The Lost Sailors

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  He joined her in bed a little while later. The silence of the terrace, the view over the city, even the alcohol hadn’t calmed him down. He needed to have her next to him. To feel her body. Her body put his mind at rest. Every time, her beauty brought him back to the land of the living.

  He undressed quickly in the darkness, and slipped into the bed beside her. From the way she was breathing, he knew she wasn’t asleep. She had her back to him, and was pretending to sleep. That wasn’t like her. Slowly, he stroked her buttocks, then slid his hand between her thighs.

  “I’m tired,” she said again, pressing her legs together to stop his hand from moving.

  “Cephea,” he murmured, taking his hand away.

  His erect cock pressed eagerly against her buttocks, looking for a way in. She had always said she liked it when he was impatient to fuck her. It wasn’t the same as those afternoon naps they took, when Cephea’s mother was looking after the children, and they made love, careful not to make the bed creak—or the table, the times when she lay down on it and opened her thighs. They would bite each other’s shoulder or neck to stop their cries echoing through the house.

  He was breathing heavily. His hand continued on its way along Cephea’s thigh, paused at her stomach, then moved higher. He grasped her right breast and started caressing it, teasing the nipple. He knew Cephea liked that.

  In his hand, her breast grew hard. She yielded, and he was relieved. He held her tighter. With his knee, he parted her legs slightly. She had stopped resisting. He let go of her breast and let his hand move down to her cunt. His fingers slipped into the moist cleft. Cephea sighed and arched slightly. The happy moment came when her round, firm buttocks rose toward him. He entered her forcefully.

  Their fused bodies became one long undulating movement, slow at first, then faster and faster. With both hands, he grabbed Cephea’s buttocks and parted them, the better to penetrate her. Each time he went deeper. When she started to convulse, his thrusts became faster. He was still kneading her buttocks. He heard her moan. Her orgasm was going to be very intense. He came, very quickly, in a few hard thrusts, indifferent to the creaking of the bed, the children asleep in the next room, the darkness shrouding the city, the freighters getting ready to cast off from one port or another, the vastness of the oceans, the loneliness of sailors, the fragility of men under the starry vault of the world.

  Cephea was sobbing.

  “Cephea . . . What’s the matter?”

  She moved away from him and lay on her back.

  “Cephea . . . Darling . . .”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Enough of what?”

  Her tears increased. He lit the bedside lamp, and they were bathed in soft ochre light. She pulled the sheet over her and held it tight against her breasts, almost like a child.

  “Enough of what, Cephea?” he asked again, worried, an imploring look on his face.

  “Haven’t you had enough of the world?”

  The question had taken him by surprise. It was the last thing he might have expected. Departures, ships, the sea, that was his life. Their life. By tacit agreement, since the first night they’d slept together.

  “It’s my life, you know that.”

  “And where am I in your life?”

  She had sat up. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her eyes were shining with a thousand tears that might still come. He had only seen Cephea cry once before. When he had asked her to be his wife.

  “Cephea.”

  “Where is your life? In Port Adelaide? Colombo? Antwerp? Valparaiso? Where? And where am I? Abdul, where am I in all that?”

  “Here. In our home.”

  “Here . . .” His answer seemed to surprise her. “Here,” she said again, to herself. “Yes . . . here.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He had never imagined that Cephea might question their life. For him, everything was simple. He left, and he came back. He left her, and he came back to her. And they loved each other.

  They loved each other, didn’t they? That was the main thing. He wanted to tell her that, but he kept silent. This conversation was meaningless.

  “Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

  “What do you want me to say, Cephea? I don’t understand. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s gotten into me. I’m sick and tired of waiting. Waiting for you. The children and I are sick and tired. That’s what’s gotten into me, Abdul.”

  Her voice was low, almost a whisper. There was no anger in it. Only weariness.

  “You’ve never said this before,” he said, gently. “Your letters—”

  “Letters, letters . . .” She exploded. “Fuck it, Abdul!”

  Cephea leaped out of bed and strode resolutely across the room. There was a closet in the wall. She opened it. At the bottom were piles of envelopes. Hundreds of envelopes. His letters.

  “You see, I have all your letters here. Year after year. What do you want me to do with them? Have dinner with them? Take them for a walk? Sleep with them? Fuck them? Huh? Tell me.”

  There was a silence.

  “Is that what you want my life with you to be?”

  “No,” he murmured.

  He felt lost, helpless. But he still didn’t understand why what had been true before he left for Adelaide wasn’t true anymore now that he was back. He stood up and went to her. He wanted to take her in his arms, comfort her, tell her once again, as he had so often before, how important the sea was to him.

  “No,” he repeated.

  “Neither do I, Abdul. Because let me tell you something, if that’s how you see the future, then it’ll be without me. And I’ll wipe my ass with your letters!”

  He slapped her.

  He’d wanted to take her in his arms and instead he slapped her. The earth seemed to give way beneath his feet. He felt unsteady on his feet. He had the impression he was sinking. He had closed his eyes at the very moment his hand had touched Cephea’s cheek. As if to cushion the blow. And he told himself there were no acts that were irreparable. His father had always said that. He hoped it was true.

