Lives of the Saints (24 page)

‘
Grazie
,’ my mother said, when her own glass had been filled. Her voice rang out strangely in the room’s strained silence. ‘Maybe you can get some
gassosa
for my son.’

My mother had held back from eating, looking from face to silent face as if waiting for her own cue to begin.

‘
Dai
, Vittorio, let’s eat,’ she said finally. She cracked a roll over her dish, stuffed a slice of meat into it with her fingers, and handed it to me. She made another roll for herself and bit into it, then raised up her glass.

‘
Saluti.
’ A hurried chorus of toasts went up around the table, dying down again into an awkward silence. My mother set her glass down again.

‘
Scusate
, Captain, but is it forbidden to talk at your table?’

Around the table a dozen mouths abruptly ceased their chewing. The captain looked up suddenly from his dish and brought his napkin to his lips, his face flushed.

‘Forbidden? Why do you say that?’

‘No one has said more than a dozen words since I came in. I feel like I’m at a funeral.’

But now the captain smiled sourly, as if he had suddenly understood.

‘I merely like to observe a little formality,’ he said. ‘
La signora
of course is free to talk if she wishes.’

The captain picked up his glass, and despite his invitation it seemed we would pass once more into a strained silence; but after he had drunk, he turned back to my mother and smiled again his grim smile.

‘Once upon a time a captain had absolute power at sea,’ he said. ‘Now everywhere he turns he finds a union. These little rituals
are all we have left.’

‘And at home?’ my mother said.

Antonio, sitting beside her, shifted uncomfortably in his chair, picking his napkin up suddenly and bringing it to his lips.

‘
Scusi
?’ the captain said.

‘At home. Does a captain still have absolute power at home?’

A nervous laugh went up around the table. The captain smiled, less sourly. Antonio set down his napkin.

‘
Ma certo
,’ the captain said, almost genial. ‘At least until wives have unions.’

The laughter now was less restrained.

‘Tell me this,’ my mother said, beginning to pick again at the contents of her antipasto dish, ‘doesn’t it worry you to spend so much time at sea? What do you think your wife does when you leave her alone like that? Even a woman has an itch she needs to scratch once in a while.’ Another round of laughter. But this one died away awkwardly: the captain was not smiling.

‘What she does is her own affair,’ he said gruffly. He turned back to his plate as if the matter were closed.

‘I see,’ my mother persisted, ‘but I also see that your children—’ she gestured with a tilt of her chin to the pictures hanging behind the captain—‘all have your features. Maybe for that you should be grateful.’

The captain set down his fork, and the tension in the room thickened; but finally he shook his head and made a sound that was half grunt and half laugh.

‘You’ve won your point,
signora
,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been accused of being a tyrant. I won’t be accused of being a poor sport as well.’

The tension in the room seemed to break now, and slowly conversation began to flow more freely. While the soup was being served, some of the officers asked permission from the
captain to take off their jackets, which he granted with a slight nod of his head; and by the pasta course many of the officers had loosened their collars as well and rolled up their sleeves, the conversation punctuated now by peals of laughter. Empty wine bottles had begun to accumulate on the serving trolley, the stewards filling glasses with a heady regularity. Dr. Cosabene, sitting across from me, kept a bottle at his elbow for ready service, his glass always brimming; and once or twice, while my mother wasn’t looking, he winked broadly at me and reached over to pour a quick shot of wine into my
gassosa
, so that soon the room had begun to revolve slowly around me, like a great globe spinning idly on its axis. Only the captain seemed unaffected by the wine: he downed his glass as regularly as the others did, but the wine seemed only to harden him, the way drink hardened my grandfather, to make him draw more and more into himself like an animal into its lair.

Dr. Cosabene had been trying to edge himself into my mother’s conversation since antipasto. Now, as the stewards were dishing out meat and vegetables, an opening occurred, and the doctor slipped into it.

‘
Scusi, signora
,’ he said, leaning his bulk across the table with an air of confidentiality. ‘You know, normally I can pick out an accent right down to the province and town. But all night I’ve been listening to you and still I can’t place you.’

