The Ordinary Seaman (35 page)

“They come in here together?”

What is he, made of glass? Her laugh is a raucous blast, and then she says, “No te preocupas, amorcito. Gonzalo’s not more homosexual than he already is because you can’t be. That’s why he was thrown out of Cuba with all the Marielitos, tu sabes? They just came to his door one day and told him he had to go. A dancer at La Tropicana, and they still made him leave. Him and as many of los
gays
as they could get their hands on. Caráy, que bárbaro.”

Now Esteban remembers the framed photograph on the wall of the salon: the strong man in a leopard-skin tunic holding a woman over his head is Gonzalo. So, the stud is a pato—

Suddenly Marilú’s eyes widen. “Don’t tell me this is a get-lost rose. Ay no, pero que dramática!”

He laughs. “It’s nothing like that. No sé, I wanted a haircut…”

“Ajá?

“Bueno, I went by, and she wasn’t there.”

“Maybe she doesn’t work on Sundays, muchacho.”

“Ah, sí pues … I’ll have another tea.”

He feels almost wide awake now. For a long time the restaurant stays empty, and he and Marilú sit at the counter. Despite his cold and her scolding, she even shares her cigarettes with him, and when he’s finished telling her the story of the
Urus,
she immediately gets up and brings him a bowl of rice and red beans and two pieces of chicken and a cola. Marilú tells him about her life too: she lives with her three children and sister on Smith Street, a street he knows from his nocturnal prowling; her husband left her for a boricua and is living with her in another neighborhood that’s mostly Dominican; he works as a doorman. This neighborhood is mainly Mexican now, but it has people from all
over Latin America. It’s true, you can live in Nueva York, says Marilú, and never have to speak English to anyone but telephone operators and bill collectors. Later two men come out from the kitchen, Melgar and Juvenal, the former the cook, from Barranquilla, Colombia, the other an Indian-featured dishwasher from Ecuador. Marilú says she doesn’t have enough room in her apartment to offer him more than a few chair cushions on the floor to sleep on, but he’s welcome to it in an emergency, and she writes her telephone number and address down on a napkin for him, and Juvenal does the same. Melgar says there isn’t a phone where he lives, nor even any spare cushions, but he can have a piece of the floor should he find himself in need.

He falls asleep with his head in his arms at a table, and when he stirs and wakes later, the restaurant is empty, Marilú has gone home, and the cook is sitting at the counter, staring out at the avenue and smoking. He looks at his watch, it’s twenty-three past four. His throat aches. He feels heavy with sorrow; it must have something to do with whatever he’s dreamed, but he can’t remember any of it. He lowers his head to the table again. The communists are going, he thinks, and la Marta is gone forever. She’s gone. It’s too horrible to think about where she’s gone, and suddenly he feels his whole body stiffen and cringe as it always does when the Zompopera Road comes back like a sudden bout of clairvoyant madness: remembering drowsing in the back of the truck one second and the next machine-gun fire tearing into the truck’s cab like rocket-propelled sledgehammers and the truck rocking and wooden planks in back rattling and splintering in the firestorm of tracer bullets coming out of the darkness on both sides of the road, the screams and shrieks of compas around him and all up and down the road; all up and down the road that resounding leaden rain of metal tearing open metal and explosions and flames and voices calling from the darkness taunting them with death to all piri comunista hijueputas. Crouching near the back of the burning cab aiming his fire back at death through planks, the AK jumping and shell casings tumbling around him and jamming in another clip and firing wildly into the dark and a shattered plank smashing him in the face, knocking him back and stunning him and
he was sure that his life was flowing out through his face. And he lay there on top of someone who was wet for seconds that passed like hours, clutching a wrist that turned out to be not his own until he felt someone pulling him back up and he was still holding his AK and he saw Rigoberto Mazariego’s novia’s doll’s red hair, and following this small torch he crawled over the bodies in the truck with his nostrils and face full of blood and he fell and felt his teeth gnashing against wet hair on the back of someone’s head; and then he spilled down onto the road and rolled behind the tires softly hissing air and seconds or hours later followed Rigoberto Mazariego’s howl and his novia’s doll out from behind the truck, sprinting straight ahead into the dark, began the long night of holding off the enemy until the helicopters and reinforcements came. In the morning they saw the long line of East German IFA trucks haphazardly skidded to stops up and down the road and off of it, the green steel of the cab hoods and doors ripped apart as if by the iron claws and beaks of giant iron birds of prey, bullet holes glinting like small stars cut from tin, shell casings spread thickly on the ground around splattered tires. And they heard the moaning and weeping of the wounded and saw uniformed bodies sprawled over the rears of the trucks and on the ground amidst wet gore and drying pools of blood and insects everywhere and some started firing off their remaining rounds at the vultures, and then he saw the truck that had been carrying the compitas in the quartermaster corps …

