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Captain of the Sleepers
By Mayra Montero, Edith Grossman Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2002 Mayra Montero
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70768-2
CHAPTER 1
CHRISTMAS Eve of 1949 was the last one we spent together. And I often think the corpse of that man was a sign. There was a corpse in the house with us that night: the remains of a desperate man who took his own life on St. Croix, but before that he'd asked to be buried on Vieques.
By then I knew that the dead were dead: people who would never wake up. But there was a time, when I was four or five years old, when they had me believe that the corpses transported by the Captain in his small plane were travelers who had fallen asleep.
When I was that age my father would take me to the Mosquito landing strip to pick up cases of provisions or liquor, and cases of bed linen or towels that he'd ordered for the hotel. If the Captain happened to have a dead person with him—someone who had died on Isla Grande (Big Island is what we called Puerto Rico) or on St. Croix, someone whose family felt like spending the money to bury the body on Vieques—he sat it down beside him, like a copilot, and covered it with sheets. My father would find some excuse to take me aside and tell me in a quiet voice: "He's sleeping. The Captain's going to wake him now"
It wouldn't have mattered to me very much if they'd told me it was a corpse. I didn't have a very clear idea of death, and I'm sure I wouldn't have tried to find out anything else. Except once, when one of the bodies, a pregnant girl who died of tuberculosis, suffered a mishap when they arrived. The Captain went to take the girl out of the plane and hand her over to her parents (who'd been waiting for their dear departed just like we'd been waiting for the case of provisions), and the flowered sheet covering her became soaked with blood. We were all deeply affected because the body also gave off a cloying, repugnant smell. It was a troubling smell that penetrated my bones. My father covered my eyes and said, "Don't watch her sleeping." The Captain's hands were stained, and later I saw him wiping them with a rag. The girl's parents, who'd brought a coffin with them, put her in it without pulling back the sheet and left, not saying goodbye, in the same one-horse wagon they'd arrived in.
John Timothy Bunker, who devoted himself to carrying freight in his Parakeet Cessna, was born in Maine, but when he was fifteen his father took him to live in the Virgin Islands. The old man, Lawrence Bunker, an engineer and combat pilot, had been one of the group of advisers who recommended the acquisition of St. Croix to President Wilson. J.T. liked to say that on the day he was born, his father couldn't be in Port Clyde with his wife, who was giving birth for the first time, because he was in Christiansted throwing out the last of the Danes. Years later, old man Bunker got sick of the Caribbean and wanted to return to his roots: the secret fishing on Monhegan Island and the red sunsets of Muscongus Bay. His son chose to stay on St. Croix, earning a living with his small plane, transporting cargo or passengers, whichever paid more. In 1941, a reporter from New York who was writing an article in Christiansted asked J.T. to take him to Vieques. They both stayed at Frank's Guesthouse, my father's little hotel. I was two years old at the time, and my mother, who must have been twenty, posed with me for the reporter near the cliffs of Puerto Diablo. The photograph appeared in The New York Times, and behind my mother, who held me in her skirt, you could see the silhouette of a large battleship. The caption under the photograph said that President Roosevelt and Admiral Leahy were traveling on the ship.
After that first trip, J.T. became my father's friend and began to make frequent flights to Vieques; every two or three months at first, and then, in '43 or '44, when he arranged to be a subcontractor for a man who in turn held contracts with the Navy, not a week went by that he didn't come to the island and, in passing, to the hotel, taking advantage of the opportunity to bring something my father had asked for, and at times a toy for me too. In general, he carried food and electrical equipment. Occasionally, if he had room, he agreed to carry a passenger or two. In those days, a good number of people who had lost lands and livestock in the expropriations being carried out by the Navy (we almost always used the English word, Navy) were moving to St. Croix to look for work. Some were unlucky enough to die, and of all those who did die, barely a handful could allow themselves the luxury of returning to the cemetery in Isabel Segunda. That was true of the corpse we sheltered on Christmas Eve 1949, a tormented soul who, without intending to, added more fear to our fear, and more anguish than we perhaps could bear.
Papá was shaving when my mother sent me to tell him that John (she never called him J.T., or Captain, or any other name but that one) needed to talk to him. Sometimes, when he brought in a corpse on the plane, its muscles and bones became so rigid he couldn't move it. Then he'd ask some boy idling on the beach for help, someone strong enough to straighten out the bones of death, and hungry enough or poor enough not to feel either disgust or fear.
