Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

  PRAISE FOR STARS IN HIS EYES

  “Drawing on material of exceptional dramatic richness, Martí Gironell has written a story of personal success starring a man who pursued a dream and didn’t stop until he turned it into a reality.”

  —El 3 de Vuit

  “A great story.”

  —El Punt Avui

  “Gironell manages to reveal the most vulnerable side of his character, as with Gatsby, the inner solitude of the successful.”

  —La Vanguardia

  “A fictionalized story of a truly filmic life.”

  —Segre Lectura

  “A novel that will surely be a sales success and may even end up on-screen.”

  —El Diario Montañés

  “Martí Gironell has turned a life full of adventure into a novel.”

  —La Razón

  “A cinematic life in the heart of the dream factory . . . A fascinating and inimitable character.”

  —Diario de León

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Martí Gironell

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Adrian Nathan West

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as La força d’un destí by Columna Edicions in Spain in 2018. Translated from Catalan by Adrian Nathan West. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542040624 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542040620 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542040631 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542040639 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Derek Thornton

  Title treatment by Kimberly Glyder

  First edition

  For my wife, Eva, and my children, Quim and Pep. For my parents, Carme and Martí.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

  —Squire Bill Widener, as quoted by Theodore Roosevelt

  CHAPTER 1

  Growl you may, but go you must!

  The words were tattooed on the forearm of the husky black man with the broad back, who was looking down at the small, pale, trembling boy.

  “But go you must?” Ceferino Carrión mumbled nervously in halting English.

  Completing the tattoo were a sailboat surrounded by thick rope, an eagle with outstretched wings, and an anchor. The man who’d cornered him, clearly a crew member of the enormous ship Ceferino had crept onto as a stowaway, threw his head back in laughter.

  “Will you tell?” Ceferino asked, this time in slightly less broken French.

  “Don’t worry, I mean you no harm,” the sailor responded, showing off a row of very white teeth. The boy was still panting and had to struggle to meet the sailor’s eyes. “You thirsty? Hungry, maybe?”

  The man crouched down beside him and took a chocolate bar from his pocket. Cefe, who had no idea how many hours he’d been hidden on the ship, snatched it from the man’s hands and swallowed it down quickly, barely bothering to unwrap it. His eyes, already begging silently for a second helping, came to rest on the letters embroidered on the front of the man’s hat, a white brimless cap bearing the word Liberté.

  Liberty! Pray God it’s a sign, Cefe thought, though he knew better than to lower his guard. He had already failed seven times to make it onto a ship. For weeks upon weeks, he’d tramped around the port at Le Havre with his companions, Pedro and Jaime, their eyes peeled for a shot at slipping onto one of those immense vessels and making their way toward New York. The Promised Land, they called it. The land of liberté.

  For Ceferino and his friends, the two years since they’d left Barcelona had been one long, grueling pilgrimage. They had all come of age in that time, but not one had any intention of waiting for their draft papers to come in, forcing them to complete their service in the fascist army. I’ll never serve the side that killed my people, Cefe told himself over and over when his spirits lagged.

  The boys were also running from the lack of opportunity in the gray, dark, early years of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. They had crossed the Pyrenees on foot until they reached Bayonne, then had followed the Atlantic coast of France under the harshest conditions. They took any job they could find to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads. They’d passed through Bordeaux during the weeks of the grape harvest; their time there stretched on through twelve-hour days of unceasing work. The boys walked among the vine rows on the banks of the Garonne, at the feet of the famous and grandiose châteaux, which Ceferino would contemplate in silence while he learned to distinguish the different varieties of grapes they were picking.

  The only time they let themselves linger for a spell was in Paris. Ceferino had worked as a waiter and cook in the popular nightspots, learning the language and developing a taste for jazz. But soon, the news came that he’d been declared a fugitive in his home country. He was no longer safe. It was time, he decided, to rebel, to put an ocean between himself and his problems. He set his eyes doggedly on a North America that had once been the stuff of legend, a magical place that felt closer, more real with every second.

  And now, at twenty-one, when his most longed-for dream was almost within his grasp, a brawny seaman was standing in his way. It wouldn’t be long before the ship started its motors. The man still had time to alert the authorities, drag the boy back to terra firma—the best-case scenario—and save himself a whole load of problems. Never before had Cefe missed his brothers in misfortune as much as he did just then. He knew his decision to strike out on his own had put him in a vulnerable situation. He was traveling alone, with nothing but the clothes on his back—a blue shirt, beige pants, and a worn-out pair of lace-ups. Those and a sheaf of documents to remind him where he came from, where he was going, and who he was leaving behind.

  “What’s your name?” the sailor asked him gently.

  “Ceferino,” he replied, before adding, “Cefe.”

