Many people, there in the restaurant on Friday nights, and elsewhere in Brooklyn, when they learn of Esteban’s ambiguous refugee status from a phantom ship on the Brooklyn waterfront, offer him a temporary place to stay, a couch or floor to sleep on until he and Joaquina can find their own apartment. He always writes their names, addresses, and telephone numbers into a little pocket-size notebook Joaquina gave him for just this purpose.
The night the Wall came down in Berlin, Joaquina bought a bottle of red wine and took Esteban back to her room to celebrate what she’d decided had to be his final liberation from an obsessive confusion she didn’t pretend to understand, which included his obscure sense of loyalty to a certain make of military transport truck, and a constant outrage over a certain cannibalistic dog named Ana.
For over a month now, Esteban has timed his comings and going from the ship to meet la Joaquina—she is, of course, extremely punctual—by la Marta’s watch. He still thinks of la Marta as being with him. Claro, he’s corrected the watch so that it no longer just tells the time over her grave, which was one way of timidly saying good-bye. He is not so morbid as to think he has betrayed la Marta by falling in love with la Joaquina. He tells himself that he’ll never love anyone the way he did la Marta, whom he knew for so short a time, and that because it was for such a short time, this love, on such intimate terms with her absence, can do nothing but endure. Even the war they shared, in comparison, won’t last inside him in quite the same way. La Marta was just a chavala, one with a majestic, grave, and courageous woman growing up inside her. We even have children, he thinks one day, feeling stuck on the ship, leaning on the rail, waiting for it to be time to go and see Joaquina. So who are their children? And he thinks, They’re orphans. They’re everything that’s invisible but still more enduring than a fucked up iron pirate ship that’s made a bunch of poor men ever poorer. Everything that gets lost, that never gets a chance to learn what it was going to be.
“Joaquina? You know what happened? A gringo came to the ship. He’s called a ship visitor.”
“Un qué?” she answers drowsily.
“A ship visitor.” He’s taken a seat against the wall, near Joaquina, who is sitting on her stool, manicuring Chuchu’s hands. He doesn’t tell her now that he’s just come from the subway stop after deciding not to go to the lawyer’s office after all. He has to be at work in another two hours.
“Güera,” interrupts Chucho, “Hueso is having a party Saturday night. It’s going—”
“Chucho, shhh,” she says. “Un momentito.” And Gonzalo, working on another customer’s hair, glances over sharply—
“Qué pasó, Esteban?” she asks.
And Esteban grins back with a bit of embarrassment at Gonzalo, because he knows why he’s just looked at him that way. Before, when Esteban would sit in the salon for hours watching Joaquina do her manicures, he would sometimes get jealous when some of her male customers were too flirtatious with her. He’d sigh and glare and snort through his nose, until Gonzalo finally lost patience and began sending Esteban out for café con leche at Marilú’s, or pastelitos, or to the post office or on some other insignificant errand. And then finally, after one of these episodes, Gonzalo exploded. What kind of men do you think come in here for manicures? he shouted at Esteban. Pues, claro, said Gonzalo, answering his own question before Esteban could, they’re men who want to get to feel like a king for a little while, a pretty chica on a stool at their feet. The last thing they want is their manicurist’s novio sitting beside them, pouting and staring daggers every time they flirt a little! Coño, Esteban! You’re turning into a real pain in the culo!
But this is different, and Esteban ignores Chucho’s grunt of impatience and says, “This Ship Visitor thinks there’s a good chance we’re all going to get paid, and he’s taking Panzón, Tostado, and Cabezón to a lawyer this very minute to see about it. It’s finally over, Joaquina. Chocho!”
Three days later it snows, fat flakes that have been falling all morning, the gray slush on the sidewalks slowly becoming covered with a soft white blanket. Esteban, who hasn’t slept since leaving his night shift at the fábrica, stands on the sidewalk in front of the salon’s steamed-up window adding snow to all the elements his indestructible boots, happy with their new laces, already know about. Then Joaquina comes out singing, “Friolín, friolín,” because it’s so cold, and she stands beside him with her pink tongue out.
And Esteban says, “Snow is just like what I’ve always imagined a rain of volcanic ash must be like, Joaquina. Only cold instead of hot.” And then he tells her about a school outing he was taken on when he was eleven, to a volcano that was a historic sight because its eruption a century and a half before blew out the side of the crater with explosions so loud that supposedly military garrisons throughout Centroamerica and as far away as Jamaica were put on alert against British invasions. All along that part of the Pacific coast, the eruption turned day into night for a week, pouring down a rain of ash that ended up two feet deep on the ground, so coating everybody and everything with volcanic ash that not even mothers could recognize their own children or husbands in the streets. On the bus ride to the volcano, their teacher, Compañera Silvia, who he’s already told Joaquina about, vos sabés, the one with braided mole hair, told them the history of the volcano, which most already knew anyway. But then she told them the part about how every domesticated animal that wasn’t suffocated in the ash and even wild ones, even tigers and monkeys, had tried to find shelter from the raining ash under any roof they could find, crowding into churches, convents, and thatched huts, pushing nuns and children out of their beds. That Compañera Silvia, she was buena onda! Esteban laughs out loud at the memory. Bueno, when they reached the foot of the volcano, everyone rolled around in the ancient ash of the lava fields just for fun. And when he got home, all coated with whitish gray ash from head to toe, you know what he did? He sprang through the door waving his arms and howling, excited by the idea of frightening his mamá with this ghost-zombie disguise. His mamá put her hand to her chest and said, Dios mío, Estebanito, you look just like your papi!
