The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  “Bueno … Sí,” she says. “But he’s in México, in the D.F. He’s a lawyer.”

  His heart leaps at the hint of hesitation in her voice.

  A moment later Joaquina says, “There’s a nightmare I’ve been having for years. A fat man in a business suit comes in for a manicure, and I say, Take a seat, momentito. And when I come back out he’s sitting there, but he’s taken his shoes and socks off. And he has horrible, dirty, smelly, hairy feet. I say, Ah, you want your feet done too? And he looks at me and says, No.” She pauses. “Then I always wake up.”

  When Gonzalo comes in, he’s wearing a long, black wool coat, a newspaper folded under his arm; he stands inside the door pulling off a leather glove and then pauses in the middle of taking off the other to look down at Esteban with a delighted grin.

  “This is the marinero I told you about,” says Joaquina, with a disconcerted expression. “Esteban.”

  Gonzalo finishes pulling off his glove, as if only to free his index finger so that he can dangle and circle it while he says, “He went around the block at least twice, and kept looking in the window, holding flowers. At first I thought it was someone sending me flowers.” And he laughs, showing perfect white teeth, his emerald eyes and ruddy cheeks radiating good humor. Then he says, “Coño, qué genial! You know, later, going home on the subway, still trying to solve the mystery of this wild boy too shy to deliver his flowers, it suddenly occurred to me that you might have been that shipwrecked sailor Joaquina told me about.”

  Esteban sits rigid in his seat, frantic with humiliation, his face hot as red steel.

  “It was Joaquina’s day off. You should have come in anyway.” But the cheerfulness drops out of his voice when he looks back at Joaquina. “Oye, niña, don’t get angry. I was just—”

  Esteban glances over and sees that Joaquina’s eyes are stormy pools again, seething furiously at Gonzalo just as they had at him the morning they met.

  “You just can’t control your mouth, Gonzalo, not ever! Bocón!”

  “Bocón? Yo? Look who says so!”

  She gets up and walks through the curtain in back, and when she comes out she’s carrying a skinny vase holding the rose and ferns. She slams it down on the counter with so much force Esteban is surprised it doesn’t break.

  “Elegante,” says Gonzalo.

  “Sí pues,” she says. “And he brought it for me, not you, güey. Órale?”

  “Claro,” he says. “OK.” He smiles furtively at Esteban, and then looks at Joaquina again. “Did you have a good day off?”

  Joaquina is still glowering at him while she nervously fidgets with her hair, winding and unwinding one golden curl around her finger. “Ajá,” she says.

  “You went on one of your shopping trips, no?”

  “Y qué?”

  “You bought another colander, no? Or a tea strainer or something like that?” He looks like he’s trying to hold in his laughter.

  “Don’t start,” she says.

  “This is one of the most eccentric women in the whole world,” he says to Esteban. “Any kitchen thing with holes in it, she has to have it. What do you think a psychologist would say about that? She doesn’t even cook!”

  “Ay no. Tus obsesiones!”

  “Mis obsesiones? I don’t collect colanders and strainers!”

  “It’s not an obsession, it’s a collection! I like colanders. But it’s your obsession that I like them! I’m not obsessed with anything you do, gúey.” She covers her eyes with her hand. “No, I just can’t take this man. Chiiín.”

  And Gonzalo chuckles richly again, and takes off his coat, and carries it into the back. He’s dressed the same as the day before, only now his sweater is gray, and close up he seems even more herculean and graceful.

  Joaquina sits in the chair next to Esteban, who must look as if he’s in a state of shock, because she speaks in such a grave and soothing tone: “Esteban, I’m sorry if Gonzalo embarrassed you. He’s completely insensitive.”

  “Embarrassed me? No. Claro que no.”

  She giggles. “You kept going around the block?”

  He sighs. “No sé,” he says. “I didn’t have anyplace to go.”

  When Gonzalo comes out he pours himself a cup of coffee and then sits down on the other side of Esteban.

  “Joaquina and I,” he says cheerfully, “we’re like a bad marriage. We despise each other, but we would wander the streets howling in grief and tearing out our hair should either of us ever leave the other.”

