Or take José Mateo, the cook, who won fifty thousand cordobas in the lottery and was about to retire from ships and buy himself a cantina when the revolution happened, so he prudently decided to go to sea again until the situation settled, and now his banked cordobas are worthless. Fired from his last job for outrageously excessive drunkenness. Now he finds himself cook on the Urus, frying mashed sardines and rancid rice.
And so you see, chaval, it isn’t only when you gamble that you lose. Bad luck brought me to this ship, because God had no reason to do that to me. Once here, He decided that my purpose should be to look after these muchachos, especially Esteban, like a son. So I’ve told myself.
But the chavalo’s bed is empty. And I’m a ludicrous old man traveling an abandoned earth on a ghost ship, unloved and uncared for, already forgotten, and look, instead of upsetting me, this truth fills me with placid peace. That’s the dream’s message, sent to console and resign, softly coercing me into relinquishing my vanity along with everything else. At last, I must begin to see things clearly. One of youth’s vanities is that you go on mattering, pues, to the people you’ve cared for, however inconsistently or ineffectively. That loving forms eternal ties, stronger than time, even when as dormant and quiet as the shade under a tree. So today this silly young man in an old man’s body is going to wake up old on the inside too, is that it? Vos, ready yourself, viejo lobo. You’re already forgotten. Even poor Desastres is gone. Desgraciado, stop trying to entangle others in your vanity. Do you really think you make a difference to these muchachos, who are fucked with or without you? Did you really think chicken incubators, a little business of your own to run in your last extra years, earning you enough to pay for your own portion of whatever gets dolloped onto your plate at meals, was going to bring a flicker of respect or affection to your daughters’ eyes, simply because their papi el viejo lobo de mar went to sea one last time to be able to sell eggs wrapped in newspaper cones to neighbors? The shit-flecked shells smudged by newsprint trumpeting the virtues of a squalid fratricidal war that has bled the country even of chickens and eggs, turning everyone but the Comandantes into heartsick paupers, sí pues, Nicaragua has no luck either, you would think that no country should feel lucky in a war or while at war but of course this isn’t true, even in Nicaragua there are many who believe themselves lucky for this chance to stuff themselves with glory while everyone else starves.
“Chocho!”—the boy’s voice obscenely exploding his reverie. So he’s not alone on a ghost ship after all. Esteban has stepped over the rat-damming iron panel laid across the cabin door’s lower portion and stands in the underwater gloom looking at him with an openly mocking and bemused smile:
“Vos, heating up your head up with a picture of your daughter? Don’t you think that’s disgusting?”
Bernardo looks wonderingly at the picture he’d been holding up between two fingers in front of his own face, the plastic peeled back as if he was getting ready to eat it. Ever since he got that bump on his head that night he’s been doing things without noticing himself, mind like a television screen fading to black and then after who knows how much time suddenly and impertinently blinking back on—and there’s Esmeralda, green-dyed ostrich feathers pluming from a little gold cap on her head, hair straightened and bobbed, lips scarlet and plump as a split-open pomegranate, a tiny gold-sequined leotard, and her limbs bared, arms out in the air, one long thigh turned towards the camera, knee slightly raised, golden high heel propped on tiptoe, “Look, Papi. I’m a Beauty Queen! Love, Esmeralda. Haifa, Israel, 1964.”
Esteban reaches down, plucks the snapshot from his hands, stands over him looking at it. When Esteban came in he had a funny, feverish glow in his eyes, private and aloof like a cat’s, and look, all over his pant legs, little bits of straw and burrs, grains of sand, as if he’s been lying down in a field …
What was he doing, lying down in a field? And with whom? What field? He sits up suddenly and swallows his question the wrong way, explodes into a coughing fit, hawking and heaving and gasping for air while Esteban watches suspiciously. And then when he’s quieted, sitting there panting like a thirsty Miracle, Esteban hands the picture back, smirks. “Bueno, I can see why that policeman went for her. But, vos, don’t you think it’s a little strange, a girl sending her father a picture like that, and her father carrying it around for years and years?”
“It’s the only one I have of her. Florencia kept the rest. But it’s a good picture. To her mother, its meaning was even biblical.”
