In the evening they rounded the cape toward the inner islands, Flores lost in the night and the fog to the south. It took two more days of cold weather sailing to reach Gomez Point on Graciosa, and there, because the prevailing winds were against them from the west, the captain changed course for a straight run to Fayal. At dawn, Wilson saw signs of habitation on the headlands—the lights of towns, radio antennas blinking red from the interior—and the realization came over him in a rush of sadness: What a lonely life was to be had upon the sea! Always sailing along foreign coasts, making for elsewhere; elsewhere achieved just to turn around and sail back again across the dark and unknowable ocean. The sailor, Wilson understood now, was a wandering soul, never truly at home.
The Azores are a forbidding, volcanic archipelago where it rains much of the year; its towns are small and poor. But when the Compound Interest entered the harbor of Angra do Heroismo on Terceira at eight the next evening, Wilson thought he had never seen such a beautiful city: The whitewashed houses rose from the waterfront up a steep slope of cobbled streets and narrow stairways to a baroque cathedral, its spire decorated with colored lights. Along the quay, cafés and restaurants were full of patrons, and from somewhere on the wind came the sound of a woman singing a Spanish song. Wilson saw the cranes and derricks of industrial wharves off the starboard, the trawlers and tankers moored in the roads, the familiar black and green smokestack of Black Star Line cargo ships, the gray-mottled bulk of Portuguese Navy destroyers.
They tied up in the marina beside a large yacht flying the blue and yellow ensign of the king of Sweden. The crew was given four days’ leave. Wilson packed his duffel and headed for Portuguese customs, a large nineteenth-century building of pink stucco at the end of a cobblestone wharf. Inside, it was like a bus station, the dirty marble floor littered with scraps of paper, long lines of crewmen from various vessels waiting to see the official for release to the outside. Captain Amundsen saved a place in line for Wilson.
“Atlantic traffic is picking up these days,” the captain said when Wilson stepped up, unshouldering his duffel bag. “Just in the last couple of years. It’s a very strange thing.”
Wilson looked around at the sailors in line. He saw dark faces and light, men of all continents and nations. Many were dressed in cheap suits, hair slicked back, like tough guys in a gangster movie. A tall sailor behind played the harmonica, a soft tune quickening into a familiar Irish jig.
“ ‘Rocky Road to Dublin,’ ” Wilson said, tapping his foot. “Do you know that one?” He was a little giddy; the sensation of being on land was disconcerting. The rocking of the ship persisted in his legs, in his bones.
The captain frowned. He seemed disturbed by all the activity.
“Come on, it’s shore leave, Captain,” Wilson said, and put a convivial hand on the man’s shoulder.
“I’m as glad to go ashore as the next fellow,” the captain said. “But there’s something unnatural about all of this.”
“How do you mean?” Wilson said.
“I’ve been shipping through the Azores for thirty years, and I’ve never seen the kind of traffic that’s come in and out of here in the last few years. Either the world economy’s gone wild and someone forgot to tell me or there’s something else going on.”
“Like what?” Wilson was barely paying attention.
“Like some illegal trade,” the captain said. “Drugs, contraband, who can say? Something sinister. Something out of Africa, it’s always something out of Africa. And it’s not just the Azores; it’s the Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries. Riberia Grande, that used to be a dismal port, forgotten by the world, now it’s like a damned boomtown. Same thing here. It’s damned peculiar.”
Wilson shrugged. His mind was elsewhere.
12
Wilson parted from the captain an hour later, on a corner in the Baxia District. The captain got in a cab for the Hotel Cristobal, a modern high-rise at the edge of town. Wilson walked along the cobbles, lost for a few minutes. The streets were full. The air held the fragrance of old stones and earth. After a while, he stepped back into a doorway and watched the crowds pass. It was the beginning of the Festival of São Xoxsa, a Portuguese martyr who had been thrown to the sharks by Barbary pirates in the fifteenth century. Thickset peasants from the countryside went by barefoot, sacred relics around their necks, drinking grappa from inflated sharkskins. Dark women wheeled barrels full of yellow calla flowers.
