The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  He’ll row out to sea like the Dutchman did. Just sit in the lifeboat waiting out there for a real ship to pass like the Dutchman must have, pick him up, give him work, wash dishes, anything, get his life going again just like that! The Urus has a lifeboat, and another embarkation deck where another lifeboat should be. Not like they’ll be needing lifeboats anytime soon, no? One afternoon a few weeks after they’d arrived, Capitán Elias suddenly ordered a lifeboat drill. They’d already spent much of that heat-torched day repairing the jammed, rusted winches that cranked the lifeboat davits forward and back over the embarkation deck—and finally succeeded! Seven ordinary seamen, including Esteban, hands, arms, and clothing black with warm lubricating grease, crowded in and sat in the boat waiting like nervously grinning astronauts for it to drop. But el Capitán stood by the release lever just watching, his lids partly lowered over something like contemptuous amazement in his eyes, thin lips pinching a paper clip smirk into his cheek, until an oppressive suspense filled the boat with a weight heavier than water. Capitán Elias, who was usually so polite and even friendly! Suddenly helpless rage had flooded Esteban like waves of nausea before vomiting: in a flash he’d understood that Capitán Elias had only ordered them into the lifeboat because he was frustrated and bored and for some reason had decided it would be amusing to see them sitting there—as if seeing them sitting there like that somehow confirmed some idea he already had about them! But the crew had been excited and eager to test the lifeboat because they were frustrated and bored too, and at least they’d fixed the winches! Capitán Elias then coolly said that that was enough, what did they think, that he was really going to drop the lifeboat? How were they going to bring it back up? Did they want to dive into that steamy muck and swim around, haul it out and carry it back up themselves? And when el Capitán turned away, he laughed, a high-pitched, short yelp of a laugh. They remained sitting in the boat, humiliated and stunned, as if each was privately wondering what he could do to recover his pride right now and coming up with nothing. Then, without uttering anything but a few low curses, they climbed out one by one …

  Sometimes, when Esteban is alone in the cabin and is sure that Bernardo is busy in the mess or with some other chore, he reaches into his suitcase and pulls out the dirty green sock which by now is his cleanest and most intact sock but which he has sacrificed to the wristwatch he keeps hidden inside—when capitán or primero isn’t there, it’s the only working watch or clock onboard now, the two clocks the crew has left being useless since they have electrical cords attached. It’s a little Mickey Mouse watch, with a red plastic strap, and though it still works, he’s never even adjusted it for the time zones passed through flying to New York. Sometimes he stares at the time as if at a mildly interesting insect wriggling in the palm of his hand. Usually he lies back on his bed and holds the watch to his nose, his lips, the worn-smooth plastic back of this watch, which holds no lingering scent or taste of her though it rode against her skin for however long she owned it before she gave it to him. Just as the time it counts, ticking forward, holds no trace of her either. Often he goes more than a week without taking the watch out and looking at it. Sometimes he just reaches into the suitcase, squeezes the sock, thumbs the hard little shape inside.

  Sometimes it drizzles for days at a time, the sky a cold sponge of gloom pressing down on the ship, frigid puddles seeping into their cabins—they miss the warm, sudden downpours of summer falling like hammer blows all over the ship, the thunder and lightning that made them feel as if they were in a savage storm at sea on a ship so sturdily navigated that not even a tidal wave could lift it or make it roll.

  Sometimes they see hawks and falcons circling, colorless, sharp specks high in the sky; they’ve never seen one dive towards the cove, but they’ve seen them doing so farther away, beyond the blocked horizon, out over the harbor. And in the sky over Brooklyn, they regularly see faraway, tight flocks of pigeons swooping and dipping like giant kites. Gull shit rains down on them.

  Sometimes at night Esteban hears brief crackles of gunfire in the distance, thinks of ambushes that are over in the time it takes a column of bodies to fall down, in the time it takes for a column of troop-jammed trucks to turn into an immobile wall of torn and twisted steel, smoke, blood, and screams…

  No one is quite the same person he was when he arrived in June, not on the outside, certainly not on the inside: time fills them like the stagnant air in a flourishing mushroom cellar.

