The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  He gapes at her. Her lips look blistered, chapped, through her lipstick—and the way she talks, hombre, it’s no wonder!

  And she turns back towards the door, and stops, and then she starts up again, mouth working like an agitated choir singer’s, keeping her own temperamental rhythm with the keys in her hand, flopped up and down: “… Hijos de la chingada, patanes, come and stand in the doorway all night pissing, drinking beer, smoking marijuana, leaving their piggishness all over. Y la policia, qué hacen? Cabrones de mierrrda. Absolutamente nada! No, no, I can’t take this anymore. It’s too much to ask. Starting your day having to step through this porquería. No! Pinche degenarados …”

  She’s stepped backwards, for a moment isn’t even facing him anymore as she orates at the doorway, and then she spins around, glaring at him again. He laughs, he can’t help it, and she says, “Ah, sí, güey? Go ahead and laugh. Laugh all the way to the homeless shelter, ándale.”

  “Chocho,” he blurts, “Qué agresiva!”

  “Qué! Vulgarote!”

  “Bueno. OK!”—flinging his arms out. Amazed at himself, standing on a sidewalk in Brooklyn, arguing with this loca! A corner of her lower lip tucked between her teeth while she glares at him like some infuriated abuela again. But what eyes!

  Finally, seemingly calmed down a little, she says, “Don’t you feel embarrassment, going around like that? Not to mention the cold. You’re going to catch something. Bueno, what’s it to me?… Except you could catch tuberculosis, gȍey, and give it to somebody else. That happens, you know. It’s been on the news.”

  And he says, “I’m not a vago. I have a job. I’m a marinero. I’ve been stuck on this ship down in the harbor for almost four months now, with no pay, hardly anything to eat, working. The whole crew looks like this. Down there.” And he gestures towards the harbor.

  “That doesn’t happen here,” she says flatly. “Four months with no pay? Güey, that’s not very intelligent. And I can tell you’re not stupid. It’s a story. I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Va, pues, don’t believe me, what’s it to me?” he says, suddenly angry. “We thought we were going to be paid. Vos, we thought we’d be sailing in a few days. And instead they put us to work repairing this old, broken ship. They keep telling us that when the ship is fixed, we’ll sail and we’ll get paid. Puta, what were we supposed to do? No one has the money even to go home. We hardly even know where we are.” Suddenly he pulls some of the tools from his pocket, holds a wire-splicing pin and the wire cutters out to her. “What do you think these are?”

  “Qué sé yo? Burglars’ tools. You break into parked cars, no? Police catch you with those, you’ll see what happens to you, güey”—and she shakes her head. “Just the pretext they’ll need to leave you in a bloody pulp.”

  “These are mariners’ tools,” he says, thinking, Puta, I guess they are burglars’ tools.

  She looks at the tools, and then up at him. “You have a funny accent,” she finally says. “What’s all that with the vos?”

  “Soy de Nicaragua,” he answers. “Esteban Gaitán. Mucho gusto. Y usted?”

  “Joaquina,” she says warily. “Encantado,” she says with a certain sarcasm and a slight smile. “Bueno. En fin,” she says sternly, and lifts the keys towards the door again, grimacing as she steps towards it. “Hasta luego, marinero.”

  “How can a cat be olive colored?” Esteban points at the sign in the window. “Why doesn’t it just say black?”

  She steps back from the door again, smiling quizzically, a little slice of a smile that suddenly widens: her smile so lights up her face that suddenly she looks about eight years old.

  “I’ve never thought of that,” she says. “Gonzalo thinks Dolores is olive green. Claro, she isn’t. More like muddy gray. Maybe he’s color blind and hides it. But imagine. You think women are going to come here to get their hair dyed if they know he’s color blind? But my jefe, bueno, that’s what he’s like, full of inventions.” She chuckles softly. “Like you, verdad?”

  “This is where you work?”

  “Pues, claro,” she says, as if suddenly annoyed by him again. “I’m the one who has to come and open it up in the morning. Can’t you read?” and she points at the sign over the door: Salón de Belleza Tropicana—Unisex.

  “I can read,” he says.

  She’s looking at him thoughtfully now, not angrily like before. “You’re really a marinero?”

  “Sí pues.”

