The Lost Sailors (26 page)

“Can you imagine?” he had said to Lalla, laughing. “I'm a Turk and he's a Greek. We hate each other, and how! Sit down for a meal with a Greek? Me? Never. Besides, our stuffed vine leaves are better!”

“You're kidding yourself, my friend,” Abdul cut in. “These are Lebanese. You can tell by the taste.”

Diamantis laughed. “What's more, it's true.”

Diamantis had talked about the thing that was closest to his heart. The Mediterranean. For him, this sea was both eastern and western. But it was one. Indivisible.

“Indivisible, right? The West, the East, that's . . . just a myth. Our countries, our roots, our culture, it's all here, on this sea.” He looked in turn at Nedim, Lalla, and Abdul. “Do you follow me?”

They nodded, but Diamantis could see from their eyes that they were confused. In fact, so was he. It was clear in his mind, but not when he put it into words. It was the first time he'd risked doing it. Up until then, all these things had been part of his world. Constantly going through his head. Sometimes, he would try to catch one of these thoughts and write it down, as best he could, in one of his notebooks.

He took a long sip of white wine. To help him clarify his ideas. Wine was invaluable for that. Its fragrance spread through him, giving flesh to his abstract words. He was in a state of euphoria that was close to intoxication. And he wasn't the only one.

Ever since he'd joined them, Abdul had been navigating without instruments through an alcohol-induced fog. Whenever his glass was empty, he would refill it, but never served the others. He was drinking coldly, deliberately, with as much determination as if he was in charge of a ship. He was stiff. Stiff in his head and in his body. He sat upright in his chair, making sure he controlled his every gesture. He was like an automaton.

Nedim had drunk quite a lot, too, but less than Diamantis, let alone Abdul. He had realized immediately that Abdul was already plastered when they had found him in the mess. The uniform was proof of that! The presence of Lalla prevented Nedim from going too far, getting as drunk as Diamantis and Abdul. He didn't want to be drunk at the end of the night. He'd had benders before. Every place he'd been. And it always ended the same way. Either he'd get in a brawl. Or he'd fuck a whore. Without remembering who he'd fought, or why. Without remembering what the girl had looked like, or how much she'd cheated him out of. The only thing he knew for certain was that eventually he'd find himself leaning against a wall, puking his guts out. And that wasn't something he wanted Lalla to see.

He gently placed his hand on Lalla's thigh, under the table. She put her hand on his. Their fingers joined. She turned to him and smiled. Then she took her hand off his, and he took his hand off her thigh.

Of the four of them, Lalla was surely the most clear-headed. She didn't really understand what had been happening since Amina had sent her to find Diamantis. But she wasn't trying to understand. She let herself be carried along by events. Diamantis and Abdul Aziz fascinated her. Of course, they were starting to get plastered, but they struck her as the kind of men she'd never met before. Men who lived their lives to the full. With a strength, a spontaneity, a truth she'd never known. They were different from Ricardo and his men. Different from the customers she saw every night. She didn't know anything about men, she'd been thinking when Nedim's hand came to rest on her thigh.

What about him? she wondered. She didn't understand him. But she couldn't deny that they'd hit it off from the moment he had taken her in his arms to dance. In fact, they'd hit it off really well. It had been more than just the physical excitement generated by the salsa. Was it possible to feel so close to a guy from the first moment you saw him, the first moment he touched your hand? If Amina hadn't been there, she would have left the Habana with Nedim and gone to a hotel. She had come close to saying yes when Nedim had suggested it. Just to feel her body being carried away by his. The only times she had slept with a man—and she could count them on the fingers of one hand—she had been disappointed. Men took, they never gave. Afterwards, she had felt curiously empty. As if they'd been firing blanks.

For Amina, Nedim had been just another asshole to be fleeced. She'd forced him to spend an excessive amount. Almost out of spite. Maybe because he was a good dancer. Or maybe because he and Lalla looked good together. Something like that. An old jealousy. Or a wound that hadn't yet healed. That was what Lalla had told herself later, lying in bed, thinking about Nedim. And she had wondered, once again, why Amina had acted like that. Nedim was no better and no worse than anyone else. Just more lost. At a glance, both of them had calculated the money they could get him to cough up. “You should hook up with that one,” Amina had said, pointing to Nedim, who was dancing alone. “That one's a real lost sailor.”

