Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (2 page)

I saw little of Unguentine. Forever in the pilot-house steering with sextant and calendar, marking off the days not with Xs but with question marks, measuring the height of his growing trees by triangulation, for he never had time to visit the gardens any more. Trees, trees, I could have cut them all down, or poured motor oil on their roots, or let the burning leaves of autumn somewhere flame too high. Often he vanished for days down the spiral staircase into the engine-room to overhaul the weary machinery, leaving me with a curt note tacked to his then-favourite aspen, the Aspen Laura-Anne, a white-limbed thing with noisy leaves: ‘A due-south drift, please, love, for a day or two, n’est-ce pas?’ And I was loyal, I was obedient, my asters be damned. When would it all end? Four-five years this went on. We fuelled by night in obscure, foetid ports where I strip-teased on the prow, ringed by candles, to mollify thin-lipped customs officials, while Unguentine whispered assignations for contraband into the lapping darkness over the stern; one week it was a case of crown jewels, another a cargo of slave babies who sang sweet songs in the depths of the hold while I leaned against partitions and wept, childless, penniless; another time, bananas. The seas, the seas, how I hated them then, and all their waters which glided us from chicanery to chicanery and in our wake, our youth, oil smears iridescent of all that might have been; but never was, never will be. Instead, we threw a great tent up over the barge, over the tops of the young trees, and conducted nautical orgies in tropical seas for bevies of wealthy yachtsmen who traded griping paramours before our very eyes, our open palms and ten per cent, and who would scramble up the tree-trunks to drape themselves nude from limbs, jeering down, and everything would be the noise of boughs cracking and leaves being stripped from twigs, nights of it, years of it. Unguentine drank; my fury went into tossing huge salads. The yachts, the gleaming motor launches, the sloops, the tern schooners with crews of twenty, they ringed our barge like ants feeding from a fat aphid day and night. We were known, we were infamous the world over, as the S.S.
The Mrs Unguentine
, floating fleshpot, ocean-going brothel, were attributed legends, miraculous powers and bumper opium crops, all lies; and how I cursed Unguentine for dragging my name, my only now, through the mud of land and scum.

The barge, poor barge. My flower beds, nightly trampled, dwindled to frightened, dusty clumps such as cower alongside thundering highways of summer, Unguentine’s trees to bare-branched skeletons crowned with only a fringe of green, trunks protruding starkly from earth packed solid by the patter of bare feet, and squeals, the heavy breathing, rolling bodies, night after night. I, the sad little figure, aproned and of shy eyes, who filled glasses and broadcast hors d’oeuvres, bottom nightly blued by palpitations of admirals and insipid pinches of millionaires. These were not the people I longed for, these were not my silken people of the past with their soft-spoken voices and elegant poses, gracefully tweaking the stems of fluted glasses; they were vandals all, and we a colonial island befouled and ravished by each passing ship. Once we were pursued by a floating casino jealous of our attractions, she ran aground on a reef our barge slid clanking over, though dropping propellor and rudder. Unguentine as ever improvised and on we sailed to other careers, The Mrs Unguentine retiring hastily from service in one port only to be re-launched, with paint-job and fanfare, in some other, as ocean-going rest home with international cuisine and daily sea-burials; as the last and briefly rented stand of a government in exile, that sea-sick king, his neurasthenic queen; as Les Bazaars Unguentine with high-class optical goods, duty-free and one third off; as, armed with three cannon, shrouded in the blanched guise of a canvas iceberg, nocturnal guano pirate. We made, stole, frittered millions in currencies hard and soft, courted the brink of disaster for years on end, lived in constant terror through a time of endless navigational blunders which, Unguentine claimed, were brought on by our heavy load of vegetables and plants, and sudden shifts in the climatic zones which rendered useless his maps, ambushing us with incredible situations. ‘You fool,’ I dared to say that time he sailed us plumb into an arctic sea right in midwinter and we ran aground on a submerged island of ice whose heavings and bucklings thrust the hull of the barge high up into the air until the whole thing keeled over, with a long and bitter winter spent on ice, the thirty-degree tilt at which we did everything, ate, slept, crawled, saving the gardens only by means of hastily constructed earthworks and terraces, tree props, guy wires, heated and gassed by homemade smudge pots. Once in attempting to outrun a high and vicious tidal wave, our top speed proved inadequate and we were swept up and borne along by it, surfed at high speed half a day or more, Unguentine at the pilot wheel with eyes closed and teeth clenched and steering straight ahead, while below deck I manned the pumps against spraying leaks of the ancient iron hull; the wind ripped out half the trees and sucked away all our chickens except the rooster, leaving us three months without a supply of fresh brown eggs, extra large. Plagues of insects we have known, chattering hordes came out of the middle of the night to munch their way across half the garden by dawn and multiply faster than we could shoo them away; and heavy night-flying seabirds which have crashed by the flock into the trees as I have wandered about the barge by candlelight, the dull thuds and cracking limbs, the hiss of leaves being sheared from branches, and my arms thrashing about, my body socked and cannonaded clear across the lawn by those feathered carcasses.

