The Ordinary Seaman (23 page)

Elsewhere onboard that night as every night, in every dark and silent cabin, desire rummages obsessively through the same old trunk,
digs at memory with a dog’s frantic claws. Roving hands and minds grope behind, between, above, below, coming up with mute dolls missing faces and limbs, handfuls of air, until all that’s left is the empty bottom of this trunk where you get to see yourself coming home after your glorious time at sea, penniless, still in debt, and will she still be waiting and what will she think of me then? The dog digs deeper, more and more frantically … what were you doing out there at that hour, Ana María, with your sister and our hijita, so far from your mother’s house? (Roque Balboa asks Ana María that almost every night, lying awake on his belly, eyes shut, keeping as still as he can, even modulating his breathing, all his concentration focused on his memory tunneling towards her.) Standing on the small dirt hill on the other side of that drainage ditch in the dark, with a diaper in your hands, letting the wind play with it. There was a warm, steady wind blowing off the lake that night, I was walking to Lino’s cantina and suddenly saw you standing there just up ahead on the hill, on the other side of the drainage ditch running along the road, you, our daughter, and your little sister. And I went a little closer. You dancing the diaper from pecking fingers, the diaper stiffening, fluttering, stiffening, and little Norma watching and laughing, her curly hair floating up in the wind. And the wind blowing your soft hair across your face, tugging your yellow dress across your body so that hip and thigh glowed through. Ay no, muchacha, it hurts. It hurts just to remember that, just my hand touching your warm skin through a dress. You didn’t see me at first. La nena did, though she didn’t recognize me, in her smudged white smock, two years old now. A tightening in my throat, va, pues. When you saw me standing there in the road, you froze with the wind pulling the diaper out sideways from your hands like it was trying to fly away with you, your eyes widening as they took me in, filling with, carajo, I know, every sadness, every reproach. I stood in the road and wanted to jump over the reeking ditch and take that rag from your hands, pull you into my arms and kiss you, tell you I was going to spend the rest of my life apologizing and making things good for us and kissing your monkey ears through your hair, but I was afraid I was going to cry, Ana María, I was about to cry so I just turned and
walked off, and then the way you called out in the dark through the wind, with hate in your voice, “Qué poco hombre eres, Chávez!”—and I kept walking to Lino’s—“Chávez Roque, eres un hijo de la gran puta!” And now, on this jodido ship I signed on to soon after, telling myself I’d come home in a year with enough money to win your love and respect back, I do it, I leap the drainage ditch and climb the muddy hill and snatch the diaper out of your hands, and every time I do this, you vanish, all three of you vanish, and I’m standing there all by myself holding this fucking diaper …

… In love as in war, every hole is a trench. A memorable joke, though not El Peperami’s, or mine, but yours, La Tusa, no doubt taught to you, puta madre, so you could parrot it to drunken seamen. Because you had breasts just like a woman and smooth sweat-perfume-moist skin and a lustily heaving female ocean swell of a belly and a plush, lipsticked mouth, and you’d even perfumed your lacy panties like a woman though underneath you were a macho. Even your big, purple pene reeked of whore’s perfume and like a wrestler’s armpit when I finally put it in my mouth knowing that from now on I wasn’t the same anymore, drunk as I was I’ve always been able to bring back the dizzying shocks and helpless degradation of that night, but now you don’t want to anymore, cabrón, it’s like trying to let a dusty old maid give you a hand job, I can’t even get hard, I don’t smell or feel anything, no surprise or even bleak humiliation, nothing, just me, I see my own face grotesquely straining in the dark to remember something, anything …

… You will be my wife, Natalia, my wife, forever and forever, we’ll have a big, sunny bedroom with a big bed because I’ll be rich—The Pink Horse will be just the first step; because I can fix anything, I’ll have my own shop and scrap yard too, buy busted old machinery, fix it and sell it to factories—but we’ll love each other just like we did when we were poor, so please let me feel that way now, the electric and slippery touch of our bodies together and your cool toes wiggling against mine, your nakedness against mine, which I’d never believed would actually happen and then finally it did, the warm, rubbery scent of your skin filling my nostrils like no other skin since that so long ago young
tía who became a nun held me in her arms at the beach and I fell asleep inside her hug with my nose stuck into the soft, sticky, vein-pulsed warmth, why have I lost you, Natalita? Why can I barely remember your face? I used to feel my love like an inflamed organ inside, and now it’s like someone operated on me in my sleep, took it out and sewed me back up and sold it to somebody else, probably to Hércules Molina, who was always trying to peel you with his eyes though I never really cared because I knew it was only me you loved …

