By Bobby Winslow
Their shore excursion completed, the tourists were tendered back aboard The Mirabilis. Leo comes on deck wearing soft yellow pants, a blue-and-white striped polo shirt, gripping a cane with tripodal rubber-sheathed prongs to forestall slippage on the deck surface. He and Constance take a cruise every year, sometimes twice a year depending on the length of the itinerary. A minimum of two months of each year pass at sea, some years – three years ago they traveled around the world on the QE2 – more than that, but a good average of eight or nine weeks on board a cruise ship since they were married ten years ago. They’ve voyaged everywhere. A favorite is the western Caribbean: the Yucatan, Bogota, the Canal Zone. They’ve circumnavigated South America, traveled up the Iguassu on a four day shore excursion via train and small river craft to the falls before rejoining the ship in Rio, though Constance thought Sao Paulo was hideously overcrowded. They’ve made the Cape Horn passage more times than they can count. Seldom do they bring anything back from these travels other than digital photos and video footage. You would look in vain for wood carvings of the Xingu or fetishes from Haiti in their home. Nothing in the furnishings would tell you they’re world travelers. If they do buy anything in port it’s something small, inexpensive, and immediately given to one of Constance’s friends upon arrival home. Limit onshore buying and onboard purchases to absolute necessities, Leo says. Their cabin cost almost seven grand for this two week voyage and Leo has been complaining about the markup on toothpaste in the shipboard pharmacy: he doesn’t think they brought enough to last all the way back to Port Everglades. Whose responsibility was that? Oversight. When they arrive at Cristobal she can go ashore and buy a tube but they ought to have stocked up before leaving home; one small tube for two people for two weeks was obviously insufficient, the pharmacy wants easily three times the retail price in Miami for the same product, and they have four or five tubes bought in bulk under the vanity at home.
The last two years Leo has had to move with the aid of a cane or walker so all ports are the same to him: he rarely goes ashore now. Seen them all anyways, some more than once. Nor can he accompany his wife to the lounge for postprandial dancing. She’s found dancing more difficult the last couple years too, though she hasn’t admitted this to Leo.
Every cruise ship is the same to him too, no matter what encomium he receives concerning its amenities. He has an eye for rust or corrosion and is quick to detect any slackening in the levels of maintenance, whether they’re seen on the hull or superstructure or the table linen or the glassware. “A rusty tub of a boat” he will tell acquaintances when he’s home and asked if his latest cruise was relaxing and enjoyable. “How much relaxation is possible when you could be going to the bottom of the sea at any moment. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want it to sink underneath me and not leave me time to bail out.”
The explanation he gives to these enquirers is that they take these cruises for Constance’s sake, it’s an interest of hers to explore. Not for reasons of cultural anthropology, history, geography; she’s never studied any of these subjects and neither has Leo, formally, who considers all of them to be grounded in idle theorizing, unproductive and unprofitable speculation. “Everyone is always trying to make out at every port you go into that the golden age once existed there until the conquering European destroyed the harmony of the social order. Which may be true, what do I care. A lot of precious romanticizing derived from Rousseau’s concept of the uncivilized noble savage communing with nature, mutually responsive yet free. Bogus.” No matter what providential spin the captain and cruise director offer to explain the motives for plunder, all are valueless. So he has come on deck to see for himself. Before he retired he worked in insurance, first as a claims adjuster, later as an executive, so bargaining is a topic of which he knows much, and he always projects a successful resolution. Of course his wife is no good at bargaining: she either accepts or rejects what is placed before her depending on her prearranged budget, and a souvenir-laden mendicant (here comes one now with an array of scarves) isn’t accustomed to this obduracy. Offer and counteroffer are not part of her natural strategy. All the more reason to be mystified when she steps aboard laden with bags and parcels. Souvenir hunting? She hasn’t remembered the toothpaste either.
“They must have seen you coming,” Leo says as they descend to their cabin. “Who is all this stuff for?” Their cabin, though of a higher grade than the standard outside rooms due to Leo’s need for maneuvering room for his walker, now has its floor space compromised by several large boxes. The wardrobe, which is barely large enough to accommodate their clothing, is now full of packages; the door won’t shut tight and Leo bumps his elbow on the door when coming out of the bathroom. He looks inside the wardrobe while his wife is changing. Spurious antiques and brass work purporting to be hand hammered but in actuality mass produced and not even locally, not even from South or Central America, dyed synthetics the hues of a cockatiel’s plumage. “In the old days,” he remarks, “you could consign this stuff to the ship’s hold as not needed during the voyage, to be offloaded when we reached home. I don’t suppose this tub is equipped with cargo holds, though. It’s all taken up with buffets and dance floors and ten thousand poker machines.”
The longer he gazes at the contents of the wardrobe the more he wonders if she’s lost her mind or agreed to purchase all these things for one of her homebound friends. If they wanted souvenirs or duty-free items, let them pay seven grand and get on the ship, he reasons. No need to make us do your shopping if you’re too improvident to afford to travel. We’re not here to provide the cachet of foreign adventure for others.
