Atlantic High (30 page)

Suddenly I realized what uniquely characterized this day. We had had no music. Early on, the ship’s cassette player broke down, but my battery-drive Superscope, with its two extension speakers, is every bit as good, and we have had it on several hours a day. I had contrived to confer on Tony the high rank of Curator of the Cassette Collection (mine) which has seventy or eighty hours of music, half of it baroque, a quarter this and that, mostly piano; and then some non-rock jazz, splendid swing music. When the young generation decides it will perish from this earth if it does not soon hear again the Mint Funks, or whatever it is they listen to nowadays, there are plenty of those in the ship’s collection, to say nothing of the private collection of David. Last night, hoping to bring a little cheer to poor, prostrate Tom, I told him that during our watch, after I did the navigation, we would hear a private concert given in my house by Fernando Valenti. Tom and Fernando were classmates at Yale. I did not know Fernando then. But seven or eight years ago Fernando wrote to me, having seen Rosalyn Tureck on one of my television programs. We became friends, I reintroduced him to Tom, Tom in due course persuaded his university at San José to come up with the budget for a resident harpsichordist; and now Fernando lives nearby.

Tom and I regularly refer to him as the “greatest horticulturist in the world.” It was six or seven years ago that Fernando flew back from a concert tour in Europe, called and asked himself out to the country. We welcomed him but told him we would all be going out that evening for dinner with Mike and Jan Cowles, along with another houseguest, Carl. I called Jan and told her we had an unexpected visitor, Fernando Valenti, “whom
Time
has called the greatest harpsichordist in the world,” and might I bring him along? Of course; but when dinnertime came Fernando said he was simply too exhausted to go anywhere, so we set out with Carl, and a half hour later, at Mount Kisco, found ourselves in the company of twenty interesting people. Carl, however, was continually mystified because the guests, particularly the women, kept addressing to him such questions as: “Can I mix my hydrangea with my poppy?” to which Carl would reply that nothing would please him more than to give good counsel in the matter, but in fact he had no idea what if anything would happen if you mixed a hydrangea with a poppy, and after a half-dozen such questions, fired at random, I did a little discreet sleuthing to discover that dear Jan had announced to her guests that I would be bringing along the world’s most famous “horticulturist.”

In any event, Tom looked forward greatly to hearing the concert I had recorded, and he stretched out on the cockpit while I stuck my little cassette player in one of those plastic zipper bags, which nicely protected it, all along the way, from salt spray. Fernando had played in the little music room I have in the country, whose humidity is controlled, which saves me from having to tune the harpsichord twice a week. He played the C Minor Partita and the G Major Partita, and then a string of Scarlatti sonatas of such compounding beauty they are, at his hands, almost unbearable to listen to, like Beethoven’s last quartets. Tom’s own harpsichord is a duplicate of my own, so that the entire experience was intimate in every way. Music showed no powers to soothe the savage sea, but Tom felt distinctly better, for an hour or two, and was quite voluble on the strengths of Fernando as a harpsichord player. I told him that when he was well again, I would play him the cassette I made of a magnificent piano concert by Rosalyn Tureck, whom I love, and who the year before had volunteered as a birthday present to give at my house the same concert she would be giving the following Tuesday at Carnegie Hall. I was quite dazzled by it all, and introduced her to the twenty or thirty friends I brought in by recalling one of those two-liners that were making the rounds when I was at college. He: “Do you want to go into my car and hear Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians?” She: “I didn’t know you had a radio in your car.” He: “I don’t. I have Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians.” That was how I felt that night.

Bad omen, no music. What do people do when there is no music? I suspect they don’t notice. Four years ago I had I think the most exasperating musical experience of my life. I embarked on the QE2 as a lecturer, New York-Fort Lauderdale-Curaçao-Caracas-Salvador-Rio: four lectures in return for room and board, which suited me just fine because I had a novel to begin. I kept the good music channel on and the first morning heard César Franck’s D Minor symphony, which is okay to listen to, once a year. That afternoon I heard Franck’s D Minor symphony; also that evening, four times the next day, three times the following day, till I thought I would go crazy. I remember expressing my frustration by killing off one or two extra-nice people in the opening chapters of my spy book. But what was going on? Finally, in frustration, I called the radio room and said: “I have heard Franck’s D Minor symphony perhaps one hundred times in my lifetime, eighty-five of those on this trip. Are you short of inventory?”

