The Ordinary Seaman (37 page)

Some of this Esteban learns while sitting in a padded chair with his head over the sink in back, behind the curtain, wearing a blue cotton apron, while Joaquina washes his hair; and some of it he’ll learn later. Joaquina keeps her own nails short for her work, and prefers painting them in what she calls the French style, with a clear, glossy polish, sliver-thin white stripes along the tops. She does them herself, of course. Before she’d started shampooing him, she’d held out her hands so that he could see her nails, and then she’d pulled on a pair of translucent rubber gloves. Here at the salon Joaquina has to do all kinds of things besides manicures and pedicures, everything from leg waxing to running errands for Gonzalo. But she can’t get a job in a nail parlor—one of those
places always up-to-date on every new fashion and breakthrough in the science and art of beautifying hands and feet, and where she’s heard they give you the title “nail technician” instead of manicurist—while she’s illegal and speaks so little English. So many of the new nail parlors are Coreano anyway, owned and staffed completely by Coreanos. She likes to stand outside those nail parlors sometimes, watching through the window. But Gonzalo is an honest and fair boss, muy padre, they have fun together most of the time.

Esteban’s hair is so dirty and tangled she decides that it needs three washings. But he doesn’t have lice, she announces cheerfully. The feminine fragrance of the shampoo she’s using is so strong he thinks he must be smelling it through his eyeballs, since his nose is too blocked to absorb anything. On the floor, against the wall, he sees a white enamel pot full of clean, yellowish brown wax, free of hair, and he feels a moment of sad wonder over being able to identify this substance, which la Marta first described for him as leg wax. In the middle of the second washing Joaquina pulls off her rubber gloves and he feels her fingertips sliding through his hair, massaging him until his entire scalp is full of exploding stars, their pleasant itchiness traveling down his spine and making him shudder. He opens his eyes and tilts his head back even farther so that he can see her, looking up past her chapped lips and nostrils at the faraway expression in her eyes.

“Why did Chucho need a manicure so early in the morning?”

“He gives cooking classes on television. Canal Sixty-seven, something like that, it’s in Nueva Jersey. But I’ve never seen it.”

“Does your novio visit you?”

“He’s coming soon.” Her fingers stop moving in his hair—it’s as if she’s about to say something earthshaking, but then she starts up again. A thought comes to him unbidden: he doesn’t care who Joaquina’s novio is, or if her novio really is visiting soon or not, because eventually he and Joaquina are going to be together no matter what. Chocho, he whispers silently to himself: He wonders if that was just his pride speaking, or if he’s too soothed by this comfortable chair and the visceral pleasure of being shampooed by her to worry about a rival. Let the lawyer come.
He shuts his eyes and settles into himself to better enjoy the massaging of his scalp, and concentrates on trying to use the power of thought to tell her fingertips about his new resolve.

He feels himself being shaken awake to the sound of her voice: “Marinero. Despiértate.”

He grins dumbly at Joaquina, feeling surprised to find himself here and not in his cabin waking up next to Bernardo.

“Were you just snoring because of your cold?” she asks. “Or do you always snore?”

“Because of my cold,” he says, though he isn’t sure.

She isn’t washing his hair anymore. She sits on a stool beside him, letting the conditioner work into his hair.

“That happened to me the other day in the middle of a pedicure,” she says. “You know how it is, the women who come in, they talk, talk, talk, and talk. And some of them have voices, I don’t what it is, it’s like they hypnotize you. You feel yourself nodding off and nodding off and trying to keep your eyes open and taking drinks from a coke to stay awake and worrying about your hand slipping and cutting their skin. Pues, the other day? It happened, güey. There I was, chin down on my chest, fast asleep, I even dropped the tijeritas onto the floor. But you know how she woke me? With her big toe. Chiiín, she put it on my nose and gave a little push and stood up making a coraje. But I got angry too. Her toe on my nose? I sent her to la chingada, güey.”

She rinses his hair. He follows her out through the curtain wearing a towel turbaned over his head. Gonzalo is already at work on another woman’s hair. And there’s a heavyset, Spanish-speaking moreno man in a black-and-white pin-striped suit with a red vest waiting for a manicure. How come every time he’s here, only men come in for manicures? And why are the men who come for manicures always so burly?

