The Ordinary Seaman (2 page)

“Claro que no, a cipote like you—”

“Esteban,” he corrected him.

“Sí pues. I’m the waiter,” this effusive viejo went on, nodding. “Apparently there isn’t going to be an officers’ waiter—pues, my usual position—but just one waiter for the whole ship. Vaya, in times like
these, a job like this, it’s like a kiss from God, no? And for a chavalito like you, what good luck!” The viejo lowered his voice and tilted his face closer so that Esteban could smell toothpaste mixed with coffee and something sour when he spoke: “Leave this shitty country behind. Vos, it wouldn’t surprise me if you found yourself in the arms of a blue-eyed, blonde gringita tonight, your very first night. Chavalo, you’ll see what it’s like to be a handsome young marinero set loose in the world!”

“What if we both have the wrong day?” asked Esteban.

“It can’t be,” he said. “I know Doña Adela said Sunday. And when I went to mass yesterday, it was definitely Saturday. The archbishop has personally blessed our voyage, patroncito.”

Esteban is nineteen, a war veteran, of course he doesn’t consider himself a boy, but Bernardo will never call him anything but chavalo, muchacho, chigüín, chico, patroncito, and, most annoyingly, cipote.

Doña Adela Suárez, a secretary with the shipping agency Teccsa Corporación in Managua, had interviewed and hired the five Nicaraguans, including Esteban and Bernardo, who were to leave from Sandino Airport that morning, headed to New York City to meet the
Urus:
the old ship’s waiter, a middle-aged galley cook, and three ordinary seamen, the latter without any previous shipboard experience whatsoever. When Doña Adela finally arrived at the airport, she was carrying their passports and U.S. Embassy—issued seamen’s transit visas. It was the twentieth of June, and the
Urus
was to sail from New York four days later carrying, according to Doña Adela, a cargo of fertilizer to Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. She wore big, clear-plastic-framed, octagonal, pink-tinted glasses, aquamarine slacks, and a white blouse with the English words
over the
followed by a colorful little rainbow printed all over it. To Bernardo the pattern on her blouse couldn’t have seemed more apt:

“Mi Reina de la Suerte,” he enthused, thanking Doña Adela yet again for his ship’s waiter’s job and giving her a clumsy one-armed embrace at the tiny airport bar, where the puffy-faced, slit-eyed cook had rum with his coke and the others just coke and Adela paid. “The
Queen of Luck” was the sister-in-law of Constantino Malevante, a Greek ship captain who’d worked for many years on the Mameli line when the dictator Somoza owned ships, and who now lived in Miami making his living outfitting flag of convenience ships with Central American crews. Twenty-three years before, Bernardo had worked as waiter in Capitán Malevante’s officers’ saloon.

“And what is my new capitán’s name, Doña Adela?” asked Bernardo at the bar.

Doña Adela frowned behind her cake-plate glasses for a moment; then said she couldn’t remember, though she was sure Capitán Malevante must have sent it to her.

“Greek, I suppose,” said Bernardo, disguising his dislike of Greek capitanes, including Constantino Malevante, which over his last eighteen years of landlocked nostalgia he’d been exaggerating as much as he had the virtues of English shipmasters.

Esteban was the tallest of the five. His brown skin had a smooth, saddle-soaped luster, and his build was so slender and bony that his jeans and white, short-sleeved shirt seemed tenuously hung from his hip and collar bones. He wore the same pair of black combat boots that had accompanied him through two years of war.

One of the other two ordinary seamen was a coppery skinned teenager named Nemesio, who looked as if some unattached mass of super-concentrated gravity must follow him around everywhere like chewing gum stuck to the soles of his shoes: mournfully drooping eyes, forehead slanting into a massive nose descending at almost the same angle, hulking but sagging shoulders, chubby, squashed legs, his stone-washed jeans zigzagging down to his shoes, and a portly panza hanging over his belt—later, onboard the
Urus,
Nemesio’s nickname would be Panzón, though not just for that reason. Esteban quickly established that Nemesio had been in the army too, serving as an aircraft spotter right there in Managua, standing on a bald hill all day with two other soldiers taking ninety-minute shifts watching the horizon through binoculars, boring as hell; so far aircraft had only attacked Managua once during the whole war anyway. Which is why, Esteban suddenly thought, Nemesio’s eyes are so droopy: staring through binoculars at the white hot sky day after day, they’d melted.