Assistance to tourist-based economies, poverty ameliorated by regular influx of wealthy and curious sightseers, has always been their mutual avoidance on these cruises and he is bewildered by what has happened. Neither of them has ever been gullible or given to shows of pitiable charity, a form of impulse buying, gratifying the conscience by spending not because you like what you see but because spending is a means of equalizing economic injustice. She’s trying to effect economic restructuring by purchasing unneeded scarves and jewelry and gimcracks. If equality is to exist the first rule is we have to eradicate individual conscience. The parts cannot exist without the whole. Out of the sum total of contributed assets comes unity. Reapportioned monies eliminate the need for currency as a medium of transaction: if everyone has enough, no one needs to exchange anything. Certainly not consciences for dollars. That’s axiomatic, he thinks. They finish dressing as The Mirabilis clears port; by the time they’re down at dinner the ship is out of sight of land.
In the morning there’s an announcement: they won’t be stopping at the next port due to present conflicts there. A delightful island situated in an estuary of the O---- river, at which they would arrive the next morning, an island neither Constance nor Leo has ever heard of let alone seen advertised in a travel brochure which has been substituted as a port of call. One place is as good as another, Leo mutters at breakfast. Probably not much if it’s an out-of-way destination and seldom visited. Why didn’t they just go on to Cristobal and give us an extra day there? Would someone feel cheated if they skipped this part of the coast altogether? What would happen later on in the cruise, would they call at two ports in the same day to resume the planned itinerary, or would one or more of the later calls be dropped as well? Neither of them have interest in itineraries which take one too far afield: they prefer common tourist amenities, the newer and more accessible the better, so an old obscure place selected for its historical interest as a stopping point for slavers is a definite disappointment. Likely to be poor and underdeveloped and they’d prefer not to see that, remember Sao Paulo? Neither says much the rest of the morning, the atmosphere on board is palpably uneasy, uncertainty caused by deviation from set schedule and an offshore breeze of dredged-up mud and soluble, half-immersed vegetation as the ship heads towards the coast at sixteen knots having induced a nervousness among their fellow passengers. Plenty of sandbars here and not very well channeled or buoyed for the passage of large vessels, certainly nothing as deep-draft as The Mirabilis has been through here in some years; they may ground at any moment and the entire rest of the cruise cancelled.
Their cabin came with a private terrace on which were two deck chairs. Preferable to have a chair where one could observe more than just ocean but the newer cruise ships seem to have done away with those long promenade spaces which had been features of older ships: the only other place to have a deck chair was at poolside, which was a location both too noisy and too warm for Leo even if such an area had not been off limits for his cane or walker. Just below the level of the terrace were the niches into which the lifeboats, mounted on davits like parentheses, were nestled. By looking over the railing one looked down on the gray canvas tarpaulin covering lifeboat number Four. She stepped out on the balcony, slid the door closed, and settled in one of the chairs. Despite the ship’s movement there wasn’t the slightest breeze: the divider at the forward end of the balcony seemed to deflect any air stirred by the ship’s motion. The heat, even with an occluded sun, made her drowsy. After a time she heard the glass door slide open and closed again. Without opening her eyes she heard Leo settle into the other deck chair and after a pause say, “We won’t be going to Cristobal.” “Or crossing the equator,” she added. “This ship doesn’t cross the equator,” Leo said. “You can’t go that far south in the Caribbean.” If this port was not a conventional stopping place, what could they expect to see? Dilapidation. At best, a local market where men sold emeralds out of baskets carried across the Cordilleras and who would, with curved knives, slice off the fingers of anyone who looked at a single jewel. “Well, we won’t go ashore,” she said as comfortingly as possible. “What if we have no choice?” “What do you mean, no choice? Why wouldn’t we be allowed to remain on board if we chose not to take a shore excursion?” “Because that’s not how it works,” Leo answered. She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him but his deck chair was empty; it was only her own voice saying to her “Why, how is it supposed to work?” and when she waited for an answer there was only the vacant teakwood deck chair with a towel spread over the backrest.
“I thought you’d come outside.”
“Outside? On the balcony? Why would I come outside? One lurch of this barge and over I go. Right over the rail. Nobody’s even notice or stop the ship. Probably in these waters they wouldn’t stop even for an emergency, how long would anyone last? I wouldn’t be caught outside at any cost. What made you think I’d come outside?”
“I thought I heard you open and close the door. You spoke to me.”
