The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  “I’ll kill that hijueputa!” exclaimed Esteban. “Wanted to trick you into doing it with him because he thought you wanted to marry him or what?” He went on yelling vehement threats and curses against the psychologist for a while, while Marta slumped back against his chest and stared off across the pasture until he was finished and then she said, “Vos, Esteban, this is the strangest part. When I got home, I found out he’d asked Amalia the very same questions. He’d told her the very same things. Word for word! Bueno, qué onda? Was he a pervert, or a serious psychologist, or both?”

  “A total pervert, Marta. You didn’t work there—”

  “Vos, had to. They gave us the jobs. But he never mentioned it again. Always polite and everything. Maintained a distance. It was rewarding work too, very educational, and they were very happy with our work, especially Amalia’s. Vos, Esteban, have you ever done it that way?”

  He almost lied. “No,” he admitted, trying to sound indifferent. Putas do it all the time, he knew, and chavalas who don’t want to get pregnant.

  “Ve?” she said. “Because I think that what he said is true. Because otherwise, I’d never do it.”

  Which is how la Marta proposed marriage to him, if you chose to think of it that way. When he went to the brothers’ gasoline station the next morning, there was a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying they were out of gasoline, no one there. He went up to the Red Cross station on the hill, and there was no one there either. The station was just one nearly bare room affixed to a shuttered garage. The door was unlocked, and he went in and looked into the garage at the ambulance: it was at least thirty years old but in spotless condition, long and cream colored, a red cross on the paneled side in back, a bulbous hood and bumper. The ambulance was slightly bouncing, shocks squeaking like quiet mice. He went back outside and waited. Finally a teenager, one of the brothers, came out buttoning his shirt, followed by a plump, pretty-faced muchacha combing out humid hair with her fingers, a blouse knotted over her rippled brown belly. “Claro, compa,” said the brother after Esteban had explained what he wanted to borrow the ambulance for. “That’s what it’s there for.”

  The rear of the ambulance had a beige, stain-mottled, padded-cloth blanket spread over the hard floor, pillows propped against the back of the front seat, stretchers rolled up against the sides. Some light penetrated from the room off the garage, through the windshield. They spent nearly four hours there, drenched in sweat, loving each other in the heat of a bread oven. Even the squirrel looked soaking wet, paralyzed in a corner though temporarily freed from its umbilical of thread. La Marta’s caresses, the way she reached for him and so easily nestled herself against him, her utter lack of nervousness, confirmed what he’d already suspected, that she was more experienced in love than he. Hairy as a newborn monkey in places, and in others as glossily smooth and brown as chocolate toffee for all the insect bites and scratches and rashes strewn across her skin as if she’d been rolling in thorns and wet rose petals. Skinny arms, ankles, tapering shins, but other parts of her gorgeously round, with a soft plushness it was astonishing the war hadn’t worn away. Hair like a submerged, softened spray of porcupine quills ran from her pubis to her navel. He felt all fumbling hands and hunger, confused by this intoxicating variety of places for his mouth and touch to go, his swollen pene flopping like a netted fish. Her chunchita, wildly hairy, its texture and taste, made him think of the earthy, mossy underside of some overturned jungle log; he snuffled into it like an anteater, swirled his tongue deep into the tart, pink buttermilk wet, her inner thighs shivering and quaking around his head. And when they fucked, such mute, earnest pushing, trying to pour all of himself, all of his emotion, into her, they both came quickly, flutteringly—he’d never fucked like that before, so solemnly and purely, almost religiously. Like a woman, he’d thought, he’d just made love the way a woman in love makes love. “Mi rey,” she called.him. Scar tissue like a tiny centipede from a childhood injury high on her hairy shin, now he thinks of it as the mark the infiltrator clawed into her skin to show death the way in. He was covered in insect bites too, and tiny bumps hard as pebbles. She spent a long time going over his body, popping the little infestations between her nails while he winced from the searing nips of pain and kicked his feet. Their fungused and rotted feet, inflamed, vinegar-reeking toes. Ay, Esteban, will she ever get to feel clean and smooth all over again? (Never.) A bubble bath! Or a manicure and pedicure—I’ve never wanted one but I’d take one now, I think I’d even let them use that hairy wax. Mami still gets her nails done and legs waxed, Papi likes her that way, she goes to a woman who runs a little salon out of her house in León. I went with Mami once, and, Esteban, it was so gross, this big bowl full of hard, yellow, hairy wax, all this hair from who knows how many women’s legs all mixed in, from her using that wax over and over again. I said, Puta, qué asco, Mami! You get smeared with that if you want, but not me! They made love again, nearly as earnestly as the first time. A while later she looked back at him with her serious owl eyes over her shoulder and said she wanted to do it, vos sabes, Esteban, the true love way. The little brown eye staring out of a tuft of mossy black. They weren’t sure how to proceed. It took a while, but finally he put himself in, maybe not gently and slowly enough, but he’d tried, she moaned and flailed her arms around so much she batted the squirrel, sent it flying like a limp glove against the wall, and then he had to stop moving inside her while she reached for it, cupped it in her hands, murmured apologetically into its fur, set it back down. “Mi rey, te gusta?” she quietly screamed. “Te gusta, mi rey?” They both gaped with embarrassed delight at the glossy little gobs of her shit clinging to his pene when he pulled out, and looked around, stumped, for something to wipe it off with. Finally he reached for his pants, cleaned himself against the inside of the mud-caked cuffs, grinned. Monumental, together they’d both been someplace they’d never been before, bodies manifesting blossoming trust. He fell back into her sweat-slicked arms, said, “So this means we’re getting married?” and she said, “Sí, mi amor, claro que si. As soon as this fucking war ends.” They spent the rest of the time fondling and making plans for the future, fondling the future. Two days later he went back to the war with her Mickey Mouse watch in his pocket and the raunchy smudge of their engagement vow mud-camouflaged on the inside of his pant cuff, marched out of Quilalí and almost immediately into the deadliest months of the whole war. A young man in love, with a future. They were always telling you that the war was over the future, no? But it was really always about the present, a world spiked and shadowed with portents that looked ahead to the next second, minute, hour, day, and no further. And now the future is here and, hijueputa, look at it: a ship that doesn’t move.

