The Pop’s Rhinoceros (88 page)

Diego redoubled his efforts, and presently a leg made its first appearance, shyly extending itself sideways as though the foot were searching for something solid to rest on and the larger but more timorous member was being cajoled into following. A second foot followed its trailblazing twin and came to rest beside it. The sack-that-was-Captain-Alfredo paused to gather its energies. Next, fumbling, hesitantly exposing itself to the Tyrrhenian light as if this cloud-diffused glow were a volcanic blast of skin-shriveling fire, entering wakefulness with the circumspection of one of the sleepers of Ephesus, then wriggling quickly over the soggy mossy boards, came a hand. The other hand followed, flopping down beside its mate with a fleshy thump. Fat, hairy fingers groped weakly at first, then more urgently.

“I think he’s looking for something,” said Salvestro. The other crewmen watched attentively.

“Bottle,” wheezed the heap at their feet, still sacklike but becoming more Captain Alfredo-ish in its responses to these unpleasant stimuli. A little moan followed, and the head began to rise again. Thinning curly gray hair parceled out the captain’s head into patches of leathery skin broken by outgrowths of steel wool below which the skin was mottled with patches of red and striated with broken
veins. The redness intensified about the nose—an oversize purplish conk whose pimples had exploded long ago, leaving a rabbit warren of holes above the nostrils, which were cavernous and choked with hair. A number of teeth had been buried in his mouth; their gravestones leaned at odd angles to one another. After making its plaint, the mouth simply remained open, allowing this inspection, or perhaps waiting for the insertion of the requested “bottle.” When it became clear that this was not forthcoming, the eyes opened.

Captain Alfredo’s eyes were held in place by fat flanges of pink eyelid flesh that puckered and wrinkled as they retracted to disclose the eyeballs themselves. Their pupils were the blue that waits within the gray of stormclouds for the sun to dissolve and spread it over a cloudless sky, a startling bright cobalt, set off in this case by the equally startling scarlet where the whites should have been. The eyes peered up at the faces looking down at them. The mouth mumbled something (” Ah, the slug”?), then realized it was still open and closed. Nothing more was heard or seen for a minute or so. Diego considered a bucket of water, but before he could act on this thought, beginning somewhere in the midst of the human heap that was Captain Alfredo, a slow eruption began, a business of rumbles and grumbles, groanings and moanings, the creak of eroded cartilage and the scrape of old bones as stiffened muscles flexed and tensed, booze-furred blood-pipes squirted venous and arterial liquor to dormant extremities and vital organs tried to remember their functions. Salivary glands eked out a phlegmy paste from which the tongue recoiled, and digestive juices trickled into an empty stomach in a preemptive strike against the anticipated “first one of the day.” A fart sounded its wan trumpet, and the battle with gravity commenced. The limbs began to move: a leg, another leg, an arm, another arm … A grunt-filled minute later Captain Alfredo’s head was topmost and his feet were bottom-most. Technically he was standing.

“Is he really awake?” asked Arturro a few moments later. His fellows looked closer.

Captain Alfredo was upright. His eyes were open. He breathed. But he seemed quite unaware of those clustered about him, let alone the ship and the sea in which she wallowed. Diego reached forward and tapped him on the nose. The eyes blinked once, then stared blankly as before.

“Bottle,” said Diego.

The eyes turned and fixed themselves upon him.

“This way,” he said, pointing aft toward the cabin.

Captain Alfredo followed.

Salvestro was left outside with the crewmen, who scuffed their toes on the deck, folded and unfolded their arms, cleared their throats, and found things to fiddle with or lean against. No one spoke for a while. Bernardo was a little way forward, bent over the side and trying to heave. Jacopo squatted down, his arm in a sling. He winced loudly as his bandaged hand knocked against his chest and Salvestro saw the one called Enzo smirk. Nothing was heard from the cabin for
some time. The door remained closed, and the men outside occupied themselves with idleness. Ruggero emerged from belowdecks with a length of planking in each hand, saw the cluster of men gathered there on the main deck, and asked what was going on. Jacopo jerked his good thumb in the direction of the poop.

“Alfredo woke up.”

Ruggero stacked his planks carefully beneath the gangway and made his way forward to inspect the damaged mainmast. Three poles had been lashed to the stump a little below the break to give the appearance that the mast was whole. He glanced curiously at the still-retching Bernardo. The men on the main deck continued their mooching. Presently, from the poop cabin, a loud voice shouted dis-believingly,

“A
what?”

