RUBICON BEACH

small girl of three to the sounds of her brothers outside her window; sitting straight up in the dark, she was too self-possessed even as a child to open her mouth and cry. Rather, typically, she waited to correctly place her own consciousness, misplaced during the previous hours of the evening. She heard four of her brothers talking. The fifth, a year older than herself, slept three feet from her side. She listened for the sound of either her mother or father or sisters. She rose from the bedding of grass in the middle of the hut and went to the window and gazed out. The four brothers stood on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay jabbering among themselves with a quiet heat in their voices, their father watching the bay and speaking only to silence his sons. They were five dark forms before her. Catherine went into the other small room of the hut and found her mother in the door, the other two daughters watching from their beds. Calmly the three-year-old girl slipped beneath the skirts of her mother so that by the time the mother saw her it was too late, Catherine was off down the path toward the bay, where now there stretched out before her blotches of sand and dark water in the glare of men’s torches, and unfamiliar people lying strangely on the beach, and also the scattering of toppled trunks and drowned lanterns, the splinters of the ship and the rags of its white sails washing in with the tide, and more motionless unfamiliar people who didn’t know enough to lift their faces from the sand. At the bottom of the path Catherine stood watching one such person gaze face down into the earth, in the way she had seen her brothers gaze into the rivers looking for fish. To the corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.

It was like Catherine that she did not exclaim joy at the freedom of being on the beach any more than she exclaimed terror at the night to which she woke, some moments before, in puzzlement. On the path behind her she heard her mother running and calling her name. The beach was covered with men poring over the sand and its bodies and loot, and the light of the torches was bright enough so that, as she wandered among and between them, she could distinguish only vaguely the form of the ship out in the water. It looks like a huge dead critter, she thought to herself. It’s a tangle of arms and extended things. She stepped out into the tip of the bay and stood several minutes watching the dead ship. The sights and sounds of everyone around her died away. It was the earliest memory of which she would ever be certain again, standing there in the middle of the night staring out into the dark of a dead ship, lights and voices somewhere behind her. Many years west of her, many thousands of miles to the north of her, she thought of it; and lying in a hospital bed in Malibu, as she slipped from the oppressive care of her attendants, she recalled last her father’s laugh in her ear as he came from behind and scooped her up from a white hooded wave. It’s time to sleep, she remembered him saying, for little girls of crazy courage. When he carried her back up the path from the tumult of the beach, her wet feet in his hair, they were met by her exasperated mother and all her older siblings, jealous of her recklessness. For the first time that night, and maybe in her life, she allowed her face to display delight.

Actually her name was not Catherine. She would be given the name of Catherine later, in America, when the speechless beauty of her face so resisted naming that the relative banality of Catherine was the best anyone could give it. Her actual name was an impossible sound, a mutation of Spanish, Portuguese and an Indian dialect, just as her people were an impossible social configuration for which the name Village suggested too much communal fabric and the name Tribe too much common blood. The closest translation for what they were would be Crowd. When Catherine was five, a couple of years after the night of the shipwreck, the rains washed away their cliff and the Crowd moved into the South American forests. For miles it was difficult to separate the forests from the sea. The Crowd traveled north to a place where the edges of a monstrous river slipped in and out of the trees and the air was constant clouds of water lit by the green light of afternoon. The people of the Crowd lived in nests. Overhead they constructed canopies of black wood. They did not consider themselves wild people. They didn’t live naked, and they did not love ritual. In the dim ambitions of Catherine’s father Colombia might be a place of ultimate migration; he’d lived there a little as a younger man. He remembered the bars. What wildness was in him was of a man-made strain.

The boats didn’t stop crashing into their lives. Rather than floundering on the beaches they caught themselves in the weird wicked roots of the forest. Sailors who survived spoke of spotting these roots slithering off the coast of England, licking the hulls of their ships with pink vulvalike mouths. If this seemed improbable even to a girl as small as Catherine, it nevertheless imparted to her a sense of the world’s smallness, which she never got over. She would think to herself, If I were the forests of my home, my face would be a cloud of water lit by the light of green afternoons, and my legs would cross the sea to England; she hadn’t the slightest idea what or where was England. The mornings of her childhood were of wreckage