“… And that’s the only time in my whole life that I ever heard Mamá make any reference at all to what my father looked like!”
Joaquina, with one of her ear-to-ear smiles, says, “Chamaquito, qué historias! That accelerated head of yours, full of nothing but stories, no?”
And then Joaquina tells him there’s something she wishes she could take him to see that very minute, something she went to see last winter when it snowed. In the botanical garden in Brooklyn, she says, there’s a glass house kept heated with steam, and it’s full of tropical plants and palms and banana trees, and, pues, everything you find growing in the jungle, even live lizards running around and iguanas.
“So if you’re inside and look out through the glass, Esteban, it’s like it’s snowing in the jungle. Chingón, no?”
And he barely has a chance to tell her how much he looks forward to seeing that, when he hears someone calling his name through the snow, and sees the Ship Visitor’s blue van parked by the opposite curb, and then the Ship Visitor getting out and crossing the street in his pillowy parka and a black wool cap pulled down just over his eyes, wearing black boots with thick black rubber soles that crunch loudly against the snow.
Esteban shakes the Ship Visitor’s hand and manages to introduce Joaquina, though he feels disturbed and confused that the Ship Visitor has been able to find him here; he counts on the protection of complete anonymity in his new, illegal existence off the ship. Now the Ship Visitor is explaining how he’d asked that gold-toothed marinero where it was that Esteban’s novia worked, and that then he’d put two and two together and driven to this neighborhood and asked in a restaurant if anyone knew of a nearby beauty salon owned by a former Tropicana dancer. And Esteban thinks, Tomaso has a big mouth. That was stupid of me, telling Tomaso Tostado about Gonzalo. The day before yesterday, on one of his visits to the ship, the Ship Visitor had told Esteban t
hat he’d really given him a fright, disappearing from the subway like that, and Esteban had laughed and shyly apologized. But then the Ship Visitor had asked Esteban about Joaquina, and though Esteban hadn’t denied having a novia, he’d been careful not to really tell him anything. And then the Ship Visitor had asked him if he knew Bernardo’s last name, and he hadn’t.
The Ship Visitor says, “I just wanted to tell you, Esteban, that because of the snow, the Seafarers’ Institute has decided to evacuate all of you from the ship. It’s going to happen sometime tomorrow.” The Seafarers’ Institute’s board had authorized the unprecedented step of taking the crew off the ship, putting them up at the institute for a few days, and flying them home, all at the institute’s expense. “I have a feeling that you won’t be coming, Esteban,” the Ship Visitor says, with a smile at Joaquina, “though of course you’re welcome to, if you want.” And then he says the U.S. Marshals Service will be posting a lien on the ship and officially seizing her the same day.
“Ajá,” says Esteban. Because the Ship Visitor seems perturbed …
And the Ship Visitor says, “But I wanted to talk to you about something else, Esteban. I know you were the closest to Bernardo.”
Though he hadn’t even remembered Bernardo’s last name, which had made him feel bad …
“Ajá,” says Esteban, noticing how the cold is beginning to make his ears hurt. “We shared a cabin, pues.”
The Ship Visitor, towering over him and Joaquina, looks down at him through the snow with a worried look in his pale eyes, and then he shrugs and lifts his hands away from his sides. “Esteban,” he says. “Bernardo’s last name is Puyano. We finally got it from the U.S. Embassy in Managua, because they issued his visa back in June.” And he said that he and la Reverenda had made a lot of phone calls and everyone was checking and they were going to check again, but so far there was no record of a Bernardo Puyano having left the United States in late October, or having come into Nicaragua. And someone from the embassy had done them the favor of going to Bernardo’s address to see if he was there, and he wasn’t.
“I told them about it, on the ship, before coming here,” says the Ship Visitor. “You can imagine how everybody felt. After everything you’ve all been through, and now this.”
“Sí pues,” says Esteban. He feels Joaquina take his arm in both of her hands and stand closely against him. “I felt bad,” he says flatly, “that I couldn’t even tell you his last name.” Then he begins to understand that this terrible though not unfamiliar sensation swelling inside him is terror. And he feels tears like tiny, hot beads rolling over the cold-numbed rims of his eyes.
Then Joaquina asks if they want to come inside. Gonzalo keeps the heat turned up all the way, she says. Inside, she brews a pot of coffee while Esteban sits in shocked silence next to the Ship Visitor. He hears a toilet flush in back, and a moment later Gonzalo steps out through the curtain.
Gonzalo says, in English, to the Ship Visitor, “Are you here for your nails or to have your hair cut?”
With her back to them at the coffee stand, Joaquina says in Spanish, “It’s serious, Gonzalo, it’s about the viejito who was on the ship with Esteban. They don’t know what happened to him.”