  “Everyone calls me Joe. You coming from Spain?”

  He said that he was.

  “You’re not the first kid to try and make it across the Atlantic. A lot of hopes and dreams and not much in the way of possessions to make it through a real long journey,” the sailor said, using slightly broken Spanish in an attempt to calm the boy down. “I don’t suppose you have any money, or food, or clothes? Might as well tell you, the place you’ve picked to hole up isn’t well suited to the cold Atlantic nights.”

  The boy shook his head to each of the sailor’s conjectures, looking balefully around at the damp, windswept corner he had chosen to hide in.

  “What will you do with me?” Ceferino gathered the courage to ask.

  “I already told you, you got nothing to worry abou
t.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I know how to keep a secret. That’s what makes a person strong. Can I trust you with one?”

  The question caught the boy by surprise.

  “Being a sailor’s not my only job on this ship. And this, uh . . . other job, let’s say, the captain don’t know nothing about it,” the sailor said conspiratorially.

  Perhaps, Ceferino thought, this was the moment when his integrity would be put to the test. He knew more than a few grim stories with dark finales out on the open sea.

  “A group of us sailors who make the regular route from Le Havre to New York, we put together a little venture bringing over people like yourself,” he said, pointing at the kid. “Making sure they get across safely. But it ain’t easy—there’s a lot more sailors against helping out stowaways than there are willing to do it. So if you want to make it, we’ll have to be very careful.”

  The kid nodded mechanically, unsure whether he could trust this man.

  “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of you,” the sailor assured him. “If the currents are good to us and we don’t come across any obstacles, we’ll be docking in New York in eight days.” Joe smiled and patted the boy gently on the shoulder.

  For the first time during the conversation, Ceferino couldn’t suppress his smile. His thoughts had jumped ahead in time, and he imagined himself grazing the peaks of the city’s skyscrapers with his fingertips. Then the noise of the onboard sirens brought him back to reality.

  “We’re about to haul anchor, and I need to get to my post. Don’t you come out of your hiding place. Later I’ll come see how you are. I’ll bring you water, a bite to eat, and a blanket later on.”

  The sailor gave him his hand to shake, in this way sealing their pact of brotherhood, then vanished into the darkness of the ship’s hold. Ceferino felt an emptiness, in the pit of his stomach and beyond. Suddenly, his nerves, his anguish, and all the frustration and tension he’d accumulated those past few months came unmoored and crashed against him. He broke into tears. It was like a storm in autumn—intense but mercifully brief. Calm followed in time, and his breathing slowed to match the sedate movements of the ship being dragged out by the tugboats. His journey, which had begun so long ago, would soon cover its first nautical mile. But Ceferino knew nothing of that. He had fallen asleep.

  The prediction of eight days’ travel was optimistic. The voyage would last two long weeks.

  First he had to get used to the shadows, which were something less than utter darkness, and to the silence, which wasn’t quite silence, either. Above all, he had to get used to the isolation, the constant tension, the danger of being found by some crew member less sensitive to his plight than his protector had been. Everyone calls me Joe. Cefe was unable to hide his gratitude for the big man’s visits and companionship, and it seemed the feeling was mutual.

  This was far and away the longest trip he’d ever taken in his life, yet all he could do was sit still, quiet, closed up in a cramped space no larger than a jail cell. It was impossible not to fill that period of solitude and waiting with memories. Inevitably, with so much time to wrestle with his thoughts, those thoughts would turn to his father.

  Ceferino had only gotten to visit his father in prison one time, but that was enough never to forget it. The Carrións were a family that believed in the values of the Republic and knew what it meant to defend its ideals. One day, his father didn’t come home. In the last days of the Civil War, they had fingered him as a political commissar for the Reds. Ceferino didn’t see him until two months later.

  “Did you bring me some cigarettes?” Antonio Carrión had said, winking at his son.

  His father was in bad shape, but he still held his head high, showing the same serenity, laced with an iron will, as always. Ceferino tried to convince himself the guards’ treatment of his father wasn’t as bad as he’d heard, that his captors had been able to see what a good person his father was. He wasn’t naive, but he loved his father so much and that was the only possibility he could accept without going mad, even after he saw the painful emptiness behind the man’s tired eyes.

  “Don’t worry, boy. Even if they pull out my teeth, I won’t pledge allegiance to this godforsaken regime that’s trying to wipe us out.”

  “If you say that, they’ll never let you go. And you didn’t do anything wrong,” the child pleaded, his eyes fixed on his father’s sad smile.

  “What’s the point of being free if you can’t think or act according to your beliefs?” His father’s voice was so firm and touched him so deeply that Ceferino’s sorrow only grew. “No one should be able to control another person’s life or bend their will. You listen to me, boy: you make your choices. You and you alone.”

