The Ordinary Seaman (25 page)

Ve? He’d never be ignorant again. He’d never go back to being just this port town lumpen, a seaside peasant, a market cook’s bastard, with an idea of the world that went little further than the tales of drunken seamen and whores. It had all sifted into him: everyone in his BLI, everything they talked and knew about. Then before you ever got the chance to understand what it was you’d actually learned, you could take a sliver of shrapnel in the head and all that new knowledge would rush out of you, compa, colder and remoter than the stars.

Or you lived. And then what good did it all do you? And what was it all for? Where’s their political officer, that fucking Rodolfo, now? Whose ears is he filling with words about poetry and killing and revolution and love and heroes and martyrs now? Hijueputa, somewhere, right now, far away in Nicaragua, Rodolfo’s mouth is still going. Vos, while here you are in los Estados Unidos, trying to work up the courage and resolve to disappear into it, puta, trying to find a reason to. Thinking you’ve done some grand thing sneaking off a ship that doesn’t move to lie down with your stolen sack of wood chips in the sand in the dark that brings her as close as lovers’ breath …

La Marta and her sister both wanted to be economists or accountants. Because la Revolución needed people who could manage money. Chocho, did it ever. They liked mathematics. La Revolución’s accountants, that’s what Marta and Amalia wanted to be.

The year before the sisters had applied for summer jobs in a branch of the Trade Ministry. They went for separate interviews with a tall, bulky, middle-aged man who kept his sunglasses on indoors, balding, a little mustache, always dressed in a spotless white guayabera and creased black trousers. He gave them each a psychological test and then had them come back to his office, separately, for another interview to talk about the test results:

“He said the strangest things,” Marta told him under the papaya-less papaya tree, with that startled, wide-eyed stillness she had whenever she was thinking of something serious. “He said my psychological profile showed I had a great capacity for love and that I was going to be a wonderful wife and mother. And then you know what he asked me? He asked me if I’d ever had anal sex.” She rocked her head back to meet his eye.

“Pendejo,” said Esteban. “What, he thought you were going to end up doing it up the culo with him right there on that couch?”

“Vos, it
was
disillusioning,” Marta said, and smiled. “I asked him what he meant, because he’d taken off his glasses and was looking at me so sternly I felt nervous. He said, You know what that is, don’t you? And I sort of shook my head yes and no at the same time and he said, You’re not a virgin, are you? And I said, That’s none of your business and yes, I know what it is. And he said, with much arrogance”—Marta made her voice go low and pompous—“Señorita compita, I have asked you a very direct question, the answer to which can help me finish your psychological profile. I asked if you’ve ever had anal sex. I’ve asked you this because according to what I’m able to deduce about you, the first time you have anal sex it will be out of true love, and that is the man you will marry. Your test suggests that you’re that kind of female. It’s important to know yourself. Such is the profound benefit of these psychological tests.”

“I’ll kill that hijueputa!” exclaimed Esteban. “Wanted to trick you into doing it with him because he thought you wanted to marry him or what?” He went on yelling vehement threats and curses against the psychologist for a while, while Marta slumped back against his chest and stared off across the pasture until he was finished and then she said, “Vos, Esteban, this is the strangest part. When I got home, I found out he’d asked Amalia the very same questions. He’d told her the very same things. Word for word! Bueno, qué onda? Was he a pervert, or a serious psychologist, or both?”

“A total pervert, Marta. You didn’t work there—”

“Vos, had to. They gave us the jobs. But he never mentioned it again. Always polite and everything. Maintained a distance. It was rewarding work too, very educational, and they were very happy with our work, especially Amalia’s. Vos, Esteban, have you ever done it that way?”

He almost lied. “No,” he admitted, trying to sound indifferent. Putas do it all the time, he knew, and chavalas who don’t want to get pregnant.

“Ve?” she said. “Because I think that what he said is true. Because otherwise, I’d never do it.”

