The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  Hours later, only Panzón is still in the cabin, dozing off on Esteban’s bed. When he hears Bernardo calling to Esteban in a quiet, lucid voice, he wakes up and sees the viejo sitting up in bed in the dark.

  “Chavalo,” says Bernardo, whispering excitedly. “Listen! You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? This old sea chantey?” And the viejo begins to sing in a low, rasping voice,

  Quiero morir cuando decline el día

  Con la cara al sol

  y la mirada al cielo …

  And when he’s finished singing the song about a marinero’s wish for an honorable death at sea, he cackles. “I was just remembering a story my old friend Gustavo Robles told me, muchacho, when I visited him in Panamá. We’d worked together on a few ships, over the years. Everyone used to call him El Domino because he had three moles in a slanted line on his cheek …”

  Gustavo Robles, an able-bodied seaman, had a little daughter, his only child so far, living at home with his wife in Panama City. Claro, she was the light of his life, chavalo. Still, whenever he was home, Gustavo used to sing her the chantey about wanting to die at the end of the day with your face to the sun and sky and so on, and it always made her cry. Don’t sing that song, Papi. It makes me sad, because if you die, I’ll never see you again! Please don’t sing that song, Papi. But men are perverse, no? He always sang it to make her cry so that he could feel how much she loved him before he went away to sea. Gustavo shipped out again, on La Reina de Guayaquil. The ship hit a hurricane in the Gulf of México, and some poorly battened hatch covers were swept away by waves breaking over the deck. The hold filled with water when the ship rolled, and she sank quickly, taking most of her crew down with her. They never had a chance, chavalo. Thirty-two dead! But Gustavo had managed to grab a life raft and was swept overboard holding on to it. He inflated it in the wild waves and crawled in and somehow survived the storm. He floated for days, while the sun came out to cook him alive. And he kept thinking of his daughter, and of that song. And he cursed himself: So you got your wish, hijo de la gran puta! But I don’t want to die with my face to the sun and the sky! I don’t want to die. No quiero! Carajo, I just want to see my daughter again! So he prayed not to God but to his daughter, promising her that if he somehow survived he’d never, ever sing that song again, and that he’d never go to sea again either. When a Pemex tanker picked him up two days later, he was delirious, raving, and still praying to his daughter.

  “My daughter saved my life, she kept me alive! That’s what Gustavo told me, with total conviction, chavalo, when I visited him in Panamá,” says Bernardo in the dark. “And he kept his promise.”

  And then Panzón hears Bernardo softly chuckling to himself, and a moment later sees the viejo’s silhouette sinking back down onto the bed.

  And then he hears the viejo mutter, “That fucking cat.”

  6

  ESTEBAN DECIDES TO GO INTO THE LITTLE RESTAURANT HE NOTICED THE first time he happened on this neighborhood. There’s a hand-printed cardboard sign on the door saying it stays open twenty-four hours. Steam tables in the window and platters under heat lamps in glass shelves behind the counter. Three men eating at the counter, sitting with empty stools between them. A few tables, one with a young couple and a little boy seated around it. Two tourist posters from the Swiss Alps on the blue walls. A merengue is playing on a radio. He walks to the end of the counter, sits on the last stool, setting his wrapped rose down in front of him. He looks at all the dishes and prices printed with red crayon on sheets of paper taped to the wall. He can’t smell anything through his nose, but he’s glad to be inside someplace warm.

  “Qué te puedo servir, Papi?” says the waitress, a fortyish, dark-skinned mulata with freckled cheeks and tired smudges under her liquid eyes, coarsely straight, reddish hair pulled into a braid at the back of her head. She is long limbed and slender, wearing jeans and a tight, long-sleeved navy top with white stripes, scattered white threads frayed out from the stripes.

  He thinks it over a moment. “Agua,” he says. “Gracias.” He blows his nose in a napkin and then holds it in his hand, not sure where to dispose of it.

  The waitress comes back with a glass of water, setting it down in front of him so noisily he jumps.

  “Estás listo a ordernar?” It sounds like a command.

  He nods. “Bueno. Un café con leche.”

  “Nada más?” she asks, and he nods again.