  “You wish, güey,” she says. “You used to say that about Dolores.”

  “That was our cat,” he says to Esteban. “We hired her to conquer our mice, and one day she went out that door and has never returned. Maybe she went to work for somebody willing to pay her more. Or maybe la migra got her.”

  “Oiga, Gonzalo, Esteban needs a haircut,” says Joaquina bluntly. “But he doesn’t have any money.” And she explains his situation and his offer to mop the doorway and sweep out the salon until he’s paid it back, though she doesn’t think Esteban should mop outside until he’s over his cold.

  “But that’s your job,” says Gonzalo when she’s done. “That’s part of what I pay you to do.” And then he collapses into laughter over Joaquina’s stricken expression and stands up and says it’s fine with him. “Wash his hair,” he says to Joaquina. “And check for lice. No offense, Esteban.”

  Joaquina had grown up in a tiny poblado near a lightly traveled highway at the desertlike edge of the Western Sierra Madre, in the Mexican heartland state of Zacatecas. Her father worked as an auto mechanic out of a junk-filled one-room workshop right on the highway, depending mainly on the occasional nearby breakdown or blown-out tire for business. Their poblado was so remote that Joaquina and her siblings—there were eight, five brothers—had no way of getting to and from school unless her father drove them in his ancient car. Often the car broke down—despite her father’s occupation, none of the car’s doors opened from the outside and only one could be opened from the inside—and Joaquina and her siblings would find themselves stranded, having to disperse among various homes in the poblado the school was in to sleep. Joaquina’s mother was an austere rural woman with no room in her life for any feminine luxuries whatsoever. So Joaquina had never even seen a nail file until she was seven, when her tía Hermalina came all the way from the Distrito Federal to visit her brother and his family. Joaquina was transfixed by her tía’s shapely, lustrously polished red nails, and by the way she would sit idly filing them while ignoring almost everything else around her, eating up the hours of a visit she seemed to find interminable. Joaquina coveted the nail file as the magical object it actually was to her, and sat in the school yard filing her own nails with a Popsicle stick in imitation. Right before Tía Hermalina was leaving to go back to the city, Joaquina stealthily opened her purse and stole the file. It was one of those old-fashioned metal nail files. But nail polish remained a mystery. She tried the colored Chinese paper at school, wetting and rubbing it against her fingernails to see if any would come off. She tried crayons. Once, when she’d walked down to her father’s workshop, she discovered that he had some paint for touching up cars that looked as glossy as nail polish even when it dried. When her father caught her dabbing her nails with the paint, he hid his paint cans somewhere amidst the clutter of the workshop, and she never found them again no matter how thoroughly she searched when he wasn’t there. Meanwhile Joaquina was already filing everyone’s nails with the durable metal file—her schoolmates’ nails, her mother’s, sisters’, even her younger brothers’ and their few neighbors’—until there wasn’t a woman or girl in sight without perpetually shapely, unpainted talons. She didn’t get to wear real nail polish until, two years later, she was sent to visit Tía Hermalina in the biggest, most polluted city on earth. (Also, in Joaquina’s opinion, the craziest, the most surreal, the most full of music, the saddest, the most fun.) When she was fifteen she finally realized her dream of going to live there with her tía, and
enrolled in beauticians’ school. She was indifferent towards the courses in hair-styling. Really, it seemed her special destiny to become a manicurist …

  Some of this Esteban learns while sitting in a padded chair with his head over the sink in back, behind the curtain, wearing a blue cotton apron, while Joaquina washes his hair; and some of it he’ll learn later. Joaquina keeps her own nails short for her work, and prefers painting them in what she calls the French style, with a clear, glossy polish, sliver-thin white stripes along the tops. She does them herself, of course. Before she’d started shampooing him, she’d held out her hands so that he could see her nails, and then she’d pulled on a pair of translucent rubber gloves. Here at the salon Joaquina has to do all kinds of things besides manicures and pedicures, everything from leg waxing to running errands for Gonzalo. But she can’t get a job in a nail parlor—one of those places always up-to-date on every new fashion and breakthrough in the science and art of beautifying hands and feet, and where she’s heard they give you the title “nail technician” instead of manicurist—while she’s illegal and speaks so little English. So many of the new nail parlors are Coreano anyway, owned and staffed completely by Coreanos. She likes to stand outside those nail parlors sometimes, watching through the window. But Gonzalo is an honest and fair boss, muy padre, they have fun together most of the time.

