Seagulls in My Soup (3 page)

“Are you interested in a little sailing trip from Málaga to Gib?” I shouted over the roar and groan of the bass pipes.

He turned and questioned me with his owl-like eyes.

“I've got a delivery job. I have to go over to Málaga next week. I earn my living that way, you see . . . and I need a mate, but no one else here wants to go, and the nearest mate I have, apart from Sissie, is Pete Kelly, and he's up in Monaco . . .”

Suddenly Tony stopped playing. There was a hush in the cabin. “Say no more. You helped us out; I'll help you out. Put my name down on your bally list, old chap. The cat'll be safe here . . .”

“And Sissie can lend Billie a hand if she needs it, and Nelson is a good guard dog . . .” I interjected.

“Yes, I'm all for a little side trip, and I love Gibraltar.”

“Then it's a deal? I'll split the delivery fee with you, 40 for you and 60 for me, OK?”

Tony grabbed my hand and shook it violently. “Done, old chap.”

Just as suddenly he turned back to the organ and, pumping for all he was worth, started another rendition of “Rule Britannia.”

I turned toward Sissie, who was strenuously fending off the by-now amorous Turk. I nodded my head and winked. She at first raised her eyebrows, then smiled broadly.

Now all the women present were beautiful, elegant, and intelligent; all the men were handsome, debonair, and witty—and only one bottle of wine remained. Soon that, too, was in the pile of empties, placed there gently and precisely by the Finnish poet, who had to be supported by Gurdjieff's ex-lover, who in turn was supported by Willie the German and Rory O'Boggarty, the savant Son of Erin.

The following Tuesday morning, Tony and I caught the rackety Iberia Dakota plane from Ibiza to Valencia, then another Dakota to the great port-city of Málaga, and made our way in the late afternoon to the Hotel La Princesa.

If either of us had had any idea, any inkling, of what lay ahead of us, we would have caught the first plane back to Ibiza. I might have been forewarned by the following Halloween episode, which occurred shortly before our departure . . .

Death, be not proud, though some have calléd thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee must go—

Rest of their bones and soul's delivery!

Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!

“Death”—John Donne

The morning after the party onboard
Bellerophon
, Sissie and I left Nelson to guard
Cresswell
and went ashore to do our daily rounds; she to head for the mail at the post office and I to have a beer at the
bodega
Antonio, the tiny fisherman's bar at the head of the town quay. The Alhambra, with its crowd of rogues and sly hucksters, was no place, after all, for a sailor with a hangover. The fishermen, although stern-faced and quiet, were gentle and kind, and understanding of sailors' ways. With them there would be no accusing stares, no weighing up of wealth, no reckoning of worth, no estimates of proclivities. At Antonio's I would be a sailor among sailors, and on that October morning that's all I wanted—peace and quiet and solitude, with a bottle of San Miguel beer to stiffen me up. As I approached the tiny, low, white-washed bodega, with its usual crew of ancient mariners outside, silently scrutinizing and supervising the activities in the harbor, Sissie, bless her, silently gave me a cheery wave and a smile and, with her raffia shopping bag slung over her shoulder, steamed off along the main waterfront. As usual her wake was marked by a scattering of children and chickens and the turning heads of a few male idlers. Previous to her appearance the men had been loitering on the quay; but now, as her electric ginger hair and bare thighs flashed by, they almost sprang to attention, Sissie steering among them like the Royal Yacht sailing between lines of minor fleet-craft at a naval review.

Antonio, who always looked as if he'd never been to bed, board, or bath in his life, bobbed his head as I ducked mine to pass through the low door.
“Café, Señor?”

“No, por el amor de Dios—CERVEZA
, Antonio! For the love of God, a beer,” I replied as I peered around the gloomy room and felt my way to one of the tiny tables.

“Mornin' Cap'n Jones!”

The voice was flat, tinny, Irish, and sounded as if it were being transmitted over a long-distance telephone line. I knew right away it was Rory O'Boggarty, the lounging literatus, the erudite Eriner, the impecunious imp, the poor man's Bernard Shaw. He was usually to be found at Antonio's at an early hour, the mid-day hour, and the very late hour, with a virgin-lined notebook and a bottle of beer in front of him. Rory was a martyr to the writer's occupational hazards—the need for solitude and solace, company and conversation, privacy and prey—all at the same time. His voice signaled on: “ . . . and how're the barnacles and binnacles today?”

I peered at him, thinking ‘how's the bloody blarney today?' He was about twenty-nine and looked like a shabby leprechaun, with his red hair and mischievous eyes set in a pudgy, pasty face—what I could see of it in the midst of a long, red beard, which reached down as far as where the top button of his yellow shirt would have been if the shirt had had a button. Rory was so small and Bohemian that if Antonio had been a dancing girl instead of a funereal, elderly bar-owner, you would have thought Rory was Toulouse-Lautrec sitting in the Moulin Rouge.