  Cephea didn’t move. She stood there in front of him, straight and proud. Naked. He realized how beautiful she was. No other woman could replace her in his heart. But he couldn’t find the words to apologize for what he had done. She was the one who broke the silence.

  There were no tears in her eyes now. Only determination.

  “I love you,” she said softly.

  “I love you, too.”

  “So think about this, Abdul. I won’t mention it again.”

  She went back to bed. When he left the room, to get a cigarillo, she turned out the light. That was the moment he lost her.

  “That was the moment I lost her,” he admitted finally, finishing his coffee. There are irreparable acts, but we don’t know what they are. He looked at the sailboats moored in the harbor, on the other side of the street. Doing that had a soothing effect on him. He ordered a second coffee.

  Abdul Aziz had gotten up early and left the Aldebaran without even taking the time to have breakfast or drink a cup of instant coffee. He hadn’t wanted to run into Diamantis. He had no desire to talk to him. He felt tense and nervous. “There’s no shipwreck worse than a life being wrecked,” he had said to himself when he got back to his cabin the night before.

  He had lain on his bunk, listening to Duke Ellington. Money Jungle, one of his favorite albums. Ellington playing in a trio with Charlie Mingus and Max Roach. The album included the most sublime version ever of Solitude. But the track he particularly liked was Fleurette africaine. He had played it four times, then had fallen asleep, exhausted, when Caravan started up.

  He had gone early to the Seamen’s Mission. To phone Cephea. He’d been trying for three days now, but in vain. He had told himself he would have more luck early i
n the morning. But Abdul Aziz had no sooner entered the building than the deputy director, Berthou, hastened to inform him of the latest setbacks suffered by the Aldebaran’s owner, Constantin Takis. The Aldebaran was no longer the only ship of his unable to leave port. Thirty-nine of his ships were now at a standstill around the world. In addition, Berthou said, a lawsuit was in hand against Constantin Takis. The Greek courts had just sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of twenty thousand dollars for violation of commercial laws.

  Abdul Aziz made no comment on this news. He merely nodded as he listened to Berthou. He didn’t really give a fuck about the future of his freighter this morning. He wanted to talk to Cephea. To hear her voice. He needed reassurance. He needed to know that if he got home in the next two or three days, she would be there.

  The idea had been running through his head since last night. He had thought about it again on the bus taking him to Place de la Joliette. He could go back to Dakar. There was nothing to stop him. He and Cephea would talk. They loved each other, so there had to be a solution. When he had negotiated the crew’s departure, he had been given to understand that the International Federation of Transportation Workers could arrange his repatriation if the situation got worse. He could make sure that both he and Diamantis went home.

  “Takis has appealed.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he replied, evasively. “He’s smart.”

  In less than ten years, Constantin Takis’s line had become

  the twelfth largest Greek shipping line by tonnage, and second largest for the number of ships. He had started with two small tankers, and his fleet had grown until he had ninety vessels: tankers, bulk carriers, roll-on roll-off ferries, and refrigerator ships.

  Abdul Aziz knew him well. They had been in the same class at the merchant-navy school. Takis had always been a go-getter. But since 1983, he’d owed him a debt. A debt of honor. That was the only reason he had accepted the command of the Aldebaran: to pay his debt to Takis, so that he didn’t have to owe anything to anyone anymore. But no one knew that.

  “Can I phone?” he asked, ignoring Berthou.

  It was nearly nine by now. As he counted the rings, Abdul Aziz panicked at the thought that the phone was ringing in an apartment emptied by Cephea of all her things. How many men had he known whom something like that had happened to? Dozens. The man takes a taxi home, in more of a hurry than usual, doubtless sensing that for the past five, six, seven months, it has stopped being “home.” In the apartment, in the living room maybe, he finds a letter in which his wife explains that she has met another man, that this man is around seven days a week, twelve months a year, and that, all things considered, that’s the way she’d prefer her life to be from now on.

  “No, Cephea, not you, not you . . .” He had put the phone down at the tenth ring. No, impossible, Cephea wouldn’t do that. She was capable of many things, she could fly into terrible rages, yes, but not that. She wasn’t like the others. She couldn’t be like the others. All the others. Not the Cephea he’d held in his arms. Cradled in his arms. He told himself not to worry.

  Six months after he had gotten back from Adelaide, things were back to normal. In the morning, he would wake early and take care of the children. He would drive them to the French school, then take Cephea to the hospital where, for the past two years, she had been the head pediatrician. In the evening, he would make the same journey in the opposite direction. A quiet life, happy days. He’d never mentioned that night again. Even when he announced that he would be leaving again in a week.

  “It’ll only be for three weeks,” he had said by way of excuse. “I’m just doing a favor to Constantin Takis. You remember? I owe him that.”

  She remembered Constantin Takis. In September, 1983, when the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, the Druze militias, supported by Abdul Moussa’s breakaway Palestinian group, had laid waste to Mount Lebanon. Civilians had been massacred, houses looted, villages destroyed. Abdul’s whole family had fled, along with two thirds of the Christian population of the Chouf. Terrified and penniless, his father and mother had found refuge in an apartment in East Beirut, abandoned by other Christians, fifty yards from the demarcation line. His father had phoned him, asking him to help them escape.