  He drinks the water down in fast gulps, then stuffs the crumpled napkin inside the glass.

  She brings him his coffee, and he asks how much and she says fifty centavos. She looks expressionlessly at his bouquet, the paper raggedly melting around the stems, while he wriggles his hand into his pocket to pull out the two wadded dollars and hands her one. She takes the napkin-stuffed glass away with her. He pulls another napkin from the dispenser and blows his nose again. The little bit of breathing he can manage through his nostrils now feels hot. He takes a sip of coffee, hiding the soaked napkin in his other hand. The coffee stings scratchily in his throat, warms his feverishly swarming insides. His eyeballs ache; de veras, he feels like shit. The waitress comes back with his change, two large silver coins. Fifty centavos this must add up to. Then he must have enough for three more coffees, which he’s going to need if he’s going to sit here all night. The waitress is still standing in front of him. He looks up at her stern yet attentive face and asks for a glass of water.

  He slowly sips his coffee, and drinks down his new glass of water and puts the used napkin inside it, which eventually she clears away too. A while later, when he asks for another glass of water, she looks at him with a skeptical smile, reaches under the counter for a large plastic ashtray, sets it down in front of him, and says, “I’m not getting you a new glass of water every time you need to blow your nose, muchacho.”

  She comes back again with another glass of water anyway.

  “That’s no way to cure a grippe,” she says. “Mixing hot and cold. You should be drinking tea.”

  “Bueno.” He pulls la Marta’s watch from his pocket; it’s nine-thirty. He should order one hot drink every three hours. “Does it cost the same as the coffee?”

  “Claro.”

  He says he’ll have one a little later.

  “Are you a mechanic?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Your clothes, muchacho,” she says, touching her own shirt, wiping her hand down her ribs. She has long, slender fingers and fingernails painted a shade of green that looks pretty against her chocolate skin. “How else do you get so dirty?”

  “I’m a marinero.”

  “No! De veras?” Her voice squawks with enthusiasm.

  “Ajá.” Seamen sure seem to be a novelty in Brooklyn, he thinks.

  “One of those with a woman in every port, eh?” She presses his wrapped rose with her finger, and he grins reflexively. A customer calls to her by name, Marilú, and she says, “Qué quieres, Papito?”

  Marilú goes from that customer to another and then to a group of people sitting at a table, and seemingly forgets all about him in her journey through their orders and chatter, back behind the counter and to the kitchen window, to the steam tables, back to her customers. But the light makes him happy. It’s dark outside, and here he is sitting inside, in the light, and when was the last time he experienced that? He savors a yawn, and wishes a good deep yawn could last as long as a cup of coffee. He thinks that at least he should say good-bye to Bernardo and everyone else. He even feels a stab of pity for El Barbie, but then he thinks, Qué se jode, that ridiculous huevón.

  The music on the radio fades and, for the first time since the night of their shipboard barbecue in July, he finds himself listening to the news. The news announcer speaks as rapidly as a Cuban; when Esteban finally understands that while he’s been locked up on the Urus the world has changed, the announcer has moved on to the fatal shooting in Brooklyn by police of an elderly black woman who’d brandished a steak knife at them. Several of the customers explode into
expletives over this last bit of news while Esteban gapes around in confusion.

  Finally, when Marilú approaches again, Esteban leans forward on the counter and asks, “Oye. Are the Sandinistas still in power in Nicaragua?”

  She seems almost frightened by him. “I think so.” Then she repeats his question, shouting it at the men along the counter, who instantly answer with another storm of ambiguous expletives, and she looks back at Esteban and says, “Parece que sí. But not for long, eh? The way things are going. Bueno, qué sé yo?”

  “Honecker resigned in the German Democratic Republic,” says Esteban. “At least that’s what it said on the radio. And that the days of communism in Germany are numbered, that it’s total chaos and the Soviets are doing nothing.” The radio said that in Poland they were already gone, and in Czechoslovakia all but gone, and on their way out nearly everywhere else too.

  “Así es, Papito,” she says wearily. “Los comunistas are going. But Balaguer stays forever.”

