by Rita Pomade
We berthed alongside moneyed boat owners, a very different breed from the rugged yachties we encountered in the East. The Australians who dominated the China Sea prided themselves on their sailing skills and self-sufficiency. Many of these European and American yacht owners generally hired crews to do the work while they supervised. What both groups had in common was hard drinking and a limited interest in their host country.
I did, however, encounter the occasional fascinating outsider. Along the Paseo Maritimo, I met an ex-Viet Nam vet who became a Buddhist after the war and kept to himself. I watched him every morning as he did Tai Chi in front of his small yacht. Gossip among the local inhabitants, who stopped to observe his practice, hinted at it being a form of devil worship. In Taipei, I had seen whole neighbourhoods doing Tai Chi before opening their shops. I had taken lessons from a Chinese woman in Singapore, who was in her late sixties but didn’t look a day over thirty. I wondered if through Tai Chi I could also push back time. One morning I asked my neighbour if I could join him, and we became friends.
Alexandra, a young French girl, not yet twenty, whose parents had chartered a yacht for a family vacation on the Mediterranean, provided another story along the Paseo Maritimo. Alexandra, to her parents’ dismay, remained behind. She’d fallen in love with the handsome captain of the yacht and was living with him aboard his boat tied up not far from us. Alexandra played classical guitar. I’d sit on deck and listen to her move effortlessly from Bach to Handel to Verdi to earlier Baroque composers. I loved the classical guitar. Under Alexandra’s skilful fingers, I lost myself in the music. My son Stefan had left his guitar behind when he returned to Canada. I worked up the courage to approach her.
“Could you give me lessons?” I asked.
Aside from endless scales, I learned to play a passable Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth. It became the only piece in my repertoire, but I never grew tired of it. Bernard, to his credit, didn’t complain through my endless attempts to perfect it. Over the course of the guitar lessons, I became Alexandra’s confidant and only friend. This shy, romantic, wisp of a young woman with the big glasses and limp hair had no one else to talk to.
“I love Patrick,” she confided. “But he has no money. A yacht is so expensive.”
I tried to be sympathetic, but it was hard. Patrick was the spoiled only child of an aristocratic French family. His mother had bought him the yacht.
Alexandra went on. “He wants me to work in a topless bar.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t want to. But he told me it’s not a big deal. I go topless on the beach. It’s the same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing,” I said. “There are only men in a topless bar.”
“I don’t feel comfortable,” she said. “I hate the idea.”
But she did it anyway. “It pleases Patrick that I’m doing something useful to help him maintain the yacht.”
One day she started to cry during my guitar lesson. “A man asked me to go with him,” she said. “I pushed him away. The owner was angry I’d refused. So was Patrick when I told him.”
“Get off that boat,” I said. “Patrick doesn’t love you. He’s using you. Go home. Go back to your parents.”
I saw her several days later.
“I went with the man,” she said.
She curled up on my settee and lay there for a long time.
“Don’t do this,” I said. “Patrick is no good. He’s a pimp. He loves only his boat and maybe his mother.”
Alexandra took her guitar and left Patrick, but when she returned to France, her parents refused to let her back in the home. They disowned her. She had many difficult years trying to find her place in the world, and never married. We stayed in touch and only recently stopped sending each other Christmas cards. Or rather, she stopped answering mine. Perhaps she’s finally put away her past and moved on.
Our first winter in Mallorca was said to be the coldest winter of the century. We hadn’t prepared for this and didn’t have winter clothes. We also didn’t have money to buy any. Many of our neighbours, including a Swedish couple that I thought would have been immune to harsh winters, docked their yacht and returned home. We had nowhere else to go and spent most of our days huddled around a kerosene lamp in the salon.
I cooked non-stop to warm the air. Moisture from condensation on cold, humid nights was our biggest problem. It crawled down the salon walls and lodged in our bedding. At night, we slept wrapped around each other. It felt good to be so close to Bernard.
“You wet the bed,” Bernard teased one morning when we awoke entangled in dank, musty sheets. He had a wicked sense of humour that still endeared him to me.
“I did not,” I said, laughing.
“Yes, you did. I bet you were too cold to make it to the head.”
Brook and Jenny, a British couple we’d met soon after our arrival in Mallorca, lived in Binissalem, a small town near Palma. One evening Brook picked us up for dinner at their recently renovated farm house. Riding in Brook’s car was the warmest I had been for weeks. I daydreamed all the way to Binissalem about the comfort of living in a home like theirs, and was taken aback to see their king-sized bed squeezed into their tiny kitchen. In that unforgiving winter, there was no place to hide.
Winter wasn’t our only problem. Money was becoming a real issue. Bernard kept talking about taking the trade winds across the Atlantic to North America.
“It’s our easiest sail. The winds are constant and steady and we’ll get there in little more than a week.”
“It’s unrealistic,” I said. “We need new sails. Our sails are too worn to get us across. And anyway, how would we live once we got there?”
Bernard didn’t disagree, but wouldn’t face reality. His drinking increased, affecting his judgement, but I didn’t want to say. For months there had been no unexpected outbursts or undermining comments. I wanted to sustain the harmony as long as I could.
