I grew up in Marseille, in a nunnery by the sea. My parents abandoned me when I was too young to remember their faces. They were rich though. They gave the nuns enough money to support me for a few years. I don’t know why they couldn’t just hire a nanny to look after me. Maybe it’s because I was a rotten child. The nuns never told me what kind of baby I was, but I could see in their eyes that I’d been troublesome. It could also have been because I was Asian. You don’t see too many Asians in France.
Holistic life wasn’t for me. Every day I would look out the window and dream about running away to America. My favorite movie was Once Upon a Time in the West. I wanted to be like Mrs. McBain, the woman who got live in a house in the desert and fall in love with Charles Bronson. It always fascinated me how he could leave the most beautiful woman in the world. Don’t get me wrong; I love the sea, oh do I love the sea, but I’d been around it so much that I yearned for something else; a different life, a life where the ocean couldn’t constantly roll me back to the shore; a life where there weren’t any shores, only endless land and no water in sight.
Devoutness was also a challenge for me. I could never be like the other girls- the ones who turned to God whenever difficulties befell them. I learned to work things out on my own, and prayer wasn’t a part of my daily routine. It seemed to me that all prayer did was delay the inevitable. It was a temporary cure for an itch, a placebo for despair, a waste of time. If you really wanted to change things you had to do it on your own instead of relying on an invisible hand in the sky. The other girls would chastise me, and word got around that I was unfit to be a nun. Imagine being a girl who not only looked different from everyone else but didn’t believe in the same things they did. I was in total isolation, and I needed an escape from that place.
When I was sixteen, I found a way to sneak out of the abbey and steal away into the streets of Marseilles. I’d never been around any boys before, and I fell in love with the first one I met. He was nice to me, and he showed me around the city. Nobody had ever paid attention to me the way he did. Soon I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Every time I tried to sleep in the abbey, I would lay awake thinking about the sweet things he’d said to me. There were dreams too, amazing dreams, and all of them came true. At night I became like a prophetess and in the day, I became like a nymph, free of all disturbances.
But the nightmare was soon to come. One night he showed me his place, and it wasn’t what I expected. I had imagined a clean place that had a nice bed and a view of the sea. But instead, it was a worn-down back-alley dump that reeked of cigarettes and alcohol. He showed me his bed, which was rigid and squeaked. I let him kiss me, but before anything else happened a stampede of whores and drunken men came into the place. They looked horrible; I couldn’t stand them. How could he hang out with such despicable people? All along he had told me how fun and carefree his friends were, but I didn’t know it really meant they were the scum of the city. The hookers were laughing and rubbing the men’s faces in their bosoms and I wanted to get away. One of the men offered me cocaine and I knocked it out of his hands. He smacked me across the face and my boyfriend just stood there, laughing at me. He took me back into his bedroom and called me a stupid slut and forced my mouth open. Instead of cocaine he made me swallow what I was later told was ketamine, which put me to sleep.
The next morning, I couldn’t remember what happened, but I felt really sore below my waist. I looked at my legs and saw that someone had slashed me in several places on the inner thigh. It hurt to walk, but I tried to leave the room anyway. Turning the knob, I found that it was locked. He had taken me prisoner, the man I had come to love. My heart shattered into a million pieces, and I wept harder than I ever have before.
When he came back, I told him that I wanted to go home and never wanted to see him again. He ignored me and forced me into a creepy room down the hall. It was dark, with only a mattress, a video camera, and a small, barred window. He wanted me to go in first, but I refused. He grabbed me and I tried to hold onto the door frame with my life, but he pushed me through anyway. Then he told me how much he’d missed me, and my heart dropped. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t after what I’d seen. When he saw that I wanted to get away, he pulled out a butcher knife and said, “If I can’t have you, no one can.” I pushed him off me and ran for the door. I was looking all over for a way out, but I didn’t see any, so I ran back to the room he’d kept me in. After I went in, he closed the door behind me and I took several steps back before I hit the wall. The he grabbed my ankle and dragged me over to the middle of the room. He got on top of me and ripped off my shirt. I was fighting him, but I couldn’t get him off me because he held down my wrists. I started crying, saying, “How could you do this?” over and over. He gave me an evil smirk and said, “Layla... taste your poison.” Then he started cutting me: my arms, my chest, my neck, and my waist. I was all bloody, and the next thing I knew he was going to stab me. But then we heard the police banging on the door, and everything stopped. He ran out of the room and left me there, defenseless and bloody.
When the police brought me back to the abbey, all the nuns thought I’d deserved what happened and that God had punished me for running off every night. They put me in a cell block in the upper tower, where the only thing that gave me solace was a wonderful view of the sea. The sea, the sea, that milky white sea. How its waves churn like wheels that beckon me to drift wherever the wind may travel. If escape was a yearning yesterday, it was a death-wish today.
