The Ordinary Seaman Read online

  Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by Newsday, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, The Hartford Courant, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Publishers Weekly

  Praise for The Ordinary Seaman:

  “A marvel of a book—vast, literate, human and entertaining.”

  —Oscar Hijuelos

  “A portrayal of the ingenious complexity and resilience of human nature in its most essential form. It is rendered with tremendous vitality, intelligence and sweetness. That combination alone makes it rare in modern American letters.”—Mary Gaitskill, Salon

  “I can’t recommend this book highly enough. … The Ordinary Seaman does credit to the novelistic form, yielding up mysterious, vivid worlds, seldom seen but always there. It’s just great. I loved it.”

  —Carolyn See, The Washington Post

  “Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens, is one of the most exciting and ambitious novelists currently exploring the form, and his second novel successfully runs thrilling narrative risks. In its electric verbal intensity … as well as in its sheer storytelling power, The Ordinary Seaman is a remarkable novel.”—Claire Messud, Newsday

  “Goldman’s art lies in the juxtaposing of ordinary desires and extraordinary circumstances to create a pattern of wonderment; he has written an epic of the misplaced and misguided … a novel … with a rare largeness of heart. Here many apparently disparate things get acquainted, as happens in port cities. Goldman brings Spanish and English into a beautiful partnership. His descriptions of sex and bodies somehow evoke both the epicure’s taste and the starved lover’s raging appetite.”—Scott L. Malcomson, The New Yorker

  “Goldman’s extraordinary second novel, The Ordinary Seaman, [is] a book that approaches mythic dimensions. … A fascinating, relentless story of psychological and moral complexity that confirms his stature as one of the brighter lights on the literary scene.”

  —Thomas Christensen, San Francisco Chronicle

  “An imaginative tour de force, a spectacular achievement by any standards … Powerful … intelligent and engrossing.”

  —Charles R. Larson, Chicago Tribune

  “Absorbing and moving … touching and provocative.”

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  “A strange and suggestive historical novel of the present moment … The Ordinary Seaman turns out to be a surprisingly optimistic book—a story of escape, not confinement, an adventure instead of a disaster. The crew’s ordeal almost fades in the bright light of Esteban’s discovery of America—an America of immigrants still alive to its original potential.”—Edwin Frank, The New York Review of Books

  “A magnificent novel, delicious to read, impeccably handled … A narrative masterpiece comparable, in my judgment, with the great classics of the genre … The skillful cunning with which Goldman weaves his plot reminds me of the best moments of The Long Night of White Chickens. This is a young author with the robust maturity of a master.”—Alvaro Mutis

  “A tightly wound narrative of hardship and survival … a powerful exploration of human behavior … As dazzling as it is exactly right … and memorably so.”—James Polk, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Francisco Goldman does what few can: he creates a world so real that when you have turned the last page, you say, ‘I’ve been there, and I will never forget it.’ … Often very funny and ribald, riveting because it is so generous and inventive … Here, a corner of Brooklyn becomes the exotic and foreign experience, and through Esteban’s eyes it is as mysterious and alluring as Tangiers.”

  —Sandra Schofield, The Dallas Morning News

  “By turns absurd, moving, comic, and bawdy. The Ordinary Seaman tackles the genre of the seafaring novel as it hasn’t been done in New York City since Melville.”—Allen Lincoln, Time Out New York

  “Keenly observant and brilliantly unnerving fiction … a tale of almost surreal intensity.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

  “Stunningly good … [a] powerful novel.”

  —Jeff Baker, The Oregonian

  “Powerful … a searing picture of human vulnerability and courage … This novel should establish [Goldman] securely on the literary map.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A tightly woven tapestry… Goldman’s powerfully charged writing brilliantly limns this allegory of immigration and abandonment.”

  —Harold Augenbraum, Library Journal (starred review)

  “Francisco Goldman is a state-of-the-art, contemporary hybridist … [a] deep evocation of the tormented entanglements of world capital and banana republic. … Goldman’s playful, tense-switching narration … gets so deep inside his character’s memories that you feel their collective nausea, which, like the shaky start of a peyote trip, is a prelude to the unfolding of painfully beautiful truths.”

  —Ed Morales, The Village Voice

  “Goldman’s acclaimed debut, The Long Night of White Chickens, proves to have been no fluke; its successor is an equally compelling saga. … Even more memorable is Goldman’s fresh and moving take on such matters as longing, love, cruelty and fellowship, probed in a poignant and original narrative.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The Ordinary Seaman is a contemporary odyssey, the chronicle of a journey that will not occur… brilliantly imagined…. The most striking aspect of The Ordinary Seaman is its language, a baroque Espanglés … which Goldman so deftly handles… the story of how a society comes into being … a Latino version of the settlement of America.”

  —Alberto Manguel, The Independent (London)

  THE ORDINARY SEAMAN

  ALSO BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

  The Long Night of White Chickens

  THE ORDINARY SEAMAN

  FRANCISCO

  GOLDMAN

  Copyright © 1997 by Francisco Goldman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldman, Francisco.

