15.3 Luna Mar

On the following day, I rode to Nativa to join the beach cleaning team.

We prepared the beachside for this ceremony to take place next evening after sunset. Set some floodlights to fall into water for safety reasons. We scraped the beach and set the bonfire grids ready for the ritual and virtually disappear from their eyes. That day I observed the clear waters of Nativa where Luna Mar would take place; aqua blue and white beach aligned with a forest of palms, quite a tranquilising spot.

Some three hundred yards away, on the edge of the rocks, there stood an empty house where me and my team lodged for the night. As soon as Luna Mar was over, it was our duty for the beach cleaning team to clean up once again and remove everything from the beach.

Late afternoon, in the mildness and thin rain, I sat wondering whether Sophie Nadz would show up with the students from Hilly High. She said so but I never knew she was a teacher at Hilly High. There were several things going on in my mind.

Luna Mar began. Moon expected to rise at 6:02 pm. Girls in their teens and twenties marched out of the narrow paths fenced on both sides leading to the beach from the group of houses lined in a row.

Girls wrapped in the sacred faldas and basically naked, wearing silver girdles on their hips, flowers on the hair and leis of ornamental white jasmines around their necks. Their eyes drawn in eyeliners.

Drums began and the girls unwrapped in a spray of confetti petals blown in an array. Laughter and shrills of merriment broke the silence. Bonfires helped to keep them warm.

All those bare skin girls dipped in moonlit water with only the silver girdle wound in sevenfold around the hips attached with talismans. They entered in groups to keep from dangers of sharks.

A complete dip meant to fully immerse the body from head to toe three times.

A Full Moon rose in the horizon in its absolute luminosity, brilliant white. A thousand sparkles reflected in the water in perfect weather for the event.

We were listening to the voices, we were hearing the drums, we were watching the girls. This was heritage – as above, so below. It gave an insight to the demography of the communities in Los Varados. No race, no tribe, no religion, everything was divi here.

Suddenly, some wild hogs ran out of the narrow paths from some of the guesthouses. They were totally a dirty dozen with their pendulums swinging in the fronts who ran to join the bathing girls in water.

We heard shrieks and hundreds of girls ran on the beach in different directions. Some grabbed wraps of faldas piled in heaps while others just ran. I saw a tanned brown short naked guy run after a nude girl.

At that point I came faced with Nizu wrapped in falda. She could not utter a word but shuddered her jaw in the cold she felt after a sudden dip, her eyes drawn in black ink. Something stopped me from touching her or to speak. Thin rain continued to pour on us. I helped the girls to vacate the beach leading them through a pathway fenced on both sides.

Wardens quickly reacted to seize control of an appalling situation and restore order. A ferocious verbal confrontation took place. A crowd of very rude men who belong to some rape culture claimed this beach belonged to everyone.

And while I was helping those girls to safety, two wardens came after me and grabbed me, put handcuffs on me with my arms behind my back. They apprehended me because they thought I belonged to the charging nasty crowd for I was a short guy. I kicked my legs in air when they carried me up the beach to a van parked on Camino Costero. They threw me in.

Soon, the girls retreated and this ceremony of la luna del encanto on the night of bewitchment came to an abrupt end.

I failed to obtain much information about those strange people. Somehow, I knew that those people came from the wrecked ship and Mayor Brando put them in the guesthouses in Nativa and kept this matter undisclosed. They were the guys waiting for the girls outside Hilly Side High. I was questioned and I honestly told my side of the story and that created another problem. I was transferred to a mental disorders’ facility and locked in a cell under the supervision of Professor H Shipman.

Two weeks later my mother visited and I hoped she would do whatever it takes to help me out of here. I sat before the glass, hands in cuffs. She sat in the visitors’ room.

After a frantic exchange of dialogue, my mother insisted, “Son, I have one final request to ask before my time come to end. I want you to sign this letter in consent to give up your father’s property of Blue Heaven or part of it as your inheritance of next-of-kin and pass it to your half-brother and half-sister that you haven’t seen but let’s hope they live a better life in the city.

“Your father was not able to raise you. He faced mortgage issues and difficulties in life keeping a family. This he requested on me and I want to get it done. We do not have much to give. We can always forgive. Remember, heaven is beneath your mother’s feet. I hope some good will rise from the ashes.”

I instantly remembered that dream with Sophie Nadz at Guesthouse; that meeting she held over property issues, where my dad stabbed my mother in the eye.

“Mother! Pass me the letter and a pen.”

I signed the waiver without even reading it but I witnessed all that in my dream.

While I spend my days admitted as a schizoid at the hospitable Pedazo del Cielo – a piece of heaven, often I wonder who Amelia was and the white girl I saw at Ferris Wheel. My friends knew Amelia.

And of course, there was Sophie Nadz I met on several occasions in different times. The red face and the horns I saw on her. That Guesthouse never was and there was no restaurant called Ambar.

My mother never got a place in Azul. Najma, my half-sister, removed my things in that house of Huvafen and took care of them. Donna and my mom were the only folks allowed to visit me.

Nizu and those lacy knickers, I don’t know where they have gone. I’m still dreaming and my time I spend following a visual snow in my eyes and listening to a tinnitus in my ears.

The sole supremo of the hospital, in white suit and grey beard, appeared at the door. Dr Shipman spoke in a calm voice, “We don’t file disputes. We profile people. Mental disorders cannot be tolerated. If you think you are better, write down your testimony, I will read.” And this is what I wrote.

– End –