The Smell of Telescopes (3 page)

Spermaceti Whiskers

He sharpened dawn on a strop and shaved the ice from his windows. When the sun weaved its way through the alleys to his shop, he sat it in his chair and trimmed the beams. Motes danced between the blades of antique scissors. Even in July it was cold in the depths of the labyrinth; the town was as mysterious as a hand beneath a table. He enjoyed comparing its secrets with those still wandering lost in his past. His mind, crewed with desperate memories, mirrored his environment perfectly, as if the maze of streets, achingly cramped with nibbled life, had been reflected from the polished dome of his head. 

Aware of this symbolism, he stitched shards of a broken mirror into his hat. The glass had smashed while he was soaping the chin of a loaded pistol. It was a convex mirror, the one reserved for customers who liked to observe their own necks, ready to catch an itch in the act. Owning a frown too wide for his head, he did not mourn the loss. He preferred to spend money with his left hand; his right was saved for gestures. Trying to splice the loose threads of his existence into a cable of meaning, he hung his identity. He spoke only bad Italian, though the aftertaste of a dozen languages coated his tongue.

He had come to Pirano a month before, deeming its position right at the top of the Adriatic a snug embrace for a simpler career. A childhood with the buccaneers, cutting the locks of rogues and romantics, had made his fingers nimble as peppers. Having worked with the most notorious and hirsute sea-rovers, an urge to settle down overwhelmed him. While others wasted their booty in bordellos and theatres, he saved enough to start a small business. He wished to legitimise his skills, to license his blade and deal with honest stubble. He now tolerated only innocent cut throats, those which can be folded in half.

Not that he was able to entirely shrug off history. It clung to him like a damp sail. His jars of lacquer smelled of typhoons and cannibals; his combs, toothless with scurvy, tasted of knives. He had forgotten his real name during the sack of Panama, but his habit of waxing moustaches with whale-oil saved him from total anonymity. He used his nickname like a compass: a pointer to inner peace. His dreams, which he could hear but not see, were filled with contradictory orders shouted by l’Olonnais and Morgan. His shipmates, likewise afflicted in the siege, raided his stock of hair-restorer to regrow their egos.

Two of these ruffians became his best friends. A carpenter, Lanolin Brows, and a cook, Muscovado Lashes, sometimes helped him with his work, grinding apricot stones for shampoo. ’Lin was a Swede, with a nose sharper than a chisel and a frosted eye. ’Vado was a Malagasy, tall as a spoon and cunning as a whisk. Both fought fanatically on land and sea. ’Lin wore a suit of armour carved from teak and wielded a saw. ’Vado fought with pot and ladle, dishing his victims a gourmet doom. Both had pleaded with him not to retire; the seas, they claimed, would grow lank and unkempt if he packed away his heated tongs.

His customers, however bloodthirsty on deck, were always polite and diffident in the presence of his towels. Even Morgan, most successful of the buccaneers, refused to jump the queue but quietly took a seat behind cabin-boys and prisoners. He would rifle through the pamphlets scattered on the low table, the improbable stories about the slack morals of Cuban missionaries, and listen to the percussive rhythms of the shears. He was always nervous; the odours of cropped hair and aftershave disturbed him. Barber-shops, he used to say, were torture-chambers for his lice. But in the chair he was confident.

“Well now, ’Ceti, did I ever tell you about my village? Marshy and poor, absurd crime rate. Llanrumney.”

“Yes, sir, lean forward. Keep quite still.”

“Not too much off the back. Local girls would die for my curls. But what would they do in your home town?”

This question had irritated him ever since. He had learnt hairdressing from Exquemelin, the most stylish barber-surgeon on the Spanish Main. He recalled talking to him effortlessly, debating the rival merits of combs made from turtles and tortoises. Perhaps he was Dutch? But there were no windmills or cheeses in his dreams to confirm the supposition. Each time he crossed borders, his thoughts were adopted by the surrounding culture like orphans in baskets. In Pirano he mislaid the flavour of the sea and picked splinters of limestone from his teeth. The karst landscape to the north was as barren as a pickled mermaid.

