The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  He sits in the sand of the old terminal, listening to the buoy bells out in the harbor, the doves in the dark, clutching the plastic sack of wood chips to his side. Hates this taste and texture in his mouth, like the inside of a rotted aguacate shell, the itch in his crotch and ass, along his scalp, this passive filth caking him. Faint, chilly shudders—must be related, somehow, to the cold in his lungs—drift up and down through the skin of his legs, light as cobwebs, somehow inside his very skin, not over or under. Yet for the first time in months, he thinks, he’s done something that lets him feel like he’s slipped back into himself. If she could see him now she’d be less disillusioned with him than she would have seeing him yesterday, no? So he lies back in the sand clutching the plastic bag tightly against himself as if he loves it.

  In a pasture just outside the town he sat with la Marta in his arms under a fruitless papaya tree, leaves like big, green, floppy ox ears. Rotting jocotes fermented in the grass under other trees, drawing wasps. Now and then an aguacate leadenly plummeted from a high branch in its towering tree, crashing through lower ones with almost the same sound a falling mortar shell can make before it hits and explodes: when she jumped inside his embrace, turning to clutch at him, he saw the sweaty strand of hair stuck to her cheek under her panicked wild stallion’s eye and he felt so in love.

  There were some cattle in the pasture, and that night his battalion was going to eat one of those oxen. The campesino who owned this small herd would be paid for his ox, though not enough to make him very happy about it. They’d roast it in big slabs over an open pit, long ribs standing up in the flames like the walls of a fortress in an infernal siege. Though he didn’t know that yet, if he had he would have ogled the herd, wondering which one, perhaps marveling that that very night a chunk of that sinewy ox over there was going to be in his belly mixing and fermenting with whatever he could drink of Marta. She and Amalia and some of the other survivors of her Nightmare BON were going to be invited to dine with their heroes of the BLI, and there she was going to learn that everyone was calling him Squirrel now.

  He held her under the tree with his arms wrapped around her soft, warm waist, under her breasts and the squirrel. The first few times he’d licked and kissed la Marta’s chichis, sturdy, ash brown nipples in big, soft globes, he’d worried about getting rabies or something, because she said the squirrel was always peeing, though its pee was like a few droplets from an eyedropper and hardly smelled and dried so quickly you barely noticed. Now he’d just told Marta that as an infant Rubén Darío had wandered off from his house one day and his family had run around in a panic looking for him and finally found him in a pasture just like this one, sitting underneath a cow drinking milk right from its udder. Was she surprised he knew stories like that? About the great poet, eh? No, she knew that story too, of course she did, hadn’t Darío spent much of his childhood in León and then come back after all his years of glory in Europe just to die there?

  “I dare you to do that,” Marta said. “Get under one of those cows and drink milk from it.”

  “Those are not cows. They’re oxen.”

  “Ah sí? What about that one there?”

  The cow’s ribs pushed against its hide as if about to rip it open, and its flaccid udder was mottled with mud and bits of straw, dotted with tics and flies. But he thought about it anyway.

  “I don’t want to,” he said finally, letting himself sound too sleepy to move. “Darío was an infant when he did that.”

  “Ve?” She grinned. “You don’t love me so much anymore.”

  He said he didn’t like milk that much anyway, which was true. She reached her arm back, around his neck, turned towards him, and they began to kiss. Both their hands were always grimy and smelling of gasoline and gun grease from the daily task of weapons cleaning.

  Yesterday, when he’d unbuttoned her shirt in this same pasture, he’d said, Breasts like anvils and garlic. Told her that was from another poet, puta, forget his name. That made her laugh. La Marta didn’t laugh much, but when she did, her laughter was like a gleeful child hiding inside her. She said she’d never suspected that being in a BLI was like taking a poetry class! Bueno, jah! not exactly, but his company’s political officer was obsessed with reciting poetry.