  She answers his blank expression with a more explicit reference to the ancient and decrepit perpetual political boss of the Dominican Republic.

  “And in Cuba?” he asks.

  “Ja! That cabrón stays forever too. What, you don’t get any news at sea? Here, every time you turn on the tele they’re knocking over those big statues and running crazy in the streets.”

  “And the war in Nicaragua?” he asks, and she says, “Que vaina, muchacho, you think I work for telemundo?” But she shouts his question down the counter again and again is answered by a brief bombardment of conflicting opinions and obscure expletives, from which he’s able to deduce that the peace seems to be holding.

  He blows his nose again. He must sit that way for a long time, lost in thought with the napkin held over his nose and his elbows on the counter, because Marilú taps his shoulder and says, “Ahlo? That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone fall asleep in the middle of blowing his nose.”

  He drops his hands, sees Marilú’s bemused smile.

  “I’ll have a tea,” he says.

  “Con limón?”

  “Ajá. Gracias.”

  “You want me to put these in water?” She gestures at his bouquet. He thanks her and she picks up the cone, looks inside, and laughs. “All this for one rose? Muy elegante. Did someone give them to you, or are you the giver?”

  “Neither,” he says placidly.

  She carefully peels back the ruined paper around the stems and stands the bouquet slantingly in a glass of water. When she brings him his tea, she asks if he’s from Nicaragua. There are a few Nicas who regularly came into the restaurant, she says, including a pair of married butchers. Then she goes away to tend customers just coming in or leaving.

  He’s hungry, but he can hardly keep his eyes open from the pressure inside his head. He sips at his tea and wonders, Y nosotros? Are we communists? Bueno, many say we aren’t and many, like my tíos, say we are. But, chocho, even in his BLI there was always some confusion about this, some said no and some said yes and many didn’t give a shit. Though without their weapons and money, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. Rodolfo and all the political officers must be talking and talking and talking now, trying to put the world back together, no? And here I am in Brooklyn, where I’m nothing. Do East Bloc ships still come to Corinto? Will the other ships come back? The world changes, and Capitán Elias never even mentions it. And here in this restaurant, it’s a little spurt of news between music, and good for a few jokes. And la Marta lies buried. A commemorative rock planted near her house. Amalia ruined, a vegetable in the military hospital. A hundred and forty-seven compas killed on the Zompopera Road, nearly a third of his BLI. Among how many tens of thousands more? And the world changes. Like a wind that drowns out voices and when the wind stops, you don’t hear the voices anymore. And I’m here, with la Marta’s watch—he takes it out of his pocket. It’s just past eleven.

  “Papito,” says Marilú. He’s resting his head on folded arms now, and looks up.

  “Your boat, Papito,” she says. “Don’t you have a boat to go to? Or somewhere?”

  “Not anymore,” he says. She looks worried, so he says, “I don’t have to be anywhere until the morning.”

  She gives him a don’t-lie-to-me look. “Are you really a marinero?”

  “Ajá.”

  “OK,” she says. “I mind my own business. But you’re planning to sit here all night?”

  He shrugs. “Más o menos.” He looks at her green nails and a thought occurs to him: “Do you go to a manicurist for your nails?”

  She smiles quizzically. “Cómo?”

  “Your nails are pretty.” He feels flustered. “I have a friend, a manicurist, just around the corner. Joaquina.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “In that salon, El Salon Tropicana.”

  “Claro, Gonzalo’s place. That little rubia, verdad? I’ve seen her. If she’s the same one who comes in here with Gonzalo now and then.”

  “They come in here together?”

  What is he, made of glass? Her laugh is a raucous blast, and then she says, “No te preocupas, amorcito. Gonzalo’s not more homosexual than he already is because you can’t be. That’s why he was thrown out of Cuba with all the Marielitos, tu sabes? They just came to his door one day and told him he had to go. A dancer at La Tropicana, and they still made him leave. Him and as many of los gays as they could get their hands on. Caráy, que bárbaro.”

  Now Esteban remembers the framed photograph on the wall of the salon: the strong man in a leopard-skin tunic holding a woman over his head is Gonzalo. So, the stud is a pato—

  Suddenly Marilú’s eyes widen. “Don’t tell me this is a get-lost rose. Ay no, pero que dramática!”