Which is how la Marta proposed marriage to him, if you chose to think of it that way. When he went to the brothers’ gasoline station the next morning, there was a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying they were out of gasoline, no one there. He went up to the Red Cross station on the hill, and there was no one there either. The station was just one nearly bare room affixed to a shuttered garage. The door was unlocked, and he went in and looked into the garage at the ambulance: it was at least thirty years old but in spotless condition, long and cream colored, a red cross on the paneled side in back, a bulbous hood and bumper. The ambulance was slightly bouncing, shocks squeaking like quiet mice. He went back outside and waited. Finally a teenager, one of the brothers, came out buttoning his shirt, followed by a plump, pretty-faced muchacha combing out humid hair with her fingers, a blouse knotted over her rippled brown belly. “Claro, compa,” said the brother after Esteban had explained what he wanted to borrow the ambulance for. “That’s what it’s there for.”

The rear of the ambulance had a beige, stain-mottled, padded-cloth blanket spread over the hard floor, pillows propped against the back of the front seat, stretchers rolled up against the sides. Some light penetrated from the room off the garage, through the windshield. They spent nearly four hours there, drenched in sweat, loving each other in the heat of a bread oven. Even the squirrel looked soaking wet, paralyzed in a corner though temporarily freed from its umbilical of thread.
La Marta’s caresses, the way she reached for him and so easily nestled herself against him, her utter lack of nervousness, confirmed what he’d already suspected, that she was more experienced in love than he. Hairy as a newborn monkey in places, and in others as glossily smooth and brown as chocolate toffee for all the insect bites and scratches and rashes strewn across her skin as if she’d been rolling in thorns and wet rose petals. Skinny arms, ankles, tapering shins, but other parts of her gorgeously round, with a soft plushness it was astonishing the war hadn’t worn away. Hair like a submerged, softened spray of porcupine quills ran from her pubis to her navel. He felt all fumbling hands and hunger, confused by this intoxicating variety of places for his mouth and touch to go, his swollen pene flopping like a netted fish. Her chunchita, wildly hairy, its texture and taste, made him think of the earthy, mossy underside of some overturned jungle log; he snuffled into it like an anteater, swirled his tongue deep into the tart, pink buttermilk wet, her inner thighs shivering and quaking around his head. And when they fucked, such mute, earnest pushing, trying to pour all of himself, all of his emotion, into her, they both came quickly, flutteringly—he’d never fucked like that before, so solemnly and purely, almost religiously. Like a woman, he’d thought, he’d just made love the way a woman in love makes love. “Mi rey,” she called.him. Scar tissue like a tiny centipede from a childhood injury high on her hairy shin, now he thinks of it as the mark the infiltrator clawed into her skin to show death the way in. He was covered in insect bites too, and tiny bumps hard as pebbles. She spent a long time going over his body, popping the little infestations between her nails while he winced from the searing nips of pain and kicked his feet. Their fungused and rotted feet, inflamed, vinegar-reeking toes. Ay, Esteban, will she ever get to feel clean and smooth all over again? (Never.) A bubble bath! Or a manicure and pedicure—I’ve never wanted one but I’d take one now, I think I’d even let them use that hairy wax. Mami still gets her nails done and legs waxed, Papi likes her that way, she goes to a woman who runs a little salon out of her house in León. I went with Mami once, and, Esteban, it was so gross, this big bowl full of hard, yellow, hairy wax, all this hair from who knows how many women’s legs all mixed in, from her using that wax over and over again.
I said, Puta, qué asco, Mami! You get smeared with that if you want, but not me! They made love again, nearly as earnestly as the first time. A while later she looked back at him with her serious owl eyes over her shoulder and said she wanted to do it, vos sabes, Esteban, the true love way. The little brown eye staring out of a tuft of mossy black. They weren’t sure how to proceed. It took a while, but finally he put himself in, maybe not gently and slowly enough, but he’d tried, she moaned and flailed her arms around so much she batted the squirrel, sent it flying like a limp glove against the wall, and then he had to stop moving inside her while she reached for it, cupped it in her hands, murmured apologetically into its fur, set it back down. “Mi rey, te gusta?” she quietly screamed. “Te gusta, mi rey?” They both gaped with embarrassed delight at the glossy little gobs of her shit clinging to his pene when he pulled out, and looked around, stumped, for something to wipe it off with. Finally he reached for his pants, cleaned himself against the inside of the mud-caked cuffs, grinned. Monumental, together they’d both been someplace they’d never been before, bodies manifesting blossoming trust. He fell back into her sweat-slicked arms, said, “So this means we’re getting married?” and she said, “Sí, mi amor, claro que si. As soon as this fucking war ends.” They spent the rest of the time fondling and making plans for the future, fondling the future. Two days later he went back to the war with her Mickey Mouse watch in his pocket and the raunchy smudge of their engagement vow mud-camouflaged on the inside of his pant cuff, marched out of Quilalí and almost immediately into the deadliest months of the whole war. A young man in love, with a future. They were always telling you that the war was over the future, no? But it was really always about the present, a world spiked and shadowed with portents that looked ahead to the next second, minute, hour, day, and no further. And now the future is here and, hijueputa, look at it: a ship that doesn’t move.

