The Ordinary Seaman (17 page)

“Bueno, so that was what Florencia foretold for Esme. And when Esme named her first two sons Moisés and José, Florencia thought these were providential signs, divining José the carpenter, not the coat of many colors. So when the girl came, muchacho, shouldn’t she have been named María, or at least for a saint? Instead Esme named her Chiniche. Chiniche? I think this is an African name …” He’ll probably never know now why his Israeli daughter suddenly chose an African name for her daughter.

Esteban lying still on his stomach, facing away—has he been listening? Bernardo lifts a hand to his head, softly strokes the still sensitive, grape-skinned bump with a finger. Was that clear? Has he made himself understood?

“So it didn’t happen, you mean,” says Esteban finally, sleepily.

“It didn’t happen… Who knows? I haven’t heard from Esmeralda in thirteen years. But I hope it didn’t. Esme decided to convert to her husband’s religion, and ve? She was happy and fertile, three children in less than five years. Maybe she’s had even more? She can name them for the Moorish kings for all I care. She’s forgotten us, but why shouldn’t she have? Her mother pestering her like one of those screaming preachers, like the one she’s married to now. Her father a hat on a chair, and of even less use to her. But when lucky people take chances, luck rewards them, that’s what I think. You made it through that war. I don’t think luck is through with you yet, chavalo. Maybe it’s just a matter of going down that rope again, and not coming back up.”

He looks over at Esteban, not even stirring, sleep as silent as smoke on a ship made of smoke; the morning light wet smoke colored and just as soft, in the cracked porthole; the corridor in the doorway still dark. A querulous and hungry squawking nearby, not gulls, a raven?

