The Ordinary Seaman (49 page)

Esteban has traveled all over the city with Joaquina on her shopping trips, riding subways and buses for hours, to neighborhoods where he sees bearded Indian, Pakistani, and Sikh patriarchs in turbans strolling the sidewalks with their families, the women dressed in gaudy, flowing, silken robes; to Chinatown’s reeking labyrinth, where Joaquina is capable of spending hours in a trance as still and focused as her manicuring one, trying to choose just one perforated, three-dollar ladling spoon. Having finally chosen, she tries to convince even Esteban of the utensil’s perfect—though not yet practical, in the sense that, pues, Joaquina doesn’t cook—beauty. They journey to a row of Arab tiendas in Brooklyn so that she can buy an ounce of black cumin there, or that jar of tamarind paste or concentrated pomegranate juice with the beautiful label that she wishes she’d bought the last time. In some of these tiendas the merchants are sometimes so hectoring,
familiar, and infuriatingly flirtatious with Joaquina that she marvels that so many different languages can come out sounding just like a Mexican market vendor’s Spanish.

Joaquina neatly displays her purchases along a wall of the single room she lives in with her brother, Martín, or crams them into a three-level wooden shelf in the corner, as if she’s getting ready to open her own spare, highly specialized tiendita. She does like to dream about the kitchen she’ll have someday, the cooking classes she’s going to take to learn how to use all of these spices, oils, pastes, and perforated cooking utensils. But the kitchen where she lives is shared by too many people, most of them muchachos with sloppy habits and some of them with personalities she finds off-putting and even threatening. Mainly she uses the kitchen to brew her fragrant teas, which she carries back to her room in one of her peltre pots.

Along with her three brothers, she sends some of her earnings back to her parents and younger siblings in Mexico, though not as much as they do. She spends more than she should on clothes, and Martín has given up fighting with her for a share of their small plywood closet, keeping his things in a suitcase and folded in piles on the floor against a wall opposite the one along which she’s arrayed her collection. The earrings she wears, and changes every few days, come stuck onto pieces of cardboard; she peels them off and sticks them on her earlobes. Joaquina has pierced earlobes, but she says she prefers these earrings, and they’re very inexpensive, she buys them at a tienda on the avenue and in Chinatown.

Esteban thinks she lives in a wretched place, and wants nothing more than to free her from it: a three-story building where all the walls have been knocked down and replaced by warrens of plywood cubicles with padlocks on the doors, a kitchen and two bathrooms on each floor. It’s mainly full of Mexicans, most from the states of Puebla and Guerrero, though there are people from other countries there too. Sometimes Joaquina and her brother have to sleep in the bed together, when Martín has day or evening instead of night shifts in the grocery store where he works. Down the hall, her brothers Abél and Juan, the oldest,
share another. Each room rents for three hundred and fifty dollars a month. Once, when Esteban and Joaquina were making their way through the plywood-cubicle maze to one of the bathrooms, they came upon a masculine-looking muchacha with hair dyed an unnatural shade of red, dressed in black stretch shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, brandishing a baseball bat embedded with nails at a gringo standing in the open doorway of one of the cubicles. The gringo was trying to talk in a reasonable voice, which was coming out tremulous with fear anyway. He was wearing just a white shirt and a suit jacket and no pants and holding a necktie in his hand, and the woman with the bat was threatening him in a fierce, low voice, telling him that she was going to smash his head in if he didn’t shut up. The man said, OK, OK, and put up his hands. Down at the end of the corridor another muchacha, younger than the muchacha with the bat, an adolescent face and pert, butter-colored breasts, was sitting naked on the floor with the gringo’s trousers, pockets turned out, across her lap, and she was pulling everything out of his wallet.

Joaquina immediately led Esteban back to her room. He was appalled that she could live in such a place, and infuriated with her for being so icily complacent about it. She answered, That’s how that putita works, bringing gringos home and before she even fucks them that big macha bursts through the door. Pinche gringo, she said, it’s his own fault for whoring around. When Esteban vehemently disagreed, her eyes turned to saber thrusts, and she asked if he had a better place for her to live. If she paid any more in rent, she’d have to live like a nun to afford it! Maybe she’ll come and live on his ship? Órale, güey? Would he like that better?

