Seagulls in My Soup (17 page)

This time I was lucky and everything went without a hitch. I slung my car-tire fenders over
Cresswell
's side again as she approached the anchoring spot. The mainsail came down with a rattle. I gazed around calmly for a spot to anchor. I kicked the anchor over the bow. The chain went down with a louder rattle. Then, as I waited for the anchor to sink into the sticky mud of the harbor bottom, I made myself a cup of tea. All around was quiet. The seawall was still deserted, even though it was almost seven o'clock.

I had already chosen my new neighbors. Indeed, I could choose no others—there was no space for
Cresswell
anywhere else on the outer mole. One neighbor was to be a Spanish fishing vessel; but she was obviously a conversion, because a cabin and a stubby mast had been added onto her, and she was far too clean and well-maintained to be a working vessel. On the other side would be a dumpy, squat, steel boat about twenty-five feet long, which, after staring at her for a while, I decided was a converted ship's lifeboat. She was painted battleship gray and had two short, squatty masts added to her. She was filthy with grease and dirt, and her topsides were loaded with heaps of junk—an old mattress and such. In other words, she looked
interesting.
All the more so because drooped over her stern was a huge, tattered British Red Ensign, which was so soaked in black goo that it looked as if it had been used to clean the boat's bilges. I stared at the name crudely painted on her in huge letters with red-lead paint, and grinned to myself:
Dreadnaught.

“Dreadnaught!”
I hollered a couple of times. No reply. I shouted a few times; then, seeing that “no answer was the loud reply,” I hustled my little rubber dinghy off the coachroof into the water, scrambled over into it with the mooring line, and paddled myself away to the outer mole wall. I secured the dinghy, clambered up the mossy, oily wall, and then hauled in my mooring line from
Cresswell
. When the mooring line tautened up I heaved the boat's stern in slowly and carefully, taking my time, as we say, by the dockyard clock. As soon as the stern was close enough I leaped aboard, quickly shortened up the mooring line—and there she was, all taut and cozy, moored stern-to. No fuss, no palaver, all done in almost complete silence. Satisfied that all was well, congratulating myself on a difficult maneuver accomplished with professional aplomb, I returned to my tea.

Then the toothache started.

For the ocean voyager there are many terrors to be overcome. Most of them can be defeated or circumvented by simple reasoning, or by guile or force of will. Some cannot. Among the most serious of these are bodily complaints which might leave one either physically incapable or mentally exhausted, too weak to struggle on. Of these unknowable, unforeseeable ailments, probably the most threatening, given otherwise good health, are appendicitis and toothache. To those who intend to make small-boat voyages, and especially those who intend to make them alone, the first thing I would advise them to do is have their appendix out, and with it all their teeth. In my years of voyaging I could not do this, simply because I could never afford the cost.

My appendix was no problem; I ate too much rough and ready food for that. But my teeth—my Celtic, inch-long-rooted teeth—with them I have suffered the tortures of the doubly damned. I had once sat alone, 1000 miles from the nearest dentist, with a raging ache burning up along my jaw, up along my nose, spearing itself in savage stabs into my brain, into my very soul. I had cursed every curse known in five languages and gripped my jaw, my head, my ears, the nearest bit of boat or rigging, trying to squeeze, force, wring, and
tense
the life out of it. I had ranted and roared and cried tears of rage. I had howled to the empty, bitter reaches of the uncaring ocean. With the boat pitching and tossing, and my tooth's burning root seeming to stab down into my heart, I had damned every sea that rolled and trundled past in the darkness of the ocean night, summoning up the courage, the will, to break out the mole-grips and somehow get the great ridged-tooth jaws onto that
bastard
of a tooth and lock the pliers onto the crown. I had then, in utter agony, worked away with both hands on the pliers, twisting and forcing, pulling and pushing this way and that, until, after a seeming eternity of twinging, wracking, griping, nipping, creaking, stabbing, and gnawing misery, the tooth loosened. Then, in desperation and anger garnished with the strength of a madman somewhere deep within me, I had pulled the bugger
out.
Finally, amid a welter of broken bone-bits and roots, saliva, and blood, and feeling a wild, triumphant joy, I had hammered the rotten-stumped tooth, still locked in the mole-grips, against a ringbolt, trying to extract from it some degree of the misery, the hell, which it had bestowed on me.

