He sits slumped with his head in his arms for a long time, staring blankly, breathing through his mouth. He must have drifted back to sleep, because when he looks up again the light outside is gray and there are a few customers at the counter and a new waitress and his wrapped rose has been moved to his table, still propped inside the glass of greening water. The new waitress brings him a cup of café con leche, gives him a pat on the shoulder, and tells him that he’s been snoring. He blows his nose and drinks the coffee, thanks her, thanks everyone though there’s nobody there now from the night before, picks up his rose, and goes out the door into the chilly air.
7
WHEN BERNARDO HEARS CAPITÁN J. P. OSBOURNE APOLOGETICALLY speaking his name as if he’s about to say he’s sorry to bother him but he just needs this button sewn again, he thinks it’s just one more of his nightlong hauntings. But then he opens his eyes from the bottom of his well of pain and meets Capitán Elias’s sad sheep eyes. El Capitán is squatting by the mattress, wearing an unzipped black leather jacket, a hand on each black-jeaned knee. He lifts a hand and places it on Bernardo’s forehead, holds it there awhile, his hand feels like a cold sponge. He takes Bernardo’s wrists in his hands, puts his fingers over his pulse.
Bernardo is lying on top of the mattress with the blanket flung off him, naked from the waist down, shivering with cold.
Capitán Elias gestures with a nod of his head towards the leg. “That’s a nasty burn,” he says. “Nastier than it looks, I’m sure. You’re probably still in shock, a little bit.”
Bernardo grunts, forces himself up on his elbows, and takes his first look at the leg in the light; his shin looks splattered with wet, pink blisters, some of them fringed with blackened shreds of cloth. His head feels heavy. He lies back down.
“… Bernardo?” He opens his eyes and sees Capitán Elias still kneeling beside him, slowly rubbing the side of his close-shaven head with his hand while staring across the bed at the three dusty, plastic-wrapped snapshots arrayed along the floor. El Capitán says, “Bernardo?” again, looks at him, and realizes.
“I have medical training,” he says, along with something else which Bernardo doesn’t grasp, complicated words and something about plants. “…That’s what I used to do. Before I decided that my heart was really with the sea and ships.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” says Bernardo, surprised at his own angry tone. “But it’s just a burn. Shouldn’t we have first aid equipment onboard?”
“But we do,” el Capitán says, and he taps a greenish metal box on the floor by his side. “It was up on the bridge. Of course, you’re right, it should have been where you could get at it. We’ve had such complex problems, I guess we often overlook the obvious things.”
Now el Capitán slides down the mattress and with one finger lightly touches one of the liquid wounds.
“Does that hurt?”
“I didn’t feel anything. But the pain seems to come from the whole leg.”
“I’m going to ask you a few standard questions, Bernardo. They may sound a little odd to you, but it’s an important part of the homeopathic method.”
“Bueno,” says Bernardo listlessly.
He feels Capitán Elias shaking him awake again.
“Have you been having any unusual food cravings?”
“Cómo?”
“Before the accident and since?”
“Eh?”
El Capitán smiles wanly. “Is there any one food you can’t stop thinking about because you want it so much? Or is there any food that, whenever you think of it, disgusts you?”
Cool leche agria, with a little salt. A whole pitcher of pitaya juice. Ice cream. A big, steaming bowl of mondongo—no.
“Those little blue berries, what are they called?”
“Bueno, blueberries.”
“They’re cool and wet and sweet in your mouth, and that would be good now. As for the other thing, I could easily never eat another sardine.”
“Is there any time of day during which you usually feel especially happy or melancholy?” el Capitán asks expressionlessly, squatting on his heels.
“Melancholy in the evenings, Capitán. Like most people, no?”
“And where do you feel happiest, in the mountains or by the sea?”
“I’ve never actually been up in the mountains. I’ve seen them many times, of course, on horizons, along certain coasts.”
“I guess that’s the wrong question to ask an old lobo de mar like yourself. Your element is definitely water.”
“Maybe it would make me happy to be in the mountains, but I doubt it.”
“Bernardo?”
He opens his eyes again.
“Are you afraid of death?” asks Capitán Elias. “What I mean is, when you find yourself thinking of death, do you feel afraid?”
Fear and sadness grip his heart at these words.
“Afraid? No tanto. But a man my age, claro, he thinks about it.”
“Angry towards death?”
Right now I’m angrier at that hija de la gran puta cat.
“It would make me angry never to see my daughters again.”
“You’ll be seeing them very soon, I’m sure.” For a moment Capitán Elias looks as if he’s contemplating his face without really seeing him. Then he glances across the bed and, propping himself with one hand on the mattress, he pushes himself up, over, and across Bernardo to pluck one of the plastic-wrapped photographs; he pushes himself back into his squat with a grunt and looks at the picture, and then hands it to Bernardo. “Your daughters.”
“Sí pues.” Bernardo looks at his daughters and grandson through the fogged plastic, gathered on the little front porch.
“You’re a lucky man. I’m going to be a father soon too.”
Suddenly Capitán Elias’s long, black-clad body is spanning him again; back again, he studies Esmeralda the beauty queen through plastic.