But there came calmer seas, we came to know even bouts of respectability and glory in the Unguentine Gardens years when, refurbished, replanted, we bobbed in leisure from port to port, the paid admissions, the aquatic parades, the holding of high-minded botanical banquets and ecological conferences, all in the days when things like that could still be done. We flew the flag of a diseased republic anxious for mail-order revenue, a pretty thing depicting the Milky Way upon a field of blue, and huge, nine by twelve, entirely hand-blocked by starving peons whose government commemorated the registration of our barge by inventing the sweet-flowing River Unguentine; and who cared that it was only a flood-control channel, for it was fame and a mark, geography with all the pomp of speakers’ platforms and waving banners and idle crowds, who cared but Unguentine? Who saved the barge then? Who suddenly noticed his disappearance only minutes before he was scheduled to unveil the bronze plaque? I did. I scurried below deck, by luck. There he was, hoisting a jackhammer into position to have a fatal go at the bottom. ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. Thus we made it on to the map and a million multi-coloured postage stamps, though so briefly. Little else do I remember of those fifteen-twenty years besides the sound of the waves, and seagulls, the engine, the interminable squawking of Unguentine’s allband portable radio as he listened to weather reports in the fourteen languages he had mastered expressly for that purpose, a snatch of each, while I had only two with which to chatter myself from madness to madness, now dwindled to the tatters of one. I saw little of him then, or saw him mainly at a distance. But then one day he summoned me, it was a summer day of crystalline air that made the horizon meeting of sea and sky into a fold, a seam, an overlapping, a wire, anything, and I hung lazily about the railings, sometimes dabbing at them with paint, longing overboard for land and people, he summoned me in his manner, which was to leave a note in the path he knew would soon be mine. As I said, I was dabbing at the railings with a paintbrush. My ear pricked up when suddenly, working away at the underside of a T-joint, the hairs of my brush touched off a scratchy resonance. I leaned over. And there, now covered with the bright sienna of anti-rust paint, was a small square of paper taped to the underside of the railing pipe. I ripped it off, carefully wiped away the paint. ‘Darling, do be at the lawn at noon, eh?’ it said, the lawn being a small plot of grass in the very center of the barge and surrounded by Unguentine’s trees in such a way that we could have a spot of rural privacy even amid the commerce of a great port. I had not seen him for days though knew he was somewhere around, what with the notes, the way we moved across the ocean by fits and starts, the steam-engine sometimes running at full speed and the wind rushing through the trees, at others adrift in a practically dead calm, I knew he was still there, somewhere. Not that I wanted to see him. His summoning me no doubt meant he had some project in mind for me and I dreaded to think what, lunch, dinner, afternoon tea. So I lolled about on the lawn and waited, for who could know what noon meant in the kind of lives we led. The sunlight flickered brightly into the depths of branches. He had planted evergreens around this little lawn, pines, fir, a redwood, some cedars, and already within so few years the spot was sunny only near noon on the equator; that particular day it was over a hundred degrees and hidden sprinklers sprayed a fine and cooling mist all over the barge: from a distance, it was said, often we were seen as a greenish cloud, a tuberous mirage, a ship of war. I waited. The grass beneath my feet ceased quivering as the steam-engine fell silent. Moments later something thrashed about behind the screen of evergreens. A branch cracked. Being the wife of Unguentine called for nerves of steel at times. Then silence. I was to speak only if and only when spoken to. The brush of pine needles against a hollow, metallic surface. Then, heavy, rhythmic breathing.

He declared a time of rest, twenty minutes, or so I thought he said with that especially fleshly tongue of his which prevented him from speaking distinctly and rapidly, his mouth so full of it few words ever squeezed out, that iguana-like tongue weight, so gagging. I smiled. Thus we ambled about the barge, arm in arm. Unguentine had grown his trees in such a way that, now in their early maturity, they were capable of generating their own little climates about them no matter which way we sailed, no matter where the sun was, or moon, or what rains, the northerly side of the barge remaining so throughout all twirls of the compass and seasons beyond the decks; further, he was thus able to keep four seasons on board, in balance, moving them fore to aft, or whatever, four times a year, like swarms of bees; though we never had snow. Thus we wandered about the decks, now hot, now cold, until we reached the pilot-house where we fell to making love amid the greasy fixtures of a dismantled auxiliary generator, my eyes, my weeping eyes tracing the dark lines of that rough wood floor across the sill and beyond deck to the mirror-sheen of surface of whichever ocean we now lay upon, on a morning no mists had risen to fuzz the horizon, no mirages. Unguentine lowered the skiff and rowed us out past the fat, drooping chain of the barge’s anchor, a few hundred yards out, where we held a picnic. We embraced again. I was crying. I could hear Unguentine’s deep voice grunting something into my hair. An explosion rang out. This, I thought, could be anything. But before I knew what was happening, champagne was coursing down my throat, I was laughing, scarcely following the line sighted by his index finger, black with grease, towards our barge, his thickly murmured word: ‘Rainbow.’ How could I see through my tears? A breeze billowed over us. Then Unguentine lowered the oars. With a grace that meant to draw the surface of the water beneath us, he bent his naked back and swung his arms to and fro, soundless, and so we returned. I was still sobbing when he lifted me aboard, imprinting my body with his greasy fingerprints. That was the first time I had been off it for two years. Two years. By any calculation.

