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A few months ago I read a wonderful novel, The Old Mermaid, which José Luis Sampedro published in 1990. I enjoyed that book, and it suggested this one to me.
However, this book is not a copy or a similar one, but rather it was suggested to me by that reading: Sampedro's mermaid adapts herself to living on land, in a bygone time, that of the Romans, while my mermaid is a 21st century man who gets accustomed to living in the sea, at the expense of the sea, and discovers —and makes us discover— that another world is possible, because it exists and is inside this one.
Serena's Male Mermaid is a fantastic story, the 78th one I have been involved in, but it is not science fiction, but fantasy fiction. My mermaids exist because they have always existed, just as chimpanzees have always been in the world without the authors who have spoken to us about them, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, with his Tarzan of the Apes, having to give us faith in their origin or continuity in the animal world: they exist and that's it. The reader may think that mermaids do not exist..., well: in this book they not only exist, but they will make us enjoy their world, their ideas and their adventures throughout the pages of this story. And if at the end of the reading you still think that mermaids do exist, or don't, that is your business, since what I have intended by describing this world is that you enjoy a moment escaping from your problems and worries, and get immersed —never better said— in this magical world of the sea.
The characters and events are entirely fictitious, and have nothing to do with people or situations in the real world. If they remind you of them in any particular way, bear in mind that this is pure coincidence beyond the will and imagination of the person writing this.
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They say that mermaids were originally birds with the head of women, but luckily the truth has prevailed over time and for the common people we have recovered the fish tail that we never stopped having and in which our own self and our wisdom reside.
Mermaids have been on the planet Teluris for millions of years. Humans know Teluris as Earth because they have little imagination and believe that what is important is what they step on, even though it is the smallest part of the whole. From the crest of our waves we have seen the dinosaurs come and go and many other species, including humans, whom we will soon say goodbye, given our experience observing the cycles of the different species that have come and gone throughout our long history, which we estimate at more than a billion years, since the planet cooled enough for Essa, the first mermaid, to appear on the face of this rock with water and air.
Essa came from consecutive species of marine animals, and lived alone until she learned to copy herself by parthenogenesis. Something went wrong, and her thirteen children did not turn out well. Some died shortly after birth, others lasted decades, and only three females and two males managed to live a century. Little by little they evolved, through a hundred generations, and we have reached extreme longevity, to such an extent that I do not know of any other mermaid —not even myself— who died or shows signs of old age, as the oldest of us report.
You will be surprised that I speak in the feminine, and do not refer to male mermaids. They do exist among us, but you will discover throughout this story why the male sex has so little relevance among us, mermaids. And why they do not last long.
I do not want to tire you with generalities, so I will tell you my story. It will be your responsibility to believe whether this is true or not. We mermaids will not cease to exist, or will we begin to do so, because you doubt or stop doubting on what I am telling you below.
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I was born on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, near the African continent. Some of us are born in the sea, but mermaids prefer to give birth on land, so that the baby can use her lungs, since the gills open in our sides and are used automatically when we run out of air. On the contrary, when we give birth in the water, the gills open automatically, which makes it much more difficult for the baby to open her lungs to the surrounding air when it comes out onto land, and it can drown if her mother does not intervene quickly. When a mermaid comes onto land, she crawls, using her hands to help her, until her tail dries and our abdomen forms, with very white legs, because they have not been exposed to the sun. Normally we exhibit the female sex, which is natural for us, but if we make a mental effort before leaving the water until our legs have dried, we can become male at will. It is not something that is done frequently, except for reproductive purposes, since we are viviparous and therefore need the help of the male.
My father, Nefrenio, maintained his sex for 20 years, until I was fully developed, because he said I needed a male reference. Then he became Nefrenia and was my mother's best friend. My sister's father, however, was Sheelo, who a few days after giving birth would return to being Sheela because she said she couldn't stand it. Luckily for Siele, my father and I adopted her and taught her everything he knows, before becoming feminized again, when she was ten and I was twenty years old.
One or two decades of age is still early childhood, compared to what mermaids have to learn to survive and what we can do, given that our longevity is very long and is measured in centuries.
