The Lost Sailors

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  “Yes, well, don’t do anything stupid. We aren’t in Panama now. And these chicks don’t look as if they’ve been waiting for you to arrive.”

  “Don’t worry, Ousbene. I’m not an idiot, I’m not looking for trouble. I just want to hold one of them.”

  He didn’t get the opportunity in the hours that followed. Few of the girls were on their own, and those that were—obviously regulars—turned him down politely.

  Ousbene laughed every time Nedim came back to the table.

  “Fuck! The bitches! What are they afraid of? Do they think I’m going to rape them on the spot?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you, pal.”

  Nedim ordered another round of gin and tonics, the fourth one. Ousbene checked the time. “After this one, I’m going.”

  “I’m staying here. I don’t know if I’ll get anywhere, but you were right about the music, it’s really good.”

  It was just after midnight. Nedim found himself dancing with a girl. He didn’t know how it had happened. He hadn’t asked her to dance. Not really. He’d started dancing on his own. Carried away by the alcohol. Trying to free the energy coursing through his veins.

  Juan Luis Guerra was singing Woman del Callao.

  Nedim was dancing with his eyes closed, his right hand close to his stomach, his left arm raised at the level of his head. Miles away, in a place where the music had led him. He could feel the sweat on his shoulders and dripping down his back. He was smiling. In that place where he was, he was obviously feeling good. Feeling happy.

  He opened his eyes, and she was there. As if he had dreamed her.

  “You’re a good dancer,” she said.

  He opened his arms, without replying. Without even looking at her. She snuggled up against him. He could feel her burning stomach against his. She fell into his rhythm. She was light on her feet. An excellent dancer. Nedim pressed slightly on her waist. He felt as if she was abandoning her whole body to him. They clung together. Her smell was intoxicating. A mixture of sweat and vanilla. He was getting a hard-on, but he didn’t mind. He loved that feeling. His cock getting harder. Rising. Swelling. Straining at his underwear and the material of his jeans. So hard it almost hurt.

  The girl arched slightly, her thigh pressed up against Nedim’s cock. He opened his eyes. She was smiling. She put her cheek against his. The music stopped. They slowly moved apart.

  “I think that deserves a drink, don’t you?” he asked.

  She nodded. He guessed she was an Arab or something like that. It was hard to be sure, because of the dim lighting on the dance floor. But her face was perfect. Huge black eyes. Her curly, glossy hair tumbled to her shoulders. She was still holding Nedim’s hand.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “No.”

  She pointed to a woman sitting on a stool at the other end of the bar. Also an Arab, but older, he thought. The girl squeezed Nedim’s hand and pulled him along. “Come.”

  Her voice was husky and sensual.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lalla.”

  “Mine’s Nedim.”

  The other woman was called Gaby.

  “Gaby?” Nedim echoed, surprised.

  “That’s what people call her. Her real name is Amina. But she doesn’t like it.”

  He didn’t give a fuck what her name was. He was only interested in Lalla.

  “Where are you from?”

  Lalla laughed. “Here.”

  “I mean, where were your parents from?”

  “Morocco. I’d really like a drink.”

  “So would I,” Gaby said, without even looking at them.

  Lalla and Gaby ordered Cokes. Nedim stuck with gin and tonic. The DJ put on Oye como va. The version by Santana. Four minutes and sixteen seconds of happiness. None of the dancers there could let it pass.

  “Shall we?”

  The only thing Nedim wanted to do was to feel Lalla’s body against his again. With his cock against her stomach. Drunk with the sweat pouring off them. He glanced at his watch. He still had a good three hours to go. He wondered if he could manage to get Lalla in a corner somewhere, for a quick fuck. A car would do fine, he thought. If they had a car. Gaby could wait here. He’d buy her a drink. Just time to . . .

  “We’d rather go somewhere else,” Gaby said. “What do you think, Lalla?”

  Nedim cursed Gaby. Moving from here meant breaking the atmosphere. Breaking the physical contact he had established between his body and Lalla’s. He didn’t like this Gaby.

