by Paul Monette
If he hadn’t been so sick, they probably would have thrown him to the sharks. After waiting two months for the clearance to leave, they didn’t need any trouble with immigration. But they could see he was Spanish, and so took pity on him. They nursed him back with coconut milk. By the time they’d reached Gibraltar he was rational again. They told him they were bound for Marseilles. He hadn’t ever so much as looked at a map of Europe, but as long as it wasn’t Africa he was satisfied. The last few days at sea, he worked with the crew and got his strength back. Cuba seemed like a dream he’d had. The whole world on the other side of the fever was just a mass of shadows now.
When they docked in Marseilles, he stayed on board to help unload the cargo. When the immigration men came on to check the sailors’ papers, he managed to slip away just as he’d arrived, down the anchor chain like a water rat. As he lay drying off in the sun at the end of the pier, he realized he had nothing. Just the secondhand clothes of a Spanish sailor. He would never go to Florida now, he thought. He would never see his family or his friends again. He thought of the fifteen thousand cash going moldy in the biscuit tin, and he laughed out loud. He’d never felt so free in his life.
He nosed around for a couple of weeks doing odd jobs on the docks, for bosses who didn’t inquire too much about his credentials as long as he’d work for three dollars a day. He scaled fish at a cannery from dawn to noon, then spent the rest of the day wandering about, talking to the old fishermen in a kind of waterfront pidgin. After a while he was able to figure out where he was by looking at sailors’ charts. He who had grown up thinking that Cuba and Miami constituted the major poles of the world now saw what a puny corner they occupied. The sailors pointed out Angola, and they pointed out Marseilles, and suddenly he had a new respect for the vastness of things.
He liked the restless feel of the port city, where it didn’t really matter how much French you spoke, where nobody asked too many questions. He found himself an attic room in the house of a blind widow, and though he grew restless with the cannery work, he managed to steal a bicycle one day. This he used for long afternoon rides up into the hills, through the medieval perched villages to the monasteries and ruined castles that had lined this route since Roman times. For weeks he was content to be by himself, poking about like a tourist.
He learned just enough French to eat by. On Saturday nights he visited a waterfront brothel, where he paid nearly half his cannery wages to stay all night, always with a different woman. He wanted nobody else in his life just then, neither friend nor lover. If someone had pinned him down, he would have said he was resting. For once he had no plans to escape, or perhaps he was trying to give fate the slip. He even put on some weight. Where he’d come out of prison lean and tight, his face hawk-thin with its burning eyes, now he ate whole loaves of bread from the basket of his bicycle as he drove around. He guzzled forty-cent wine from a goatskin. From the look of him he was settling down to be a lazy Bohemian. After a couple of months he wouldn’t have looked out of place with a sketchpad, wearing a beret.
But if anyone thought he had outgrown his ambition and put away his dreams, they were much mistaken. It was just that for once he wasn’t in any rush. It didn’t take him long to find out he’d landed in the heroin capitol of the world. He was also smart enough to know it wasn’t in the same league as selling reefer in the slum alleys. The market wasn’t local at all. But he knew that every operation of this kind needed runners and bagmen, and they might be glad of a man without a country, especially somebody trained to kill.
He went at it very, very slowly. He haunted the waterfront night after night, and gradually fell in with a couple of street dealers, two-bit hoods no older than he. He knew the type like the back of his hand. They had no ambition except to get stoned and stay stoned. Tony didn’t push them. He simply let it be known that he had some experience dealing weed and that he was always open to a proposition. Then he sauntered away, prepared to wait for months if he had to.
Then things began to accelerate, as if fate had caught on to his casual ways and decided to make him jump. One morning at the cannery, word went around that an immigration team was raiding along the docks, looking for illegal aliens. The foreman tried to cut a deal with Tony, proposing to get him a French passport on the black market. Tony could see it was a setup, that the foreman was probably in collusion with immigration. He refused and quit on the spot. He didn’t want a passport anyway. He liked being unattached.