  A few weeks ago, on deck, by the light of their hissing-popping-cracking-pungently-fuming fire, El Tinieblas had taken off his shirt and then pulled down his pants to tell them his life story: that was the first time he’d ever told them what he’d gone to prison for, and how long he’d stayed. Some of his tattoos are just for decoration, or they’re symbols: the scorpion over each forearm, Superwoman in a G-string, La Santa Muerte in hooded cloak. But others depict key moments and turning points in his life story: those banana trees, that’s the coastal banana plantation where he was born, and, claro, that’s Chiquita Banana, but it’s also his mamita, and this is the cemetery she’s buried in, and that weeping full moon over the cemetery wall, that’s him. This is the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tegucigalpa he robbed, though he fucked it up—two years he got, he went in when he was sixteen. And that’s his novia, Leticia. She’s sitting like that, so modestly—with her knees drawn up over her chest and her arms clasped around her shins—because he didn’t want to commit a falta de respeto, couldn’t have everyone staring at Leticia’s secrets all the time, after all she used to come twice a week for a conjugal visit. Until she stopped coming. And this, here on his thigh, those are prison guards beating him because in the middle of another surprise search of the prisoners’ barracks, he’d vom
ited up the plastic-wrapped mota and pills he’d hastily swallowed—another year added to his sentence, because of that. And here on his shin, this date, 5/13/86, wrapped in a snake chopped in pieces, that’s the day Leticia came to the prison to tell him she was pregnant, maybe or maybe not his child, but she was getting married to another …

  The tattoos were always done by another prisoner using a guitar string connected to wires and radio batteries rolled up in a magazine, the guitar string’s filed point dipped in precious ink carefully doled into the indented top of a toothpaste tube cap. So that when the guards searched, they found nothing: batteries inside the radio, toothpaste capped, guitar string back on the guitar. Tattooing was against the prison rules, but every day prisoners had new tattoos as if images from their dreams at night revealed themselves on their skin by day.

  “When this is over, you’re not going to have enough room for a ship tattoo,” said El Faro.