That evening at dinner Constance said to the captain “The tendency of celebrities to gain unwanted attention can be a virtue in that others are more apt to perceive the conditions surrounding the celebrity’s misfortune, if only by contrast and comparison.” “Yes, we all have our troubles,” the captain smiled. “Fame is a solid platform from which to be heard,” Constance continued, “only it can vanish.” Leo isn’t at the table; tired from maneuvering about the decks with his cane today, he’s resting in their cabin. “Even if the celebrity finds criticism of his or her actions, at least those actions are fully visible because of the intensity of the spotlight thrown upon them.” Celebrity does not always confer authority, the captain remarks mildly. “Oh no,” Constance agrees. “It merely focuses attention. That’s why we’re visiting this port, isn’t it?” She wants to ask the captain how long he intends to stay in port; none of the port calls made by The Mirabilis so far on this cruise have lasted more than six hours but the notice posted at the cruise director’s office seems to indicate a stay of at least twelve. “That is due to the uncertainty of the tidal flow in that location,” the captain assures her. “The estuary can only be entered or exited during the period of slack tide following the ebb. Otherwise the currents would play the ship—“ He gestures with his hand. “It’s an uncertain area. You will see a great display of seamanship if I can bring her in with no more pilot than two men in a skiff below the bow indicating the course, if you choose not to remain belowdecks.” The captain smiled; this was the way he dealt with engendered expectations. His dreams had also been uneasy. Even if those aboard are free from worry, others will worry about them, in a similar way to how the ship itself, seen at a distance, afloat above a yellow reef like a cloud above shallow seas, drawing up vapor from below its base, is glimpsed by those recently gone ashore. After some time one dreams up a distorted view of the liner, since it cannot be seen as a whole once you are aboard: he has encountered many passengers who, gazing at the high white side of The Mirabilis from a distance, exclaim, “That’s our ship?” The configuration of decks does not accord with the dimensions plotted by the mind’s eye: certain decks magnified, the bow out of proportion, imperator of too many visions: that is the verifiable miracle to those who distrust what they see as larger or smaller than their conception of the same space. And passengers may think this a fiction he retails to reassure them, but he tells his staff the same thing. To engender rest and ease in dimensionless space surmounted by the cockleshell emblem of the cruiseline bolted to the funnel above the sun deck, splurging on relaxation and illimitable niceties. The malcontent kills the ease that would soothe all arrogant malcontention. All direction is our own. Safety of radar above water, sonar to eavesdrop on coral outcroppings and goggle-eyed fish below. The engines thump, the sun strikes sparks off a dozen reflective pools, the hull grinds, the stabilizers fin through bubbles on an even keel, the horns weehoo, the orchestras crash and crescendo, the casinos clink silvery tokens on the deck and we steer through it all, Palinurus. Our enervation, replete despite these sounds, is absolute and unrousable.
She slept uneasily. During the night she was awakened by the bellow of the ship’s horn: one long blast that seemed to go on for an eternity followed by three shorter blasts at longer intervals. Naturally after that sound she was too excited to sleep at all, only she knew she must have fallen asleep eventually because suddenly it was light and she thought a searchlight or the beam of a lighthouse had fallen across the ship. The entire ship seemed to be listing: her bed was canted to one side and no matter how she lay she felt unable to remain level. “There must be some sort of emergency,” she said to Leo.
“What do you mean?”
“There was a searchlight. And the ship’s horn was blowing. I heard it. What was it to mean? A distress signal?”
Leo convinced her to remain in bed. As soon as she was certain he had fallen asleep again she left the bed and, without even drawing on anything over her nightgown, she slid open the door to the balcony and went out to see if in fact the ship was making a great arc in the sea, and beheld two lights, a red and a green, below and a short distance from the side of the ship, moving slowly ahead of The Mirabilis itself. The red and green lights blinked slowly on and off as they moved. “Why don’t they turn their lights on?” But the liner’s lights also were not illuminated: the decks were dark below her, the big electrically-lit steel letters spelling out the ship’s name looming above on the sun deck were dark too. “Maybe we are receiving an escort into port. Maybe they had to pick up a pilot.” “Pilot, nothing,” Leo muttered. “They don’t employ pilots to take ships in and out of port these days. It’s accomplished with global positioning technology.” Marker buoys? But they appeared to be moving ahead of the ship. “You’re making it up,” Leo said to her. Although she was sure he had been sleeping when she went out on the balcony he sounded wide awake whereas she spoke in a dreamy monotone. “There must be some sort of emergency,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That searchlight. And the ship’s horn was blowing. I heard it. What was it to mean? A distress signal?”
By the morning the water around the ship had changed sometime overnight to a yellowish-green but there was no island, no estuary in sight. Perhaps she might have welcomed this change in hue as a sign they were nearing land except for the oppressive air, a miasma like that of decomposition and desuetude. “Don’t you smell it?” she asked Leo.
“What?”
“The smell. From the river, the estuary: it must be stagnant, a pool of everything washed down from the hills.”
How could this immensity be navigated on a starless, moonless night such as they had the night before? “They have sonar. Radar. Everything,” Leo said. “They see things we can’t even see. Porpoises below the stabilizing fins. Flights of birds flying above the mast. I’m hungry. Hadn’t we better get something to eat? They still feed you aboard this barge, I imagine.” “But we just ate.” “Nonsense. I haven’t had anything since dinner Tuesday night when you spoke to the captain.”
By midafternoon they had still not arrived, though the ship still appeared to be moving, quite slowly now, as they were in a channel which revealed itself to contain many sandbars, each coming into view as a pale yellow crescent before slowly plunging out of sight, so they must have been near the mouth of the river: the course kept shifting and naturally neither the captain nor any of the officers could be spared from the bridge to come down to one of the six dining rooms for cocktails. After the cancellation of that event Constance began to lose track of time completely. In the morning she’d expected the usual program listing daily activities to be slipped under the door, but there had been none before or after breakfast: neither had a basket of fresh fruit and soaps been placed on the table by the balcony doors, as had been the custom on previous days. Nothing. “They’re hoarding it for themselves,” Leo said.
Not a ship, a vessel of any kind, was in sight, nothing but an overcast, still sky which might be concealing anything at horizon level. She would not have been surprised if the clouds had separated to reveal a volcanic cone roaring out of banana plantations into a tropic sky, or a waterfall such as superstitious mariners believed existed at the edge of the sea. A complete calm prevailed: the only waves were those moving outward from the ship’s hull. The color of the sea was such that if the sun had come out it would have shone like burnished brass, a glare to envelop everything. At breakfast the only advice she received was to eat a banana. “For the potassium. The humidity.” She tried to encourage Leo to eat a banana but he refused. The other passengers seemed listless, bored by the blank sky and yellowish-green water and the oily smell given off. The air inside the ship was cooler than that outside, but not much cooler, not as cool as on previous days of the cruise, and the stagnant smell pervaded every lounge and ballroom as did the humidity. Suddenly there was a rumbling sound; a shudder passed along the keel of the ship from bow to stern, the champagne glasses in pyramids behind the bar tinkled, the etched glass panels of the room rattled, the heads of gladioli in cutglass vases on each table trembled, even the light emitted by the glass sconces on the walls flickered.