“Top o' the morn to you!” Rory was the only real Irishman I ever met who actually said this.

“Hi, Rory,” I sighed. I sat down opposite him with my back to the bodega door. Behind Rory there was a grimy picture of Jesus holding a heart, dripping dollops of blood, surrounded by a halo. Christ was gazing upward and to one side. I sighed again.

Rory took a swig of his beer with a lascivious look in his blue-green button eyes.

“How the hell can you drink that stuff at this time in the morning?” I kidded him.

“Cap'n Jones,” he replied irascibly, “will you stop . . . It's a clock-watcher you are. It's Barclay's Bank you should be workin' in, beJasus!”

Antonio put a beer in front of me as sadly as if it were a death-sentence.

“Yeah, I'd nick the lot and have it away on my toes so fast you'd think I'd a rocket up my jacksy . . .”

“So you would, an' all, so you would, indeed you would, even if it's myself that says it, I do believe you would!” said Rory. “I see ye've the black dog on ye this fine day, and anyway, me lad, how's your Celtic face and the Gaelic heart of ye, old son?”

“O'Boggarty,” said I, sensing his sarcasm, “it's a shit-face I have this morning, and my heart's the heart of a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty, as black as thunder and as hard as Portland granite!”

“Ach, areen,” replied Rory, “so it's missing your navy days, you are old son?”

As I listened, half amused, half furious, O'Boggarty quietly and sonorously, in his flat yet lovely sounding round-voweled Western Irish voice, quoted Joyce:
“That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God's earth and their lands in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs 
. . .”

“Oh, come off it, O'Boggarty,” I interjected. “That's been over and done with these twenty . . . forty years past.”

Rory's voice rose now, and his words—Joyce's words—rolled and reverberated from the dirty walls of the bodega.
“They believe in rod,”
he roared, as with the end of each phrase he banged a closed, pudgy fist on the table,
“the scourger almighty, creator of hell on earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried 
. . .” O'Boggarty's eyes gleamed now with a rascally joy as he watched me wincing . . .
“yelled like bloody hell, the third day he rose again from the bed, steered into haven, and sitteth on his beam end until further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”

O'Boggarty's quote, as he well knew, was word-for-word perfectly accurate. I screwed up my forehead as I quoted back at him:
“But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn't it be the same here if you put force against force?”

“Ah!” O'Boggarty shouted with delight. “Ah ha!” He laid his bottle of beer down, rubbed his lips with his wrist, and went on now in a low, melodramatic tone:
“Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinkin' this porter if he was at his last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.”

Rory, keeping a half-malicious grin on his face and his gleaming elf's eyes on me, half-turned his head away. Then, after a moment or two, his eyes left mine, his grin dissolved, and he slumped down further and stared at his almost-empty bottle, which dully returned his look as if it were bereaved by the loss of its former contents.

“How's it goin', Rory?” I murmured.

The little Irishman perked up and smiled at me hugely. “The very best, it is!” He reached in his pocket. He brought out a large, bent envelope. He scuffled it open with his white, soft, pudgy fingers. He riffled through a pile of English banknotes, an inch thick, all fivers by the look of them. Again he grinned from ear to ear. “Enough for six months' booze,” he said, and winked one gnome's eye at me. “Six hundred of the best!”

“So you got your advance through?” I knew he had been waiting anxiously for a publisher's advance on a “long novel” (not a word of which had so far been written).

“Yeah, Sleazy Frank brought it back from London for me, like I asked him to. Can't trust the Spanish mails . . .” O'Boggarty replaced the money in his pocket, all the while watching me—for traces, I suppose, of envy. But of course I gave him no satisfaction, for I had none. Sissie's allowance was due, and that would see us over until my next delivery job, which was already arranged. Instead, I looked around the bodega. Antonio, sad-eyed as a hanged spaniel; O'Boggarty, happy as a Hobbit, and I were the only people in the bar.

“Not many people about today,” I remarked, to break the silence. “And those that are look like they're going to a bloomin' palace investiture.”

“Or an execution,” commented O'Boggarty.

“I wonder what the score is, Rory?”

The little elf scowled at me. He was like a bearded baby doll frowning. “You don't know what day it is today?” he asked. I kept silent as I looked at him. I found myself, as usual in harbor (never at sea), trying to remember the date.

“Sure, it's the day of All Saints,” he continued. “It's the day when they . . . all us good Christians, at least . . . remember all our loved ones who've passed away . . .” (He looked serious as a judge while he said this.) Then his eyes took on a dreamy glaze, and I knew another quote was coming . . .
“across the bourne from which no traveler returns.”

