by Jordi Puntí
When darkness fell, routine led me to the Rimini. I only had to walk in for the barman to start making my whisky sour and Sam to greet me from the piano, just raising his eyebrows and not looking at me. The British couple soldiered on with their project of getting through the whole cocktail list. If I spotted one of my day’s endeavors clasped in other arms, my pride took a blow. I bet with the guys at the bar on how long it would take before they headed off to one of the cabins. We also informed each other, with a spot of melancholy, about people who’d definitively left the boat. At some point Sam always played the opening notes of “Yesterday,” as if about to launch into a long overture, and then, when tears started pricking my eyes, he changed course and sang a completely different song.
If I’d taken the time to write a ship’s log, it would note that on the Tuesday, my fifth day on board, there were major changes. That morning the sky was dingy, with low clouds, and the light coming through my cabin porthole wasn’t as bright as it had been on other days. I woke up in a state of revived affective alertness. The previous night we’d left Naples behind and, as you might say, we were on the home run. My chances were dwindling. During my midday walk, attracted by a clamor of voices, I went into a ballroom, which I’d never entered before, and discovered one of the two women—the brunette—I’d semipursued the night of the fireworks. I watched her for quite a while and then deferentially approached. She was sitting at a table, jotting down a whole lot of names in a notebook. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was a presenter and was preparing for the karaoke duets championship, an activity designed so people could meet. She spoke a very amorous-sounding mixture of Italian and Spanish, and her voice was so persuasive that a minute later I was looking for my partner in the competition.
I found Anja from Sweden and, yes, she was my shipboard lady. I never asked how old she was but I imagine around forty-five. She was blond, married, a mother—doing the trip with her sister Marianne—very Scandinavian, and I’ll sum up her appeal and romantic disposition with the image of a black thong under white Bermuda shorts. Yes, on the prowl. In the karaoke duets championship, Anja and I did a song called “Guilty,” which Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb (the Bee Gees guy) made famous. If you know it, you’ll also know that it’s a very difficult song, especially the bits where his falsetto comes in. The presenter handed us a copy of the lyrics and we rehearsed a few times, hidden away in a discreet corner of the deck. We were laughing a lot. If Sam had heard us singing, he would have stopped speaking to me. Finally, because of the question of high and low notes, we decided that I’d be Barbra and Anja would be Barry, and this formal pirouette worked very nicely for us, to the point of our coming second in the championship. A pair of Belgians who sang “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell were the winners. They nailed it.
Anja pronounced my name French-style, “Moguí” instead of “Mauri.” Onstage, we learned to hold hands and gaze deeply into each other’s eyes as we sang falsetto, “We got nothing to be sorry for / Our love . . . is one in a million . . .” And it was true, we didn’t have to apologize for anything because our love—or whatever it was that united us right then and there—was one in a million. We didn’t have to feel guilty, as the title of the song suggested. A shipboard photographer, one of those guys who always want to capture your moments of happiness and sell them back to you at exorbitant prices, took our picture in the final round. If I look at it now—because I still have it—I think we were acting and that’s all. But I also relive, with a touch of nostalgia, the calm that suffused me when at last life swept me up and I knew my place on the cruise ship, the role that was mine to play in the cast of the floating opera.
That night we were invited to the official black-tie dinner. The winning Belgian couple, Anja, and I were seated at the captain’s table. At dessert time we were handed the runners-up cup for the karaoke duets championship. (Applause. Another photo.) It was silver plated and, hastily engraved on the front, were our misspelled names, Anya and Maury, the errors making the whole thing even more fabulous. We filled it with champagne, made a toast, and drank out of it together, our mouths very close. People came over to the table to congratulate us, calling us Barry and Barbra. The sparkle was with us all night. Anja and her sister had boarded in Naples, one day earlier, and their pleasure tanks were overflowing. They were unstoppable. First, the three of us, and then Anja and I alone—because Marianne gave us the slip and disappeared—drank exotic cocktails in a bar that imitated a bamboo hut, and then we went to dance in the nightclub.
In a fog of alcohol, without knowing how or why, Anja and I ended up in the tattoo parlor that night. Lying side by side on two beds, pants pulled down and finding it hard not to burst out laughing, we had our right buttocks decorated forevermore with a tattoo of a joyfully leaping dolphin.