  The ordinary seaman / Francisco Goldman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-5558-4640-4 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3557.0368073 1997

  813′.54—dc21 96-47626

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Veronica

  and in memory of Robert Rosenhouse

  Passa, lento vapor, passe e nâo fiques …

  Passa de min, passa de minha vista,

  Vai-te dentro de meu coraçāo,

  Perde-te no Longe …

  Pass on, slow steamship, pass on, don’t stay …

  Sail away from me, get out of my sight,

  Get out from inside of my heart,

  Lose yourself in the Distance …

  Oda Marítima by Fernando Pessoa

  Table of Contents

  MIRACLE

  DESASTRES

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  AS IS, WHERE IS

  A HAIRCUT

  1

  2

  3
>
  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  BUT LUCK IS NOT FOR EVERYONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  SCRAP

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MIRACLE

  WHEN ESTEBAN FINALLY REACHED THE AIRPORT IN MANAGUA IT was nearly three in the morning and the airport was closed and he sat down on his suitcase on the sidewalk in the humid, buggy night to wait for it to open. Doña Adela Suárez had told him to be there at six. For the second time in two weeks, he’d ridden a bus all the way from the Pacific port town of Corinto to Managua. The colectivo from the bus stop had cost more than he’d expected, and he thought now that maybe he should have walked, though Sandino Airport was a long way from wherever it was he’d gotten off the bus in that invisible city of sprawling night that didn’t seem to have any center or outskirts, here and there a cow standing at the edge of the highway, a stretch of slogan-decorated wall, the disc jockey on the colectivo’s radio dedicating romantic ballads to the wide-awake war dead.

  He sat on his battered cowhide suitcase listening to the predawn racket of the birds and roosters crowing nearby and others that sounded as faraway as the stars and chewed manically on his thumbnail and tried not to have too many thoughts. As a way of turning off the light on something that had just come to mind, wincing his eyes shut and then opening them wide to stare as if blindly into the dark seemed to work. Sometimes he took his thumbnail out from between his teeth and quietly said, “Chocho.” Several times he took her watch out of his pocket to look at the time: her watch, until she’d given it to him. And then he’d put the watch back into his pocket, and light another cigarette, letting the first exhalation mix with a long sigh while he silently spoke her name. Once he even said, out loud and emphatically, “Today you start a new life.” And then he felt excited and nervous in the pit of his stomach again, just as he had been off and on for weeks, ever since the afternoon he’d sat in Doña Adela Suárez’s office in Managua and she’d told him he could have the job.

  It was still dark when a double column of soldiers stomped by on a predawn run, calling out in unison. And then, just when the sky was beginning to lighten behind the palms, the first of the airport workers, men and women, many dressed in green fatigues, began drifting in; and then they came more steadily; while travelers began arriving with mountains of luggage, entire families and others traveling alone gradually forming a long line behind Esteban; workers swept the sidewalk, gardeners marched out with their machetes; food and chiclet sellers, taxi drivers, beggar children, police all appeared out of the murky dawn to take up their positions. And he sat watching as if it was a performance meant just for him, thinking it was all like one of those parable-plays about the creation of the world according to the Indians. When the sole entrance to the airport finally opened, it was manned by soldiers, and he tried to explain his situation to them but lost his privileged place in line anyway because Doña Adela Suárez hadn’t arrived yet with his papers and passport. He retreated on the sidewalk and set his suitcase down. Within seconds an old man with silvery, receding hair who’d been waiting in line just a few places behind him stepped out too. The viejo, wearing a white guayabera and pressed tan pants, carrying a dark vinyl suitcase, walked limberly towards him with a preposterously excited smile lighting up his face and a bright, expectant look in his eyes, and said, “Until I overheard you at the door, chavalo, I was worrying that maybe I had the wrong day!” He laughed, his smile somehow became even wider, and he put out his hand and said, “Bernardo Puyano, a sus órdenes.”

  “Esteban. Mucho gusto,” he said warily, shaking the happy viejo’s hand. He didn’t like being called chavalo.

  “You’ve been to sea before?”

  “Pues, no,” said Esteban.

  “Claro que no, a cipote like you—”

  “Esteban,” he corrected him.

  “Sí pues. I’m the waiter,” this effusive viejo went on, nodding. “Apparently there isn’t going to be an officers’ waiter—pues, my usual position—but just one waiter for the whole ship. Vaya, in times like these, a job like this, it’s like a kiss from God, no? And for a chavalito like you, what good luck!” The viejo lowered his voice and tilted his face closer so that Esteban could smell toothpaste mixed with coffee and something sour when he spoke: “Leave this shitty country behind. Vos, it wouldn’t surprise me if you found yourself in the arms of a blue-eyed, blonde gringita tonight, your very first night. Chavalo, you’ll see what it’s like to be a handsome young marinero set loose in the world!”

  “What if we both have the wrong day?” asked Esteban.

  “It can’t be,” he said. “I know Doña Adela said Sunday. And when I went to mass yesterday, it was definitely Saturday. The archbishop has personally blessed our voyage, patroncito.”

  Esteban is nineteen, a war veteran, of course he doesn’t consider himself a boy, but Bernardo will never call him anything but chavalo, muchacho, chigüín, chico, patroncito, and, most annoyingly, cipote.

