The Ordinary Seaman (36 page)

“Así dijo”—Bernardo turns his head towards the voice and sees José Mateo looking up from the picture of Esme in his hand. José Mateo says, “El Buzo, that cabrón, told el Capi that it sounded like witch stuff to him, told him to just take you to the hospital instead. And el Capi said no, this is the medicine the king and queen of England use. It’s the new medicine, the most modern. Better than or just as good as what they’d give you in the hospital. Isn’t that what he said?”

“Sí pues,” says Panzón. “Your whole body is a vibration. Qué sé yo?”

“A vital force,” says Tomaso Tostado.

“It’s just a burn,” says Bernardo. “Put that picture back.”

“Sí pues, compadre,” says José Mateo. “He knows what he’s doing. Puta, it’s not surgery.”

“Qué loco, ese capitán, no?” says Panzón.

“But he’s educated,” says Tomaso Tostado.

“What was that story about the rat?”

“With this kind of medicine,” says Tomaso, “to cure a burn, you give a medicine that burns a little less, and then the body knows what to do. Like cures like, that’s what he said. Scientists gave this medicine to a rat and put it on the stove and it could stay there without burning up and the other rats that didn’t have it couldn’t.”

Bernardo grunts. “He was going on about putting my head in an oven.”

“So you’re telling me, to cure a burn, he’s going to have to burn Bernardo?” says Panzón.

And then Capitán Elias is waking him up again. Now only el Capitán and Tomaso Tostado are in the cabin.

El Capitán is holding a red plastic jug with a white cap, smaller than the jug he brought the medicine in when they were all sick from drinking rat water. He’s explaining to Tomaso Tostado that Bernardo has to drink some every half hour.

“It’s a combination of cantharis and arnica, diluted,” says el Capitán. “You might know it as Spanish fly and leopard’s-bane.”

El Capitán pours some into the plastic cap. Bernardo takes a drink; it tastes like rust-silted water. There’s something else for them to wash his burns with, a tincture, it’s called, made from calendula and Saint-John’s-wort. And gauzy bandages to lay over his leg.

Just before leaving the cabin, Capitán Elias says, “Try to think of happy things, Bernardo, it helps the healing process.”

“Gracias, Capitán,” says Bernardo. “I feel a little better.”

“This medicine works fast. The
Urus’s
segundo oficial will be back on his feet in a few days, eh, güey?” Then el Capitán frowns, as if chagrined with himself over that tasteless remark. He lingers a moment, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. “Don’t forget, Bernardo,” he finally says, forcing a smile. “It’s impious for a good man to be sad.”

And Capitán Elias leaves the cabin. Bernardo never sees el Capitán again.

ESTEBAN HAS ALREADY CARRIED THE BEER BOTTLES FROM THE SALON
doorway to the trash cans and kicked cigarette butts all the way over to the curb when, after he’s been standing there nearly three hours, he finally sees la Joaquina coming down the sidewalk in her coat, with her limber, scuffing, shoes-too-big gait. Her tights are black. When she notices him waiting, her eyes widen into dark disks and she briefly stops, but she doesn’t smile. She’s already holding her keys when she reaches him. He watches her eyes glide from the bouquet in his hand and, suspiciously, up to his face.

“Buen día, Joaquina,” he says, so out of breath and with his head so clogged he can barely hear his own voice.

“El marinero,” she says, in her deep-toned voice. “Esteban, no? Qué paso?”

“Joaquina …” Her controlled, almost subdued manner, confuses him. She seems an opposite person from the volatile tyrant he met the other day. He says there’s something he wants to talk to her about.

“Bueno. De qué?” Her mild interest dismays him.

“I cleaned up around the door,” he says nervously. “I’ll mop it if you want.”

“Oiga, güey, you’re not trying to take my job, are you? There’s more to it than that, you know.” She smiles.

He’s so relieved to see her personality flaring back that he blurts, “I know that. You’d have to pay me a million dollars to get me to hold hands with that Chucho.” He cringes inside over having betrayed himself.

But she laughs and puts the key in the door. “And how much would you charge to do his feet?”

He thinks, Chucho gets his toenails done? But he doesn’t let himself say anything about it and follows Joaquina into the salon and says,
“I brought you this,” holding out the bouquet so that when she turns around she only has to reach up her hands to take it. She says, “Ay, Esteban, por qué?” looks down into the cone at the single rose, smiles thinly, and thanks him. She turns and walks swiftly to the back of the salon to turn on the lights. Then she steps through the curtain, and he hears water running, briefly, but when she comes out she isn’t carrying anything. She’s wearing a smocklike, velvety crimson dress with two rows of brass buttons down the front, and a black ribbon falling from the collar. She starts making the coffee.