  “No,” said El Tinieblas. “Well, maybe a tiny ship.”

  “It would be a lie to get a ship tattoo anyway,” said Esteban. “Because if you put a ship on your skin, people will think you went somewhere in it.”

  “That’s true,” said El Tinieblas. “Everyone would think I’d been a marinero, and they’d all ask, Where’d you go? And I’d have to explain over and over and over how I was on this ship that didn’t go anywhere. Puta.”

  “You are a marinero,” said Tomaso Tostado. “You just haven’t gone anywhere.”

  “You know what maybe I’ll do?” said El Tinieblas. “The day this is over, however it ends, I’m going to choose a symbol of what I feel then. Just for me. Like this one here, ve? Only I know the meaning of this one.” And he lifted up his shirt again and tapped the small, inky image of a spoon on his chest. “That’s a spoon,” he said. “And I’ll never tell anyone why.”

  “Puta vos, don’t tattoo anything then,” said El Barbie. “Sink the fucking ship. Sink it so no one can ever see it again. Don’t tattoo anything, and then you can say, Ve? Underneath here?”—and he tapped his own chest—“there’s a sunken ship.”

  “Tattooed on your heart,” said Panzón.

  “Sí pues, tattooed on your heart,” said El Faro, nodding and squinting.

  “Tattooed up my culo,” said El Barbie.

  In another seven days Esteban will meet Joaquina Martínez. In ten days, Bernardo will have his accident. In another six weeks, the Ship Visitor will finally find them. But for the next seven consecutive nights, beginning with this one, Esteban will prowl the waterfront neighborhoods looking for useful things to steal … Much later he’ll remember what El Tinieblas said about the tattoo he was going to get when the Urus was finally over and he’ll wonder how you tattoo a sack of wood chips.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t leave, patroncito. It’s a city full of opportunities. There must be thousands out there from countries like ours, young like you but less prepared, maybe less lucky. I promise you, this ship is going nowhere.”

  The viejo is going crazy, hyper and jittery. Why does he keep smelling his blanket? Suddenly obsessed with sniffing at his blanket. And always asking if I smell anything strange.

  “Vos, qué te pasa? Why do you keep smelling your blanket?”

  Bernardo looks at him like some sheepish little cipote, and then he asks, uncertainly, “Do you smell cat pee?”

  “No.”

  The viejo drops the blanket back down onto his lap. “Bueno,” he says. “Me neither.”

  Crazy viejo!

  “I brought back wood chips.”

  “Wood chips?”

  He explains. Tells him how he hid the sack behind the grain elevator and then climbed back up the mooring line.

  “It will be good for lighting fires.” And he pulls the blanket over him and turns towards the bulkhead and instantly falls asleep.

  The day is partly overcast, sun fighting through clouds; a sporadic, chilling, mid-October wind, bringing the first sharp nips of winter, tatters the air, flickering uncomfortably up pant legs, under sleeves, through rips in their clothes, leaving a faint burning sensation against skin. The wind hums around the masts and stays, through the derricks and rigging; slides water in smooth, metallic, gull-skimmed sheets across the cove. Sunlight catches a swooping gull’s chest, makes it arc radiantly-whitely through the air.

  They haven’t been abandoned, not yet: Mark comes to the ship that day in the Honda, with Miracle and groceries. Neither of their officers has been out in three days, but Mark’s arrival—great relief that it is—is unceremoniously observed by both sides. He greets no one, and none of the crew allows himself much more than a glance at him.

  El Primero stands on deck and says, in English, “Brought some food and stuff,” gesturing down at the pier. He turns back to the gangway, and Roque Balboa and Cebo follow, to carry the groceries up from the car. Moments later they come back up, Roque carrying a bulky paper bag, Cebo a large sack of potatoes, into the mess. Mark and the dog go up to the bridge.