His betrayal left me as empty as Job after cursing the day of his birth, or Eve when she realized she’d been responsible for tasting the forbidden fruit. It appeared that God had forsaken me for eating the apple, for leaving the convent and tasting the outside world when I should have obeyed my sisters and stayed put. There was no limit to the amount of punishment my disgrace had generated. The internal torment I faced was far more painful than my social isolation. My heart had frozen in shards after I’d woken up and realized that the man I’d given it to had used me for prostitution. I’d rather have spent a thousand years in that tower than face the agony of his betrayal. Whenever I think about him now, I think about how stupid I’d been to trust the first man I’d laid eyes on. I wished the Mediterranean water would cleanse that stain on my heart, as it would cleanse even the staunchest dirt that buried itself in our wimples. But my prayers were left unanswered, and the frostbite infecting my soul made me more bitter as the months went by.
That was, until the rains came. It rained for hours and hours, until every ravine of Marseille filled, and the waters crept over their riverbeds. And then it rained some more. It rained so hard that I couldn’t even see what was happening around the tower. But I could hear the sea. It was roaring, every bit as loud and furiously as the chambers of my heart.
The water came so high that the room in my tower started flooding. I didn’t know what had happened to my sisters, or anyone else in the town. All I knew was that I had to get out of there or I’d drown in the sea. I tried to use my mattress, but it was too big to fit outside the window. Then I tried the desk, but it was too heavy to move. By this time the water had risen so high that everything in the room became submerged, except for a barrel that stood in the corner. It held some of my most treasured things, such as my diary, jewelry from the Swiss Alps, and the romance novels I’d read that made everyone else in the convent cringe. However, the most important book was not to be found. It was the Bible, which I held in my drawer. I went to fetch it and put it inside the barrel with the others. Then I wedged it outside of the window, with my little arms hanging onto it tightly.
Outside the tower I struggled with the thrashing of the sea, finding it difficult to keep my balance. It twisted and turned in the ferocity of the wind, and my hands kept slipping off because it was so wet. Then out of nowhere came a vessel to my aid. A gentleman threw me a rope and hauled me up. I tried to bring the barrel with me, but it was too large. After I was rescued, I mournfully watched it float away into the mist, which had finally started clearing now that the rain had stopped. My home was ruined, and my belongings were lost. The sea had swallowed our city up, like it had been hungry for the blood of its polluters.
How unreal it was to be above it now, my city under the sea. I’d spent so many years down there, playing in its gardens and watching sunsets on the beach. Whenever that orange ball of fire glinted off the water in the special way it does, I’d always think to myself that I’d never seen a color more beautiful. But now that the beach was gone, the memories were all that remained. Once the sea relents its hold, they will be scattered and smeared by the fury of its retaliation. Some memories I want to keep forever, but others I don’t. These memories always pull at me in two directions simultaneously: one in mourning and the other in relief. The nature of this blended emotion causes a great deal of confusion whenever I think about the past. And that wasn’t the last time I’d ever feel it.
The man who’d saved me smelled of seaweed and rum. He was a sailor on a mercantile vessel that traded between ports all over Europe. They’d saved many of us from drowning, but none of the other survivors looked like me. One of them looked at me strangely, as if the threat of an Asian would bring a plague upon their ship. He suggested to the others that I be put in the spare raft immediately, so I could drift to the shore alone. Then a man securing the masts sarcastically asked him if I looked like a rat, which received several bouts of laughter from his fellow crew. They had nothing to worry about, I told them, because I’d been raised in a nunnery and lived in Marseilles my whole life.
The man who’d spoken up for me looked like a caricature of a pirate who was usually mistaken for a goth. He wore a bandana that sprouted wild dreadlocks about his head. His face had the peculiar hollowness of a ghosts, or a Neanderthalic Englishman like David Bowie or Russell Brand. He wore earrings, a nose ring, and the cross of our Lord around his neck. A blunt settled on his lips as he swaggered over the riggings, like he’d been doing it for years. Despite his ruffian appearance I was drawn to him in a way that I wasn’t with all the others. The way his hair blew in the ancient winds of the sea beckoned me forth to him. My eyes followed their strands in a direction away from the circus of Mid-World, and into the secluded lands of the Elven north.
But I didn’t approach him; I was too worried what he might think.
They let us all off in Barcelona, but I stayed behind because I’d heard their destination was for Iceland and I wanted to go there too. It wasn’t only because I was fascinated by that sailor, but because I didn’t really fit in with Marseilles and there wasn’t anything left for me there. What better opportunity was there to escape from the convent? The storm had probably ruined it anyway, leaving me homeless without even knowing.
I hid in the wardroom while the others departed, finding a nice little niche where I could stowaway to the north. That didn’t last long, as I was soon discovered by the cook and forced to earn my keep by becoming his assistant. Sweet deal, I thought. It was a small price to pay for safe passage to Iceland.
