The Ordinary Seaman (16 page)

He walks back through the terminal, early morning sunlight slanting at awry angles through the roof. What do the doves feed on? Mice? He imagines doves roasting on a spit over a fire on deck. Would it make his crewmates sick? He’d have to catch at least a dozen anyway. Bueno, he’s eaten pan-fried hummingbirds, each no more a mouthful than a peanut inside a grease-soaked shell. Make a net and build some wings and float around up there snagging doves, vos, ni verga …

CLARO, ESTEBAN’S BED IS EMPTY, HIS BLANKET A JUST VISIBLE KICKED-OFF
lump in the cold, grimy cabin, the same leaden gray dawn he’s just watched from his barstool on deserted Bourbon Street filtering through the cracked porthole along with the sobbing of gulls. What a dream this is, chavalito, it just goes on and on, but what does it mean? And why does he feel that he’d rather not wake up from it? The ghost ship stone silent, but isn’t it time to leave, shouldn’t the engines be running? It would be comforting if he could get up and look out the porthole, see shifting furrows of foam-striped, gray, empty ocean all the way to the horizon, know that the dream would last at least as long as an Atlantic crossing. Then he could go about his work serenely, setting the officers’ saloon table three times a day for no one, serving no one, mopping the floor in the officers’ quarters corridor for no one, diligently sewing a lost button onto the uniform shirt of his invisible capitán, polishing his empty shoes. But then who would pay him? Bueno, if it’s true that on this ship, as on the other, no one ever comes to pay you, then, all things considered and weighed, I’ll stay on this one, muchísimas gracias …

Except, as every morning, every part of his body asserts its own distinct ache or chilly discomfort. Kidneys left out over night in a cold iron pan. Fingers made of chalk. Crushed can knees, and swollen ankles—every morning, until his ankle joints begin to loosen, he shuffles around as if his feet are serving trays. Chest heavy as a dead elephant lying on its side in a pit of wet talc. Dios mío, what desolation. But at least long stretches of this dream have been peaceful and even pleasurable, an untroubled journey, bringing me closer to something, knowledge, a recognition, algo.

There are three color snapshots propped against the bulkhead by his mattress on the floor, images blurred behind the fogged plastic he keeps each tightly wrapped in. Right now a giant cockroach is crawling
up the veiled ladder of the cargo freighter
Mitzi
—that is, crawling up the plastic over the picture of himself holding Clara’s hand in front of the
Mitzi
’s ladder, her hair, skin, and dress bright as a daisy in the eternal tropical sunlight; in another split second a now forgotten crewmate will lower his camera, while he himself will let go of Clara’s hand and climb the ladder with a taste of her lips on his which will have to last nearly a year. Another snapshot is a fairly recent one of his and Clara’s daughters and grandson on their front porch in Managua—his motherless daughters impossibly grown up now, glad to have him out of the way, but expecting him home in another year or so, their unconsoling investment in his airfare to New York having paid off, his pockets wadded with redemptive dollars. The third snapshot is of Esmeralda, his daughter from his first marriage, when she was a beauty queen in Haifa. He hasn’t heard from Esme in thirteen years now, and as far as he knows neither has Florencia, her mother, remarried now to an evangelical Protestant pastor, moreno like herself, in Greytown. Not a single letter. He has no address for her.

Santísima Virgen! so many years ago! when he was little older than Esteban is now, and Esmeralda was a baby, a grinning chocolate elf with freckles and dimples, living in Managua with Florencia, her sister and grandfather, Don Peter Cooper, from Bluefields, a tailor who worked at home, people would ask, “Where’s your papi, Esme?” or “Who is your papi, Esme?” and Esmeralda would point at a hat, any hat that happened to be nearby, a souvenir capitán’s hat from Veracruz, a baseball hat, one of her abuelo’s straw fedoras hanging from a peg. She would point at that hat. Whenever she sees a hat now, does Esme still think of her papi?

Her papi el viejo lobo de mar, a hat lying in bed, dreaming with eyes open, waiting to wake up on a dead ship named
Urus.

Bueno, if you believe that the earth, everyone and everything in it, just as it all is, really is proof of God’s will, does that help you make sense of anything? Because at least you can tell when Luck is out to fuck you, but who can bear to think that God is? God treats each person’s life like a tedious game of solitaire, indifferently laying down the cards but determined
to reach the end, no? Or maybe it’s more like this: God and Luck are two old friends drinking in a cantina, taking turns buying, growling like two pompous Spaniards, “Yo invito ahora,” after every round.