He sits slumped with his head in his arms for a long time, staring blankly, breathing through his mouth. He must have drifted back to sleep, because when he looks up again the light outside is gray and there are a few customers at the counter and a new waitress and his wrapped rose has been moved to his table, still propped inside the glass of greening water. The new waitress brings him a cup of café con leche, gives him a pat on the shoulder, and tells him that he’s been snoring. He blows his nose and drinks the coffee, thanks her, thanks everyone though there’s nobody there now from the night before, picks up his rose, and goes out the door into the chilly air.

WHEN BERNARDO HEARS CAPITÁN J. P. OSBOURNE APOLOGETICALLY
speaking his name as if he’s about to say he’s sorry to bother him but he just needs this button sewn again, he thinks it’s just one more of his nightlong hauntings. But then he opens his eyes from the bottom of his well of pain and meets Capitán Elias’s sad sheep eyes. El Capitán is squatting by the mattress, wearing an unzipped black leather jacket, a hand on each black-jeaned knee. He lifts a hand and places it on Bernardo’s forehead, holds it there awhile, his hand feels like a cold sponge. He takes Bernardo’s wrists in his hands, puts his fingers over his pulse.

Bernardo is lying on top of the mattress with the blanket flung off him, naked from the waist down, shivering with cold.

Capitán Elias gestures with a nod of his head towards the leg. “That’s a nasty burn,” he says. “Nastier than it looks, I’m sure. You’re probably still in shock, a little bit.”

Bernardo grunts, forces himself up on his elbows, and takes his first look at the leg in the light; his shin looks splattered with wet, pink blisters, some of them fringed with blackened shreds of cloth. His head feels heavy. He lies back down.

“… Bernardo?” He opens his eyes and sees Capitán Elias still kneeling beside him, slowly rubbing the side of his close-shaven head with his hand while staring across the bed at the three dusty, plastic-wrapped snapshots arrayed along the floor. El Capitán says, “Bernardo?” again, looks at him, and realizes.

“I have medical training,” he says, along with something else which Bernardo doesn’t grasp, complicated words and something about plants. “…That’s what I used to do. Before I decided that my heart was really with the sea and ships.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” says Bernardo, surprised at his own angry tone. “But it’s just a burn. Shouldn’t we have first aid equipment onboard?”

“But we do,” el Capitán says, and he taps a greenish metal box on the floor by his side. “It was up on the bridge. Of course, you’re right, it should have been where you could get at it. We’ve had such complex problems, I guess we often overlook the obvious things.”

Now el Capitán slides down the mattress and with one finger lightly touches one of the liquid wounds.

“Does that hurt?”

“I didn’t feel anything. But the pain seems to come from the whole leg.”

“I’m going to ask you a few standard questions, Bernardo. They may sound a little odd to you, but it’s an important part of the homeopathic method.”

“Bueno,” says Bernardo listlessly.

He feels Capitán Elias shaking him awake again.

“Have you been having any unusual food cravings?”

“Cómo?”

“Before the accident and since?”

“Eh?”

El Capitán smiles wanly. “Is there any one food you can’t stop thinking about because you want it so much? Or is there any food that, whenever you think of it, disgusts you?”

Cool leche agria, with a little salt. A whole pitcher of pitaya juice. Ice cream. A big, steaming bowl of mondongo—no.

“Those little blue berries, what are they called?”

“Bueno, blueberries.”

“They’re cool and wet and sweet in your mouth, and that would be good now. As for the other thing, I could easily never eat another sardine.”

“Is there any time of day during which you usually feel especially happy or melancholy?” el Capitán asks expressionlessly, squatting on his heels.

