Once you get good at something, the stakes are raised. This is what they talk about when they talk about the universe granting your desires. If you think you want something, you'll most likely get it. But as the sages probably say, you have to be ready. Because what the universe obviously wants is not for us to remain happy and comfortable the way we, in our narrow way, define those things, but for the scales to fall from our eyes and the way we we used to think of comfort and happiness to seem kind of pathetic, at best irrelevant.

Tallulah is a cheerful id. I fail to follow her lead at my psychic peril. She befriends stray cats and drunk men. One of the men pours out the dregs of his beer and climbs the tree where, he says, the best quenepas grow, tossing down bunches of this sweet, pale-peach-colored fruit that you pop open and suck on like candy.

Like an archaeologist walking a grid, she stops every yard or so to examine whatever might have fallen or grown there. She wanders into the shop of a man whose name, we learn, is Jorge. He's a drummer and his congas are lined up along the walls. She pounds on them, calling him out of the back room with a deep chord of memory that emanates from the stretched hide of the drumhead. We talk. Every culture sees time differently, he tells me.

My occasional frustration with the process of walking slowly, rapturously, around el pueblo--that must be my notion of time knocking up against a whole other way of seeing the world, which understands the valuable information contained in animal droppings, as a tracker does, which perceives possibility in every seedpod and bloom, in every discarded and broken thing.

Culebra

Until the mid-seventies the marines were here, speaking their clipped language, that imperialist stutter, firing rounds into the azure of the sea, dropping bombs on the scented hillsides. We are here, rocking gently in the bay, the myopia of everyday life making ordinary things blur into each other and loom large. I came upon a little book in the bilge about the Virgin Islands, "in full color." The colors are the colors of remembered vacations, dreams, cookbooks with faded yet somehow vivid photographs of ham and cakes with soft billows of icing. A confection of experience, old sugar mills framed in bleeding heart vine, tourists beside a chlorine-blue hilltop resort pool, palm fronds pendent across the bright sails of beached dinghies in two-dimensional perfection. It is not only the lack of three dimensions but the silence that, against all odds, perfects. This is what I found out the other day when I dove into the reef. Suspended above the swaying coral--pale purple, yellow, olive--watching the fish move in their separate society, live rounds of ammunition crusted with life, I saw the clear blue underside of a wave. It bowed up like the mystifying sine curve from high school math, and I thought how obvious some things become if you examine them in their natural setting.

This taskmaster, found at the local St. Vincent de Paul, made me think of stocky Germanic women in surgical white gowns, patients screaming on the tables as they expertly unkinked vertebrae and battered quadriceps. The inventors of breakfast cereals and Pilates--machine love affairs, strange newfangled things with springs, levers and chutes. Slender, unmuscled weaklings would shed their carapaces and burst forth, shining beacons of modernity.

A guy saw me with my camera aimed and said, “This is really something, isn’t it?” Me: “Yeah, that’s why I had to come back and take a picture of it.” The guy: “I wonder if you could run your whole house on this. Or at least your TV. There’s gotta be some way to reverse it.” Me: "Why don't you go ahead and ride it?" He tries to plug it in, but the woman behind the cash register tells him she thinks it’s broken. He tries to take a picture, but he forgot to recharge the battery on his camera. We go our separate ways, inspired, perhaps, to slow down, take it easy.

The worst book in the world

Before we left the U.S., I shopped for books in thrift stores. I began to see myself as a kind of anthropologist gleaning insights into the reading habits of different communities. At the Goodwill in Tucson among the well-worn Jonathan Kellerman and James Patterson paperbacks I found what the back cover claimed to be the definitive English translation of Anna Karenina. In Santa Barbara I found Dancing Wu-Li Masters and a copy of Stephen King’s The Green Mile in French.

But I quickly realized that I was not going to spend all my time reading in foreign languages and enjoying classics I’d neglected. I was going to indulge my unseemly passion for crime. I found Murder at San Simeon in San Diego (along with a World War II pea coat that fit perfectly), and I couldn’t resist the pop culture appeal of a “novel of suspense” (co)written by Patty Hearst about a murder supposedly hushed up by her own grandfather. We had recently anchored off the pier depicted by the book designer at the bottom of the dust jacket. I was intrigued by the concept of a Biddle and a Hearst writing historical “fiction” about a world they presumably knew intimately. But this was the worst book I have ever read.

I turned to the Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, which includes Anna Katherine Green's "Missing: Page Thirteen" (1915), featuring a “fairy-like” young detective named Violet Strange who solves her case by crawling through hidden passageways wearing a ballgown, and the work of Clinton H. Stagg, whose hero is completely blind. It chronicles the rise of the hardboiled style, including a 1943 story by Robert Leslie Bellem called “Homicide Highball" that contains the line, “He must crave somebody cooled for this kind of geetus.”

Later, in marinas and the offices of hotels that we didn’t even stay in, I parsed the reading habits of gringo ex-pats. At the book exchange in the Ensenada marina, I found a whole new subgenre: romances featuring pregnant women and women with infants. These horrified me. I was forced to pick up a Patricia Cornwell thriller about maggots instead.

Here in Barra, abandoned books show up at Beer Bob’s Book Exchange, located a couple of blocks away in a converted garage. I browse alone in the overheated stillness. The books are covered in dust. The tastes of those who donate run to trashy romances, trashy thrillers, occasionally a decent work of modern fiction, and a lot of novels in German. Lately I’ve begun to keep a journal of the books I’m reading, and its intended result, in the short term, is simply shame. Gradually I am weaning myself from the rush of satisfaction that comes when someone else solves the problem. One day soon, maybe I’ll end my addiction to what they call closure. Maybe I won’t be waiting for a revelation.


[A few interesting books fortuitously found here and there: mysteries by Henning Mankell (set in Sweden—so stark and spare, and they’re always eating pizza. Could it be the pizza with tuna, bananas, mustard and mayonnaise that Adam and his dad discovered in Kungsviken?); The Last American Man (Elizabeth Gilbert’s chronicle of a man who lived in a tepee and killed his own food in late 20th-century North Carolina—aka “Davy Fucking Crockett”); Son of the Morning Star (Evan S. Connell poetically uncovers everything there is to know about Custer and his Last Stand); Random Family (Adrian LeBlanc’s gripping work of journalism about a Puerto Rican family from the Bronx), On Beauty (diverting Zadie Smith book about multiculturalism in the academy, sort of outdated and frustrating but absorbing), We Were the Mulvaneys (Joyce Carol Oates’ family saga set mostly in western New York—much better I think than The Corrections, which, National Book Award aside, was annoying, the author’s prose wasted on his characters); and, a recent find at Beer Bob’s, one of my favorites, The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West’s brilliant take on Hollywood in the 1930s).]