The scrawled map in Wilson’s pocket led him to a café called the Arquipleago. It was a small, dirty place, open to the street, with smoke-blackened beams and a gaudy, incongruous American pinball machine in one corner. Wilson took a table outside. Half a block down the dark leaves and flowering palms of the Parque Citadino. Young ilhéu couples strolled its sandy lanes in the dark, their voices reaching Wilson as a soft murmur. The waiter came, a young man slim as a bullfighter, with sideburns shaved to a point.
“Senhor?”
Wilson hesitated, then pointed to a poster in the window showing a raven-haired, buxom woman in a bathing suit posing beside an enlarged and distinctly phallic bottle of something alcoholic.
“Uma botelha de aguardente?” the waiter said.
Wilson nodded, helpless. The waiter brought a whole bottle of yellowish liquid and one small glass. Wilson tasted the stuff. It was a sort of brandy made from white grapes, strong and sour. He did a quick shot, and it burned the back of his throat.
“So you found the place?” Cricket sat down at the table a few minutes later, smelling of perfume. Wilson stared.
“You look great,” he said.
She smiled shyly at him, then turned to call for another glass in Portuguese. “I’ll join you,” she said.
Tonight Cricket wore her hair pulled back in a French braid, a little dark eye shadow, and bright red lipstick. She had put aside her shipboard jeans and sweatshirt in favor of a bolero jacket of dark wool and a short, tight silky dress printed with blue and black flowers. A dozen thick bracelets jangled together on her left wrist. They were studded with stones and seemed made of a white metal that was far brighter and more lustrous than silver—platinum? Where would a common sailor get such jewelry? Wilson wondered. Then he put the question out of his head. She looked beautiful tonight. Right now, nothing else mattered.
When the glass came, she poured a shot of the yellow liquid and raised it in the light of the street. “We made it this far in that ship of fools,” she said. “Here’s to the next leg of the journey.”
“Sure,” Wilson said, and they both drank.
When they had finished half the bottle of aguardente, Cricket went inside to pay the waiter and came out again. Wilson tried to give her some of the crisp new Portuguese money he’d exchanged his dollars for at the customs house, but she waved him away.
“It’s on me,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“What about the rest of the bottle?”
“Bring it along.”
They walked side by side without touching up the cobbled streets, past stone-fronted houses, shuttered against the night, turned up a narrow alley into a plaza where a bronze horseman sat on his horse pointing out to the sea, and went past him up two flights of stairs. Now, they were out of the lower town on quiet, residential streets. Some of the houses here were painted powder blue with white trim, others pale yellow with blue trim. Across the terra-cotta back of the town Wilson caught a glimpse of the harbor below. Clouds ran across the moon. A black cat crossed in front of them, stopped and hissed, then disappeared into a cul-de-sac.
“Bad luck,” Wilson said, shivering.
Cricket put her arms around him and pushed him against the side of a blue house. She kissed him; then she kissed him again.
“O.K.,” Wilson said.
At the end of the cul-de-sac there was a small pension of two stories, its flat facade lit by three large plastic lanterns in the shape of owls. The lobby was a narrow hallway with one overstuffed easy chair and a bunch of calla flowers in a brass pot. The concie
rge, an old woman wearing an old woman’s black dress and a dirty white cardigan, sat in the chair, dozing over a copy of the Courier Ilheú. On the cover Wilson recognized a picture of Michael Jackson. The concierge woke up when Cricket closed the door, and a brief exchange followed in Portuguese. They gestured at Wilson several times and spoke quickly in raised voices. After ten more minutes of bargaining, the concierge produced a key from her sweater, and Cricket took it and led Wilson up the stairs.
The room was large with a double bed on a raised platform and a window that opened on a straight view down the cul-de-sac, between the houses to the harbor and the sea.
“This is the only room in the place worth a damn,” Cricket said. “The other ones look out on plaster walls or have an illuminated owl hanging in the window. Also, it’s the only room with a big enough bed.”
