On Potheads and Perfection

I wore my bikini, only the second one I had ever owned, proudly. At least internally. I wrapped my towel around myself whenever I climbed back onto the sailboat after snorkeling, claiming I was cold when I was wet and keeping myself from getting sunburned when I was dry. Baby fat still clung to my new hips, and my skin was pale, splotched with irregular red patches I had missed with the 50 SPF.

My second bikini, my family’s second tropical vacation. We had travelled away from Western America for the first time only the summer before, flying all the way to Maui, Hawaii to enjoy some rest and relaxation. My dad had only consented to such a typical and unadventurous trip because my mother had chewed him out during our last vacation to Yellowstone National Park as they paddled a canoe back to camp during a hailstorm. “Next year, I want a tropical vacation!” she had screamed over the thunder. And so we went.

Relaxation the way normal people did it seemed, unexpectedly, to stick, though Hawaii was still too mild for my father. A place with a McDonald’s just wouldn’t do. Dad found what he called a happy medium for our next trip: warm and beautiful with palm trees included, but still (mostly) untouched by those disgusting “other tourists.” Though the sand was white and the water blue, some chance of exotic danger still remained, a rare combination of attractions that existed, he said, in a magical place called Belize.

Soon after we arrived, this magic took on a form, in my mind at least. His name was Mateas. His dark, bronzed skin shone smooth with sweat from the tropical sun, and his eyes were as green as the water over a shallow bed of sea grass. His arms were covered with the scars of life on the ocean: rope burns, eel bites, anemone stings. The salt dried as crystals in his short curls.

He was our snorkel tour guide. But not just any tour guide. The most wonderful, most beautiful tour guide ever.

He taught my brother and me how to swim against the current coming through breaks in the coral when we were snorkeling on the reef. He pointed out the eel’s hole, the nurse shark beneath the rock, the coral we shouldn’t touch. He showed us how to catch a lobster with our bare hands, though we never actually tried. Instead, we became his fellow hunters, finding the crustaceans and pointing with mute fingers as he dove down to hook a hand underneath the biggest part of their shells and drag them to the surface, where they ended up in our lunch.

Mateas lived on the same beautiful island where we were staying in our resort: Ambergris Caye. If Belize was magical, then Ambergris Caye was paradise. The only town, San Pedro, flashed lively and bright along its two main streets, where the owners of clothing stores and the only internet café yelled greetings to people in the street from their doorways. Fluorescent, flower-printed fabric hung outside every shop, lifting and sighing in the cool breeze. Everyone drove golf carts, the only vehicles cheap and small enough for the narrow cobblestone roadways, and no one honked. Family-owned restaurants lined the beach, where live bands played reggae as bartenders made smoothies of fresh papaya and mango. Paint of every bright color, students in school uniforms walking home on the beach, the smell of grilled fish mingling with the salty sea breezes. Beautiful and perfect. Like Mateas.

In my fifteen-year-old imaginings, I willed myself to believe that Mateas thought I was beautiful, too. After all, he had paid more attention to my younger brother and me than to any of the other people on the tour. Given, all the others were either honeymooners or gray-haired retirees, the women of both groups barely sticking a toe in the water before they decided they would just stay on the boat and drink margaritas. But still, Mateas let us swim with him. That had to mean something.

I told myself he had fallen in love with my adventurous spirit, my wavy blond hair, my gradually tanning skin. I imagined obstacles to our love that would only make our story even more romantic. He might have to choose between me and life on the sailboat, having been threatened with losing his job if he dared to love a tourist client. There would also be a question of ages: he had to be at least twenty, ancient in comparison to me. And so he would keep his love quiet, agonizing in silence as he showed me how to catch lobster, including me in his world the best he could.

While in reality he could only follow the tour and show me the popular tourist snorkeling spots on the reef that bordered the island, in my dreams he could make me a part of his fascinating home. We could go to the only church together on Sundays, the church with the windows that opened on the sea, substituting for air conditioning. We could build ourselves a house of cinder blocks on stilts to weather hurricanes and termites, painting it green to compete with our neighbor’s bright, fluorescent pink. He could take me on dates to the places with the best grilled lobster and coconut rice and beans. We could drink cerveza and salsa dance all night with his sun-browned, dreadlocked, ivory-smiled friends.

I already felt at home when the madres on their golf carts waiting for their children waved to my family in our cart as we passed the school. The man with the fruit stand gave my brother and me free limes and laughed as we sucked the halves and showed him puckered faces. I could live in the flowing, brightly-colored cotton clothes sold by the vendors on the main street, I could eat fresh fish and shrimp and lobster with beans and rice forever. I could swim in the water everyday, calm and blue, protected from the waves of the Gulf of Mexico by the bordering reef. I would let the cool breezes blowing through the palm leaves dry my salty hair as I listened to the steel drums being played on the beachfront.