  Takis had one of his freighters make a detour to Beirut and took the whole family on board. They sailed to Limassol, where he booked Abdul’s family into a hotel, at his own expense, until they found their feet.

  When things were going badly for him, Takis had thought it advisable to surround himself with captains whose reputation was irreproachable. Abdul Aziz was one of them. And he couldn’t refuse him this “little favor.” His name would reassure the customers. The crews, too. Even Diamantis had been taken in.

  It was when he’d arrived at La Spezia that Abdul had realized that, for Cephea, things had changed for good. A letter was waiting for him there. I thought, when you left the room, that you’d come back and talk to me . . .

  He had stayed on the terrace. Drinking and smoking. Letting his mind wander. Far from the house. Far from the children. Far from Cephea. Reliving past journeys. Reviving passing love affairs. Another life. His life. What he had thought of up until then as his real life. If you can’t envisage another life, then I will, she continued in her letter. I love you, Abdul, but I think I’m going to leave you. Because our love won’t survive all this. One slap is bad enough. I won’t stand for a second one . . .

  Abdul stood up and paid for his two coffees. He needed to walk. To lose himself in the city. Marseilles, he knew, was the only city in the world where you didn’t feel like a foreigner. No one was a foreigner here. Wherever you came from, whichever race you were. By definition, you were a Marseillais. You saw it in people’s eyes. It was a feeling of universality you found nowhere else.

  Abdul Aziz walked back along part of the Canebière, then once past Cours Saint-Louis turned onto Rue des Feuillants and walked along it as far as the narrow Rue Longue-des-Capucins. There, he plunged into the dense, colorful crowd doing its shopping. From the stalls there rose the smells of the whole world. Barcelona and Shanghai, Rome and Bombay, Algiers and Valparaiso.

  He finally started thinking about the future.

  In the future, Diouf the fortune-teller, an old uncle of Cephea’s, had told him once, everything exists, because everything is possible. Maybe everything was still possible.

  9.

  CYNICISM IS WHAT THREATENS ALL OF US

  Diamantis remembered only one thing about that time. He was madly in love. Amina, when he met her, seemed like something out of the Arabian Nights. She must have been there in his head all the time, a sailor’s dream. The fact was, he had recognized her as if he already knew her. She was having lunch with a group of friends in the Cintra, a brasserie in the Vieux-Port, now long gone. Their eyes met when Diamantis came in, then both looked away.

  The boat on which he was sailing at the time, the Stainless Glory, had just put in at Marseilles. To him it was always a marvel to enter the harbor. He couldn’t say why, but each time he arrived here, he had the feeling he had come home. He loved the smell of Marseilles. There was a distinct smell to the city. Maybe not the smell of peppery carnations, as Blaise Cendrars had written, but something close to it, a mixture of basil and coriander. With a touch of pepper and cinnamon.

  There was good news waiting for him as soon as he disembarked. The D’Artagnan, commanded by his father, was moored parallel to his ship, at Pier E in the Pinède dock. They hadn’t seen each other for three years. Whenever he was in Athens, his father was at sea, and vice versa, and whenever they were both sailing, even though they might put in at the same ports of call, it was usually at several weeks’ interval.

  There was a message from his father waiting for him at the checkpoint, asking him to meet him at the Cintra. He ordered a mauresque and waited at the bar for a table to be free. He tried to meet Amina’s eyes again. She seemed more
reserved than the people with her. But that might have been because she was aware of being watched. At one point, she raised her head, looked straight at him and smiled. He didn’t respond, because at that moment his father put his arm around his shoulder and he turned to him.

  The meal with his father didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped. But what had he hoped for? He didn’t know. A miracle, maybe. The man who had taught him so much, who had given him a taste for the sea, for travel, the man whose clothes he used to sniff, trying to smell Africa or Asia on them—those continents that fired his imagination—that man didn’t exist. He wasn’t his father anymore, he was a myth. A kind of Odysseus, who rewrote Homer for him in the language of freighters. They had too much in common, and nothing more to say to each other. They didn’t talk much. They crossed the Vieux-Port on the ferry and separated in front of the town hall. The D’Artagnan was putting to sea that evening.

  “I do this crossing every time I come to Marseilles. It’s a ritual. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. Such a huge city, revealing itself totally in the few minutes it takes to cross its harbor . . . Look, it’s beautiful.”

  Diamantis had smiled. He, too, liked taking the ferry.

  That was where he had started his journey this morning, after his coffee at Toinou’s. On the ferry. Smoking a cigarette and looking toward the harbor entrance, he had let the memory of that day wash over him. In spite of time, in spite of life, Amina’s smile hadn’t aged at all.

  The door was opened by a man of about sixty. Masetto. An archetypal southern Italian. Short, thin, nervous, with curly hair and dark skin. Diamantis had never met him, but once, coming out of a pizzeria on Rue d’Aubaigne, he and Amina had run into him by chance, and he’d crossed the street to avoid them. He wasn’t a brave man. Nor was he the best of fathers, to judge by the little Amina had dared to tell him.