  “Is she your big sister?” he asked Lalla.

  “Gaby?” She laughed. “Why, do we look alike?”

  “A little.” He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “A bit older, of course. The two of us could stay here. It’s good here, isn’t it?”

  “Come with us,” she replied, as if she hadn’t heard, sliding her hand down over Nedim’s buttocks. She winked. “How about it?” She stroked his buttocks.

  “It’s just that . . .”

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “No. But I have my bag with me.”

  “Are you going away?”

  “I’m a sailor.”

  Nedim sensed Gaby’s eyes on him. He turned to her. Their eyes met. He didn’t like the way she was staring at him. As if she was sizing him up.

  “Drop it,” she said to Lalla. “If he doesn’t want to come.”

  “Do you have a boat to catch?” Lalla asked him.

  “No. I . . .”

  He was really attracted to this girl. He wanted to fuck her, but it wasn’t only that. He was under her spell. As if bewitched. He couldn’t have said how she did it. Or, rather, he did know. Lalla had slid her hand down below his buttocks and was now moving it slowly up his right thigh. But there was something else.

  “I like you,” she said in a very low voice, and nibbled his ear.

  He couldn’t think anymore. All he knew was that he’d be crazy to let an opportunity like this pass. He’d never met a girl like her before. Even his Cuban girl in Panama, who’d been number one in his memories and fantasies, couldn’t hold a candle to her.

  “Where is it you want to go?”

  “The Habana,” Lalla replied. “Do you know it? Place de l’Opéra.”

  “I know the area. What kind of place is it?”

  “Cuban. But more intimate than here.”

  Gaby slid down off her stool, and as she did so, her skirt rode up her thighs. Nedim couldn’t help looking. She was a beautiful woman. More than he’d thought at first. She had a riper, more voluptuous body than Lalla. “An Arab princess,” Nedim thought. She certainly looked like one.

  Lalla went off to the toilet. Nedim approached Gaby, cautiously. As if he was dealing with a wild cat. There was a curious smile at the corners of her mouth and her eyes shone with a strange light. She looked him up and down. For the first time he noticed the small scar under her left eye. From the corner of the eye to the middle of the cheek. Nedim assumed it was a knife wound, or maybe a razor wound. He’d have liked to ask her. Instead, what he said was, “Don’t talk much, do you, Gaby?”

  “Let’s put it this way. What men have to say doesn’t interest me very much.”

  “Does that mean you prefer women?” he replied, curtly, suddenly convinced that he’d figured out the relationship between the two women.

  Gaby laughed. A deep laugh, throaty and warm. A real laugh. Nedim laughed with her, at himself, realizing how stupid what he’d just said was.

  “You play with yourself too much on your ship!” She took him by the arm and pulled him to the exit. “Shall we get your bag and go?”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “We’ll get a taxi.”

  “A taxi! There can’t be many taxis around here at this hour.”

  “Lalla went to fin
d one.”

  Nedim told himself, as she drew him to the exit, that he still had time to break free, find an excuse, and get away. But he didn’t have the strength. All he could do was make a rough estimate of how much money he still had in his pocket. He reckoned he could still spend five hundred francs, maximum. When he’d paid Pedrag, the truck driver, he would still have around a hundred francs. It wasn’t much. But once he was home, he’d manage somehow.

  Lalla joined them as Nedim was collecting his things from the cloakroom. A filthy US Navy bag stuffed with old clothes and a few souvenirs he’d been carrying around with him during the four years he’d been at sea.

  “I see you’ve become friends,” Lalla said.

  Gaby smiled, and Nedim knew he’d been trapped. A big, strong-looking guy opened the door for them and said goodnight. Nedim didn’t see the wink he gave Gaby. Outside, the air was muggy. It still hadn’t rained. The taxi was waiting.

  5.