And, a few minutes later, “From
where?!”

It was a pensive Captain Alfredo who paced the decks in the days that followed. His drunkard’s totter evolved into a rolling swagger, an all-purpose amble that had been designed and perfected over the last three decades to keep him upright on decks rolling through anything under sixty degrees and which now propelled him about the
Lucia
to acquaint himself with his crew. Discovering that the “fishermen” recruited by his mate and pilot were of the rod-and-line rather than the boat-and-net variety made him more pensive still. Nevertheless he divided them into watches under himself and Jacopo, who was given the additional responsibility of showing them the ropes, for it seemed there was not a single man amongst them who could tell a vang from a brace, let alone a stay from a guy. Salvestro and Bernardo were posted as lookouts and stationed on the forecastle until the crow’s nest directly above on the foremast could be repaired. In the meantime it reminded them of its existence by shedding pieces of wood on their heads at regular intervals and once, during Bernardo’s watch, a large block of sandstone, though that turned out to be dropped accidentally by Jacopo, whose shout of “Look out!” came a split second after the arrival of the stone itself to the left of Bernardo’s head and was followed another split second later by the arrival of Jacopo himself, who tumbled through the bottom of the decaying structure and would certainly have broken his legs had Bernardo not caught him. Captain Alfredo added an intermittent stomp to his swagger, and his makeshift crew began to appreciate the subtle distinctions between, say, the ratlines (which were for climbing on), the clew-lines (which were for pulling on), and the gob-lines (which were for leaving well alone because the martingale had snapped off years ago and the bowsprit was about to follow it). Under his bellowed directions, the sails went up, and after long hours spent on the poop deck with charts, compass, crosspiece, tables of declination, brow furrowed and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, a course was set, too. Ustica was sighted, and a few days later the island of La Galita, from where hot, dusty winds blowing off the coast pushed the
Lucia
north and west. Ruggero loped about the ship with a sharpened nail which he would sink into various beams, planks, and rails, and a lump of yellow
chalk, with which he would make obscure marks. Each time he did this he would hoist his tool-sack higher onto his shoulder, scowl and mutter to himself until his aspect became so forbidding that even Captain Alfredo kept out of his way. Twenty leagues south of Cartagena, two stays snapped with eerie simultaneity, sending the mizzen lateen yard crashing heavily to the deck with Jacopo atop it. Bernardo, who happened to be underneath, sidestepped neatly, then plucked the mate from the tangle of lines and canvas, and Jacopo hobbled away with a lightly sprained ankle. Bernardo continued his journey aft to the poop rail, where he duly emptied that mornings breakfast over the side: salted anchovies and biscuit. Similar deposits were made off Cabo de Gata, Punta de las Entinas, Cabo Sacratif, the Torre del Mar, Punta del Cala Moral, and many other points in between. Large yellow stains drifted in the
Lucia’s
wake, proving remarkably cohesive in these tranquil waters, the wind fanning them along, still observable at distances of up to two furlongs, where small fish fed on them and died. Diego was not seen on deck much and the girl not at all. When the Rock of Gibraltar was sighted by Salvestro, slightly ahead (” For’ard,” he corrected himself) and far off to the right (” Starboard”), they had been at sea for twelve days and the
Lucia,
her crew could not help but notice, was covered from bow to stern with little yellow hieroglyphs. Ruggero had completed his survey.

“I want to explain the markings to you before we start,” he told Captain Alfredo. They were crouching in the nose of the ship, legs splayed awkwardly amongst the ropes and hawsers piled there. Ruggero held up an oil-lamp to the massive compass-timbers that curved about them at waist level and on which a dot with a circle about it had been drawn. “This one, that looks like a man being sucked down a whirlpool, this means worm,” he said.

Captain Alfredo said, “Right.”

Ruggero rooted amongst the tangled fakes of rope ensnaring their feet and pointed down to where the bow timbers passed beneath the breast-hook. Here the symbol was a simple cross. “This one, that looks like a man floating facedown in the sea after his ship broke apart in a storm, this means rot. And this one”—he rooted deeper, uncovering an irregular oval—” this one that looks like a man’s mouth screaming in terror as the waves bury him beneath them, this means that I don’t know the cause but the timber in question has the resilience of a wet bootlace and the consistency of pork fat. Now, shall we begin?”

