Colum McCann - Songdogs

He took photos as he moved his way up and down the country, along the eastern coast — a prostitute in a blond wig, leaning out of a window; a boy playing soccer alone in a laneway; a man on a boat dumping a dead child, covered in lime, into the sea; men in cotton trousers; boys in the rain flinging stones up at birds; political slogans on the walls; a pig slaughtered at the rear of a church; a woman in an adelita dress moving very precisely under a parasol. Colour seemed to exist in his black and white shots, as if it had somehow seeped itself into the shade and the shadows of his work, so that years later — when I sat in the attic — I could almost tell that the parasol was yellow, it had that feel about it to me. His photos spoke to me that way. Many other things were yellow in my ideas of Mexico at the time — the leaves of plants, the leftovers of malaria, the sun pouring down jonquil over the land.

He spent a couple of seasons with fishermen close to Tampico, living in a palm-fronted hut down near the water. One of the men, Gabriel, inhabited his photographs. On the far side of his sixties, with a patch of hair on the front of his forehead, Gabriel tucked bait in his mouth to keep it warm. Worms, or sometimes even maggots, were held between his gum and lip, causing the lower lip to bulge out. It was as if he carried an extra tongue with him, jutting out over a cleft in his chin. Even when he was fishing with nets or lobster pots Gabriel kept the bait in his mouth. It was a trick he had learned as a child — warm bait, he claimed, made for a better catch. He would lean over the side of his boat and let some foul-looking spit volley out over the water.

He taught my father about nets and reels, hooks and flies, carried a note in his pocket that read, in Spanish: ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a day, kill a pig; if you want to be happy for a week, get married; if you want to be happy for a lifetime, go fishing.’

Gabriel had developed an aversion to land. His legs wobbled when he walked on dry soil, so he stayed in his boat most of the time, feet propped over the edge of the deck, taking his worms from an old tobacco can, shoving them down in the pouch of his mouth. He visited his wife in town occasionally, preferring to sleep with her in a hammock because of its rocking motion. Gabriel and his wife had eight children together. Gabriel had called his youngest son ‘Jesus’ with the idea that he would one day walk on water. But Jesus had walked elsewhere, along with other sons and daughters, leaving Gabriel with nobody to take to sea — his wife got seasick in the bath.

Every Sunday, Gabriel brought my father out on the boat instead of going to mass. While church bells rang, my father left his hut and went down to the dock and out to sea. The old Mexican would kneel in between two small shrines he had erected on either side of the rowlocks. Wooden saints were nailed into the boards. They hovered above the blue, pellucid sea. Gabriel said prayers while the boat bobbed out on the ocean, maintaining that on Sundays his shrimp nets were fuller than ever. My father saw him every day, but there weren’t as many photos of Gabriel as he would have liked — film was becoming scarce. Gabriel was almost like a father to him. They filled a void in one another. Gabriel wanted to teach my father ballads, but he soon found out that he had a voice not unlike the ravens that came down to feed on discarded fish heads. So the old Mexican insisted that he just listen, not sing. Raucous tunes rolled from Gabriel, songs that he made up as he went along, eyes cast to the sea. He sang of other days when he was able to dive to great depths and take up precious things from the ocean floor, of traditions, of curious motions that arose from waves. The two of them rowed together through bays and inlets, season piling into season, my father’s face reddening at first, then darkening in the reflected sunlight, his accent improving as he learned Spanish from Gabriel, who rolled his vowels around the parasites in his mouth.

Gabriel’s wife came down to dockside with plates of food, the plates covered with an old cloth to keep them warm. She brought only enough for her husband to eat and seldom even gave a nod to the gringo with the cameras. Sometimes she hung around to listen to the mournful sound of her husband’s four-stringed guitar.

My father knew then that it was time to head on but before he did, a strange thing happened. A group of landcrabs made their way up from the shore to invade the shacks of the seafront. They scuttled in unison, a barrage of them, almost in formation, clambering over stones, a wash of movable eyes. Gabriel was on land at the time, the bait between his gum and lip. The sea had threatened storms, and he was out mending nets on a pier and securing his boat when the invasion happened. He ran home, towards his wife, but found himself surrounded by the creatures. In the photograph Gabriel is perched on a fencepost, much like a bird, scared, looking down, staring at the crabs as they go past, his lip jutting out, letting gobs of maggoty brown spit down upon them. His shabby jacket hangs around him. An old black glazed sombrero with a large brim and steeple crown sits precariously on his head. A perplexed look on his face. The crabs look bizarre and out of place, a bit like my old man, moving crabways through people’s lives, bound to incongruity.

When he got back to his hut, my father found that the place had been ransacked. He suspected Gabriel’s wife, but couldn’t prove a thing. The rucksack, a few clothes, and the Foxford blankets were all missing. He felt it lucky that he always kept his cameras and money with him — but there was a portent in the robbery. Gabriel walked out of town with him, and a few miles beyond — a big sacrifice for a man with an epileptic tenor in his legs — offering my father the shell of a landcrab as a memento. The crab had slithered up and died on Gabriel’s porch. My father hung the shell from his new rucksack and continued north, along the seaboard, towns thinning out, the Sierra Madres looming.

At night the old man slept with his equipment in much the same way that he might have slept with a woman, coveting his cameras, everything curled in around him, the film in a special bag, even the tripod ensconced at his feet, a little piece of string tied around it and hooked to a big toe. He still had enough money left to go where he wanted, but he kept it tucked in his waistband in case of emergency. He moved inland, took a job painting fences for a rich rancher in the grasslands, sleeping in a horse barn with ten vaqueros. The other men played poker at night. Eight long months, keeping to himself, sulking around the corral, making enough to move along once more. Working on the fences, hammering a tamping bar into the ground, he often thought of the Mexican soldier’s sister. The photo had burned itself like magnesium into his mind. Every now and then he woke up and saw two dreamlike fingers beckoning him. He would go and find the girl. He wandered all the way north, towards the Texas border, hitching occasional lifts across the mountains from small grey trucks. Sometimes men told him about a massive war that had erupted on the other side of the world, rumours of skinny women walking barefoot into gas chambers, rows and rows of them pale as Easter lilies, small mines bobbing on the Pacific, an eruption of barbed wire in a halo around Europe — but all of that was an eternity away, he couldn’t fathom how men could continue their lust for dying after the agonies of Spain. He was treading the middle line between drifter and coward, I suppose. He could have gone to Europe to photograph or fight, but instead he continued his peregrinations, heading westward, away from the smell of the sea, wind in the vast emptiness, all the way through the mountains, across Coahuila, to the eastern side of the Chihuahuan desert.