The Ordinary Seaman (34 page)

He smells burnt cloth and his own flesh frying. His whole leg is on fire but he can’t feel anything or see any flames—that’s the last thought he has before he passes out.

Bernardo is carried into his darkened cabin and laid out on his bed. Some of the crew try to pull off his pants, but the fabric is burnt into his flesh, it resists coming loose as if barbed right into his wounds. Finally they just yank the pants off. Cebo comes into the cabin carrying a pail filled with water. Tomaso Tostado, using the cleanest rag he can find, mops Bernardo’s wounds with soap and water in the dark. The crew members take turns sitting by the bed, coming and going from the cabin, having whispered arguments over what should be done, which always end in the decision just to wait for el Capitán. The full moon outside dissolves the cabin’s darkness enough so when Bernardo opens his eyes, they can see the whites murkily shining, and then they ask him if it hurts, and try to speak consoling words. They hold a cup of water to his lips. He’s in shock, they think. His eyes are open but he doesn’t seem to hear anything they say. He curses Desastres. Desastres? Esteban should be here—the viejo would feel better if Esteban were here.

Hours later, only Panzón is still in the cabin, dozing off on Esteban’s bed. When he hears Bernardo calling to Esteban in a quiet, lucid voice, he wakes up and sees the viejo sitting up in bed in the dark.

“Chavalo,” says Bernardo, whispering excitedly. “Listen! You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? This old sea chantey?” And the viejo begins to sing in a low, rasping voice,

Quiero morir cuando decline el día

Con la cara al sol

y la mirada al cielo …

And when he’s finished singing the song about a marinero’s wish for an honorable death at sea, he cackles. “I was just remembering a story my old friend Gustavo Robles told me, muchacho, when I visited him in Panamá. We’d worked together on a few ships, over the years. Everyone used to call him El Domino because he had three moles in a slanted line on his cheek …”

Gustavo Robles, an able-bodied seaman, had a little daughter, his only child so far, living at home with his wife in Panama City. Claro,
she was the light of his life, chavalo. Still, whenever he was home, Gustavo used to sing her the chantey about wanting to die at the end of the day with your face to the sun and sky and so on, and it always made her cry. Don’t sing that song, Papi. It makes me sad, because if you die, I’ll never see you again! Please don’t sing that song, Papi. But men are perverse, no? He always sang it to make her cry so that he could feel how much she loved him before he went away to sea. Gustavo shipped out again, on
La Reina de Guayaquil.
The ship hit a hurricane in the Gulf of México, and some poorly battened hatch covers were swept away by waves breaking over the deck. The hold filled with water when the ship rolled, and she sank quickly, taking most of her crew down with her. They never had a chance, chavalo. Thirty-two dead! But Gustavo had managed to grab a life raft and was swept overboard holding on to it. He inflated it in the wild waves and crawled in and somehow survived the storm. He floated for days, while the sun came out to cook him alive. And he kept thinking of his daughter, and of that song. And he cursed himself: So you got your wish, hijo de la gran puta! But I don’t want to die with my face to the sun and the sky! I don’t want to die. No quiero! Carajo, I just want to see my daughter again! So he prayed not to God but to his daughter, promising her that if he somehow survived he’d never, ever sing that song again, and that he’d never go to sea again either. When a Pemex tanker picked him up two days later, he was delirious, raving, and still praying to his daughter.

“My daughter saved my life, she kept me alive! That’s what Gustavo told me, with total conviction, chavalo, when I visited him in Panamá,” says Bernardo in the dark. “And he kept his promise.”

And then Panzón hears Bernardo softly chuckling to himself, and a moment later sees the viejo’s silhouette sinking back down onto the bed.

And then he hears the viejo mutter, “That fucking cat.”

ESTEBAN DECIDES TO GO INTO THE LITTLE RESTAURANT HE NOTICED THE
first time he happened on this neighborhood. There’s a hand-printed cardboard sign on the door saying it stays open twenty-four hours. Steam tables in the window and platters under heat lamps in glass shelves behind the counter. Three men eating at the counter, sitting with empty stools between them. A few tables, one with a young couple and a little boy seated around it. Two tourist posters from the Swiss Alps on the blue walls. A merengue is playing on a radio. He walks to the end of the counter, sits on the last stool, setting his wrapped rose down in front of him. He looks at all the dishes and prices printed with red crayon on sheets of paper taped to the wall. He can’t smell anything through his nose, but he’s glad to be inside someplace warm.

