This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  Luckily, the next day swept away all those fears, and I got up in a different mood. It was Saturday, the sun was shining, and I had a mission. While having breakfast in an on-deck café, I studied and learned by heart the ship’s list of activities. Among other attractions, leisure-time amusements on the Wonderful Sirena included three nightclubs, two theaters, and two swimming pools. Keen golfers could improve their swing during the day by hitting organic balls that turned into fish food once they were in the sea. The word “bored” was banned and “Mediterranean parties” lasting till sunup were organized every night. I read the whole list of pastimes and, with my illusions still intact, looked up and watched the people on deck. They were strolling round, gummy-eyed, slow-moving, ecstatic. The men sported Bermuda shorts in a great array of tartans, and the women smelled like the vaguely Provençal soap provided in the cabins. More than one person carried a book and a cocktail, searching for deck chairs in which to keep dozing, books lying open on bellies. I dismissed a reactionary thought extolling the aristocratic cruises of yore because they would have excluded me, too, and once I’d finished my coffee, I went off to imitate the masses.

  Like everyone else, having roamed the deck all morning, I devoted the afternoon to exploring the entrails of the whale. I covered the length of the ship, the six decks from bow to stern, port to starboard, and soon saw that this was no aquatic metropolis but a huge shopping mall. I had to get lost ten times at different levels and in their grid pattern of symmetrical streets to understand the liner’s urban planning: general attractions clustered in the middle and cabins gathered around them at both ends.

  Since I wanted to socialize, I hung around in the shopping zone. In the luxury boutiques I tried to make eye contact with some of the haughty, ennui-stricken women shoppers who couldn’t hold a seductive gaze if it didn’t have dollar signs stamped on it. I stopped for a moment outside the beauty center with its wildly gesticulating, obsequious hairdresser, who was probably a failed artist. A sign offered tattoos and piercings for those seeking strong emotions. I went into the gym where a flock of elderly folk were showing off new tracksuits their children had given them for Christmas. Pillboxes tinkled in pockets as they rode the stationary bikes. I wandered among the bustling tables in the miniature casino, which had an exit onto the promenade deck in case some desperate soul wanted to take a dive into the sea after losing everything.

  I also had an otherworldly sensation that I should describe. As you moved away from the ship’s sparkling center, the light in the passageways became increasingly tenuous, the shadows mistier and fleeting. I’m not talking about paranormal phenomena but just saying it was quite evident that, at the outer edges of the world of brightness, shy passengers traveling alone, centrifuged away and banished from leisure activities, were mooching round these corridors with eyes of a beaten dog. In every corner, near windows looking out, they stopped to check if they had cell phone reception at last.

  I suspected they were outcasts and I didn’t want to be one of them—not yet—so I went looking for a restaurant where I could have dinner. I chose the self-service, because I figured that trays laden with food, all nicely set out, and the ceremony of getting up and walking around with your plate favored contact with people. To break the ice, you could always say to the person next to you how great the trunk of hake à la Basque looks, or even joke about the glutton who’s got up from the table five times to get another serving of paella. I was counting on a predisposition to good humor, on people wanting to have some fun, but all I got were a few cautiously courteous smiles or, to be more precise, three from women and two (much more open) from men. A friend of mine going back to our high school days, a born optimist, would have called it “building infrastructure.” But as I’ve already suggested, I opted for satiating my disappointment with smoked salmon and Roquefort ravioli, knowing I’d have all night to regret it.

  Before bedtime, I went out to pace the deck again, up and down, tenaciously trying to get my dinner moving. At sea, the night was warm and the gentle breeze brought a kind of static electricity that numbed the senses. Under the full moon the deck was like a small-town promenade on a Sunday evening in summer. People nodded at each other. Some faces were starting to look familiar, maybe from the restaurant or the shops, but it wasn’t worth trying to speak with anyone. (I mean that they wouldn’t have contributed to the point of my journey.) Half a dozen brattish kids were fooling around, splashing each other in the lit-up swimming pool astern. In a couple of deck chairs normally used for sunbathing but now tucked away out of the light, I spotted two women chatting and smoking. Like me, they were over thirty and looked as if they’d been telling all their secrets. When I was cooking up some excuse for approaching them, the loudspeakers announced a spectacular fireworks display, and everyone looked up at the sky waiting for the first rocket. The two women—champagne ad look-alikes, one blond and the other brunette—stood up and went over to the railing. When they walked past me they started whispering and pretended they didn’t know I was there, but a few steps further on they burst out laughing. Knotted at the waist, their pareus flew in the breeze.