He sits in a chair against the wall looking at himself in the mirrors and then at Gonzalo dressed like Pedro Picapiedra holding the woman dancer over his head. He feels drugged from his cold and sleeplessness, his skin caked with dried perspiration and grime. He’s furious at himself for having brought her the rose, and then he’s furious at Bernardo for having heated up his head with his preposterous notions. Joaquina is embarrassed that he’s there. Pues, who wouldn’t be? But then he remembers how kindly Marilú treated him, and he resents Joaquina for misinterpreting the gesture of the flower.

Joaquina brings him a cup of coffee and sits with a chair between them sipping hers, her legs straight out and her feet apart just like the last time. She asks him what it is he wants to talk about.

“I’ve decided to leave the ship,” he says, and waits for her to finish her yawn. She drops the back of her hand from her mouth and looks at him.

“Perdón,” she says with a sleepy smile. “Entonces?”

He notices that her earrings are different today. Instead of tiny glass stars, these are tiny glass triangles, yellow.

“I’ve left—”

“I told you you were going to catch a cold going around like that, didn’t I?” And she gets to her feet and quickly crosses the salon and comes back with a box of tissues, setting it down on the chair between them. “Güey, you have to take better care of yourself.”

He repeats that he’s decided to leave the ship, and she nods, and he says, “I was wondering if there was anything I could do, maybe clean
up the doorway, and here inside too, for as many days as you want, in exchange for a haircut.”

She seems to be giving his proposal serious thought. “We’ll have to ask Gonzalo,” she finally says. “He should be here any minute.”

And they sit in absolute silence until finally she asks if he’d like some aspirin. She goes in back again and comes out with a glass of water and two aspirin.

When he can’t stand the silence anymore he almost asks if that’s Gonzalo in that photograph, dressed like the cartoon caveman, but he realizes that could expose what he did and learned about Gonzalo last night, and with a surge of embarrassed apprehension, he realizes that Gonzalo might recognize
him.

“Do men really get their toes painted?” he finally asks.

“Some,” she says. “But not Chucho.” And then she looks directly at him and says, “Por qué, güey? You think there’s something wrong with men having pedicures?”

“No,” he says. Though of course he does. “I’d never do it.”

“Some men like it.” And she smiles strangely, as if that puzzles even her. “My novio likes it when I do his feet, but I guess that’s different. He doesn’t put any polish on, claro, but for anyone it feels nice to have your feet pampered, no? Nails trimmed, cuticles cut away, your feet scrubbed y todo.”

“You have a novio?” Ve? It doesn’t bother him. She isn’t his type anyway, a manicurist. A chica plástica, hair dyed, probably fake curls too—

“Bueno … Sí,” she says. “But he’s in México, in the D.F. He’s a lawyer.”

His heart leaps at the hint of hesitation in her voice.

A moment later Joaquina says, “There’s a nightmare I’ve been having for years. A fat man in a business suit comes in for a manicure, and I say, Take a seat, momentito. And when I come back out he’s sitting there, but he’s taken his shoes and socks off. And he has horrible, dirty, smelly, hairy feet. I say, Ah, you want your feet done too? And he looks at me and says, No.” She pauses. “Then I always wake up.”

When Gonzalo comes in, he’s wearing a long, black wool coat, a newspaper folded under his arm; he stands inside the door pulling off a leather glove and then pauses in the middle of taking off the other to look down at Esteban with a delighted grin.

“This is the marinero I told you about,” says Joaquina, with a disconcerted expression. “Esteban.”

Gonzalo finishes pulling off his glove, as if only to free his index finger so that he can dangle and circle it while he says, “He went around the block at least twice, and kept looking in the window, holding flowers. At first I thought it was someone sending
me
flowers.” And he laughs, showing perfect white teeth, his emerald eyes and ruddy cheeks radiating good humor. Then he says, “Coño, qué genial! You know, later, going home on the subway, still trying to solve the mystery of this wild boy too shy to deliver his flowers, it suddenly occurred to me that you might have been that shipwrecked sailor Joaquina told me about.”

Esteban sits rigid in his seat, frantic with humiliation, his face hot as red steel.

“It was Joaquina’s day off. You should have come in anyway.” But the cheerfulness drops out of his voice when he looks back at Joaquina. “Oye, niña, don’t get angry. I was just—”

Esteban glances over and sees that Joaquina’s eyes are stormy pools again, seething furiously at Gonzalo just as they had at him the morning they met.

“You just can’t control your mouth, Gonzalo, not ever! Bocón!”

“Bocón? Yo? Look who says so!”

She gets up and walks through the curtain in back, and when she comes out she’s carrying a skinny vase holding the rose and ferns. She slams it down on the counter with so much force Esteban is surprised it doesn’t break.

“Elegante,” says Gonzalo.

“Sí pues,” she says. “And he brought it for me, not you, güey. Órale?”

“Claro,” he says. “OK.” He smiles furtively at Esteban, and then looks at Joaquina again. “Did you have a good day off?”

Joaquina is still glowering at him while she nervously fidgets with her hair, winding and unwinding one golden curl around her finger. “Ajá,” she says.