Now, although I cursed at the first sudden stabs of pain, I was not in the throes of despair I had felt at sea, alone. Here it was simple. All I had to do was go ashore and get the thing pulled out. No messing about between me and my teeth—at the first sign of mutiny, out it comes, and over the side. No root-canals, no fillings, no petting and cosseting and pampering and pouncing about. Get the bugger
out.
Give him the deep-six!

A tooth which once has had its way and yet has not been jettisoned is like a once-disaffected crewmember: Listen to him, slap his wrist, let him off, tell him to be good, and send him forward to the crew's quarters—and before you know it you'll have the whole fo'c'sle raging with all sorts of weird ideas, like democracy and equality for all, and soon the whole slew has gone bad and the ship is aground or foundering, and there you are, swimming strongly for England and bugger the Olympics.

I grabbed Sissie's raffia shopping bag, but it was decorated with little embroidered flowers, so I flung it on the starboard berth, and charged ashore without it. I wasn't going to have the fishermen at the bodega door staring at me and a be-flowered bag—not Rory O'Boggarty, the Playboy of the Western Approaches, either. As I jumped, with the starboard side of my face in a fury of pain, over the stern onto the jetty, Nelson whimpered and stared after me in sympathy.

It took about fifteen minutes to reach the dentist's office. It was on the second floor of a big, decrepit building at the rear of the Hotel Montesol. Its walls, all discolored and black-streaked plaster, looked as miserable as I felt. I raced up the wide, dirty staircase and passed the usual black-shawled, chubby, elderly woman on them.

“Dentista!”
I shouted at her.

“Cerrado,”
she gummed back at me, her black eyes gleaming with unexpected enjoyment. “Closed. He opens at ten o'clock.”

“Is there another one nearby?” I pleaded.

The harridan smiled gently as she turned the knife. “No—he's the only one in Ibiza,” she said slowly, savoring every lisped word.

I dashed back down the street, still holding my jaw. It was only eight fifteen. What to do? What to
dooo
 . . . I moaned softly as I tensed my midriff, trying to prevent my soul from escaping through my jaw. I would be British about the whole thing, I told myself sternly. That's what I would bloody-well do! None of this Continental nonsense, this damned foreign self-pity, this Frenchified indecency! Keep a stiff upper lip, that's what I would do. Straighten my spine, stick my chest out, look everybody in the eye, and be so self-controlled that Her Majesty would be proud of me.

I would do the shopping. Yes, that was it, the shopping I would do. Business as usual. Everything stops for business—even a toothache. Keep the home fires . . . But
God,
there was nothing about the home fires burning in my mouth. Sweet Jesus, hear my plea, I prayed as I stamped each step hard into the ground, as if trying to take revenge on the earth itself for my having been born into this life of misery and pain. Get a-hold of yourself, man—don't forget that England expects every man to do his duty, I admonished myself as I reached a tiny grocer's store, a mere hole in a cottage wall.

Inside was the customary black-shawled lady. She was knitting behind the counter. She threw me a look of consternation as she wondered what a foreigner was doing in the preserve of small, dark women with huge broods and small, dark men with huge thirsts. I went to the bar immediately to show her that I was, in fact, a man, even though not Ibizan. With a shaking hand I took out the 300 pesetas that Sissie had given me earlier, just as a wizened gnome with a face the color of cured mahogany stepped through a dark curtain behind the counter. He was about eighty-five, and wore a brown woolen cardigan over a collarless gray-and-white-striped shirt. On his head was the requisite black fedora, which, even in my agony, I was surprised to see did not have a pointed crown.

The gnome-patriarch gauged me for a moment.
“Señor?”
he said.

“Please, quick,
señor,
I have a toothache. Please give me brandy. Two glasses!”

As the head of the gnome family poured out two measures of brandy the old lady clucked her tongue in sympathy. I turned to her; she shot me a look of intense pity. I raised the glasses swiftly, one after the other, and poured the stuff down. “Another,
por favor, señor,
” I wailed.