The other ordinary seaman, Chávez Roque, nearly as tall as Esteban and even darker skinned, looked older than his twenty years, his cleft chin swarthy, chest hair brimming up through the collar of his blue polo shirt. He wore black jeans, old cowboy boots. Chávez Roque said he hadn’t been in the army, not exactly. He’d worked on a government road-building crew along the Costa Rican border, in the jungles of the Rio San Juan, but he’d been given militia training and an AK to carry, but he’d only fired it in “combat” once, when a tapir bursting from riverbank foliage startled him … missed it, pues.

“I was in a BLI,” said Esteban, lighting a cigarette. He was sure he saw respect still their expressions like the fleeting shadow from an airborne hawk. He didn’t have to say anything more. He’d been in one of the irregular warfare battalions.

“Maybe the war’s over now,” said the former aircraft spotter.

“Maybe,” said Esteban neutrally. Chávez Roque, turning his head to watch an hembra in tight jeans and stiletto heels walking past, said, “Saber, vos.” Onboard the
Urus
his nickname would be Roque Balboa.

When they’d boarded the plane, Esteban was disappointed to find himself seated next to the happy viejo. After the takeoff he craned forward for a glimpse past Bernardo at the airport military installations below, thinking of helicopters he’d ridden at the front. He saw five green military ambulances parked in a row, rear doors open, canvas stretchers on the tarmac, figures in fatigues and medical whites standing around waiting … So helicopters and planes were still flying mangled and bullet-punctured bodies in heated, vibrating pools of blood over jungles, mountains, and plains. Despite the cease-fire and all the talk of peace. The ambulances shrank to a row of capsules and vanished from sight, the corrugated metal roofs of hangars turned into huts, palms became weeds, the green and brown landscape plummeting, plummeting downwards like a whole country flung off a high cliff. Bernardo suddenly turned to him with an ecstatic grin and said, “Once again, chavalo, the old wolf to the sea!”

Then he sat back, remonstratively patted the armrests as if making sure they were really bolted in, and stared straight ahead, smiling beatifically into the air over the mounded tops of passengers’ heads, all
this, Esteban supposed, in some further display of gratitude to his Queen of Luck. A profusely perspiring middle-aged steward, bulging cheeks, goatee, was wheeling the jingling liquor cart down the aisle. The scarletlipped stewardess, her hair a maelstrom of oiled, ebony ringlets, was still giving her safety lesson, her hands wagging the pinkish tubes—the voice on the intercom said to blow into these—protruding from the deflated life jacket bladders over her breasts. The blast of sun in the window turned Bernardo’s broad, spotted forehead as silvery as his hair, and Esteban reflected that he really did look like some benignly crazed old wolf: his chin was angular, and his lips looked as if they reached ear to ear, two long, thin, contented-looking seams.

The liquor was free. “Chivas?” said the steward grouchily, over and over, sliding his forearm over his slick forehead, underarm dark with sweat. And wine from France. Up ahead Esteban saw the cook reach out for another rum and coke, a gold chain bracelet dangling from his thick, hairy wrist.

Poured into clear plastic cups, flashing in sunlight, the wine looked like candlelight inside dark red glass. Or like bear’s blood.

“I’ve never drunk wine,” said Esteban. Not even in church. The men in his family, his tíos and primos, didn’t go to church, though his mother did.

“All ship’s capitanes take wine with their meals, bueno, on Sundays at least,” said Bernardo. “Greeks, every night. I’ll try to sneak you a glass now and then, patroncito.”

“Bueno,” said Esteban flatly.

“The English prefer beer,” the viejo went on. “Every afternoon at three Capitán Osbourne would say,
Beer O’clock!
But he was never drunk. A grand man, chico. Capitán John Paul Osbourne was his name, but his friends called him
Hay Pee.”

Bernardo took only coke with his peanuts, so Esteban did the same, though he felt entitled to drink whatever he wanted because this was a significant day, the start of a new life, and the airline ticket had cost him so much. He owed his tíos the combined sum of the ticket and the fee charged by Doña Adela Suárez for getting him the job. After two
months on the
Urus
he’d be able to pay them back and there’d still be four months to go; then he’d be able to sign on for a whole other year, provided his capitán was happy enough with his work.