“Cheaper than water,” he kept repeating every time he opened another bottle of wine. It didn’t help that every café meal came with a glass of wine. If you wanted water, you had to ask for it. And sometimes it came with a service charge.
Bernard’s reputation as a whiz with anything mechanical spread quickly throughout the waterfront. Yachts always had problems. He was the “go to” man. It meant we could buy provisions, sit long hours in cafés lingering over coffee or glasses of wine, and always have a stash of wine aboard. Without the usual expenses connected with onshore living, life in Mallorca was cheap. He liked working on other people’s boats, sometimes not even charging them or asking for next to nothing, talking forever to them about the mechanical difficulties associated with boat life, and commiserating about it over countless glasses of wine. I felt like trailer trash afloat.
Our plans to use the Santa Rita in some kind of enterprise had disappeared. Our dream of finding that special place on the planet where we would settle never materialized. Even the plan to sell the Santa Rita in Mallorca was drifting away. Bernard seemed quite happy to live hand to mouth doing odd jobs and repairs but never really turning his skills into a business.
In early spring, a letter came from Middlebury College in Vermont, an invitation to my son Jonah’s graduation which was to take place that June. I was desolate.
“How can I go?” I said knowing there was no money for a plane ticket.” I felt a knot in my stomach. “I promised him I’d go. And I want to be there.”
Bernard drifted away from me, and focused on some piece of metal he’d found that he thought could be useful on the yacht. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t with much interest. “A lot of the luxury yachts need housekeeping. It won’t pay much, but it’ll pay something.”
“I hate cleaning,” I said. “It’s a thankless job that you have to do over and over. I don’t even like doing it for myself, and I certainly don’t want to do it for others.” I was livid that he’d even make the suggestion.
“Where do you expect to get the money
?” he asked.
So, for the next few weeks I found myself cleaning toilets on other people’s boats. With each plunge of the brush into a toilet, I imagined plunging it down Bernard’s throat. I resented his living as though he were one of the privileged or one of the retirees with sufficient income to sustain this lifestyle. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t look for work. And worse, why he did “favours” repairing other people’s yachts instead of making a business out of it for himself. Who did he think he was? And worse, who did he think I was? I couldn’t help thinking about Alexandra and Patrick. If I were younger, would he have suggested I go work in a topless bar?
Then I remembered that I could read palms. I’d done it in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Cyprus. Why not Mallorca? I had an article from a Taipei newspaper where I’d been interviewed about my skill. It was in Mandarin, but it used my name and I could show it to potential clients. I also had a letter from the harbour master in Colombo in Sri Lanka, who was impressed with the reading I had given him. The East believed in palmistry, and I thought their recommendation would go far with a Western clientele.
I was right. I charged thirty US dollars, which included two palm prints and a typed analysis. I read the palms of most of the people along the waterfront and, with the help of Brook and Jenny, who had a lot of ex-pat friends on the island, I had as much work as I could handle. In two months I had earned enough for a plane ticket and more. I took the money I made cleaning toilets and bought myself a white bikini. I needed a reward to clear my head of the anger I had felt doing it.
“You look awful in that,” Bernard said the first time I wore it. I never put it on again. When we sold the yacht, I gave the bathing suit to the girlfriend of the new owner as part of the package.
I had lost all illusions about the yachting life. My disillusionment was reinforced when Jenny told me about a rummage sale one of the churches was having a week or so before I was to leave. “I’ve a good eye,” she said. “We’ll get you something real classy to wear for Jonah’s graduation.”
As soon as we entered the church basement, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. I noticed the same woman behind me wherever I went. “Why is that old lady following us around?” I asked Jenny.
“Don’t you know? Yachties steal all the time. They can spot you as soon as you walk in.”
I wanted to crawl into a hole.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll buy something to wear in Vermont.”
Chapter 30
SETTING A NEW COURSE
Spring 1985 — Summer 1986: Palma de Mallorca
There is nothing permanent except change.
— HERACLITUS
I left Bernard in charge of the Santa Rita, and flew to Montreal to see Stefan before taking the train down to Middlebury College for Jonah’s graduation. When I greeted him at the airport, I had no sense that three years had passed since I last saw him. It could have been the day before. But since his return to Montreal, he had found part-time work and an apartment while earning the credits necessary to be accepted as a full-time student majoring in physics at Concordia University. And he had established a relationship with a lovely girl who was to become his wife. During those years his life had moved ahead. Mine, I felt, was at a stand-still.
The girlfriend was a surprise, but a pleasant one. I was happy he’d found someone with whom to share his life. “I’d like to get the two of you a gift,” I announced shortly before leaving for Jonah’s graduation. I wanted to give them something as a memory of the visit since I had no idea when I’d see them again.
“How about a set of dishes?” Stefan said.
“Dishes?”
“Yeah, why not? We could use them.”
I’d forgotten how practical Stefan was. I hoped his girlfriend shared this trait. “Sure, why not?” I answered.