This one I didn't swallow; I rolled it around and around the offending molar with my tongue. The pain dulled momentarily and I got on with my shopping, being careful not to be too finicky as I slammed down sugar and flour, peas and beans to be weighed, lest the old lady should question my masculinity to herself.

By the time I had pointed out all my needs, and the men had weighed them, and the women had bagged them, it was almost ten o'clock (slowness is a virtue in Ibiza), and I, ostensibly to be
macho,
but actually to dull the toothache and basically because I
liked
it, had quaffed yet another four glasses of cognac.

Now, as I paid the bill—185 pesetas into the half-drawn claw of the old woman—I felt a hundred times better. Now the toothache was a mere annoyance.

What's a minor ache and pain now and again to a hearty sailor? I asked myself as I stepped outside into the bright sunshine. In fact it's almost gone now—maybe it doesn't need to come out at all? Then a sudden stab of hot fury from my upper jaw told me that I must be terribly
British
again, and face the music. Right, I told myself—you go in, Tristan-bach; bear the standard of the red dragon on high, and remember the loins from which you sprang!

Up the stairs I went, past the same old crone I had seen earlier. To my relief, and to her obvious disappointment, the dentist's door was half open.

“Would you like . . . what are you, English?” asked the small, dark dentist. He had a toothbrush mustache and shiny hair, which looked as if it had been polished by a boot-black. “Do you want . . . anesthetic,
señor?
” (Women's stuff, anesthetic—it almost pained him to pronounce the word in front of a man.)

“How much is it—the extraction, I mean?”

“A hundred pesetas plain. A hundred and fifty with . . . anesthetic.” His eyes dropped again as he mentioned the unmentionable.

Quick calculation. Only 115 pesetas left. “Well, I don't need anesthetic, of course.” Oh, God, why did I spend so much on groceries? I asked myself.

“Ah,
bueno
!” The dentist smiled widely as he sighed with relief. Now he knew he was dealing with a
man.
Now there would be no problem with delicacy or gentleness. Now the beast was loose. He grinned again, as he suddenly tipped the chair back, and I was flung down to an almost horizontal position.
“Bueno.
Of course not. Naturally. I beg your pardon,
señor!
”

I will not speak protractedly of the anguish, the agony I went through in that little dentist's chair in Ibiza that fine November morning. All I will say is that during the hour and a quarter it took him to prod and probe, tease and tug the molar out, I wished again and again, a thousand times an hour, that I was alone at sea with those bloody mole-grips.

But all things come to an end—even torture, slowly and steadily applied by a gloating tailor's dummy with a toothbrush mustache. Eventually I was able to flee the room groggily and speed past the ancient hag who had been relishing my Calvary through the open door of the office. Even in my shock, the knitting she held brought to my numbed mind visions of the Reign of Terror and the guillotine.

Swallowing blood, I hared around to the grocery
tienda
to collect my earlier purchases. The ancient lady was still there. So were the two men. The gnome-patriarch in the cardigan sprang to attention with his eyes as he saw me enter the shop. After about a minute's swift silence, to me an eternity, he said, “My God! What happened to thee,
señor
?” (I was
in
with them now—Pappy had
theed
me.)

“Quick, brandy!” I croaked. My mouth felt as if it had been clawed by a tiger, which indeed it had been. Blood had dripped all down the front of my tee-shirt, and was caked on my hands.

“
Por Dios, pobrecito!
By God, poor little chap!” muttered the ancient lady, pulling her shawl closer around her comfortable breasts, as if to ward off evil spirits.

The patriarch grinned at me, and it immediately became obvious that he knew very well what I had been through. He had only one tooth.

He placed a tray of small glasses on the counter. There must have been a dozen glasses—maybe two dozen; I was too agonized to count them. He took a bottle of
Terry
brandy from the shelf behind him, all dust and grimy silk tassles. Without pausing to lift the bottleneck he poured the golden liquid into all the glasses, so that they were almost brimming. “From God and us,” he intoned gravely, as his grubby hand swept the tray toward me, “to you and God,
señor.
”

I was already fishing nervously in my pocket for the fifteen pesetas. The patriarch reached over the counter and held my arm. “There is no payment,
señor,
” he said. He turned his eyes sideways in the direction of the dentist's office. “You have already paid the devil. We can take nothing from you. Drink!”