“That was a close one,” the actor pronounced after the latest bolt, and spat. “Take a breather, Aeolus. Relax a moment.”
There was a strange silence. The lights, the walls, the furniture, everything was in its place, unlikely yet unmistakable, so that Ábel’s entrance was a little unsteady, his steps uncertain, counterbalancing the swell of the sea. With the minimum fuss they took control of their new realm. Ernõ made a formal gesture of taking Tibor by the hand and ceremoniously leading him over to the table. The one-armed one stood on the barrel, absorbed in watching the storm with its roof-high waves through a porthole. Ábel clapped an arm round his shoulder.
“A sublime scene,” he said with awe. “One cannot help but feel one’s insignificance.”
A trapdoor opened in the floor and a tray laden with glasses rose through it, the naked arm of the actor supporting it and rising with it until his head appeared. He made a formal show of climbing through, then let the trapdoor clap shut behind him. He raised the tray high in the air and, leaning forward at a sharp angle, moved around with all the weathered skill of a ship’s waiter in a storm, his body seeming to collapse after the tray with its glasses that he eventually deposited unbroken on the table.
“The two most important things,” he gasped, “alcohol and a cool head. There are people who panic in a storm: some lose their heads, others the contents of their stomachs. We are making eight knots full speed, the temperature is falling. One good draught of brandy, gentlemen, a mouthful of ship biscuit, a bit of refrigerated meat, and we feel readier to face the following hours with equanimity. The captain is at his post and the passengers are inclined to trust him.”
The tray was piled high with ship biscuits covered with meat and flasks of water-colored brandy. The actor gave a modest smile. He sat down, tapped his pipe against the tabletop, adjusted his belt, and stuffed a great hunk of meat into his mouth.
“Creation is hungry work,” he said. He wiped the rim of the bottle with his hand and took a long draught.
“Burns your mouth!” He turned to Tibor. “A snifter for you, my lovely incognito?”
T
HE LOVELY INCOGNITO ADMITTED THAT AFTER
the first glass she felt like throwing up. The actor knew a cure for seasickness that you should take an hour before the storm set in. They laid the lady out across the chest, fanned her, and tried to entertain her. The cabin darkened somewhat. The cabin boy left them every five minutes to increase the roar of the four winds and to provide a weather report.
Danger draws people together. No longer sturdy and Spartan, the actor fell ravenously to eating and drinking. He was the first to wilt. They had never seen him so drunk. Ernõ, who drank cautiously, taking little sips, kept an eye on him as he wasn’t convinced the actor was genuinely drunk. The actor meanwhile pulled a barrel up to the porthole, sat down on it, and stretching his arms wide pretended to play an accordion while singing in a harsh nasal tone.
“The Negroes sang this one,” he remarked. “That was before they leapt into the water.”
The monotonous melancholy air swirled and faded in the high auditorium. The actor rose to his feet and tirelessly continuing to play on the imaginary accordion walked up and down, undergoing a curious series of meta-morphoses. He sang and played, but a few minutes later seemed to have vanished to be replaced by a fat drunk sailor sitting on the edge of the table, this time with a real accordion, his song full of the sadness of docks, harbors, and stagnant water, his face quite transformed, his eyes asquint, awkward in body, good-tempered, with a brandy-sodden joviality, somehow ponderous. He hadn’t actually done anything, merely transformed himself. They couldn’t understand what he was saying as he mixed words from English, Spanish, and other languages unknown to them, in a kind of incomprehensible macaronic, then he gave a croak and fell to praising distant skies and climes while radiating regret for years of pointless roaming.
The actor certainly knew his trade. It was a fat, drunk sailor that sat at the edge of the stage singing into the dark auditorium. The rest of them wandered up and down behind him, humming along with the hypnotic rhythm while the storm continued unabated outside and the vessel with all its passengers lurched towards an unknown harbor. The heady smell of brandy floated through the cabin as the sense of danger and a mood of mutual reliance took hold of them. In any case, there was going to be no escaping each other’s company until the ship was safely docked. Tibor was feeling better and fell to eating with an appetite that belied his seeming sex. Béla was sitting at the actor’s feet, his chin propped on his palms, observing him. They waltzed round each other, the actor setting the rhythm for the dance, his voice overflowing with melancholy.