  “Then you must be good with a mop, no? Isn’t that what marineros are always doing, mopping the deck?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Bueno, te propongo algo. If you mop and sweep the doorway here, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. Órale?” Her eyebrows go up.

  He smiles. Doesn’t understand that word. “Órale?” he repeats.

  “Papas!” she says. Potatoes? And she steps forward and opens the door, turning various keys in various locks. As she’s going inside, she looks at him standing dumbly on the sidewalk. “Ven!”

  He follows Joaquina inside, into the almost noxiously sweet-smelling salon, the gray glow of mirrors in the dark; he stands inside the door while she crosses the room to the light switches. The light comes on, and she disappears behind a red-yellow printed curtain into the back. He hears water pouring against metal, filling a pail. He gapes at himself in the mirror, appalled at his beggar aspect of long, dirty hair and light beard, his hollowed face and frightened eyes: he looks like one of those boys raised by wolves. The water stops; she steps back out through the curtain, she’s taken off her coat and is wearing a pleated gray-black wool skirt, a pink cardigan sweater over a white blouse with a lacy collar. She gestures to him. “Ven,” she says. “You carry it out, güey.”

  He follows her through the curtain, into a corridor with three closed doors, a coat rack hung with her coat and blue smocks, supplies arrayed along shelves, an industrial sink. Joaquina is pouring ammonia from a plastic bottle into the metal pail, and when she’s done, she carefully twists the cap back on, holding the bottle away from herself. He notices an earring, a small, glassy-purple star, on her lobe. She hands him a mop and a broom, steps out through the curtain; he follows her out, carrying the broom between biceps and rib, the mop in one hand and the sloshing pail in the other.

  “I could use a haircut,” he says, wanting to make a kind of self-dignifying joke. “And a shave, pues.”

  “Pinche güey!” she exclaims, darting her eyes at him. “You’re out of luck. I’m just the manicurist.”

  He’s walking to the door when he hears her say, “Bueno, I can also wax your legs. Even your bikini line, güey. Ja!”

  He turns to look at her, her back to him as she fumbles with the coffee maker on a side table against the wall. She says, “Gonzalo will cut your hair for ten dollars.” The hem of her sweater falls like a soft bell over her slender rear. “Clean everything well, güey, and I’ll let you have a pastelito too.”

  The reek of urine is strong in front of the door. He thinks, Bocona, mandona. He really doesn’t like the way she speaks to him, mouthy, bossy, patronizing, eh? He picks up two empty quart bottles of beer standing in paper bags between the salon’s door and another door with affixed buzzers and scrawled numbers on a battered metal sheet, carries the bottles to the trash cans on the curb, and laying them in, prods open the tear in a plastic bag, sees it full of hair, mainly dark hues of hair. Hairy wax, he remembers, la Marta. Sweeps cigarette butts, a few tiny marijuana butts in pinched pink paper, all the way across the sidewalk—people hurry around and past him on the sidewalk. He stares down at his boots with the broom in his hands. Thinks, This is totally strange, no? His scuffed, grease-stained black boots, made in the Soviet Union, laced with electrical wire, which accompanied him all the way through the war, which la Marta unlaced and tugged off his feet more than once, which that German tracking dog sniffed with its nose of sorrow, boots that stood in a pile of tumbling bullet cartridges as he returned blistering fire through truck planks duri
ng the Zompopera ambush and got soaked with the blood of compas while somehow he wasn’t killed; and then went home to Corinto with him and walked through the shitty, steaming, salty mud of its streets and which, oddly yet typically, his Tío Nelson and not his mamá used to like to clean and polish for him; boots which watched his pathetic freak-out with that puta in the burdel, standing empty by her bed, stinking up the already smelly little room and filling it with silent howls of fucked up grief, and then a week later went away to sea with him: and now, vos, here they are, while he sweeps up outside a beauty salon in Brooklyn, these boots like a last living witness to his life, like the only proof he has of the life of Esteban Gaitán … He gazes up the ramshackle row house-lined street—brick, wood, concrete, and aluminum-sided facades, some with tiny, littered gardens out front behind corroded gates—past trash cans and parked cars, at the avenue flashing busily with traffic and pedestrians now. These people passing, they’re probably thinking, Look at that dirty beggar, sweeping up in front of a salon, he must be mentally retarded or a drunk, working for just a few pennies. Puta. Y qué? He finishes sweeping, nudges the small pile between two trash cans. Then he mops vigorously and thoroughly, wringing the mop out with his hands, breathing in the strong scent of ammonia, slapping water all over the place, from the door all the way out to the curb—

  “Oye, chamaco,” Joaquina says, standing in the door. “Did I ask you to mop all of Brooklyn?”

