by Nino Ricci
‘What she does is her own affair,’ he said gruffly. He turned back to his plate as if the matter were closed.
‘I see,’ my mother persisted, ‘but I also see that your children—’ she gestured with a tilt of her chin to the pictures hanging behind the captain—‘all have your features. Maybe for that you should be grateful.’
The captain set down his fork, and the tension in the room thickened; but finally he shook his head and made a sound that was half grunt and half laugh.
‘You’ve won your point, signora,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been accused of being a tyrant. I won’t be accused of being a poor sport as well.’
The tension in the room seemed to break now, and slowly conversation began to flow more freely. While the soup was being served, some of the officers asked permission from the captain to take off their jackets, which he granted with a slight nod of his head; and by the pasta course many of the officers had loosened their collars as well and rolled up their sleeves, the conversation punctuated now by peals of laughter. Empty wine bottles had begun to accumulate on the serving trolley, the stewards filling glasses with a heady regularity. Dr. Cosabene, sitting across from me, kept a bottle at his elbow for ready service, his glass always brimming; and once or twice, while my mother wasn’t looking, he winked broadly at me and reached over to pour a quick shot of wine into my gassosa, so that soon the room had begun to revolve slowly around me, like a great globe spinning idly on its axis. Only the captain seemed unaffected by the wine: he downed his glass as regularly as the others did, but the wine seemed only to harden him, the way drink hardened my grandfather, to make him draw more and more into himself like an animal into its lair.
Dr. Cosabene had been trying to edge himself into my mother’s conversation since antipasto. Now, as the stewards were dishing out meat and vegetables, an opening occurred, and the doctor slipped into it.
‘Scusi, signora,’ he said, leaning his bulk across the table with an air of confidentiality. ‘You know, normally I can pick out an accent right down to the province and town. But all night I’ve been listening to you and still I can’t place you.’
‘I was born in the king’s palace at Caserta,’ my mother said, talking more towards Antonio than the doctor, as if to close the doctor out of her joke. ‘But my mother gave me to the gypsies, to save me from the republicans.’
‘Ha, ha,’ the doctor laughed. ‘And now, no doubt, you’re running to America to save yourself from the gypsies.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Tell me, signora, if I may ask a personal question, how long before you deliver that little parcel in your lap. I ask, of course, out of professional interest, as a postmaster to a postman, so to speak.’
‘Who can say?’ my mother said, shrugging. ‘You know how the mails are.’
‘Ha, yes, very good. But only three months ago, you see, I delivered a baby on this very ship. A Calabrese woman. Two weeks early—the motion of the ship, you know. The water broke, and plop! The baby, unfortunately was stillborn—’
‘Doctor, please.’ Antonio had edged towards my mother protectively.
But the doctor opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness, as if the comment had been unavoidable.
‘Scusi,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to upset la signora—but I wonder why a woman in her state would travel? Why not wait another month or two, and have the baby at home?’
‘Sometimes it’s easier to carry a baby in your belly than in your arms,’ my mother said.
‘Ha, ha, you may have something there, it’s true. But still it must be hard for you—you’re in your last month, no?’
‘What a lot of questions you ask, doctor. Perhaps at one time you were a priest?’
‘Ho, ho, oh no, never a priest! Not even an altar boy—I’m much too honest for that kind of work. Though after all we work together, they take over where I fall short, heh, heh.’
As the stewards were clearing away our last dishes and setting out fruit, our meal was interrupted—a boyish crewman, apprehensive and grave, his sailor’s cap clutched in a white-knuckled hand, came into the room with a message for the captain.
‘There’s a storm, sir, we just had a wire from the Vulcania. The first mate thought you should have a look. Sir.’
‘All right.’ A look of fatigue crept into the captain’s eyes. ‘Tell him I’ll be up in a minute. The rest of you have ten minutes to get to your posts. Signora, you’ll excuse the interruption—Darcangelo will see you to your room after your coffee.’