What should he tell him now? Sadness like a chimney, smoky words and memories pouring from it … Clarita curled up, withered and stiff as a dead spider on her hospital bed from tetanus … Esteban has never even been in love, at least has never mentioned having ever felt either the euphoria or the infernal consequences of love; all he thinks about is that fucking war, which has robbed him of everything a chavalo his age should be so vulnerable to … Florencia … When he first met her. As fresh and shyly full of life as any niñita but already a sturdy woman’s body. She’d been to school, was working in a bakery in downtown Managua. A bakery that, like the rest of downtown, isn’t there anymore, destroyed in the earthquake of ’72. “Florencia was standing in a bakery window the first time I saw her, chavalo, a bakery that isn’t there anymore…” She stood in the bakery window, in her clean, white uniform, setting little white plastic swans into the blue frosting waves
rimming the tiers of a very grand wedding cake. There, on the other side of the window, stood her future hat on a chair, just home from his first long and lucky voyage at sea, having embarked from Panama City as a lowly crew’s mess dishwasher and janitor nearly two years before! And lucky to have found even that job. Begging marineros for a hint of work from bar to bar, his paltry saved-up-to-go-to-sea money nearly gone, but he had a little girlfriend, a cimarrona named Miriam Monróy, who snuck him food, worked in a little cantina—seamen’s brothel in the Casco Viejo owned by a raucous, skinny, long-limbed woman, part Syrian, part Chinese, who’d seemed ancient to him then but undoubtedly would seem young now, she was the lover of a Greek capitán named Gorgo, whose ship had been in port for repairs three months already—what was her name?—her skeptical and shiny Oriental eyes coming back to him now, the small, lipstick-smudged mouth, the loose skin drooping under her chin, her nervous, cigarette-winged, dragonfly fingers … Gorgo had given her a port pass so that she could get past the yanquis and come to his ship whenever she wanted, and she lent it to him on the condition that while looking for work he’d also distribute mimeographed flyers advertising her “Seaman Bar,” boarding as many ships as he could, leaving flyers in little stacks by the gangways. Which is what he did; how he was hired, not by Gorgo but by another Greek whose ship was in port, Aristotle Voulgaris, master of the
Opal,
one of a small fleet of cargo vessels owned by one Señor Fedderhoff, a gringo living in Panama City. A good, busy, and profitable ship. Five months into the voyage, they departed Veracruz with a cargo of garbanzos bound for Barcelona, sailing into a mid-Atlantic Christmas. An obese and nasty-tempered Panamanian named Zacarías Rojas was the officers’ saloon waiter. And would you believe it, chavalo?—the day before Christmas Eve, Zacarías Rojas was in the meat locker with the mayordomo, both of them struggling with all their might to pry a frozen Christmas turkey loose from the ice-coated rack the turkey was ice-welded to, when Rojas suddenly fell over dead from a heart attack. He had family in Panama, a wife, children. Señor Fedderhoff radioed the ship that they should bring Rojas home. In other words, leave him there,
right where he’d fallen, sparing the crew the grotesque effort of having to drag his manateelike bulk up on deck for a burial at sea. For the rest of that voyage, which eventually took them through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea to India and the Orient, Rojas lay unmourned in the meat locker, frozen under a frozen sheet, hard as concrete, his skin turned an iridescent, turbid blue. His timid and repentant ghost never bothering anybody. For seven whole months, until they docked in Panama again. With crowbars and boiling water Rojas was pried loose from the floor, delivered to his family. But guess who’d been promoted to the officers’ saloon the day after Zacarías Rojas ceased to exist? Christmas Eve. No older then than you are now, chico! (While a green ordinary seaman who’d discovered he hated deck work began a new career in the crew’s mess.) More coffee, mi Capitán? Sugar on your toast, mi Primero? Sí, jefe, your liver without onions. He never had to ask twice, always remembered what they wanted and how they liked it, rode their whims and caprices and sullen midvoyage torments smoothly, elegantly, never scowling with aggravation like Rojas, who had often refused the low-ranking officers dessert if they asked for it even two minutes after the meal hour had passed! In roughest seas, chavalito, he was a sweet-tempered circus plate juggler. Instinctively knew how to make a Greek boor feel like an English admiral, well before he had the unforgettable experience, in 1969, of serving Capitán John Paul Osbourne as personal waiter and valet. Bernie, Capitán Osbourne used to call him, and sometimes
Old Bean
. How couldn’t he have felt lucky? In all the merchant ships sailing all the seas, was there another officers’ saloon waiter so young, so well liked and appreciated? And not badly paid, no. Bueno, a burning Managua sidewalk, Panama hat tilted back over forehead, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth, basking in the vision of this young morenita’s poise and beauty, fluid limbs and shapeliness and a clean, white uniform, fingers dipping into a small cardboard box perched on her ample hip, pulling out swans. Ask any seaman, Santos, Brazil’s bule bars have no rivals, but if he’d confused a taste for African skin with their squalid enchantments, this vision of a happy-eyed Florencia and cake, as seductively deranging as any Santos siren, disinfected his lust and left his desire intact, left him standing there strangling
on a need to possess not for one night but for a lifetime! Impulsive, sí pues. But often seamen who want to get married don’t get much time on land to make up their minds! Which is why, claro, they make mistakes, why it takes them so many years to realize these mistakes, realize that they themselves are the mistake, carajo. She looked over her shoulder, saw him watching, left him stuporously rooted with her direct, utterly blank, green-gray stare, went back to swanning her cake, looked over at him again, and then suddenly, a shy and flustered smile like a sunny, snowy island rising on the horizon … He went right into that bakery, said he wanted to buy that cake. She giggled, said, Aren’t you going to let me finish? Who’s in such a rush to get married? And he said, Me. With you, queen of my life. The boldest moment of my life, chavalo. An electrical charge still jumps his heart, his belly, when he remembers it. She looked at him incredulously, her eyes glinting with what he thought was a proud girl’s haughty affront, and then her tongue went
tchl
against her teeth, and she said, Are you a marinero? Yes, he said, but not that kind of marinero, I’m no womanizer or liar. And she laughed, said she didn’t mean it that way. You see, Florencia had recently been to see some old woman, an hechizera who could read the future in cigarettes. You brought this witch a cigarette, she lit it, puffed on it a bit, twirled it slowly between thumb and finger in front of her eyes while it burned down, and in the pattern of burning paper and ash, she could read the future. The love of her life was going to be a marinero, this brujita had told Florencia. Young and handsome, who would marry her and then leave her alone at home with children for years, but that she shouldn’t worry because when that marinero finally came home for good he was going to be as rich as Petroceli… “Florencia believed that, cipote, and so did I. How couldn’t I have, I mean to say, back then? Si pues, back then! The way—”

“You both got what you deserved, viejito.” Esteban’s emphatic, pillow-muffled voice breaking in and surprising him, and he says, “Qué?” and bird-cocks his head, and the boy says it again, louder, his body not even stirring. “She got what she deserved. Vos, you both did. Believing a thing like that, the future in a cigarette, hombre, no jodas! And you’re always calling
us
gullible.”