“Sí? Cómo?” And he laughs. “Puta, I’d like to see that Bible.” Esteban sits down on the edge of his bed, undoes his electrical wire laces, pushes his boots off with his feet, lies down fully clothed, and pulls the blanket over himself. “So why is it biblical?” he asks after a while, turned on his side facing away.
“Where were you all night?”
“All night? Here. Where else?”
“You have campo on your clothes. This ship has not suddenly turned into a farm.”
“I was here, but I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.”
“A walk.”
Esteban suddenly sits up, glares at him with perplexed affront. “To look at the ocean. Oye! Qué te pasa?” Finally his expression softens. “You know what I did? I went down the mooring line, and then back up. Nobody saw me. So don’t tell anybody.” The boy holds his eye a moment longer, then flops back down.
Bernardo ponders this. Sí pues, that goes with Esteban, it’s something he’d get it into his head to do. Climb down and then back up a mooring line—like some stowaway who decides he’s gotten off in the wrong port. Why? Why did he come back?
“Then why did you come back?”
Esteban says nothing.
“You’re going to leave.” Halfway through this sentence turned from a question into something close to a command. And suddenly Bernardo feels excited, wonders how he couldn’t have thought to suggest it before! Wouldn’t a real father have thought of it long ago?
“You should go, Esteban. Take your chance, chavalo. Me, I’d rather die than go home empty-handed after all these months, owing my daughters money.”
And he thinks, It’s true, I’d rather die.
“Who says we’re going anywhere? They’ll find us here in a thousand years, and your skeleton will still be holding on to that picture, and, vos, they’ll put you in a museum, the primitive viejo lobo pervert.”
“You should leave,” he persists. “The way Esmeralda did. For her, taking this chance, it was a triumph.”
“Bueno. I’ll be an Israeli beauty queen too.”
“Think of it this way, patroncito. Luck bought the last round, and so here you are with the rest of us”—but Esteban is a complete atheist—”so now it’s your turn.”
“My turn to sleep.”
Does he want to end up like me? He left the ship and now he needs to go farther, like Esme, who triumphed. Why should the poorest wetback sneaking across the border have more daring when he couldn’t have more hunger? Trouble is, Esteban is loyal, to the idea of what he came here for and of who he is, to all that won’t ever pay or repay him, is that it? I have to be convincing, lay down this argument paving stone by paving stone.
“She went from Nicaragua all the way to Israel, chigüín, a bold girl, no one can take that away from Esmeralda, she even changed her religion. You know what her mother thought? That in her own way, Esme was living almost the whole story of the Bible.” That Esmeralda had strayed so far into Satan’s domain—that picture, Satan’s beauty queen!—that God fought back by planning a back-door escape for her, going all the way around, practically, to the beginning of the Bible to build her a little door, lead her through it into heathen Golden-Calf-without-a-cowbell wanderings in the desert so that she could find the One God in the unlikely form of a lonely, somewhat lost and lusting, but basically stable, hardworking, and decent Israeli policeman of frankly dark North African features, a family man to lead her to the land of milk and honey. Didn’t it happ
en that way? It came to pass, pues, that God next situated Esme and her blossoming family in Jerusalem, holy to Christians and Mussulmans too, claro, a strategic maneuver, because here, according to Florencia, Esme was destined to embrace the Messiah along with all Rome’s idolatrous perversions, this just a stepping-stone to salvation’s last stop, the True Path, the Purified Word, et cetera. Florencia had shed her own never very devout Catholicism by then; he’d come home from the sea one year and found himself married to a fervent Protestant, fundamentalist, pentecostal, and evangelical. You can’t imagine, chavalo, the grip this howling salvation had on her. A troubled time. As bleak as this one now, in many ways. Denouncing the wayward, irrefutably vice-ridden, and worldly ways of the seafaring life night and day, begging him to stay home, renounce that life, accept the Lord’s Call. She vacuumed all the love that was left from his heart with her incessant Lord, Satan, Doom, and Paradise, until he only wanted to get away. Blaming himself for what his years of desertion had made of her, he fled to sea again and never came back, not to her … The money he’d been saving for years so that one day he and Florencia could move out of her father’s, buy a little house of their own, this was destined to go to another woman, other daughters.