Nevertheless, we still haven’t come to the major changes I announced before. I said that the main character is Sam Cortina. And, as tends to happen when you take the risk of staking everything on a single card, the tattoo operation dampened our euphoria with overly sore buttocks. Anja and I decided we’d meet the next day and keep celebrating in a more intimate manner.
“After all, we’re passengers on the Love Boat, aren’t we?” She smiled from the door of her cabin, which she was about to enter alone, and kissed me. “Have a good night, Barbra,” she said.
“Sweet dreams, Barry.”
Though it was late, instead of going to bed, I decided to round off the night with a whisky sour in the Rimini. Moreover, in one of our earlier conversations when Sam and I were talking about music, we’d started praising the songs of Steely Dan, those two guys we both liked a lot, and I’d challenged him. Could he adapt “Deacon Blues” for piano and voice? He was going to perform it for the first time that night.
When I got to the Rimini, I had the impression that the other drinkers at the bar looked at me with some relief, as if confirming that, in the end, I hadn’t let them down. The barman fixed my drink. On one of the sofas, entangled in the arms of a purser, I could see a squealing Marianne who sounded like she was getting ready for the fray. Sam ended his version of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and, with some relish, set about “Deacon Blues.” Breaking from his usual routine, he presented it as something new and dedicated it to me.
I couldn’t imagine it then, but “Deacon Blues” was the last song I heard Sam Cortina sing. Those five minutes are absolutely unforgettable. I’m still fascinated by the whole thing, the song and that night in the Rimini. Standing at the bar, without being able to sit on a stool because of the emerging dolphin on my buttock, I heard how the piano notes stripped the Steely Dan melody of all its electricity and dressed it up again in a new, more fragile, moving rhythm. It was as if that song of the seventies had gone back forty years to end up in the hands of George Gershwin, let’s say. I’d listened to the original dozens of times, but Sam’s voice made some of the fragments stand out. “I play just what I feel / Drink Scotch whiskey all night long / And die behind the wheel / They got a name for the winners in the world / I want a name when I lose . . .” The words seemed to have been written solely for Sam. Claiming a name from his isolation.
When he finished “Deacon Blues,” he took his usual break and came over to the bar. The barman served him his whisky without ice. Moved, I thanked him for his version, and when we shook hands, I could feel his whole arm trembling. The barman shot me a sideways look and raised his eyebrows. It was as if, when Sam sang that Steely Dan song, all sobriety had drained out of him, all the energy he had left.
He whispered in my ear, “Got a cig?” His breath stank of whisky and the words stumbled as they left his mouth.
“Let’s go out on deck,” I said. “We’ll have a smoke and get some fresh air. You’ll feel better up there.”
On the deck, he recovered slightly in the cool night air. We were astern, leaning on the railing. The ship’s engines churned up the water, leaving a whitish wake behind. We toss
ed our cigarette butts into it but they vanished in the dark before hitting the sea. Trying to revive him, because apparently he had to play again, I started talking to Sam about his adaptation and how he’d seemed to have taken over the song so easily and made it his. Then I asked if he composed any songs of his own. Among the covers he did, some were so free and personal that they sounded as if he’d written them himself.
“No,” he said brusquely. But a few seconds later he cleared his throat, getting rid of a bad taste, and went on: “I don’t write songs. I don’t make records. I told you the other day, I live on this ship. In eight years, I’ve had my feet on the ground a dozen times and then only to go from one transatlantic liner to another and change the scenery a bit. And now I must say this, too: Atlantic or Mediterranean, it doesn’t matter anymore. The sea’s always the same when you sail on one of these monsters, and the people are, too.”
“Can I ask why you’re inflicting this penance on yourself?”
He hesitated a few seconds and reluctantly—it was evident—said, “Because of a woman.”
“There’s always a woman.”