  A dead ship, a mass of inert iron provocatively shaped like a ship, holds no snug dreamers at night, just fifteen fucked up marineros shivering and waiting for sleep. Every night they send themselves out on the same forced marches through the same interior landscapes of recalled, imagined, and reimagined pleasures, mostly having to do with love. But even the most pleasing and arousing and seemingly reliable love scenarios become harder and harder to bring to life after too many visits—though these keep smiling invitingly as if nothing has changed, smiling as if they really wish nothing had changed and are maybe even denying to themselves that they’ve grown bored and just don’t desire their lonely marinero’s callused touch anymore, they say tomorrow night it will be OK again but then it’s even worse; they fade, turn coldly reluctant and finally exasperatingly dull; they break your heart a little, when you just can’t bring a favorite love scenario to spectral life anymore. Then you have to, just have to turn to something or somebody else …

  But insomnia is also like another person lying in bed beside you, verdad, Esteban? It’s yourself, keeping you company. Your mind, lying brightly awake beside you, while you turn away from it, burying your face into a stinking mattress, your body exhausted from being exhausted. Insomnia is a woman lying perfectly still beside you while you toss and turn, Estebanito, sometimes she reaches out a dry, cool hand and caresses your pene so stealthily that not even the viejo sleeping with his eyes open will notice; or sometimes she reaches out a hand and touches your shoulder, reaches out all the way from that warmly lit, yellow-painted room in León; she’s one of two sisters who shares it, although, Esteban, she’s also lying right there beside you at the same time. It’s a school night and they’re listening to El Amante Loco de La Loma’s radio show. For all the manly Castilian butter of his voice, they say El Amante Loco is actually a Spanish dwarf who came to León with a Mexican circus and then stayed behind. But what a voice! She told Esteban once that just hearing it made girls shiver and smile. All you men out there, listen to what El Amante Loco de La Loma has to tell you: A woman doesn’t want your resentments, jealousies, your crazy bad thoughts, save that for the cantina, compañeros, or for that sad song you’re going to write, set it to music and then pretend it doesn’t belong to you. A woman wants joy, happiness, pleasure, and if she tells you she wants you to be that new modern man, to open up that sad birdcage in your heart and let all your complaints and worries and misfortunes come hopping, squawking and flapping out, don’t do it ’manos. Listen to El Amante Loco, he’s never wrong, never milks the wrong leg, amputates the wrong cow, pollinates the wrong train, boards the wrong flower, and now for this marvelous old bolero from Bola de Nieve … La Marta sits on the bed combing and combing her hair while the bolero plays, solemnly frowning as she forces herself to remember all the brave young compañeros fighting at the war fronts, her sister sitting on the opposite bed with an examination book open on her lap, lightly obliterating with her pencil eraser some equation she’s just realized she set down wrong. Both sisters wear long, loose, white T-shirts to bed, and lately Esteban lets himself briefly savor the smooth, sturdy curve of her bare thighs leading back into the shadowy crevice, a glossy centimeter of scar tissue on her gleaming shin like a foreboding amidst soft, brown angel’s hair. How long do we have left to live, sister? How many months and days left to you, to me? It will happen twenty-three days after the true love thing. Shhh, grosera, good night, turn off that ridiculous Amante Loco. Do you think he tells the truth? Leave the light on so Esteban can watch us. He doesn’t need light. Hi
s brain and lungs are full of light…

  Esteban pushes off his blankets, sits up gasping cold air. He’s never told Bernardo, never told anyone onboard, about the volunteer nightmare battalion from León, about la Marta and her sister. Once he told the viejo about Ana, the German shepherd tracking dog, and he kicked up such a hysterical fuss Esteban swore never to mention war to him again.

  He sits at the edge of the mattress tying on his boots with electrical wire laces and moments later steps from the short passageway out onto the deck and looks up at the lights of small planes scattering like mercury beads into the far corners of the night. A helicopter banking towards the glowing skyscrapers, abandoning its futile search for some sign of life from the Urus and her crew buried somewhere down there in the darkness. The decanted thunder of yet another descending airliner. The night sky is always busy, always awake too.

  2

  THEY FOUND A RAT SKELETON AT THE BOTTOM OF THEIR WATER TANK THE first time they took it down to refill it at the spigot at the foot of the pier, that’s why everyone but Panzón and Miracle was so sick those first few days in June; even Capitán Elias and Mark, but everyone knows they went to see doctors. But Capitán Elias brought them a clear plastic jug filled with something watery and almost tasteless to drink; it made everyone’s diarrhea worse and then left them constipated for three days. Sometimes, they’ve noticed, Mark, with a touch of friendly mockery, calls Elias “Doc.” Capitán Elias seems to know almost everything about the mechanical workings of ships, and el primero Mark seems to know almost nothing, though they can’t know this for sure, since he doesn’t speak Spanish.