Sometimes he did glimpse water between gaps in red-tiled buildings. A stroll down to the lighthouse, a tiny flame dancing above what seemed to be a nameless church, could have been enough to convince him that Pirano was still a port, that the link with his youth was intact. But he never managed to find his way on to the Punta, the promontory. The lanes were complex and risible, they led him in ellipses away from his destination. In the Jewish square, the vaulted passages and arcaded courtyards filled up with exotic scents, provoking him into a misplaced nostalgia for the present. Beards wove a symbolic net.

He sharpened dusk on a strop and closed his shop for the night. The business was failing already, he could tell. As he secured the shutters, replaced the unused scissors on the shelf and swept a clean floor, black silence suffused the room; the shop bulged. All over the town, hair grew from angry or serene heads, its texture denied to him by an inexplicable process. What kept customers away? He had mounted a striped pole outside his door, his windows were made from Venetian glass. It could not simply be a question of appearances. Did the citizens mistrust his instruments? Did they lack suitable banter?

In his rickety kitchen, he set a kettle to boil and dipped his last yam into the liquid. Soon he would be reduced to stewing belts, shoes or empty wallets. This happened when he worked for l’Olonnais in Nicaragua, shortly before that pirate’s violent death at the hands and teeth of the Darien Indians. Hunger was nothing new to him, though back then it was a nomadic emptiness which moved from gut to throat as he hunted for food. Hunger in one place is worse than in many; while the kettle whistled the flavours on board, he counted the coins in his hidden purse. Money grows inward, like a fringe in reverse.

Previous hungers were bearable because he looked generally full in his warped mirror. Sometimes periods of famine were switched so rapidly with periods of plenty that food took on the glowering appearance of a storm. Once, just off the coast of Mayaguana, they were hemmed in by a flotilla of coconuts. Each globe was as ripe and matted as a starving stomach. Sweet milk slicked the deck, as ’Lin and ’Vado cracked the spheres with drills and cleavers. Since then, he regarded coconuts as guardian angels, solid as hymns and coarse as martyrs. If he asked in tastes rather than words, they always turned up to help him.

His profession was so linked to his survival that he could hardly imagine another way of staying whole. His ointments and powders, for the dusting of nicked lobes, had saved the lives of many in Jamaica, where death was schooled not in wounds but in their infections. He tended l’Olonnais on the rigging of a sinking caraval, smearing an unguent mashed from Havana chillies over his bleeding limbs. Barbering had never let him down while he floated on the brine; only now, on a stable surface, was it acting like a whore. How much longer did he have to wait before his first customer entered his shop? Would the bell over the door never speak?

Another time, becalmed in the Antilles, he wove a durable rope from snipped hair. This was when he sailed with Pierre le Grand, an eccentric and reckless captain. Dice were cast and it was decided to use the cord, heady with a myriad colours, as a cable for the anchor. It was gnawed by a shark that evening, and in the ensuing cyclone their barque was blown all the way back to Tortuga. On this voyage he perfected the perm, but realised it would have to be reinvented at a later date. At least hunger was blunted by hope at sea; in the depths of a shop it mimicked the plumbing and flooded the mouth with despair.

He imagined the building torn loose from its foundations and pushed along the alleys by a freak wind. Would it finally burst out of the maze and tumble into the silent sea? He clung to this febrile idea as the yam rose and fell. He dished the thin broth and lifted it to his lips with a fork, to save some for the following day. He felt the meal was digesting him, rather than the opposite. He wrestled his way into his old sailor’s coat and opened the back door, stepping out into an invisible bustle. On balconies higher than his gaze, unseen neighbours lounged. Shrill curses swooped on his shoulders like gulls. “It’s old ’Ceti Whiskers! Bet he shaves throats like rope and turns customers into overpriced pies.”

“Never ask a corsair for a singe.”

“Combs with a rum bottle, I say, and dries with a cannon. Better to sweep the streets with a beard.”

He hurried past, through the oldest of old squares, where the giant cistern spoke riddles to itself, and up a cobbled hill in the shadows of the Church of St George. The bell-tower, set as far apart from the main edifice as a debate from an argument, loomed with an ironic sort of wit, a tongue poking forever upward. Although unable to find his way right up to the town walls for a clear view of the Adriatic, he had discovered a reasonable alternative. Here was a house with a room at eye level and no shutters. Inside, a family ate spherical bread: with a corrugated crust, a loaf played the role of a coconut.

