Maiden Voyage (16 page)

Delaying the present-opening time to when the day's position was worked out, I sat and waited for something special to happen. Already that morning, during my search for stranded flying fish for Dinghy's breakfast, I had found a genuine nickel lying on the foredeck. How it got there remained a mystery that I spent the next half hour pondering.

I opened a can of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts for the birthday feast, shredded some cabbage and threw the whole thing together in a frying pan with Uncle Ben's rice, soy sauce and sesame oil. When it was cooked, I sat down and slowly savored the taste of
Varuna's
Suzy Wan version of Chinese food as Dinghy dined on his Galápagos-brand can of sardines smothered in tomato sauce. Then I did the dishes and cleaned up.

Even though I knew that the presents and messages from my family had all been prepared before I left New York, I treasured the little time capsules about to be opened. Thoughts from the people I loved had been wrapped up and frozen in time for four and a half months, and finally the long-awaited moment had arrived.

First, to set the mood, I pulled out my cassette player and clicked in the family tape Tony had made without anyone suspecting, the night before I left New York. Everyone was at the dinner table and seemed even more hyper than usual. After dinner, he had confessed and they had all written little notes to me. From my father,
“Dans ce
meilleur des mondes . . . tout est au mieux,”
in this best of worlds, all is for the best, a quote from
Candide
.

“Tania, with love from your brother. I hope you are enjoying yourself and if you feel homesick now, after you listen to this tape, you won't be anymore. Love, Tony, the maker and producer of this tape.”

“Remember yourself now and then. Christian.”

“Since everyone used up the space, I'll just say have fun and remember me. Love, Jade. PS. Notice I said love. It took a lot of effort.”

And finally from Nina, “I hope you like my singing and piano version of Für Elise.
Adios.”

The voices from our round table at home swarmed inside
Varuna
, rebounding from the walls, and I thought about Nina, Tony and Jade. What were they all doing now? Was my father with Fritz in Holland or was he eating dinner at Raoul's on Prince Street again? How was Nina faring in her first year of college? I opened her birthday present. This time, it was dehydrated scrambled eggs. She was so funny—my aide whenever I used to sneak out of the house at night. My girlfriends Rebecca and Jill used to sleep over, and we'd count the creaking floorboards down the staircase after Nina had given us the all-clear sign. I felt a pang of guilt, remembering my embarrassment when she asked once to tag along on one of our jaunts. We reluctantly brought her, ignored her all night and she was hurt. Bursting with self-importance, surrounded by friends, I hadn't cared, until now.

Jade's present had a suspiciously familiar shape. It was a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream, and the letter said, “Daddy told me I should make it a ‘Happy Crossing the Equator Line' present. But, knowing your navigational skills, you probably won't even find the equator.” I would be sure to tell her in my next letter how right she was.

Pouring myself a plastic cup of the creamy liqueur, I opened the package from my father. “My dear Tania,” his letter began, “A very happy birthday to you. Wherever you are now, the thermometer probably says something in the 80's. Here, it is 36 degrees and sunny. A Saturday morning and all is quiet. The kids are still sleeping. Nina has her friend Adrian with her. Last night I found in the street an almost dead bamboo plant. I took it home to try to revive it and messed up my jacket along the way. I just got it back from the cleaners yesterday! I am jealous of your trip. God, do I wish that I was taking off for a long time. Be proud, happy, excited about the
fact that you are doing it. Oh, there is not a word that says it exactly—something like ecstatic would do, but, even that is too tame. . . .

“Last night Fritz was in a solemn mood. As we ate dinner, he called to say that he was going
alone
to Raoul's for a steak
au poivre
, an espresso and a cognac. Would I join him for the espresso and the cognac? Of course I would. Boy, the cognacs just kept coming to us two originally gloomy guys. Somewhere along the evening, two ladies wanted to take us home to teach them Swiss German, but we refused since we were too busy making plans.