My mother, Irenia, had never had a baby, and it cost her a lot more than she thought to bring me into the world. A mermaid can have offspring once every ten years, approximately, so when my sister Siele was born, I had already learned many tricks to defend myself in our habitat, the liquid layer that covers our world.
Hehe, man thinks he is the king of the universe, but he doesn't usually live to be a hundred years old, and instead we die only by accident or by mermaid murder, because not only are we long-lived by definition, but we love life. Man is pigeonholed into countries of several tens of thousands of square kilometers, perhaps a million, but we have five billion square kilometers (or almost two hundred and thirteen billion cubic kilometers) for a much smaller population of just a few hundred of us. Sometimes a mermaid dies, but it is very rare. We have no predators, and we do not prey. Some of us eat only sea plants, but others of us eat different species of sea animals, although not so much that we kill any species. My favorite delicacy is sharks, because they have no bones, and their hardest parts are the teeth in their mouths, but I spit those out. Sharks eat everything they get their teeth on, they are voracious, and they go crazy for blood. That's why I go after them.
As I said, my mother gave birth to me on an island in the Mediterranean, we call it Iscia, but I think humans call it Cyprus. When there were no humans there it was a peaceful place, with magnificent sunsets. But for a few thousand years those people have been fighting each other, and sometimes they have surprised some of my kind and attacked them, not knowing that sharks are afraid of us. My friend Tiara was once attacked by two humans, and she defended herself by biting them and killed them. She then told me that they didn't taste very good, although they were very nutritious. She had to swim a lot to synthesize all the food that those two unfortunate guys gave her. She had to fast for about a month, and she suffered from aerophagia that lasted for weeks. The bubbles she made made us know where Tiara was...
My mother breastfed me until I was ten, when Siele was born. From then on, my mentor was Nefrenio, my father. He taught me to hunt, and to respect the fish populations that were not very numerous. He also taught me to break the nets of the fishermen who caught everything they could, without caring about making entire colonies disappear, whether they were minority species or not. We broke their nets, and even wrecked their boats, attracting them to the rocks with our songs, because when in contact with the air our voice is melodious and we sing duets and trios very well. They see us when we stick our bodies out of the water, and they are dazzled by our hair and our breasts, believing that we belong to their species, and they come towards us. They run their boats aground and sink them in their greed for lust, and if they do not jump ashore in time, the sharks —who have also heard our songs and know them as the prelude to a feast— show up and carnage. We let them do, because it takes them three days to synthesize the flesh of the land dwellers and then the sharks taste better when we eat them.
Nefrenio also taught me to distinguish underwater currents and to take advantage of them to navigate more quickly and with less effort, as well as to interpret well the messages they bring us through color, smell, taste, flavor and temperature.
The light of the Sun —from red to violet— does not penetrate the sea very deeply. When we feel like it, we go up to the surface and lie on our backs, receiving the rays of our star for hours. Sometimes a dolphin comes up and plays with us, and we chat a lot with them. Other times we fall asleep looking up or down, which gives us a darker skin tone. I like it when the waves lift me up, and I look out from the crest at the surrounding sea. Sometimes I ride the wave continuously, so that I am always on the crest, and it seems to me that I am on top of a still mountain in the sea, although in reality I am moving with the wave towards the open sea or towards the beach, and when I reach it I lie down on the sand with my arms extended. More than once I have woken up with my tail dry, that is, my legs. When this has happened to me and I see a human nearby I dive into the water so as not to end up hurting them. They are stunned, looking at me, and after I throw myself into the water, they stay looking to see me appear, what never happens.
It is in those moments when we are lying on the beach that a male siren can appear and fertilize us. But the life of a mermaid becomes much more complicated when that happens, because for the next 80 years we have to take care of our offspring to teach her to live as a good mermaid.
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There was that man. It was an almost deserted beach, where there were barely twenty humans swimming, floating or chatting with each other in that language so unpleasant to the ears, the human language. I suppose they speak differently in each of the countries they have invented, but to us mermaids they all sound like the same unpleasant murmur, although sometimes they scream very loudly. But that man did not talk to anyone.
