Where boats rest at night

or, words penned in the thin moments of day

To Roberto,

If only you knew the impact you’ve had.

---

Towards the end of my postgraduate, and for almost an entire year, I worked in a bar in the west side of the city. My government funding (three years of it, no less) was drying up, leaving me facing the bleak reality of the outside world, and so the bar, in all its minute glory, acted to supplement a stipend that would soon be no more. There was another reason, of course. There always is. One that makes little sense to put here into words.

It was a small bar, the kind that was open later than most, located at the edge of the city and on a busy main road, a spot that held little else except for a handful of restaurants: a pizzeria, a Mexican fast food joint affectionately (or offensively, I couldn't decide) called Taco, Señor?, and a small Thai place, arguable the nicest of the lot, with a courtyard out back that on summer nights became a pleasant enough place to eat. There was also a coffee shop. Not that I ever went there. Come evening, when I would make my way to my shift, the little café was already closed, with blinds down and a blue sign informing me it was no longer open and would remain so until the morning. In any case, the bar had its own espresso machine, mainly for espresso martinis, which by then were all the rage and everyone was drinking in great quantities. Myself included. The bar, as it happened, was called Shrew. An odd name for a bar, I thought. Not The Shrew, like some pub, one with a painting of a shrew on a sign outside the window and with taxidermied shrews to be found dotted around the shelves within; not Shrewd, a venue no doubt offering itself up as “A place for the discerning drinker” (the same words surely printed in a serif typeface at the top of the drinks menu), attracting customers that might fit such a description but also bringing in many who merely wanted to be seen drinking there, their lives nothing more than a checklist of venues to frequent and obsess over and to be observed within. No. It was simply Shrew, in the singular. I have no idea why it was called it that. Not that I ever asked the owners. Still, being quite fond of shrews, I found it amusing and somehow appropriate to land a job in a bar named after such an animal, an animal that isn’t, in fact, a rodent—the rodent being a common misconception for the shrew’s order, which is actually Eulipotyphla, the same order as hedgehogs and moles—not that I thought of myself as a rodent, or even a hedgehog, but perhaps as a mole, one who preferred his eyes to be buried away from the bright glare of reality.

As I was saying, the bar was small. And it was quiet. It never got rowdy, is what I’m trying to say (perhaps it truly was a place for the discerning drinker). That's not to say it didn't attract its own set of locals, each of whom visited at their own specific time during the evening, or only on certain days of the week, their varying schedules meaning that if someone new were to walk in—a tourist, say, who’d wandered outside the busier and fancier parts of the city, or perhaps someone from out of town staying at one of the cheaper hotels nearby—there was never any issue finding a table. Over time, I got to know these regulars with their quirks and idiosyncratic qualities, and to observe the comfort that routine can bring. There was Camilla, a professional film and theatre critic who worked for a national magazine, her columns appearing in the entertainment section and occasionally also in the weekend insert of one of the major newspapers. She would come to the bar to write a first draft of her review after seeing a film or show, the bar being on her way home. With her thoughts still fresh, the ambience of the bar, or so she told me, was within the acceptable range for her to think and write. I cannot work when it's noisy, nor when it's quiet, she said, without even the faintest hint of emotion or humour, as though everyone would feel the same and know what she meant. This bar, she went on, absolutely straight-faced, is within the ideal range. It didn't take me long to realise that when she spoke she emphasised certain words and phrases. Camilla, you speak in italics, I wanted to tell her, but never did, worrying that my meaning would be lost. Then there was Arturo, a man of Spanish descent, in his late sixties and with dark skin that reminded me of old leather, who would come for a single glass of red wine, a Shiraz or a Cabernet Merlot, the bar having a surprisingly decent wine list, and who would lament, briefly, only for the duration it took him to drink his wine, of how it was better in Europe, how the nights were warmer and the women more beautiful, that vegetables tasted more of the earth and that there were no finer lemons than those grown along the coast of Italy. This he would say to anyone who would listen, which mostly would be me and no one else, and then he would nod his thanks and leave, and I would smile, knowing that I would hear it all again come the following night.