  Inside, they sit on folding chairs against the wall, a white cardboard box holding a few pastries on the chair between them, sipping their coffee. So how should he to talk to her? Like she’s his boss?

  “Y usted, where are you from?”

  “México,” she says, yawning, lifting the back of her hand to her mouth. “And you don’t have to say usted.” She gestures at the box. “These are left from yesterday, so they’re a little stale.”

  She’s already explained to him about how she made the coffee in that machine over there, told him it’s real coffee. Sí pues, like the coffee he had on the airplane. The first of any kind in months, since their officers stopped bringing them jars of instant coffee, which apparently isn’t real coffee. He savors the strong, muddy taste, feels the warmth and caffeine hitting inside, feels his intestines cringe. He looks around at the salon, the glossy color photographs of men and women with different hairdos; a framed picture of La Virgen del Cobre against a red backdrop with lighthouse and palms painted in, seashells glued to it; and another framed photograph of a man dressed like Pedro Picapiedra, in a tunic that looks made of leopard skin, holding a spread-eagled, platinum blonde woman in a silvery leotard over his head in muscular arms.

  “I don’t usually have to come in this early,” Joaquina is saying, “but I have a customer coming in for a special appointment.”

  “Ajá,” he says softly, not looking at her. He reaches for one of the pastelitos, crescent shaped, glazed, and sugar sprinkled, bites into the chewy crust, jam squirts into his mouth. Dismally, he watches himself chewing in the mirrors.

  “So you’re a nÿufrago, güey,” she says. “De veras?”

  A shipwrecked sailor—that’s true enough. “Sí pues,” he says, “it’s true. But my name isn’t güey, it’s Esteban. Our capitán always calls us güey.”

  “He’s a chilango?”

  He asks what a chilango is, and she tells him it’s someone from México, el Distrito Federal. “May-ksee-koh Ceetee,” she says, trying to imitate a gringo accent.

  “No, I don’t think so. Bueno, he’s a pendejo, wherever he’s from. Americano. Inglés. Griego. Las Amazonas. I guess he’s from all those places.” He shrugs. “Is that where you’re from in Mexico?”

  “Sí. No. Zacatecas. But I lived there for a few years, that’s where I went to beautician school, and worked awhile, before I came up here to live with my brothers. We all lived there, for a while.”

  “It’s a big city, no?”

  “Sí güey, it’s a big city. Much bigger than this one, they say, though it doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Is it difficult to live here as an immigrant?”

  For some reason this makes her laugh, a brief, airy giggle. “Más o menos. Bueno, es bonito… Esteban.” She sips her coffee, eyes beaming as if she’s said something funny; holding her cup with her little finger out, chin up, gazing off with a tight-lipped little smirk, as if she’s savoring the taste of whatever it is she thinks is so funny and not just the coffee.

  They fall into a silence while she holds the cup up to her lips in both hands, taking steady little sips. Her fingernails cut short, neat, glossy. She sits, bent over her coffee, with her legs straight out and a little apart, her feet pointed up in her high heels and gently rocking, the fabric of her tights wrinkled around the straps over the ankles. He lets his eyes coast quickly over her slender, curving calves. He inhales with his mouth closed, slowly drawing in her perfume and faint soapy scent, along with the coffee, all the salon smells. In a nose full of Urus, no? Corroded nostrils that by now must be like portable bits of the Urus: rust and paint, old diesel oil from the depths of the ship, his unwashed compañeros. No wonder he’s a little dizzy, perspiring from the cold, frothy ache in his bowels. And her perfume is beginning to affect his breathing, making his breathing passages feel wooly.

  He’s finished his coffee, sees that there’s more in the pot. Should he ask for more? Doesn’t think he wants any more. Can’t think of anything to say. Shouldn’t he ask to use the toilet? Doesn’t dare, what if he stinks the place up. Golden curls partly tucked behind her ears, falling down around her thin neck and lacy collar, a fine silver chain dangling over her small chest, disappearing under the sweater; she has one of those little stars on both lobes. She has a surprisingly low, chesty, womanly voice that goes shrill when she’s excited. Kind of a baby face, for all her haughtiness and mouthiness. How old is she? Maybe even younger than he, because all that makeup must make her look older than she is. Hair must be dyed. Decides not to like her, much. Compared with la Marta, he decides, she seems stuck-up and artificial.