The sailor with dreadlocks first spoke to me when we were out on the Atlantic. I’d been watching a school of dolphins jump over the waves behind our boat, flipping their fins in midair under the light of the sun. He said that dolphins were the daughters of the Air and the Sea, their humanlike abilities masked by aquatic bodies that needed as much oxygen as they did water. Their cheerfulness was like a rosy virgin’s, innocent and sweet; their communication skills were as superior as a matriarch’s; and their smooth skin, wavy like the curves of a woman’s hips, were all byproducts of a feminine dynamic that was further enhanced by the energy of water. He said the dolphins followed us because they wanted to become us, as if they were mermaids in the flesh that could never completely transform their legs. Honestly, I thought the man quite mad after hearing this, but then I looked at the dolphins and noticed how they really were quite different from all the other creatures of the sea. I’d never even seen one before today, but when I reflected on how they weren’t afraid of us and seemed to be trying to imitate how we sailed over the water, I came to accept just a little bit of what he said.
His name was Dominic and he had been raised in a monastery, like me. He wore the cross because he never forgot the word of the Lord, despite being excommunicated from the Church. I asked him why they’d done that, and he said it was because he’d criticized the way they hoarded riches when it was Jesus who taught his followers to share their wealth. For that he was deemed a heretic and never saw their faces again. He decided to become a sailor because it was always a dream of his to see the world. All the places he described on his travels made me yearn for them, and deep down I wished that I’d been with him while he sailed abroad. After I told him my story, it appeared that we were alike in many ways, and I grew warmer to him with each passing day of the journey.
The further we sailed north, the more icy our breaths became. If the air was colder in these regions, it was even colder in the cavern of my heart. As I grew fonder of Dominic, a demon from the past revealed itself. What was supposed to be the euphoria of newfound love was really an insecure fear about him betraying me the way my first love had. He was like him in many ways, and he would say the same sweet things. How was I to trust someone who told me I was his everything and wanted to show me the world? How could I have possibly known that I wasn’t making the same mistake twice? A seed of confusion grew in the core of my belly. I loved him, yes, but did I really know him? My heart was telling me to have him, but my brain was telling me no. Sometimes this warning was so severe that I’d spend my nights writhing in bed, uncertain of what to do once I reached Iceland. I also thought that he was too good for me, which made it even more difficult to believe he loved me. There had to be a way to find out, so I spent a lot of time analyzing everything he said, scheming about different ways to get him to prove himself. I’d seen him vulnerable once. It was when he told me, “Layla, you can’t be afraid of love because of the consequences.” He was right, but I still had a strange desire to hurt him, to twist his words around and destroy what was building between us in order to see that he really wanted me.
So I played hard to get. I ignored his advances and told him I needed space. But he wouldn’t give me any because it was really hurting him. It made me feel good to have this kind of power over a man, and I took it for granted. Then he said something I’ll never forget, that I was using him in order to conquer the betrayal of my last love. He said I was using him to feel powerful, the same way I’d been used in the past, when I felt powerless. And what hurt the most is that he thought I didn’t really love him because of that. But he was wrong, it was ludicrous. What that man did to me to was worse, and I couldn’t possibly want to do that to anyone else. I was completely offended by his opinions and ignored him the rest of the way to Iceland, even after he apologized.
I was worried he’d tell other members of the crew what I’d been through and how I was treating him. They were curious about me and prodded him with questions, but I don’t think he ever told them. We just kept quiet for the rest of the journey, in separate compartments. His words were devastating, too difficult to forgive. He knew he’d messed up, so he stopped pursuing me. It’s horrible that he couldn’t prove he loved me without insulting me; that’s all I wanted. I was in a dark place again, that same one I was in before. But I don’t know, maybe this time it was my fault. After all, he never deliberately hurt me.
Then came the bells. They were frosty bells, coming from a shore that signaled the entrance to Iceland’s chilly coves. Puffins were perched on the red roofs of houses, homes to the descendants of Gaelic civilizations. These people had withstood this harsh environment for centuries. The tough climate had unified their communities, forcing a friendly cooperation between their neighbors.
When Dominic left the boat, I watched him walk away, hoping he’d look back in my direction. But he never did. I didn’t know where to go, so I followed him without his knowing. His home was on a green slit of land that stood at the bottom of a mountain, out on a dangerous Atlantic cape.
Then the ground shook and I saw her, a fair maiden as white as the snow. She glided along the grass and ran to him, as if she were an angel in the flesh. My heart burned to be the one to embrace him; an overwhelming jealousy consumed my soul. He was supposed to mine, this dolphin pirate. I watched him lift her off the ground and the Earth shook again. On the other side of the gulf a volcano was erupting. Dominic had told me that Iceland had many volcanos that were constantly active, and so I thought this must be one of them. As lava rolled down its side, I thought I could feel the pain that the land must be feeling under its scorching heat, for my heart burned more fiercely in that moment than in any other. So, it had really happened; for the second time I’d been cheated. Tears of ash from the smoke started to fall around me, and so did my eyes, brimming at the witnessing of his betrayal. In that moment I became one with volcano: the pain of it melting my heart with every bit of agony that the lava burned the solid ground with.