At the sound of the splash I sprang to the
rail, peered overboard. I had not been far off. Bending over a flower bed, weeding. Sweeping a deck. Such things. And now I stared down into the foam of his white splash sliding over the wound in the sea like the knitted fingers of the elderly. Then bubbles, his last globes of carbon dioxide. Free at last? So I thought, and would soon have dashed to the pilot-house to set sail on a course due-north for some great harbor where I might sell the barge for a handsome price, to live out my life on land, my days; parched throat, sea legs to the end. Years and years. Packages one unwraps, then wraps up, again unwraps, brown paper, twine, excelsior, an unwanted gift. But I was wrong. Suddenly out of the turquoise depths a shiny form wiggled surfacewards and shot into the air like a jumping trout, to splash back. A gaff was handy; I netted it. Inside, a note: ‘Will be back in an hour or so.’ Of course. As was sometimes his wont this time of morning, he’d gone for a plunge in his hand-made diving bell, a thing of beaten brass and capable of extraordinary depths. So I went back to what I had been doing. Swept a deck. Bent over a flower bed, weeded. Such things. Humming a resigned tune. For such were the days when Unguentine’s forty trees were grown stout and healthy enough that we could sail anywhere in the world so long as we avoided arctic ices and equatorial heats. My work was simple and fulfilling, but hard. I watered and trimmed the flower banks, raked up the leaves under the trees, gathered fallen branches to dry out on the bow for firewood, I tended the vegetable garden we had growing in a small plot aft of the lawn and which was richly fertilized by ground-up seaweed, I fished, I cooked when we tired of raw food; I mended the ancient clothes we rarely had occasion to wear; and mushrooms I grew on trays in the bilge next to the chicken coop. We had ducks, too, mallards with clipped wings; they kept down the snails. One cat, two dogs, retired port mongrels. Also a goat. From twin vines that formed a natural awning over the stern pilothouse deck, we yearly harvested grapes, pressed them, casked and drank the wine whenever we sensed from over the horizon, on a distant land, an aura of national celebration. Cheers to some people (I would murmur, our glasses colliding), some race, as they commemorate some fine hour within the sadness of history.

Unguentine was about and visible more than ever before, his darkly tanned body now striding the length of the barge to fetch a hammer and wrench—as I might press myself against a bulkhead to clear a path—now crouching on the deck wet from my waterings to secure a length of rope, lubricate a winch, assemble his latest device. Long hours he spent in the uppermost branches of the tallest tree, the fast-growing Cottonwood Elizabeth, gangly thing, with field-glasses pointed out to sea, looking over the driftwood and floating debris with which he made up the machinery of our lives, and the ships, the countless ships which often cluttered our route and menaced our navigations, and abandoned all as if sailing the seas had gone out of fashion. Indeed, no wonder, with those waves, those swells. Whenever the weather was windless and calm, Unguentine would take the skiff and row out to sea, and soon the horizons would ring and chatter under the distant detonations of the charges with which he cleansed the seas of ships and floating wrecks, sending up plumed geysers as they went down, gasping, gulping in a last indigestible drink. Single-handedly he scuttled the fleet of a great nation, taking weeks to do it; and on the decks of one tall ship he found laid out the numbered stone blocks of an historic monument which I thought I remembered seeing as a child, having eaten roasted chestnuts in its presence; if that childhood was ever mine and all that seemed to follow. From the bow half of an abandoned freighter probably broken up in a hurricane, and one of the last ships we were ever to see, he salvaged the materials for a towering salt-water distillation plant which he installed on the south side of the pilot-house with some of its solar panels hanging over the rudder, eastwards, in a most unsightly manner. But we had no choice, for the barge, grown heavy and cumbersome under its weight of vegetation, could no longer be so speedily navigated in and out of rain zones. Many times for days on end we floated through the dismal wreckage of aircraft disasters, the split-open suitcases, the dead, the limbs, the only other people we were ever then to see, and with a net between prayers we fished up a fine set of silverware, an alarm clock, a kerosene lantern, several volumes of an encyclopedia. One day, inexplicably, for the sea was like that, we came across a sturdy raft bearing a flawlessly new electric stove, refugee of some inland flood or advertisement, and Unguentine stripped it down to pieces small enough to fit through the hatchway and down the stairs to my galley where he hooked it up; the raft we took in tow as a swimming platform. Likewise we acquired deck-chairs, sofas, bedding, linen, teacups, curtains.