The Ordinary Seaman (50 page)

Whenever he and Joaquina manage to steal some time alone together, in the little plywood room, heated by a small electric heater with glowing orange coils, the air so spice scented that even his sluggish nose can smell it, Esteban is the one who sometimes still finds himself conquered by his secret inhibitions. While Joaquina sheds her outward restraints, takes control, does what she wants, until, with voracious hands and mouths and finally their whole bodies, they’re eating each other alive. Sometimes she mounts him and goes away, far away inside herself, traveling the secret paths of her own pleasure, eyes closed, lips silently mouthing some lost language, until she cries out and quakes and her cheeks flush almost ashen blue and her eyes open as if waking from a hundred years’ sleep to find him still there, still watching—a little unnerved over having been left so far behind, but glad to have been found again; then it’s his turn to let go, if he hasn’t already. She tells him it isn’t always like this, that it has to be love and even then, it won’t always be like this. What does he know? Chocho Joaquina, he lives now for their time together, in this little room. He thinks there’s no better answer to life than this. She also cuts and files his toe- and fingernails, snips his cuticles, sands his soles with a pumice stone, rubs lotions all over his feet, and tells him that now he can never make fun of men who have manicures and pedicures ever again. Joaquina loves Esteban with a solicitous tenderness and exacting passion that dissolve his self-doubts and fears or startle them away like a flock of crows. Her love comes out of the same seemingly bottomless well of emotion that causes all her moods and outbursts, from rage to hilarity. When she’s sullen her face
seems to deflate, she turns into an abuela with enormous, blind person’s eyes that accuse the world of a whole lifetime of unendurable grief. And when she’s ebullient, her smile stretches ear to ear in the most deliriously childlike way, her eyes shining as if they’re telling silent jokes only cats can hear. He sometimes feels frightened that so much emotion can dwell inside one slight frame: he’s seen her topple in a split second from giddy affection to blaspheming, sobbing fury, sometimes with no provocation other than being overwhelmed by so much love that she can’t control.

Esteban has told her everything about himself now—pues, almost everything. Joaquina knows about la Marta, even about her watch, which he still carries in his pocket. She leaves Esteban alone when he sinks into one of those faraway moods, gnawing at his thumb, sniffling and snorting. Joaquina broods over him, and has a talent for finding practical solutions to his most unnameable dilemmas. It was her idea to start going to the Friday night dances in a certain Salvadoran restaurant in another part of Brooklyn, which draws Centroamericanos from all over New York, and even, regularly, a pair of black ex-soldiers who’d been stationed at the U.S. military base at Palmerola, Honduras, where they’d picked up an honest enthusiasm for the local muchachas. A live band plays música tropical there on Friday nights, and he and Joaquina share a few beers and dance in that nalga-swinging Centroamericano way that at first she found tastelessly lascivious, and still has her doubts about. The restaurant is owned by a middle-aged woman, Doña Chilcha, who’d been a barracks chef in Salvador, and who, when she’d foreseen the way the war was going, had fled to Nueva York with her five children. On his very first Friday night there, Esteban met a fellow Nica who worked as foreman at a chair fábrica, and who wrote down its address and the name of the nearest subway stop and told him to come by on Monday morning. He’s met refugees from the Salvadoran and Guatemalan wars and death squads there, including a doe-eyed, skinny chavala chapina who’d had sixteen members of her extended family disappear, and until recently had been living with a group of nuns in Coney Island, who’d helped her to get out of Guatemala and were extremely kind to her,
though somehow that very kindness had made it impossible for her to cure herself of a paralyzing sorrow. But then, at a Friday night dance there last winter, she’d met the Salvadoran college student, and soon after had left the convent house and moved in with him. Their love struck Esteban as rapturous and mature, they both had night jobs, and she was still attending high school by day. One of the cooks in back, slapping out a perpetual train of pupusas, was from Nicaragua too: she had a son who’d died fighting in a BLI, another still living in the contra camps, and two more children with her in Brooklyn, and she’d wept and embraced Esteban when he was taken back into the kitchen to meet her, introduced as a survivor of the war, a former soldier in a BLI. Esteban sat at a table one night listening to Nicaraguans of three generations arguing about the Sandinista military draft with the same ardent vehemence they might have skewered each other with at home if they were all one family, until the muchacha named Barbara, who hadn’t been saying anything, got up from the table in a flood of tears over her lost novio and fled the steamy-smoky, packed restaurant to collect herself out on the sidewalk in the cold air. Esteban saw her shadow through the fogged window and was about to get up and go outside and weep with her, but her older sister put a hand on his forearm and told him to just let her be, that this happened every time they came here. But many who come to that restaurant on Friday nights are so young and have already been here for so long that the wars that have been ravaging the isthmus for at least a decade are like a dark fairy tale to them, and they already consider themselves Nuyorquinos as much as anything else; they tower over their parents, growing up tall and radiantly chubby faced because here even the tap water is supposedly good for you—at times Esteban, who’ll turn twenty in January (for five months he and Joaquina will be the same age), so burdened by the war that broke his heart, feels like an irrelevant abuelo around these jokey jovenazos, most of them actually a bit older than he.