It was the first time any of them had set foot on stage. The strange thing was that they felt perfectly at home there. They took possession of this world composed of three walls and a few boards as if nature had intended them for it. Ábel stood by the footlights and quietly recited something for the benefit of the invisible audience. As for the actor, he was absorbed in his acting and was growing ever more remote, ever less like the figure they had known, already recalling Le Havre, relating tales of amorous nights in various harbors, gazing around him as if they were all strangers. His vast half-naked body shook with every gesture. He was no longer sucking in his stomach and his flesh bulged through his vest, and as he passed before the spotlights Ábel spotted tattoos that served as tickets, some on his arms, some on his chest.
“Beware! A man with a tattoo! Take care, I say!” the one-armed one cried out.
Ernõ was wearing his top hat. His hump weighed heavily on his back, pressing down his upper body.
“My intentions are honorable,” he said frostily. The one-armed one threw himself on Ernõ and Tibor leapt between the combatants, giving a faint shriek. Ábel had the impression that there were too many of them, too many strangers and newcomers, and miscounted their numbers. The actor was dancing in a corner, stubbornly, insistently alone, his accordion constantly moving, not to be forgotten for a second, while his heel stamped out a stiff, nervous rhythm. The gang sat down around the table and Ábel took out his pack of cards.
“I refuse to play with cheats,” the one-armed one mumbled, clearly drunk.
But the sight of the pack enticed the actor over too. He examined each card carefully, slowly appraising it, drinking, rattling his change, then getting into arguments, using strange offensive-sounding phrases. They smacked their cards down, propped themselves on their elbows, pulled a lamp closer, Béla once again offering himself to be searched. There was silence for a while. The ship was clearly in calmer waters now, the wind abated. While they were dealing the cards again the actor left the cabin to return with a fresh bottle of brandy and declared with satisfaction:
“It’s a starry night. Wind southeasterly. By morning we shall be in Piraeus.”
Ábel wanted to know how long they had been here. Even experienced sailors tend to lose track of time. But what does it matter, he thought with dizzy delight. It’s a fine ship and we’re making good progress somewhere between sky and water. We will have arrived somewhere by morning. He clambered down into the prompter’s box and watched the proceedings from there. Béla had one arm round the actor’s neck, his legs crossed, the smoldering remains of a cigarette in his mouth, his body slightly bowed as he stood, slender and boyish, with a gentle, somewhat decadent smile on his yellow face, an unconscious picture of lecherous, bovine self-satisfaction. Tibor threw off his long wig with its bunches, and Ábel was pained and surprised to note that he remained as effeminate, as girlish, and as much the ingénue without it as he had been with, his beauty spot still fixed above his upper lip, his arms still white, and his bosom still in place. He was sitting between Ernõ and the one-armed one, chin propped on two fingers, holding his cards with a feminine, grande-dame-ish, almost woman-of-the-world air. Ernõ cut him a fan from a cardboard box and Tibor employed it, fanning himself slowly and easily.
Ábel leaned on his elbows in the prompter’s box. It was more interesting watching than taking part, he thought. He felt dizzy. Only the actor seemed to behave as naturally as you might expect of someone who had spent his whole life on this very ship, wearing a striped vest, with a pipe in his mouth, never stepping out of his role, not one voice, not one glance out of place. He was scanning the company, looking for something, and when he discovered Ábel in the prompter’s box he began to protest.
“You cheat!” he bellowed in a tremendous voice. “You scoundrel! Have you no manners? You spend your time on shore observing where the tide is sweeping us! Fancy spying on others, eh? Get back to your place among the rest. Push his head under the water!”
They rushed Ábel, grabbed his arms, and dragged him from his nook. Ábel put up no resistance. He lay flat on the boards, his arms spread wide. The actor took a contemptuous tour of him, as if he regarded him as no more than a corpse. He poked at him with his toes, then turned away.