Conversation died down quickly now. One by one the officers took their leave, offering apologies and goodnights to my mother, and in ten minutes only the doctor, Antonio, and my mother and I remained, and the stewards had begun to clear the table. The doctor was still drawing regular draughts from a bottle of wine in front of him; when a steward reached for it, the doctor made a sudden move to stop him and the bottle toppled forward, spilling out onto the table. My mother quickly drew back, but before she could get clear a bright stream of wine had spilled into her lap.
‘Addio,’ she said, rising abruptly. The steward, a boy of not more than fourteen or fifteen, hurried over mumbling apologies and began wiping at my mother’s dress with a napkin.
‘Watch where you put your hands,’ the doctor said. ‘After all, the lady is pregnant.’
‘Oh, scusi, signora!’ the steward said, blushing. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘It’s all right,’ my mother said. She took the napkin from him. ‘The doctor is just having his little joke.’
‘I was merely thinking of la signora’s health,’ the doctor said.
Dr. Cosabene stood and reached towards the other end of the table for a bottle that still had most of its contents intact. His glass in one hand and the bottle in the other he walked unsteadily towards a grouping of couches and low armchairs on the other side of the room.
‘I remember,’ he was saying, ‘a storm in ’33 that came out of the sky just like that, one minute it was blue and the next black as night, and this on an old ship left over from Caesar’s time. We had to tie ourselves to the deck so we wouldn’t get washed overboard. Nowadays on these big ships you could sleep through a storm and never notice a thing—’
He had eased himself now onto one of the captain’s couches and leaned forward to untie his shoes, his voice hoarse and strained.
‘We’d better go,’ Antonio said, taking my mother’s arm. ‘The storm may be hitting soon, and anyway you’ll want to get out of that dress. And the doctor, you can see, does not make a very pleasant after-dinner partner. Buonanotte, dottore.’
‘Eh? But it’s early still, why are you running off?’ The doctor had stretched himself out now along the couch, his white-stockinged feet protruding over one end. His bottle and glass he’d set on a low table in front of him, a larger replica of the table in room 213, with the same old brown map veneered over its surface, Europe abnormally bloated and large, America just a thin strip of bush across an endless ocean. Antonio had begun to lead us towards the door, but when the doctor saw us moving past him he reached out suddenly for the bottle he’d set on the table and held it towards us.
‘Oh, stay and have another small glass,’ he said. ‘Dai, the doctor insists. No? Beh, va bene, go to the devil then. E buon viaggio alla signora! Let’s hope that—’ But we were already out the door.
Outside, Antonio pointed to a patch of sky towards the horizon where the stars seemed abruptly to end.
‘It looks like we’re going to run right into the middle of it,’ he said. But beyond the rails the water seemed calm and still in the moonlight, only the waves from the ship’s motion disturbing its surface.
‘Should we put on our life jackets?’ my mother said.
But Antonio had become suddenly serious.
‘There’s no danger, really,’ he said. ‘All the same, it’s no fun to pass through these things. This is an old ship—all we have to control the rolling are tanks. They’re not nearly as good as
the fins on the newer ships.’
‘You worry about the tanks and fins,’ my mother said. ‘I just want to know if I can get a good night’s sleep.’
‘Keep a bucket by your bed.’
At the door to our cabin, Antonio paused.
‘Cristina, I don’t want you to leave your room during the storm. In your condition —’
‘Yes, yes, I’m tired of hearing about my condition. I’m not sick, I’m pregnant.’ My mother touched an orange she’d carried away from the captain’s table to Antonio’s nose. ‘Go, I’ll be fine. Go play with your toys, like a good boy.’