That this grandiose luxe glittering adjacent to crumbly reefs and marl frankly presents a tempting prize is unmistakable. If the inequality is not balanced the ship will never find her way off the sand but inevitably be hurled against reefs which will scatter orchestras and gladioli and slot machines and feather boas and buffets into the waves and coral and darting tropical fish and wary barracuda, to be picked up piecemeal from the skiffs of salvagers. This calamity won’t solve any economic problems, to be sure, nor will it convey prosperity to the population of this segment of coastal estuary, mainly fishermen: the ship is symbol, not fact, of notorious riches, and as symbol can convey only what illusions may be brought to bear upon its cargo. Even if The Mirabilis were seized, where could she be taken? No suitable deep-water harbor, no port facilities capable of succoring a ninety-thousand ton hull full of elderly passengers, crystal champagne glasses in pyramids, glass walled atria a hundred feet high, dancers in the dome-gilded lounge, harlequinades of laden buffet tables, plenitude, surfeit upon surfeit. Why, the ship would never be taken anyplace by anyone who gazed, unknowingly, upon this richness, even in the name of fair economic distribution. Free from all guilt of a subjugated past, free from all obligation. Suppose she were to be sailed to the destination of each passenger’s whim, for there existed on board provisions enough, it would be an idealist’s cruise, not a voyage after plunder.
Leo, however, drafts a different proposal. First, so as not to be mistaken as representative of the Gloria Mundi, he paraphrases Marx in saying that the heap of capitalists are by nature reactionary and avoid charitable obligations. “I do not mind giving but I will not be subject to coercion involving charity. It’s unjust and an affront to one’s conscience. Charity is better left as an attribute of free will. Second: the means does not equal the end. Pastry cooks, sous-chefs, garnishers, ice-swan sculptors, sommeliers have needs which drown out the needs of these local salvager-pirates. Do they consider life aboard to be a paradise? That none of us worked to attain this leisure and some of us aren’t even enthralled by its prospects? Nothing is paradise which alleges to be paradisiacal: this tub is no benefactor and balm to injustices, no portal to forgetful ease. Splurging to excess is a flimsy excuse for a paradise anyways. On what do these people expect to found a balanced economy? Fish? Oil reserves? Emeralds mined from the mountains? The straw handbags of elderly women? We’re not being unjust in asking for assistance so as to proceed and it is not our exploitative greed which has cast us on this sandbar. Last: equable sharing of misfortune by any other system than individual responsibility is never democratic and troubles the dreams of many people. That’s it.”
The sky was still the same disquieting flat gray but the smell was no longer that of oil or swamps or mountains full of emeralds and jaguars’ teeth or even an attar of roses but the old bony brine of salt-baked beaches on which anything could be cast up and she knew she had slept despite the oppressive air. She looked down at the water, which was now more brown than yellow, as it swirled past the white hull of the ship. It flowed past without radiating outward in waves from the hull, without any whiteness of foam, exactly as if the ship was dead in the water, perhaps even anchored. We’ve run aground, she thought. We’re not even moving! She looked at the other bed. “Leo! Leo!” She looked over the rail and instead of the gray tarpaulin snugly grommetted over lifeboat number Four there was no tarpaulin: not even a lifeboat: the davits were empty, a single cable swung slowly to and fro against the hull. She held the rail and tried to look aft to see if other lifeboats remained in position, but the partition granting privacy to the next terrace aft interfered with her view and she could determine nothing. Then she heard a squeak, as of a wooden drawer being opened in humid weather. “Ridiculous, ridiculous,” Leo was saying. At first she couldn’t tell if he was speaking to her or to someone at the cabin door, or merely to himself. “We shouldn’t have to. We didn’t request to come here. In fact we’d have been perfectly contented if you’d sailed completely by.” She looked inside and he met her gaze. “Don’t be concerned. They’re on the other side of the ship.” She tried to determine if the movement of the water alongside the shell plating was due to the forward motion of the ship or the current of the unseen river which, by all reasonable calculations, must have its mouth lying dead ahead, flowing past the immobile hull. We’ve been aground the whole time, that’s what those lights I saw last night must have been and why the entire ship felt tilted: we’re aground on some sandbar no one knew was there because the channel isn’t normally used by cruise ships of this size, the keel is resting on mud, and where would we go, if the hull suddenly began to vibrate furiously from the effort to detach ourselves from this embedded ooze so the crystal-stemmed glasses of ice water and the etched glass peacocks of the dining rooms and ten million bottles of merlot and Riesling began to clink and shudder at the boiling water thrust up at the ship’s high, white stern, squared like that of a conquistador’s galleon, scrolled with golden lights twinkling and flashing in coded sequence, even if we got off here, it wouldn’t surprise her if the makers in Mexico of tourist accoutrements had never even considered anyone would touch at this port to send a souvenir from where they were going now and so had not even supplied a single one.
