Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

  In principle, this was the worst time to hole up on board as a stowaway. Or maybe it wasn’t . . .

  “I didn’t think twice. The very day when we had the most eyes on us was the one when I managed to get on this ship,” he told the astonished sailor. “It was thanks to a robbery on the docks and the uproar that followed. I don’t know if you heard the commotion. During the chaos, I took off running, and I could hear the bullets whiz past me. Then I saw the ramp leading up to the Liberté; it seemed to be telling me to try my luck. I crossed the deck without looking back, hid down in the hold, and you know the rest.”

  Ceferino knew nothing about the fate of his companions. He hoped they’d made it onto one of the other ships moored in the port. They’d agreed it was each man for himself, but the other two kept balking at it when the moment came. For him, at least, it had worked. Down in the hold of the Liberté, huddled among the cargo, he felt as if he were in the entrails of a giant whale: a whale that weighed fifty-one thousand tons, as Joe had told him, and was three hundred yards long and thirty-two yards wide.

  He was no more than a drop of water in the middle of a storm.

  But all through that storm, huddled in that claustrophobic makeshift cell, he could hear his father whispering in his ear, encouraging him: Don’t give up, son. Thanks to those heartening words, and the memory of his father’s stoicism during his own much more perilous time in captivity, Ceferino’s lonely journey seemed milder, easier to bear.

  And if he needed another nudge, all he had to do was reach a hand into his pocket and take his mother’s photo from his wallet. His memory didn’t have to drift too far back—and his situation, stuck there in transit, stirred up recollections like nothing else—for him to realize his time as a stowaway wasn’t all that desperate. Yes, it felt like everything was moving too slowly, but he didn’t lose hope, even when Joe confirmed that the captain had revised their schedule and the crossing would take longer than they’d expected. His only worry was that the kind sailor would get tired of helping him. Then he would be truly alone.

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” Joe reassured him. “I’ll take care of you till we get there.”

  Ceferino had lived his entire life thinking nothing was permanent, and he’d gotten used to not letting people or hard times disappoint him. He had an extraordinary resilience and a capacity to emerge from difficulties stronger than he’d been before, and since the sailor had exceeded all his expectations, he decided to trust the man, to trust that the winds would take him where he was meant to be. Slowly, slowly, he began to adapt to the rhythm of the voyage.

  The boy thought calmly, slept calmly, and even ate calmly. As if he were savoring that varied repertory of foods the sailor snuck him. Apparently, he had a friend on the kitchen crew who pretended to look away while he gathered up the leftovers. The longer Cefe took to eat, the more time he spent with Joe, who was his only human contact.

  “This ship won the Blue Riband in 1930. It was called Europa then and belonged to the German merchant marine.”

  “What’s the Blue Riband?”

  “The prize given to the ship that made the best time between Hamburg and New York. But the war ruined everything.”

  “What happened?”

  “France got the ship as part of the war booty. They gutted it in the port and turned it into what it is now: something halfway between a cruise ship and a merchant ship. Practical but elegant at the same time, see. The Liberté is just another child of the war,” Joe said, winking at him affectionately.

  The sailor could see he was anxious.

  “Don’t sweat what you can’t fix. Think of all the great things that are waiting for you. Remember?” Joe rolled up his sleeve and pointed at his tattoo. “You still don’t know what this means?”

  Ceferino shook his head.

  “It’s about freedom, kid. You can kick and scream all you want, but sooner or later, you’ve got to go out and get things done on your own. So chin up. You’re about to see an entirely new world.”

  The days passed with stultifying slowness. But Ceferino was optimistic by nature and didn’t let the weight of the past or his loneliness get him down. He had the chance to put his life in order, to learn he who was, and to figure out who he wanted to be.