“And what plans! I shall quickly arrange my affairs, go to Holland and order THE boat. Then, in the fall, we will go together to Holland, get the boat and sail down to Buenos Aires. There, Fritz gets off and buys a horse and mule to go across the Pampas and the Andes to Santiago de Chile. There I shall be waiting for him after sailing alone around Cape Horn and a little visit to Antarctica. Then we sail up to the Galápagos, Panama, New York. Then I shall have my boat for the trip to the Northwest Passage. That's why now I'm not really jealous of your trip anymore. The little present should have some nostalgic meaning. We listened to it when Bobby was whining and Hank's Adam's apple was dancing. Be happy on your birthday and all other days. Daddy.”

The present was a cassette of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. I remembered back to the storm we had encountered in the Gulf Stream on
Pathfinder
between Bermuda and New York. Never before had I seen a sea so boiling and malicious, as our sailboat wildly bucked for three days in the wrath of Neptune. During the whole ordeal, my father had wasted precious battery power to boost our morale with the intricacies of Liszt and, indeed, we prevailed finally to see a clear dawn a day and a half later. Through it all, my father had never doubted himself, or his young green crew.

•   •   •

It was always a mystery to me how my mother and father could ever have been attracted to each other—he so wild and hungry, she so rigid and dark. She was nineteen when she carried me, “the same age as I am now,” I thought, reaching for the envelope from her that I had found aboard that first night in Sandy Hook.

“To be opened in the middle of the ocean,” it said in that disquieting printing. I had saved it for this day; after all, how could I possibly be more in the middle of the ocean than now? My mother had been on my mind and I wondered how she was and what she might be thinking. Although she had made us suffer so much when
we were younger, I could never resent her for it. She was a wounded bird and, if anything, I loved her all the more for her secret torments. Whatever it was that happened in her life before she met my father was something that she would probably take to her grave.

It was at a party in Paris, when he was twenty-eight and she was nineteen that my father met my mother, Sabina Borrelli, or so she called herself then. A student of French literature at the Sorbonne, she was a beautiful Italian, with perfect olive skin, wide green eyes and long dark hair. She was brilliant, seemingly wealthy and very mysterious. “All the right ingredients,” my father used to like to say. “She came home with me that night, made eggplant parmesan and never left.”

But there were peculiarities. She was vague about her past, often changing the details of her childhood to suit the occasion, and although she said she was born in Torino, Italy, she did not speak Italian with an Italian accent. Multilingual, she seemed to speak no language with a native accent. Her German had a French accent; her French had an Italian accent. Italians who knew my father in those days said she spoke the Italian of a Pole. “She was a very interesting woman,” he told us later, when we plundered his memory for facts about our heritage. “But your mother had many secrets.”

Soon after my father immigrated to the United States, a letter arrived from Paris to his Englewood, New Jersey, apartment. “Dear Ernst,” it began, “I am pregnant. . . .”

•   •   •

The envelope from my mother was on the verge of complete disintegration from the humidity, so I opened it carefully, hoping this would be a special moment. I had placed reminders of her all around me on
Varuna:
drawings, a pot holder she crocheted, the Chinese doll she gave me, the Bible from Switzerland and volumes of literary masterpieces she had pressed on me before my departure.

“You must educate yourself,” she had said a hundred times. “The most important thing in the world is an education. It will open your eyes and you will see all the hypocrisy. You make fun of Mommy, but one day, Tania, you will see.” Guiltily, I stole a furtive look toward the shelf of books and promised myself I'd crack the spine of a classic the next day.

Inside the envelope was a lock of my mother's long brown hair, tied with a piece of yarn. On a note was written: “I am with you.”

The two letters, one from my mother and one from my father, lying next to each other on the bunk each aptly summed up their
authors more than they would ever dream. It had all started with a letter and, the way things were going, it would probably end that way.