… She was eleven, a virgin, her mother said. Bueno, she spoke no Spanish of course and about as much English as I, but I understood these words:
girl
,
eleven, virgin,
and that she was signaling with her fingers in the charcoal-smoky, howling dark full of strange music and smells that she was lowering her price, the most criminal act of my whole life. And now I drag this up, why now? The next morning I couldn’t even bring myself to meet Capitán J. P. Osbourne’s eyes, so deep was my shame. I punished myself by staying out of burdels for nearly a year and never told anyone and never will, there are some secrets you take alone to the final reckoning, no? And there it will make no difference that she wasn’t a virgin after all and at least fifteen and that shriveled witch probably wasn’t even her mother, because I hadn’t been able to resist, led in as meekly as a depraved lamb. Vos, I was young, freer than I knew how to be, with an unloved wife, reckless and lonely and craving and protected by the anonymity of a poor young man beguiled by the magic of money in his pocket in an even poorer port city on the other side of the world where everyone thought even I was gringo, europeo—
Hey! Sir? You Eenglish man? Eenglish? Greek? Eleven! Virgin! Sir?
And look, there she is, her brown face and eyes full of a little girl’s innocent terror (I thought), waiting for me in bed again, and when I pull back the sheet it’s as if her skinny little chameleon’s body has evaporated into it like an image on a shroud, there’s nothing but an empty bed, so even the shame you’ve earned comes back like a ghost now …

There’s another onboard who grieves for a dead lover: Caratumba, the Guatemalan electrician, keeps it to himself like Esteban does but harasses himself in a different way because he witnessed it, ran away to
save himself and forget, but finds himself with nothing to do but remember the day, after lunch, when they left the oil exploration camp on the Río Usamacinta in a little launch he’d been lent the use of, headed for their favorite spot, on the Río Pucté. She worked as a laundress, one of the only females in camp, where the workers lived in tents and the gringo geologists and technicians in their own screened wooden cabins and big platform tents; she’d go up and down the rowed tents collecting laundry at dawn, bringing it back in the evenings, her face and loose, tendrily hair ducking in through the tent flaps in the gray, humid, bird-singing dawn for a quick kiss, a nibble at her thick, smooth lips. Lips that, even when closed tight, always looked as if they were gently smiling, and eyes so fiery she always looked angry at the same time. A pooled tributary covered with hyacinths, the water sweet and crystal clear, the bottom’s white sand rising in sugary clouds around their feet, they’d made love and were now swimming around naked when the first shot shattered their shimmering delight, fired from the tall reeds, and then another shot; he ducked under the water and saw her sinking with blood billowing from her head like a magenta flare and knew she was dead and swam away as far as he could, came up quickly for air and swam some more and heard another shot, couldn’t even risk going back to the launch for his clothes, knew who it had to be, he’d somehow followed them there, that soldier he’d taken her from, always bothering and threatening her ever since, one of the soldiers dispatched to guard the camp after that guerrilla raid when they made off with some of the oil company dynamite and burned their helicopter; he struck out naked into the rain forest, fled. It’s almost like watching a scene from another man’s life now. He shares that man’s horror and grief, but numbly, almost resentfully. Knows he’s doing penance for a crime he didn’t actually commit but that he’ll just have to keep on doing so, that’s all, until his time is up …

Esteban is alone in the room watching in horror as la Marta’s name writes itself in bright red paint on the wall. No brush or spray-paint can
or hand, just paint slowly spelling out
M A R T A
in big, dripping letters on the gray-painted, insect-splattered plank walls, droplets of paint dribbling from
MARTA
to the floor … Wakes panting in the dark, heart pounding, the rest of himself flooded with terror around it.

“Qué haces?” rasps Bernardo softly.

His rib cage heaving, as if he wants to sob but can’t, his almost-sobs like the last, slow-burning log impatient for the peace of cold ash around it.