  Esteban’s hair is so dirty and tangled she decides that it needs three washings. But he doesn’t have lice, she announces cheerfully. The feminine fragrance of the shampoo she’s using is so strong he thinks he must be smelling it through his eyeballs, since his nose is too blocked to absorb anything. On the floor, against the wall, he sees a white enamel pot full of clean, yellowish brown wax, free of hair, and he feels a moment of sad wonder over being able to identify this substance, which la Marta first described for him as leg wax. In the middle of the second washing Joaquina pulls off her rubber gloves and he feels her fingertips sliding through his hair, massaging him until his entire scalp is full of exploding stars, their pleasant itchiness traveling down his spine and making him shudder. He opens his eyes and tilts his head back even farther so that he can see her, looking up past her chapped lips and nostrils at the faraway expression in her eyes.

  “Why did Chucho need a manicure so early in the morning?”

  “He gives cooking classes on television. Canal Sixty-seven, something like that, it’s in Nueva Jersey. But I’ve never seen it.”

  “Does your novio visit you?”

  “He’s coming soon.” Her fingers stop moving in his hair—it’s as if she’s about to say something earthshaking, but then she starts up again. A thought comes to him unbidden: he doesn’t care who Joaquina’s novio is, or if her novio really is visiting soon or not, because eventually he and Joaquina are going to be together no matter what. Chocho, he whispers silently to himself: He wonders if that was just his pride speaking, or if he’s too soothed by this comfortable chair and the visceral pleasure of being shampooed by her to worry about a rival. Let the lawyer come. He shuts his eyes and settles into himself to better enjoy the massaging of his scalp, and concentrates on trying to use the power of thought to tell her fingertips about his new resolve.

  He feels himself being shaken awake to the sound of her voice: “Marinero. Despiértate.”

  He grins dumbly at Joaquina, feeling surprised to find himself here and not in his cabin waking up next to Bernardo.

  “Were you just snoring because of your cold?” she asks. “Or do you always snore?”

  “Because of my cold,” he says, though he isn’t sure.

  She isn’t washing his hair anymore. She sits on a stool beside him, letting the conditioner work into his hair.

  “That happened to me the other day in the middle of a pedicure,” she says. “You know how it is, the women who come in, they talk, talk, talk, and talk. And some of them have voices, I don’t what it is, it’s like they hypnotize you. You feel yourself nodding off and nodding off and trying to keep your eyes open and taking drinks from a coke to stay awake and worrying about your hand slipping and cutting their skin. Pues, the other day? It happened, güey. There I was, chin down on my chest, fast asleep, I even dropped the tijeritas onto the floor. But you know how she woke me? With her big toe. Chiiín, she put it on my nose and gave a little push and stood up making a coraje. But I got angry too. Her toe on my nose? I sent her to la chingada, güey.”

  She rinses his hair. He follows her out through the curtain wearing a towel turbaned over his head. Gonzalo is already at work on another woman’s hair. And there’s a heavyset, Spanish-speaking moreno man in a black-and-white pin-striped suit with a red vest waiting for a manicure. How come every time he’s here, only men come in for manicures? And why are the men who come for manicures always so burly?

  Joaquina stands looking at Gonzalo’s back, twisting a curl on top of her head around her finger again. Esteban smiles to himself, recognizing the gesture as her anxiety’s signature.

  “Gonzalo,” she says. “Esteban can’t sit here with wet hair, not with the cold he has.”

  “Then put him under the dryer,” says Gonzalo. “What were you two doing back there that took so long? No. I don’t want to know. I have one appointment after another now.”