Joaquina stands looking at Gonzalo’s back, twisting a curl on top of her head around her finger again. Esteban smiles to himself, recognizing the gesture as her anxiety’s signature.

“Gonzalo,” she says. “Esteban can’t sit here with wet hair, not with the cold he has.”

“Then put him under the dryer,” says Gonzalo. “What were you two doing back there that took so long? No. I don’t want to know. I have one appointment after another now.”

It isn’t until six-thirty in the evening that Esteban is finally summoned to Gonzalo’s barber’s chair. By then the light outside is murky gray and sad under the street lighting, and a steady parade of people headed home from work are passing by the salon’s window, wisps of vaporized breath around their mouths. Esteban has spent most of the day feeling forgotten by both Gonzalo and Joaquina: they’ve tended to one customer after another until both seemed as drained of their usual humor and emotion as outside is now of midday’s autumn sunshine. Esteban has already begun to learn some of the lyrics of the more popular songs played over the radio on the Spanish-language station. He’s listened to more snatches of news about the changes in the world without having anyone to share his astonishment with. He’s read through every page of Gonzalo’s Spanish-language New York newspaper, and the international page and the section called “Nuestros Países” several times: in the latter he learned that the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala continue, but there’s no news at all of Nicaragua in the paper that day, which gave him the eerie sensation again that everything and everyone he used to know have disappeared forever while he’s been stuck on the
Urus.
Yet his horoscope advised him it was a good day for patching up relations with estranged relatives and old loves. He’s leafed through half a dozen back issues of
Vanidades
and
Hola,
catching up on the real-life love dramas of telenovela stars and other apparently famous people, few of whom he’s ever heard of. He’s used up a whole box of tissues and spent hours fighting off sleep, sitting there in a soporific stupor, building and rebuilding scaffoldings of air in his eyes to hold them open so that he can watch Joaquina bent over customer’s hands and feet, working like a meticulous surgeon. He’s fascinated by the variety and delicateness of the instruments she uses—she seems to have almost as many tools at her disposal as they have on the
Urus,
all in miniature—and by the aura of fastidious
concentration and stillness that envelops her, whether she’s snipping at cuticles, or filing, or sanding with a little pumice stone, or applying lotions, or using a hand towel to dry feet lifted from a bowl of hot water, or massaging, or painting nails, or squeezing glue from a tiny tube to attach synthetic nails, then having the women put their fingers and new nails inside a little machine whose coils glow purple. Most of her customers are women after all, and they do tend to talk so much that Joaquina has seemed transformed into someone who hardly ever opens her mouth. Esteban has eavesdropped on all kinds of amorous, familial, and neighborhood gossip. A woman with a droning voice and feathery lisp soon had both him and Joaquina nodding off towards sleep in unison.

At lunchtime Gonzalo had opened the drawer in which he keeps the money and given Joaquina a twenty-dollar bill, telling her to go for sandwiches and to stop in quickly at the Salvation Army store to buy Esteban a sweater and whatever else with the change left over. In the grocery store Esteban ordered a ham and cheese sandwich like Gonzalo’s, and Joaquina bought herself a plastic-wrapped cardboard tray of raw chícharos. That was her lunch; she said it was one of her favorite foods. Outside on the sidewalk she peeled back the wrapping and began popping raw, green chícharos into her mouth one at a time.

“Híjue,” he said. “You eat like a pavo real.”

“It’s funny you say that,” she said. “Because in English these are called
green peas.
And that bird is called
peacock
. See how clever you are?”

She told him she studies English two nights a week at a church in the neighborhood and that the lessons are free, and that he should sign up too.

“And you live around here?”

“Not far.”

Then she led him into the Salvation Army store, up a narrow flight of stairs into a room with ill-sorted secondhand clothing spread out on long tables, crammed into boxes, hung on racks. When she saw the look of disappointment on his face she said that she only liked new clothes
too, and apologized for taking him to this place. But the little money they had would go further here than even at the most inexpensive stores along the avenue. But he said he was just surprised, not disappointed, because he couldn’t remember ever having been in a real clothing store before. In Corinto he’d always bought contraband clothing in the market, or directly from thieves’ middlemen like his tíos, all of it brand new, fresh from ships’ cargo holds or smuggled across borders. He tried on at least a dozen sweaters and didn’t even have a chance to see himself in the mirror until she’d chosen the one she wanted. It was a thick, green wool sweater with a black stripe around the collar, only slightly fraying at the ends of the sleeves and hem, and it smelled pleasantly of old mothballs and boiled milk.