  Doña Adela Suárez, a secretary with the shipping agency Teccsa Corporación in Managua, had interviewed and hired the five Nicaraguans, including Esteban and Bernardo, who were to leave from Sandino Airport that morning, headed to New York City to meet the Urus: the old ship’s waiter, a middle-aged galley cook, and three ordinary seamen, the latter without any previous shipboard experience whatsoever. When Doña Adela finally arrived at the airport, she was carrying their passports and U.S. Embassy—issued seamen’s transit visas. It was the twentieth of June, and the Urus was to sail from New York four days later carrying, according to Doña Adela, a cargo of fertilizer to Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. She wore big, clear-plastic-framed, octagonal, pink-tinted glasses, aquamarine slacks, and a white blouse with the English words over the followed by a colorful little rainbow printed all over it. To Bernardo the pattern on her blouse couldn’t have seemed more apt:

  “Mi Reina de la Suerte,” he enthused, thanking Doña Adela yet again for his ship’s waiter’s job and giving her a clumsy one-armed embrace at the tiny airport bar, where the puffy-faced, slit-eyed cook had rum with his coke and the others just coke and Adela paid. “The Queen of Luck” was the sister-in-law of Constantino Malevante, a Greek ship captain who’d worked for many years on the Mameli line when the dictator Somoza owned ships, and who now lived in Miami making his living outfitting flag of convenience ships with Central American crews. Twenty-three years before, Bernardo had worked as waiter in Capitán Malevante’s officers’ saloon.

  “And what is my new capitán’s name, Doña Adela?” asked Bernardo at the bar.

  Doña Adela frowned behind her cake-plate glasses for a moment; then said she couldn’t remember, though she was sure Capitán Malevante must have sent it to her.

  “Greek, I suppose,” said Bernardo, disguising his dislike of Greek capitanes, including Constantino Malevante, which over his last eighteen years of landlocked nostalgia he’d been exaggerating as much as he had the virtues of English shipmasters.

  Esteban was the tallest of the five. His brown skin had a smooth, saddle-soaped luster, and his build was so slender and bony that his jeans and white, short-sleeved shirt seemed tenuously hung from his hip and collar bones. He wore the same pair of black combat boots that had accompanied him through two years of war.

  One of the other two ordinary seamen was a coppery skinned teenager named Nemesio, who looked as if some unattached mass of super-concentrated gravity must follow him around everywhere like chewing gum stuck to the soles of his shoes: mournfully drooping eyes, forehead slanting into a massive nose descending at almost the same angle, hulking but sagging shoulders, chubby, squashed legs, his stone-washed jeans zigzagging down to his shoes, and a portly panza hanging over his belt—later, onboard the Urus, Nemesio’s nickname would be Panzón, though
not just for that reason. Esteban quickly established that Nemesio had been in the army too, serving as an aircraft spotter right there in Managua, standing on a bald hill all day with two other soldiers taking ninety-minute shifts watching the horizon through binoculars, boring as hell; so far aircraft had only attacked Managua once during the whole war anyway. Which is why, Esteban suddenly thought, Nemesio’s eyes are so droopy: staring through binoculars at the white hot sky day after day, they’d melted.

  The other ordinary seaman, Chávez Roque, nearly as tall as Esteban and even darker skinned, looked older than his twenty years, his cleft chin swarthy, chest hair brimming up through the collar of his blue polo shirt. He wore black jeans, old cowboy boots. Chávez Roque said he hadn’t been in the army, not exactly. He’d worked on a government road-building crew along the Costa Rican border, in the jungles of the Rio San Juan, but he’d been given militia training and an AK to carry, but he’d only fired it in “combat” once, when a tapir bursting from riverbank foliage startled him … missed it, pues.

  “I was in a BLI,” said Esteban, lighting a cigarette. He was sure he saw respect still their expressions like the fleeting shadow from an airborne hawk. He didn’t have to say anything more. He’d been in one of the irregular warfare battalions.

  “Maybe the war’s over now,” said the former aircraft spotter.

  “Maybe,” said Esteban neutrally. Chávez Roque, turning his head to watch an hembra in tight jeans and stiletto heels walking past, said, “Saber, vos.” Onboard the Urus his nickname would be Roque Balboa.

  When they’d boarded the plane, Esteban was disappointed to find himself seated next to the happy viejo. After the takeoff he craned forward for a glimpse past Bernardo at the airport military installations below, thinking of helicopters he’d ridden at the front. He saw five green military ambulances parked in a row, rear doors open, canvas stretchers on the tarmac, figures in fatigues and medical whites standing around waiting … So helicopters and planes were still flying mangled and bullet-punctured bodies in heated, vibrating pools of blood over jungles, mountains, and plains. Despite the cease-fire and all the talk of peace. The ambulances shrank to a row of capsules and vanished from sight, the corrugated metal roofs of hangars turned into huts, palms became weeds, the green and brown landscape plummeting, plummeting downwards like a whole country flung off a high cliff. Bernardo suddenly turned to him with an ecstatic grin and said, “Once again, chavalo, the old wolf to the sea!”