The Lost Sailors (20 page)

He had made the decision without saying a word to Cephea. He'd presented her with a fait accompli. He was leaving, and that was it. Once again, he'd been a coward. In relation to Takis. In relation to her, too. Especially in relation to her. If he'd been able to answer her, if he'd been prepared to question the life he had made her live, he might have been able to refuse Takis's crooked proposition. That was when Cephea had decided to leave him.

Now, asking Diamantis for advice—if it was still possible—asking him for help, meant exposing himself to him. Putting an end to his constant compromising, his constant juggling with the values of life. And that was something that seemed to be beyond his strength. That was the crux of it, the heart of the matter. He was all too well aware of it now. Men's lives were non-negotiable. Friendship was non-negotiable. So was love.

Cephea, he thought.

She had always been on his side. Not him. He liked the fact that she loved him. But had he loved her for herself? He hadn't always been on her side. On the side of her love. This girl beside him now, Stella, was a cruel testimony to that.

 

“You're thinking about her, aren't you?” Stella asked, putting out her cigarette.

“Yes.”

He looked at Stella, the way you might look at an object. A beautiful object. Stella was a pretty hooker. Her damp body glowed. She wasn't yet worn down by men, alcohol, drugs.

She had told him she was twenty-one. She came from a small village—he'd forgotten the name—near Iasi, in Romania. She had always lived in the country. Her body had blossomed with the seasons, and the hard work of the land. It was powerful and muscular. Rather like Cephea's. They both had bodies that wouldn't easily submit to the unforgiving nature of time, the blows of fate.

He had met Stella on the terrace of a bar called Les Templiers, on Place Cézanne, at the top of Cours Julien. One of the newly fashionable areas of Marseilles. Some longshoremen had recommended the place to him. “It's full of girls from Eastern Europe. Yugoslavs, Romanians, Russians . . . You sit down and they're all over you like flies. You just have to take your pick . . . But be careful,” they'd warned him. “Most of them are doped to the eyeballs.”

His choice had fallen on Stella, because of her physique. He didn't like fragile women. They were too passive in bed. He could make love only when there was an element of physical confrontation. Stella hadn't disappointed him. She had the strength, and enough hatred in her, to give him the pleasure he'd hoped for.

“I don't think about anything anymore,” she said.

He wasn't listening. She'd already said that. Earlier, on the terrace of the café. Her father and brother shot by the partisans, after the flight of Ceaus¸escu. Her father had been the Party secretary in the village. Vasil, the head of the militia, had raped her. A young peasant, the same age as she. They'd grown up together, danced together when there were parties in the village. He often did odd jobs in her house. He was a protégé of her father's. “Vasil will be a good Communist, and a good husband for you,” her father would say whenever he saw him. She had always refused to sleep with him, because she wasn't sure she wanted to be made pregnant by this fucking beggar, who wouldn't make her any happier than her father had made her mother. She knew life was better elsewhere. In Bucharest. And even more so in the capitalist countries. In Italy, and especially in France.

Vasil had had his revenge that day. On poverty. On the Communists. And especially on her. He could do it. He had nothing to fear. He had the power now, not her father.

She had packed her bags and left for Bucharest. She felt no shame or remorse there. No one knew her. Ceaus¸escu was gone, but nothing had changed. The people who had money still had it, and the people who didn't have any had even less.

She had become a hooker, of course. It was a good way to make a lot of money fast. Now she was here. In Marseilles. For six months. She still made a lot of money, but she spent twice as much on rent, food, clothes . . . That was why she never haggled over prices. It was a thousand francs for a fuck. O.K., she might take her time. She didn't believe in doing everything by the clock.

Abdul had stopped by the American Express office on the Canebière and withdrawn five thousand francs from his savings account. Money he'd put aside for a rainy day. He hadn't touched it in all the time the
Aldebaran
had been stuck in Marseilles. He offered Stella two thousand five hundred, for the whole afternoon.

“O.K.,” she'd said. “But first buy me a meal. I'm starving.”