“There are people who are utterly corrupt,” he declared with plain disgust. “People addicted to the most depraved passions. But the worst of them are the voyeurs who derive their satisfaction from observing other people indulge their passions. I have always loathed them. There was a time in Rio when I smashed in the teeth of one. These are the kind of people who drill holes in walls. They are pimps, purveyors of pomade. Beware of such. People in the act itself are inevitably innocent. Sin begins the moment you leave the circle and watch from outside.”
He circled the cabin and put a bottle down next to Ábel.
“Drink!” he ordered, then slumped down at Ábel’s side as if exhausted. “Over here, Madonna!” He laid Tibor’s head in his lap with gentle paternal solicitude. The boy lay down compliantly beside him. He filled his pipe and puffed at it in the manner of an old salt or an ancient gold-miner about to tell far-fetched yarns.
“You must be very careful on board ship,” he said, nodding. “Nowhere else do people live in conditions of such ruthless servitude. And I know what I’m talking about when I say that. There was a time…what I mean to say is that you need strict discipline on board. Just imagine: year after year, locked up together like prisoners in one small cell. A sailor quickly loses his sense of all that is fine and lovely in the natural world. He is constantly under surveillance, never alone. It’s the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. Mutinies, when they occur on a ship, burst on you with a sudden fury: the men go about their ordinary jobs for years without a word of complaint, without a voice raised in anger. Should one of them express a contrary opinion he is simply booted off at the next port of call, and you can’t expect the ship’s judge and jury to see the joke. Then something happens, something utterly insignificant, and a line is crossed. This sort of thing happens with exceptional suddenness and later you can’t determine what really caused it, because it seems so very stupid: a row over a cake of soap or a drop of grog, it’s all beyond understanding.”
Béla stood at the edge of the stage laughing.
“That was the box we used to reserve!” he cried. He stretched his arms out towards the dark auditorium. “Box three on the left!” he shouted with boundless delight. “That’s where we had to sit every Sunday afternoon, our hair neatly combed, forbidden to lean on the balustrade. We wouldn’t get any sweets either because Father said people would laugh if they saw the grocer’s children sucking sweets.” He leaned forward and bellowed into the auditorium.
“My father has principles! I have none!” He was reeling with laughter. “If only he could see me here…”
“Box two was better,” said Ábel. “That was our box, number two on the right. Tibor, if only your father could see you now! Careful, your skirt is riding up.”
Tibor sat up and smoothed his skirt down. Ábel addressed him most solemnly.
“Have you ever read poems with cotton wool in your ears? Or prose, for that matter…It’s quite different, you know. You should try it some time…”
The actor fished in his pocket for a contraption that looked a little like a pocket watch and splashed perfume on his palms and cheeks. The cloud of sickening chypre enveloped Tibor too.
“A proper sailor likes his scents,” said the actor. “His pockets and his chest are full of gifts for his friends and brides.”
So saying he dipped in his pocket again and brought out a small hand-mirror, a comb, some cakes of soap, and ceremoniously handed them round. What was left of the chypre he poured all over Tibor.
T
HERE WERE CONTRARY STORIES AS TO WHAT
happened later. Ernõ asserted that everyone, with the exception of the actor, who had in fact drunk the most, was drunk. The actor was only pretending. The one-armed one obstinately maintained that the actor was genuinely and helplessly drunk because there was that embarrassing moment when he touched him with his fingertip and the actor collapsed like a sack.
What they all remembered was that round about dawn the actor made an interminable torrent of a speech and behaved most strangely. He walked up and down waving his arms and told ridiculous stories in a mixture of languages. No one the next day could remember what he actually said. He kept mentioning the names of foreign cities, made grandiloquent gestures at the dark auditorium, and shouted obscene remarks into it. There was one time when they were all speaking at once. The one-armed one was weeping and staggering around. He went from person to person, tapping each on the arm and pointing to the space where his missing arm should have been. “There’s yours,” he said, “but where is mine?” He wept, sat down on the ground, and felt about himself. “There must be a mistake,” he pleaded. “Help me look for it. It must be here somewhere.” They stood around not knowing what to do. They tried whispering soothing things into his ear. He was impossible to console or calm. He screamed and shouted and started vomiting. They washed his face. Tibor sat down with him and laid his brother’s head in his lap. The one-armed one was twitching, his whole body racked with tears.