“Qué te puedo servir, Papi?” says the waitress, a fortyish, dark-skinned mulata with freckled cheeks and tired smudges under her liquid eyes, coarsely straight, reddish hair pulled into a braid at the back of her head. She is long limbed and slender, wearing jeans and a tight, long-sleeved navy top with white stripes, scattered white threads frayed out from the stripes.

He thinks it over a moment. “Agua,” he says. “Gracias.” He blows his nose in a napkin and then holds it in his hand, not sure where to dispose of it.

The waitress comes back with a glass of water, setting it down in front of him so noisily he jumps.

“Estás listo a ordernar?” It sounds like a command.

He nods. “Bueno. Un café con leche.”

“Nada más?” she asks, and he nods again.

He drinks the water down in fast gulps, then stuffs the crumpled napkin inside the glass.

She brings him his coffee, and he asks how much and she says fifty centavos. She looks expressionlessly at his bouquet, the paper raggedly melting around the stems, while he wriggles his hand into his pocket to pull out the two wadded dollars and hands her one. She takes the napkin-stuffed glass away with her. He pulls another napkin from the dispenser and blows his nose again. The little bit of breathing he can manage through his nostrils now feels hot. He takes a sip of coffee, hiding the soaked napkin in his other hand. The coffee stings scratchily in his throat, warms his feverishly swarming insides. His eyeballs ache; de veras, he feels like shit. The waitress comes back with his change, two large silver coins. Fifty centavos this must add up to. Then he must have enough for three more coffees, which he’s going to need if he’s going to sit here all night. The waitress is still standing in front of him. He looks up at her stern yet attentive face and asks for a glass of water.

He slowly sips his coffee, and drinks down his new glass of water and puts the used napkin inside it, which eventually she clears away too. A while later, when he asks for another glass of water, she looks at him with a skeptical smile, reaches under the counter for a large plastic ashtray, sets it down in front of him, and says, “I’m not getting you a new glass of water every time you need to blow your nose, muchacho.”

She comes back again with another glass of water anyway.

“That’s no way to cure a grippe,” she says. “Mixing hot and cold. You should be drinking tea.”

“Bueno.” He pulls la Marta’s watch from his pocket; it’s nine-thirty. He should order one hot drink every three hours. “Does it cost the same as the coffee?”

“Claro.”

He says he’ll have one a little later.

“Are you a mechanic?”

“No. Why?”

“Your clothes, muchacho,” she says, touching her own shirt, wiping her hand down her ribs. She has long, slender fingers and fingernails painted a shade of green that looks pretty against her chocolate skin. “How else do you get so dirty?”

“I’m a marinero.”

“No! De veras?” Her voice squawks with enthusiasm.

“Ajá.” Seamen sure seem to be a novelty in Brooklyn, he thinks.

“One of those with a woman in every port, eh?” She presses his wrapped rose with her finger, and he grins reflexively. A customer calls to her by name, Marilú, and she says, “Qué quieres, Papito?”

Marilú goes from that customer to another and then to a group of people sitting at a table, and seemingly forgets all about him in her journey through their orders and chatter, back behind the counter and to the kitchen window, to the steam tables, back to her customers. But the light makes him happy. It’s dark outside, and here he is sitting inside, in the light, and when was the last time he experienced that? He savors a yawn, and wishes a good deep yawn could last as long as a cup of coffee. He thinks that at least he should say good-bye to Bernardo and everyone else. He even feels a stab of pity for El Barbie, but then he thinks, Qué se jode, that ridiculous huevón.

The music on the radio fades and, for the first time since the night of their shipboard barbecue in July, he finds himself listening to the news. The news announcer speaks as rapidly as a Cuban; when Esteban finally understands that while he’s been locked up on the
Urus
the world has changed, the announcer has moved on to the fatal shooting in Brooklyn by police of an elderly black woman who’d brandished a steak knife at them. Several of the customers explode into expletives over this last bit of news while Esteban gapes around in confusion.

Finally, when Marilú approaches again, Esteban leans forward on the counter and asks, “Oye. Are the Sandinistas still in power in Nicaragua?”