For example, let’s say God brought Esmeralda to Haifa to be a beauty queen, knowing what that would probably mean in the long run. But then Luck decided that Esme’s crown, rather than being the prelude to a long career as just another fading dockside, exotic dama, should serve to entice a lonely Israeli policeman.

Or take José Mateo, the cook, who won fifty thousand cordobas in the lottery and was about to retire from ships and buy himself a cantina when the revolution happened, so he prudently decided to go to sea again until the situation settled, and now his banked cordobas are worthless. Fired from his last job for outrageously excessive drunkenness. Now he finds himself cook on the
Urus,
frying mashed sardines and rancid rice.

And so you see, chaval, it isn’t only when you gamble that you lose. Bad luck brought me to this ship, because God had no reason to do that to me. Once here, He decided that my purpose should be to look after these muchachos, especially Esteban, like a son. So I’ve told myself.

But the chavalo’s bed is empty. And I’m a ludicrous old man traveling an abandoned earth on a ghost ship, unloved and uncared for, already forgotten, and look, instead of upsetting me, this truth fills me with placid peace. That’s the dream’s message, sent to console and resign, softly coercing me into relinquishing my vanity along with everything else. At last, I must begin to see things clearly. One of youth’s vanities is that you go on mattering, pues, to the people you’ve cared for, however inconsistently or ineffectively. That loving forms eternal ties, stronger than time, even when as dormant and quiet as the shade under a tree. So today this silly young man in an old man’s body is going to wake up old on the inside too, is that it? Vos, ready yourself, viejo lobo. You’re already forgotten. Even poor Desastres is gone. Desgraciado, stop trying to entangle others in your vanity. Do you really think you make a difference to these muchachos, who are fucked with or without you? Did you really think chicken incubators, a little business of your own to
run in your last extra years, earning you enough to pay for your own portion of whatever gets dolloped onto your plate at meals, was going to bring a flicker of respect or affection to your daughters’ eyes, simply because their papi el viejo lobo de mar went to sea one last time to be able to sell eggs wrapped in newspaper cones to neighbors? The shit-flecked shells smudged by newsprint trumpeting the virtues of a squalid fratricidal war that has bled the country even of chickens and eggs, turning everyone but the Comandantes into heartsick paupers, sí pues, Nicaragua has no luck either, you would think that no country should feel lucky in a war or while at war but of course this isn’t true, even in Nicaragua there are many who believe themselves lucky for this chance to stuff themselves with glory while everyone else starves.

“Chocho!”—the boy’s voice obscenely exploding his reverie. So he’s not alone on a ghost ship after all. Esteban has stepped over the rat-damming iron panel laid across the cabin door’s lower portion and stands in the underwater gloom looking at him with an openly mocking and bemused smile:

“Vos, heating up your head up with a picture of your daughter? Don’t you think that’s disgusting?”

Bernardo looks wonderingly at the picture he’d been holding up between two fingers in front of his own face, the plastic peeled back as if he was getting ready to eat it. Ever since he got that bump on his head that night he’s been doing things without noticing himself, mind like a television screen fading to black and then after who knows how much time suddenly and impertinently blinking back on—and there’s Esmeralda, green-dyed ostrich feathers pluming from a little gold cap on her head, hair straightened and bobbed, lips scarlet and plump as a split-open pomegranate, a tiny gold-sequined leotard, and her limbs bared, arms out in the air, one long thigh turned towards the camera, knee slightly raised, golden high heel propped on tiptoe, “Look, Papi. I’m a Beauty Queen! Love, Esmeralda. Haifa, Israel, 1964.”

Esteban reaches down, plucks the snapshot from his hands, stands over him looking at it. When Esteban came in he had a funny, feverish glow in his eyes, private and aloof like a cat’s, and look, all over his pant
legs, little bits of straw and burrs, grains of sand, as if he’s been lying down in a field …

What was he doing, lying down in a field? And with whom? What field? He sits up suddenly and swallows his question the wrong way, explodes into a coughing fit, hawking and heaving and gasping for air while Esteban watches suspiciously. And then when he’s quieted, sitting there panting like a thirsty Miracle, Esteban hands the picture back, smirks. “Bueno, I can see why that policeman went for her. But, vos, don’t you think it’s a little strange, a girl sending her father a picture like that, and her father carrying it around for years and years?”