“And because of a song. But maybe it’s the same thing in this case. Oh, and it’s not punishment or penance, OK. As I see it, playing the piano every night is salvation. Look, I’m not a man of great ambition. Not anymore. There was a time when I thought I’d have the world at my feet. In the eighties, Las Vegas was the world for a pianist like me. One night some guys from a record label came and offered me a contract. The new Mark Murphy. Or, no, even better, the new Burt Bacharach, and that meant more money and more fame. I started composing, and the first song I wrote had a woman’s name.” At this point he paused and stared at me. An inner storm shimmered in his dull eyes. “First mistake: there are very few songs that survive a woman’s name. Angie. Diana. Michelle. Suzanne. Aline, if you must. Then you can stop counting. Mistake number two was premiering it in public before recording it. I won’t tell you her name. No need. I’d rehearsed it with a few guys in the casino orchestra and it sounded great. One especially brilliant night when my fingers were dancing over the keys and my voice was coming out with an intensity that had the public eating out of my hand—you can tell these things—I played it in one of the encores. We were at Caesars, the imperial colosseum, with an audience of nearly a thousand. She didn’t know. It was a surprise for her. While we were playing, I was looking for her in the audience, in the place where she always sat, and I couldn’t find her. Naturally. Because she was up in our casino hotel room packing her bag, taking everything with her. If she’d paid attention while she was stuffing my money into her luggage, she might almost have heard me singing out her name, declaring my love to the four winds. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as I’m sure you’ve heard, and the weirdest things seem totally normal.”
He went quiet again. He was woozy and clinging to the rail, trying to stay on his feet. He’d made several attempts to drain a few more drops of whisky from his empty glass. He was sweating and in the moonlight his skin had an unhealthy, pasty sheen.
The only thing I could come up with was “Life has many mysteries, Sam. You say you don’t play your own songs and that you don’t compose. Yet you make other people’s songs your own. For example, nobody plays ‘Yesterday’ like you do.”
“Steady, now. That’s enough.” He sounded as if he was calming a little boy he carried inside him but then let out a sarcastic laugh. Now he’d crossed some sort of line and couldn’t get the words out straight. “I don’t want to bore you anymore. We’re getting bored, aren’t we? Come on. The show must go on.”
I took him at his word. He got down the stairway clinging to my back, staggering, and when we entered the Rimini it was evident that his legs were giving way under him. The barman came over and told me that “the accident” didn’t happen very often but they’d been expecting this one for some days. Then he asked me if I’d take Sam to his cabin and gave me the number and a copy of the key.
The place where Sam Cortina had decided to bury his days wasn’t much bigger than a first-class cabin. In any case it seemed smaller because some of the space was occupied by an upright piano wedged against the wall in case of rough seas and because the objects that, over the years, might have found a place there were strewn around in the utmost disorder, as if the ship had come through a tornado. I took off his shoes and got him to lie on the bed, on his side. In a couple of minutes he was snoring. I didn’t want to snoop, but my admiration for the man led me to check out his belongings. A few signed photos hung on the walls. Among them I recognized Liza Minnelli, Dean Martin doffing his hat, and Petula Clark, who sent him a lot of kisses in the note she wrote. On the piano were several open scores, their pages coated in a film of cigarette ash. There was also a tape deck and a lot of recorded tapes, some of which were piled up outside their boxes, coexisting with a collection of mementos from cities where the cruiser berthed. The latter, bits of junk, looked very like gifts from some phony, spurious admirers. On the nightstand I found a picture frame with a Technicolor photo of a girl. It was slightly burned at the corners, had been ripped up and then very carefully stuck together again like a jigsaw puzzle. At first glance the girl, sitting in a typical diner, looking out at you with an adorable pose as if for some Pygmalion, seemed worthy of having a song written for her.