Many people, there in the restaurant on Friday nights, and elsewhere in Brooklyn, when they learn of Esteban’s ambiguous refugee status from a phantom ship on the Brooklyn waterfront, offer him a temporary
place to stay, a couch or floor to sleep on until he and Joaquina can find their own apartment. He always writes their names, addresses, and telephone numbers into a little pocket-size notebook Joaquina gave him for just this purpose.

The night the Wall came down in Berlin, Joaquina bought a bottle of red wine and took Esteban back to her room to celebrate what she’d decided had to be his final liberation from an obsessive confusion she didn’t pretend to understand, which included his obscure sense of loyalty to a certain make of military transport truck, and a constant outrage over a certain cannibalistic dog named Ana.

For over a month now, Esteban has timed his comings and going from the ship to meet la Joaquina—she is, of course, extremely punctual—by la Marta’s watch. He still thinks of la Marta as being with him. Claro, he’s corrected the watch so that it no longer just tells the time over her grave, which was one way of timidly saying good-bye. He is not so morbid as to think he has betrayed la Marta by falling in love with la Joaquina. He tells himself that he’ll never love anyone the way he did la Marta, whom he knew for so short a time, and that because it was for such a short time, this love, on such intimate terms with her absence, can do nothing but endure. Even the war they shared, in comparison, won’t last inside him in quite the same way. La Marta was just a chavala, one with a majestic, grave, and courageous woman growing up inside her. We even have children, he thinks one day, feeling stuck on the ship, leaning on the rail, waiting for it to be time to go and see Joaquina. So who are their children? And he thinks, They’re orphans. They’re everything that’s invisible but still more enduring than a fucked up iron pirate ship that’s made a bunch of poor men ever poorer. Everything that gets lost, that never gets a chance to learn what it was going to be.

“Joaquina? You know what happened? A gringo came to the ship. He’s called a ship visitor.”

“Un qué?” she answers drowsily.

“A ship visitor.” He’s taken a seat against the wall, near Joaquina, who is sitting on her stool, manicuring Chuchu’s hands. He doesn’t tell her now that he’s just come from the subway stop after deciding not to
go to the lawyer’s office after all. He has to be at work in another two hours.

“Güera,” interrupts Chucho, “Hueso is having a party Saturday night. It’s going—”

“Chucho, shhh,” she says. “Un momentito.” And Gonzalo, working on another customer’s hair, glances over sharply—

“Qué pasó, Esteban?” she asks.

And Esteban grins back with a bit of embarrassment at Gonzalo, because he knows why he’s just looked at him that way. Before, when Esteban would sit in the salon for hours watching Joaquina do her manicures, he would sometimes get jealous when some of her male customers were too flirtatious with her. He’d sigh and glare and snort through his nose, until Gonzalo finally lost patience and began sending Esteban out for café con leche at Marilú’s, or pastelitos, or to the post office or on some other insignificant errand. And then finally, after one of these episodes, Gonzalo exploded. What kind of men do you think come in here for manicures? he shouted at Esteban. Pues, claro, said Gonzalo, answering his own question before Esteban could, they’re men who want to get to feel like a king for a little while, a pretty chica on a stool at their feet. The last thing they want is their manicurist’s novio sitting beside them, pouting and staring daggers every time they flirt a little! Coño, Esteban! You’re turning into a real pain in the culo!

