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for the tail fin alone was as tall as she was. And as it moved back and forth, it pushed before it a wave of water so powerful that it cast her away in a helpless tumble.
    The whale shark had then moved off into the gray-green gloom, relentlessly, seeming almost dutiful—as if programmed to follow a course, or a pattern of courses, set by nature countless millions of years ago.
    But today, as Paloma lay on the surface of the sea, with her face in the water, breathing through a rubber tube—wanting to be part of the sea but confined to the world of air—she saw below a scene of routine and undisturbed daily life. It was a life of ceaseless movement, constant vigilance, perpetual caution, and perfect harmony.
    A change of pressure told her something was happening, or was about to happen—a slight alteration in the way the water felt around her body. It felt tighter, seemed to press on her, as if something of great mass and size was moving toward her at high speed.
    Reflexively, she back-pedaled in the water, trying to get away from this thing, whatever it was, that she could feel but couldn’t see, that felt as if it was coming closer and closer, for the pressure on her body was beginning to lift her out of the water.
    Then she saw it, a black thing.
    It was larger than she was, larger even than her boat. It was soaring up at her. It was winged, and the wings swept up and down with such power that everything before and beside them was tossed aside, scattered. She could see a mouth that was a black cavern, and it was flanked by two horns, and the horns were aimed at Paloma, as if to grip her and stuff her into the gaping hole.
    It was a manta ray. And even though she knew, rationally,that she had nothing to fear, she felt a rush of panic. Why was it coming straight at her? Why didn’t it turn?
    Her body was rising higher in the water, driven by the pressure wave forced before the manta. Her breath caught in her throat. Sparks shot through her brain, impelling an action, contradicting the impulse, impelling another action, contradicting that. She was paralyzed.
    When it was no more than a few feet from Paloma, the manta tilted its wing and arched its back, changing its angle to display a belly of sheer and shiny white. Five trembling gills were on either side, crescent wings like slices of the winter moon.
    The ray rushed up through the water and broke the surface, a perfect triangle of solid flesh that should not be able to fly but was flying, as it broke free of the sea and reached for the sky.
    In Paloma’s head, sight and feeling gave way to sound, for there was a thick and deafening roar, an enveloping, infernal boom, like the sound the wind makes at the height of a hurricane.
    Paloma’s head rose with the manta, and her eyes followed it as it flew high in the air, shedding diamonds of water. At the top of its arc it hung for a fraction of a second, a titan of shimmering black against the sun that rimmed it with a halo of gold.
    Then it fell backward, showing its belly; it smashed flat against the pewter sea. The water erupted, and the sound seemed to carry the same reckless violence as a thunderclap that cracks the clouds close by.
    Now Paloma could let out her breath, a whoosh of excitement. She had seen mantas jump before—young ones especially, at twilight usually—but always from a distance. They seemed to be flipping in happy somersaults.
    But mantas couldn’t be “happy.” This was what the islanders called an “old” animal, and by “old” they meant low and primitive and stupid. Its cousins were the sharks and the skates and the other rays. The wisdom was that “old” animals could not know pleasure or pain, happiness or distress. Their brains were efficient but small, their capacities limited.
    And Paloma agreed with most of this wisdom, for Jobim had taught her that it was wrong ever to think of animals in human terms. It deprived animals of what was most precious about them—their