But that afternoon J.T. didn't find anyone near the Mosquito landing strip who could help him. The dead man's family had not come at the agreed-upon time to pick up the body. By now the corpse was as stiff as two stuck dogs—that was the description my father used—and its arms and legs so contracted it was almost impossible to get the body out of the plane. The Captain came to our house, holding his dark panama in his hands, turning it round and round as if he were looking for a sign in the hat, and in a quiet voice he told my mother what had happened. He was sorry to bother us on a holiday, but he needed the help of his friend Frank. My mother drew herself erect; she would always stand erect in a way that, over time, began to seem contradictory to me: she would thrust out her chest and look straight ahead, like a pigeon about to impose its authority, which was not very natural in a woman with a character as peaceful as hers. Standing erect in that way, she told the Captain that a dead person is a dead person and could not spend the night outdoors. I was a few steps away from my mother and heard everything, thinking it looked like a disagreement but knowing it really wasn't. She asked me to find my father, who as I've said, was in the bathroom shaving. Papá went out with traces of lather on his face to get the keys to his truck, since the Captain was driving his Willys, a military vehicle we all called Eugene the Jeep, where nobody would have dared to seat a corpse. They sped away, and my mother put her arm around my shoulders but didn't say anything.
A couple of hours later, when it was getting dark, they came back. They were crestfallen and spoke to my mother in whispers. She turned and looked at me, and I pretended to read the comics in the newspaper. I heard her say: "Andrés, come with me to the kitchen." I stood up and followed her. She gave me some of the sweet she was preparing as our Christmas Eve dessert: it was a custard with tears. My mother called the drops of lemon juice she squeezed over it "tears," and they were slow as they ran down the sides of the custard, slow and tremulous, as if something were hurting the dessert.
We sat down at the kitchen door that opened onto the courtyard, the courtyard that in turn led to the service door of the hotel. She watched me eat the custard, and when I happened to look up, I suddenly discovered a bitter sight: my mother, who three or four months before had looked just like the actress in Buffalo Bill, who was certainly the same one who'd been in The Mark of Zorro and was not called Pretty—Linda, Linda Darnell—for nothing, didn't look like anybody anymore, not like that actress, not like herself. At least on that day, in the weak light that faintly lit the kitchen, my mother had dark circles under her eyes and had been transformed into something delicate but unknown. She began to talk to me, and I didn't listen; I was trying to examine her face to find out what had changed.
"Do you hear me, Andrés?" She knew I was paying no attention to her, but I nodded that I was. She persisted: "Listen to me just for a minute."
Only then did I hear her talking about compassion, about the dignity of the dead, about what was for me even more incomprehensible: the flight of the soul, which was a silent spiral and the sleeper's true repose. In short, the corpse of the man who'd hung himself on St. Croix, and whose family my mother thought she knew by sight because everybody knew everybody else on Vieques, would spend the night in our house, and my father and she (she, at least) would watch over him until dawn. She added that at my age, in addition to numbers and verbs, I had to learn about the cruel blows in life. John (she said John, and it was as if she were speaking about a different man, not the Captain or J.T., who were the same person) had gone with my father to Isabel Segunda to look for the family of the unfortunate man. But they hadn't found anyone, not even a distant relative, willing to take charge of him.
My mouth was dry. Perhaps I turned a little pale. My mother must have thought I was shaken by the fact that a dead man would spend the night with us. But I hadn't even stopped to think about that. My dry mouth was due to her mouth—livid, as if it were bloodless—and my fearful eyes were due to her eyes, which no longer were like Linda Darnell's, and weren't even pretty, though they were still very mysterious and intensely deep. She preserved that knowledge until the end.
While she was talking to me, my father and the Captain took the body out of the truck and put it in one of the rooms. The hotel housekeeper, whose name was Braulia and who was my mother's right hand, helped the men with preparations. Before supper, Mamá let me go up to see him. They'd laid him out—to me, at least, he didn't look like two stuck dogs—and crossed his hands over his chest; they'd placed flowers around him, and his fingers held a rosary. On her own, Braulia had sent for four large candles and placed one on each night table and two at the foot of the bed. A sheet covered him to the waist. I approached and saw the mark of the rope on his neck. Then my mother told me to wash my hands. I said I hadn't touched him, and she, somewhat surprised, murmured that it wasn't because of the deceased but because we were going to have supper.
