Scenes from a beach

- “Hotter than Satan’s arse”, he said to no one in particular as they stepped off the flight.

- And perhaps just as humid, he thought to himself, as he surveyed the tropical foliage. His brief musing was interrupted by the sound of the children screaming their entreaties of going to the beach.

He had come of age in a city by the sea, and longed for the water all the more now that he lived in a high desert environment. There, in his adoptive home, the nearby lake sometimes experienced enough evaporation to become as salty as the Dead Sea itself. But the limpid expanse now stretched out in front of him was very different from those other water bodies. Admittedly, the aquamarine ocean was a far more breathtaking sight than the muddy brown waters of his childhood, but regardless of hue, the sight of water stirred something primordial in him, perhaps a desire to return to it following a long absence. In some ways, he identified with other exiles who experienced a sense of belonging as well as profound alienation, no matter where they lived. Inspired by Camus, he ordered an absinthe-based cocktail and imagined that he was lounging on a beach in Oran. Not surprisingly, like his literary idol, he had a generally grim view of the world. He liked to call it his existential dilemma, this delicate balancing act of Optimism and Absurdism. She ascribed it to his inherent grumpiness. He took a gulp of his drink, savoring the anise flavor over all the other competing ones. He had not thought it previously possible, but his spirits seemed to lift as the cool liquid coursed through his veins.

There they were, the locals; their faces a beautiful pastiche of indigenous features and European complexions. They were a proud people, once subjugated by disease and tyranny, now perhaps experiencing their long overdue resurgence, if only in this instance by servicing the hospitality industry. He was still conflicted about the legacy of imperialism, military and economic, contemporary and historical, having grown up in a former European colony himself. As he looked at the locals, he half expected them to speak to him in the Queen’s language, knowing that his features were different from theirs. He found it altogether strange when one of them spoke to him in a Romance language familiar to him from the country where he lived- for they assumed he was one of them. In his adoptive country, this was the second most commonly spoken language. Yet, for reasons both cosmetic and political, many people still considered it a “foreign” language and imbued it, as well as its native speakers with a distinct sense of otherness. In another time and place, a similar exoticism may have been labeled ‘Orientalism’. But here he was, unambiguously an alien, yet strangely at home, much like back ‘home’, where even rank strangers would inevitably ask him where he was ‘really from’.

She had remarked earlier that the beach was a great place for “people watching”, and he had only half-heartedly agreed. He thought it instead to be a great social experiment, replete with opportunities to observe and comment on human behavior. But this was their way, her un-fussiness contrasted against his pretensions to philosophical grandeur, both usually conveying the same idea, his invariably the more verbose. As he looked around and listened, he was able to discern several different strains of conversation. In them, he could easily tell apart his ‘countrymen’. They were usually the loudest and most self-assured among the lot. One could almost imagine them with their bravado, standing in a foreign land with combat fatigues, masters of all they surveyed. Here, their commands were directed at the local wait-staff, asking to be served a chilled beverage or food. Usually this involved adding extra accents aigu and tildes to the local language, hyper-foreignisms that did not exist, in an attempt to sound more authentic. Looking around, he saw some well-scrubbed teenagers, younger compatriots by the sound of their accents, running towards the water excitedly, yet with a certain practiced restraint. Like the older generation, the youth were endowed with some of the same cool self-confidence. He looked further, and saw a handsome man trying, with little success, to embrace his youngest daughter whilst getting the mother to take a photograph for posterity. He then looked at his own young ones, deeply catatonic as they stared into their electronic devices, only occasionally rising out of this state, when the vagaries of the sea breeze interrupted the certainty of their connectivity to the invisible web of information. The younger one looked at him for an instant with a flicker of recognition, and then quickly back at the screen, where an imaginary purple dinosaur with an unfailingly cheery disposition held her undivided attention. Inwardly, he smiled.

It was, the locals said, an unusual summer. There was an unprecedented amount of Sargassum in the water, and this was being deposited on the beach like berms. The local authorities had resorted to cleaning off piles of the seaweed to ‘beautify’ the beach for the tourists, and every morning, he saw a group of locals (almost certainly being paid less than the local minimum wage) picking up and carting away wheelbarrows of the stuff. This was, in his mind, a Sisyphean endeavor, as the next morning, there were more berms, and more cleaning to accomplish. As he looked around in what seemed to be a beehive of activity, he saw them, the woman with the alabaster skin, and her much older male partner, both bathers, meticulously picking up seaweed from the water and depositing it on the beach. She was young, beautiful, slender, and seemed wedded to the task with a certain air of resignation. He, on the other hand, seemed to assume a more supervisory role, picking up a clump every now and then, with a certain delicacy to his movements. It was obvious they were lovers, and he looked old enough to be her father, but he held his chest up with the pride of a man cavorting with a much younger woman. A few clumps later, perhaps having achieved a certain sense of accomplishment, they stood still, facing the water. He surveyed them, and mused about the absurdity of it all- the woman, the seaweed, the old man, and the sea.

            His eyes continued to scan the water, out to the distant horizon. There, high-rise buildings on the nearby island appeared and disappeared in the blue haze, like mirages in the desert. On the sea in front, an oil tanker; gigantic, utilitarian, and covered with rust, the sea in front of it usurped in turn by a speeding white yacht. Closer at hand, on the beach, obsequious locals responded to the beck-and-call of moneyed tourists. He was certain that they were secretly thankful for the favorable exchange rate of the currency of their nearest neighbor to the north, political invectives notwithstanding. A study in contrasts, he thought to himself.

            The bathers converged on the beach despite the sweltering heat. They looked like seals of different sizes, all beached to take in the life-giving light. ‘Skin cancer’- he thought, as he quietly retreated to the shade of a beach umbrella. His pathos stemmed from the realization that dark skin was no protection against painful sunburns. He thought about this as he looked at his own arms. A travel brochure touting a beach destination might have well described his tan as copper or bronze, but to him, the reality was much more mundane- he looked like the color of burnt toast. Oh well…

His eyes scanned the beach again. In the far distance, a group of people played beach volleyball. Closer, a woman with a Mohawk haircut sat among three other people and was engaged in an animated conversation with them. With the passage of time, she nonchalantly whipped off her bikini top, baring her breasts to the group, and by extension, to the world beyond. Whether this was a profound philosophical statement or merely the desire to tan evenly was unclear to him, but the four-way conversation seemed to proceed without obvious pause, or even a furtive glance by the others in the direction of her chest. He looked around, averting his gaze guiltily. In front of the conversationalists, a dark skinned man in beach shorts juggled what appeared to be three very sharp sword-like objects. As he looked at this triptych, he tried to determine who, if anyone was most out of place at the beach.

His observing session was pleasantly interrupted by her and the children asking him to join them in the water. He looked at her, beautiful and tan in her gold bathing costume, straight out of a French Art-Deco travel poster in the style of Broders. She looked radiant, like the day he had first seen her. The children jumped around happily in the waves, skin glinting from sunscreen lotion. He pushed up his sunglasses and waved back at her, miming that he preferred to rest in the shade. He laid his head back down on the deck chair and took another sip of his cocktail. “This is the life”, he thought to himself, as he lapsed into a deep, languorous slumber.