Then he sat back, remonstratively patted the armrests as if making sure they were really bolted in, and stared straight ahead, smiling beatifically into the air over the mounded tops of passengers’ heads, all this, Esteban supposed, in some further display of gratitude to his Queen of Luck. A profusely perspiring middle-aged steward, bulging cheeks, goatee, was wheeling the jingling liquor cart down the aisle. The scarletlipped stewardess, her hair a maelstrom of oiled, ebony ringlets, was still giving her safety lesson, her hands wagging the pinkish tubes—the voice on the intercom said to blow into these—protruding from the deflated life jacket bladders over her breasts. The blast of sun in the window turned Bernardo’s broad, spotted forehead as silvery as his hair, and Esteban reflected that he really did look like some benignly crazed old wolf: his chin was angular, and his lips looked as if they reached ear to ear, two long, thin, contented-looking seams.
The liquor was free. “Chivas?” said the steward grouchily, over and over, sliding his forearm over his slick forehead, underarm dark with sweat. And wine from France. Up ahead Esteban saw the cook reach out for another rum and coke, a gold chain bracelet dangling from his thick, hairy wrist.
Poured into clear plastic cups, flashing in sunlight, the wine looked like candlelight inside dark red glass. Or like bear’s blood.
“I’ve never drunk wine,” said Esteban. Not even in church. The men in his family, his tíos and primos, didn’t go to church, though his mother did.
“All ship’s capitanes take wine with their meals, bueno, on Sundays at least,” said Bernardo. “Greeks, every night. I’ll try to sneak you a glass now and then, patroncito.”
“Bueno,” said Esteban flatly.
“The English prefer beer,” the viejo went on. “Every afternoon at three Capitán Osbourne would say, Beer O’clock! But he was never drunk. A grand man, chico. Capitán John Paul Osbourne was his name, but his friends called him Hay Pee.”
Bernardo took only coke with his peanuts, so Esteban did the same, though he felt entitled to drink whatever he wanted because this was a significant day, the start of a new life, and the airline ticket had cost him so much. He owed his tíos the combined sum of the ticket and the fee charged by Doña Adela Suárez for getting him the job. After two months on the Urus he’d be able to pay them back and there’d still be four months to go; then he’d be able to sign on for a whole other year, provided his capitán was happy enough with his work.
“The best years of my life, muchacho …” No major port on earth, apparently, where Bernardo hadn’t walked with the long, loping steps and sinewy smile of a lighthearted and elegant officers’ saloon waiter. But he hadn’t been to sea in eighteen years, not since Clara, his second wife—Clarita was only twenty-nine when she died, he said. Of tetanus, horrible. She was German on her papi’s side, chavalo. And he was left with three little daughters to raise on land. All of them light skinned, just a little plump like their mother, and one, the youngest, even has blue eyes, though her mami didn’t. Raised them in the same neat little cement house with a cement porch out front that they all still live in now, in Managua, in Colonia Máximo Jerez. A house paid for with two decades of saved-up officers’ waiter’s wages and a loan from Clara’s much older cousin, a customs inspector in Corinto, like a father to her. Perhaps you know the family, muchacho? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young, he’s in Panamá now, left right after El Señor Somoza did. Never paid him back, never a word of recrimination. María, Gertrudis, and Freyda, muchachas maravillosas, educated, prepared. One a teacher, the other a secretary in the Trade Ministry though she keeps out of politics like all her sisters, and little Freyda still a student. María’s novio and Gertrudis’s eight-year-old cipote live at home too, a crowded little place, crowded but always neat and clean—Pues, he’s never produced a son of his own. But he has three grandsons, three little cipotes, Gertrudis’s hijito and two whom he’s never even seen, though it’s his dream to. Because he has two daughters from his first marriage too. The younger, who disgracefully has never married or forgiven lives in Greytown now, with her mother and mother’s new husband, an evangelical Protestant pastor, but the other, Esmeralda, restless like her papi, lives in Jerusalem. Sí pues, in Israel. In Israel, Esmeralda became a Beauty Queen, chavalo! Married an Israeli policeman, they have a daughter and two sons. The Israelitas are the oldest and most noble race on earth, don’t listen to the lies they tell in our poor, hate-demented little country, muchacho. How many times has he sat on his porch in the evenings grieving over the state of our beloved Nicaragua, wishing for Israeli commandos to fly in and do away with our Nine Comandantes the way they did those terrorists on that hijacked plane at the airport in Africa!