“You went on one of your shopping trips, no?”

“Y qué?”

“You bought another colander, no? Or a tea strainer or something like that?” He looks like he’s trying to hold in his laughter.

“Don’t start,” she says.

“This is one of the most eccentric women in the whole world,” he says to Esteban. “Any kitchen thing with holes in it, she has to have it. What do you think a psychologist would say about that? She doesn’t even cook!”

“Ay no. Tus obsesiones!”

“Mis obsesiones? I don’t collect colanders and strainers!”

“It’s not an obsession, it’s a collection! I like colanders. But it’s your obsession that I like them! I’m not obsessed with
anything
you do, gúey.” She covers her eyes with her hand. “No, I just can’t take this man. Chiiín.”

And Gonzalo chuckles richly again, and takes off his coat, and carries it into the back. He’s dressed the same as the day before, only now his sweater is gray, and close up he seems even more herculean and graceful.

Joaquina sits in the chair next to Esteban, who must look as if he’s in a state of shock, because she speaks in such a grave and soothing tone: “Esteban, I’m sorry if Gonzalo embarrassed you. He’s completely insensitive.”

“Embarrassed me? No. Claro que no.”

She giggles. “You kept going around the block?”

He sighs. “No sé,” he says. “I didn’t have anyplace to go.”

When Gonzalo comes out he pours himself a cup of coffee and then sits down on the other side of Esteban.

“Joaquina and I,” he says cheerfully, “we’re like a bad marriage. We despise each other, but we would wander the streets howling in grief and tearing out our hair should either of us ever leave the other.”

“You wish, güey,” she says. “You used to say that about Dolores.”

“That was our cat,” he says to Esteban. “We hired her to conquer our mice, and one day she went out that door and has never returned. Maybe she went to work for somebody willing to pay her more. Or maybe la migra got her.”

“Oiga, Gonzalo, Esteban needs a haircut,” says Joaquina bluntly. “But he doesn’t have any money.” And she explains his situation and his offer to mop the doorway and sweep out the salon until he’s paid it back, though she doesn’t think Esteban should mop outside until he’s over his cold.

“But that’s your job,” says Gonzalo when she’s done. “That’s part of what I pay you to do.” And then he collapses into laughter over Joaquina’s stricken expression and stands up and says it’s fine with him. “Wash his hair,” he says to Joaquina. “And check for lice. No offense, Esteban.”

Joaquina had grown up in a tiny poblado near a lightly traveled highway at the desertlike edge of the Western Sierra Madre, in the Mexican heartland state of Zacatecas. Her father worked as an auto mechanic out of a junk-filled one-room workshop right on the highway, depending mainly on the occasional nearby breakdown or blown-out tire for business. Their poblado was so remote that Joaquina and her siblings—there were eight, five brothers—had no way of getting to and from school unless her father drove them in his ancient car. Often the car broke down—despite her father’s occupation, none of the car’s doors opened from the outside and only one could be opened from the inside—and Joaquina and her siblings would find themselves stranded, having to disperse among various homes in the poblado the school was in to sleep. Joaquina’s mother was an austere rural woman with no room in her life for any feminine luxuries whatsoever. So Joaquina had never even seen a nail file until she was seven, when her tía Hermalina came all the way from the Distrito Federal to visit her brother and his family. Joaquina was transfixed by her tía’s shapely, lustrously polished red nails, and by the way she would sit idly filing them while ignoring almost everything else around her, eating up the hours of a visit she seemed to find interminable. Joaquina coveted the nail file as the magical object
it actually was to her, and sat in the school yard filing her own nails with a Popsicle stick in imitation. Right before Tía Hermalina was leaving to go back to the city, Joaquina stealthily opened her purse and stole the file. It was one of those old-fashioned metal nail files. But nail polish remained a mystery. She tried the colored Chinese paper at school, wetting and rubbing it against her fingernails to see if any would come off. She tried crayons. Once, when she’d walked down to her father’s workshop, she discovered that he had some paint for touching up cars that looked as glossy as nail polish even when it dried. When her father caught her dabbing her nails with the paint, he hid his paint cans somewhere amidst the clutter of the workshop, and she never found them again no matter how thoroughly she searched when he wasn’t there. Meanwhile Joaquina was already filing everyone’s nails with the durable metal file—her schoolmates’ nails, her mother’s, sisters’, even her younger brothers’ and their few neighbors’—until there wasn’t a woman or girl in sight without perpetually shapely, unpainted talons. She didn’t get to wear real nail polish until, two years later, she was sent to visit Tía Hermalina in the biggest, most polluted city on earth. (Also, in Joaquina’s opinion, the craziest, the most surreal, the most full of music, the saddest, the most fun.) When she was fifteen she finally realized her dream of going to live there with her tía, and enrolled in beauticians’ school. She was indifferent towards the courses in hair-styling. Really, it seemed her special destiny to become a manicurist …