The Captain was invited to share our supper with us. As I recall, he'd never been there on Christmas Eve. He'd come instead on Christmas Day, with a present for each of us: he'd bring perfume for my mother, and on one occasion he brought her some records of songs in English. He'd bring my father a bottle of liquor, or cigars. And he always brought me an airplane, for Christmas he'd give me one of those planes you had to put together piece by piece, using glue. I already had five of them, and five was all I got. In 1949 he didn't give me one.
My mother and Braulia served supper. And when we were about to sit down at the table, Mamá said she missed her sister and her sister's family, her husband and children, who for the first time in many Christmases had not been willing to make the trip from San Juan. She said this in a quiet voice, not adding another word, because we all knew that the Navy had forbidden launch traffic between the Port of Mosquito and the Port of Ensenada Honda, and for that reason the crossing from one island to the other took twice as long. My cousins would get seasick, it was too long to be throwing up your guts on the rough December ocean, and nobody completely trusted the oldlaunches they used back then. We remained silent, and Mamá caressed the embroidered flowers on the tablecloth, which was the most elegant one we had and was hardly ever used the rest of the year. She did this with a gesture of ancient weariness and murmured that in the end they'd take us off Vieques, they'd move everybody, like animals being transferred from one pen to another, and give us a pittance for our house and the hotel. My father swallowed hard and said it would be better to change the subject.
"It would be better to talk about the dead man," I suggested.
It came out just like that, a sentence that now might seem very heartless or very adult, but in the middle of that somber conversation, it was like a consolation. The Captain began to laugh and looked at my mother, who pressed her lips together because she was still upset. Papá poured me some liquor, just a drop to wet my lips. Mamá prayed quietly, and we all waited. Then she held out her glass and tapped it gently against mine. We toasted and said "Feliz Navidad," except the Captain, who raised his glass and said "Merry Christmas." Then he looked into my mother's eyes, and she whispered: "Merry Christmas, John."
We finished supper, and I didn't start to play right away, as I did at other times. At that age it's impossible to distinguish between what is concern and fear, and what is exhaustion or the doglike need to save oneself. A glance was enough for my mother to decide that I was collapsing with fatigue. She walked over to me, her hands damp from washing the dishes, and put one of her enormously cold hands on my forehead. "Go to bed, Andrés." I looked up and stared at her lips, and even today, after so many years, I'm convinced her lips were whispering "Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas." They continued moving, as if repeating a visceral psalm, the inner incantation that marked her breathing.
I stood up, and instead of going to my room I went straight to the balcony where J.T. and my father were smoking in silence, but they'd said something that was still floating in the air. Something that in some way was crushing them and in passing hit me in the chest, as if I'd been struck by the tail of an invisible fish. My father, at least, seemed pressed into his chair. And J.T., sitting on the railing, made a strange gesture, stretching his neck and moving his head from side to side. They looked at me without seeing me, and I went back to the dining room. Suddenly, the presence of the dead man became a reality for me, and I realized I didn't want to go up to my room alone. My mother was still drying dishes. Her lips were quiet now, they didn't seem to be whispering "Merry Christmas" anymore, and maybe for that reason, because she was herself again, she paid more attention to my face and saw that I was afraid.
"I'll go up with you," she said, smiling without really wanting to.
We went up, and she waited with me while I brushed my teeth. Then she tucked me in and asked me to say an Our Father, "even if it's just one," for the dead man in the next room. I promised her I would, and she began to take off her apron, as if she were going out or were about to receive a visitor. She assured me she wouldn't leave the man's side for the whole night because she'd be praying for him, keeping a vigil the way you were supposed to. I was sorry my mother was going to waste her time at the foot of a stranger's bed, but at the same time I was comforted by the idea that the dead man couldn't get up or come into my room in search of warmth or company. My mother, awake next to that corpse, was the best guarantee he wasn't a sleeper. Somebody who at any time could cough, sit up, or vomit blood. It was the sleepers I was afraid of. I found that out before I closed my eyes. And confirmed it before dawn on Christmas Day 1949, which was silent and torrid. An endlessly hot day.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero, Edith Grossman. Copyright © 2002 Mayra Montero. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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