But the one whom I remember most was Marína, who visited always on a Wednesday and Thursday evening, at around 9 p.m., give or take, and sometimes also on a Tuesday, although (as she would later tell me) this was entirely dependent on her shifts at the Women’s, or maybe it was the Children’s hospital, I forget which, her schedule as a nurse not always predictable, never allowing her to depart the bar late on a Thursday night and to confidently state I’ll see you Tuesday, the little bell attached to the door jingling as she left, knowing full well it could be Wednesday when she would be here next instead.

Marína was mid-twenty something. That’s what I thought, anyway. My eyes, eyes that back then (and even now, for that matter) had no justification to be reading a woman's age, but that did so anyway, putting her features at twenty six, perhaps seven, still a few years away from thirty, that age at which things change and a person begins to transition into the next stage of life, or that if they don't, which for some can be the case, remain fixed and can seem as though they never transitioned over the threshold at all. It was entirely possible, is what I’m trying to say, that Marína could have been thirty five but that she existed in a perpetual state a decade younger.

Marína had black hair, a deep black, like the light was being stolen when it touched her, kept cut short and with a fringe at the front that fell close to her eyes. In her left ear she always wore three silver rings, each identical in their circumference, and her arms looked like the kind that wanted to be covered in tattoos, but weren’t, not a single drop of ink to be found there or elsewhere, or at least so far as I could tell, it being entirely possible that the only places without tattoos were her arms and her face. There was something else, too: Marína always wore the same clothes.

I’m Marína, she told me, the first or second time she came in, likely having noted to herself that I was new. It has an accent on the i, although the accent doesn't change the way it sounds, I just put it there when I write my name, and mentally when I say it, I wasn’t named with it spelled that way or anything, I’m not from a country where you’d do that and you can't hear it, the í, but I want you to know it's there. I know it's weird to have to say that, but if I don't tell someone then it plays on my mind. And then she stopped talking, halting herself, and I explained to her that it was fine, I was happy to know the i in her name had an accent and that it was actually an í, even if it sounded the same, and that if I were ever to write her name I would make sure to include it that way in honour of her desire. Telling her this seemed to make her happy.

Anyway, as I was saying, Marína was a regular. She came in alone and left alone and would sit at the bar with a notebook and pen and order a tequila that she would down in one swallow, promptly ordering another that she would sip over the course of thirty minutes as though it were an entirely different drink. She spent this time (her sipping time, as I liked to think of it, which would be repeated with subsequent shots of tequila throughout the night until she’d gotten through the best part of half a bottle, though it never showed, she never seemed drunk, the only thing I could tell being that she started to shiver) scribbling in her notebook with her eyes closed. Actually closed, I mean. Squeezed shut whilst her hand and pen drifted over the surface of the page. Around the second or third time I saw her doing this, watching as the pen left one continuous mark on the paper, I went over, waiting for a moment when she paused and took a sip of tequila (still with her eyes closed, I should note), and I asked what she was doing. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added.

“Spirit writing,” she said. The pen was poised over the paper, ready to continue.

I knew what spirit writing was, I'd just never seen anyone do it. I told her as much and she shrugged, her eyes still closed.

I elaborated: “But why are you doing it?”

She opened her eyes and placed the pen down. The trail the pen had left was indecipherable. Or at least it was to me.

“Why does anyone do it? I'm trying to communicate with the dead.” She looked at me and wrinkled her nose, and then said: “With my brother.”

And that was how I found out about Marína’s brother, how he’d passed away in a drink-driving accident, that it was her brother, forever 18, who'd been the one who was drinking and driving, how he’d swerved off the road into a lamppost, killing himself and also taking the life of his friend, a friend who was also 18 and who had been sat in the passenger seat without a seat belt on, his body ending up 20 metres down the road.

“It happened just outside,” Marína added, as though this were a minor detail she’d forgotten to mention.

“What? Right here?”

She nodded. “Over on the other side.”

I looked out through the bar’s window, to the streetlamp on the opposite side of the road. Several cars zipped by, their drivers oblivious to the conversation we were having inside.

“At that very spot?” I asked, the question entirely pointless.

“That’s why I do it here,” she said. She took another sip of tequila and winced. “Of course, it’s possible I should be sat right over there, right on the spot where he died, but this is close enough, don't you think?”