Their shore excursion completed, the tourists were tendered back aboard The Mirabilis. Leo comes on deck wearing soft yellow pants, a blue-and-white striped polo shirt, gripping a cane with tripodal rubber-sheathed prongs to forestall slippage on the deck surface. He and Constance take a cruise every year, sometimes twice a year depending on the length of the itinerary. A minimum of two months of each year pass at sea, some years – three years ago they traveled around the world on the QE2 – more than that, but a good average of eight or nine weeks on board a cruise ship since they were married ten years ago. They’ve voyaged everywhere. A favorite is the western Caribbean: the Yucatan, Bogota, the Canal Zone. They’ve circumnavigated South America, traveled up the Iguassu on a four day shore excursion via train and small river craft to the falls before rejoining the ship in Rio, though Constance thought Sao Paulo was hideously overcrowded. They’ve made the Cape Horn passage more times than they can count. Seldom do they bring anything back from these travels other than digital photos and video footage. You would look in vain for wood carvings of the Xingu or fetishes from Haiti in their home. Nothing in the furnishings would tell you they’re world travelers. If they do buy anything in port it’s something small, inexpensive, and immediately given to one of Constance’s friends upon arrival home. Limit onshore buying and onboard purchases to absolute necessities, Leo says. Their cabin cost almost seven grand for this two week voyage and Leo has been complaining about the markup on toothpaste in the shipboard pharmacy: he doesn’t think they brought enough to last all the way back to Port Everglades. Whose responsibility was that? Oversight. When they arrive at Cristobal she can go ashore and buy a tube but they ought to have stocked up before leaving home; one small tube for two people for two weeks was obviously insufficient, the pharmacy wants easily three times the retail price in Miami for the same product, and they have four or five tubes bought in bulk under the vanity at home.
The last two years Leo has had to move with the aid of a cane or walker so all ports are the same to him: he rarely goes ashore now. Seen them all anyways, some more than once. Nor can he accompany his wife to the lounge for postprandial dancing. She’s found dancing more difficult the last couple years too, though she hasn’t admitted this to Leo.
Every cruise ship is the same to him too, no matter what encomium he receives concerning its amenities. He has an eye for rust or corrosion and is quick to detect any slackening in the levels of maintenance, whether they’re seen on the hull or superstructure or the table linen or the glassware. “A rusty tub of a boat” he will tell acquaintances when he’s home and asked if his latest cruise was relaxing and enjoyable. “How much relaxation is possible when you could be going to the bottom of the sea at any moment. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want it to sink underneath me and not leave me time to bail out.”
The explanation he gives to these enquirers is that they take these cruises for Constance’s sake, it’s an interest of hers to explore. Not for reasons of cultural anthropology, history, geography; she’s never studied any of these subjects and neither has Leo, formally, who considers all of them to be grounded in idle theorizing, unproductive and unprofitable speculation. “Everyone is always trying to make out at every port you go into that the golden age once existed there until the conquering European destroyed the harmony of the social order. Which may be true, what do I care. A lot of precious romanticizing derived from Rousseau’s concept of the uncivilized noble savage communing with nature, mutually responsive yet free. Bogus.” No matter what providential spin the captain and cruise director offer to explain the motives for plunder, all are valueless. So he has come on deck to see for himself. Before he retired he worked in insurance, first as a claims adjuster, later as an executive, so bargaining is a topic of which he knows much, and he always projects a successful resolution. Of course his wife is no good at bargaining: she either accepts or rejects what is placed before her depending on her prearranged budget, and a souvenir-laden mendicant (here comes one now with an array of scarves) isn’t accustomed to this obduracy. Offer and counteroffer are not part of her natural strategy. All the more reason to be mystified when she steps aboard laden with bags and parcels. Souvenir hunting? She hasn’t remembered the toothpaste either.
“They must have seen you coming,” Leo says as they descend to their cabin. “Who is all this stuff for?” Their cabin, though of a higher grade than the standard outside rooms due to Leo’s need for maneuvering room for his walker, now has its floor space compromised by several large boxes. The wardrobe, which is barely large enough to accommodate their clothing, is now full of packages; the door won’t shut tight and Leo bumps his elbow on the door when coming out of the bathroom. He looks inside the wardrobe while his wife is changing. Spurious antiques and brass work purporting to be hand hammered but in actuality mass produced and not even locally, not even from South or Central America, dyed synthetics the hues of a cockatiel’s plumage. “In the old days,” he remarks, “you could consign this stuff to the ship’s hold as not needed during the voyage, to be offloaded when we reached home. I don’t suppose this tub is equipped with cargo holds, though. It’s all taken up with buffets and dance floors and ten thousand poker machines.”
The longer he gazes at the contents of the wardrobe the more he wonders if she’s lost her mind or agreed to purchase all these things for one of her homebound friends. If they wanted souvenirs or duty-free items, let them pay seven grand and get on the ship, he reasons. No need to make us do your shopping if you’re too improvident to afford to travel. We’re not here to provide the cachet of foreign adventure for others.