  I miscalculated. I must have gotten carried away with the fireworks, trusting that they’d also be looking at them, but when I tried to find them again after last explosion of light, they’d completely disappeared. An hour later, now after midnight, I’d fruitlessly checked out the three nightclubs. My feet hurt. I was a sad poor wretch and there was no one to console me. Then, luckily, I discovered the piano bar where Sam Cortina played, and no sooner had I walked in, sat at the bar, and asked for a whisky sour than his voice washed over me, balm for my weariness, succor for my anxieties.

  The piano bar was called the Rimini. It appeared out of nowhere, hiding behind thick curtains, a clandestine oasis that adopted me like a little orphan for the whole week. The barman wore a tux and a red bow tie. They opened when it got dark and closed—if they closed—at sunup. The place was shaped like a number eight, with a circular bar at one end. Around the other circle, dim in russet shadows, you could detect some velvet sofas. A few brand-new couples were making the most of the intimacy they afforded to do a bit of warming up before deciding whose cabin. Those of us sitting at the bar watched them leave, somewhere between envious and hopeful because we, too, were part of the scene. At the other end was Sam Cortina playing the piano. Next to the piano, a stand displayed a faded poster announcing, “With you today, Sam Cortina, Tap Dance Fingers, three years undisputed king in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.” Occasionally someone, maybe Sam himself, turned the poster around so that it read, in a more classical design, “With you today, Sam Cortina, Velvet Voice, king of Atlantic City.” After a couple of nights, I understood that “today” meant always, eternally.

  I recall that when I walked into the piano bar, Sam Cortina was playing a Neil Diamond song, “Solitary Man.” Since then, I’ve listened to it over and over again: “But until I can find me / . . . I’ll be what I am / A solitary man . . .” Accompanied only by the piano, Sam Cortina sang it slower than Neil Diamond, lingering over every word, massaging out all the feeling. The velvet voice, breaking at the perfect point of a flaw, aging, elegant, rounded out the desolation. Yet the final effect wasn’t excessively sad. That song’s about me, I thought. It’s a coded message. How gullible, how ingenuous I was. It didn’t even take five more songs for me to understand that Sam was singing for himself.

  His repertoire was so well chosen he never fell into the trap of routine. He could alternate Cole Porter and Irving Berlin evergreens with Joni Mitchell and James Taylor ballads. He always started with Jobim, something different every day. His signature. He sang Stevie Wonder with echoes of Frank Sinatra. He took on Gainsbourg when it got very late. Physically, he looked like Burt Bacharach if he sang his songs, and there was no need for choirs or violins. He knew how to choose what he did of the Beatles.

  And speaking of the Beatles, that first night when I beached up in the piano bar, just when I was finishing my third
whisky sour and the barman was making me another one at his own initiative, Sam Cortina started to play “Yesterday.” I always cry when I hear “Yesterday.” I can’t and don’t want to avoid it. The first three notes are enough to trigger some deep wellspring that fills my eyes with tears. I’ve never been to see any specialist. I’m cool about it. It’s a song that cracks me up in a millisecond. It can come from Muzak in a department store, watered down in Fausto Papetti’s version, in Marvin Gaye’s more emotional rendering, reconstructed by Miles Davis’s trumpet, or even warped into a lullaby. My wife, Bet, thinks it’s funny, because, according to her, I’ve chosen the corniest song in the world to get soppy over. Sometimes at home she hums it in my ear to surprise me. It could be to make fun of me, pretending that she’s crying, too, or because—and now I see it—it actually really moves her.