  By the end of that first week onboard, nearly everybody already had a nickname: Panzón, sagging stomach so strong he was the only one who hadn’t gotten sick from rat water; burly El Barbie, after the doll, because he’s so loud, ugly, and macho; El Tinieblas, his hard, thin body covered with prison tattoos, a vivid black scorpion on each forearm, always speaking in whispers as if hiding in dangerous Darkness; Cebo, radiantly good-natured and built like an Adonis from so many years of deep-sea free diving for lobster, no one was sure exactly why Tomaso Tostado had decided to call him Fish Bait, but it seemed hilarious the first time and stuck; El Faro, the Lighthouse, wearing glasses and smilingly nodding and agreeing with whatever anyone says; Bonnie Mackenzie, El Buzo, his skin like a skin diver’s wet suit; Cabezón with his big head; Chávez Roque, Roque Balboa; Caratumba, the only Guatemalan; Pínpoyo, the pretty boy electrician; Canario. They’d tried Rambo on Esteban, and then El Piricuaco or El Piri, which means Rabid Dog, which the Hondurans knew was what la contra called their enemies in Nicaragua, but both names always made him look befuddled-crestfallen and later they’d come up with El Nieto because he was like the viejo’s grandson, but that wouldn’t stick either, maybe Esteban is slippery with nicknames (though in his BLI he’d eventually had one which made him blush and grin like crazy…). With a name like Tomaso Tostado, Tomaso Tostado doesn’t need a nickname. Bernardo is just the viejo, and José Mateo is just the cook, Cocinero.

  Throughout that first month Capitán Elias and el primero Mark were still coming to the ship every day, even Sundays, to share and guide the crew’s labor. They worked right alongside the crew from morning until dark and often later, their commitment to the task of repairing the ship setting a tone of concentrated urgency and optimism: they were in a hurry. They didn’t have all the time in the world. The port berthing fees were costing the owner a fortune. Soon the ship would sail. On hands and knees under the barbed sun, the ordinary seamen scraped, sanded, and chipped, scrubbed with wire brushes; and so did Mark, melting with sweat, cheerlessly and silently grimacing like a man clawing a tunnel out of prison with his fingernails. Orange extension cords and pneumatic cables ran from the generator and compressor on the pier up onboard, powering the few disc sanders, chipping hammers, grinders, and blowtorches they took turns using; plumber’s lamps for working below deck. All day long the industrial shriek of tools blasting iron numbed their ears and doubts. Capitán Elias, the electricians and mechanics immersed themselves in the engine room, attacking the dead forest of wiring and generator at their scorched roots, huddling over el Capitán’s small library of well-thumbed, grease-stained engineer’s and electrician’s manuals …

  Capitán Elias and el Primero always lock up the generator and compressor on their pier and take the keys with them when they drive off at night with Miracle in the back of the Mazda. Mark, when he and Miracle come alone—Miracle is Mark’s dog—drives a maize-colored Honda. Where do they go at night? Where do they live? They live in the city. Capitán Elias says his wife is an artist and a university professor—“An artist first,” Esteban heard him say once, “a professor second, and a wife, though she does love me, a distant third, soon to be an even more distant, over the horizon let’s say, fourth”—el Capitán’s wife is “expecting a baby.” El Capitán says his wife’s belly “is like a melon.” Hmmmm, qué rico. Why doesn’t el Capitán ever think to bring them a few melons? Even one melon. It would be great to eat a melon.