  Her eyes were like buzzing honey hives whenever they looked into his. She was already in love with him, he felt sure of it, if he’d ever been sure of anything in his life he was sure of that. Impossible to believe that in another few days he’d be back in the war. Amalia had rebuffed Esteban’s friend Arturo and was appalled that her sister could lose herself in love so quickly amidst all their death, but Amalia had a novio back in León. La Marta looked up to him. Up to him. It was as if she needed his breath, sometimes they’d put their mouths together and just breathe air in and out of each other’s lungs, hot air in and out, in and out, in and out of each other’s mouths and lungs. No time to lose: the seconds and touches bearing them away nibble by nibble like the sail-shaped shards of leaves carried aloft by long caravans of leaf-cutting ants. Twice they’d fucked outdoors already, not daring to get fully naked, and each time they’d been spotted by little brats, campesino cipotes who weren’t content just to spy but finally had to announce their presence, throwing clumps of dirt and rotted jocotes at them from their hiding places behind the brush-covered small hills at the edge of the pasture, one hit him with a wet splat right on his bared nalgas just as they were doing it. They had to find someplace else to go. He’d heard about two brothers whose parents had left them in charge of their two-pump gasoline station when they went to live in los Estados Unidos and who ran that small Red Cross station on the hill too; the brothers supposedly liked to seduce their own muchachas in the ambulance, and some in the battalion had already found out that they’d lend compas the use of the ambulance for that too. He lifted her arm, pushed back her sleeve to look at the red plastic Mickey Mouse watch: he was almost due back. And began undoing her shirt. Tomorrow, the ambulance. The faint baked, fecal scent of mud, sweat, and fear that never seems to wash out of military fatigues, that smell always stronger in the heat. The tangy, salty taste of her neck. Kissing her cheeks, he’d think that in fifty years he’d still be kissing these cheeks, they’d tell their grandchildren how they met in the war—the famous war for the future of their country, for the future of the world, for the future of Esteban and Marta!—in Quilalí, when she went around with a wild squirrel tucked between her breasts and came so much closer to death than even he.

  * * *

  A dentist’s and a finquero’s daughter. Who loved la Revolución. Because la Revolución helps those with money too, no? Maybe more than it helps the poor who, ni modo, usually want most from la Revolución the very things it can’t seem to grant: more to eat, more to buy and sell, peace. But those who already have money want something else, things that can be named but not really touched and certainly not eaten, and these la Revolución does seem able to provide, especially if you’re lucky enough to have been drafted and put in a BLI. And so she looked up to him. So she should have, because without the BLI, he would have been no one. Someone else entirely, whom she would never have looked twice at, and would have had no reason to.

  Bueno, her family wasn’t rich anyway, they were cómodo, and now barely that. Though as children, Marta and Amalia had even been taken to visit Disney World, in Florida, and another time to Miami, and once to Philadelphia, where they’d stayed for a whole year. La Marta lived with her family in an old colonial house with mildewed pink walls taking up half a block in León. Marta’s mother was the dentist, working in a state clinic, still treating former and wealthier patients on the side: she was the ardent revolutionary, the Sandinista. Her mother took Marta and Amalia three times to see that movie Apocalipsis Ya to learn about the yanquis, except it backfired when both sisters developed a crush on the blond young soldier who water-skis and ends up, pobrecito, going crazy. Esteban had seen it too, in Corinto, that scene when the yanqui helicopters come flying in over the oc
ean with symphony music blaring from speakers and incinerate that Vietnamese village, the whole packed movie theater suddenly airless from everybody gasping and holding his breath, everybody thinking the same thing: chocho, the yanquis might come and do that to us any day now. They’d already mined the harbor, blown up the oil storage tanks, and every day the news brought more threats. How could anyone not feel a sickening terror just thinking about it? Marta’s father had had two fincas where he grew cotton and raised cattle, but the government had expropriated the larger one, turned it into a farming collective; both farms were unproductive now. Her father had let the smaller one lapse in his disgust over the pointless prices the war-bled revolutionary government was paying for cotton and beef. Last year, when her father refused to hire extra workers to harvest the remnant of the cotton crop, Marta and Amalia’s Juventud Sandinista group had gone out and camped on the finca for two weeks, armed with just a few old AKs and FALs against the plausible danger of contra raids, to finish the harvest themselves—so la Revolución would have a little more cotton to sell or to trade for weapons and oil and Polish potatoes. Yet her father was working as a warehouse inspector for the Agricultural Ministry because they’d asked him to and he hadn’t dared say no—which made him a contra target too, he might be ambushed in his jeep on any lonely rural road. He wanted to move the family to Philadelphia, in los Estados Unidos, where his sister lived, married to a psychiatrist, also a Nica. Amalia and Marta had spent a whole year in Philadelphia, living with their aunt and uncle and attending a Catholic primary school so that they could learn English, spending part of the summer at a camp in the woods with other little yanqui children, the rest with their relatives in a big, airy wooden house on a beautiful beach somewhere, mother and father and baby Camilo having flown up to join them there. Her father even had some money in the bank in Philadelphia, waiting for them. He was always threatening to go ahead and move there by himself—but he loved his wife and daughters and little son, couldn’t abandon them (anyway, what would he do in Philadelphia? his wife was the one with a profession), couldn’t stop them from living the way they wanted, couldn’t even stop two teenage daughters from going to war in a volunteer Juventud Sandinista battalion!