  He laughs. “It’s nothing like that. No sé, I wanted a haircut…”

  “Ajá?

  “Bueno, I went by, and she wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t work on Sundays, muchacho.”

  “Ah, sí pues … I’ll have another tea.”

  He feels almost wide awake now. For a long time the restaurant stays empty, and he and Marilú sit at the counter. Despite his cold and her scolding, she even shares her cigarettes with him, and when he’s finished telling her the story of the Urus, she immediately gets up and brings him a bowl of rice and red beans and two pieces of chicken and a cola. Marilú tells him about her life too: she lives with her three children and sister on Smith Street, a street he knows from his nocturnal prowling; her husband left her for a boricua and is living with her in another neighborhood that’s mostly Dominican; he works as a doorman. This neighborhood is mainly Mexican now, but it has people from all over Latin America. It’s true, you can live in Nueva York, says Marilú, and never have to speak English to anyone but telephone operators and bill collectors. Later two men come out from the kitchen, Melgar and Juvenal, the former the cook, from Barranquilla, Colombia, the other an Indian-featured dishwasher from Ecuador. Marilú says she doesn’t have enough room in her apartment to offer him more than a few chair cushions on the floor to sleep on, but he’s welcome to it in an emergency, and she writes her telephone number and address down on a napkin for him, and Juvenal does the same. Melgar says there isn’t a phone where he lives, nor even any spare cushions, but he can have a piece of the floor should he find himself in need.

  He falls asleep with his head in his arms at a table, and when he stirs and wakes later, the restaurant is empty, Marilú has gone home, and the cook is sitting at the counter, staring out at the avenue and smoking. He looks at his watch, it’s twenty-three past four. His throat aches. He feels heavy with sorrow; it must have something to do with whatever he’s dreamed, but he can’t remember any of it. He lowers his head to the table again. The communists are going, he thinks, and la Marta is gone forever. She’s gone. It’s too horrible to think about where she’s gone, and suddenly he feels his whole body stiffen and cringe as it always does when the Zompopera Road comes back like a sudden bout of clairvoyant madnes
s: remembering drowsing in the back of the truck one second and the next machine-gun fire tearing into the truck’s cab like rocket-propelled sledgehammers and the truck rocking and wooden planks in back rattling and splintering in the firestorm of tracer bullets coming out of the darkness on both sides of the road, the screams and shrieks of compas around him and all up and down the road; all up and down the road that resounding leaden rain of metal tearing open metal and explosions and flames and voices calling from the darkness taunting them with death to all piri comunista hijueputas. Crouching near the back of the burning cab aiming his fire back at death through planks, the AK jumping and shell casings tumbling around him and jamming in another clip and firing wildly into the dark and a shattered plank smashing him in the face, knocking him back and stunning him and he was sure that his life was flowing out through his face. And he lay there on top of someone who was wet for seconds that passed like hours, clutching a wrist that turned out to be not his own until he felt someone pulling him back up and he was still holding his AK and he saw Rigoberto Mazariego’s novia’s doll’s red hair, and following this small torch he crawled over the bodies in the truck with his nostrils and face full of blood and he fell and felt his teeth gnashing against wet hair on the back of someone’s head; and then he spilled down onto the road and rolled behind the tires softly hissing air and seconds or hours later followed Rigoberto Mazariego’s howl and his novia’s doll out from behind the truck, sprinting straight ahead into the dark, began the long night of holding off the enemy until the helicopters and reinforcements came. In the morning they saw the long line of East German IFA trucks haphazardly skidded to stops up and down the road and off of it, the green steel of the cab hoods and doors ripped apart as if by the iron claws and beaks of giant iron birds of prey, bullet holes glinting like small stars cut from tin, shell casings spread thickly on the ground around splattered tires. And they heard the moaning and weeping of the wounded and saw uniformed bodies sprawled over the rears of the trucks and on the ground amidst wet gore and drying pools of blood and insects everywhere and some started firing off their remaining rounds at the vultures, and then he saw the truck that had been carrying the compitas in the quartermaster corps …