Assistance to tourist-based economies, poverty ameliorated by regular influx of wealthy and curious sightseers, has always been their mutual avoidance on these cruises and he is bewildered by what has happened. Neither of them has ever been gullible or given to shows of pitiable charity, a form of impulse buying, gratifying the conscience by spending not because you like what you see but because spending is a means of equalizing economic injustice. She’s trying to effect economic restructuring by purchasing unneeded scarves and jewelry and gimcracks. If equality is to exist the first rule is we have to eradicate individual conscience. The parts cannot exist without the whole. Out of the sum total of contributed assets comes unity. Reapportioned monies eliminate the need for currency as a medium of transaction: if everyone has enough, no one needs to exchange anything. Certainly not consciences for dollars. That’s axiomatic, he thinks. They finish dressing as The Mirabilis clears port; by the time they’re down at dinner the ship is out of sight of land.
In the morning there’s an announcement: they won’t be stopping at the next port due to present conflicts there. A delightful island situated in an estuary of the O---- river, at which they would arrive the next morning, an island neither Constance nor Leo has ever heard of let alone seen advertised in a travel brochure which has been substituted as a port of call. One place is as good as another, Leo mutters at breakfast. Probably not much if it’s an out-of-way destination and seldom visited. Why didn’t they just go on to Cristobal and give us an extra day there? Would someone feel cheated if they skipped this part of the coast altogether? What would happen later on in the cruise, would they call at two ports in the same day to resume the planned itinerary, or would one or more of the later calls be dropped as well? Neither of them have interest in itineraries which take one too far afield: they prefer common tourist amenities, the newer and more accessible the better, so an old obscure place selected for its historical interest as a stopping point for slavers is a definite disappointment. Likely to be poor and underdeveloped and they’d prefer not to see that, remember Sao Paulo? Neither says much the rest of the morning, the atmosphere on board is palpably uneasy, uncertainty caused by deviation from set schedule and an offshore breeze of dredged-up mud and soluble, half-immersed vegetation as the ship heads towards the coast at sixteen knots having induced a nervousness among their fellow passengers. Plenty of sandbars here and not very well channeled or buoyed for the passage of large vessels, certainly nothing as deep-draft as The Mirabilis has been through here in some years; they may ground at any moment and the entire rest of the cruise cancelled.
Their cabin came with a private terrace on which were two deck chairs. Preferable to have a chair where one could observe more than just ocean but the newer cruise ships seem to have done away with those long promenade spaces which had been features of older ships: the only other place to have a deck chair was at poolside, which was a location both too noisy and too warm for Leo even if such an area had not been off limits for his cane or walker. Just below the level of the terrace were the niches into which the lifeboats, mounted on davits like parentheses, were nestled. By looking over the railing one looked down on the gray canvas tarpaulin covering lifeboat number Four. She stepped out on the balcony, slid the door closed, and settled in one of the chairs. Despite the ship’s movement there wasn’t the slightest breeze: the divider at the forward end of the balcony seemed to deflect any air stirred by the ship’s motion. The heat, even with an occluded sun, made her drowsy. After a time she heard the glass door slide open and closed again. Without opening her eyes she heard Leo settle into the other deck chair and after a pause say, “We won’t be going to Cristobal.” “Or crossing the equator,” she added. “This ship doesn’t cross the equator,” Leo said. “You can’t go that far south in the Caribbean.” If this port was not a conventional stopping place, what could they expect to see? Dilapidation. At best, a local market where men sold emeralds out of baskets carried across the Cordilleras and who would, with curved knives, slice off the fingers of anyone who looked at a single jewel. “Well, we won’t go ashore,” she said as comfortingly as possible. “What if we have no choice?” “What do you mean, no choice? Why wouldn’t we be allowed to remain on board if we chose not to take a shore excursion?” “Because that’s not how it works,” Leo answered. She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him but his deck chair was empty; it was only her own voice saying to her “Why, how is it supposed to work?” and when she waited for an answer there was only the vacant teakwood deck chair with a towel spread over the backrest.
“I thought you’d come outside.”
“Outside? On the balcony? Why would I come outside? One lurch of this barge and over I go. Right over the rail. Nobody’s even notice or stop the ship. Probably in these waters they wouldn’t stop even for an emergency, how long would anyone last? I wouldn’t be caught outside at any cost. What made you think I’d come outside?”
“I thought I heard you open and close the door. You spoke to me.”
