Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz

  I forgot myself and said improvidently: “It’s because you’ve formed a kind of vicious circle and there’s no side release. Pins need pincushions—take a pincushion and put it on the table between you.” Smith’s mouth dropped open, and he looked at me with respect. “I’ll be sc ... Mr. Zantman! We had you for a greenhorn, sir, but it’s clear you’re a seasoned mariner. You have experience!”

  “God forbid! I assure you .... It’s quite by chance .... What are you saying, Mr. Smith? I’ll be angry with you. I give you my word of honor, this is my first time at sea!” I spluttered, deeply embarrassed.

  “You’re a devilish seasoned mariner!” repeated the lieutenant, bowing to me. “Come along now, sir! Don’t play the fool! You must have sailed to your heart’s content on all those damn ponds, the Red and the Yellow, and the Okhotsk, and the Sargasso, and the China, and the Arabian.—You’ve never sailed? Come now, sir, you have the flair of an old sea wolf; you go directly, as they say, to the root of the matter. A pincushion—yes indeed! That’s the best remedy! If we put a pincushion down we’ll stop jabbing one another at once.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I’ve just remembered I left a spirit stove burning in my cabin; the coffee may boil over.—Excuse me, Mr. Smith.”

  Around four in the afternoon I saw pelicans playing with deep-water fish. Two of them glided in from the southwest and began wheeling over the ship. Pelicans are big snow-white birds with large crops and extraordinarily sharp bills a meter long. Of course they cannot dream of managing to swallow a shark or whale, but they are tempted by their absolute superiority over those marine monsters, arising from the fact that neither sharks nor whales can fly. This tempts them and gives them no peace. For that reason they fly quietly up and—plop—they plunge their razor-sharp bills into the back of a deep-water fish that is fleeing into the depths or thrashing about, trying to leap out and chase after the pelican into the forbidden element of the air. The deckhands interrupted their work in order to stand and stare, which brought down on them an awful series of curses from Smith.

  “Scoundrels,” he bellowed at the compact, silent group—“worthy gentlemen! Thompson!—you’re the worst of them, I’ve got my eye on you, you swine, Thompson! I’ll have a word with you this evening! You and I—Thompson—we’ll have a word—this evening—you’ll see.”

  Then he began to confess to me that as far as the crew were concerned, they were old stagers, old hands, rovers gathered from every port, who needed to be kept tightly by the throat.—“All they think about is how to wheedle their way out of work and lie there on their backs. For instance there’s one of them, by the name of Thompson; he’s the worst of them.”

  “The worst?”

  “Thompson? He’s a leech. Take a look at his mouth—it always forms itself into a little snout, as if poised for sucking. He hides it, working like everyone else, but I told myself I’d show him at the first opportunity, and I’ll show him this evening. He’ll be so frightened he won’t be able to stand when I show him.”

  “The mouth,” I said in a conciliatory manner, “is probably because he’s a mammal, and they suckle. Everyone is a mammal. We belong to the family of mammals.”

  I delicately expressed some doubt concerning the torso movements, the foot-staring and the recitations of “Fish and sea birds feed behind the ship.”—I spoke cautiously, with a certain moderation, and indicated as if in passing that it was possible to have too much of a good thing. To this Smith replied that he thought I, a seasoned sailor, was making fun of him. After all, worse things happened in the waters of the Far East with the Chinese. Or on the Aden-Pernambuco line, where they were constantly using melted stearin. The torso movements were intended to develop flexibility of the spine, while staring at one’s feet was a punishment for inadequate cleanliness—whoever had dirty feet had to stare at them for almost an hour. And as for the line: “Fish and sea birds feed behind the ship”—it sounded like a handwriting exercise and in fact the point was to inscribe it in the sailors’ brains in a pearly roundhand.

  “A brig like this moves of its own accord, unless there’s a storm. I mean, the sailors can’t keep endlessly scrubbing this grr ... frr ... deck, or they’d scrub it into oblivion. And discipline must be maintained, these scoundrels have to be kept in line; and so the captain chose that rather than anything else.”

  “Oh, rather than anything else.”