They ate grilled rib steak, fries, and salad. Beer for her. A half-liter bottle of chilled rosé for him. She talked as much as Nedim, and listening to her he forgot all his problems. By the time they left the café, he knew everything about her. And he was desperate to fuck her.

 

He could hear the sounds of the city now, rushing in through the open windows of the bedroom. Cars hooting. Tires screeching. Police sirens. Voices. Pigeons beating their wings from time to time. The same noise you hear in every port in the world after sleeping with a girl you don't know and will never see again. The noise of homesickness. The noise that reminds you you're not from these parts. Just a foreigner, passing through.

A lost sailor.

Stella had turned to him and was stroking his cock, with more skill than tenderness.

“Thinking doesn't get you anywhere. We're here and the rest of the world doesn't exist. Don't you think so?”

“Is that what you think?”

His cock was swelling beneath Stella's fingers.

“I think we're here to forget.”

He remembered Diouf again. “I don't think it's necessary to forget in our lives,” he had said. “In fact, I don't think we can.”

“So what do you advise me to do?”

“I don't have any advice for you. And I can't predict your fate.”

“So I'm paying you for nothing?”

“When you pay, it's never for nothing.”

The same as with Stella.

He didn't know if he could forget. But he felt as though a certain number of things lodged deep inside him, things he had never dared put into words, things that had been part of him for years, were gradually detaching themselves from him, and slipping away.

He looked at Stella. Her fingers were still on his cock, moving with a slowness that aroused him.

“Do you like it?”

 

He hadn't waited for Stella to wake up. Though she might not even have been asleep. What did it matter? He had paid her. He had listened to her. He had fucked her. He didn't owe her anything. Not even a goodbye.

He had dressed in silence. He had looked one last time at her body. The way you look at a dead person before the coffin is closed. That was it. He was closing the lid on his past life. There beside Stella, on the sheets still damp with his sweat, he was leaving his old skin, his corpse.

Anything could happen to him now, it didn't matter anymore. He walked along Cours Julien as far as the Canebière. He remembered something else Diouf had said to him. “We mustn't despair. The future is a world that contains everything.”

T
he cockroaches were outside the door of his cabin. Three huge, hideous black cockroaches. Diamantis felt a knot in his stomach. He hated cockroaches more than anything in the world. “That's it,” he told himself, “here they are . . .” The
Aldebaran
must be infested with them. They'd soon be everywhere. These vermin were always where you least expected them. Under your plate. In a sack of rice. Between your sheets. It was disgusting.

He kicked angrily in their direction. He didn't try to squash them. That was something he couldn't do. Especially ones as big as these. The crunch of their shells under his feet gave him the shivers, made him want to vomit.

He opened the door cautiously. As if thousands of cockroaches might leap onto his face, or rain down on his head and shoulders. He had goosebumps just thinking about it. But he didn't see any. He took the sheet that was on his bunk and shook it, looked under the mattress and the pillow, then undressed and lay down. He was exhausted.

Maybe if Mariette hadn't left straight away, he'd have asked her to give him a ride to the bar where he was supposed to be meeting Amina. But maybe it was better this way. He needed rest. There was an insistent pain throughout his body, spreading outward from his bruised muscles. The pain was the only way he could still feel his body, and he was groggy with fatigue and Dolipran.

All thought seemed to have vanished from his head. He was curiously empty. But he didn't feel any desire to sleep, and his eyes were open and fixed. It was a feeling he'd known only once before in his life. One day when he'd had a fist fight with an Irishman in a bar in Hanover. Fueled by Guinness, the asshole was holding forth about the state of the merchant navy around the world.

“And if we have to make a distinction,” he was bellowing, “I'd say the Haitians have the worst boats and the Greeks the worst sailors.”

His remarks had been greeted with applause, laughter, and cheers. Diamantis, who was completely plastered, had gotten unsteadily to his feet, a glass of beer in his hand. He had gone up to the Irishman and tapped him on the shoulder. The man had looked at him with yellowish, protruding eyes. Diamantis had thrust his face into his.