Maybe it was the eloquence of a round-the-dinner-table argument on the family tape, or the grand words of my birthday letters, or the Bailey's Irish Cream, or simply a lock of hair connecting me with my home and a mother I still hadn't quite figured out, but the tears welled up. I looked for the package from Luc and, just then, heard the familiar songs of the dolphins. A herd was alongside, squeaking a birthday chorus, their whistles resonating through the hull so I could hear them without even going outside. I grabbed Luc's present, unwrapped it and found the cassette of the classical guitar concerto by Narcisso Yepes I had loved on
Thea
.

“Ma jolie petite
Tania,” began his letter. “Today is your birthday and I come with my friends, the wind, the skies and the sea. You are nineteen years old today and you are all alone on a little sailboat in the middle of the ocean. I tried to remember what I did for my nineteenth year. I was in France, anxious about my future and only dreaming about a departure, for where, I didn't know yet. You, at nineteen, are living a great adventure and you are very lucky. On your little boat, there is before you the immensity of life. You will meet with stumbling blocks, anguish and storms, but also the calm mornings, when everything is enveloped in soft gentleness, when you wake up in the arms of somebody you love. That person will always be your home port and you will always come back to him. I think that you feel very lonely with Dinghy, wherever you are. But, close your eyes and receive the vibrations from all the people who love you and are thinking about you. In the middle of the crowd, you will find me. Right now, there is no one that can be less lonely than you. Keep your course and your faith. Love, Luc.”

Tears were streaming down my face by the time I finished the letter. As beautiful as his words were, and as much as I did not doubt the sincerity with which he wrote them, I knew that Luc and I would never share a future. He was already married and had a child. When he had first told me about Fabienne, in Taboga, I had thought that she was a girlfriend. But as my rusty French became lubricated, less conversation flew over my head and the fog began to clear, revealing the obvious facts.

Fabienne was his wife. They had eloped when they were eighteen, had lived together ever since, and brought new life onto the planet. The pictures on the bulletin board behind his chart table were not of
different beautiful women, but of one woman taken over the span of fifteen years. They had fought; she had left the boat in Martinique and was now in France. He wanted a divorce, he said, but the only problem was his son. Tristan was the love of his life.

“He renews my youth, Tania. With him, I discover the wonders of the world as they unfold before his eyes. I was a cynic and Tristan is showing me the beauty of life all over again. I don't know what to do. All I know is that I could never give him up.”

Hidden in between the words he had spoken was the reality of our situation. He could never leave his family. No matter how miserable it made me feel, here in the middle of the ocean, I couldn't help thinking about what fifteen years together with one person really meant. His whole life, once away from his parents, had been spent with Fabienne. All his adult memories were of her. Christmases, every ocean passage, motorcycle accidents—the stories of his adventures all had a female character with the same name. In the Galápagos, I had begun to realize that we would never have a future together. Now, hard as it was, I had to try and accept that. Things were going to be different in the Marquesas and once again, it would be just me and Dinghy. Pulling out my logbook, I tried to put my feelings into words.

“The most beautiful, yet sad birthday I've ever had. Listening to the tape, I am crying. I miss my home and family and wonder if they are thinking of me today. The wonderful letters from Daddy, Jade and of course Luc. The Bailey's Irish Cream and even Mommy's hair. I have definitely left something wonderful behind, and when I return it will all be so different. I love Luc, Daddy, Mommy, Jeri, Nina, Tony, Jade and my friends. My ship is so small and the ocean so immense. Never ending, always another horizon. But God has given me his own special present: a beautiful sunny day. I love my crazy family and wish I could hear them laughing, fighting, anything. I try to imagine the sounds of voices, cars and living. But I am content with the rush of water, the wind, the leaks. Thank you, God, for life.”

Finally, weariness overcame my racing mind. Jade's liqueur had really jazzed up my afternoon and, tuckered out, I pulled myself up from the cramped position wedged behind the table, grazing my hip bone. Cursing at the table, I swore that it would be the first thing to go overboard in
Varuna's
upcoming Tahitian overhaul. I picked up the port berth's cushion, dragged out the lee cloth and tied it up to
the handrails. Laying out the sleeping bag, blanket and sheet, I popped out on deck for a last check before bedtime.