  So Marta loved la Revolución—and Esteban loved his battalion: his BLI, conceived to operate not like a regular army unit but like guerrillas living off the land, always moving, relentlessly hunting the enemy, hounding them and sometimes fighting them every day for weeks until they’d finally driven them back across the border (the invaders, traitors, bestias, the dictator’s old torturers and poor dumb rural lumpen turned yanqui mercenaries, no?). Even in his battalion, it seemed that everyone understood that when they talked about la Revolución they were really talking about the BLI—because outside the BLI there was so little else to go by, almost nothing else but jungle and mountains and what only warring armies can bring to these. The BLI was everything: fighting, staying alive. Con mucho arte militar, as their commander liked to say. A coherent and necessary concept once you saw what happened to those without it. So in this harrowing landscape they were elegant, did everything as they were supposed to, had never been routed in combat or blundered into an ambush … until that dog joined them, and then on the Zompopera Road, but that was after Quilalí.

  Their battalion commander, Milton, one of the original members of El Coro de Ángeles, the very first BLI, formed at the start of the war, came from a campesino background. But his company’s jefe, Noél, came from a burgesa family that was much richer than Marta’s; they’d left for Miami just before the Triumph in ’79, and Noél lived there four years, having a beach-cars-sex adolescence like in the movies until he turned eighteen, when instead of entering some university there he came back to Nicaragua on his own, enlisted in the Ejército Popular Sandinista, and had been at war against los yanquis ever since—Noél’s older brother had been in la guerrilla, killed in combat in Matagalpa all the way back in ’75. Noél died in the ambush on the Zompopera Road, after Marta, after Milton had been stripped of his command, even after the dog, all during that last furious contra offensive. Another officer, Jacinto, had spent two years studying in Bulgaria. Another compa, Guillermo, spent his childhood in exile with his family in Paris, his parents were intellectuals—Guillermo died in the Zompopera ambush too. Their medic, Nelson, though only twenty-four, was already a doctor, he’d studied in Cuba. Their best marksman and sniper, Frank, was a moreno from Bluefields who’d been to Angola with the Cubans, where he’d perfected his craft. A platoon leader, Aldo, who was also a circus clown, who gave clown classes through the Cultural Workers’ Union, died because of that dog. Like Marta and Amalia, a few of the compas in his BLI had had parents wealthy enough to have taken them to Disney World. Some had parents and siblings living there now, in los Estados Unidos. Everyone else, of course, almost everybody in the battalion, was just a draftee like Esteban, poor people who’d never been anywhere. Poor people who’d been rounded up before they could run away from the draft, to Honduras or Costa Rica or elsewhere; and others, like him, who hadn’t wanted to run. Many, especially among the campesino compas, had relatives and old friends fighting on the other side. Nobody wanted to have to kill his brother or cousin in battle, though everyone knew of others this had happened to and knew that if they had to do it they would and then carry the regret, though not the blame, forever. It was often talked about. His company had a political officer, Rodolfo—a professor before the army, what else?—who was supposed to help them think clearly about such matters; and who taught them about the Law of True Value, proletarians, lumpen, democracy, perestroika—words handed to them like extra bullet clips—tried to explain the changing world and the upheavals of history which they found themselves at the ferocious forefront of, their battalion’s exploits already adding little daubs of wet ink to the great histories of the bloody century and the whole world that would one day be written! who tried to teach them about the sort of men they were supposed to be from now on, revolutionaries, and the ideal revolution versus the achievable one (for now, the BLI was the achievable one); and who loved to recite poetry from memory, political poems, love poems, poems about common things and about chichis, and poems so strange that in the silence after they were spoken the whole jungle seemed to tense around them, become even more ominous, their elusive meaning echoed in the throbbing uproar of tree frogs. Your breasts are anvils and garlic. At least that wasn’t a lie, could never be a lie if it was also poetry, once spoken it became a thing in the world as real as any other thing—a hat, a rifle, an ox—that was Rodolfo’s point about poetry. So he even learned to think of love in a new way. You were supposed to make something of it, not just let it happen. And if you couldn’t make something of it, compa, then it couldn’t be love. Somehow that went for everything, from killing to love. Knowing you had to kill and why, you were supposed to find a way to speak of love. What was it you were supposed to love? Claro, la Revolución, which was like a poem you were supposed to be writing in your head; and, most important, the BLI, which was real, and which had only one soldier in it whom la Marta loved.