  MEMORIES THAT FORECAST A SHIPWRECK

  The storm broke over the sea first. Then over the city. A violent storm, the kind that only comes two or three times a year. Every time the horizon was set ablaze with blue and green lightning flashes, the Château d’If and the islands of the Frioul emerged from the darkness. The thunder would follow a few minutes later. Not the usual roll, but a sharp, cold, metallic crash that split the air.

  The Aldebaran started pitching. Its hull seemed about to buckle. The rain came down. Huge, hard drops, almost like hail. It was as if the boat had come under machine-gun fire. At the first clap of thunder, Diamantis had jerked awake on his bunk. It had been hard for him to get to sleep. Because of the heat. His cabin—if you could call his cubbyhole a cabin—was like a sauna. He had stripped naked, but, even so, he was streaming with sweat. And when he couldn’t sleep, he started thinking. Or, rather, he was assailed by all kinds of thoughts that went around and around in his head, becoming increasingly gloomy. Since they’d been stuck here, he’d been waking up more and more often during the night. Today the storm had seen to that.

  Now he was watching the spectacle through his porthole. His cabin was on the port side, facing out to sea. He imagined himself out there. Not on board the Aldebaran, but on another ship. A big coaster called the Maris Stella, plying the classic navigation route around the Mediterranean, loading and unloading at every port. Diamantis had been a last-minute replacement for an old friend of his named Michaelis, whose wife was about to give birth. “I can’t stop you being a sailor,” she had said before they married. “But if you want me to give you a child, stop being away for so long.” Michaelis hadn’t hesitated. He’d just turned fifty. Angela was twenty years younger than he, and very pretty. Sailing on the Maris Stella, Michaelis could get home every two weeks.

  That night, in late January, the Maris Stella had just left Limassol in Cyprus, heading for Beirut. They were expecting a big squall. What they got was something worse. The kind of storm the Mediterranean sometimes has in store for sailors. Contrary to popular belief, the Mediterranean isn’t a calm sea, but a very squally one.

  The Maris Stella was thirty-five years old at stem and stern, six less than that in the middle. It had been widened in order to take larger cargoes. By about eleven o’clock, the winds were gusting at nearly seventy miles an hour and the waves were twenty-six feet high. The ship was plowing the waves as best it could. But the water started coming in at the forward hatches as if through a sieve. An hour later, the sea began to submerge the heavily-laden stern, and the ship listed.

  The captain, Koumi—Michaelis and Angela had already asked him to be their child’s godfather—asked Diamantis, “Do you know any good prayers?”

  He shook his head. “Well, I’m not really one for prayers . . .”

  “Then tell the radio operator to call the coast guards. We’re abandoning ship.”

  It was an order, and it wasn’t up for discussion. Koumi knew his ship, he knew all about the Mediterranean and about storms, and he loved life. They didn’t even have time to lower the lifeboat. The ship capsized, and they were pitched into the icy water. By daybreak, the Maris Stella was lying eighty feet down. Swept away by what the coast guards call “the dynamic effects of a raging sea.” The search continued until nightfall, but Diamantis was the only survivor.

  That was why Diamantis was the godfather of a cute little five-year-old girl called Anastasia—and was terrified of storms.

  He put on a pair of shorts, lit a cigarette, and went to the mess to pour himself a beer.

  Abdul joined him. “Can’t sleep,” he grunted.

  “Beer?” Diamantis asked, holding out a can.

  And he told him the story of the Maris Stella.

  “There was this guy I knew,” Abdul said when he’d finished. “An Irishman named Colm Toibin. I met him when I was doing the Atlantic route via the Azores. He always liked to be on the bridge when the weather was bad. He used to say, ‘You can’t imagine how impressive it is! What a spectacle! What huge waves! There always comes a moment when you’re not just afraid, you’re terrified.’ He loved it. And he got what he wanted. We went through some pretty rough times together. Every time, once the storm had died down, he’d laugh and say, ‘Well, it wasn’t the big one, I’m still waiting for that!’ We’d reply, ‘Maybe you’d change your mind if it happened.’ ‘Maybe,’ he’d reply, ‘but I still haven’t seen it, so . . .’”

  “And did he see it?”