A few weeks ago, on deck, by the light of their hissing-popping-cracking-pungently-fuming fire, El Tinieblas had taken off his shirt and then pulled down his pants to tell them his life story: that was the first time
he’d ever told them what he’d gone to prison for, and how long he’d stayed. Some of his tattoos are just for decoration, or they’re symbols: the scorpion over each forearm, Superwoman in a G-string, La Santa Muerte in hooded cloak. But others depict key moments and turning points in his life story: those banana trees, that’s the coastal banana plantation where he was born, and, claro, that’s Chiquita Banana, but it’s also his mamita, and this is the cemetery she’s buried in, and that weeping full moon over the cemetery wall, that’s him. This is the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tegucigalpa he robbed, though he fucked it up—two years he got, he went in when he was sixteen. And that’s his novia, Leticia. She’s sitting like that, so modestly—with her knees drawn up over her chest and her arms clasped around her shins—because he didn’t want to commit a falta de respeto, couldn’t have everyone staring at Leticia’s secrets all the time, after all she used to come twice a week for a conjugal visit. Until she stopped coming. And this, here on his thigh, those are prison guards beating him because in the middle of another surprise search of the prisoners’ barracks, he’d vomited up the plastic-wrapped mota and pills he’d hastily swallowed—another year added to his sentence, because of that. And here on his shin, this date, 5/13/86, wrapped in a snake chopped in pieces, that’s the day Leticia came to the prison to tell him she was pregnant, maybe or maybe not his child, but she was getting married to another …

The tattoos were always done by another prisoner using a guitar string connected to wires and radio batteries rolled up in a magazine, the guitar string’s filed point dipped in precious ink carefully doled into the indented top of a toothpaste tube cap. So that when the guards searched, they found nothing: batteries inside the radio, toothpaste capped, guitar string back on the guitar. Tattooing was against the prison rules, but every day prisoners had new tattoos as if images from their dreams at night revealed themselves on their skin by day.

“When this is over, you’re not going to have enough room for a ship tattoo,” said El Faro.

“No,” said El Tinieblas. “Well, maybe a tiny ship.”

“It would be a lie to get a ship tattoo anyway,” said Esteban. “Because if you put a ship on your skin, people will think you went somewhere in it.”

“That’s true,” said El Tinieblas. “Everyone would think I’d been a marinero, and they’d all ask, Where’d you go? And I’d have to explain over and over and over how I was on this ship that didn’t go anywhere. Puta.”

“You
are
a marinero,” said Tomaso Tostado. “You just haven’t gone anywhere.”

“You know what maybe I’ll do?” said El Tinieblas. “The day this is over, however it ends, I’m going to choose a symbol of what I feel then. Just for me. Like this one here, ve? Only I know the meaning of this one.” And he lifted up his shirt again and tapped the small, inky image of a spoon on his chest. “That’s a spoon,” he said. “And I’ll never tell anyone why.”

“Puta vos, don’t tattoo anything then,” said El Barbie. “Sink the fucking ship. Sink it so no one can ever see it again. Don’t tattoo anything, and then you can say, Ve? Underneath here?”—and he tapped his own chest—“there’s a sunken ship.”

“Tattooed on your heart,” said Panzón.

“Sí pues, tattooed on your heart,” said El Faro, nodding and squinting.

“Tattooed up my culo,” said El Barbie.

In another seven days Esteban will meet Joaquina Martínez. In ten days, Bernardo will have his accident. In another six weeks, the Ship Visitor will finally find them. But for the next seven consecutive nights, beginning with this one, Esteban will prowl the waterfront neighborhoods looking for useful things to steal … Much later he’ll remember what El Tinieblas said about the tattoo he was going to get when the
Urus
was finally over and he’ll wonder how you tattoo a sack of wood chips.