Today when I visit them, more than thirty years later, and reach for one of the odd pieces remaining from the set, it takes me back to their old apartment in Montreal.
On the train down to Middlebury, I thought about my boys. Before leaving Mallorca, I received a letter from Jonah saying he’d been awarded a two-year scholarship to do a Master’s of Philosophy at Oxford University. It reassured me that both my sons were making good decisions about their futures. Knowing how unconventional their childhood had been, I felt relieved, and because well-meaning people had told me over the years that I was making a mistake in how I was raising them, I also felt vindicated.
When Stefan and Jonah were young, it sometimes felt as though they’d be with me forever and I wished they’d grow up faster. Then one day they were gone, and I wished I could bring back those years. I was glad they had the confidence to venture out, but it was also painful. I hadn’t realised how much I missed them until an acquaintance in Mallorca asked how they were doing, and I suddenly burst into tears. I was finally able to let in that feeling of loss, and in time, I let it go. My boys had moved on with their lives. It was time for me to move on with mine.
At the graduation, one of Jonah’s professors made a point of letting me know how much he enjoyed having him as a student. “I’ve rarely had a student so focused on his work, yet so socially amenable and integrated into college life,” he said. It was another confirmation that my son’s exposure to different cultures and people broadened him and opened him up to new experiences, and that the independence that came with the sea life gave him a remarkable discipline for his age.
I mingled with other parents and found the time spent with them stimulating. They were engaged in the world — earning their way, making a difference in their communities, participating in social affairs. There was a dynamic between their personal lives and the greater world at large. I valued my experiences at sea, and what I’d learned from other cultures and about myself. Now I wanted to use what I had learned in a challenging and meaningful way.
I was determined that Bernard and I put the Santa Rita on the market. Just “hanging out” during my most productive years seemed like a waste of a life. Before we had embarked on this adventure, I had envisioned the transition from land-living to water as a change in lifestyle, not as an escape from life. We would test our strengths, explore different worlds, and grow from the enrichment of our expanding awareness. I saw our journey as a book with many chapters waiting to be written in life experiences. I had assumed Bernard saw it the same way. What I discovered was that, for Bernard, there were no chapters to be written. Acquiring the Santa Rita was the last chapter of his book, not the first.
“Just having a yacht,” I kept insisting on my return to Mallorca, “isn’t an end in itself. We wake up the next day and there’s still a whole life to live.” But I was talking to myself.
While we were sailing I could feed my sense of adventure, test my resourcefulness, and feel an integrated wholeness in my body that empowered me. But now that we were anchored in Mallorca and no longer moving, I felt the full weight of living a parasitic life. I told Bernard I couldn’t go on drifting from day to day. “I want a stable home on land,” I said, “and I want to do something productive with my life.”
“You never loved the boat,” he said.
“It has nothing to do with loving the boat. I don’t love our life. I want us to have a shared life. We don’t. Your whole world is wrapped up in this yacht.”
He didn’t answer, but nodded as though he understood what I was saying.
“Look,” I said, “if you want to continue living this way, you can. Sell the yacht. Get a smaller one — more to your liking. You’re always saying there are things you would do differently if you built again. Or you can crew on other people’s yachts, without the responsibility of ownership. You have great skills, and you can easily earn your way doing boat maintenance. I can get a small place somewhere and restart my life.”
Bernard didn’t object to what I was saying, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to actively pursue the sale of the yacht. “We can’t get a good price here,” he said. “It would be bet
ter to sell in the States.”
“It’ll take us a long time to make the money for new sails,” I said, “and we can’t sail across the Atlantic without them.” I had reminded him of this several times before, and each time he just nodded and said nothing. “Maybe we should charter,” I blurted out in frustration, knowing he wouldn’t, but still hoping. After our one try in Singapore, he vowed never to do it again and so far stuck to that mind set.
“Sure,” he mumbled in a half-hearted attempt to appease me, and put an end to the conversation.
A few days later a voice called us from the shore. “Santa Rita, Santa Rita. Anybody home?”
I came through the hatch and found myself face to face with a slim, stylishly dressed but severely bruised woman in her mid-sixties. Her face, arms and legs looked as though someone had repeatedly punched her. I was sure it was a case of domestic violence, and I wondered what yacht she’d just run away from.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Do you mind if I come aboard?”
I nodded, and she deftly manoeuvred along the four-foot long, two-by-four inch beam that was our walkway from the cement pier to the bow of the yacht, and hopped over the stanchion lines onto the deck. I led her below deck prepared to hear a tale of woe.
“Hi, I’m Kit,” she told Bernard and me. “I heard about you from some friends of yours when I was looking for a yacht to charter. I was on another yacht, but a mistral hit us. The boat and captain were badly damaged. They’re both being tended to, but I’d like to go on with my trip and was told that you people might be willing to take me.”
So this wasn’t domestic abuse. Those bruises came from her being tossed about when that yacht she hired got caught in the squall. I knew how nasty a mistral was, and most sailboats were reluctant go out when one was brewing. I admired her spunk, hoped I had it at her age, and immediately liked her.