El Capitán smiles slightly. “An old love?”
“No, another daughter,” says Bernardo, surprised again by his own angry tone.
“Muy bonita.”
“The other picture. That’s Clara, my wife, the mother of my daughters.”
“Ah.” El Capitán reaches across the bed again, and then he’s looking at blurred Clarita and Bernardo standing in front of the Mitzi in Veracruz; he glances at Esmeralda in his other hand with a briefly puzzled expression. “Lovely,” he says. “You look very happy.”
Bernardo lifts his hand from his belly to hold out the picture of his daughters. It takes a few seconds for el Capitán to react, but then he takes the picture from him, and this time pushes himself up onto his feet and walks to the other side of the bed, where he sets the three snapshots back more or less as they were.
El Capitán stands over him, looking around the cabin, at Esteban’s empty bed, at the two open suitcases filled with neatly folded, tattered, filth-darkened clothes at the foot of each mattress. And then he’s scrutinizing him again.
“You’re an Arsenicum type, I think,” he finally says.
“Cómo?”
“I can’t be sure, but I think I know you well enough to say that.” El Capitán smiles. “An Arsenicum is the type of person who decides to commit suicide by putting his head in the oven, because that seems the least messy way of doing it. But when he sticks his head in, he sees that the oven needs cleaning. And while he’s cleaning it, he forgets all about committing suicide.”
“Sí pues … It’s just a burn, no?”
And then el Capitán squats by the bed again and rummages through the metal box.
“Just a burn, of course. It’s not a complex case. But I’m going to mix a constitutional treatment with a fundamental one just to be sure. Have you been drinking much coffee?”
They haven’t had coffee in weeks. “None,” says Bernardo.
“Good, because coffee interferes with the effectiveness of these medicines,” says el Capitán, moving down the bed to Bernardo’s leg again, pulling the metal box after h
im. “You really shouldn’t have any until you’re healed. Let’s try to clean you up a little.”
With tweezers, el Capitán plucks at the bits of cloth scorched into his leg.
“Feel anything?” he asks.
“Nada.”
El Capitán sprays his leg with water from a plastic water bottle and dabs his numb wounds with cotton balls.
“This is going to sting,” he says.
El Capitán is soaking cotton balls with liquid from another bottle and dabbing his wounds again, but he feels nothing, but then in that spot he does, fiery needles of pain that suddenly explode through his leg—
“I’ll be back in an hour or two,” he hears el Capitán saying through a roaring bonfire.
When he opens his eyes again, Tomaso Tostado is cleaning up the litter of cotton balls by Bernardo’s mattress. Standing inside the doorway Panzón says, “El Capitán says he’s a—A licensed qué?”
“A master herbalist,” says Tomaso. “And something called a—no sé. Un méxdico homeopático. No?”
“Así dijo”—Bernardo turns his head towards the voice and sees José Mateo looking up from the picture of Esme in his hand. José Mateo says, “El Buzo, that cabrón, told el Capi that it sounded like witch stuff to him, told him to just take you to the hospital instead. And el Capi said no, this is the medicine the king and queen of England use. It’s the new medicine, the most modern. Better than or just as good as what they’d give you in the hospital. Isn’t that what he said?”
“Sí pues,” says Panzón. “Your whole body is a vibration. Qué sé yo?”
“A vital force,” says Tomaso Tostado.
“It’s just a burn,” says Bernardo. “Put that picture back.”
“Sí pues, compadre,” says José Mateo. “He knows what he’s doing. Puta, it’s not surgery.”
“Qué loco, ese capitán, no?” says Panzón.
“But he’s educated,” says Tomaso Tostado.
“What was that story about the rat?”
“With this kind of medicine,” says Tomaso, “to cure a burn, you give a medicine that burns a little less, and then the body knows what to do. Like cures like, that’s what he said. Scientists gave this medicine to a rat and put it on the stove and it could stay there without burning up and the other rats that didn’t have it couldn’t.”
Bernardo grunts. “He was going on about putting my head in an oven.”
“So you’re telling me, to cure a burn, he’s going to have to burn Bernardo?” says Panzón.
And then Capitán Elias is waking him up again. Now only el Capitán and Tomaso Tostado are in the cabin.
El Capitán is holding a red plastic jug with a white cap, smaller than the jug he brought the medicine in when they were all sick from drinking rat water. He’s explaining to Tomaso Tostado that Bernardo has to drink some every half hour.
“It’s a combination of cantharis and arnica, diluted,” says el Capitán. “You might know it as Spanish fly and leopard’s-bane.”
El Capitán pours some into the plastic cap. Bernardo takes a drink; it tastes like rust-silted water. There’s something else for them to wash his burns with, a tincture, it’s called, made from calendula and Saint-John’s-wort. And gauzy bandages to lay over his leg.
Just before leaving the cabin, Capitán Elias says, “Try to think of happy things, Bernardo, it helps the healing process.”
“Gracias, Capitán,” says Bernardo. “I feel a little better.”