Because of the heat from immigration, the job market suddenly dried up. Now Tony had no choice but crime. For a couple of days he picked pockets in the city parks and cased a few shops and banks, but his heart wasn’t in it. He grew wistful for the days when he and Manolo used to talk their way into the houses of the rich in Havana and pocket everything that wasn’t nailed down. There he had had his first real taste of privilege. That was what he wanted now, more than he wanted to shoot up a bank and paw through bags of currency.
Restless and brooding, he stopped on his way out one morning to ask the widow if she needed anything. Almost in spite of himself he’d permitted a certain friendly intercourse between them. Perhaps he’d let down his guard because she was blind: there was no way she could finger him. He was almost shamefaced when he did errands for her, as if he feared somebody would notice and accuse him of being a good boy.
He found her out in the kitchen yard, washing clothes in a big tin tub. As they exchanged a few minimal words of French, he happened to glance along the clothesline. Billowing there and drying in the sun was a whole wardrobe of priest’s vestments—cassock and surplice and collar, hand-edged linen, richly brocaded capes shimmering with Easter. When Tony asked where it all came from, the blind woman proudly explained that she worked in rotation with three other women of the parish to keep the monsignor spotless.
Without even really thinking, Tony walked to the end of the line and lifted down a black cassock. The widow noticed nothing as she hummed along at her work. Tony plucked a couple of collars off the line, called good day to his landlady, then raced back up to his room. The cassock was still faintly damp under the arms and along the hem, but he couldn’t wait. He pinned the collar in place and ducked into the widow’s bedroom to borrow her Bible. Then he was off to the western edge of the city, where the white-walled villas were tiered above the sea on the first flank of the Riviera.
It was as easy to get in as it used to be when Manolo feigned a stomach ache. In halting French, his black eyes rapt with saintliness, Tony explained he was taking up a collection to build a children’s hospital. The deep-tanned Riviera matrons, wearing halter tops and bubble glasses and heavy gold bangle earrings, had just enough reflex left from all that convent training that they couldn’t turn him away. They ushered him in, running upstairs to grab a robe and fish some bank notes out of their Hermès wallets. And quick as a cat thief Tony would dart through the downstairs rooms, pocketing silver and bibelots.
As he staggered home that evening, the pockets of his cassock laden down with treasure, he was totally exhilarated. He set out all his loot around his room, not bothering even to think about what he should take to the pawnbrokers. Of the cash he’d collected for his bogus charity, he only kept a few hundred francs. The lion’s share he brought next morning to the church near the docks, depositing it in the poor box when nobody was looking. He knew he was just being superstitious, but also he seemed to want to prove he was in it for something besides the money.
His act got better and better. He mesmerized the women of the villas—it was almost always a woman, whose husband was out making his fortune or dawdling with his mistress. They begged Tony to stay for lemonade. They served him lunch on their dazzling terraces, with a view out over the Mediterranean that seemed like a kind of sin it was so gaudy. They couldn’t have been more well-mannered in the presence of a priest. All their virginal modesty seemed to come back to them. Unconsciously they began to confess, spilling out the misery and boredom of their lives to the dark-eyed Spanish pri
est with the dueling scar and the air of a pirate.
Tony never tired of it, and more curiously still, he was not overcome with desire. Even without the protection of the cassock, he wouldn’t have made a move to seduce even the most beautiful of them. Perhaps his experience with the general’s woman had left him gun-shy. Yet he seemed to be after something deeper than pleasure. For this was the princess class that lived in the villas above the sea. He saw them in all their splendid isolation, accoutred in limpid silks and lying about in rooms cushioned like a jewel box.
What was he after? Was he there to learn how their men kept them, so he would know when he came to occupy a castle of his own? Or did he really want to know what the boredom was like—the long afternoons on the telephone, the desultory shopping—so as to be sure it would never happen to any woman of his?