Bernardo looked directly at Esteban, the forced vehemence of his expression contradicted by the clouded softness of his wide-open stare. Esteban merely returned it until the viejo looked away. His tíos always talked like that, if not quite as screwily. What was it to him what viejos thought, except, chocho, why did they always seem to think he needed to hear strong opinions, and that he must be full of strong opinions about the same things they always had strong opinions about?
Seething, he barely listened while Bernardo chattered on about his years working as a chauffeur in Managua, the families he’d driven for, including one related to the Petrocelis. Bernardo hadn’t touched the lunch that had been served in the middle of his life story—Esteban had glumly passed up wine again—but now the viejito punctured the wrapping of his crackers with his plastic fork, carefully peeled yellow wax from his tablet of cheese, and cut the cheese into thin slivers, which he arrayed over two crackers. It was all he ate. Then he was talking about his daughters again. Esteban, devouring the gravy-soaked beef that was as mushy as eggplant in just a few forkfuls while his stomach roared with hunger, wondered what the viejo’s youngest daughter looked like, and who’d fixed the middle one, leaving her with child when she was what, fourteen or so? Bernardo said that his daughters’ paychecks were worthless now, vaya pues, like everyone’s. He felt he’d become a burden to them. Disgracefully, he hadn’t had any work in nearly two years, since the last family he’d worked for had suddenly gone to live in Venezuela. But he’d been going to see Doña Adela Suárez once a month ever since, pleading with her to convince Capitán Constantino Malevante to find a place for him on a crew despite his age. With the money he earns on this voyage, muchacho, he’s going to buy two chicken incubators! Then he’ll no longer be a burden to his daughters; he’ll have a dignified old age, because people always need chickens and eggs, especially now, when sometimes in Managua you can’t buy a chicken or even an egg anywhere:
“Son of a million whores, have you ever heard of a country running out of chickens?” He brought his fist down onto the armrest and fell silent a moment. And then he deftly switched the two meal trays, saying, “Here, take mine.” Esteban picked up the pineapple cake and began to eat it. Bernardo said, “All the meat that doesn’t go to the Comandantes or Cubans or Russians and I don’t know who else goes to the soldiers.”
Esteban had heard this so often he merely shrugged. He didn’t know where all the meat went. But his battalion, a BLI, rotated into the jungle for three-week stretches with a week at base or bivouacked outside some town in between, had rarely been supplied with anything to eat, never mind meat. The few campesinos they ran into in the depopulated war zones might have bananas to take, or even an ox, but never nearly enough chickens to feed a battalion. Otherwise they lived on fish from rivers and streams, hunted birds and rodents, macheted down makengue trees for the sopping, breadlike pulp at the heart of the trunk. In the jungle everything was always dripping wet, but sometimes you couldn’t even find a limón to suck; sometimes the nearest river or stream might be days’ march away, but there were insect-clouded bogs of undrinkable black water everywhere …
“You know what we learned to drink in the jungle? We called it refresco.”
“You were in the army? A cipote like you?”
“Can yo
u guess what we drank?” He felt really irritated by this viejo now, his soft eyes intently fixed on him as if he’d asked him something much more personal.
“From coconuts, imagino pues.”
“That far in from the coast?” Esteban laughed. “No, the juice inside a monkey’s stomach. You kill a monkey and take out its stomach and poke a hole in it”—and he lifted his hands to his lips and mimed holding a wobbly sphere, which he slowly deflated in his long, spread fingers. Monkey stomach juice tasted like sweet fruit pulp blended with urine and grass.
Bernardo zipped an angry line in the air with a finger. “To send young muchachos like you off to die, brother against brother. How can it be?”
“Muchachas too,” said Esteban matter-of-factly, staring down at his tray. Now this annoying viejo was going to want him to explain war too.