  “Yes, the captain’s a seasoned, experienced sailor too, a genuine sea wolf. You ought to get to know him better, Mr. Zantman; I’m sure you gentlemen would find a great deal to talk about.

  “The old man has often said to me,” continued Smith, “‘Mr. Smith, what are the duties of the captain of a ship: He has to think things up, because otherwise everything would go mad from boredom. You, Mr. Smith, should think things up with your mug, and I should think things up with my head, and that’s all the difference between us. And now, what am I to think up, Mr. Smith? After all, darn it, we can’t play ball, Mr. Smith. After all, confound it, we’re not children, Mr. Smith, in short pants.’”

  “Ahem—so playing ball is childish, and those, ahem ... legs ... aren’t,” I said with a cough.

  “Certainly,” he replied swaggeringly, “the legs—aren’t, because which of us doesn’t have corns?—and at the same time they maintain discipline among the crew. They have to perform everything without a murmur. The same with the pin—by God!—it was utterly mad—insane—brainless. How do you like that, Mr. Zantman? Come now! You, with your experience, cannot fail to admit that’s right. That’s how things always are, everywhere. Without that we’d drop dead from boredom.”

  He licked his finger and raised it to the wind.

  “All the more so because the wind is dropping and it seems there’s a danger of a sea-calm. Sh ... godda ... ff ... pl .... That’s always the way. You know the saying—water and boredom are the sailor’s elements.”

  Toward evening I saw some large flounders and I discerned the head of a hammerhead shark three or four inches below the surface.

  Captain Clarke appeared on the bridge and beckoned to me. Smith must have been gossiping with him about the pincushion and about how I was a seasoned mariner—since the captain now treated me entirely differently than before, even giving the impression that he wanted to sound me out. He evidently thought that I knew something he didn’t, or that I was somehow able to set myself up so I was less distressed. When I climbed up to the bridge, Clarke said:

  “Boredom, sir. Sea boredom.”

  “Hm,” I replied.

  “Not a pleasant thing, boredom. Eh? Not pleasant. Things are boring. It’s not clear what.”

  “It’s bearable,” I said. “It’s not so boring as all that. There’s the water, the fish ...”

  “Come now, sir, Mr. Smith has told me,” said the captain amicably, nudging me. “You must have your own ways of dealing with boredom, so you’re not bored. If I only knew. That pincushion, ho ho. It’s just that you don’t want to share them, you’re being miserly ... hm ... hm ... you’re saving it all for yourself.”

  “Nothing of the sort. Really, I’ll be angry with you, captain. Smith’s been talking poppycock.”

  “Now then, let’s not get offensive! I just meant to indicate that you’re the kind of man a person can talk to, Mr. Zantman, you’re not like any old landlubber—and you don’t need to conceal it from us—I don’t understand why it matters so much to you .... Well, but you’re free to do what you want.”

  I was in a very disagreeable and difficult position and I cautiously plucked at a button on my jacket, since Clarke had a vein in his temple that stood out clearly against the receding corners of his forehead. He suddenly grew morose and began to scratch himself behind the ear.

  “Boredom,” he said, returning to his old topic, kicking something with his feet—“boredom. I signed a contract with the company and now I have to travel the Birmingham-Valparaiso run, to and fro. What the hell is it? It’s boring on land—the trams, the bars—land boredo
m drives you to sea. And what happens at sea? You’ve already set off—you’ve already left under full sail—the coast is disappearing—you’re already being rocked—the trail astern is already churning—and all at once boredom, eh? Sea boredom.”

  “Nature is standing in the way,” I murmured, clearing my throat. “Such is nature.”

  “What do you mean?” said Clarke.

  “Nature doesn’t like it,” I murmured. “It doesn’t like it.”

  “The best thing for boredom is your companion the pipe,” he said mawkishly. “Whiskey’s good too—biting your fingernails—taking snuff ... if someone has a cavity in their tooth, then poking the tongue in it. If there’s an itch it can be scratched—you know, in Mukden I once went into a club; there were four captains having lunch, and they were all scratched till they bled, all scratched up as if they had a rash. And what about you, Mr. Zantman?”