  “So you like it here,” he says.

  “Siií. ’sta padre, ’sta chingón.”

  Uses too much strange slang.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asks.

  “When?”

  “On your boat, güey.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave,” he says. “Try to get a job here in the city. Of course, I’ll need a haircut first. Some clothes.” Wonders if he can find some way to sell all those Parcheesis, and the swimming goggles too.

  “Claro,” she says.

  “But I think I should try to find the United Nations first. See if they can do something to resolve our situation. Do you know how to get there?”

  “I think it’s somewhere in Manhattan,” she says, seemingly unimpressed by this bold, new plan. “I’m sure you can get there by subway. Claro, you can’t go there looking like that, though, they’ll think you’re a terrorist. I’d lend you some clothes, but—My brothers have clothes, but they’re shorter than you, and wider, and I don’t think they’d like me to be giving away their clothes.”

  “Bueno,” he says. “Thanks for thinking of it.”

  “Por nada,” she says. “Anyway, there are places that sell very inexpensive clothing, secondhand, sometimes you find some nice things … Ah! Here’s my customer! Esteban, you have to go now.”

  He looks up and sees a broad-shouldered, tall, yet squarely built man in a bright red, white-trimmed jogging suit outside the door; ebony hair slickly smoothed back over a broad, sharp-featured indio face. Joaquina opens the door for him, and he bends down to embrace her, they give each other kisses on the cheek, she says, “Chucho, corazón, cómo te va, eh?”

  “Joaquina, ángel de mi alma,” his voice a gruff singsong. “I haven’t made you get up too early, I hope. In this pinche cold.”

  “Sí, ’sta friolín, no?”

  Chucho looks down at Esteban, his briefly puzzled glance resolving into an unfriendly stare through nar
rowing eyes, his chin seeming to pull back into his brawny neck. He is wearing shiny black ankle boots tucked up into his sweatpants; three gem-studded gold rings on one hand, a big, gold-banded gold watch peeking out from under a red sleeve.

  “This is Esteban,” says Joaquina, glancing over at him and scoldingly widening her eyes. “He’s a shipwrecked marinero. Imagine.”

  “Ah,” says Chucho. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Mucho gusto,” says Esteban, rising from his seat.

  “Sí pues,” says Chucho, and he looks over at Joaquina.

  “Really, it’s true,” says Joaquina, flustered, taking Chucho’s arm in two hands and tugging him lightly across the room—she walks, thinks Esteban, as if her shoes are both too heavy and loose fitting for her, yet with a certain elastic rhythm and grace—and starting to explain how she found Esteban outside.”… He wanted to know how a cat could be green like an olive. Isn’t that cute? When he said that I knew I didn’t have to be afraid of him. He cleaned the doorway”—laughing, guiding Chucho to a leather-backed metal chair with leather armrests, next to a footstool, and a small, wheeled cart loaded with bottles of nail polish and other potions, delicate, silvery tools laid out across it, and a cup holding emery board files that remind Esteban of tongue depressors in a doctor’s office. And when she has him seated she breathlessly says, “Chucho, un momentito y ya,” and Chucho says he’s in a hurry, guerita, and she says, “Sí, sí, corazón, I just have to let Esteban out,” and she glares at Esteban and walks towards the door and he turns and says good-bye to Chucho and follows her out the door, which she holds open with her shoulder. She gives Esteban her hand.

  “Oye, gracias por todo,” she says. “And good luck with everything, eh? If there’s anything I can do to help? Órale?”

  “Gracias a vos!”

  “Por nada, güey. Órale?”

  “Órale.”

  “Papas!” a quick smile, and then she’s already turned back into the salon. He watches her hurry back to Chucho, pulling the little stool in front of him, sitting down on it as she smooths her skirt around her, pulling the little trolley cart to her side while Chucho lifts his hand, extends it towards her; he can see them talking as she takes his hand in both of hers. Chucho glances over at him. He’d better go; he goes. Thinking, Qué cosa, qué cosa. That macho prepotente getting a manicure first thing in the morning!