* * *

Throughout his life, of course, Bernardo has heard countless stories about people seeing ghosts, sensing and hearing phantom presences, though it has been exactly half a century plus one year since he last suffered such an experience, the year before he left for the sea, when his own mother’s ghost appeared to him, an incident which then terrified and grieved him since he’d understood that his mother’s showing herself to him like that meant she was unhappy, her spirit in distress. But he hasn’t thought about his mother’s ghost in years, nor has he ever received such a visitation even from poor Clarita, even though he used to pray for one, willing silently, into the night for her to come and reassure him of her forgiveness and love. He believes he’s long lost whatever it is that makes a person seem receptive enough to such apparitions that they appear, and assumes it must have something to do with age—why should a spirit hurry to see him when he’ll be among them soon enough?—or with the tarnishing of his own soul by misdeeds and guilt.

Yet at the very moment when Esteban was sneaking off the ship for the first time last night, he was dreaming of being on a ghost ship. The dream’s lonely suggestiveness has lingered into the day, as such dreams tend to. This queasy mood, a languid, hollowed out sensation at odds with the excitement he feels over his new secret obligation—Esteban must leave!—an immanence out there, like the sense of a still-faraway change in the weather coming, his tattered nerves straining to pick it up in the chilly October air. Thus a certain receptivity to ghosts.

He’s doing some laundry down on the pier, his pant legs rolled up, his hands numbing in the cold water from the spigot as he rubs uselessly at stained rags with an evaporating sliver of soap, and glancing up he sees them coming around the corner of the grain elevator, arm and arm, an old couple helping each other along, two ancianos: the old man in a green gabardine overcoat, black beret, and dark glasses, the old woman in a pink woolen coat and a flowered scarf knotted around her head. They’re the very first people he’s seen close up, besides officers, crew, and los blacks on the pier, since that night in los proyectos—and they’ve come on foot? His first shocked impression is that they
are
ghosts, that
somehow he’s fallen back into last night’s dream and this is some new twist, an impression abetted by the anciana’s powdery-papery pallor, her wrinkles shining like sprinkled sugar in the sun, her smeary raspberry red lipstick, and the wafting scent of her perfume, heavy, florid, and sweet enough to drown any trailing odor of the grave.

The old woman speaks first, and Bernardo, gaping up at them like a frog from his midpuddle crouch, stammeringly answers in Spanish that he doesn’t speak English. And the anciana’s thin, painted eyebrows rise, and she says that it is certainly a pleasant surprise to run into a Spanish speaker out here, yes, what a pleasure it is, mi buen hombre, to meet you; she uses the formal usted.

“Gracias, señora,” says Bernardo, turning off the tap and rising to his feet. “Mucho gusto, a sus órdenes. En que te puedo servir? Dígame.” And he rolls down his pants and dries his hands against the legs, and has the uncertain impression that the two, even the old man behind his dark glasses, have been frowning at his accent.

For a moment more the couple stand looking expressionlessly around them at the rusted ship, out at the dilapidated remains of long ago thriving piers and terminals; at the obscenities and skull and crossed bones spray-painted on the grain elevator, the rusted remnants of scaffolding and chute dangling beneath its high window like broken sticks from an old eagle’s nest.

“Somos de Argentina,” the anciana says, adding that they’ve lived in Brooklyn for many years now; she doesn’t ask where Bernardo is from. They are truly old, he thinks, at least ten years older than I, and the anciana, maybe more!

“Mi buen hombre. Can you tell me? Is this the so-called Grain Pier?” asks the old man, his voice a bit hoarse though with a polished, politely demanding timbre and enunciation; and he smiles, pulling his lips back, showing pink gums and all his yellowed but orderly teeth.

Bernardo answers that he guesses, with all due respect, that it’s been a long time since anyone has called it by that or any name, as you can see, señores, there’s not a lot going on, just this old ship, which we’re trying to repair, though, if you want my opinion, when that statue over
there walks, that’s when this ship will sail, sí, señores, not until then! No! Not until that statue walks! And he stands emphatically nodding at them, feeling embarrassed by himself over this sudden outburst…