  “Me?—I sometimes ...”

  “I was just thinking that you look so fresh and ruddy,” the captain said with interest. “I swear—it’s as if you’d never let go of your mommy’s skirts. How do you do it?”

  “But, captain, I really ... I assure you.”

  “Ha ha ha ha ha,” he laughed at length. “Ho ho ho, you’re quite the slyboots, Mr. Zantman. But I’m not going to force you, since you don’t want to; in the end, let’s agree that this is your first time —ha ha ha ... We could use a bit of a storm, eh?” he added, nudging me once again. “Then we’d have a decent ride, eh? And here a fellow’s dragging along—and in addition the wind’s dropping. I’m all twisted up—it’s so boring—dammit—I can’t stan ...”

  “That’s unhealthy,” I said. “Very unhealthy. Bad thoughts. Bad thoughts come.”

  “Blast it,” muttered the captain. “Just look at those masts. They’re so foolish standing there. It’s foolish. And I’m also standing foolishly. I’m standing, and this glass is standing too. Tell me, what can be done with a glass—it can only be smashed, eh? And that’s what I did yesterday evening. On this sh ... brig nothing happens from morning to evening. When I look at this rail”—he struck it with his hand—“and I see that it’s still gleaming so foolishly—I look at it and I feel like leaping out of my own skin.” He started complaining painfully, in a low voice, that everything was foolish—foolish. “Everything has to be cleaned, everything in its place, the sailors don’t do anything but scrub and clean for days on end. On ships, as you know, an inordinate, simply excessive cleanliness is in force. What the hell for? Or those flying fish ... Just tell me, why do they jump so foolishly out of the water—there, take a look”—he showed me one that flew over the deck in a high arc—“That’s foolish too, foolish as anything. Tell me, why do they do that, eh? I mean, they don’t have wings.”

  I replied after some thought that this phenomenon should be ascribed to certain specific properties of these gill-bearing creatures, which are capable of swelling themselves up to such a degree that at a given moment the water cannot take it any longer and expels them, out of fear that they might burst. In the same way some land toads often swell up with cigarettes to terrifying proportions, but the land, which is worse in this respect than the water, does not let them go and for this reason they burst.

  “By my word!” cried the captain with unaccountable excitement. —“Ha ha ha! That’s right! That’s it! You’re a one, sir! Of course—the little rascals! Swell up, get frightened, and that lily-livered f ... water is afraid and expels them—ha ha! It’s afraid, dammit—it’s filled with fear, it’s in a funk, in a funk! In the throat! In the throat and by the throat!” he shouted in delight. It seemed that my words had aroused some kind of terrorist streak in him. —“Bravo, splendid! How could I not have thought of that. You’re a real expert. You’re a naturalist,” he added, swelling slightly and looking at me with admiration. “And you say you’ve not traveled?”

  “I know a little about nature,” I said, “but only theoretically.” I started coughing, said it was growing cold, and returned to my cabin, which I did not leave for the whole of the following day.

  That day (the following one) there once again occurred a curious incident, which I, however, did not see (since I was in my cabin). It is common knowledge that sharks are extraordinarily voracious, hence the expression “sharklike appetite.” Well then, the galley boy accidentally dropped a large copper saucepan in the water, and the saucepan—snap—instantly vanished into a greedy maw. This fact brought him such pleasure and such bizarre delight that he could not resist, and also threw overboard a few forks, which were caught in midair; and then he began to throw out everything he could get his hands on, which meant plates, kitchen knives and table knives, teacups, his own pocket watch, a compass, a barometer, his three-month salary, and a full set of the sailing encyclopedia. Smith caught him as he was tearing the shelves from his completely stripped cabin. It can be imagined what happened next. The lad came down with malaria that same evening and, it seemed, would not appear again till the end of the voyage. Either way, we were deprived of necessities and we had to eat our omelette straight from the frying pan. Learning of this occurrence, I frowned and said to myself, though rather loudly and wisely, as if it mattered to me that someone should overhear: “Aha, right—that’s very wise. Very well thought out. This is an illness well-known in medicine, involving a certain obduracy—it is, to speak scientifically, a particular kind of tumulus, the result of a certain lack of control—it’s a certain kind of delight derived from imperfections of the senses and from errors of instinct blinded by undue voracity, a certain, one might say, fascination with automatism, in a word an illness that is as it happens automatic, arising from the application of great universal forces of gravitation, projection, and hunger to a game of blindman’s buff. And on top of this—how will the objects ache in the belly?”—Yet a moment later the muscles of my face relaxed; on it there appeared an awful, hopeless foolishness, and I said more quietly: “Oh Lord! Very well, but why so foolishly? Why so foolishly, emptily, incessantly, without a break, without a single moment of respite, why so foolishly-wisely and wisely-foolishly somehow? Someone’s being wise here and someone’s being foolish; oh Lord, grant at least five minutes’ respite.” And I even allowed myself to add: “It’s as if I’m in a dark forest, where the bizarre shapes of the trees, the plumage and calls of the birds entice and amuse with a curious masquerade, but from the depths of the woods there comes the distant roar of a lion, the thunder of the buffalo and the creeping step of the jaguar.”

  2

  The Banbury was advancing ever more slowly. The sun was burning ever hotter; melted tar dripped from the sides of the vessel into the sea, the sea was sapphire blue, and the water used to scrub the deck evaporated into the equally sapphire-blue sky. Captain Clarke appeared on the bridge, licked his finger, and said:

  “I knew it—the breeze is dying down. And it’s quite possible that we’ll have an adverse wind. Mr. Smith—have them put up the side foresail. On this run it’s always the same way—always, whether we’re going to Valparaiso or coming from Valparaiso, there’s an adverse wind. And this is called sailing? This is sailing! This is supposed to be sailing!” he shouted furiously.

  A school of dolphins remained by the stern. They were not after meat—their only wish was to scratch themselves a little against the ship’s rudder, since they were suffering terribly from water lice. It was not often that they had such a golden opportunity—a solid object in the boundless waters against which they could rub themselves. They would swim about the ocean for weeks on end in search of such an object. Yet they did not see that the ship, though very slowly, was nevertheless moving forward, and they were continually missing the edge of the rudder by a couple of inches. The wretched fish, failing to understand the reason, kept repeating the maneuver unsuccessfully.

  On a sheet of paper I noted the following: “I feel there’s too much of all this. Dolphins missing the edge of the rudder, rats biting their own tails, sailors who stare at their own feet and strai
ghten their bent backs, pelicans jabbing the backs of whales, the captain and the lieutenant jabbing each other with pins, whales incapable of rising in flight above the water, flying fish that on the contrary swell up so much that the water cannot stand the pressure and expels them into the air—this is all decidedly too monotonous. I imagine that from time to time something different could be shown. If I’d known it would be like this I never would have set off on a voyage. A little tact wouldn’t go amiss. Repeating the same thing over and over is dotting the i, utterly unnecessary—and furthermore, someone might suspect something.

  “Besides, sights are one thing, but on the part of the captain and Smith there’s now a glaring lack of tact; those feet and those pins are impossible, and the conversations are even worse. What’s supposed to be the meaning—pardon me—of these confidences? ‘We mariners’—what does ‘we mariners’ mean? Who wishes to ‘rock’ here; what’s the meaning of ‘drive’ and ‘devouration,’ what’s the meaning of ‘boredom’ and ‘getting carried away’? I have no desire to know. It was clearly a tip of the head in my direction—they’re all tipplers. They’re tipplers and people with disastrous tendencies, cocaine or morphine addicts I’ll wager, thoroughly corrupted in some Pernambuco somewhere. I’m not going to talk to them any more. I’m not a mariner and I want nothing to do with the captain’s nautical ‘imagination’ and his nautical ‘boldness.’ I’ll try cautiously (since the sock is after all still lowered) to loosen our relations. I’ll put Smith in his place too, with his ideas and his gimlet. It’s not true that I spoke about the pincushion or the flying fish (something’s bound to pop out from time to time, since they’re always on at me) so they would immediately declare me a ‘seasoned mariner’ and initiate me into everything, whether I want it or not.