“This medicine works fast. The Urus’s segundo oficial will be back on his feet in a few days, eh, güey?” Then el Capitán frowns, as if chagrined with himself over that tasteless remark. He lingers a moment, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. “Don’t forget, Bernardo,” he finally says, forcing a smile. “It’s impious for a good man to be sad.”
And Capitán Elias leaves the cabin. Bernardo never sees el Capitán again.
8
ESTEBAN HAS ALREADY CARRIED THE BEER BOTTLES FROM THE SALON doorway to the trash cans and kicked cigarette butts all the way over to the curb when, after he’s been standing there nearly three hours, he finally sees la Joaquina coming down the sidewalk in her coat, with her limber, scuffing, shoes-too-big gait. Her tights are black. When she notices him waiting, her eyes widen into dark disks and she briefly stops, but she doesn’t smile. She’s already holding her keys when she reaches him. He watches her eyes glide from the bouquet in his hand and, suspiciously, up to his face.
“Buen día, Joaquina,” he says, so out of breath and with his head so clogged he can barely hear his own voice.
“El marinero,” she says, in her deep-toned voice. “Esteban, no? Qué paso?”
“Joaquina …” Her controlled, almost subdued manner, confuses him. She seems an opposite person from the volatile tyrant he met the other day. He says there’s something he wants to talk to her about.
“Bueno. De qué?” Her mild interest dismays him.
“I cleaned up around the door,” he says nervously. “I’ll mop it if you want.”
“Oiga, güey, you’re not trying to take my job, are you? There’s more to it than that, you know.” She smiles.
He’s so relieved to see her personality flaring back that he blurts, “I know that. You’d have to pay me a million dollars to get me to hold hands with that Chucho.” He cringes inside over having betrayed himself.
But she laughs and puts the key in the door. “And how much would you charge to do his feet?”
He thinks, Chucho gets his toenails done? But he doesn’t let himself say anything about it and follows Joaquina into the salon and says, “I brought you this,” holding out the bouquet so that when she turns around she only has to reach up her hands to take it. She says, “Ay, Esteban, por qué?” looks down into the cone at the single rose, smiles thinly, and thanks him. She turns and walks swiftly to the back of the salon to turn on the lights. Then she steps through the curtain, and he hears water running, briefly, but when she comes out she isn’t carrying anything. She’s wearing a smocklike, velvety crimson dress with two rows of brass buttons down the front, and a black ribbon falling from the collar. She starts making the coffee.
He sits in a chair against the wall looking at himself in the mirrors and then at Gonzalo dressed like Pedro Picapiedra holding the woman dancer over his head. He feels drugged from his cold and sleeplessness, his skin caked with dried perspiration and grime. He’s furious at himself for having brought her the rose, and then he’s furious at Bernardo for having heated up his head with his preposterous notions. Joaquina is embarrassed that he’s there. Pues, who wouldn’t be? But then he remembers how kindly Marilú treated him, and he resents Joaquina for misinterpreting the gesture of the flower.
Joaquina brings him a cup of coffee and sits with a chair between them sipping hers, her legs straight out and her feet apart just like the last time. She asks him what it is he wants to talk about.
“I’ve decided to leave the ship,” he says, and waits for her to finish her yawn. She drops the back of her hand from her mouth and looks at him.
“Perdón,” she says with a sleepy smile. “Entonces?”
He notices that her earrings are different today. Instead of tiny glass stars, these are tiny glass triangles, yellow.
“I’ve left—”
“I told you you were going to catch a cold going around like that, didn’t I?” And she gets to her feet and quickly crosses the salon and comes back with a box of tissues, setting it down on the chair between them. “Güey, you have to take better care of yourself.”
He repeats that he’s decided to leave the ship, and she nods, and he says, “I was wondering if there was anything I could do, maybe clean up the doorway, and here inside too, for as many days as you want, in exchange for a haircut.”
She seems to be giving his proposal serious thought. “We’ll have to ask Gonzalo,” she finally says. “He should be here any minute.”
And they sit in absolute silence until finally she asks if he’d like
some aspirin. She goes in back again and comes out with a glass of water and two aspirin.
When he can’t stand the silence anymore he almost asks if that’s Gonzalo in that photograph, dressed like the cartoon caveman, but he realizes that could expose what he did and learned about Gonzalo last night, and with a surge of embarrassed apprehension, he realizes that Gonzalo might recognize him.
“Do men really get their toes painted?” he finally asks.
“Some,” she says. “But not Chucho.” And then she looks directly at him and says, “Por qué, güey? You think there’s something wrong with men having pedicures?”
“No,” he says. Though of course he does. “I’d never do it.”
“Some men like it.” And she smiles strangely, as if that puzzles even her. “My novio likes it when I do his feet, but I guess that’s different. He doesn’t put any polish on, claro, but for anyone it feels nice to have your feet pampered, no? Nails trimmed, cuticles cut away, your feet scrubbed y todo.”
“You have a novio?” Ve? It doesn’t bother him. She isn’t his type anyway, a manicurist. A chica plástica, hair dyed, probably fake curls too—
The Ordinary Seaman Page 28