“You don’t like it?”—the symphony was stopped in mid-movement, and some Mozart slid in.

“Is that better, sir?” I expressed great gratitude; but two days later, would you believe it, they were back to César Franck. I would keep my set on, and when the opening chords were struck, would rise, turn off the set, and forty minutes later turn it back on. I got my exercise that way, relieving me of the responsibility to do my daily calisthenics. I thought surely we would pick up from the crowd (1,500 passengers) a mutinous hum; but so help me, I found no one with whom to share my misery.

Well, tomorrow would be another day, as the saying goes. Certainly there were no indications of any change in weather. The barometer hadn’t budged in days—hadn’t tipped us off, as a matter of fact; to what we were in. Presumably we were still in the same Azores High, but in a part of it that was windy. I missed, also, our daily swims, though the rain and the waves kept us well laundered, besides which there is a splendid shower by the master stateroom. The sights have been irregular, and this afternoon we spotted a Portuguese warship and spoke it
(v.t.)
. The reply: “We ahrr Portugal. You ahrr what?” I suppose if we had said we were Mozambique they’d have declined cooperation, but we gave our flag, and asked if they had a position, and after a few minutes’ silence they gave us one. Either we were six miles south of where I had us, or they were six miles north of where they placed themselves. I had had a noon sight, and was not lightly going to give ground on the subject, though those northerly winds were probably giving us considerable set and leeway, and I cranked our course north by three degrees. I’m not worried about where we are. As a matter of fact, I thought, turning off the reading light, I wasn’t really worried about anything. The
Sealestial
was built without any notion of being overwhelmed by such seas as come at you with winds of forty miles per hour, and was proving it very nicely.

The next day was just as bad, but it was on the evening of it that Allen made his remarkable prediction. It is hard to describe the joy that comes to a sailor when after a particularly long blast, the weather clears. I swear, it’s like V-J Day. You just want to go out and be happy. There were still swells at 6
P.M
., but the wind was down to seven knots. For the first time since leaving the Azores, we ate in the cockpit. The moon was perfect, the stars were out. The music was on. Everyone had a snort, and wine besides. Tom was fully recovered, and once again was finding everything funny, including imitations of him during the preceding three days (Reggie’s was superior. To do it right, you must lie flat on your back, and look straight up, and put your hand over your eyes. The tone of voice must be funereal. “I’ll have one saltine. No! Make that
half
a saltine. Thank you”). And the whole of the next day was more of the same, with just enough wind to sail by.

I began to make calculations. As I’ve suggested, I don’t like to end a big trip at anticlimactic hours. At the rate we were going, we’d pull into Marbella at about two in the afternoon, and that is no damn good for celebrating. Rather like being married at six in the morning. So, said I studying the charts, I have a proposal. Let’s go into Gibraltar, get off the boat, have lunch there, look around for an hour or two, then reboard and sail up the thirty miles to Marbella. My proposal was greeted with cheers from all sides, and I knew how Magellan must have felt when he said, “What do you say we pop around the world?” That night was especially animated, we played poker followed by a little wild Red Dog, and when the chips were counted, the whole exercise resulted in an entirely tolerable redistribution of wealth, a modest amount of it in my direction.

You must not ever count on uneventful endings to ocean passages. For every day I have finished a race or cruise in calm circumstances, I can think of two that have been turbulent.

The next morning the breeze was on the nose, and before I came on deck, Tony had hardened up the sails; and now, the wind having veered directly east, we had given way, heading about
110
degrees. We had run into what they call in those parts a “levanter,” namely a tough wind that comes out of the Mediterranean from the east, and has a swooshing funnel effect in the Strait of Gibraltar, which after all is only nine miles wide at its closest point.

I took the helm, and hung on to it for six hours, enjoying it all, though it was fierce and salty. By now we could see the southern coast of Spain—and the northwestern tip of Africa. The navigation from this point would be visual. Consulting the Coast Pilot, I learned that after high water in Gibraltar, the current flows east to west beginning four hours after high tide in Gibraltar, until the next high tide. So, all we needed to do was find out what time was high tide in Gibraltar.

