“You both got what you deserved, viejito.” Esteban’s emphatic, pillow-muffled voice breaking in and surprising him, and he says, “Qué?” and bird-cocks his head, and the boy says it again, louder, his body not even stirring. “She got what she deserved. Vos, you both did. Believing a thing like that, the future in a cigarette, hombre, no jodas! And you’re always calling us gullible.”
* * *
Throughout his life, of course, Bernardo has heard countless stories about people seeing ghosts, sensing and hearing phantom presences, though it has been exactly half a century plus one year since he last suffered such an experience, the year before he left for the sea, when his own mother’s ghost appeared to him, an incident which then terrified and grieved him since he’d understood that his mother’s showing herself to him like that meant she was unhappy, her spirit in distress. But he hasn’t thought about his mother’s ghost in years, nor has he ever received such a visitation even from poor Clarita, even though he used to pray for one, willing silently, into the night for her to come and reassure him of her forgiveness and love. He believes he’s long lost whatever it is that makes a person seem receptive enough to such apparitions that they appear, and assumes it must have something to do with age—why should a spirit hurry to see him when he’ll be among them soon enough?—or with the tarnishing of his own soul by misdeeds and guilt.
Yet at the very moment when Esteban was sneaking off the ship for the first time last night, he was dreaming of being on a ghost ship. The dream’s lonely suggestiveness has lingered into the day, as such dreams tend to. This queasy mood, a languid, hollowed out sensation at odds with the excitement he feels over his new secret obligation—Esteban must leave!—an immanence out there, like the sense of a still-faraway change in the weather coming, his tattered nerves straining to pick it up in the chilly October air. Thus a certain receptivity to ghosts.
He’s doing some laundry down on the pier, his pant legs rolled up, his hands numbing in the cold water from the spigot as he rubs uselessly at stained rags with an evaporating sliver of soap, and glancing up he sees them coming around the corner of the grain elevator, arm and arm, an old couple helping each other along, two ancianos: the old man in a green gabardine overcoat, black beret, and dark glasses, the old woman in a pink woolen coat and a flowered scarf knotted around her head. They’re the very first people he’s seen close up, besides officers, crew, and los blacks on the pier, since that night in los proyectos—and they’ve come on foot? His first shocked impression is that they are ghosts, that somehow he’s fallen back into last night’s dream and this is some new twist, an impression abetted by the anciana’s powdery-papery pallor, her wrinkles shining like sprinkled sugar in the sun, her smeary raspberry red lipstick, and the wafting scent of her perfume, heavy, florid, and sweet enough to drown any trailing odor of the grave.
The old woman speaks first, and Bernardo, gaping up at them like a frog from his midpuddle crouch, stammeringly answers in Spanish that he doesn’t speak English. And the anciana’s thin, painted eyebrows rise, and she says that it is certainly a pleasant surprise to run into a Spanish speaker out here, yes, what a pleasure it is, mi buen hombre, to meet you; she uses the formal usted.
“Gracias, señora,” says Bernardo, turning off the tap and rising to his feet. “Mucho gusto, a sus órdenes. En que te puedo servir? Dígame.” And he rolls down his pants and dries his hands against the legs, and has the uncertain impression that the two, even the old man behind his dark glasses, have been frowning at his accent.
For a moment more the couple stand looking expressionlessly around them at the rusted ship, out at the dilapidated remains of long ago thriving piers and terminals; at the obscenities and skull and crossed bones spray-painted on the grain elevator, the rusted remnants of scaffolding and chute dangling beneath its high window like broken sticks from an old eagle’s nest.
“Somos de Argentina,” the anciana says, adding that they’ve lived in Brooklyn for many years now; she doesn’t ask where Bernardo is from. They are truly old, he thinks, at least ten years older than I, and the anciana, maybe more!
“Mi buen hombre. Can you tell me? Is this the so-called Grain Pier?” asks the old man, his voice a bit hoarse though with a polished, politely demanding timbre and enunciation; and he smiles, pulling his lips back, showing pink gums and all his yellowed but orderly teeth.