They decided that as soon as they had the money, they’d find a place to live together, no matter what her brothers said. Of course it was a strange existence, with almost everything about it unsolved but for love and his tedious job at a chair fábrica on the other side of Brooklyn, still having to go back to the ship to sleep. Life went on aboard the
Urus
almost exactly as it had before, though Bernardo and el Primero and his dog weren’t there anymore. Esteban ignored el Capitán in his comings
and goings. He bought stamps and stationery for the crew so that everyone who wanted to could finally write home and tell his family and novia where he’d been all these months—only four chose to. Thanks to him, the crew is eating no worse now than before the sardines ran out, but over the last month the crew has been costing him almost as much money as renting a share of a plywood room would.

The night that el primero Mark took Bernardo to the hospital, the crew roasted the beef Esteban brought back over a roaring fire on deck, on spits fashioned from long steel pipes. Esteban had forgotten his morning’s anger over Bernardo’s neglected leg; he thought the viejo must be happy now, in a warm hospital bed, being treated by yanqui doctors. At least he’s not here, he thought. Because if the viejo were here, he’d be jodiendo with his corny, insinuating remarks about Joaquina. Puta, the last thing he needed; he felt nervous and excited enough. Esteban intended to go back to the salon and make love to Joaquina there that very night. It was already growing dark, and he pulled out la Marta’s watch. He had to go soon. Joaquina had said that Gonzalo usually closed the salon before eight. José Mateo was heating him a cup of pure beef blood and marrow, said it would be good for his cold. The fire was already going, but Cabezón was still busy hacking up beef. Esteban was hungry, but they hadn’t started cooking yet. They didn’t know he had to go, or where, or why, he hadn’t told them anything. He chose a big hunk of beef out of the pile and impaled it on a wire splicing pin, then cooked it over the flames until it was seared on the outside, the fire’s heat hurting his hands. He ate the cooked fat off the outside first. When he bit into the beef, holding it like a melon in both hands, the meat was still nearly raw on the inside; warmed blood filled his mouth. Then he drank down the plastic cup José Mateo had filled with a thick soup of simmered blood and marrow—marrow which the cook had scraped out of hacked bones. Bueno, this had to be fortifying, no? It probably wouldn’t be very romantic, to bring Joaquina the gift of a big slab of raw beef. He said a quick good-bye and left the
ship, still eating. He couldn’t even finish it. He tossed the rest over a fence, let those crazy barking dogs fight over the bloody, rubbery scrap.

When he reached the salon he wanted to die: the shutter was lowered, it was dark. They were gone! But he went to the window and stood in front of the shutter’s metal slats, and then he saw her getting up in the dark. Joaquina had been sitting there in the dark, waiting. She opened the door and he went in and she said, “Ven!” and took his hand and turned to walk him towards the back, but then she let go. “What’s on your hand?” she asked. “It’s sticky.” And he resisted the urge to laugh, and said, “Blood.” He could barely see her in the dark, but he could tell she was looking at him oddly. Suddenly he burped. She said, “Pig!” “Perdón.” “What have you been eating, chamaco naco?” And he had to take a deep breath against the fear and excitement already rising from the sloshing sea of blood and raw beef in his belly, and he said, “Meat and blood, pues. Too much of both, I think.” They kissed, and she said, “Your breath smells like a butcher shop.” And he laughed. Joaquina pulled him through the curtain and said, “Wash your hands.” When he came out of the bathroom, he saw that she’d lit a candle inside a red glass next to a blanket spread over the floor and then the way she was smiling at him. They kissed standing up for a long time.

Then she sat down, pulled the straps of her dress down over her shoulders, and began undoing the buttons of her blouse. He sat on the floor and untied his bootlaces. He had an erection and struggled getting his boots off, and then his socks, as if he was in a frantic hurry. He wanted to say something, something that might calm and anchor him, that would make clear why he was there. And when he stood up to take his pants off, he found himself silently speaking the words, Te quiero, wondering if it was time yet to speak out loud about love.

Then he heard Joaquina saying, “Sticky hands. Runny moco nose. Burping,” and he looked over. “You’re like a human swamp! Leaking and oozing all over! Whole cows vanish into your quicksand, verdad? Caráy! What am I getting myself into?”