  “He was there when the Sea Land Performance went down. It was a freighter doing the northern European route, via the Arctic Circle. And the storm was the worst ever recorded in the last two hundred years.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Colm told me himself. And I don’t think he exaggerated. We met up again by chance, at the Spray in Gibraltar. Over a dozen beers, he told me all about his storm.”

  “We don’t have as many beers as that. But we can open the last two.”

  It didn’t matter if it was true or not. Both of them knew that sea stories only exist when they’re told. Not that they’re invented, but in telling them, the person who lived through them tries to block out his own inner fears. In telling them, he gives a logic to the events. A meaning to his daily reality as a sailor.

  Abdul Aziz and Diamantis were no different than any other sailor. Any story of life at sea, especially when it was about a storm, had to be taken very seriously. Even if it wasn’t necessarily true. Most likely, Colm Toibin’s storm hadn’t been as terrible as all that. But at that moment they were convinced it was.

  “He told me the captain stayed on the bridge for fifty-two hours, trying to save the ship. He would put on speed in the troughs, and slow down when the waves were high in order not to put too much pressure on the hull. A really good guy.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Colm was on watch that night, on the bridge. That was where he wanted to be, he’d insisted on it, and no one had tried to take his place.”

  “Hell, I can believe that.”

  “Right. But that was when he started shitting himself. Because the bridge was submerged, even though it was about a hundred feet above sea level. The waves had torn down the mast, and a forty-five-ton crane was lying on the deck and ramming against the wheelhouse of the second deck, which had been completely destroyed.”

  “He panicked.”

  “I guess so. What’s for sure is that he suddenly found himself with his ass on the floor. He’d slipped on his back in the gangway and gone flying against the ship’s rail. He grabbed hold of it for dear life. By now, the waves were huge. The sea was going up and down. His mouth was full of water. ‘I was praying,’ he told me. It was the captain who saved him.”

  “That must have calmed him down!”

  “Can you imagine? He was always headstrong, whatever the weather.”

  “A real madman.”

  “Not mad, no. I think the sea
terrified him. I think it had scared the pants off him the first time he ever set foot on a ship. So he charged right into it, to overcome the fear.” Abdul paused for thought, and took a swig of beer. Then he resumed, “We’re like that in life, aren’t we? Something scares us and we put our heads down and charge right into it. Into the fear, I mean. Don’t you think so?”

  Diamantis didn’t answer the question, but asked, “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Yes. Five or six years later. I ran into him in Dakar. Talking about ‘his’ storm in a greasy spoon down by the harbor. Just before setting sail for El Callao in Peru. He was playing down what he’d been through. You know the kind of thing. ‘Yes, guys, it was just like I’m telling you. I was forty feet above the water. The wave broke over the deck. At my feet. It swept away the radar mast. But believe me, it wasn’t the big one, I’m still waiting for that.’”

  “And is he still at sea?”

  “No, he’s retired now. Apparently he lives near Galway. He has his little patch of land. And don’t laugh, but he’s never again set foot on a boat. Not even a fishing boat!”

  For a while, they drank in silence. The rain was still pounding the deck. From time to time, there was a crash of thunder, as loud as ever. They were united by the storm. In the same way that a storm at sea brings a crew closer together. No sailor ever tells his family about times like that. Never writes about it, never mentions it when he comes home. Because he doesn’t want to worry them. And, anyway, it’s not something you can talk about. Storms don’t exist. Any more than sailors do, when they’re at sea. Men are only real when they’re on land. No one knows anything about sailors until they come ashore. No one who hasn’t been to sea himself, that is.

  Diamantis remembered watching the TV news a few months after the Maris Stella went down, and being struck by some words spoken by a reporter. They were showing pictures of the damage caused by bad weather in England. Six people had died. “The danger is now past,” the reporter had reassured viewers. “The storm has moved away from the coast and is now out at sea.”

  Out at sea, away from the coasts, there were thousands of men who didn’t exist. Even for their wives. They had no reality until they were home and in their beds.