Lalla turned her attention back to Diamantis. She didn't really understand what he was talking about. Or what he was driving at. But she felt that what he was saying was basically right.

“You could say, look, the Mediterranean is our body. I agree. We have two eyes to see properly, two ears to hear well, two nostrils to smell better, two lips to speak . . .”

“Two arms, two legs . . .” Abdul said ironically.

“Exactly.”

“And a cock . . .” Nedim said.

“Bravo,” Diamantis retorted. “If someone was going to think about that, it had to be you.”

“Wait, wait,” Nedim said, as serious as he had ever been. “I wasn't thinking . . . I was just pointing out that we have one cock, not two, and . . .”

He searched for the words. He understood Diamantis's explanation. He even liked it. He thought it was well founded.

“And what is this body, male or female?”

“The Mediterranean is androgynous.”

“Androgynous?” Lalla asked. She thought she knew what the word meant, but she wasn't sure. Even if it meant looking stupid, she wanted to set her mind at rest.

“Belonging to both sexes,” Abdul said.

He said it in an unfriendly tone. This girl was exactly what she appeared to be, a bimbo. Good for a fuck, definitely good for a fuck, but deadly dull. He downed his drink in one go, and poured himself another. He had started on the red wine, while the others were still on the rosé.

The girl was just like Hélène. The two of them had their brains in their asses. And they both thought that gave them the right to humiliate you. Nedim was just a loser. He didn't understand that. The more Abdul looked at Lalla, the more she reminded him of Hélène. He could hear her saying, “A pity” in her poor schoolgirl English.

Lalla caught the look Abdul threw her. A severe look. The man clearly didn't like her. There was a gleam of hatred in his eyes, hatred toward her. No one had ever looked at her like that. She didn't know why, but all her senses went on alert.

“The Mediterranean is neutral in the Slavonic languages, and in Latin. It's masculine in Italian. Feminine in French. Sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine in Spanish. It has two masculine names in Arabic. And Greek has many names for it, in different genders.”

“Why is that?” Lalla asked.

“I don't know. It may have something to do with everyone's own bias. But I think the Mediterranean is like a body inside us. And that what our right hand does, our left hand can't ignore.”

He stopped suddenly, lost in thought. The alcohol was making him lose the thread. What had started him off on all this? What was he trying to explain, to demonstrate?

“I've forgotten what I wanted to say.”

“You were talking about the
Odyssey
,” Nedim said. “Homer's
Odyssey
.”

“About Odysseus,” Abdul said.

“Yes . . . In fact, the
Odyssey
has constantly been retold, in every tavern or bar . . . And Odysseus is still alive among us. Eternally young, in the stories we tell, even now. If we have a future in the Mediterranean, that's where it lies.”

He stopped again. That still wasn't what he wanted to say. It was something more specific.

“The Mediterranean means . . . routes. Sea routes and land routes. All joined together. Connecting cities. Large and small. Cities holding each other by the hand. Cairo and Marseilles, Genoa and Beirut, Istanbul and Tangier, Tunis and Naples, Barcelona and Alexandria, Palermo and . . .”

He finally found the idea that had been nagging at him, and the words to express it.

“The fact is, we need a personal reason to sail the Mediterranean.”

That was it. He'd found it. A personal reason.

Abdul stared at him. Diamantis was raving. A personal reason. Bullshit. No, he wasn't raving. He was talking bullshit just to make them listen to him. He wanted to enthrall them. To be the center of attention. He had been monopolizing the conversation since the beginning of the meal. And he, Abdul, had been reduced to a walk-on part. Not everything Diamantis was saying was wrong. But dammit, he was the captain. He also had things to say.