“Nada. Una pesadilla,” he manages. Sí pues, just a nightmare …

“I’m not hungry,” Bernardo mumbles. Qué?

“Me voy!” he says. Springs from the bed as if it’s on fire.

“Don’t come back,” and then in a louder, awakened voice, the viejo cries out, “Vos, Estabanito? Vete!”

Descending the mooring line, still trembling, he feels the cable-splicing knife sliding out of his pocket yet doesn’t dare or can’t let go of the rope to catch it, the tool falls away like a fatal mistake, hears the splash in the water below alerting the enemy, now they’d grab their weapons and fire blindly into the dark.

What an awful dream. Can’t remember ever having a more upsetting dream. He feels cold and weak limbed, dazed and taunted. Marta’s name writing itself on a wall. Why was that so terrifying and sad? Wishes he could just take off running. Run where? Into the city! She’s never once, not once, come to me in a dream, staying away as if out of some mistaken desire to protect me. And, chocho, now she comes and writes her name on the wall.

A row of three-story, old brick warehouses, windows sealed with newer brick, rows of star-shaped floor-support caps protruding. Dove cooing resonates inside this darkness too, coming from inside the warehouses: like giant brick birdcages, warehouses full of pitch black nothing and doves. A pair of rats slinking along the bottom of a warehouse wall like the shoes of an otherwise invisible prowler. His own invisible shadow wearing shoes. Except some of these warehouses seem to be still in use,
some of the ground-level iron doors in brick arches padlocked. He finds one door left slightly ajar, padlock uselessly closed over an unfastened door hinge. And he pushes the heavy door open, stares into the musty dark, and steps inside.

His lungs feel as if they should give off cold, dusty light of their own, but the darkness is absolute. This place must be full of rats. He takes one careful step forward and then another and another, walks right into something neither soft or hard, a cold crunch of plastic against his leg. Prods it with his foot, feels it with his hands, a pliant plastic covering and a packed looseness inside. Crackers? Cereal? Something like that. Something edible? Groping around, he finds that the darkness is full of these. Hoists one up, it’s not so heavy. Carries it outside, where he can see it better by the weak glow of the city-suffused sky. Milky plastic, folded and stapled across the top. Carefully he pries the stapled seam open and reaches inside …

Wood chips. Holds a handful to his nose, breathes in the tangy fragrance, reminiscent of paint solvent. Cedar? A warehouse full of wood chips. These get shipped somewhere? Won’t it make excellent tinder for their fires? It always takes a long time to get their fires going, the broken boards they collect from the rubble of the old terminals around the cove so heavy with ocean damp and air. Though when that old paint-and-creosote-scabbed wood does finally get going, it goes up like a whole tiny wharf-side warehouse jammed with barrels of flammable chemicals, fish meal, the ancient dust of Arabian spices and suddenly combusting, century-old stevedores’ spit.

He walks back through the alley, carrying the sack of wood chips in his arms. What will they say in the morning, when they learn he’s been leaving the ship, see what he’s brought back? Why keep it a secret that he leaves the ship? Now they’re going to see who he is. So they should.

He sits in the sand of the old terminal, listening to the buoy bells out in the harbor, the doves in the dark, clutching the plastic sack of wood chips to his side. Hates this taste and texture in his mouth, like the inside of a rotted aguacate shell, the itch in his crotch and ass, along
his scalp, this passive filth caking him. Faint, chilly shudders—must be related, somehow, to the cold in his lungs—drift up and down through the skin of his legs, light as cobwebs, somehow inside his very skin, not over or under. Yet for the first time in months, he thinks, he’s done something that lets him feel like he’s slipped back into himself. If she could see him now she’d be less disillusioned with him than she would have seeing him yesterday, no? So he lies back in the sand clutching the plastic bag tightly against himself as if he loves it.

In a pasture just outside the town he sat with la Marta in his arms under a fruitless papaya tree, leaves like big, green, floppy ox ears. Rotting jocotes fermented in the grass under other trees, drawing wasps. Now and then an aguacate leadenly plummeted from a high branch in its towering tree, crashing through lower ones with almost the same sound a falling mortar shell can make before it hits and explodes: when she jumped inside his embrace, turning to clutch at him, he saw the sweaty strand of hair stuck to her cheek under her panicked wild stallion’s eye and he felt so in love.