Wilson nodded. He felt unaccountably nervous. He set his duffel on a cane-bottom chair, put his hands in his pocket, and walked around the room. Bare wood floors except for a small oval throw rug; on the walls, a colored chalk drawing of the terraced fields of São Miguel and a fifties-era framed photograph of the queen of England in the scarlet uniform of the Horse Guards. In the bathroom, a deep marble tub with claw-and-ball feet. When he walked back into the bedroom, Cricket was already out of her jacket and dress, and she stood barefoot beside the bed, her arms elbow-twisted behind her back to undo the clasp of her black bra.
Wilson gaped from across the room, hands still in his pocket, the back of his neck sweating.
“Hey, you going to help me with this?” Cricket turned a coy shoulder.
Wilson crossed over and fumbled with the clasp, his hands trembling. The side of Cricket’s face was lit a pale ivory by the reflected light of a plastic owl just beyond the window. Her back was smooth and muscular, the vertebrae like knobs of coral beneath a surface of shallow water. The bra fell loose, and Wilson reached around to take Cricket’s breasts in his hands. He stood there quietly for a moment, his heart beating, feeling her nipples harden against his palms. Then he leaned forward and bit into the soft web of skin just above her collarbone. Cricket shuddered and pulled him down, and in another moment, Wilson couldn’t quite say how, he was out of his clothes, and Cricket’s legs fell open and they were rolling across the bedspread of the double bed in a room of an obscure pension on a distant island, girded at every point of the compass by the deep and somber Atlantic night.
13
They stayed in bed for two days, making love and telling each other stories of their lives. The sun came and went over Fayal and Pico, over Sao Miguel and Corvo, over all the islands of the Azores and over the dark and burgeoning continents hidden like flaws in the gem of the world. But they did not heed the changing light and lay oblivious in each other’s arms, one inside the other, part of the vast, infamous compromise that allows one generation to pass to the next.
Wilson was delighted with Cricket’s body. There seemed twice as much of her as there was of Andrea, and she was hard and soft in different places. The muscles in her back and arms were from honest work, not exercise—which is another form of indolence—and when he climbed on top of her, Wilson felt like he was climbing on top of something very solid indeed. It was only her hands that he found disturbing, though he did not tell her so. It was hard to get used to such hands on a woman. They were wider and thicker than his own and a good deal harder. They had held things his would never hold; a whole history of work and hardship was written upon them.
Perhaps Cricket could sense Wilson’s reaction. She used her tongue more than her fingers when they made love, and lying together afterward, she would tuck her hands away beneath the sheets. He felt a little guilty because of this, though he also found her shyness a charming inconsistency. Each of us, he thought, has our own secret places, our cherished weaknesses. Then, on the morning of the third day, Wilson took Cricket’s hands between his own and tried to kiss her palms.
Startled, she pulled away.
“Come on,” Wilson said. “Give me your hands.” A steady drizzle fell on Terceira now, and the light was no brighter than it is at eight in the evening in other latitudes.
“No, they’re gross. I hate them.”
“Come on, how can you hate a part of your own body?”
“That’s easy,” Cricket said, and turned her head away and the shadows of the rain from the window beaded across her face. “Let me see them,” Wilson insisted.
Cricket turned back to him slow and sullen, withdrew a hand and placed it on the sheet between them like a dead thing. Her eyes were dark; her hair matted and brown-looking across the pillow.
“It’s not so bad,” Wilson said. But it was bad, scarred and hard as a rock. Gently, he pressed his thumb into her Mons Venus, her Mons Jupiter, where the palmists say lie our desires and our fortunes. These bumps, usually soft and fleshy, were scuffed as the bottom of a shoe.
“Satisfied?” Cricket said, and she took her hand back and rolled away on her hip.
“So what?” Wilson said. “You’ve worked with your hands. Your life’s been different from mine. That’s all.”
“Different? My life’s been hell.” It was a statement of fact, not self-pity. Wilson reached out to touch her, but she shrugged him off.