  Sometimes he heard the muffled voices of passengers. He amused himself by reconstructing their conversations, the relationships between the speakers, the excitement of their lives. He didn’t imagine himself involved in the situation; instead, it was as if he were watching a film from the front row, chewing a chocolate bar like the one he’d devoured at the beginning of the trip. His love for film was his deepest secret. Ceferino was crazy about everything to do with the movies, and when he was younger, he had dreamed of becoming an actor. But that desire didn’t last long; it had dwindled and then vanished when the realities of life brought him back down to earth. All his options passed through a single arrival point that he kept in his wallet, next to that photograph of his mother and his Spanish ID card: a wrinkled scrap of paper with an address dashed off hastily by hand, the home of the only family member he had in America, his uncle Ramón. He had copied it down himself from a letter his mother kept in an armoire in the dining room. Finding it was the last push he needed to run away.

  One day, the voices outside the ship’s hold were a little too clearly audible, distinct from those of the crew members who occasionally came down to where the goods were kept and made Ceferino realize he’d been right to hide. These voices came to him with a frightening clarity.

  “Hear that?” The sailor didn’t take long to come over and tell him to prick up his ears.

  “It’s . . . people talking?” he said, surprised.

  Joe nodded with closed eyes.

  “We should take our chances before the sun comes up, while it’s still foggy and a lot of the passengers have gone up on deck.”

  “Take our chances doing what?”

  “We’re about to reach the port. New York. You made it.”

  He was a man of few words—though Ceferino’s flimsy English couldn’t handle many, anyway. He didn’t know what to say, let alone what to do. But the sailor understood. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder to steady him. Partly because the waves were choppy on that stretch, but mainly because he needed Ceferino to pay attention to him one last time.

  One last time before the ship’s siren announced their entry into New York Bay, before the engines stopped, before the tugboats started pulling them toward land. Before Joe gave him a suitcase left behind by some passenger, along with a five-dollar bill—“A passenger without a suitcase looks suspicious, and the money will be enough for you to make it to your uncle’s.”

  Before Ceferino emerged from his hideout to witness the broad morning sky, feeling the wind riffling through his hair and stroking his face, inviting him to mingle with the other travelers. Before he tried to answer the questions from the customs officials and the health inspectors who stood between him and the Promised Land. Before all this, Ceferino looked again at the man’s tattoo, which now seemed to be speaking directly to him: Growl you may, but go you must!

  “Now’s when we go our own ways,” the sailor said to him. “You know what you’ve got to do.”

  CHAPTER 2

  That July morning in 1949, Ceferino Carrión was moved almost to tears by the sight of the big city rising up over the water. There was something both hypnotic and savage in that crescendoing image that seemed like a set from a movie. It wasn’t the ship that was approaching New York, but the city that was swallowing the ship.

  Dawn still hadn’t broken, and the boy floated toward the heart of New York, eyes wide, overwhelmed by its dimensions. Not to mention the sea of cars and people coursing back and forth along Eighth Avenue, the name of which was the only thing he remembered from the directions Joe had given him to keep him from getting lost. He was shivering from head to toe and bathed in cold sweat. The transition from the cramped hideaway in the hold of the Liberté to
his welcome before—or rather, behind—the Statue of Liberty filled him with a kind of vulnerable chill that wouldn’t seem to fade—and yet he was convinced good fortune would smile upon him as soon as he figured out how to make it to the Bronx.

  Clutching the little suitcase like a talisman, he gawked at the glimmering skyscrapers with their facades stretching infinitely upward, dotted with thousands of closed windows. No matter how far he looked, he couldn’t see the ends of them, and they gave him vertigo. They were all sharp angles and immense dimensions, as if the city were a gawky adolescent still waiting to finish its growth spurt. Not daring to breathe too deeply, he held on to the one thing that was his and his alone—the suitcase—and kept his eyes on the scrap of paper with the address of his father’s brother, Uncle Ramón, even though he knew it by heart.