He had a kind of strange and ridiculous seaweed on his head, and he just floated. From time to time he looked at his wrist, which I would later find out to be a machine called a watch that tells him the time, what part of the day he is in. For humans, time is very important because they have so little of it. It amused me to see him there, with that ridiculous piece of seaweed on his abdomen and the other even more ridiculous one on his head. Obeying a playful impulse, I grabbed his foot and pulled him out to sea.
He was meditating, thinking about his life, his family, his profession, because he had just retired, as he would tell me later. Retirement is when you have worked for a long time and you stop doing so, and other humans give you the money they call a pension so that you can live until you die. Among us there is no pension or work, but tasks. Every one of us has to do what she needs, and if somebody else asks you, you help her. We feel strong all our lives and we never have to depend on others.
When he felt the gentle tug of my hand, that human was startled, and he did not relate it to another being, but at first he thought it was a sea current. I held his foot gently, but also firmly, so he could not let go. But I didn't like the other foot moving to the right, so I grabbed it with my other hand, and that creature saw that it was sailing out to sea with its feet together, helplessly in spite of the effort he made with hands or its screams being able to prevent it from going out to sea. The other humans didn't realize that one of their own was leaving them, because they always mind only their own business. And there are many of them, humans.
It took us a long time, two hours according to that human's clock, to get five kilometers away from the coast. I felt the anguish of that man. Gently, while he was gripped by terror because he didn't know what was happening, I removed the two rags that he had for all his clothing. It amused me to see that despite being in the water for so long he still had his legs. Then I introduced myself.
He reacted with fear. He didn't understand what I was saying, because my command of the human language is very limited. Later he would tell me that it sounded like something like iiiijk! to him
Seeing that he didn't understand me, I moved on to using telepathy.
The man touched his hips and saw that he was naked, he touched his head and saw that he no longer had those seaweeds.
I dove in and hugged her legs at the knees. How nice, to have them in the sea. Then I came up to the surface.
That human was stupid. Five thousand meters away from his world, lost in the middle of the sea, and his concern was my eyes, my hair and how we reproduced.
I had seen him a while ago too, but I didn't want to scare him, because I know that sharks scare humans. He had been circling around us. He was undecided whether to attack the human and eat him, or run away from me. As I said before, mermaids always let them eat humans. Then we follow the sharks so that those who escaped our hunt did not find out that after three days we each catch one of them and eat it in bites, because their meat is much more appetizing when they have just synthesized the human flesh and bones in their metabolism and have already expelled the toxic part from their bodies.
I half-listened to him. I went up to the shark and bit him on the nose, making him shudder and swim away as fast as he could. I slowly chewed that kilo of fresh meat, and after swallowing it, I swam after my prey, and I kept biting him until only the mouth of that animal remained. I took it with my hand and went back to where I left my human, who was now swimming desperately towards the beach.
I showed him the triple row of teeth on the shark's jaw, and he looked at me in terror.
That human looked at me with a calmer look, almost smiling.
Humans aren't much for talking, not even in thought. They're more for acting. Almost like us, although we have the advantage of having learned more things in more time than they have in several generations. So I took him by the hand and led him down, despite his protests.
After a few minutes he stopped moving. I assumed it was because his lungs were full of water. When we got to the bottom, I gave him siren breathing and then took him to my cave, and he slept there for a long time, so that when he woke up he was calmer.
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For days he was there, learning to breathe with the gills that came out from under his chin, and if you didn't look closely, you wouldn't see them when they were open. When we're on land, they close automatically and we breathe through our lungs, and that makes us look just like humans. Did humans originate from a pair of mermaids who settled on Earth for some reason? I refuse to believe it because they would have lost their longevity and the immense pleasure of ruling almost the entire planet through its most liquid part...
Then he sat up and noticed the greater resistance that water makes to the movement of the body than air.
He looked at me with a stupid face, as if he had a hard time accepting what was happening. He looked at my tail, and then at his legs, crowned by his masculine attributes.