  When Sam Cortina played it that night, with a long piano introduction before he started singing, I whimpered with feeling I’d never known before, a more genuine feeling, I’d say, as if all the liters of tears I’d shed in my life until then were just a rehearsal for this one occasion. I sang it softly to myself and I’m sure I was babbling.

  I mopped up my tears with a paper napkin. The barman gave me a supportive smile. Only a few stalwarts were left in the Rimini: two couples marooned on their sofas, a British husband and wife being bored together, and three sojourners like myself leaning on the bar. When he finished “Yesterday,” Sam Cortina thanked his audience and announced a break. There were a few attempts at lazy, desultory applause. I was the only one who clapped loud and long. He came down from the stage and sat beside me. The waiter brought him a whisky, no ice.

  “Men don’t cry,” he said after taking a sip of his drink, and winked at me. I gave back what I suppose was a bovine stare and blinked to see him better. He was tall, skinny, but broad-shouldered. His hair was whitish-gray and well cut. His skin bronzed and dry. I thought he was about sixty. He had class, the class of a displaced pianist. I’m not saying he had airs, but he was definitely too classy for that piano bar on the Wonderful Sirena.

  “ ‘Yesterday’ has been a weakness of mine for years,” I said, “and you stirred it up again. I imagine I should be grateful. Your whisky’s on me.”

  I wobbled slightly on my stool but, hearing my voice, I realized I wasn’t as drunk as I thought.

  “Here my whisky’s always on the house. This is my place.” He tilted his glass in a sort of toast, long, thin fingers cradling the drink with languor acquired over years. We spoke English, and his American accent was still tinged with lees of the Italian his parents had spoken. At first sight and from the outside, Sam Cortina seemed to be living on the fringes of human passions. The conversation that night and those that were to follow in the next few days were to confirm this first impression. Sam presented himself in public as nerveless, poised, the guy who’s seen it all, and his coolness—on board a cruiser and transmitted to the audience—gave him an aura of inscrutability which protected him like armor plating.

  I asked him about Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and he described the outlandish glamor of the big casinos where you never know whether it’s day or night, the tedium of playing with an orchestra that only does medleys of the big hits, a dozen shows a week. Without making a big deal of it, he mentioned in passing that he’d played with José Feliciano, Barry Manilow, and Liza Minnelli. He reminisced about those old times without a trace of emotionality, and it was only when we went back to the subject of music, the carefully chosen songs of his repertoire, that his expression recovered the verve he’d shown onstage. Nonetheless, he took advantage of a lull in the conversation to change the subject.

  “Forgive me for returning to your tears before, but there’s a woman behind that, isn’t there?”

  “There’s always a woman. You’d know better than anyone. All those songs you played tonight talk about the same thing.”

  He gestured in false modesty, in slight rebuttal.

  “I asked because it’s not the first or the second time I’ve seen this happen. Men cry more often than people imagine. They have to be alone, yes, sure. They need to atone for something. Are you traveling alone?”

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you: I boarded yesterday afternoon with the intention of having an affair and cheating on my wife. But, for the moment, the whole thing’s a dead loss. Right now, if I could, I think I’d jump in a lifeboat and row back home.”

  “Ah, now I get it. So basically you were crying with rage.”

  “Dunno,” I muttered. The whisky sour was pumping through my blood. My tongue felt thick and gluey. It might have been a warning to stop the conversation right there, but I didn’t pick it up.

  “Be patient. Don’t play the victim and it’ll all be fine. I’ve been working on this boat eight years now and I think I know what you need. There’s one detail that doesn’t appear in the cruise brochures and it’s very important. Listen to me: the best thing to do is to go looking among the crew members. Flings between passengers never end well because everyone expects too much, and the goodbyes are too sudden, leaving everyone unsatisfied. By contrast, when it all ends, the crew stays on board, if you get what I mean.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You can pay, of course—you’ve got the whole kit and caboodle here—but, for that, you don’t need to get on a boat.” He paused and, turning slightly in the direction of the sofas, lowered his voice. “Over there in the corner, for example, you have those two who’ve just got together. I don’t know where he came on board. Maybe Marseille. She’s Italian, from Naples, and she’s been working as a waitress in the pizzeria for the last six months. She’s very homesick, they tell me, and when she finishes her shift, the only thing she does is walk around the deck, staring at the horizon in the direction of Italy. Someone always approaches her and they start talking. Then two and two are four.”