“What about the sea? I thought you loved the sea,” Wilson said because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Cricket said, then she flopped over suddenly and laid her head on his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she put her hands on his shoulders, where they felt like the pads of a nervous animal. “I’m trying to become a different person. I’ve been too tough for my own good, and I’ve been very lonely. And I’ve done a few things that make me lose sleep at night.”
“Like what?” Wilson said. The back of his neck prickled.
Cricket shrugged. “Later,” she said. “When you know me better.”
“What are we talking about here? Weird sex? Did you sleep with the crew of a tramp steamer? Did you kill someone?”
“Not sex. Who cares about that? We’re not a couple of virgins here. Right?”
Wilson had to agree.
“Sure, I’ve probably had sex with too many people. But the worst part is I’ve never been in love. You asked me before we left why I wanted you along on this voyage. O.K., here’s another reason: I need to trust somebody right now or I’ll dry up inside. And there was a sadness about you that I thought I could trust with my own sadness.”
Wilson nodded. “It’s the dread,” he said. He had noticed this in women. The very neurosis that made his life so difficult attracted members of the opposite sex. Some women went for the dread the way bees went for honey.
“The what?” Cricket said.
“The feeling I have that something bad is going to happen next, that disaster is always waiting just around the corner.”
“I know that feeling,” she said, and it sounded like she understood. “At any moment you’re prepared to lose everything. That’s why you’re such a good gambler.”
Wilson thought for a minute. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said.
14
That afternoon, they dressed and for the first time in two days went downstairs starving, to look for something to eat.
The concierge, drowsing over the same copy of the Courier Ilheiú, looked up scowling and pointed to a hand-lettered sign over her easy chair.
“We missed breakfast,” Cricket said. “We missed lunch too. Dinner isn’t for another four hours. No eating between meals, those are the house rules.”
“Oh, my God,” Wilson said with alarm. “Four hours. I don’t think I can wait that long.”
Cricket nodded and narrowed her eyes and turned to the old woman. There was another exchange in Portuguese, this one rising to an argument, but Cricket was persistent. At last the woman threw up her hands, heaved out of the easy chair, which bore the permanent indentation of her bony rear end, and slammed off into the kitchen through a heavy door to the right. C
ricket and Wilson followed.
“What did you say to her?” Wilson whispered into Cricket’s ear.
“I told her if she didn’t feed us, I’d break her face,” Cricket said.
The kitchen was a large, pleasant, well-lit room with a fireplace, a white ceramic gas stove, and a large old-fashioned wooden sideboard along one wall. Pots bubbled on the stove and filled the room with the rich, delicious smell of food. A glass door opened onto a beautiful little moss garden at the center of which stood a crumbling plaster nymph, glistening in the rain.
“She looks cold out there,” Wilson said.
Cricket didn’t say anything.
They sat at a tile-topped table. The concierge ladled some of the food from the pots into pottery bowls, slammed them down on the table, and left. Cricket brought over plates and cutlery, a bottle of wine, and bread from the sideboard. They had sopa de Peixes, a delicious soup of fish and squid and shellfish; chicarrones, which are hot Portuguese sausages; and saffron rice. The wine was a red Verdelhoa, which, according to the label on the bottle, once graced the table of the tsars.
“This is great,” Wilson said with his mouth full.
Cricket was too busy eating to respond.
When the rice and soup and sausages were gone, they sat sated, finishing the wine. Wilson already knew Cricket well enough to know that good food and wine put her in a confessional mood.
“Tell me more,” he said, and filled her glass.
“About what?” she said.
“About you.”
She took a quick gulp of the wine and lowered her eyes. “You really want to know?” Her voice sounded small and uncertain.
“Yes.”
“I was a lot of trouble in the old days,” she said after a pause. “I fell in with a pretty bad crowd my first year at Palmetto High. You know the type, beer-swilling shit-kicking dudes with bad-ass cars; only because it was an island, the thing there was cigarette boats with huge engines. I ran away a couple of times—once to New Orleans, once to Miami—was in and out of juvie for the usual vandalism and drunkenness. Guess you could say I grew up pretty fast. In any case, my parents couldn’t control me, so my dad thought I’d be better off at sea.
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