“Chamaco, sabes qué?” she said while he stood looking at himself in the mirror, glowing with gratitude but still thinking that he looked as if he’d been raised by wolves. “I like you with your hair long, now that it’s so clean.” She reached up and briskly smoothed hair out of his face, and combed it out with her fingers. “A trim, maybe, is all you need. And, claro, a shave.”

“I want a haircut. This hair has been unlucky. Bueno, vos, until the other day, because that’s when I met you.”

“Ay no, qué cursi!” But she smiled, shyly he thought, and even blushed a bit, and then turned her attention to a rack of dresses, rapidly thumbing through them with her back to him. And he knew his comment, even if it
was
corny, had hit its mark, awakening her to his sudden existence in her life in a way that so far nothing else had, not even the rose.

There was enough money left over for a red T-shirt without any advertising on it and a pair of thick socks. He kept his new sweater on for the walk back to the salon, during which he kept looking for himself and Joaquina reflected together in the windows of the stores they passed, though all he saw were fleeting, translucent shadows barely denting the midday glare. Joaquina was eating peas again, telling him about how she’d been setting money aside for a José José concert in Manhattan, in a huge arena there, it wasn’t going to happen
for another six weeks, but just the other day she’d been shattered to learn it was already sold out. Her friend Rebecca had two tickets, but she was going to invite some galán, that traitor. He felt flushed with pleasure over how natural it suddenly felt and must have looked to others, he and Joaquina on the sidewalk together, she so absorbed in eating peas and telling her story and walking so close to him that he felt the constant pressure of her shoulder tucked against his biceps, shifting without breaking contact whenever she brought another pea up to her mouth. Yet he sensed that if he were to call her attention to this proof of what seemed an instinctual intimacy between them, or try to press it further by putting his hand on her back or by turning his head to lower his nose into the golden clover of her hair, which he was dying to do, she’d instantly pull away. Love hasn’t caught up to us yet, he thought, but it’s following a trail of dropped peas down the sidewalk. He wanted to impress her with another clever remark but couldn’t think of a way to make this one sound less presumptuous or more believable. She’d only dropped a few peas anyway, and every time she did, she said, “Chiiün,” or “Mierda.”

When Esteban is finally seated in the barber’s chair, he profusely thanks Gonzalo for the haircut and promises to pay him back as soon as he can for the clothes and the sandwich.

“Coño, don’t even think of it,” says Gonzalo. “We refugees from the communist countries have to look out for each other, no?”

He feels his face turning hot again. He doesn’t know what to say, but he knows he has to say something if he doesn’t want to end up losing himself in the maze of a prolonged lie. Gonzalo is fastening a scratchy paper collar around his neck.

“The truth is I’m a refugee from a ship,” says Esteban.

Joaquina is standing beside them, sipping at a can of coke through a straw and watching in the mirror.

“Pues, sí,” says Gonzalo. “But you’re from Nicaragua and I’m from Cuba.
Same boat,
as they say here, no?” Gonzalo is misting his hair with
water from a plastic bottle. “The same rapidly sinking boat, I hope. Why did you leave? Did they want to take you and put you in that horrible war?”

“I
was
in the war,” he says. Joaquina looks up from her can of coke in the mirror. “In el Ejército Popular Sandinista,” he says, holding her gaze in the mirror until she glances away. “I served in an irregular warfare battalion for two years. And that’s all I’m going to say about it. Bueno, if that means you don’t want to do me the great favor of cutting my hair, I understand, I—”

“Niño, shut up,” says Gonzalo. “We do not discriminate against nice people here. Bad people, I snip off their earlobes. But it will be much easier for you to get legal status here when you tell them you’re fleeing those maldito Sandinistas. If you say the opposite, chico, you won’t stand a chance.”