“No sé.” Esteban sighed. He picked up a sugar packet, bit off a corner with his teeth, and poured some sugar on his tongue.
After a long moment, Bernardo said, “The first time you get seasick, you know what to do? … Go forward, and bite the anchor.”
“Bueno.”
“Or drink gasoline.”
They didn’t talk much after that, though neither pretended to sleep either. The movie was eliciting an almost unbroken riot of yelping laughter and swooning squeals of Ay qué Undo from the passengers. Esteban put on his headphones. A huge, slobby dog was in love with another huge, slobby dog wearing a pink bow in her collar, and because the two dogs didn’t want to be apart, the smiling, teary-eyed families who owned each dog had to decide what to do about this awkward situation, but then the dogs ran away together. They all lived in that usual America-land of big white houses, each in the middle of its own tree-shaded park. The enemy is the government and its warring policies, not the American people, no? When Esteban removed his headphones, Bernardo immediately turned to him and asked: “Have you fathered any children?”
“Pues, no.” Esteban scowled.
Eventually even the light in the window had paled. Esteban forced himself into a long, methodical daydream of female flesh and love-making. It didn’t work; he felt miserable, not at all aroused, trying to remember her and the way it had been in Quilalí, the last girl he’d fucked and one of only three he’d ever fucked but the only one who’d ever let him do it up the culito, buried in jungle earth now, something of him still inside her scientifically if invisibly still inside her mixing into the rotting earth, verdad? In another half century he’d be this old waiter’s age. Puta, would it have stopped by then? This death blotting out love whenever he tries to conjure love, totally fucked up: like with that whore in Corinto last week, when she was naked on her burdel bed and suddenly all he could think of was her perfumed, satiny flesh and blood ripped apart sprayed through green underbrush while on her bed she rolled over on her belly like a dog thrusting hard round smooth little buttocks up at him, No te preocupas, amorcito, no pasa nada chúpame aquí—smiling! If that putita had known what he was thinking, it would have been her getting the hell out of there as fast she could, no? No pasa nada. Ni verga. No pasa nada, mi amor … Was there a girl in one of the ports they’d be stopping at, maybe even someone he’d meet over the next few days in New York, or someone out there in their voyage along that part of the world where city and ocean air intermix, where people live caressed inside and out by opposite kinds of air and breezes, which is why they’re incapable of keeping things in, of keeping love hidden, no? Was there a girl who was going to bring love back to him, fill him with love as he swallowed the warm breath of her kisses, who was waiting for him right now in a shimmery haze of hot city and ocean air without even knowing him yet? He sat purposefully and suspensefully still, trying to imagine her. Should I make her older or younger? Rich or poor? Light or dark? What’s her name? What language does she speak? Should she pull her shirt off over her head herself, her chichis suddenly blooming and bouncing from under her elbows going up in a band of cloth, or will I unbutton … He turned his head away, staring down at the aisle so the viejo wouldn’t see the hot, wet stinging in his eyes—I’m ruined, no good for anything …
Later, when there was turbulence, Bernardo told him about chairs lashed to the legs of the officers’ mess dining table during rough seas and that the way to keep plates and glasses and silverware from sliding off was to soak the tablecloth with water, and even better than that, water that rice had been boiled in, if the galley cook had had the discipline and foresight to save it.
“A man who plans ahead is worth two, muchacho. But not this one. This cook drinks too much. First day on the job, and look, he’s arriving drunk. Have you seen how many rum and cokes he’s already taken?”
Maybe I’ll get a tattoo, thought Esteban. Should I get a tattoo? Up on my arm, not all over like prisoner tattoos. Elegant, with meaning, a sailor’s tattoo. Something that says, I’m leaving the earth to be reborn. A skeleton climbing a ladder up into the stars. Or navigating a ship through the stars. Otilio de la Rosa has a yellow fish outlined in red tattooed on his chest and a hummingbird on his arm and at the beach that chavala said, What are you, a pet store? and just like that he learned what a mistake he’d made.