He couldn’t say. All he knew was, he had to go back to the villas day after day. He’d ring a new doorbell and wait, a shiver of excitement creeping up his spine, till the door was opened by some new vision of sultriness, her lips wet with longing, a restless glint in her haunted eyes. Meanwhile, his room grew cluttered with treasures. Every surface was covered with clocks and china dogs and silver ashtrays and jade figurines. Tony could have opened a pawn shop himself. Every now and then he would give a trinket to one of the whores, but otherwise his store of riches seemed to have no plan, no scheme, no purpose.
He developed such a perfect air of detachment, the hoods on the docks began to be drawn to him. When he drifted about the waterfront bars at night, no longer a priest but still somehow desireless, the small-time gangsters bought him drinks and hinted at certain deals. Tony kept his distance, not yet ready to commit himself till someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was no more interested in getting too involved with any particular criminal than he was with any particular woman. He still went to the brothel on Saturday night, and still he demanded a new girl every time. None of these could remotely be called a princess.
Tony Montana was a happy man that rainy afternoon when he passed the sweetshop. He had just changed out of his priest’s attire, having spent the morning with the wife of an industrialist, wandering through her rose garden. He had a meeting that night with a dealer who was going to introduce him to the next link up in the chain of command. There was a chance to do some runner work over the border into Switzerland. Tony had everything in place. For once he was not the prey of forces, but had set things up so he was free of everybody else’s needs.
In the sweetshop window was a tray of marzipan fruit—strawberries, figs, apricots. He smiled, remembering the widow’s passion for candy. On an impulse he headed inside, patting the pocket of his sailor’s pants and realizing he had no money. He chuckled softly, since for once he’d had no thought of stealing. But the old proprietor was busy, weighing chocolate for a bunch of kids, so it was the easiest thing in the world for Tony to lean into the window and scoop up a handful of marzipan. He stuffed his hand in his pocket, turned around and slipped out the door—right into the arms of a scowling cop.
It seemed like a joke. All right, the cop had seen him red-handed through the window, but it was only half a franc’s worth of candy. Tony could hardly believe he was being led to the station. As they bore down the street, the gendarme tugging Tony along by his cuffed hands, Tony threw back his head and laughed at the craziness of it all. He wasn’t even worried when they fingerprinted him and stuck him in a detention cell with a lot of drunks and pimps. Tony Montana was a secret now. They couldn’t possibly stick him with a ten-cent crime.
But they left him there for a week, till he started to fight with the drunks and pimps and hollered at the guards. He finally thought he’d got somewhere when a fleshy man in a self-important suit came swaggering down the hall and let him out. Tony began to complain about his rights, and the man cuffed his ear and sent him sprawling. “Shut up, Tony Montana,” he sneered. “You got a one-way ticket to Havana, compliments of the French government. Save your breath for Castro.”
All the way back in the plane, Tony kept revolving it over and over in his mind. He couldn’t believe they’d tracked down who he really was. He thought Tony Montana had disappeared in the hills of Angola. Tony Montana had died on a ship in the mid-Atlantic. It was something to learn, that the world had a network subtle enough to pick up a nobody. Your store of treasures didn’t help you a bit, nor your best disguises, nor all the princely women who’d told you the story of their lives.
It was the last thing he would learn about the world for the next five years. Back in Havana they put him on trial for twenty minutes—desertion—and then he was sentenced to twenty years. Twenty years was life these days. Nobody lived past forty in a Cuban jail, not since the revolution. Tony Montana, the one they would call Scarface, was led away in a stunned silence. The key that turned in the lock was forever.
Only Tony Montana himself knew there would be a next chance. He couldn’t have learned what he’d learned for nothing. A man who had a destiny had to have three chances. And so he waited, month after month. He needed no one. He wanted nothing. All he knew was this: his apprenticeship was done. When he next got out he would own the world, or leave it in ashes before they’d ever take him again.