In the end, my week with Mateas could be captured in one interaction: him pointing to a creature under a piece of coral and me trying to yell “cool!” through my snorkel, which ended up sounding like a drowning man’s gurgle.

My family decided to return the next summer. I looked forward to seeing Mateas again, seeing the island again. It felt like returning home, and I bragged all about my knowledge of San Pedro and the people I knew to the elderly couple sitting next to me on the flight from Houston.

We got our names on the list for three different sailboat snorkeling tours over the week, remembering that this particular activity had been, unanimously, our favorite. On our last tour, Captain Alito had told us the story of how he had built his entire sailboat tour company from one beaten up boat, bought for cheap after a hurricane. He also told us all about his daughter, his wife, his wife’s restaurant (which he high recommended we eat at), and the island he loved. We felt as if we knew him, as if we had become a part of his family, as if he had liked us more than any other tourists he had ever met. I thought it likely that Alito, and therefore Mateas, would be exactly the same as when we left them, happily living and working in their island paradise.

As my family boarded the boat, we smiled at Alito, thinking he would recognize us. Instead, as we set sail, he gave us the same conversation starters about his daughter, his wife, his wife’s restaurant (which he suggested we eat at before the end of our vacation), and so on and so forth. We quickly realized that he didn’t remember us at all, that we were just tourists, then and now.

And Mateas was nowhere in sight. I asked Alito if Mateas still worked for him.

“Mateas? Mateas who?” he said with a squint.

I told him I only knew Mateas’ first name, not mentioning that we had never actually had a real conversation. Or that I knew all of the stories behind his scars, stories I had made up, of course. Alito squinted some more and frowned.

“Oh yeah, Mateas. We had to fire him.”

I asked why, and Alito was reticent to explain, but I used my innocent face and eventually got him to tell me that Mateas had a problem with marijuana. Drug use on the island was not looked upon kindly, since the residents wanted to keep their home clean from the corrupting influences of other Central American countries. In particular, someone in the tourism industry couldn’t afford to show the visiting, paying customers a side of the region that might shock them out of their perceptions of perfection. And so Alito fired him.

Mateas a pothead? Not my beautiful Mateas.

More cracks began to appear in my images of paradise. A recent tropical storm had flooded the barely-more-than-a-sandbar island, strewing trash from the local dump along the length of the beach and the sides of the roads. We took a trip over the bridge to the north end of the island, where we saw the shacks of the people who worked in the resorts. We also realized that the grocery store we had once labeled “quaint” was only visited by tourists. The local grocery stores had no dairy products and their Coke in the glass bottles cost a fraction of what we were been paying. The same was true of our favorite restaurant; I realized we had only ever eaten next to other tourists. Maybe locals didn’t eat fish all the time, after all.

New signs went up across the road from our resort, advertising a soon-to-be-built gated community of vacation mansions. Where before there had stood a thick patch of tropical jungle, a concrete wall had been erected, surrounding a bare sandy patch ready for sale at over two million dollars a lot. The beach to the south of us had acquired the same partitions. Kids no longer played with coconuts and stray dogs in the open sand lots on their way home from school.

The island was changing. At first I was angry. Those “other tourists” had come along, discovered our wonderful hideaway, decided to make it their own and destroy the beautiful culture by tossing around their cash. But then I thought about how many people my family had told about Belize, how much we had been paying for our food and drinks, how we had shopped in the stores selling souvenirs, how we stayed in a British-owned resort. We might have had more respect for culture, more desire for true wildness than other tourists. But we were still tourists, just the first wave of many more, less considerate vacationers to come.

And the island had always had its flaws. Mateas had been a pothead when I met him. I just hadn’t had the eyes to see it.

My family now owns a time-share in a resort on Ambergris Caye. We visited for the third time this last summer. Now in college, ready to graduate, I brought my fiancé along to show him the island. I dreaded what further changes might have occurred in the wide gap of time between visits. I dreaded telling him about the beauty, the culture, that had been, but that he would never see. I dreaded being conscious of my place as just another tourist.

To my surprise, I found that the people were friendly. And the food, the food was delicious. And the main streets were excitingly narrow and busy and colorful. The man at the fruit stand gave me a free lime and we laughed as I puckered while sucking the juice.

One night we took a walk on the beach and watched the moon rise over the ocean, its yellow face fragmenting into golden sparks on the water. “It’s absolutely beautiful here,” my fiancé said in awe.

And so it was. Even though I was a tourist. Even though I would never live there. Even though it would have problems to face in the incoming onslaught of tourism. Still beautiful in imperfection. Like Mateas.