I admitted to not knowing the rules that governed the success of spirit writing. It was entirely possible that, yes, she should be sat on the other side of the road, that that would be the only way to communicate with the dead, especially her brother, the one whose life had been lost in that exact location. But at the same time, I could understand why she’d chosen the warmer insides of a bar in which to conduct her work.

“It was six years ago.”

So you would have been twenty, perhaps twenty one, I didn’t add, asking instead: “Have you ever made contact?”

“No, not yet.” She looked down at the paper. The lines of black ink were a mess. Marína turned the paper around a few times, inspecting it at different angles, as if a clue were to be found if only she looked at it the right way. But there was nothing. Nothing that she admitted to seeing, and I didn’t feel comfortable spending too long looking at it myself. Instead, I left her to it, and a few hours later she departed, a cold sadness in her eyes.

After that night we began to speak more and more, like there was something opening up between us, not a relationship but a friendship, something like that, or at least that’s how I felt, and with the passing of the weeks I began to sense that I was the only person she spoke to, that I might be the only one who knew she came to the bar two or sometimes three times a week, to drink tequila and attempt to contact her dead brother.

One night, a cold night in winter when the rain lashed the windows and the bar was devoid of all but the two of us, Marína told me (her breath leaving the occasional cloud of vapour as she spoke) that she didn’t even like tequila, that the only reason she drank it was because it was what her brother had been drinking the night he’d died. He’d consumed half a bottle (or so the coroner estimated, as Marína informed me) with his friend at a party—the same friend who’d been flung from the car and killed. The friend’s girlfriend (and this was according to Marína herself) had just had an abortion and that was why they were celebrating, a fact that struck me as utterly grim.

“It’ll get me closer to him, the tequila,” Marína said when she explained all this. “It’ll get me closer to him,” she repeated.

I don’t think I slept at all that night.

Some time after this, I told Marína how I, too, had known death, not in the same manner as her, saying that I couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about it but that I admired the way she spoke so freely about her brother, about what she did—what she was doing—even if I didn’t really believe in spirit writing or the dead and that it was likely a waste of her time (none of these things I said out loud). I don’t remember what else we spoke about, and maybe we didn’t speak about anything else at all, we were just another Arturo, someone who would enter a room, speak the same things, and then leave. And that, despite how it sounds, was OK.

Eventually, of course, I stopped working at the bar. With my postgraduate finished, I landed a job working for a company on the east side of the city, earning enough money—not a huge amount, but enough—that keeping the job in the bar made little sense. It was hard saying goodbye. We almost exchanged numbers, Marína and I, and perhaps we would have done had mobile phones been what they are today, but we didn’t, and on my last shift we hugged—her body shivering as we embraced—and I think we both cried, just for a moment, our friendship seeming to have reached that point when crying was a natural response.

In the months after, I would walk past the bar, even though it was far out of my way, not at all close, living as I did at that time on the other side of the city. I would walk past on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, at an hour sometime after 9 p.m., slowing down to look in through the window. Marína was always there, wearing the same clothes and sat with her eyes closed, one hand resting on a pad of paper whilst the other held a pen that drifted slowly across the page, a shot of tequila never far out of reach. I almost went in. Twice I almost went in to take her hand and remove the pen and tell her that it's OK, that she didn't need to drink tequila anymore, that she could stop, he wasn’t going to make contact and that that was OK, it was OK to let go and free herself of her hurt. Christ, I nearly went in, my hand one time actually on the handle and ready to open the door and hear the bell jingle and for Marína to turn and see that it was me, to smile and stand and walk over and hug, just briefly, just for a moment, long enough for me to impart a gift of warmth, something that I could offer her even if there was nothing else I could say. I still think about it, I still think about the fact I didn't do that. I never went in, not once, and I've never dared go back, worrying she might still be there, older now of course, although perhaps still looking the same, perhaps still twenty six or seven, or whatever age below thirty that she remained within, and maybe that's it, maybe that's what I've been thinking about all these years and that’s bothered me and that I could never realise and shake free from my system until now: that it was Marína. It was Marína and not her brother. Marína was the one who'd died and she was trying to contact the living and not the dead, and in all those weeks and months that I worked there I wasn’t talking to a person but instead a ghost.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash