The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Page 13
“Over here.” The leader was standing in front of a small cave shadowed by the hilltop, smiling as he pointed at the entrance.
To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous. He couldn’t say why he thought so. With the adroitness of a minnow slipping through a net, the boy shifted his gaze away from Ryuji’s face and continued the explanation.
“This is our dry dock. A dry dock on top of a mountain. We repair run-down ships here, dismantle them first and then rebuild them from the ground up.”
“Is that right? . . . Must be quite a job hauling a ship way up here.”
“It’s easy—nothing to it,” the boy said, and the too pretty smile lit his face again.
They sat down on the faintly green, as though grass-stained, ground in front of the cave. It was very cold in the shade and the sea breeze spanked their faces. Ryuji bundled into his pea coat and crossed his legs. He had just settled himself when the bulldozers began their din again.
“Well, have any of you guys ever been aboard a really big ship?” he ventured, with forced cheeriness.
They glanced around at each other, but no one answered.
“You talk about life at sea,” he began again, facing his stolid audience, “you have to begin with getting seasick. Any sailor’s been through it one time or another. And I’ve known men to throw in the towel after one cruise, they’ve had such a hell of a time with it. The larger the ship is, the more mixing of rolling and pitching you get; and there are some special smells too, like paint and oil and food cooking in the galley. . . .”
When he saw they weren’t interested in seasickness, he tried a song for lack of anything else. “did you fellas ever hear this song?
“The whistle wails and streamers tear,
Our ship slips away from the pier.
Now the sea’s my home, I decided that.
But even I must shed a tear
As I wave, boys, as I wave so sad.
At the harbor town where my heart was glad.”
The boys nudged each other and giggled, and finally burst out laughing. Noboru was embarrassed to death. He stood up abruptly and, plucking Ryuji’s cap from his head, turned his back on the others and began to toy with it.
The anchor at the center of the large, tear-shaped emblem was girded with chains of gold thread and wreathed in laurel branches embroidered in gold and hung with silver berries. Above and below the emblem, hawsers of gold braid were looped in slack coils. The peak was bleak: reflecting the afternoon sun, it shone with a mournful luster.
Once, at sunset on a summer day, this marvelous cap had receded over a dazzling sea, becoming a glittering emblem of farewell and the unknown. This very cap, receding until it was free of the high injunctions of existence, had become an exalted firebrand lighting the way to eternity!
“My first voyage was on a freighter bound for Hong Kong. . . .” As he began to talk about his career, Ryuji felt the boys growing more attentive. He told them of his experiences on that first voyage, the failures, the confusion, the longing, and the melancholy. Then he started on anecdotes collected on voyages around the world: waiting in Suez harbor for clearance through the canal when someone discovered that one of the hawsers had been stolen; the watchman in Alexandria who spoke Japanese and conspired with merchants on the pier to foist various vulgar items on the crew (details of these Ryuji withheld as being unsuitable material for the classroom); the unimaginable difficulty of taking on coal at Newcastle in Australia and then readying the ship for the next load before they reached Sydney, a journey logged in a single watch; encountering off the coast of South America a United Fruit transport vessel and the sea air suddenly redolent of the tropical fruit brimming in the hatches. . . .
Halfway through his story, Ryuji happened to glance up and saw the leader slipping on a pair of long latex gloves. Tensing his fingers, the boy crossed them nervously again and again as if to glue the cold rubber to his flesh.
Ryuji ignored him. A bright student bored with class was acting on a caprice—a meaningless display. Besides, the more he talked, the more insistently recollection was prodding him; turning, he gazed at the thin line of condensed blue which was the sea.
Trailing black smoke, a small ship was teetering on the horizon. He could have been aboard that ship himself. Gradually, as he talked to the boys, Ryuji had come to understand himself as Noboru imagined him.
I could have been a man sailing away forever. He had been fed up with all of it, glutted, and yet now, slowly, he was awakening again to the immensity of what he had abandoned.
The dark passions of the tides, the shriek of a tidal wave, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal . . . an unknown glory calling for him endlessly from the dark offing, glory merged in death and in a woman, glory to fashion of his destiny something special, something rare. At twenty he had been passionately certain: in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.
Whenever he dreamed of them, glory and death and woman were consubstantial. Yet when the woman had been attained, the other two withdrew beyond the offing and ceased their mournful wailing of his name. The things he had rejected were now rejecting him.
Not that the blast furnace of a world had ever been his to call his own, but once he had felt the sun fasten on his flank beneath the tropical palms he missed so much and gnaw his flesh with sharp, hot teeth. Now only embers remained. Now began a peaceful life, a life bereft of motion.
Now perilous death had rejected him. And glory, no doubt of that. And the retching drunkenness of his own feelings. The piercing grief, the radiant farewells. The call of the Grand Cause, another name for the tropical sun; and the women’s gallant tears, and the dark longing, and the sweet heavy power propelling him toward the pinnacle of manliness—now all of this was done, finished.
“Want some tea?” The leader’s high, clear voice rang out behind him.
“Okay. . . .” Ryuji mused on without even turning his head. He recalled the shapes of islands he had visited. Makatea in the South Pacific and New Caledonia. The West Indies: seething with languor and melancholy, teeming with condor and parrots and, everywhere you looked, palms. Emperor palms. Wine palms. Surging out of the splendor of the sea, death had swept down on him like a stormy bank of clouds. A vision of death now eternally beyond his reach, majestic, acclaimed, heroic death unfurled its rapture across his brain. And if the world had been provided for just this radiant death, then why shouldn’t the world also perish for it!
Waves, as tepid as blood, inside an atoll. The tropical sun blaring across the sky like the call of a brass trumpet. The many-colored sea. Sharks. . . .
Another step or two and Ryuji would have regretted it.
“Here’s your tea,” Noboru offered from behind him, thrusting a dark-brown plastic cup near Ryuji’s cheek. Absently, Ryuji took it. He noticed Noboru’s hand trembling slightly, probably from the cold.
Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
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Footnotes
* In the neighborhood of five thousand dollars; one dollar = 360 yen. [Trans.]