While my mother took a bath, I watched from a porthole for the coming of the storm. The sea had grown choppy now, sending up glints of reflected moonlight like secret signals; as I watched the waves began to swell higher and higher, with a thrilling suddenness, until they were lapping up as high as the portholes. The light of the moon and stars drained away, as if a canopy had just been drawn over the sky, only the glint of deck lights and other portholes shining out in the darkness. Heavy drops began to pelt against the porthole glass, and by the time my mother came out of the bath room the window had become a steady wash of rain and sea, the dizziness I’d felt earlier from the wine Dr. Cosabene had poured in my glass beginning to give way to a new dizziness, one that started in the pit of my stomach.
‘I think the storm has hit,’ my mother said. ‘All that wonderful supper is going to go to waste.’
Holding the frame of the bunk bed for support she eased herself onto the lower bunk. But as she settled onto the mattress she drew in her breath sharply.
‘Addio. Now my back is starting to go. I’ll be glad when I get this extra weight off of it.’
I abandoned my place at the porthole and went to my mother. The floor was listing noticeably now, the furniture beginning to creak against its bolts. The orange my mother had placed on the coffee table had begun to rock slightly back and forth, reluctantly, as if some tiny insect beneath were continually hurling its weight against the orange’s uneven bulk, trying to overcome its mute inertia.
‘St. Christopher will protect us,’ my mother said, taking me in her arms. ‘Look how he’s staying straight in the storm.’
But the painting of St. Christopher was moving too, scraping against the cabin wall in fitful jerks.
‘He’s not staying straight,’ I said.
‘It’s not the picture that’s moving, it’s the wall.’
‘Mamma,’ I said, ‘I feel sick.’
I was the first to start emptying my supper into the toilet. But not long after my mother followed, and soon the cabin had begun to reek with the smell of our vomit. The rolls of the ship had grown so steep now that it was impossible to stand upright without some handhold for support. Every few minutes another wave of nausea would wash over me, and finally I gave up stumbling up and down the ladder to my bunk and settled in my pyjamas on the bathroom floor, one hand clutched to the door frame for support and the other to my stomach, my feet gripping the floor to keep myself from sliding with the ship’s rolls. The bathroom light had begun to flicker like lightning, making my head swim; to blot it out I closed my eyes and listened for the low rumble of the orange still rolling to and fro on the coffee table, imagined it crossing and recrossing the misshapen oceans and continents veneered on the table’s surface, waited for the moment when it would exceed its bounds finally and drop with a dull thud to the cabin floor.
Every few minutes my mother lurched through the bathroom doorway, hands scrambling for supports, and eased herself down in front of the toilet. One hand clutching her back she’d begin to retch, with a violence that frightened me, her body jerking like a whip with each heave; in the flickering light she looked like a wild animal howling in a storm. But by her third or fourth visit she seemed to have coughed up the dregs of her supper, her heaves coming up dry. Her breathing had grown shallow and quick, and with each heave she threw her head back with a groan, as if a pain were passing up her spine. Finally her visits to the toilet stopped altogether, though I still heard her shallow breathing through the doorway, and every few minutes a pause and a groan.
Though the floor was still listing sharply, the churning in my own stomach had begun to subside; a long time had passed since I had last had to crawl to the toilet. My mother was muttering, words I couldn’t make out, her groans growing more drawn out and frequent, like the creak of a great branch slowly breaking beneath the weight of a storm. I had an image of her stretched out on her bunk with her swollen belly and matted hair, her head rocking back and forth; but I didn’t want to leave the bathroom to look at her, remained huddled on the floor there instead counting the number of times the ship rolled between each of her groans, now twenty-three, now twenty, now eighteen.
Finally she called out to me. She was lying with her knees up and her hands clutched to the bed posts; as I watched another pain passed through her and she squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Addio,’ she said when the pain had passed. ‘I wish we could do it just the two of us, without that drunken idiot.’
She smiled weakly, but tears had formed in the corner of her eyes. She squeezed my hand.
‘There’s nothing for it,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go for the doctor. Tell him—tell him the pains are only a few minutes apart. Take the stairs up to the main deck and go to the infirmary, next to the swimming pool. There should be a nurse there or someone who’ll know where he is.’