  Sometimes, when he’s in the mood, Capitán Elias becomes curious about the crew and politely asks them all sorts of questions about themselves, his tender sheep eyes so attentively fixed on their faces as they answer. And sometimes they question him. Capitán Elias says his father is British and his mother Greek, and mainly he’s lived in London, right here in New York, and all over Latin America, in the Amazon even, that’s why his Spanish is so good. He studied mechanical engineering, engine room mechanics, and ship design before switching to navigation and officer’s training at a nautical academy in Greece. He also studied medicine in London for a while. He’s tried his hand at lots of things, he’s very educated and worldly. This is the second time he’s been hired as a shipmaster. He says that someday he would like to open up a first-class Greek restaurant in New York, and own his own small fleet of cargo ships, and spend part of every winter in the Aegean and summers in Wiltshire, which is in the English campo. Personal questions always make Mark grimace; he never tells them anything about himself, hiding easily behind his lack of Spanish. Though Mark’s private life seems to be a constant topic of conversation between him and Elias, with el Capitán always seeming to give advice, which Mark eagerly or miserably accepts, nodding, ruefully smiling, frowning, or wincing. When Capitán Elias talks to Mark, he talks very fast, one hand hatcheting up and down, his vivid eyebrows fusing close together over his suddenly narrowing eyes, and sometimes, when he seems excited about the point he’s about to make, he pauses, then launches it in a surprisingly high, almost whinnying voice while his eyebrows arch up too. A few times el Capitán has turned to whichever crewmen might be standing nearby to translate what he’s been telling Mark and to ask what they think, and then laughed at Mark in a delightedly mocking way, while Mark scowled and rolled his eyes or grinned with embarrassment. Esteban was standing nearby the time Capitán Elias said that about women not wanting to hear a man’s resentments, jealousies, and crazy bad thoughts: “Mark has to learn not to whine in front of his women, no matter how much they love him, am I right, Esteban?” el Capitán asked. And Esteban taciturnly agreed, then spent the day pondering the advice. Though it didn’t seem to apply to any way he’d ever yet behaved, it seemed worth remembering. There’s something very unrelaxed and unhappy about el Primero, even though he smiles a lot and doesn’t ever seem mean-spirited the way el Capitán occasionally does.

  Capitán Elias keeps access to the bridge, officers’ quarters, and wings locked at night too, though they’ve all been up there in the day, where everything has been stripped bare of the teak paneling and brass fittings Bernardo says would usually cover the walls of the officers’ quarters on such a ship. Capitán Elias and Mark keep a table, a few chairs, a radio-cassette player, and two mattresses up on the bridge, though they never stay the night. The only remnant of the officers’ quarters’ presumed former luxury are three black-and-white tiled, nearly square, sunken bathtubs, each in its own cabinet
like little room. These are Japanese, Capitán Elias has explained, they work something like steam baths. Let’s fix the electrical problem, muchachos; once we have plumbing again we’ll get these baths going and then we can all sink our bodies down into those boxes of hot water and steam, have Japanese baths. Won’t that, el Capitán adds in English, exaggerating his usual accent, be bloody fucking marvelous. So the ship’s previous owners and officers, according to Capitán Elias, were Japanese. That explains the leftover sacks of roach-infested rice and the musty box of chopsticks they found in the galley, the rotted crates of rusting sardine cans left behind in a deep corner of the hold.

  From the starboard bridge wing they can see all the way across the harbor to the opposite shore: ships and fragile-looking cargo cranes in the ocean-hazed distance, oil refinery and storage tanks, factory smokestacks, bridges, church steeples, smoky hills beyond; looking south over waterfront warehouse and terminal roofs and trees, they can see the upper portion of the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor, green, oxidized arm in the air.

  The first time he climbed up there for a look Bernardo said, “When that statue walks, chavalos, this ship will sail.”

  The viejo never passes up an opportunity to remind them.

  Throughout the hot summer months, until just a few weeks ago, noisy groups of teenage morenos often came late at night to sit at the end of the pier, under the Urus’s prow. Los blacks was what Capitán Elias called them, and soon most of the crew began calling them that too. They were the only people during all those months that the crew saw from the ship at night, though sometimes cars drove into the lot behind the grain terminal’s ruins, stayed awhile, drove off into their own wobbling tunnels of light. Usually los blacks had two or more music boxes, all tuned to the same radio station; they drank beer from quart bottles and passed marijuana cigars, listening to their booming, shouted music. Sitting well out of sight up on the darkened deck, the crew always felt aroused by the sweetly pungent smoke—sometimes marijuana smelled like deliriously roasting meat—it made their taste glands tighten, faintly drifting up through harbor rot mixed with burning tobacco leaf, radio music and deejay crowing, laughter and shouted speeches. City life and sexiness happening just under their noses, down there on the pier! The crew tried to avoid any mention of the one night they’d left the ship and cut through los proyectos on their way into Brooklyn and Capitán Elias’s warning had come true; it was too depressing to talk about, the humiliation and their own cowering terror still popping away like camera flashes inside them whenever they thought about it or even imagined the possibility of lowering the ladder and trying to join the parties on the pier. Sometimes los blacks smoked something else in little stems they held like toy whistles to their lips, though the odor didn’t seem to reach them. Capitán Elias said it was “crack,” and in the mornings he’d often pause to idly kick the little glass vials this drug came in off the pier.