That evening at dinner Constance said to the captain “The tendency of celebrities to gain unwanted attention can be a virtue in that others are more apt to perceive the conditions surrounding the celebrity’s misfortune, if only by contrast and comparison.” “Yes, we all have our troubles,” the captain smiled. “Fame is a solid platform from which to be heard,” Constance continued, “only it can vanish.” Leo isn’t at the table; tired from maneuvering about the decks with his cane today, he’s resting in their cabin. “Even if the celebrity finds criticism of his or her actions, at least those actions are fully visible because of the intensity of the spotlight thrown upon them.” Celebrity does not always confer authority, the captain remarks mildly. “Oh no,” Constance agrees. “It merely focuses attention. That’s why we’re visiting this port, isn’t it?” She wants to ask the captain how long he intends to stay in port; none of the port calls made by The Mirabilis so far on this cruise have lasted more than six hours but the notice posted at the cruise director’s office seems to indicate a stay of at least twelve. “That is due to the uncertainty of the tidal flow in that location,” the captain assures her. “The estuary can only be entered or exited during the period of slack tide following the ebb. Otherwise the currents would play the ship—“ He gestures with his hand. “It’s an uncertain area. You will see a great display of seamanship if I can bring her in with no more pilot than two men in a skiff below the bow indicating the course, if you choose not to remain belowdecks.” The captain smiled; this was the way he dealt with engendered expectations. His dreams had also been uneasy. Even if those aboard are free from worry, others will worry about them, in a similar way to how the ship itself, seen at a distance, afloat above a yellow reef like a cloud above shallow seas, drawing up vapor from below its base, is glimpsed by those recently gone ashore. After some time one dreams up a distorted view of the liner, since it cannot be seen as a whole once you are aboard: he has encountered many passengers who, gazing at the high white side of The Mirabilis from a distance, exclaim, “That’s our ship?” The configuration of decks does not accord with the dimensions plotted by the mind’s eye: certain decks magnified, the bow out of proportion, imperator of too many visions: that is the verifiable miracle to those who distrust what they see as larger or smaller than their conception of the same space. And passengers may think this a fiction he retails to reassure them, but he tells his staff the same thing. To engender rest and ease in dimensionless space surmounted by the cockleshell emblem of the cruiseline bolted to the funnel above the sun deck, splurging on relaxation and illimitable niceties. The malcontent kills the ease that would soothe all arrogant malcontention. All direction is our own. Safety of radar above water, sonar to eavesdrop on coral outcroppings and goggle-eyed fish below. The engines thump, the sun strikes sparks off a dozen reflective pools, the hull grinds, the stabilizers fin through bubbles on an even keel, the horns weehoo, the orchestras crash and crescendo, the casinos clink silvery tokens on the deck and we steer through it all, Palinurus. Our enervation, replete despite these sounds, is absolute and unrousable.
She slept uneasily. During the night she was awakened by the bellow of the ship’s horn: one long blast that seemed to go on for an eternity followed by three shorter blasts at longer intervals. Naturally after that sound she was too excited to sleep at all, only she knew she must have fallen asleep eventually because suddenly it was light and she thought a searchlight or the beam of a lighthouse had fallen across the ship. The entire ship seemed to be listing: her bed was canted to one side and no matter how she lay she felt unable to remain level. “There must be some sort of emergency,” she said to Leo.
“What do you mean?”
“There was a searchlight. And the ship’s horn was blowing. I heard it. What was it to mean? A distress signal?”
Leo convinced her to remain in bed. As soon as she was certain he had fallen asleep again she left the bed and, without even drawing on anything over her nightgown, she slid open the door to the balcony and went out to see if in fact the ship was making a great arc in the sea, and beheld two lights, a red and a green, below and a short distance from the side of the ship, moving slowly ahead of The Mirabilis itself. The red and green lights blinked slowly on and off as they moved. “Why don’t they turn their lights on?” But the liner’s lights also were not illuminated: the decks were dark below her, the big electrically-lit steel letters spelling out the ship’s name looming above on the sun deck were dark too. “Maybe we are receiving an escort into port. Maybe they had to pick up a pilot.” “Pilot, nothing,” Leo muttered. “They don’t employ pilots to take ships in and out of port these days. It’s accomplished with global positioning technology.” Marker buoys? But they appeared to be moving ahead of the ship. “You’re making it up,” Leo said to her. Although she was sure he had been sleeping when she went out on the balcony he sounded wide awake whereas she spoke in a dreamy monotone. “There must be some sort of emergency,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That searchlight. And the ship’s horn was blowing. I heard it. What was it to mean? A distress signal?”
By the morning the water around the ship had changed sometime overnight to a yellowish-green but there was no island, no estuary in sight. Perhaps she might have welcomed this change in hue as a sign they were nearing land except for the oppressive air, a miasma like that of decomposition and desuetude. “Don’t you smell it?” she asked Leo.
“What?”
“The smell. From the river, the estuary: it must be stagnant, a pool of everything washed down from the hills.”
How could this immensity be navigated on a starless, moonless night such as they had the night before? “They have sonar. Radar. Everything,” Leo said. “They see things we can’t even see. Porpoises below the stabilizing fins. Flights of birds flying above the mast. I’m hungry. Hadn’t we better get something to eat? They still feed you aboard this barge, I imagine.” “But we just ate.” “Nonsense. I haven’t had anything since dinner Tuesday night when you spoke to the captain.”
By midafternoon they had still not arrived, though the ship still appeared to be moving, quite slowly now, as they were in a channel which revealed itself to contain many sandbars, each coming into view as a pale yellow crescent before slowly plunging out of sight, so they must have been near the mouth of the river: the course kept shifting and naturally neither the captain nor any of the officers could be spared from the bridge to come down to one of the six dining rooms for cocktails. After the cancellation of that event Constance began to lose track of time completely. In the morning she’d expected the usual program listing daily activities to be slipped under the door, but there had been none before or after breakfast: neither had a basket of fresh fruit and soaps been placed on the table by the balcony doors, as had been the custom on previous days. Nothing. “They’re hoarding it for themselves,” Leo said.
Not a ship, a vessel of any kind, was in sight, nothing but an overcast, still sky which might be concealing anything at horizon level. She would not have been surprised if the clouds had separated to reveal a volcanic cone roaring out of banana plantations into a tropic sky, or a waterfall such as superstitious mariners believed existed at the edge of the sea. A complete calm prevailed: the only waves were those moving outward from the ship’s hull. The color of the sea was such that if the sun had come out it would have shone like burnished brass, a glare to envelop everything. At breakfast the only advice she received was to eat a banana. “For the potassium. The humidity.” She tried to encourage Leo to eat a banana but he refused. The other passengers seemed listless, bored by the blank sky and yellowish-green water and the oily smell given off. The air inside the ship was cooler than that outside, but not much cooler, not as cool as on previous days of the cruise, and the stagnant smell pervaded every lounge and ballroom as did the humidity. Suddenly there was a rumbling sound; a shudder passed along the keel of the ship from bow to stern, the champagne glasses in pyramids behind the bar tinkled, the etched glass panels of the room rattled, the heads of gladioli in cutglass vases on each table trembled, even the light emitted by the glass sconces on the walls flickered.