  2309 Arthur Avenue.

  He looked at a crossing guard trying to establish some kind of order amid the endless vehicle and foot traffic: delivery vans, taxis that might screech to a halt at any moment, cars in bright colors and the occasional motorcycle jockeying for lanes, and very elegant men and women, taking cover from the summer sun with broad-brimmed hats or caps, waiting their turn to cross the wide street. There, in the middle of that multitude milling on the crosswalks and intersections, he felt alive. Pushed and shoved, but alive.

  Ceferino waited for the absolute worst moment to approach the orchestra director in the blue uniform conducting that urban symphony.

  “Bronx? Bus?” he asked with an unsure voice, showing the man the paper with the address.

  The crossing guard read it and jerked his head a few times to one side. He was used to giving directions to people fresh off the boat with little knack for the language. He stressed his directions with very precise gestures and wrote the letter D on Ceferino’s paper.

  “D. Go down in the subway. The train for the Bronx is the D.”

  “D,” Ceferino repeated slowly.

  The cop nodded and motioned for him to keep going up the avenue, then gave him a sort of martial salute, touching his temple with the tips of his fingers.

  To minimize the risk of getting lost along the way, Ceferino concentrated on finding the subway entrance, and only once he was downstairs did he let himself get distracted by the sights—in this case, another person waiting on the platform. A young black girl sitting on a bench, who didn’t look lost the way he did. She was the first person he’d had time to observe at ease since arriving in the United States. He looked at her hair, pulled back in a bun, the same way his sister Angelines wore hers. He liked her bright face and her big, dark eyes, and her red lips seemed eminently kissable. Cefe was dying to say something to her, in spite of his limited English and his generally deplorable appearance. He smiled at her, as he did with every pretty girl he came across. He couldn’t help it. Then he looked up and down the tracks, wondering which way the train would come from. When it appeared, the girl stood up—she’d been waiting for the same one. A gray-green beast with a red floor and red seats, the words “Sixth Avenue” in a black-and-white sign on its flank, it screeched metallically to a stop. Ceferino stepped back to let the girl enter first. He didn’t understand the scathing glances of the passengers until he saw her sit down. Immediately, the whites around her got up and changed places.

  He stepped on and showed the paper with the address to one of the passengers.

  “Fordham Road,” the man said, and then, louder, “FORDHAM ROAD.” When Cefe tried to ask how long it would take to get there, the man told him to leave him be, in Spanish, with a strong American accent.

  No matter. He was on the train, and he would get there eventually. Cefe sat next to the black girl and weathered the surly stares from his fellow riders. When she wouldn’t meet his eyes, he looked out the windows, watching the passing of the stations with their colored tiles and the dark interior of the tunnel.

  The train wound through the bowels of Manhattan and eventually came to his stop in the Bronx. Gone was the sea of skyscrapers, replaced by rows upon rows of no-longer-gargantuan buildings with zigzagging stairways on their facades. American flags flapped on most of the housefronts, and the bus stops and billboards seemed designed to clear up the boy’s worries. An ad for Pepsi took him aback: it glowed on the roof of a building, a giant bottle cap flanked by two mammoth bottles. Everything in America looked big, deluxe, endless.

  Everything but the narrow alleys and the occasional closed mind, apparently. What he’d seen on the train had upset him, but he didn’t want to let any nastiness spoil this milestone, having his feet on the ground in this new land of opportunity that he was ready to take by storm. Little by little, his nervous sweat drained away, dried by the balmy air of summer.

  Ceferino Carrión and his accidental suitcase were finally in the Bronx, in search of 2309 Arthur Avenue, apartment 4-2, the home of his uncle Ramón, which Cefe hoped to call home for a while, too. But first he ran into the building’s superintendent, who was on her way out to run errands and seemed shocked when she saw the boy. She did a double take and squinted as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “Justo Ramón?”

  Cefe was confused. Who was Justo Ramón? He shook his head. “My name is Ceferino Carrión, and I’m looking for my uncle Ramón Carrión. Do you know if he lives here?”

