Into the mundanity and trudge of Sam’s and Elena’s lives comes a bear.
Sam and Elena live in San Juan with this ailing mother in a increasingly dilapidated house. Since Sam was 16 and Elena 18, they have been taking care of their mother, who is dying. Now at 28 and 30, the sisters are still as close as ever and as devoted to their beautiful mother as ever, but caught in dead end jobs to make enough to survive on; or not quite enough, because with their mother’s medical bills, their debts keep increasing. Elena works in a golf course club, and Sam works on the ferries in the galley, making coffee and selling snacks and answering tourists’ questions. Both sisters feel caught in a rut, in dead end jobs, but without a choice. Sam hates her job, and although Elena does not complain, she too had been struggling.
The regulars, her manager, the tiny tips, the occasionally docked wages. The accounts, the bills…(p119).
Then one day, from the ferry, Sam sees a bear swimming the waters. Later on, with Elena and their mother in their house, the bear actually comes right up to their home.
Its rump was huge, thickly furred, gold and black and brown. Matted in spots. Dense with texture. Past that, the lump of its shoulders, the soft half circles of its small high ears. Its head was massive. […] It looked in profile toward the road, sniffed the air, and yawned, expansive, a mouth opening vastly, yellow teeth exposed three inches long, lack lips curling back and tongue spilling forth. […] There, not ten feet away was the animal’s massive body. As big as three men. Wider, stronger, and far deadlier. Its tail, its back, its thighs. It twitched and its muscles rippled. A dark stripe of fur lay over its spine” (p36-37).
There are many such descriptions throughout the book of the physicality of the bear, and of its smells – the wet, musk, sour odour. The bear terrifies the sisters, but after the visit to their house, it goes away. Sam reports it but is told it has become increasingly common for bears to pass through on their way elsewhere, so no one is coming to take the bear away, but it will pass through if they do not provoke it and that they should be fine if they stay well away from the bear.
The excitement dies down, then Sam receives a message from her sister while she is at work. Elena has had another encounter with the bear. Sam is terrified for her beloved sister. But Elena is curiously unterrified, she is even delighted. Instead of reporting the encounter, Elena continues to seek out further encounters with the bear. She does not conceal this from Sam, instead, she tries to share it.
Describing it, she was focused. Detailed. Reverent, even. […] Elena talked of her sighting the way a person might if an angel touched down in front of them, or if a burning bush spoke, or if, as Sam supposed, a grizzly walked up, met their gaze, and did not do them harm. It was remarkable. Certainly. To come so close to danger and emerge unscathed. Elena’s day, before seeing it, must have been tedious, spotted by moments of frustration, but after crossing the bear’s path, the simple fact of her life had to be recast as some sort of miracle (p56).
Elena tries to convince Sam that the bear is not just harmless, but that it is a good thing that has happened to them.
She said it was magic – enchanted – a gift from the animal gods – She’d told Sam, leading up to this afternoon, that when she was with it she felt strong and brave and also tiny and insignificant and utterly aware of her own body and dissolved into everything else in the universe. She felt glowing and connected and magnificent. She told Sam that this was the best thing that had ever happened – she said that. Elena. That the bear was what she looked forward to each day” (p151)
Sam understands her sister, but she also feels it is madness for her sister to continue interacting with the bear. Elena seems oblivious to the danger she is running, and even exposes Sam to it, so oblivious does she become. Elena brings Sam once to meet the bear, where she calls to it on her walks from work, and it comes because sometimes she brings it food, the very thing authorities are expressly mad clear no one is to do. The bear encounter with her sister terrifies Sam and makes her realise she needs to reach for outside help.
But Sam and Elena have been their own self-contained unit for such a long time, that Sam both reaches for and rejects help at the same time. She connects with people and then pushes them away, her neighbour, her lover, authorities. Events continue to unfold rapidly and the end comes suddenly – the story seems to plunge off a cliff, abruptly. The bear looms so large in the novel, and yet in the end, the real risk from harm perhaps is not a wild animal, but the tedium and death of dreams and hopes, which has seriously endangered the sisters. A very good read indeed, very controlled writing which holds the high drama tight and close, unspooling the tensions created and coiled with impact at the end.
~ Bear, by Julia Phillips ~ Random House, 2024.
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