Chapter Two
THE WIND HAD been rising all night in the Florida Straits. By dawn the waves were fifteen feet, and only the barest bruise of day got through the moiling clouds. Lightning shot the sea, and the thunder fell like bombs. The trawler had gone astray about two A.M., but the captain didn’t find out till after five, when he came up to relieve the drunken sailor nodding in the wheelhouse. Now the captain sat at the shortwave, probing a break in the static. With so many overfilled boats in the Straits, he doubted the Coast Guard would answer a “Mayday.” But he knew every groan in his ship, and it felt like she might break up from the strain and the extra weight. He had a boat for maybe sixty. There were two hundred and thirty-four people aboard.
Most of the refugees were huddling on the deck. They held to their families in pitiful clumps, the thin blankets tented about them soaking wet from the spray of the waves. A toothless retard, half-naked, his shirt draped around his head, capered around the deck, giggling and pointing a finger at the storm. The men with their families shoved him away, and he caromed from group to group, spinning his laugh like an incantation. Every time the ship rose up on an angry swell, a chatter like a tribe of monkeys rose from the crowd on deck. There was panic, but they didn’t dare move for fear they would be thrown overboard.
Tony stayed close to Manolo, right up at the prow of the ship. The younger man lay curled and shivering on the anchor chain. He’d been vomiting his guts out all night long. At each heave of the ship he groaned and cursed, but softly, like a man praying. He had no strength left to shout. Tony, meanwhile, leaned out over the rail of the ship, dousing his face in the sea spray. He laughed at the power of the storm. He almost seemed to be urging it to greater heights, shouting into the wind as if he was master of the revels. He dropped to Manolo’s side and shook him.
“Whatsa matter, chico?”
“I wish I was back in my cell,” said Manolo, moaning through gritted teeth. “I miss the cockroaches.”
“Hey, babe, this is good for you. Clean out your system. In a month you’ll be eating lobster. Steaks this thick,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger four inches apart.
Manolo retched. With a shaking hand he fingered a small Negrito charm on a chain around his neck. “We’ve had it, Tony,” he whispered. “Yemaya is angry with us.”
“Oh shit, not you,” retorted Tony with disdain. He’d managed to duck the Afro-Catholic malarkey all the while he was growing up, but the prisons were rife with it. Men in cages needed their mystic fix. Tony looked down at the cheap glass charm—Chango, god of fire and thunder, his sharp teeth glinting, his eyes rolling deliriously, head crowned in gold. Chango had no power on the sea. The sea was Yemaya’s kingdom.
“Help me, Tony, while we still got time. All
we need’s a pin. Little rouge—little eye shadow. Ask one o’ them broads.” His trembling hand gripped Tony’s shirt. He was practically crying.
“Knock it off!” cried Tony, pulling away. “I don’t go for that mystical shit. It’s your fear talking, chico. You make your own fate. There’s no such thing as gods. You hear me?”
As if in answer, the mainmast shuddered and began to crack. Planks flew up from the deck, and deep in the belly of the ship timbers began to rend. The captain came scrambling out of the wheelhouse. He looked up at the mast and slowly crossed himself. The refugees had scattered from their huddles. Screaming and stampeding, they raced for the rails. Their eyes were riveted on the quaking mast, trying to gauge where it would fall. A huge wave broke on the starboard side, sucking ten people into the sea.
Manolo rose to his knees and drummed his fists on Tony’s hip. “See what you did!” he bellowed. “Yemaya heard you! Take it back!”
Tony stood with his feet apart, his gaze wild as he searched the deck. He seemed to be the only one still upright. The others just clung to the rails and pleaded at the sky. Those who’d lost their relatives to the surging of the waves raged and gnashed their teeth. Nothing could comfort them. Tony saw a couple of sailors cutting free the lifeboats below the wheelhouse, close under the swaying and splintering mast. He reached down and dragged his raving cousin to his feet.
“You shut up now, chico. We’re getting off this tub.”
He gripped Manolo about the shoulders, and they lurched across the heaving deck. Another wave hit them broadside. Tony and Manolo went sprawling, and another handful of refugees tumbled into the sea. One of the lifeboats sprang loose from its fittings and slid down the deck. Only one boat still held in its ropes, ready to be launched to the open water. Tony crawled to it, one hand gripping Manolo’s collar. The younger man had passed out.