“I'm a Greek, and to hell with you. And to hell with the asshole of the world that gave birth to you.”

And he had emptied the contents of his glass over the guy's head.

He'd only had the upper hand for a few minutes. The first two minutes. After that, he'd taken a hammering. Then the Irishman had landed a punch on his left temple, and he'd collapsed onto the bar counter. And there he'd stayed, eyes open, not wanting to move. The quartermaster and the radio operator had taken him back to the ship. Early the next morning, he was still staring up at the ceiling, unable to move.

 

Last night's beating up was confused in his mind now with the one he'd received twenty years ago. He remembered the cold barrel of the gun in his mouth. The threats they had made. Even though there hadn't been a gun this time, last night's threats seemed to him more serious than those of twenty years ago. More serious because more recent. It was still as dangerous as ever to go near Amina. Why? She was the only one who could tell him that.

He wasn't crazy about the idea of getting himself killed but he had decided to see this thing through. He had accepted it. It was something he had to do. He had to ask forgiveness. Maybe it was childish. But if he didn't do it, he'd never be able to envisage a different life, and he'd be obliged to continue sailing the seas. All this time he'd been running away—that was all he'd ever done, run away—from the thing that grew once you'd gotten past the fucking. Love. Love, and everything it led to. Building a future. Fidelity. Trust. How could you build a future of trust if you couldn't ask forgiveness for all the stupid things you'd done in the past? Forgiveness from those you've loved. Forgiveness from those you commit yourselves to love.

That was why things had fallen apart with Melina. He hadn't asked forgiveness. And so she hadn't forgiven him. And their love had foundered. He was more than ever convinced that Melina and he could have been happy. The sea wasn't an obstacle to their love. The lack of trust was, and that endless escape he called his profession. Or his vocation, the nights when they quarreled.

He always had excuses for his infidelities. And he always used Odysseus as a clinching argument. Just like his father. How many times had he heard his mother and father arguing? And his father saying that polygamy was part of Mediterranean culture, and then slamming the door and going off on a spree, for a night or a week? Mediterranean man, Diamantis had read somewhere, believes that men can act like sailors even when they're not sailing.

Melina didn't want to play the part of Penelope. Or rather, she did, but she wanted to be Circe and Calypso, too! In a way, she was even more Greek than Diamantis. It wasn't marriage that interested her, but the pleasure of loving. Her kind of love had nothing to do with all that Anglo-Saxon romanticism. It was the kind of love you die for. The kind of love you kill for. She loved because it was her life. Amina had come before Melina, but Melina, whom he'd known forever, was already there in Amina. They were two facets of the same love, a love he had wrecked. After twenty years of wandering, Diamantis was trying to get back to home base. He wanted to love. More than anything, he needed Amina to forgive him.

He turned over, making as little movement as he could, and peered into those corners of the cabin that were within his field of vision. He didn't see any cockroaches. He closed his eyes. In her note, Amina didn't mention the message he had left her the day before. Who was the girl who had left the envelope for him? How did Nedim know her? From where? Where had the asshole been hanging out? The Perroquet Bleu. The Habana. Shit, the Habana! Amina worked at the Habana. She was one of the two girls who had hustled Nedim. Amina wasn't a hooker, she was a hostess. Amina. Nedim hadn't mentioned anyone called Amina. What were their names? Lalla. Lalla was the one who was leading him by his dick. The other one was an older woman, he'd said. Gaby. Gaby? Gaby.

Was Amina at the Habana when he had gone there to try to get Nedim's bag back? Why hadn't she showed herself to him? Maybe she couldn't. But who had suggested that deal to Doug—Diamantis's passport for Nedim's things? And why? Lalla? Why would Lalla have done that? Did Lalla have the authority? No. Too young. Amina? Gaby? Gaby. Maybe she was the owner. Or Amina. What did Nedim mean by “an older woman”? Fifty? Forty? Forty. Gaby. Was Gaby Amina?

That was it, wasn't it? Yes, that was it.