She was smiling, and sitting there completely naked now, her legs crossed at the ankles under the chair, her hands holding on to each side
of the seat. He stood there with his pants half-tugged down, bent over, looking at female nakedness for the first time since the burdel in Corinto six months before, when the sight of that puta’s nakedness, her pretty young skin gleaming in the humidity and the harsh light of a bare bulb, had filled him with a sudden, vivid terror of what had happened to la Marta. Now he looked at Joaquina’s chichis, small and upright, coppery pale in the wavering glow from the candle, the little cones of her hardened nipples, and he looked at her slender arms and shoulders, at her soft-looking belly and her long, skinny ribs as she pushed herself up from the chair and came towards him, at her lithe thighs and the triangle of black hair. He let go of his pants and stood up again, and they fell around his feet while he put his arms around her and ran his hands up and down her slender, hard back and down onto her smooth, rounded nalgas and felt her lips warmly touching him there, on his neck, on his cheeks, on his lips. And then she whispered into his ear, “Qué te pasa?” just as he was letting out a long sigh of bewilderment and relief, because she’d stayed whole, her body had stayed whole and he didn’t know what to do now with so much sudden pleasure. And then she was undressing him, pulling his dirty T-shirts up over his head and then he felt her hand on his stiffness through his underpants and she laughed. “Ay no! Ve? Leaking!” His underpants were wet and sticky there. And when she pulled them off, a long spider’s thread of jism flared silvery red in the candlelight as it dropped from his trompeta and they started to laugh. Too much! Qué ridículo. He couldn’t stop laughing. They held each other laughing, each one’s laughter inciting more laughter in the other and she squealed,
“Ujujuy!
Esteban the Swamp Monster!” with her arms around his neck, and they tumbled down onto the blanket. They were fucking before he knew it, and he came in about two seconds. It was an explosion—more so than even the abundant elephant’s pee of his dreams on the
Urus
, when he was so dehydrated his bladder had turned to rust. He felt as if his whole insides were collapsing, leaving him so emptied he could hear his own heart pounding loudly in a void. Joaquina murmured, “What a mess, Esteban. Now I feel like a swamp too.” They lay kissing, touching—he burped again—until he was ready for more.

Joaquina, as she’d vowed, ate him alive. Then they lay there a long time, holding each other tightly, his lungs feeling twitchy and gilded again, riled by the heavy, sweet fragrances of the salon …

During the three days in mid-November that Joaquina’s other novio, the lawyer from México, visited, Esteban felt more trapped on the
Urus
than ever. The lawyer was staying in a hotel in Manhattan. He’d been a client of Joaquina’s in México, when she’d worked as manicurist in a salon in the city’s colonia of Polanco. Joaquina insisted that she had to see the lawyer, that she’d never lied to Esteban about the lawyer, and so he had no right to be angry. Esteban vowed to break with her forever if she went to see this little lawyer who paid to have his hands manicured. Joaquina sent both Esteban and his mother to la chingada on a blisteringly foulmouthed comet of insults and abuse, and promised
she’d
never set eyes on Esteban again.

And maybe she wouldn’t have, if five days later, on his way to work, Esteban hadn’t found himself standing outside the salon window with one wrapped rose in his hand and a suffocating head cold, in perfect imitation of his first attempt to win her. They completed the new ritual by coming back to the salon after Gonzalo had closed up to make love in the back again, on a blanket on the floor, only this time without a candle. Then Joaquina had him sit fully clothed with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his bare feet submerged in a pot of scalding water, and told him that he should never, but absolutely never, ask her what had transpired with the lawyer.

“It’s finished between us,” she said. “And if you ever bother me about it again, güey, you’ll learn what it’s like to believe in God in the land
of indiosl”

Joaquina’s room is where they usually make love now, and only when she’s sure none of her brothers is around. Joaquina has her brothers’ constantly shifting work schedules constantly memorized. All three of her brothers have black hair, and two are darker complexioned than she is. But Abél has Joaquina’s nutmeg-and-cream complexion, with more freckles. All three brothers are given to constant hard slaps on the back and bewilderingly slangy salutations, and they travel in packs
whenever they go out, they and a bunch of other muchachos. They seem to neither like nor dislike Esteban, to neither approve nor disapprove of his seeing their sister, though Martín, whom he sees much more frequently, is the friendliest. Most of all their stance towards Esteban and their sister seems worn like a hard-faced mask, not out of personal meanness but out of an impersonal meanness they think enhances and protects their own and her stature—so his future brother-in-laws irritate him, he being accustomed to outwardly much easier-going tropical port town ways.