  It isn’t until six-thirty in the evening that Esteban is finally summoned to Gonzalo’s barber’s chair. By then the light outside is murky gray and sad under the street lighting, and a steady parade of people headed home from work are passing by the salon’s window, wisps of vaporized breath around their mouths. Esteban has spent most of the day feeling forgotten by both Gonzalo and Joaquina: they’ve tended to one customer after another until both seemed as drained of their usual humor and emotion as outside is now of midday’s autumn sunshine. Esteban has already begun to learn some of the lyrics of the more popular songs played over the radio on the Spanish-language station. He’s listened to more snatches of news about the changes in the world without having anyone to share his astonishment with. He’s read through every page of Gonzalo’s Spanish-language New York newspaper, and the international page and the section called “Nuestros Países” several times: in the latter he learned that the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala continue, but there’s no news at all of Nicaragua in the paper that day, which gave him the eerie sensation again that everything and everyone he used to know have disappeared forever while he’s been stuck on the Urus. Yet his horoscope advised him it was a good day for patching up relations with estranged relatives and old loves. He’s leafed through half a dozen back issues of Vanidades and Hola, catching up on the real-life love dramas of telenovela stars and other apparently famous people, few of whom he’s ever heard of. He’s used up a whole box of tissues and spent hours fighting off sleep, sitting there in a soporific stupor, building and rebuilding scaffoldings of air in his eyes to hold them open so that he can watch Joaquina bent over customer’s hands and feet, working like a meticulous surgeon. He’s fascinated by the variety and delicateness of the instruments she uses—she seems to have almost as many tools at her disposal as they have on the Urus, all in miniature—and by the aura of fastidious concentration and stillness that envelops her, whether she’s snipping at cuticles, or filing, or sanding with a little pumice stone, or applying lotions, or using a hand towel to dry feet lifted from a bowl of hot water, or massaging, or painting nails, or squeezing glue from a tiny tube to attach synthetic nails, then having the women put their fingers and new nails inside a little machine whose coils glow purple. Most of her customers are women after all, and they do tend to talk so much that Joaquina has seemed transformed into someone who hardly ever opens her mouth. Esteban has eavesdropped on all kinds of amorous, familial, and neighborhood gossip. A woman with a droning voice and feathery lisp soon had both him and Joaquina nodding off towards sleep in unison.

  At lunchtime Gonzalo had opened the drawer in which he keeps the money and given Joaquina a twenty-dollar bill, telling her to go for sandwiches and to stop in quickly at the Salvati
on Army store to buy Esteban a sweater and whatever else with the change left over. In the grocery store Esteban ordered a ham and cheese sandwich like Gonzalo’s, and Joaquina bought herself a plastic-wrapped cardboard tray of raw chícharos. That was her lunch; she said it was one of her favorite foods. Outside on the sidewalk she peeled back the wrapping and began popping raw, green chícharos into her mouth one at a time.

  “Híjue,” he said. “You eat like a pavo real.”

  “It’s funny you say that,” she said. “Because in English these are called green peas. And that bird is called peacock. See how clever you are?”

  She told him she studies English two nights a week at a church in the neighborhood and that the lessons are free, and that he should sign up too.

  “And you live around here?”

  “Not far.”

  Then she led him into the Salvation Army store, up a narrow flight of stairs into a room with ill-sorted secondhand clothing spread out on long tables, crammed into boxes, hung on racks. When she saw the look of disappointment on his face she said that she only liked new clothes too, and apologized for taking him to this place. But the little money they had would go further here than even at the most inexpensive stores along the avenue. But he said he was just surprised, not disappointed, because he couldn’t remember ever having been in a real clothing store before. In Corinto he’d always bought contraband clothing in the market, or directly from thieves’ middlemen like his tíos, all of it brand new, fresh from ships’ cargo holds or smuggled across borders. He tried on at least a dozen sweaters and didn’t even have a chance to see himself in the mirror until she’d chosen the one she wanted. It was a thick, green wool sweater with a black stripe around the collar, only slightly fraying at the ends of the sleeves and hem, and it smelled pleasantly of old mothballs and boiled milk.

  “Chamaco, sabes qué?” she said while he stood looking at himself in the mirror, glowing with gratitude but still thinking that he looked as if he’d been raised by wolves. “I like you with your hair long, now that it’s so clean.” She reached up and briskly smoothed hair out of his face, and combed it out with her fingers. “A trim, maybe, is all you need. And, claro, a shave.”