Bernardo answers that he guesses, with all due respect, that it’s been a long time since anyone has called it by that or any name, as you can see, señores, there’s not a lot going on, just this old ship, which we’re trying to repair, though, if you want my opinion, when that statue over there walks, that’s when this ship will sail, sí, señores, not until then! No! Not until that statue walks! And he stands emphatically nodding at them, feeling embarrassed by himself over this sudden outburst…
The anciana looks at him openmouthed, her light brown eyes looking filmed over with blurry, transparent amber. “A strange notion,” she finally says.
The old man seems a bit vexed by Bernardo’s words, his arms rigid at his sides, and then, as if finally finding the internal strength for a hiccup to release an uncomfortable pocket of air, he says, “Well.” And then, in Spanish, “I am looking for a certain shipping clerk I was told worked here, a man named… ach, but it’s terribly difficult to pronounce, Ponds-and-berry. Francis, and this terrible last name, Ponds-and-berry,” and he chuckles dryly, showing his gums and teeth again. “Something like that … You’ve never met such a man? Francis Ponds-and-berry? In Spanish he would be Francisco Lagunas y Baya, which I suppose is not of much help, since that is not the caballero’s name, hmn?” and again, his soft, repressed chuckle.
“No,” says Bernardo, feeling strangely impressed by the old man. “No, we never meet anybody here, señor.” They remind him of a couple he once worked for as a chauffeur in Managua, a hermitlike sugar plantation owner who liked to play fandangos on the harp every afternoon and his doting wife, whom he used to chauffeur to mass every evening in a red De Soto two-seater sports car with a cream convertible top; they’d given him a pale blue jacket to wear despite the heat and, daily, a white carnation to put in the lapel…
“Ah,” says the man, his lips tightening as if making an effort to restrain his disappointment.
“My husband has a very rare illness,” says the anciana, “and his doctor told him that this man—”
“Ponds-and-berry!” interrupts the old man, as if it cheers him up just to say it.
“This man is the only other man who suffers from it,” she says. “Well, perhaps not in the world, you understand, but the only other man our doctor is acquainted with.”
“A very rare disease of the blood, which I’m afraid has no cure,” says the old man, “though it progresses so slowly I’m sure something else will finish me off first. Be that as it may, my doctor thought it would be good for us to get together, this Ponds-and-berry and I, to talk about it, compare notes, you see.”
“But he’s not here,” says the anciana.
“I don’t believe so, señora.”
“In my youth I used to love to go down to the Río de la Plata and watch the ships coming in and out of the harbor,” she says a moment later. “Do you know Fernando Pessoa’s Oda Marítima? Do you understand Portuguese?”
“Perdón, señora? …”
But she is already reciting, the Portuguese familiar enough after so many unforgettable stopovers in Brazilian ports and enough like Spanish that Bernardo can pick most of it up, Pass on, slow steamship, pass on, don’t stay, pass away from me, get out of my sight, out from my heart, lose yourself in the distance, in the distance, God’s mist …
And when she’s finished she says, “A grand, extravagant ode to ships and men who go to sea, declaimed in the voice of one who likes to go down to the harbor and watch. Bueno, it goes on like that for many, many stanzas.”
But the words she has recited remind Bernardo of his dream, he’s even about to say so, but suddenly the
old man shouts out:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” and chuckles deeply again.
And the anciana is staring down at the soaked, blackened vagrants’ rags clumped around Bernardo’s feet. “But what are you doing here?” she asks.
“A little laundry.”
The women puzzles over this a moment. “Is this a very modern ship?” she asks.
“No, señora, not very,” says Bernardo.
“How does it, what is the word, navigate?”
“They go by the stars and use a sextant, Maruja!”—the old man grins—“just like Cristóbal Colón, no?”
Bernardo smiles. “Sí pues. With a sextant and the stars.”
And she asks Bernardo to please name some of the stars and constellations most useful to seafarers in plotting their course, and, bemused, Bernardo names the first that immediately come to mind, Orion, the Pleiades…
“You can always find Polaris by holding your fist out in front of you, over the Great Bear’s hind feet, and then move five fists over, fist after fist, to the left,” says Bernardo, putting up his hands to illustrate how he would do this against the sky if it were night.
“Qué maravilla,” she says happily, “now I know I shall never again be lost. But those are all Northern Hemisphere constellations you named, mi buen joven. And when you are in the Southern Hemisphere?”
Bernardo’s mind goes blank. He can’t think of a single southern constellation right now … And he decides to change the subject.
