poolside palms surgically relieved of their fruit. Tanning and blonding, the guests make use of the green-banana light, and maybe the umbrellas are really meant to keep an epiphany from glancing off the skull. When the sun reaches a certain height, a swish unwraps the cellophane from peppermint; a green stripe in the surf burns auroral. Tender the flesh under the shoulder strap, and the bubble where the sandal thong chafes threatens to burst. Sea grapes, saw palmettoes. A seraglio of interior paramours. Little herds trot across the sand wrapped in towels identical to the umbrellas. Waifs wander in search of lizards. A man throws out his arms: “Venga, como una mariposa!” and the little girl jumps. A boy, maybe four, points out a baby iguana poking its snout through the slats of a porch. The smallest among us spot the miniscular. They adore the giant chess set, knocking the queen out with the flourish of a major plot-twist. Mother and son share a kayak. They bump and bumble into the mangrove swamp and barely keep up with the tour guide. “Life starts here,” he’s saying, “the tide brings animals and fish to incubate.” Unsynchronously paddling the strait, mother hissing, son throwing a backward glare, they pantomime a mismatched pair. Amid a cloud of kicked-up sand (“mermaid’s milk”) manatees, mouths full of sea grass, gleam in bulk. The guide holds up a jellyfish; the boy puts out his hand. A smile shows he’s hooked. The sting he can stand: it’s impersonal. Now they sail through a cove of hurricane wrecks and it looks like love. Yes, the future has come to harass parents while the scenery plays second fiddle to the girls with cameras — snapping themselves. The boy worships each one from afar. The afternoon is turning a corner, hence the heat, which makes the parking lot a griddle. Better to languish on those balconies like shelves than seek out the telescope which brings a star too close. Besides, a starboard light will serve, after too many rosé-colored glasses, as the true purveyor of mysteries, because you know there’s a captain there, negotiating earth’s curve. Whatever the green light in the darkness promises, what kissed you, you’ll see in the morning, was a mosquito. A steady stream of rhymes (lingo/gringo) purls across the palms’ scanty shade. Now country, now reggae, now “light contemporary.” The balconies repeat dizzyingly, all rails and wickerwork and cushions printed with zz’s receding like a single room between two mirrors. A man, with his actress companion, appears. The palms start up like a band in a sudden breeze: Rain, rain, rain, their only song. Crabs fallen from the zodiac make like putts into their holes. Rain, which drop by drop sounds a complaint of zinc-tipped arrows against Eros, comes when lightning collects its highway tolls. Then we see what bulls-eyed umbrellas meant.
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