‘I was born in the king’s palace at Caserta,’ my mother said, talking more towards Antonio than the doctor, as if to close the doctor out of her joke. ‘But my mother gave me to the gypsies, to save me from the republicans.’

‘Ha, ha,’ the doctor laughed. ‘And now, no doubt, you’re running to America to save yourself from the gypsies.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Tell me,
signora
, if I may ask a personal question, how long
before you deliver that little parcel in your lap. I ask, of course, out of professional interest, as a postmaster to a postman, so to speak.’

‘Who can say?’ my mother said, shrugging. ‘You know how the mails are.’

‘Ha, yes, very good. But only three months ago, you see, I delivered a baby on this very ship. A Calabrese woman. Two weeks early—the motion of the ship, you know. The water broke, and plop! The baby, unfortunately was stillborn—’

‘Doctor, please.’ Antonio had edged towards my mother protectively.

But the doctor opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness, as if the comment had been unavoidable.

‘
Scusi
,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to upset
la signora
—but I wonder why a woman in her state would travel? Why not wait another month or two, and have the baby at home?’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to carry a baby in your belly than in your arms,’ my mother said.

‘Ha, ha, you may have something there, it’s true. But still it must be hard for you—you’re in your last month, no?’

‘What a lot of questions you ask, doctor. Perhaps at one time you were a priest?’

‘Ho, ho, oh no, never a priest! Not even an altar boy—I’m much too honest for that kind of work. Though after all we work together, they take over where I fall short, heh, heh.’

As the stewards were clearing away our last dishes and setting out fruit, our meal was interrupted—a boyish crewman, apprehensive and grave, his sailor’s cap clutched in a white-knuckled hand, came into the room with a message for the captain.

‘There’s a storm, sir, we just had a wire from the
Vulcania
. The first mate thought you should have a look. Sir.’

‘All right.’ A look of fatigue crept into the captain’s eyes. ‘Tell him I’ll be up in a minute. The rest of you have ten minutes to get to your posts.
Signora
, you’ll excuse the interruption—Darcangelo will see you to your room after your coffee.’

Conversation died down quickly now. One by one the officers took their leave, offering apologies and goodnights to my mother, and in ten minutes only the doctor, Antonio, and my mother and I remained, and the stewards had begun to clear the table. The doctor was still drawing regular draughts from a bottle of wine in front of him; when a steward reached for it, the doctor made a sudden move to stop him and the bottle toppled forward, spilling out onto the table. My mother quickly drew back, but before she could get clear a bright stream of wine had spilled into her lap.

‘
Addio
,’ she said, rising abruptly. The steward, a boy of not more than fourteen or fifteen, hurried over mumbling apologies and began wiping at my mother’s dress with a napkin.

‘Watch where you put your hands,’ the doctor said. ‘After all, the lady is pregnant.’

‘
Oh, scusi, signora
!’ the steward said, blushing. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘It’s all right,’ my mother said. She took the napkin from him. ‘The doctor is just having his little joke.’

‘I was merely thinking of
la signora’s
health,’ the doctor said.

Dr. Cosabene stood and reached towards the other end of the table for a bottle that still had most of its contents intact. His glass in one hand and the bottle in the other he walked unsteadily towards a grouping of couches and low armchairs on the other side of the room.

‘I remember,’ he was saying, ‘a storm in ’33 that came out of the sky just like that, one minute it was blue and the next black as night, and this on an old ship left over from Caesar’s time.
We had to tie ourselves to the deck so we wouldn’t get washed overboard. Nowadays on these big ships you could sleep through a storm and never notice a thing—’

He had eased himself now onto one of the captain’s couches and leaned forward to untie his shoes, his voice hoarse and strained.

‘We’d better go,’ Antonio said, taking my mother’s arm. ‘The storm may be hitting soon, and anyway you’ll want to get out of that dress. And the doctor, you can see, does not make a very pleasant after-dinner partner.
Buonanotte, dottore
.’