On the way to Miami, where they cleared customs and immigration, the plane had stopped in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where among the passengers who boarded and filled the remaining seats were ten more young seamen on their way to New York to meet the Urus. But they wouldn’t all come together until Kennedy Airport, gathering around the gargantuan, hairy-shouldered American in basketball shorts who met them in the arrivals area, a cardboard sign that read “Urus” in scratchy black marker held from the bottom in two hands against his chest. After that day they’d never see him again, but whenever the crew had cause to recall him, they’d refer to him as El Pelos, The Hairs, or just Pelos. He had black hair cut short like a yanqui soldier, wore work boots with bright orange laces and a sleeveless T-shirt with his shorts, and his muscular arms and broad shoulders were totally matted with bristly black hair. “Hi. How are ya,” he said over and over as they gathered around, scrutinizing them with gray eyes as quiet and watchful as a mistrustful child’s. When he’d finally counted to fifteen he said, “All here? OK, let’s go.”
He led them outside, this odd and uneasy American, into a late afternoon heat as stupefying as any which mundanely withers Nicaragua’s coastal plains, and left them, faces burning, standing on the sidewalk while he went for the van. A moreno porter wheeling an empty cart back inside shouted at them, “Qué vaina? Son equipo be béisbol, no? Campeones!” and raucously laughed. Is that what they looked like, a baseball team? Sun and clouds had dissolved into a haze the color of boiled, yellowing cauliflower. The airport, a vastness of sooty concrete and glass and traffic, was all by itself the biggest, noisiest, and most unfamiliar city Esteban had ever been in, though it wasn’t as if he’d never seen such places on television or in movies. He stood gaping at the endless clamor of yellow taxis pulling up in a flurry of shouts, doors and trunks flapping open, slamming shut, roaring off—yet the air, for all the commotion, the constant, ripping thunder of takeoffs and landings overhead, felt utterly still; humid, petrol-fumed air and a faint rankness of old crab shell, the ocean somewhere nearby.
Behind the open trunk of a radiantly polished red car, a blonde stewardess in a crisp white blouse was tightly entwined in a ravenous kiss with a handsome young man, mouths deeply tunneling. Her honey-hued elbows and arms shifted around his neck; she seemed to be trying to press herself ever more tightly against him, hip to hip, head tilted back, hair falling down like poured, shimmering grain. The man dropped a hand from her waist to her nalgas, her starched skirt denting like soft tin around his big-knuckled fingers, cheeks underneath springing back, wobbling the shimmering fabric around those flagrant indentations. They went on kissing while the crew watched, each in his own way sharing the sweltering heat between the two clamped bodies, running their tongues over their own sweat-salted lips, feeling their own humid shirts clinging to th
eir skin. Then the lovers broke apart as if they’d agreed to do it for exactly so many minutes and seconds; he shut the trunk, they walked to opposite sides of the car, got in, and the car drove off. “Hijo de la gran puta,” one of the crew inevitably growled, others clucked impressed assent, they stood marveling and grinning as if they’d all just had their first providential taste of life at sea.
They shook hands, exchanged names; there really wasn’t much more to say, they’d be spending the next six months together and maybe more, so what was the hurry? Nearly everyone struck a pose of friendly reserve, serious and casual, as if to say, I’m a good guy, but don’t think I can’t be a cabrón. Though a few seemed stuck in wary surliness, or seemed to think they were superior. The cook, squinting through swollen, reddened eyes, stinking of sweat and rum, put out his hand to everyone. “José Mateo Morales. Soy el cocinero.” “Marco Aurelio Artola, electrician.” “Tomaso Tostado, ordinary seaman”—Tomaso Tostado had a gold tooth. Bonnie Mackenzie, the one moreno on the crew, a wiry and cherubic costeño from Puerto Cortés, was an ordinary seaman too, and, despite his name, said he doesn’t speak much English, bueno, un poco, mon, fock, brother; knows the words to eight Bob Marley songs, but, brother, take the lyrics apart, try to use a word here and a word there to speak his own thoughts in English, it comes out sounding like a parrot making senseless noise. Regarding Esteban’s qualifications as an ordinary seaman, Adela Suárez had asked him if he was literate and if he knew how to use a paintbrush, and that was almost all she’d wanted to know.
The Ordinary Seaman Page 2