There ensued a search through every paper and document on board the
Sealestial
. We came up with stuff that would have permitted us to navigate up the Amazon, around Patagonia, into uncharted ports in Micronesia; but no tide tables for the Mediterranean.

So I asked Allen to try Radio Gibraltar, which he did.
This is Whiskey Oscar George 9842 Whiskey Oscar George 9842 calling Radio Gibraltar, calling Radio Gibraltar
. Nothing. By now we were coasting along the shore of Africa, with a good view of the wind-harried dunes, including a relatively new-looking tanker that had missed the turn by a mere quarter mile and was now abandoned, on its side on the rocks. There is a spectacular lighthouse there, at a point east of which the Barbary pirates took sanctuary for so many years. Now we were abeam of Tangier, and I suggested we try Tangier Radio, with which, however, we had no better results than with Gibraltar. Okay, I said, let’s try the handheld radio with which we had successfully communicated with several vessels during our passage. There were great tankers and freighters of every nationality and size steaming east and west across the Strait. All we desired was the simplest datum—namely, What time was high water in Gibraltar?

We tried it in English, in French, and in Spanish: just the bare question. There was a sullen muteness in all that traffic: hard, really, to understand, because ships at sea tend to be civil to one another. I tacked about again, to starboard, pointing now to the Spanish coast about ten miles west of Gibraltar, and thought: what the hell, we’ll stay on this course. If the tide is favorable, it will waft us into Gibraltar. If it isn’t it will blow us west with the wind, and worse fates are imaginable than spending a night in a southern Spanish bay,
reculer pour mieux sauter
and all that sort of thing.

The triple-reefed main was augmented by a storm jib, because we had blown out the staysail and topsail, so we added engine power and moved tight into the wind at a full nine knots.

Within one hour, we knew we had gambled—and won.

Two hours later, without tacking again, we were suddenly surrounded by hills—we were in the Bay of Gibraltar, and the time was four in the afternoon. Too late for our lunch plans, but not too late, I thought, for a little
tour d’horizon
, and so, with the binoculars, I got the lay of the land and brought the
Sealestial
through a crack in the breakwater, only to run into a frenzied harbor pilot on an armed launch, directing us away from the southern end we thought to tour. “Probably Limey off-limits naval forces,” Allen commented. I was glad to experience the sinews of Western military strength: but thirty seconds later we heard the crack of a gun. It was not a fusillade, let alone the beginning of the third world war. It was a blank cartridge signaling the start of a children’s dinghy race. We had been escorted out of an area in the bay reserved for ten-year-old kids on the days they race. Oh well.

So we took in other parts of Gibraltar, passing the fancy hotels serenely, looking up at the mountain where all the monkeys are cosseted, passing a dozen freighters tied up, loading and unloading. The girls were handing around some wine, and I took some and said, “Well, gentlemen, shall we proceed to Spain?” The consensus was affirmative, and so we moseyed out of Gibraltar and, to our surprise, found that the levanter had entirely dissipated, leaving us waters so placid, one would not have thought they had experienced wind in a week. We rounded, and I set the pilot on automatic, with a heading for Puerto Banús, whose light we would in any event pick up within a couple of hours. I don’t remember ever seeing such pinks and blues as we saw that night, quietly proceeding at a mere thirteen hundred rpm so that there would be no noise to contend with. Every few moments, as the sun went down and the moon blared up, the color combinations changed, and we saw deep mauves, every color every painter ever used, when painting in a tranquil frame of mind; such a frame of mind as our own. Dinner was served slowly and consumed slowly, and there was barely time for coffee, brandy, and cigars before we saw the light and closed down on our destination.

I had seen it before, and remembered sending Danny in a dinghy to delineate absolutely the angular little channel by which you enter the huge facility at Marbella. I remembered it, and we crawled in, and instantly spotted two flashlights signaling us in a direction where, through the glasses, I could make out an unoccupied section of a dock, about the length of the
Sealestial
, and so I gave my last command: “Fenders, port side.” I approached, did a figure eight to test the current, and we slid in. Betsy and a friend had just then (at midnight) arrived, expecting an all-night vigil. Betsy and Christopher had eloped only last November.