He continued saying a lot of things that I didn't understand. A bunch of nonsense, instead of being happy to be with us, to have inherited the rest of the planet. He wasn't like us, but he had adapted well, much better than other humans we had adopted as pets in the past. They had drowned at first, but this one had adapted, had reacted well to my mermaid resuscitation. I took one of his hands and caressed his face with my other, and comforted him:
I no longer liked what that being, so strange to us, thought. I considered returning him to the beach where I found him, but his readaptation was going to be costly and difficult, if he survived. I'd rather keep him. That's why I had to be tough:
I felt sorry for the poor human. It was a lot to take in. I smiled at him, and said to finish:
And with a gentle flick of my tail I left the cave and took a long walk to the surface, and then came back. It took me a day. What would my pet decide?
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When I got to my cave I saw that he wasn't there. Where had he gone? Had something happened to him? There were no traces of a struggle, there was no blood anywhere. Sharks are very careless and they would have left some pieces, some bones.
I looked around, but I couldn't see him anywhere. Suddenly I heard his thought:
Suddenly a hole opened in the seabed and little by little my pet appeared.
In the following days my pet spoke to me less and less about his terrestrial world, or his wife, or his family. It was as if he was forgetting, as he discovered the wonders of the sea.
Indeed, since he had been living in the depths of the sea, he had had a long adaptation to his new environment. While he was unconscious, his gills had developed. Then he had learned to move little by little after the fright he had given me. I said that he was my pet, and he said that I was his teacher.
Yes, when he had found himself alone after his argument with me, he had think things over: there, a kilometer deep, he either got used to this life, or he would die. He must have developed a very tough skin, because his body had not collapsed, nor had his bones broken from the enormous pressure of the water above his head, reaching the surface. He wondered when he would see her again. But those thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the shark. It had approached the entrance of the cave, and had looked inside. He knew that the sunlight did not reach that far down, at least not as visible to the human eye, and yet he saw in blue and violet tones of varying degrees. He deduced that so did the shark, and it had seen him, too. But suddenly that predator of the seas, instead of advancing into the cave, was retreating. A mermaid had appeared, and the creature had quickly fled from her. But the fish woman was faster and grabbed it by the tail, climbed on top of him, and what Diego saw next was a carnage much wilder than a bullfight: the beast that was riding the other beast was eating him bite after bite, and soon the shark did not move anymore. However, she continued eating until only the teeth remained, which she let fall to the bottom. Satisfied, she slowly walked away. My pet noticed that her tail was much longer than before, she would tell me later. Yes, in fact when we mermaids eat a big fish, our stomach stretches and with it the tail that houses it, and when we have digested it all, our tails return to normal, as we return to the water what is left over from digestion.
Diego remembered what I had told him, that we respect each other, and we do not entertain ourselves with other people's things. Maybe that mermaid, who I would later tell him was my friend Hayk, hadn't seen him. Or maybe she had and recognized that was my cave, and didn't bother to make the acquaintance of my pet. But perhaps the sharks weren't so cautious, and that's why he took a laminar stone from the bottom and dug a hole where he could go vertically and cover himself with mud from the seabed, with only a rusty tube that he found in a nearby shipwreck sticking out so she could breathe until I returned and he could get out of her temporary grave. That happened hours later, and he surprised me by coming out of his hiding place. It would never have occurred to me, because mermaids are the queens of the sea, and no other species can stand up to us. We are few, but the other marine beings fear us, and those who don't, are soon eaten by us.
Diego, hereafter Iiik, told me a very interesting old myth about an African prince who had taken the slaves from his country to found another one on another continent. My mermaid friends wouldn't understand it, because we don't have countries, princes, or slaves in our world.
But he was wrong, because we don't make pets work for our benefit, like their owners do with slaves. For us, a pet is someone who is taught to live in our world, and if they can bear it, they become one of us.
Not entirely satisfied with my explanations, he still asked me:
I smiled at my pet's naivety.
That left him very thoughtful. For days we did not speak again, although we fished and swam together for a long time, always in silence, in communion with our marine environment.