“Melancholy in the evenings, Capitán. Like most people, no?”

“And where do you feel happiest, in the mountains or by the sea?”

“I’ve never actually been up in the mountains. I’ve seen them many times, of course, on horizons, along certain coasts.”

“I guess that’s the wrong question to ask an old lobo de mar like yourself. Your element is definitely water.”

“Maybe it would make me happy to be in the mountains, but I doubt it.”

“Bernardo?”

He opens his eyes again.

“Are you afraid of death?” asks Capitán Elias. “What I mean is, when you find yourself thinking of death, do you feel afraid?”

Fear and sadness grip his heart at these words.

“Afraid? No tanto. But a man my age, claro, he thinks about it.”

“Angry towards death?”

Right now I’m angrier at that hija de la gran puta cat.

“It would make me angry never to see my daughters again.”

“You’ll be seeing them very soon, I’m sure.” For a moment Capitán Elias looks as if he’s contemplating his face without really seeing him. Then he glances across the bed and, propping himself with one hand on the mattress, he pushes himself up, over, and across Bernardo to pluck one of the plastic-wrapped photographs; he pushes himself back into his squat with a grunt and looks at the picture, and then hands it to Bernardo. “Your daughters.”

“Sí pues.” Bernardo looks at his daughters and grandson through the fogged plastic, gathered on the little front porch.

“You’re a lucky man. I’m going to be a father soon too.”

Suddenly Capitán Elias’s long, black-clad body is spanning him again; back again, he studies Esmeralda the beauty queen through plastic.

El Capitán smiles slightly. “An old love?”

“No, another daughter,” says Bernardo, surprised again by his own angry tone.

“Muy bonita.”

“The other picture. That’s Clara, my wife, the mother of my daughters.”

“Ah.” El Capitán reaches across the bed again, and then he’s looking at blurred Clarita and Bernardo standing in front of the
Mitzi
in Veracruz; he glances at Esmeralda in his other hand with a briefly puzzled expression. “Lovely,” he says. “You look very happy.”

Bernardo lifts his hand from his belly to hold out the picture of his daughters. It takes a few seconds for el Capitán to react, but then he takes the picture from him, and this time pushes himself up onto his feet and walks to the other side of the bed, where he sets the three snapshots back more or less as they were.

El Capitán stands over him, looking around the cabin, at Esteban’s empty bed, at the two open suitcases filled with neatly folded, tattered, filth-darkened clothes at the foot of each mattress. And then he’s scrutinizing him again.

“You’re an
Arsenicum
type, I think,” he finally says.

“Cómo?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think I know you well enough to say that.” El Capitán smiles. “An
Arsenicum
is the type of person who decides to commit suicide by putting his head in the oven, because that seems the least messy way of doing it. But when he sticks his head in, he sees that the oven needs cleaning. And while he’s cleaning it, he forgets all about committing suicide.”

“Sí pues … It’s just a burn, no?”

And then el Capitán squats by the bed again and rummages through the metal box.

“Just a burn, of course. It’s not a complex case. But I’m going to mix a constitutional treatment with a fundamental one just to be sure. Have you been drinking much coffee?”

They haven’t had coffee in weeks. “None,” says Bernardo.

“Good, because coffee interferes with the effectiveness of these medicines,” says el Capitán, moving down the bed to Bernardo’s leg again, pulling the metal box after him. “You really shouldn’t have any until you’re healed. Let’s try to clean you up a little.”

With tweezers, el Capitán plucks at the bits of cloth scorched into his leg.

“Feel anything?” he asks.

“Nada.”

El Capitán sprays his leg with water from a plastic water bottle and dabs his numb wounds with cotton balls.

“This is going to sting,” he says.

El Capitán is soaking cotton balls with liquid from another bottle and dabbing his wounds again, but he feels nothing, but then in that spot he does, fiery needles of pain that suddenly explode through his leg—

“I’ll be back in an hour or two,” he hears el Capitán saying through a roaring bonfire.

When he opens his eyes again, Tomaso Tostado is cleaning up the litter of cotton balls by Bernardo’s mattress. Standing inside the doorway Panzón says, “El Capitán says he’s a—A licensed qué?”

“A master herbalist,” says Tomaso. “And something called a—no sé. Un méxdico homeopático. No?”