But this is different, and Esteban ignores Chucho’s grunt of impatience and says, “This Ship Visitor thinks there’s a good chance we’re all going to get paid, and he’s taking Panzón, Tostado, and Cabezón to a lawyer this very minute to see about it. It’s finally over, Joaquina. Chocho!”

Three days later it snows, fat flakes that have been falling all morning, the gray slush on the sidewalks slowly becoming covered with a soft white blanket. Esteban, who hasn’t slept since leaving his night shift at the fábrica, stands on the sidewalk in front of the salon’s steamed-up window adding snow to all the elements his indestructible boots, happy with their new laces, already know about. Then Joaquina comes out singing, “Friolín, friolín,” because it’s so cold, and she stands beside him with her pink tongue out.

And Esteban says, “Snow is just like what I’ve always imagined a rain of volcanic ash must be like, Joaquina. Only cold instead of hot.” And then he tells her about a school outing he was taken on when he was eleven, to a volcano that was a historic sight because its eruption a century and a half before blew out the side of the crater with explosions so loud that supposedly military garrisons throughout Centroamerica and as far away as Jamaica were put on alert against British invasions. All along that part of the Pacific coast, the eruption turned day into night for a week, pouring down a rain of ash that ended up two feet deep on the ground, so coating everybody and everything with volcanic ash that not even mothers could recognize their own children or husbands in the streets. On the bus ride to the volcano, their teacher, Compañera Silvia, who he’s already told Joaquina about, vos sabés, the one with braided mole hair, told them the history of the volcano, which most already knew anyway. But then she told them the part about how every domesticated animal that wasn’t suffocated in the ash and even wild ones, even tigers and monkeys, had tried to find shelter from the raining ash under any roof they could find, crowding into churches, convents, and thatched huts, pushing nuns and children out of their beds. That Compañera Silvia, she was buena onda! Esteban laughs out loud at the memory. Bueno, when they reached the foot of the volcano, everyone rolled around in the ancient ash of the lava fields just for fun. And when he got home, all coated with whitish gray ash from head to toe, you know what he did? He sprang through the door waving his arms and howling, excited by the idea of frightening his mamá with this ghost-zombie disguise. His mamá put her hand to her chest and said, Dios mío, Estebanito, you look just like your papi!

“… And that’s the only time in my whole life that I ever heard Mamá make any reference at all to what my father looked like!”

Joaquina, with one of her ear-to-ear smiles, says, “Chamaquito, qué historias! That accelerated head of yours, full of nothing but stories, no?”

And then Joaquina tells him there’s something she wishes she could take him to see that very minute, something she went to see last winter when it snowed. In the botanical garden in Brooklyn, she says, there’s a glass house kept heated with steam, and it’s full of tropical plants and
palms and banana trees, and, pues, everything you find growing in the jungle, even live lizards running around and iguanas.

“So if you’re inside and look out through the glass, Esteban, it’s like it’s snowing in the jungle. Chingón, no?”

And he barely has a chance to tell her how much he looks forward to seeing that, when he hears someone calling his name through the snow, and sees the Ship Visitor’s blue van parked by the opposite curb, and then the Ship Visitor getting out and crossing the street in his pillowy parka and a black wool cap pulled down just over his eyes, wearing black boots with thick black rubber soles that crunch loudly against the snow.

Esteban shakes the Ship Visitor’s hand and manages to introduce Joaquina, though he feels disturbed and confused that the Ship Visitor has been able to find him here; he counts on the protection of complete anonymity in his new, illegal existence off the ship. Now the Ship Visitor is explaining how he’d asked that gold-toothed marinero where it was that Esteban’s novia worked, and that then he’d put two and two together and driven to this neighborhood and asked in a restaurant if anyone knew of a nearby beauty salon owned by a former Tropicana dancer. And Esteban thinks, Tomaso has a big mouth. That was stupid of me, telling Tomaso Tostado about Gonzalo. The day before yesterday, on one of his visits to the ship, the Ship Visitor had told Esteban that he’d really given him a fright, disappearing from the subway like that, and Esteban had laughed and shyly apologized. But then the Ship Visitor had asked Esteban about Joaquina, and though Esteban hadn’t denied having a novia, he’d been careful not to really tell him anything. And then the Ship Visitor had asked him if he knew Bernardo’s last name, and he hadn’t.