And the Ship Visitor turns to Esteban and says, “I wish I could even be sure Bernardo was taken to the hospital. None of the Brooklyn hospitals, anyway, has any record of a Bernardo Puyano having been a patient. We’re going to keep looking, of course. There must be an explanation. I don’t know, maybe, somehow, Bernardo is still here in New York.”
Esteban covers his face with his hands and sits back in his chair. And he remembers the day he came back to the ship with his new haircut, soaring on love and carrying the side of beef over his shoulder, and suddenly found himself being hustled into his cabin, which stank of rotting cheese and an old man’s illness. Bernardo was in delirium, eyes blindly rolling, but he’d reached up his arms and in an iron embrace had pulled Esteban’s head towards him and kissed him with dry lips. But he’d been too wrapped up in his love even to realize how alarmed he was until he set on eyes on Mark, when suddenly he’d felt capable of murdering that useless hijueputa unless he took Bernardo to the hospital. And then he’d instantly felt better, no? So happy in love that he hadn’t let himself worry about the viejo. A yanqui hospital, pues. Why should he have suspected anything? Now here he is draining tears of fear and guilt and pity into his hands, for himself as much as for the viejo. Hijo de cien mil putas, he’s hardly given Bernardo another thought ever since he found out he’d been sent home! Though he’s told Joaquina all about the viejo. All about how it was Bernardo who’d practically driven him from the ship so that he could meet her, challenging his pride. That crazy viejo with all his fussy doting and his sad stories and his wrapped snapshots and his pedantic lessons and his sitting cat and his ridiculous dreams of chicken incubators! This can’t be, no? What did they do with Bernardo? Puta, why?
“What do you think happened?” Esteban asks the Ship Visitor, when he can finally bear to look out from behind his hands, sitting there with Joaquina’s arms tightly wrapped around him.
“I don’t know, Esteban,” the Ship Visitor answers. “I’m just as baffled as you are. What we really need to do is find this Elias and this Mark.”
After the Ship Visitor leaves the salon, Gonzalo announces that he’s closing up early because of the snow. Esteban wakes late in the afternoon in Joaquina’s room, under a blanket on the bed, clutching her body against him. He buries his nose in the soft place between her upper arm and her chest, breathes in deeply… Bernardo Puyano. He feels terrible now that he hadn’t been warmer with the viejo. But Bernardo’s effusive and dogged love was so generously and at times so stiflingly given that Esteban always felt blocked from showing him much affection in return. Or maybe love had just stopped flowing inside him, until he met Joaquina … And trying to comprehend or even imagine this mysterious abyss that has somehow swallowed Bernardo, he suddenly realizes that it isn’t something that has been done only to Bernardo. It’s something that’s been done to all of them, and that they never even knew or suspected the truth makes it all the more terrifying. And makes it also too much like what happened to la Marta and to how many compas, everyone he’s lost so far, another thing he’s never understood until right now …
It’s night when he finally feels ready to walk to the ship. There’s plenty of time left. He puts the roll of quarters he’s saved for this occasion into the pocket of his wool jacket, pulls on his stocking cap. From a pay phone on the corner outside he calls in sick at the fábrica for the first time ever, and then he makes all his other phone calls, leafing through the little address book with fingers numbed and aching from the cold. When he’s finished he stands staring at the receiver for a moment through the clouds of his breathing, wishing there was a way he could track down and phone Milton in Miami, just to talk to him. He listens to the crunching of tires through the packed snow on the avenue, hears shovels scraping pavement everywhere. It’s stopped snowing now. Everywhere, this sparkling white sugar. The avenue has been strung with Christmas lights and tinselly banners.
3
“IT’S STOPPED SNOWING.” ELIAS TURNS FROM THE WINDOW AND LOOKS AT Kate, who’s nursing their baby. Hector. Two weeks old. The Law of Similars. Like cures like. Therefore, those nearly ten pounds of pure and innocent flesh cure the father.
Kate’s disappointed in him, of course. Very disappointed. She thinks he’s a total fuck-up. But Mark absconded with all the money, what could he do? Kate has always thought there was something slimy about Mark Baker. She hopes Elias has learned something from all this. These risky ventures have their charm, but really, Elias, it’s time to get serious. He’s explained the “technicalities” to Kate: The crew is still on the boat. Sooner or later federal marshals will seize the ship, there’ll be an auction, the crew will be paid and sent home. Tough break for everybody, all around, but it’s the way things work. In the maritime industry.
Where’d
the wanker go? And where’d the old waiter go? Bernardo.
He’s waiting to find out. He’s been waiting for six weeks now, to find out. And feeling sick with fright.
But they won’t find his name on a single piece of paper. And the Panamanian Registry has no legal culpability, because they were never licensed seamen. He made sure that the “Oath of Officer or Agent of an Incorporated Company” was signed on behalf of Achuar Corp. of Panama City by Mr. Mark Baker. And Mr. Mark Baker has apparently vanished off the face of the earth. And who’s going to force the Panamanian Registry to turn over even that piece of paper?
The Ordinary Seaman Page 40