“Bueno, so that was what Florencia foretold for Esme. And when Esme named her first two sons Moisés and José, Florencia thought these were providential signs, divining José the carpenter, not the coat of many colors. So when the girl came, muchacho, shouldn’t she have been named María, or at least for a saint? Instead Esme named her Chiniche. Chiniche? I think this is an African name …” He’ll probably never know now why his Israeli daughter suddenly chose an African name for her daughter.
Esteban lying still on his stomach, facing away—has he been listening? Bernardo lifts a hand to his head, softly strokes the still sensitive, grape-skinned bump with a finger. Was that clear? Has he made himself understood?
“So it didn’t happen, you mean,” says Esteban finally, sleepily.
“It didn’t happen… Who knows? I haven’t heard from Esmeralda in thirteen years. But I hope it didn’t. Esme decided to convert to her husband’s religion, and ve? She was happy and fertile, three children in less than five years. Maybe she’s had even more? She can name them for the Moorish kings for all I care. She’s forgotten us, but why shouldn’t she have? Her mother pestering her like one of those screaming preachers, like the one she’s married to now. Her father a hat on a chair, and of even less use to her. But when lucky people take chances, luck rewards them, that’s what I think. You made it through that war. I don’t think luck is through with you yet, chavalo. Maybe it’s just a matter of going down that rope again, and not coming back up.”
He looks over at Esteban, not even stirring, sleep as silent as smoke on a ship made of smoke; the morning light wet smoke colored and just as soft, in the cracked porthole; the corridor in the doorway still dark. A querulous and hungry squawking nearby, not gulls, a raven?
What should he tell him now? Sadness like a chimney, smoky words and memories pouring from it … Clarita curled up, withered and stiff as a dead spider on her hospital bed from tetanus … Esteban has never even been in love, at least has never mentioned having ever felt either the euphoria or the infernal consequences of love; all he thinks about is that fucking war, which has robbed him of everything a chavalo his age should be so vulnerable to … Florencia … When he first met her. As fresh and shyly full of life as any niñita but already a sturdy woman’s body. She’d been to school, was working in a bakery in downtown Managua. A bakery that, like the rest of downtown, isn’t there anymore, destroyed in the earthquake of ’72. “Florencia was standing in a bakery window the first time I saw her, chavalo, a bakery that isn’t there anymore…” She stood in the bakery window, in her clean, white uniform, setting little white plastic swans into the blue frosting waves rimming the tiers of a very grand wedding cake. There, on the other side of the window, stood her future hat on a chair, just home from his first long and lucky voyage at sea, having embarked from Panama City as a lowly crew’s mess dishwasher and janitor nearly two years before! And lucky to have found even that job. Begging marineros for a hint of work from bar to bar, his paltry saved-up-to-go-to-sea money nearly gone, but he had a little girlfriend, a cimarrona named Miriam Monróy, who snuck him food, worked in a little cantina—seamen’s brothel in the Casco Viejo owned by a raucous, skinny, long-limbed woman, part Syrian, part Chinese, who’d seemed ancient to him then but undoubtedly would seem young now, she was the lover of a Greek capitán named Gorgo, whose ship had been in port for repairs three months already—what was her name?—her skeptical and shiny Oriental eyes coming back to him now, the small, lipstick-smudged mouth, the loose skin drooping under her chin, her nervous, cigarette-winged, dragonfly fingers … Gorgo had given her a port pass so that she could get past the yanquis and come to his ship whenever she wanted, and she lent it to him on the condition that while looking for work he’d also distribute mimeographed flyers advertising her “Seaman Bar,” boarding as many ships as he could, leaving flyers in little stacks by the gangways. Which is what he did; how he was hired, not by Gorgo but by another Greek whose ship was in port, Aristotle Voulgaris, master of the Opal, one of a small fleet of cargo vessels owned by one Señor Fedderhoff, a gringo living in Panama City. A good, busy, and profitable ship. Five months into the voyage, they departed Veracruz with a cargo of garbanzos bound for Barcelona, sailing into a mid-Atlantic Christmas. An obese and nasty-tempered Panamanian named Zacarías Rojas was the officers’ saloon waiter. And would you believe it, chavalo?