  “My baby!” María Buenavida exclaimed; she seemed to be holding back a maternal urge to hug him.

  The one who didn’t hold back, and who nearly crushed him to death, was his uncle Ramón, who jumped out, squeezed his hand, then pulled him into a bear hug, following it with a few thundering claps on the back.

  “You’re the spitting image of your father!” Ramón told him, smiling widely.

  Ramón Carrión had more Cantabria than North America in him. He was a slender man with a slight hump at the top of his back; a narrow face, sunken and furrowed like a raisin; bushy eyebrows that barely revealed his eyes; and a gaze that strongly recalled Ceferino’s father. He was a Carrión through and through. A widower with one son, Julio, the same age as Ceferino, Ramón had made a place for himself in that community as the owner of a small restaurant and bar, a simple establishment on the edge of the Quarry Ballfields frequented by working-class locals. At that hour, he had just returned from buying fruits and vegetables from Mr. Provenzano’s store.

  “I just got into the city. I brought your address with me all the way from Spain.”

  He showed him the wrinkled scrap of paper.

  “Welcome home!”

  And the two men hugged while beside them, María Buenavida murmured over the resemblance again: “Justo Ramón.”

  The bustling life of the Bronx suited Cefe. At times, that working-class city within a city reminded Ceferino of his neighborhood in Barcelona. Maybe it was the boisterous streets packed with bakeries, butchers’ shops, hardware stores, seamstresses, and fruit stalls pouring out onto the sidewalk, offering their goods in crates piled up before the customers’ eyes. Or maybe it was the abundance of bars and taverns where the neighbors gabbed over their beers—when they weren’t having bull sessions and telling stories in the doorways.

  “The Bronx has become home for the children of the Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, and Spanish people like us. We’ve been here twenty years now,” Ramón explained to him. The borough had also gained a reputation as the part of New York with the most boxers, roughnecks, and gangsters per square foot. “But most of us are humble working people, with a strong feeling of community. We help each other out because we’re one big family,” he said.

  Arthur Avenue was the main thoroughfare crossing through the Italian neighborhood. It was a broad street, full of life, fragrant with washing soap from the clothing hung on balcony clotheslines, dots of color against the gray buildings, and with the variety of spices whose scents wafted out of kitchen windows across the neighborhood.

  Within days of arriving, Ceferino had his first shift in his uncle’s restaurant. There was always something to do there, and the boy worke
d like crazy. There was barely a second’s rest; days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and it wasn’t long before he felt at home.

  One night he fell asleep in the park while waiting for his cousin to accompany him home, and someone stole the few possessions he had on him, including his ID card. The next day, while Ceferino, Uncle Ramón, and Julio were trying to figure out what to do, María Buenavida came to them with a plan.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Sorry for barging in at this hour.”

  “No problem, María! You’re always welcome in our house.” Uncle Ramón offered her a chair and a place at the table with them. “Something going on? You feel like a coffee?”

  “No, no, thanks.” She sighed long and deep. “I’m here to make you a proposition.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Last night, Cefe told me how they stole his wallet.”

  “That’s just what we were talking about,” Ramón said.

  “So I’ve been turning it over . . . and . . . it may sound crazy, and I know I shouldn’t stick my nose into other people’s business, the way my daughter always says. But I was thinking Cefe could use my son Justo’s papers. Justo Ramón León. They’re nearly identical. That could help him straighten things out.”

  The Jones-Shafroth Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in March 1917, granted full American citizenship to Puerto Ricans like María and her boy. But Justo Ramón León suffered from a debilitating illness that kept him confined to his grandmother’s home in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico, and his mother had resigned herself to living without him.

  “He’ll never come to New York. Not to the Bronx, not to Arthur Avenue. If I do this for you, Cefe, in a way it’s like I’m doing it for my boy.”

  “Mrs. Buenavida, I don’t know what to say. Thank you. I owe you and your son.”