“Perdón,” he says, “since you are here, pues, bueno—I must tell you. I think this ship is in violation of every conceivable maritime law and regulation. The truth is, we’re stranded here, as much as any shipwrecked sailors on some remote island. Do you think, when you get back into Brooklyn, you could inform someone of our situation? The name of this ship is Urus, and the capitán is a young man named Elias. That’s all I really know. There is an owner, but we don’t know his name.”
And then he feels bad about what he has just done, since he has no right to presume his crewmates would want him to do this; they would insist, as always, on putting it to one of their interminable votes.
The two look at him blandly. He can see his reflection in the old man’s sunglasses. The anciana, Doña Maruja, looks up at the ship again, and so does Bernardo, wondering if anyone else is witnessing this encounter, but he sees no one. She looks back at Bernardo. She has yet to even ask him his name.
“My husband, el maestro, is a semiretired piano and voice teacher. And I have no worldliness. Who should we speak to?”
“Bueno, Doña Maruja,” says Bernardo. “Usually, in most big ports, there is a church that looks after seamen, something—”
“Religion!” interrupts the old man jovially. “I shit on it!”
“Shhh, Jorge, don’t be vulgar!” She looks back at Bernardo. “Of course, I’ll look in the telephone book.”
“Gracias, señora. That would be very kind.” He has a feeling they’re not going to do anything anyway. They might as well be ghosts.
“I’ll tell them you’re at the Grain Pier.”
“Describe it to them as well as you can …”
“I will then.”
“Señora,” asks Bernardo after a moment during which they have all fallen silent, “how is it you know so much about the stars?”
“I am an astrologer, it’s been a lifelong hobby. That and other pursuits of that nature. Palm reading, tarot cards. What sign are you, joven?”
“Bueno … I have to admit I don’t know.” It seems to him that once upon a time he knew the answer to this. The woman pulls a small black notebook from her purse. She asks him his birthday, and he tells her, and she writes it down, and then asks what time of day he was born, and Bernardo shrugs helplessly and says, “In the morning,” which he somehow feels is true, that he once knew that too, from his mother … And the anciana, Doña Maruja, seems to lose herself in her own thoughts for a long moment, apparently doing mental calculations, her raspberry lips tremulously and slightly moving, and then she stares at him in such a way and for so long that he begins to feel uneasy.
“You’re a Sagittarius, of course,” she says, finally. “You are in some pain. Do your knees bother you?”
“Everything bothers me, Doña Maruja.”
“I can tell you with certainty that had you been born a woman, you would have had trouble with your ovaries.”
“Ponds and berries!” exclaims the old man, seeming impatient now, “Woods and fairies, that’s what I say!”
And after a few more pleasantries—“Bon voyage… bonne chance!”—the old couple say good-bye without offering a hand to shake or a polite kiss on the cheek or having asked him his name; and they go on their way, passing out of sight quickly, despite their slow, twinned pace, off the end of the pier and around the corner of the grain elevator, and now Bernardo hears the sound of car doors opening and closing and an engine starting up and catches a glimpse of a yellow taxi driving off from behind the grain elevator and through the lot. Strange that he hadn’t heard the taxi arriving. Pues, the splashing of water from the spigot must have drowned it out while he was absorbed in the laundry, in his thoughts.
Bernardo picks up the cold, wet laundry in his arms and climbs the ladder to the deck, where no one is doing any work today, and no one has witnessed the old couple’s visit or even heard the taxi. And he thinks, Nowadays life on the Urus almost feels like the middle of a long ocean crossing on a real ship—the lassitude, people keeping to themselves, bored with one another, not much to do but play dominoes and tinker around or endlessly chip and paint. He lays the clothes out to dry on the rear deck, trying to remember the words to the poem Doña Maruja had recited. Pass on, slow steamship. Don’t stay. Get out of my heart. Lose yourself in the distance … Sí pues, in God’s distant mist.
Then, as every afternoon, he sits down on a crate in front of the mess, while José Mateo sits beside him, and begins sifting through rice. This was the time of day when he used to teach Desastres to sit, when he and the cook would exchange sea stories, and often the others would gather around to listen and watch the cat sit; but they have very little, perhaps nothing, new left to tell each other nowadays. Bernardo feels like talking though.