  Many months later, Ceferino’s father returned home. He never talked about his time in prison, and he never showed any bitterness. He wanted his life back, and since he wasn’t the type of man to sit idle for long, when the opportunity came to enlist in the merchant marine with his older son, he didn’t let it slip by. Months later, both lost their lives in an incident the regime’s official sources covered up with customary diligence.

  That was eight years ago already. July 1, 1941. Also in summertime, on the open sea.

  “What happened to them?” the sailor asked.

  “From what we were told, the ship was on a route that docked at a German port, carrying clandestine war materials for the Third Reich. The British fleet smelled something funny and sank it.”

  The sailor looked at the boy with compassion. He drew a metal flask from his pocket and shared it with Ceferino.

  “We all lost someone we loved in the war,” he said.

  They drank in silence until the alarm announcing the changing of the guard on deck separated them.

  Ever since the day of his father’s and brother’s deaths—though he kept it to himself, thinking that to say it aloud would be to dishonor their memory—Ceferino had felt an insuperable revulsion toward the sea, a kind of visceral dislike that gnawed at him from inside.

  The national newspapers didn’t publish a single line about the sinking of the merchant vessel from the Carandini shipping firm. The family viewed their silence as a way for Franco’s regime to keep up the facade of neutrality during the goddamn war. That silence, of course, kept them from being able to seek any sort of compensation. Ceferino’s mother had to move heaven and earth to get her widow’s pension; she was lucky to have the parish priest on her side. The one gesture of humanity came from Enasa, the national truck company, or rather its founder, Wilfredo Ricart. Enasa manufactured heavy vehicles—vans, trucks, and cars—responding to a vital need of the state after the devastation of the Civil War. Located in the Barcelona neighborhood of La Sagrera and founded at the behest of the National Institute of Industry, Ricart’s company gave jobs to all the children, brothers, and other immediate family of the victims of the incident. The owner was a seaman’s son; he was moved by the tragedy, and he wanted to do something to help. And that was how, cursing and gritting his teeth—because there was no way around it, he was serving Franco’s cause—Ceferino became a sheet-metal worker, a model employee, despite everything. During break time, he shared conversation and cigarettes with two young men who’d been scarred by the regime, who were as unhappy as he was, and who planned to flee the country.

  “The clock’s ticking for me to turn nineteen. After that, they’ll call me up,” Ceferino said to them with indignation, which he underlined by throwing his cigarette to the ground and crushing it beneath his shoe. “And I’m not about to give up my best days for a goddamn country that killed my father and my brother.” The others nodded in silent assent.

  In the hold of the ship, as the days passed, Cefe longed for these lost friends. Once, the sailor asked him what methods they used to try and sneak aboard the other vessels. Joe admired how they hadn’t given up after the third or fourth attempt. Ceferino made a list for him. They had tried everything you could think of: hidin
g among grain sacks, breaking into a shipping container and creeping in, even hiding in a car just before it was loaded on board with a crane. His expression turned glum when he recalled the two times they had truly feared for their safety, after unsympathetic crew members had discovered them: “The first time,” Ceferino explained, “they found us huddled in a lifeboat, on the port side; the second, they surprised us in the ship’s hold when the guards were making their rounds.”

  The episode that had left the deepest mark on his friends took place on their seventh and final try. Frustration had started to wear at the young men’s spirits, and they were thinking of giving up and making a go of it in France. But then they met a sailor who offered, between glasses of wine and shots of rum, to get them on a ship moored in the port in exchange for what money they’d managed to scrape together. Once there, they were locked in a small cabin—for reasons of safety, they were told.

  “It didn’t take them long to find us,” Cefe remembered. “We heard voices and footsteps coming quickly toward us. They opened the door, dragged us out, and beat us the whole way down the gangplank.”

  They should have given up. But that was when they decided to try the one thing they hadn’t wanted to consider until then: going it alone. They would do it by blending in with the stevedores. They observed the men’s work in detail, the shifts, how they chose who would help load which ship. For some time, the three friends worked the job straight, to win the trust of the foremen and the port workers, but also to learn the layout of the ships’ holds and get a sense of where it would be best to hide. Ceferino remembered it as the hardest work he’d ever done—harder than working sheet metal in Barcelona or harvesting grapes in Bordeaux.

  They handpicked the stevedores for every job. The call—that was the term they used at the docks—came three times a day: morning, afternoon, and night. A big group of hopefuls in berets would gather, milling around the foremen, who would stand at the feet of the ships and choose crews of fifteen men or fewer. And since loading or unloading a ship could take from eight to ten days, depending on the tonnage, Ceferino and his friends had time to study their options. The most delicate operation—transporting gold ingots by hand—required added security.