“Well, what I think . . .” he began, and stopped, not sure how to continue. “What I think is . . . The Mediterranean . . . The sea . . . The sea only starts being beautiful beyond it. Once you get past Gibraltar. The ocean . . .”

“And what's your personal reason?” Lalla asked Diamantis.

“To find myself, I think.”

He was thinking of something his father used to say. “Everything in the soul of man is ambivalent. But all these dual values are searching for that pure place where the opposites become one.

“Or, rather, to unite all these things in myself . . . If you don't know who you are, you're lost.”

“The ocean,” Abdul cut in, raising his voice.

He didn't know what he wanted to say. He was just trying to take over the limelight again. What the hell was going on here? This was anarchy! He commanded this boat. He had commanded lots of others. They had to listen to him! He'd tell them what the sea was. The real sea. What adventure was. Not the wretched adventures of Odysseus, caught in the threads the Mediterranean wove around him like a fucking spider's web. Penelope was the fucking spider. She'd caught that loser in her web. She'd woven the thread that would bring him home when she chose. In Circe's arms, in Calypso's bed, Odysseus was still tied to Penelope. To routine. To domestic life. The ocean liberated men from spider women. From Penelope. From Penelope and Cephea.

The ocean was adventure.

“The sea only starts being beautiful beyond the Medi­terranean,” he repeated, raising his voice.

There were other freighters. The
Aldebaran
wasn't an end. It was a beginning. A new beginning. His life was ahead of him. And he would never allow any woman to dictate his future to him, he would never allow any whore to say “A pity.” This Lalla had better not open her pretty mouth.

She was looking at him. What was it that was making this man suffer so much? she wondered. She looked at him tenderly. Because of the pain he carried inside him. She didn't know what it was. But she did know that everyone carried within them their share of unhappiness. The four of them here were no exception.

But that wasn't what scared her about life; it was the inability to tame the unhappiness. For her, this inability lay in the fact that she couldn't put faces to the words “mother” and “father.” She felt dizzy whenever her thoughts moved in that direction. What was it that Abdul didn't have—or what had he lost—that he should be so sad, so adrift? She'd have liked him to talk to her nicely. She'd have liked him to smile at her. Since he had arrived, dressed up in his uniform like a marionette, he hadn't smiled at her once.

Abdul hadn't smiled at anyone.

What was Lalla doing, rolling her eyes at him like that? He couldn't bear her eyes on him. As if she was trying to worm her way into his thoughts, into his heart. If he lowered his guard, he knew that she would dominate him, because then she really would be like Hélène. And he'd be dying to fuck her. He'd get a hard-on, without being able to control it. He would be like a dog, wanting only to fuck her. A dog fucking was the most disgusting thing he could imagine. He hated dogs. And bitches too. He thought of Cephea. He loved to fuck her doggie-style. One last thought. The last one ever. Where could she be at this moment? And who with? Getting fucked, he guessed, like the bitch she was.

He took a big gulp of wine and launched himself into the cold fog of the ocean. Talking more for himself than for the others. Trying to convince himself that his reason for living really was there, far from any coast. In those cold moments when the dawn comes up and you have to face the deep, broad, heavy swells of the Pacific. In those moments when you hear the ship creaking like a three-master on a calm, equatorial sea. In those moments when every sailor tells himself that he would prefer to be anywhere else in the world rather than here.

“Has anyone here ever seen a rainbow in the moonlight?” he asked.

He ignored Lalla, barely glanced at Nedim, but looked straight at Diamantis with an air of superiority, the superiority of a captain over his first mate.

“No, never,” Diamantis admitted.

“That's what I thought. You wouldn't see that in the Mediterranean.”

“And is it beautiful?” Lalla asked.

“More beautiful than you could ever imagine.”

Touché, he thought. He'd done it. He'd taken control of his ship again. He was the captain of the
Aldebaran
once again. The only master here.

I
t was the heat that had made them move. The air in the mess had become unbreathable. The cigarette smoke clung to their damp bodies. Their eyes were starting to smart. Lalla had suggested a tour of the ship.

Nedim had laughed. “Well, that's what she came for, isn't it?”