Kissing his tongue with his teeth, he crouched and watched the wife and children chew slowly, like squid, in the splendid chamber. The burly husband, who poked every dish with his finger before tasting it, sat with a deflated sack between his legs, as if to catch his stomach. The interior was so brightly illuminated with candles that friars could burn monks on the window. The family dipped into the display with lassitude, regarding each dish as a visit to an obscure relative. Not that they were ignorant of the importance of nourishment; merely that food for them had acquired abstract edges and aloof textures.

Returning to his shop, he thought he detected footsteps behind him. It was the sound of a man who favours his left leg: perhaps a government agent was tailing him? The Italian republics did not like former pirates settling in their towns. He turned and wove in his usual random fashion, hoping to confuse his pursuer. The starlight blew darts at the shards in his hat and he glittered as he ran. Pirano was small enough, despite its cryptic heart, and he soon found himself passing the cistern, one of the few familiar landmarks among the tangle. Here he paused to drink ripples from the surface of the water.

Hunched over the side, still and stony, he waited for the hunter to pass. There was a flapping noise, a slack mouth kissing departing cakes, and then the silence of a town where echoes are caught in washing-lines. Turning the final corner, he encountered one of these cords blocking his path. Heavy with patchwork washing, the vestments of a giant family, the line bent from a lofty window, brushed the pavement with buttoned hooves and curved to a window even higher, giving the arrangement a squint. The distance from one balcony to the other was only three feet, but the line was long enough to choke an island.

Too stiff and huge to brush aside, sheets, shirts and skirts formed an impenetrable barrier against his homecoming. He sought an alternative approach. Up a sweep of steps, down another backstreet, through a midget courtyard: there was no entry this way. Washing-lines netted the dark. A dressing-gown punched him in the eye. He pretended to be a cat, climbing a low roof and picking a path over broken tiles. He had the whiskers but not the balance; he was forced to jump down, defeated, feeling that he was no more than a shirt himself, pegged by the assumptions of brutal citizens. Voices warbled from high above:

“Bet ’Ceti doesn’t wash his clothes in hot water. Bet he cleans his socks with an abrasive tongue.”

“He uses sapphires instead of soap!”

“Gives a despicable blue-rinse. The usual camouflage for an oceanic rogue. He wears tidal fashion!”

Lurching away from the insults, he considered his remaining option. He must find the façade of his shop and enter like a customer. He tugged at his hair, acting the part of a scruff. Only by adopting the mentality of a client would the building call out and reel him in. But even at the end of the sick alley which led to his front, ropes had been strung. Now they were empty; the linen which would throttle on their narrow strength was still being worn by disobedient sons. So it was necessary for him to duck and weave, as if avoiding petrified traces of cutlass strokes. When they were full, he would be caught.

The bell chimed as he opened the door and he leapt in anticipation, lunging for the comb. Then he remembered he had no money to pay himself. He coughed apologetically and lowered his head as he passed the chair. A hook accepted his hat. This was a bigger fright for him than the time he was shipwrecked with Betrand d’Ogeron near the Guadanillas islands. Only embarrassment was to be feared more than octopuses. Those who called the buccaneers unmannered and boorish had no idea of the social graces which governed their every act. A corsair’s etiquette is much like that of a vicar; only the quality of china is different.

He was finished on his own. It was time to apply for help, before the barber became a fish, hauled to a spluttering doom in a knot of washing. He mixed dyes and carved a pen from a stick of soap. On a napkin’s back, he wrote his first letter, addressed to his old comrades. ’Lin and ’Vado would come for him, blowing away the laundry with a zumbooruk or cutting it into bandages with pikes. They would rescue him from this arid Sargasso where he was stuck fast and he would embrace the real sea again, sailing with Captain Rock or Bartolomeo el Portugues, trimming the beards of the whole of Maracaibo and Cartagena.

Sealing the letter in a bottle, he crept out once more. Sea was his only method of sending messages, but it remained more elusive than ever. At last, after a fruitless search, he recalled the cistern. Large enough to mimic the briny deep, it accepted his epistle with a sigh. Quickly he hurried back. Already a pair of trousers had been added to the cord. Too exhausted to veer, he squeezed between the legs. Once in his kitchen, he curled up in the oven, his makeshift bed, without brushing his teeth. No need: the sugar content of his life was not high enough to rot his icy gums. They had ossified into crossbones.