That this grandiose luxe glittering adjacent to crumbly reefs and marl frankly presents a tempting prize is unmistakable. If the inequality is not balanced the ship will never find her way off the sand but inevitably be hurled against reefs which will scatter orchestras and gladioli and slot machines and feather boas and buffets into the waves and coral and darting tropical fish and wary barracuda, to be picked up piecemeal from the skiffs of salvagers. This calamity won’t solve any economic problems, to be sure, nor will it convey prosperity to the population of this segment of coastal estuary, mainly fishermen: the ship is symbol, not fact, of notorious riches, and as symbol can convey only what illusions may be brought to bear upon its cargo. Even if The Mirabilis were seized, where could she be taken? No suitable deep-water harbor, no port facilities capable of succoring a ninety-thousand ton hull full of elderly passengers, crystal champagne glasses in pyramids, glass walled atria a hundred feet high, dancers in the dome-gilded lounge, harlequinades of laden buffet tables, plenitude, surfeit upon surfeit. Why, the ship would never be taken anyplace by anyone who gazed, unknowingly, upon this richness, even in the name of fair economic distribution. Free from all guilt of a subjugated past, free from all obligation. Suppose she were to be sailed to the destination of each passenger’s whim, for there existed on board provisions enough, it would be an idealist’s cruise, not a voyage after plunder.
Leo, however, drafts a different proposal. First, so as not to be mistaken as representative of the Gloria Mundi, he paraphrases Marx in saying that the heap of capitalists are by nature reactionary and avoid charitable obligations. “I do not mind giving but I will not be subject to coercion involving charity. It’s unjust and an affront to one’s conscience. Charity is better left as an attribute of free will. Second: the means does not equal the end. Pastry cooks, sous-chefs, garnishers, ice-swan sculptors, sommeliers have needs which drown out the needs of these local salvager-pirates. Do they consider life aboard to be a paradise? That none of us worked to attain this leisure and some of us aren’t even enthralled by its prospects? Nothing is paradise which alleges to be paradisiacal: this tub is no benefactor and balm to injustices, no portal to forgetful ease. Splurging to excess is a flimsy excuse for a paradise anyways. On what do these people expect to found a balanced economy? Fish? Oil reserves? Emeralds mined from the mountains? The straw handbags of elderly women? We’re not being unjust in asking for assistance so as to proceed and it is not our exploitative greed which has cast us on this sandbar. Last: equable sharing of misfortune by any other system than individual responsibility is never democratic and troubles the dreams of many people. That’s it.”
The sky was still the same disquieting flat gray but the smell was no longer that of oil or swamps or mountains full of emeralds and jaguars’ teeth or even an attar of roses but the old bony brine of salt-baked beaches on which anything could be cast up and she knew she had slept despite the oppressive air. She looked down at the water, which was now more brown than yellow, as it swirled past the white hull of the ship. It flowed past without radiating outward in waves from the hull, without any whiteness of foam, exactly as if the ship was dead in the water, perhaps even anchored. We’ve run aground, she thought. We’re not even moving! She looked at the other bed. “Leo! Leo!” She looked over the rail and instead of the gray tarpaulin snugly grommetted over lifeboat number Four there was no tarpaulin: not even a lifeboat: the davits were empty, a single cable swung slowly to and fro against the hull. She held the rail and tried to look aft to see if other lifeboats remained in position, but the partition granting privacy to the next terrace aft interfered with her view and she could determine nothing. Then she heard a squeak, as of a wooden drawer being opened in humid weather. “Ridiculous, ridiculous,” Leo was saying. At first she couldn’t tell if he was speaking to her or to someone at the cabin door, or merely to himself. “We shouldn’t have to. We didn’t request to come here. In fact we’d have been perfectly contented if you’d sailed completely by.” She looked inside and he met her gaze. “Don’t be concerned. They’re on the other side of the ship.” She tried to determine if the movement of the water alongside the shell plating was due to the forward motion of the ship or the current of the unseen river which, by all reasonable calculations, must have its mouth lying dead ahead, flowing past the immobile hull. We’ve been aground the whole time, that’s what those lights I saw last night must have been and why the entire ship felt tilted: we’re aground on some sandbar no one knew was there because the channel isn’t normally used by cruise ships of this size, the keel is resting on mud, and where would we go, if the hull suddenly began to vibrate furiously from the effort to detach ourselves from this embedded ooze so the crystal-stemmed glasses of ice water and the etched glass peacocks of the dining rooms and ten million bottles of merlot and Riesling began to clink and shudder at the boiling water thrust up at the ship’s high, white stern, squared like that of a conquistador’s galleon, scrolled with golden lights twinkling and flashing in coded sequence, even if we got off here, it wouldn’t surprise her if the makers in Mexico of tourist accoutrements had never even considered anyone would touch at this port to send a souvenir from where they were going now and so had not even supplied a single one.