“The best years of my life, muchacho …” No major port on earth, apparently, where Bernardo hadn’t walked with the long, loping steps and sinewy smile of a lighthearted and elegant officers’ saloon waiter. But he hadn’t been to sea in eighteen years, not since Clara, his second wife—Clarita was only twenty-nine when she died, he said. Of tetanus, horrible. She was German on her papi’s side, chavalo. And he was left with three little daughters to raise on land. All of them light skinned, just a little plump like their mother, and one, the youngest, even has blue eyes, though her mami didn’t. Raised them in the same neat little cement house with a cement porch out front that they all still live in now, in Managua, in Colonia Máximo Jerez. A house paid for with two decades of saved-up officers’ waiter’s wages and a loan from Clara’s much older cousin, a customs inspector in Corinto, like a father to her. Perhaps you know the family, muchacho? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young, he’s in Panamá now, left right after El Señor Somoza did. Never paid him back, never a word of recrimination. María, Gertrudis, and Freyda, muchachas maravillosas, educated, prepared. One a teacher, the other a secretary in the Trade Ministry though she keeps out of politics like all her sisters, and little Freyda still a student. María’s novio and Gertrudis’s eight-year-old cipote live at home too, a crowded little place, crowded but always neat and clean—Pues, he’s never produced a son of his own. But he has three grandsons, three little cipotes, Gertrudis’s hijito and two whom he’s never even seen, though it’s his dream to. Because he has two daughters from his first marriage too. The younger, who disgracefully has never married or forgiven lives in Greytown now, with her mother and mother’s new husband, an evangelical Protestant pastor, but the other, Esmeralda, restless like her papi, lives in Jerusalem. Sí pues, in Israel. In Israel, Esmeralda became a Beauty Queen, chavalo! Married an Israeli policeman, they have a daughter and two sons. The Israelitas are the oldest and most noble race on earth, don’t listen to the lies they tell in our poor, hate-demented little country,
muchacho. How many times has he sat on his porch in the evenings grieving over the state of our beloved Nicaragua, wishing for Israeli commandos to fly in and do away with our Nine Comandantes the way they did those terrorists on that hijacked plane at the airport in Africa!

Bernardo looked directly at Esteban, the forced vehemence of his expression contradicted by the clouded softness of his wide-open stare. Esteban merely returned it until the viejo looked away. His tíos always talked like that, if not quite as screwily. What was it to him what viejos thought, except, chocho, why did they always seem to think he needed to hear strong opinions, and that he must be full of strong opinions about the same things they always had strong opinions about?

Seething, he barely listened while Bernardo chattered on about his years working as a chauffeur in Managua, the families he’d driven for, including one related to the Petrocelis. Bernardo hadn’t touched the lunch that had been served in the middle of his life story—Esteban had glumly passed up wine again—but now the viejito punctured the wrapping of his crackers with his plastic fork, carefully peeled yellow wax from his tablet of cheese, and cut the cheese into thin slivers, which he arrayed over two crackers. It was all he ate. Then he was talking about his daughters again. Esteban, devouring the gravy-soaked beef that was as mushy as eggplant in just a few forkfuls while his stomach roared with hunger, wondered what the viejo’s youngest daughter looked like, and who’d fixed the middle one, leaving her with child when she was what, fourteen or so? Bernardo said that his daughters’ paychecks were worthless now, vaya pues, like everyone’s. He felt he’d become a burden to them. Disgracefully, he hadn’t had any work in nearly two years, since the last family he’d worked for had suddenly gone to live in Venezuela. But he’d been going to see Doña Adela Suárez once a month ever since, pleading with her to convince Capitán Constantino Malevante to find a place for him on a crew despite his age. With the money he earns on this voyage, muchacho, he’s going to buy two chicken incubators! Then he’ll no longer be a burden to his daughters; he’ll have a dignified old age, because people always need chickens and eggs, especially now, when sometimes in Managua you can’t buy a chicken or even an egg anywhere:

“Son of a million whores, have you ever heard of a country running out of chickens?” He brought his fist down onto the armrest and fell silent a moment. And then he deftly switched the two meal trays, saying, “Here, take mine.” Esteban picked up the pineapple cake and began to eat it. Bernardo said, “All the meat that doesn’t go to the Comandantes or Cubans or Russians and I don’t know who else goes to the soldiers.”

Esteban had heard this so often he merely shrugged. He didn’t know where all the meat went. But his battalion, a BLI, rotated into the jungle for three-week stretches with a week at base or bivouacked outside some town in between, had rarely been supplied with anything to eat, never mind meat. The few campesinos they ran into in the depopulated war zones might have bananas to take, or even an ox, but never nearly enough chickens to feed a battalion. Otherwise they lived on fish from rivers and streams, hunted birds and rodents, macheted down makengue trees for the sopping, breadlike pulp at the heart of the trunk. In the jungle everything was always dripping wet, but sometimes you couldn’t even find a limón to suck; sometimes the nearest river or stream might be days’ march away, but there were insect-clouded bogs of undrinkable black water everywhere …