“You mean who've kicked the bucket?”

Rory O'Boggarty leaned his hairy head back and closed his eyes. “Acch!” he intoned, “God save us from the coarseness of the Cymry, the waggishness of the Welsh, fellow Celts though they be. Sweet
Mary
in heaven, help us poor Irish souls!”

I grinned at his kobold head as he leaned it forward onto his chest and sighed, closing his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared at me, an imperious imp. “Cap'n Jones,” he announced gravely, “it's no great respect for the dear departed that you have.”

“Aah!” (I was enjoying myself now that I was getting back at him.) “It's a load of bullshit, O'Boggarty. It's little to do with respect for the dead. All it is, is . . . pity for the living, that's all!”

O'Boggarty's face clouded darkly.

I went on . . . “Self-pity, mainly, that's what it is. ‘Oh, poor me, look at poor little me, left all alone.'”

I cocked two fingers at Antonio, silently ordering two beers. “The best way you can respect the dead is to live your own life as best you can, and for God's sake show more respect for the
living.”

Rory's leprechaun eyes danced in fury at the challenge. I had touched a raw nerve of a man who resented having been brought up in a repressive home and had been, to compound his self-torment, educated by Jesuits.

I gave the screw another twist. “The best way that you can show respect for the dead is to do your best to share their belief in life, but in
your
life, and by putting your life ahead of their deaths. I think more of one living child or a leaping dolphin than I do of all the generations of dead who ever lived!”

“Then you're a hypocrite!” shouted O'Boggarty, his Irish up. “You told me that you could not imagine life without the works of great writers of the past—Plato and Homer and Shakespeare and Blake . . .”

“Don't forget Joyce,” I taunted.

“They don't really mean a thing to you if you've no respect for the dead . . .” He took a swig of his new beer. “I've suspected it, sure, from the very first time I saw you and heard you, Cap'n Jones—it's a bloody Druid you are! A drooling Druid! An idling idolator . . .”

“Better than being a nattering necrolator!”

O'Boggarty slumped down even farther into his rickety chair. Again he closed his eyes. Slowly he wagged his head from side to side.

“It's the little things that make up life, Rory,” I said.

Still with his eyes closed, O'Boggarty asked in a low voice, “Then you don't believe in a hereafter?”

“I don't know, but if there is a hereafter, it surely can't be anything like
this
life, and if it's not like this one, then where will all the gladness and delight, the pleasure and joy, be? Where will all the
life
be? If there isn't joy and delight and pleasure . . . and yes, pain and misery and suffering, too, then how the heck can it be
life?
And if there isn't any life, then how can it be an
afterlife?”

As I spoke O'Boggarty slowly wagged his red-shocked head from side to side, wisely, as if he were a Sunday-school teacher listening to an inquisitive child asking who created God, and why, and when, and how many of
them
were there?

He was silent for a whole minute, until, suddenly, the whole tiny bodega bar-room seemed to fill with people. He opened his eyes with a start. He stared in the gloom at the intruders for a second or two, then his face lit up like a boy whose kite has been lifted for the first time by a breeze.
“Josélito!”
he roared,
“Cómo estás, amigo?”

Rory quickly stood up, all five-and-a-bit feet of him, and thrust his strangely small, childlike hand in front of him. The Castilian language, spoken in the accent of County Limerick, is a wonder to the ears, at least to mine, but the newcomer, who was now vigorously shaking the hand of the Green Land, evidently understood him perfectly. I turned to inspect the new arrival who had interrupted my revenge on O'Boggarty. As I did so, my attention was caught by the other figures which darkened the already dark bodega and made it seem suddenly crowded.

There was a woman—small, rotund, and dressed completely in black—her hair gleaming under a black shawl. She had one arm still lingering through the door as she awkwardly turned her body and shyly smiled at O'Boggarty. The hand on the end of the lingering arm gently rocked a perambulator, on which was balanced, precariously, it seemed to me, a large raffia-work hamper. On top of the hamper sat a little girl of three or so, while from behind the hamper gazed the red and well-fed face of a fat baby, which violently shook a rattle. It was as if the fat baby knew that both O'Boggarty and I had hangovers which would have made a rainy day after Ballinasloe Horse Fair, with every sweepstake stub in Galway swirling around in the sodden wind, and every man's hand shaking for twenty miles around, look like the midnight Christmas Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

I recoiled, winced, cringed, and flinched as I stared at the fat baby. Every time it shook the rattle it drooled and laughed at me. Inside the door, clinging to the dark little woman's skirts, were two little dark, well-dressed boys, both on their best behavior, looking ineffably bored. And so they should, I thought, as I studied them. It was, after all, the Day of the Dead, and on this holy day of dread not even little boys should be little boys; it might disturb the spirits of the underworld, and
then
what would become of us?