“In La Spezia, Italy,” he says—he’s sure he’s told José Mateo this before—“you find the laziest, most cabrón stevedores on earth, no? Whenever we had to load or unload cargo there, it took twice as long as anywhere else, half the time spent with our crew and those Italians screaming and insulting each other and even getting in fights. But their union is de puta madre. They give them very beautiful work gloves, made of soft, brown leather. Chamois, I think, rabbit fur on the inside. Every time one of those Italians would get careless and leave his gloves laying around for a second, one of our marineros would come along and snatch them right up!”
José Mateo narrows his eyes, nods, says those huevones haven’t changed a bit, he was in La Spezia just two years ago.
“But they understood contraband,” says Bernardo. “If we just passed them a few bottles of good rum while they were unloading coffee sacks, they’d make sure they used their hand hooks to tear open the burlap of uuuf! hundreds of sacks! We’d collect the spilled beans, sell it ourselves later.”
“You hardly see that anymore, viejo”—José Mateo yawns—“what with so much moved in containers now. Drugs, now that’s something else. These muchachos bringing their own coca and mota onboard. Right before we’d get into a port where the dogs were going to come on sniffing, you know what they’d have me do? Burn chilis in pots, until they were charred black, the smoke billowing, carajo, until it was like fire in your lungs, made you nearly blind. And they’d carry these pots all up and down the corridors and into the cabins like priests with their smoky censers. And when the dogs came onboard—Ayyy, tu madre, it made those dogs crazy, it was like they wanted to jump off, noses down, right into the water.”
It is lat
e afternoon when Bernardo gets up and goes to his cabin, and he’s about to step over the rat-damming panel across the doorway when an overpowering sensation of fear roots him and he feels something pass swiftly through his legs as it bounds over the dam, a shadow, a blurry, translucent, dimly orange shadow now hovering over his bed; he shuts his eyes, opens them, but it’s still there—isn’t that colored shadow shaped something like a sitting cat? He feels the ache in his shoulder and the fear inside that won’t let him move, and he shuts his eyes again and is sure that he hears the low, radioactive crackle of the cat’s purr in a corner of the cabin. It’s Desastres, he thinks. I must be going mad. How can a cat have a ghost? … He hasn’t seen a ghost in fifty-one years, since one day a year after his mother died when he came into their old house in Rivas and encountered her there just like this: a pale-colored shadow, her face a brown cloud, her dress a yellow haze, this blurred but recognizable impression and then the terrifying certainty that it really was his querida mamita, sitting on the floor, arranging hairpins in a circle around her. A restless soul enters through the shoulder, in that way makes its presence felt and allows you to see it, he knew that then. And he knew also that he was supposed to shut his eyes and pray as hard as he could for her spirit to find peace, apologize for not having mourned her deeply and constantly enough, promise to have a mass said, to put out flowers in a vase once a week just like you always liked, mamita, beg her to evaporate again into the diffuse spiritual matter of the eternal afterlife. And so he stands in the doorway praying, with shredded concentration, wondering if it was simply a ray of sunlight flashing in and out of a cloud, beaming through the porthole … But he felt the shadow moving through his legs before he even saw it, felt the pain in his shoulder blade and the terror enter him there. Wondering Dios mío what does this portend … and if Desastres is now just a little pile of bones sharing a rat’s nest with a clock’s hour hand … And if maybe he did the wrong thing, not telling the chavalones about the cat he knew about in Rivas as a little boy that belonged to a well-off campesino who lived outside town, a cat that could do anything a dog could do except bark, not just sit but fetch sticks and lie down and roll over and the campesino even trained the cat to help herd his milk cows, the cat would follow him into town on Sundays when he went to get facedown drunk in the cantina, would sit at the campesino’s feet; as a little boy his own father took him there more than once to see this cat, and everyone thought this campesino must be St. Francis of Assisi returned to earth until he was caught smuggling U.S. cigarettes and whiskey by mule train over the border from Costa Rica … Vos, was it so wrong? I didn’t tell them, Desastres, so that they would love you more … He prays, Go away, Desastres, I won’t forget you, I’ll leave food out, find peace, gatito … And when he opens his eyes again the cat’s ghost is gone. And, hijo de cien millones y novecientos miles de putas, he can smell cat pee, it’s faint but he can smell it!
The Ordinary Seaman Page 14