She seems almost frightened by him. “I think so.” Then she repeats his question, shouting it at the men along the counter, who instantly answer with another storm of ambiguous expletives, and she looks back at Esteban and says, “Parece que sí. But not for long, eh? The way things are going. Bueno, qué sé yo?”

“Honecker resigned in the German Democratic Republic,” says Esteban. “At least that’s what it said on the radio. And that the days of communism in Germany are numbered, that it’s total chaos and the
Soviets are doing nothing.” The radio said that in Poland they were already gone, and in Czechoslovakia all but gone, and on their way out nearly everywhere else too.

“Así es, Papito,” she says wearily. “Los comunistas are going. But Balaguer stays forever.”

She answers his blank expression with a more explicit reference to the ancient and decrepit perpetual political boss of the Dominican Republic.

“And in Cuba?” he asks.

“Ja! That cabrón stays forever too. What, you don’t get any news at sea? Here, every time you turn on the tele they’re knocking over those big statues and running crazy in the streets.”

“And the war in Nicaragua?” he asks, and she says, “Que vaina, muchacho, you think I work for telemundo?” But she shouts his question down the counter again and again is answered by a brief bombardment of conflicting opinions and obscure expletives, from which he’s able to deduce that the peace seems to be holding.

He blows his nose again. He must sit that way for a long time, lost in thought with the napkin held over his nose and his elbows on the counter, because Marilú taps his shoulder and says,
“Ahlo?
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone fall asleep in the middle of blowing his nose.”

He drops his hands, sees Marilú’s bemused smile.

“I’ll have a tea,” he says.

“Con limón?”

“Ajá. Gracias.”

“You want me to put these in water?” She gestures at his bouquet. He thanks her and she picks up the cone, looks inside, and laughs. “All this for one rose? Muy elegante. Did someone give them to you, or are you the giver?”

“Neither,” he says placidly.

She carefully peels back the ruined paper around the stems and stands the bouquet slantingly in a glass of water. When she brings him his tea, she asks if he’s from Nicaragua. There are a few Nicas who regularly came into the restaurant, she says, including a pair of married
butchers. Then she goes away to tend customers just coming in or leaving.

He’s hungry, but he can hardly keep his eyes open from the pressure inside his head. He sips at his tea and wonders, Y nosotros? Are we communists? Bueno, many say we aren’t and many, like my tíos, say we are. But, chocho, even in his BLI there was always some confusion about this, some said no and some said yes and many didn’t give a shit. Though without their weapons and money, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. Rodolfo and all the political officers must be talking and talking and talking now, trying to put the world back together, no? And here I am in Brooklyn, where I’m nothing. Do East Bloc ships still come to Corinto? Will the other ships come back? The world changes, and Capitán Elias never even mentions it. And here in this restaurant, it’s a little spurt of news between music, and good for a few jokes. And la Marta lies buried. A commemorative rock planted near her house. Amalia ruined, a vegetable in the military hospital. A hundred and forty-seven compas killed on the Zompopera Road, nearly a third of his BLI. Among how many tens of thousands more? And the world changes. Like a wind that drowns out voices and when the wind stops, you don’t hear the voices anymore. And I’m here, with la Marta’s watch—he takes it out of his pocket. It’s just past eleven.

“Papito,” says Marilú. He’s resting his head on folded arms now, and looks up.

“Your boat, Papito,” she says. “Don’t you have a boat to go to? Or somewhere?”

“Not anymore,” he says. She looks worried, so he says, “I don’t have to be anywhere until the morning.”

She gives him a don’t-lie-to-me look. “Are you really a marinero?”

“Ajá.”

“OK,” she says. “I mind my own business. But you’re planning to sit here all night?”

He shrugs. “Más o menos.” He looks at her green nails and a thought occurs to him: “Do you go to a manicurist for your nails?”

She smiles quizzically. “Cómo?”

“Your nails are pretty.” He feels flustered. “I have a friend, a manicurist, just around the corner. Joaquina.”

“Where does she work?”

“In that salon, El Salon Tropicana.”

“Claro, Gonzalo’s place. That little rubia, verdad? I’ve seen her. If she’s the same one who comes in here with Gonzalo now and then.”