“It’s the only one I have of her. Florencia kept the rest. But it’s a good picture. To her mother, its meaning was even biblical.”

“Sí? Cómo?” And he laughs. “Puta, I’d like to see that Bible.” Esteban sits down on the edge of his bed, undoes his electrical wire laces, pushes his boots off with his feet, lies down fully clothed, and pulls the blanket over himself. “So why is it biblical?” he asks after a while, turned on his side facing away.

“Where were you all night?”

“All night? Here. Where else?”

“You have campo on your clothes. This ship has not suddenly turned into a farm.”

“I was here, but I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.”

“A walk.”

Esteban suddenly sits up, glares at him with perplexed affront. “To look at the ocean. Oye! Qué te pasa?” Finally his expression softens. “You know what I did? I went down the mooring line, and then back up. Nobody saw me. So don’t tell anybody.” The boy holds his eye a moment longer, then flops back down.

Bernardo ponders this. Sí pues, that goes with Esteban, it’s something he’d get it into his head to do. Climb down and then back up a mooring line—like some stowaway who decides he’s gotten off in the wrong port. Why? Why did he come back?

“Then why did you come back?”

Esteban says nothing.

“You’re going to leave.” Halfway through this sentence turned from a question into something close to a command. And suddenly Bernardo feels excited, wonders how he couldn’t have thought to suggest it before! Wouldn’t a real father have thought of it long ago?

“You should go, Esteban. Take your chance, chavalo. Me, I’d rather die than go home empty-handed after all these months, owing my daughters money.”

And he thinks, It’s true, I’d rather die.

“Who says we’re going anywhere? They’ll find us here in a thousand years, and your skeleton will still be holding on to that picture, and, vos, they’ll put you in a museum, the primitive viejo lobo pervert.”

“You should leave,” he persists. “The way Esmeralda did. For her, taking this chance, it was a triumph.”

“Bueno. I’ll be an Israeli beauty queen too.”

“Think of it this way, patroncito. Luck bought the last round, and so here you are with the rest of us”—but Esteban is a complete atheist—”so now it’s your turn.”

“My turn to
sleep.”

Does he want to end up like me? He left the ship and now he needs to go farther, like Esme, who triumphed. Why should the poorest wetback sneaking across the border have more daring when he couldn’t have more hunger? Trouble is, Esteban is loyal, to the idea of what he came here for and of who he is, to all that won’t ever pay or repay him, is that it? I have to be convincing, lay down this argument paving stone by paving stone.

“She went from Nicaragua all the way to Israel, chigüín, a bold girl, no one can take that away from Esmeralda, she even changed her religion. You know what her mother thought? That in her own way, Esme was living almost the whole story of the Bible.” That Esmeralda had strayed so far into Satan’s domain—that picture, Satan’s beauty queen!—that God fought back by planning a back-door escape for her, going all the way around, practically, to the beginning of the Bible to build her a little door, lead her through it into heathen Golden-Calf-without-a-cowbell
wanderings in the desert so that she could find the One God in the unlikely form of a lonely, somewhat lost and lusting, but basically stable, hardworking, and decent Israeli policeman of frankly dark North African features, a family man to lead her to the land of milk and honey. Didn’t it happen that way? It came to pass, pues, that God next situated Esme and her blossoming family in Jerusalem, holy to Christians and Mussulmans too, claro, a strategic maneuver, because here, according to Florencia, Esme was destined to embrace the Messiah along with all Rome’s idolatrous perversions, this just a stepping-stone to salvation’s last stop, the True Path, the Purified Word, et cetera. Florencia had shed her own never very devout Catholicism by then; he’d come home from the sea one year and found himself married to a fervent Protestant, fundamentalist, pentecostal, and evangelical. You can’t imagine, chavalo, the grip this howling salvation had on her. A troubled time. As bleak as this one now, in many ways. Denouncing the wayward, irrefutably vice-ridden, and worldly ways of the seafaring life night and day, begging him to stay home, renounce that life, accept the Lord’s Call. She vacuumed all the love that was left from his heart with her incessant Lord, Satan, Doom, and Paradise, until he only wanted to get away. Blaming himself for what his years of desertion had made of her, he fled to sea again and never came back, not to her … The money he’d been saving for years so that one day he and Florencia could move out of her father’s, buy a little house of their own, this was destined to go to another woman, other daughters.