—the day before Christmas Eve, Zacarías Rojas was in the meat locker with the mayordomo, both of them struggling with all their might to pry a frozen Christmas turkey loose from the ice-coated rack the turkey was ice-welded to, when Rojas suddenly fell over dead from a heart attack. He had family in Panama, a wife, children. Señor Fedderhoff radioed the ship that they should bring Rojas home. In other words, leave him there, right where he’d fallen, sparing the crew the grotesque effort of having to drag his manateelike bulk up on deck for a burial at sea. For the rest of that voyage, which eventually took them through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea to India and the Orient, Rojas lay unmourned in the meat locker, frozen under a frozen sheet, hard as concrete, his skin turned an iridescent, turbid blue. His timid and repentant ghost never bothering anybody. For seven whole months, until they docked in Panama again. With crowbars and boiling water Rojas was pried loose from the floor, delivered to his family. But guess who’d been promoted to the officers’ saloon the day after Zacarías Rojas ceased to exist? Christmas Eve. No older then than you are now, chico! (While a green ordinary seaman who’d discovered he hated deck work began a new career in the crew’s mess.) More coffee, mi Capitán? Sugar on your toast, mi Primero? Sí, jefe, your liver without onions. He never had to ask twice, always remembered what they wanted and how they liked it, rode their whims and caprices and sullen midvoyage torments smoothly, elegantly, never scowling with aggravation like Rojas, who had often refused the low-ranking officers dessert if they asked for it even two minutes after the meal hour had passed! In roughest seas, chavalito, he was a sweet-tempered circus plate juggler. Instinctively knew how to make a Greek boor feel like an English admiral, well before he had the unforgettable experience, in 1969, of serving Capitán John Paul Osbourne as personal waiter and valet. Bernie, Capitán Osbourne used to call him, and sometimes Old Bean. How couldn’t he have felt lucky? In all the merchant ships sailing all the seas, was there another officers’ saloon waiter so young, so well liked and appreciated? And not badly paid, no. Bueno, a burning Managua sidewalk, Panama hat tilted back over forehead, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth, basking in the vision of this young morenita’s poise and beauty, fluid limbs and shapeliness and a clean, white uniform, fingers dipping into a small cardboard box perched on her ample hip, pulling out swans. Ask any seaman, Santos, Brazil’s bule bars have no rivals, but if he’d confused a taste for African skin with their squal
id enchantments, this vision of a happy-eyed Florencia and cake, as seductively deranging as any Santos siren, disinfected his lust and left his desire intact, left him standing there strangling on a need to possess not for one night but for a lifetime! Impulsive, sí pues. But often seamen who want to get married don’t get much time on land to make up their minds! Which is why, claro, they make mistakes, why it takes them so many years to realize these mistakes, realize that they themselves are the mistake, carajo. She looked over her shoulder, saw him watching, left him stuporously rooted with her direct, utterly blank, green-gray stare, went back to swanning her cake, looked over at him again, and then suddenly, a shy and flustered smile like a sunny, snowy island rising on the horizon … He went right into that bakery, said he wanted to buy that cake. She giggled, said, Aren’t you going to let me finish? Who’s in such a rush to get married? And he said, Me. With you, queen of my life. The boldest moment of my life, chavalo. An electrical charge still jumps his heart, his belly, when he remembers it. She looked at him incredulously, her eyes glinting with what he thought was a proud girl’s haughty affront, and then her tongue went tchl against her teeth, and she said, Are you a marinero? Yes, he said, but not that kind of marinero, I’m no womanizer or liar. And she laughed, said she didn’t mean it that way. You see, Florencia had recently been to see some old woman, an hechizera who could read the future in cigarettes. You brought this witch a cigarette, she lit it, puffed on it a bit, twirled it slowly between thumb and finger in front of her eyes while it burned down, and in the pattern of burning paper and ash, she could read the future. The love of her life was going to be a marinero, this brujita had told Florencia. Young and handsome, who would marry her and then leave her alone at home with children for years, but that she shouldn’t worry because when that marinero finally came home for good he was going to be as rich as Petroceli… “Florencia believed that, cipote, and so did I. How couldn’t I have, I mean to say, back then? Si pues, back then! The way—”
The Ordinary Seaman Page 13