* * *
Sometimes I still wonder about the trophy that Anja and I won in the karaoke duets championship. She kept it. It was an ugly thing and I would have discreetly thrown it overboard one of those nights when the ship’s routine, the programmed fun, weighed on you like a tombstone. Maybe she did that; who knows? Or maybe not. Maybe she keeps it as major booty—materialization of short-lived happiness—and it’s decorating her house, on the mantelpiece over a Swedish fireplace. Her friends see it and read my name, Maury, and then Anja shows them the photo of the dinner and tells them cruise anecdotes while her husband struggles to suppress suspicious thoughts. But then again, they say Scandinavians see these things differently. Or maybe Sam Cortina ended up with it—which wouldn’t be at all remarkable—and today it’s gathering dust in his cabin next to all the other gifts that he doesn’t know how to reject because he’s a good man. And maybe the bottom line is that they keep him company. Oh, no, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Sam were now the guardian of the trophy. The last day of the cruise, when we set sail from Marseille en route for Barcelona, I met up with Anja again. We had dinner together in the ship’s most expensive restaurant, in candlelight, with jazz playing in the background. At some point in the conversation I told her about Sam Cortina and his songs. How he, this lonely guy, had made me homesick. After dinner and full of pride, I escorted her to the piano bar but Sam wasn’t there. On the stand, beneath his name, a tired old poster announced in three languages that the pianist was indisposed that night. In order to get over our disappointment, Anja and I repaired to one of the sofas, where we smooched until our butt-dolphins started hurting. The barman and the usual barflies looked on incredulously. Before we said goodbye, I asked Anja to promise that one night after I was gone she’d go to the piano bar and ask Sam Cortina to play “Deacon Blues” for her.
Sometimes, when I come out of the shower and am alone in the bathroom, I look at my cavorting dolphin in the mirror. My wife knows I had it tattooed during my week of expiation on the Wonderful Sirena. I occasionally suggest that we should do a Mediterranean cruise, but she claims she wouldn’t be caught dead on a ship with such a stupid name. It seems to me that she’s afraid to discover what I experienced that week, or maybe she prefers not to know. Maybe I prefer it, too. But the thing is, I miss the tap dance fingers and velvet voice of Sam Cortina. What could have become of him?
MATTER
At first the movement is excruciatingly slow. He knows he has to open his eyelids and the world will gradually get going, like a turntable with the needle on a 45 rpm. The cracks composing his first view are random. There’s no lineal order, no sequence he might have foreseen before
closing his eyes. Sensorial perception is messily activated. He starts putting together the first details, now imposed in flashes that refuse to go away: car brakes squealing two meters from his ears; the repetitive cadence of traffic lights (like three-layered ice cream); a throbbing at his temple later reverberating in his pulse as a painful echo; the legs of passersby; unfolded newspapers; a child’s crying; dry skin being scratched by fingernails; the hobble of a lame pigeon; the rough texture of the pavement beneath his buttocks; the smell of a warm croissant spreading over the ground mixed with his own piss . . . It seems impossible, but as the whole thing starts orchestrating and picks up the necessary tempo, the voices lose gravity and the background music is less opaque. The nausea’s going away. Signals link up and sounds are sharper. Now he’d like to find some explanation for this mystery stubbornly binding him to life. Now he’d like to be ready, because the city will soon be a symphony of movements, a map of nerves, veins, muscles, and umbilical cords, and Lord knows where they start and where they end. By the time the revs get up to 45 and the urban music is echoing in the vault of his cranium, he’s ready, too. He opens his eyes wide. He gets up, taking it slowly. He runs his fingers through greasy hair, tries to smooth over the eternal creases in his pullover and trousers and, while he’s at it, dust off sleep. He takes two or three steps and then goes back. He seems to be exploring the two square meters where he’s slept. He tries to get his bearings, reconstruct the world. He puts his hand in his pocket and his fingers recoil in horror: he finds a knot of cloth that could be covering anything, but he can’t remember what. Right now everything is possible: a few walnuts, half a dozen coins, a dead bird, a live mouse. Someone walking by curses and the incomprehensible words make him stagger. To calm down, he joins his fingers as if praying and passes them over his belly. This trick always works. But it’s early in the day and now his stomach’s telling him it’s hungry. He’s not sure whether to take another step or stay where he is, and his feet, which don’t always obey, move in opposite directions, four steps of an impromptu tap dance. He stays where he is because a flash of sunlight dazzles him. It’s then that, without warning, a mute shudder sets out from the deepest depths of his being, an expansive wave rising until it finally comes out of his mouth. Now, yes, he does take two steps forward, opens out his arms, making the shape of a cross, and there, in the middle of the street, as if everyone has to celebrate this instant of a morning epiphany, he yells at the top of his lungs, “Matter obeys God!”