  “Two and two are four,” I parroted.

  “Nobody in this world wants to be alone. The tourist coordinators, waitresses, receptionists, salesclerks, cooks, beauticians . . . If you’re not too fussy, you’ll get what you want.”

  “And for you, meanwhile, the elegant rich ladies in first class. I get your drift . . . ,” I said.

  He laughed with his eyes, a silent snicker, and pushed his glass over to the barman for a refill.

  “I’m not in the game anymore,” he said. “I won’t deny that in the early years it was a pushover. I’ve known ladies from around the world and, if you’ll forgive my boasting, couldn’t count how many different languages I’ve made love in, but now I’m retired.” He said these words still clinging to a certain vanity, but then, after a pause to take a sip of his whisky, he added, “I’m a loser. Don’t be fooled by me.”

  In fact, the words tumbled out of him. His face changed for a second, as if he were plunging into an abyss, but then he realized what was happening and looked me in the eye with the same firmness as before, adopting a haughty air. He quickly started talking again in order to circumvent any comment I might make.

  “You look like a smoker and I’d really like a cigarette, but smoking’s banned in here because they say we’ll set fire to the carpet. Follies of modern times. By way of compensation, though, they let us take our drinks out on the deck. Want to come?”

  There was hardly anyone on deck. The full moon swept the calm sea, shining on us like a spotlight on a stage. We smoked in silence, each absorbed in his own world. Then Sam announced he was going back to the piano bar. He still had to play another hour for nobody. I decided to go to bed and we introduced ourselves as we said good night. Sam. Mauri. Shaking his hand, I said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, Sam. Where do you live? Where’s your home?”

  He was silent for a couple of seconds. “Here,” he said. “I live here. On the ship.”

  * * *

  I don’t think it’ll be a spoiler if I reveal at this point in the story that my wife and I are back together again. Not long ago we celebrated our eighth a
nniversary—in Paris—two weeks after the actual date, because we decided not to count on our calendar the fortnight we were separated. I guess it’s not a spoiler, as I say, because at the heart of this story I’m not talking about her but about Sam Cortina. My wife still doesn’t know who he is. I’ve never mentioned him, but at some level she senses he’s there. Sometimes, when we’re arguing again, she’ll drop a hint, saying I was different when I came back home, but she never goes further than that because she knows this territory’s out of bounds. In our tacit reconciliation agreements, I gave in to some things she thought were important and she had to accept my silence, which sometimes—I admit it—can be as mysterious as a dolphin’s smile.

  After that first conversation with Sam Cortina, I spent the next three days stuck in what we might call the routine of disappointment. Day in day out, the Wonderful Sirena docked in some port in the morning, people disembarked to have some fun, and we set sail again at dusk. In the afternoons she was semideserted and, taking Sam’s advice, I tried my luck with the female crew members. No go. I learned to forget about the Filipinas who worked in the laundry doing the washing and ironing and, in general, all the Asian women, because they only giggled and avoided me, pretending they didn’t understand anything. The Italian cooks and waitresses played along for a while but never let it go any further. A twenty-two-year-old Frenchwoman gave me a manicure and pedicure. Her soft, warm hands tidied up cuticles and filed my nails with promising intimacy, but she avoided my gaze the whole time. And Sam, who knew her from having his nails done, had assured me that she’s not shy. Since I didn’t want to get a bad name on the ship, after day four, I was much more selective in my attempts at seduction and sought chance encounters in the narrow passageways. And that only gave me the sensation of being an outcast. Sometimes I found a quiet corner with cell phone coverage and listened to my voicemail. Bet was phoning every day, and every day her voice sounded more concerned and understanding. It was mainly this detail that spurred me on in my mission.