‘Eh? But it’s early still, why are you running off?’ The doctor had stretched himself out now along the couch, his white-stockinged feet protruding over one end. His bottle and glass he’d set on a low table in front of him, a larger replica of the table in room 213, with the same old brown map veneered over its surface, Europe abnormally bloated and large, America just a thin strip of bush across an endless ocean. Antonio had begun to lead us towards the door, but when the doctor saw us moving past him he reached out suddenly for the bottle he’d set on the table and held it towards us.

‘Oh, stay and have another small glass,’ he said. ‘
Dai
, the doctor insists. No?
Beh, va bene
, go to the devil then.
E buon viaggio alla signora!
Let’s hope that—’ But we were already out the door.

Outside, Antonio pointed to a patch of sky towards the horizon where the stars seemed abruptly to end.

‘It looks like we’re going to run right into the middle of it,’ he said. But beyond the rails the water seemed calm and still in the moonlight, only the waves from the ship’s motion disturbing its surface.

‘Should we put on our life jackets?’ my mother said.

But Antonio had become suddenly serious.

‘There’s no danger, really,’ he said. ‘All the same, it’s no fun to pass through these things. This is an old ship—all we have to control the rolling are tanks. They’re not nearly as good as the fins on the newer ships.’

‘You worry about the tanks and fins,’ my mother said. ‘I just want to know if I can get a good night’s sleep.’

‘Keep a bucket by your bed.’

At the door to our cabin, Antonio paused.

‘Cristina, I don’t want you to leave your room during the storm. In your condition —’

‘Yes, yes, I’m tired of hearing about my condition. I’m not sick, I’m pregnant.’ My mother touched an orange she’d carried away from the captain’s table to Antonio’s nose. ‘Go, I’ll be fine. Go play with your toys, like a good boy.’

While my mother took a bath, I watched from a porthole for the coming of the storm. The sea had grown choppy now, sending up glints of reflected moonlight like secret signals; as I watched the waves began to swell higher and higher, with a thrilling suddenness, until they were lapping up as high as the portholes. The light of the moon and stars drained away, as if a canopy had just been drawn over the sky, only the glint of deck lights and other portholes shining out in the darkness. Heavy drops began to pelt against the porthole glass, and by the time my mother came out of the bath room the window had become a steady wash of rain and sea, the dizziness I’d felt earlier from the wine Dr. Cosabene had poured in my glass beginning to give way to a new dizziness, one that started in the pit of my stomach.

‘I think the storm has hit,’ my mother said. ‘All that wonderful supper is going to go to waste.’

Holding the frame of the bunk bed for support she eased herself onto the lower bunk. But as she settled onto the mattress
she drew in her breath sharply.

‘
Addio
. Now my back is starting to go. I’ll be glad when I get this extra weight off of it.’

I abandoned my place at the porthole and went to my mother. The floor was listing noticeably now, the furniture beginning to creak against its bolts. The orange my mother had placed on the coffee table had begun to rock slightly back and forth, reluctantly, as if some tiny insect beneath were continually hurling its weight against the orange’s uneven bulk, trying to overcome its mute inertia.

‘St. Christopher will protect us,’ my mother said, taking me in her arms. ‘Look how he’s staying straight in the storm.’

But the painting of St. Christopher was moving too, scraping against the cabin wall in fitful jerks.

‘He’s not staying straight,’ I said.

‘It’s not the picture that’s moving, it’s the wall.’

‘
Mamma
,’ I said, ‘I feel sick.’

I was the first to start emptying my supper into the toilet. But not long after my mother followed, and soon the cabin had begun to reek with the smell of our vomit. The rolls of the ship had grown so steep now that it was impossible to stand upright without some handhold for support. Every few minutes another wave of nausea would wash over me, and finally I gave up stumbling up and down the ladder to my bunk and settled in my pyjamas on the bathroom floor, one hand clutched to the door frame for support and the other to my stomach, my feet gripping the floor to keep myself from sliding with the ship’s rolls. The bathroom light had begun to flicker like lightning, making my head swim; to blot it out I closed my eyes and listened for the low rumble of the orange still rolling to and fro on the coffee table, imagined it crossing and recrossing the misshapen oceans and continents veneered on the table’s
surface, waited for the moment when it would exceed its bounds finally and drop with a dull thud to the cabin floor.