  So capitán and primero haven’t given up on the Urus. And if their officers haven’t given up, that means there’s still something … to wait for. As soon as they heard the car arriving on the pier, all the ordinary seamen but Esteban—still sleeping in his cabin—immediately resumed working, prying open paint cans, priming brushes, there was always something to be done. El Primero’s arrival, rather than merely activating an innate obedience, has provided an excuse, and a context, to exchange a completely lethargic tedium for a somewhat more active one. Only the mechanics and electricians keep busy when neither capitán nor primero is there: they were already down in the two-level pit of the engine plant when Mark arrived, reengaged in the task of disassembling parts, cleaning, lubricating, tightening, reassembling, endlessly theorizing about how it all might work if only it all worked. The illusory satisfactions of studying and tinkering with dead engines, generators, and pumps, so complicated, mysterious, and inert, demands and compels an unreciprocated love. Last week el Capitán put some of the ordinary seamen to work welding fissures in the ballast tanks in the bottom deck under the hold—serious and dangerous work, without goggles, rags tied across their noses and mouths, the concentration it took burned up the day. But they haven’t been able to finish the job with no one coming out to turn the generator and compressor on. Nor does Mark turn them on today.

  When an appropriate amount of time has passed, some put down their paintbrushes and tools and go into the mess to look at the groceries, which José Mateo and Bernardo have already unpacked. Potatoes, cooking oil, chicken livers, six cans of peas, a plastic bag full of waxy pink apples, soap, five tubes of toothpaste, toilet paper. But el Primero forgot to bring razors again.

  The crates of rusted sardine cans, paper labels rotted away, they found left behind in a deep corner of the hold back in June have been a salvation, but also a curse. There are still more than three hundred cans left—keys uselessly rusted to the sides, but José Mateo and Bernardo tear them open with can opener, hammered tools—so their officers know they can neglect to bring them groceries and at least they won’t starve. But the rice is running low, down to five sacks.

  Later they see Mark out on the wing having a smoke, leaning on his arms, staring out over wasteland, port and harbor. Too bad he didn’t bring them cigarettes, not that they ever do. Wouldn’t it be great to have a cigarette? Soothing, hot smoke bathing and cleaning your lungs. El Primero stays out there a long time. As if he’s come just to show himself, as if to say, Don’t worry, Capitán Elias and I are still here, responsible for all of you, little lambs. He looks calm and dreamy up there, as if the ship is already far out to sea and he’s flicking cigarette butts in high arcs out into the middle of the ocean, into the wind. Doesn’t seem to have noticed that Esteban is shirking his work today. Or maybe doesn’t care. Wouldn’t be likely to say anything about it anyway, since what’s he ever say? Hi guys! Qué pasa! and today not even that. The viejo says Esteban isn’t feeling well, to just let the chavalo be. Panzón will
mark him down for a full workday with overtime anyway.

  After the relief of just seeing el Primero there, what riled emotions and moods! Anger, humiliation, frustration, self-pitying sulks. Like a callously disregarded and tormented lover whose lover finally calls. That their most basic sense of security actually depends on one or the other of these two huevones coming to the ship! Relief to feel secure again, then fury over this deception camouflaged as security: just because what they most fear hasn’t yet come to pass. El Barbie forgets what he’s doing and paces up and down, paintbrush in his hand, dripping paint all over, fuming: he more than anyone else trusted and even loved his capitán, has behaved deferentially even to this maricón primero out of respect for his capitán. He lets them call him El Barbie, but he hasn’t forgotten who Omar Usareli is, nor should they. It’s Omar Usareli who allowed himself to accept the honor of being promoted to contramaestre, to dignify that honor with his own dignity, because let me tell you, cabrón, when you call on the dignity and honor of Omar Usareli, you’re asking him to put the very best of himself on the line for you, to return respect with respect, and it isn’t very often that Omar Usareli finds someone he respects enough to do that, but that’s what he tried to do, and, look, they made a fool out of him! Let’s get that pendejo primero, let’s strip him and paint him, hold him down while I paint his pija bright red, see if he wants to have another game of Break the Cookie then, maricón jodido!

  What will happen if capitán and primero never come out to the ship again? If they give up, quit, won’t they at least come and tell them, ready them for whatever comes next? That’s the question that crashes into thoughts at night like a sudden mud slide. How many days will pass without their officers coming to the ship before they’ll have to accept that they’ve been abandoned once and for all? How will they know when they’ve been abandoned and what will they do then?