  Ve? He’d never be ignorant again. He’d never go back to being just this port town lumpen, a seaside peasant, a market cook’s bastard, with an idea of the world that went little further than the tales of drunken seamen and whores. It had all sifted into him: everyone in his BLI, everything they talked and knew about. Then before you ever got the chance to understand what it was you’d actually learned, you could take a sliver of shrapnel in the head and all that new knowledge would rush out of you, compa, colder and remoter than the stars.

  Or you lived. And then what good did it all do you? And what was it all for? Where’s their political officer, that fucking Rodolfo, now? Whose ears is he filling with words about poetry and killing and revolution and love and heroes and martyrs now? Hijueputa, somewhere, right now, far away in Nicaragua, Rodolfo’s mouth is still going. Vos, while here you are in los Estados Unidos, trying to work up the courage and resolve
to disappear into it, puta, trying to find a reason to. Thinking you’ve done some grand thing sneaking off a ship that doesn’t move to lie down with your stolen sack of wood chips in the sand in the dark that brings her as close as lovers’ breath …

  La Marta and her sister both wanted to be economists or accountants. Because la Revolución needed people who could manage money. Chocho, did it ever. They liked mathematics. La Revolución’s accountants, that’s what Marta and Amalia wanted to be.

  The year before the sisters had applied for summer jobs in a branch of the Trade Ministry. They went for separate interviews with a tall, bulky, middle-aged man who kept his sunglasses on indoors, balding, a little mustache, always dressed in a spotless white guayabera and creased black trousers. He gave them each a psychological test and then had them come back to his office, separately, for another interview to talk about the test results:

  “He said the strangest things,” Marta told him under the papaya-less papaya tree, with that startled, wide-eyed stillness she had whenever she was thinking of something serious. “He said my psychological profile showed I had a great capacity for love and that I was going to be a wonderful wife and mother. And then you know what he asked me? He asked me if I’d ever had anal sex.” She rocked her head back to meet his eye.

  “Pendejo,” said Esteban. “What, he thought you were going to end up doing it up the culo with him right there on that couch?”

  “Vos, it was disillusioning,” Marta said, and smiled. “I asked him what he meant, because he’d taken off his glasses and was looking at me so sternly I felt nervous. He said, You know what that is, don’t you? And I sort of shook my head yes and no at the same time and he said, You’re not a virgin, are you? And I said, That’s none of your business and yes, I know what it is. And he said, with much arrogance”—Marta made her voice go low and pompous—“Señorita compita, I have asked you a very direct question, the answer to which can help me finish your psychological profile. I asked if you’ve ever had anal sex. I’ve asked you this because according to what I’m able to deduce about you, the first time you have anal sex it will be out of true love, and that is the man you will marry. Your test suggests that you’re that kind of female. It’s important to know yourself. Such is the profound benefit of these psychological tests.”