There were other symbols, too, one for iron-sickness, another for mold, yet another for the luxuriant growths of white mushrooms that flourished in the hold, and one—a circle with a line through it, indicating a man cutting his own throat, according to Ruggero—that denoted bad workmanship. The latter was a phrase Captain Alfredo found increasingly irksome as Ruggero moved back through the lower deck, past the hammocks where Enzo, Arturro, and Piero were snoozing, amongst the barrels and casks lashed down to either side of the steerage, holding up his lamp to point out gaps in the planking of the wales where the apron had lifted off the stem-piece. The sharpened nail was produced and sunk to
depths of four or five inches in timbers, which, following retraction, oozed unidentifiable black liquid from the puncture-hole. Matters were no better in the hold, where more barrels, lengths of rotting rope, the detritus of a hundred concealed breakages, and a small rowboat all floated in a foot of stinking liquid. Ruggero tapped beams and planks with his hammer until the hull resounded with soggy thunks and thwacks. Kneeling down in the soupy muck, he fished with his hammer until a distinct
clang!
rang out.

“Ah,” said Captain Alfredo. Ruggero raised an accusing eyebrow, then struck the submerged object again. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to know what that is,” began the captain.

“I know what it is,” Ruggero retorted. “It’s the anchor. What I want to know is, what’s it doing down here? Another thing, why is it that not a single stick of wood on this ship has seen a tar-brush in the last twenty years? Another thing, how is it that this wormy, rotting, moldy piss-pot is still afloat at all? This”—he pointed to the evil-smelling slop that swilled about their legs—” has got to be removed. The pump will have to be patched and the foremast, too. I haven’t even looked at the yardarms, but if the rest of this ‘ship’ is anything to go by …” He came to a halt there, his outrage being temporarily too great to contain. Captain Alfredo took this opportunity to look once again at the rowboat, which he could not remember seeing before this morning. “It’s the wood,” Ruggero resumed in a strangled tone, then fell finally silent, as though so deeply affronted by the abuse of this beloved material, evidenced all around him, that he could express only his own dumbfounded shock.

“Well, yes,” replied the captain. “With ships, it usually is.”

A voice sounded behind them. “Add a cage to that list, carpenter.” They turned to find Don Diego clinging to the ladder. He addressed himself to Captain Alfredo: “We’re entering the strait.” He paused, then added almost as an afterthought, “And Jacopo’s gone overboard,” then disappeared upward.

Bruno and Bernardo were hauling him up on the end of a rope when Captain Alfredo reappeared on deck.

“I was just standing here, you know, waiting,” Bernardo was explaining as he heaved the mate clear of the water, “then I leaned forward to, well, I was sick, was the problem,” he continued, grabbing the dripping man under the armpits and swinging him over the side, “and Jacopo here”—depositing him on the deck— “seemed to jump over my head. …”

“Don’t know what came over me,” gasped the mate. “One minute, here. The next…” He waved an arm. “There. In the drink.”

“No time to worry about that now,” Captain Alfredo said, casting an anxious eye over the lee shore, which, though still a good two leagues to starboard, was coming up on them faster than he would like. There were easterlies, called levan-ters, if he remembered correctly, which blew through here from time to time, and some shoals after Tarifa, but if you kept leeward of the latter, received wisdom was that you missed the former. “We’re going to put on a bit of sail in a minute, but
first of all I want a man up front swinging the lead.” He cast his eye over the men assembled on deck, then pointed to the rearmost.

“Who are you?”

“Salvestro,” said Salvestro.

“You’ll do.”

The lead was a large rusted cleat tied to a line with the fathoms marked by strands of string up and down its length. It plopped into the water, and Salvestro paid out eight fathoms of line, feeling the water’s drag increase, the line bow as the heavy cleat drifted under the keel. He shouted, “Clear!” and pulled it up. Thirty feet above his head the crow’s nest belched a cloud of wormy sawdust and dropped a length of planking onto the deck. He threw out the lead again. The shore was a wavering ribbon of sand topped with scraggy-looking trees. He glanced aft. Bernardo was helping Enzo and Luca pull on the mizzen lateen. As the wind caught hold of the great sail they moved quickly to secure the guys, and the
Lucia
seemed to skid very slowly to port. They were moving away from the coastline, and the water became more choppy, jostling the vessel. If he were to dive right now and strike out for land, he would be standing upright on solid ground inside the hour. It must be now, he told himself. He had believed that they would put in at Tunis or even as soon as Naples. Or the Roads of Marseilles, and if not there, then certainly Cartagena. … He had been wrong on all these counts, and now they were in the strait that would take them from a sea to an ocean, so it had to be now, without delay, without reflection.