I stood irresolutely a moment.
‘Go on.’ She squeezed her eyes shut again and groaned. By the time the spasm had passed I was at the door.
‘Put on some shoes,’ she called weakly, but I was already running, weaving unsteadily towards the stairwell that led up to the deck.
XXX
The hall on the main deck was deserted, the silence there broken only by the tumble and creak of furniture and loose objects shifting and straining behind closed doors. Even the maintenance staff, who usually began to come out at this hour, had kept to their rooms—in the stairwell I had had to step over a few pools of vomit that had simply been left to congeal where they had fallen. The lights on the main deck were not flickering, but the infirmary, its door propped open with a rubber wedge, was dark. When I looked into the reception room, which held a few upholstered chairs and a large metal desk, I found it deserted; but it gave onto another room, beyond a partition of frosted glass, from which I heard a low moan. Inside, from the dim light filtering in from the hall, I made out about a dozen high tubular beds tilting precariously with the ship’s roll, their bolts creaking; and on one of them, facing away from me, lay a small woman in a nurse’s bonnet and uniform, her stomach pressed to the mattress.
‘Scusi,’ I said from the doorway. But the woman did not turn towards me.
‘Scusi,’ I said, louder. ‘My mother’s sick.’
The woman on the bed moaned.
‘Everybody’s sick,’ she said finally, her voice slurred and muffled by her pillow. She moaned again, then brought a foot up lazily to scratch her calf, her toe hissing like static against her nylons.
‘My mother told me to get the doctor,’ I said.
‘The doctor’s sick,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s probably throwing up in a closet somewhere, like everyone else.’ I stood uncertainly a moment, clutching the frame of a bed for support.
‘She said the pains are only a few minutes away.’
‘She’s lucky,’ the nurse said. ‘Mine are here right now.’
But I was suddenly sure where I would find the doctor, stretched out like a beached whale on one of the captain’s couches where we’d left him a few hours before, and already I was out the door and running again. I knew only one way to get to the upper deck, by the outdoor stairwell, and I headed towards the double doors at the end of the hall that led outside to the sun deck.
The ship was still rolling steeply, erratically, pitching sharply forward or back sometimes in the middle of a roll; but I had grown so used to the movement now, lul
led by it almost, that I’d lost any sense of the storm outside that was causing it. The portholes on the doors that led out to the deck were thick with rain, but they were too high for me to peer through, and preparing myself merely for the prospect of getting wet I pushed down on one of the bars that released the doors’ catches. But the door wouldn’t budge. I tightened my feet against the floor and leaned into the bar with my full weight, then again, harder; but still the door held firm. I stepped back about ten feet and made a running lunge; but though the door frame creaked as if about to splinter, the door did not give. Then on my second running lunge, the sea gave me a sudden boost, the ship pitching sharply forward and flinging me hard against the bar; and with a crack the door suddenly gave way, and I was hurled out into the storm.
I found myself sprawled on a deck thick with rushing water, my eyes blinded by wind and rain and my head reeling. I tried to stand but the ship was tilting to port, and a torrent of water caught me at the knees and flung me to the rails. For perhaps five seconds I stood pinned there by the roll of the ship and by the rush of water at my back, staring helpless as the ship completed its roll and the sea opened up before me like a jaw, so close I could have thrust my fist into it, the great wall of a wave building over me in a lengthening curve. But in the brief instant before the wave fell, all my fear suddenly drained away and I felt a tremendous power surge in me, as if I had grown god-like and could command the movement of the world at will; and for a moment it seemed the world had obeyed me, had become suddenly silent and still and calm again, frozen in an instant that might stretch on endlessly, give me time to crawl into the sea’s belly and find whatever spoils of storms and tempests lay half-digested there. Then as if in a dream the wave finally closed over me, and the world went black.
