Original public domain image from Digital Commonwealth
At dawn, John Ernest Greene boarded the steamship Celtic Hope at Recife, Pernambuco, bound for Liverpool, fleeing Brazil for fear he might kill a man.
Mr. Thatcher, Greene’s manager at Tate and Lyle, had a different view of the matter.
“No shame in it,” Mr. Thatcher muttered. “No shame. I would be boarding her myself.”
“No, Mr. Thatcher, there’s no shame in it,” said Greene. He tossed off the platitude without thought.
The crew flung the Celtic Hope‘s gangway onto the quay. It landed with a thud, propelling a cloudlet of brown dust before it. The ramp was a wooden contraption of slats and stays like a battered housepainter’s ladder.
The sun rose; it picked out the burnt yellow sandbar and the far reefs that give their name to the city bobbing among the waves like prowling alligators. Suddenly, it was hot.
“I rejoice you see the light,” said Mr. Thatcher.
“I do,” said Greene. “There is no sunrise in the tropics and it rains only in season.”
Greene made ready to board the Celtic Hope. Mr. Thatcher became animated, almost perturbed. “I wish to tell you, Mr. Greene, that no one at Tate and Lyle thinks the less of you.” He spoke avidly. His voice was shrill. “You have the right to preserve your own life.”
Greene’s indifference vanished. “Is that what you think, Mr. Thatcher?” He glared at the Tate and Lyle manager. “Is it?”
“Of course.”
Greene looked down at his superior. “There is no threat to my life, Mr. Thatcher. There is a threat, only, to that of my adversary. You forget, Mr. Thatcher, what kind of Irishman I am. I am a country Irishman, but a country Irishman of means. My adversary demanded guns to satisfy what he supposed to be his wounded honor. He knows nothing of guns; he known nothing of anything, like so many in this benighted country; I know everything about guns. I kill deer, fox, birds on the wing…with guns…but I do not kill men.”
“And your honor?”
“Honor is a debased coin,” said Greene. “It is hollowed out and clipped as it circulates among men. ‘Can honor set to a leg? No. Therefore, I’ll none of it.’“
Mr. Thatcher sniffed his disapproval.
“I do not wish to seem cruel, Mr. Thatcher,” said Greene. “I wish only to be honest.”
“I see.”
“You have been kind to me,” Greene added.
Mr. Thatcher softened. “I cannot assure you of employment in London, young man,” he said. His voice turned to a troubled whisper. “This financial panic…the New York crash has brought the collapse of sugar…all this is well known to you.”
“It is of no consequence,” said Greene. His voice was firm.
Mr. Thatcher was taken aback, like a man expecting a reward for sympathy but receiving only cold conceit. “I only feel sorry for these niggers.” He scanned the quay.
“They will take care of themselves,” said Greene. “They always have and they always will.”
“What will you do?”
“I will take the cloth,” said Greene. “And a vow of poverty.” He turned to his superior: “And you, sir?”
***
The young man boarded the Celtic Hope. He carried only a green duffel bag distinguished by a yellow stripe. The steamer smelled of tar and vomit.
Greene reached the bulwark. He nodded to Mr. Thatcher on the quay below. He searched for a slim girl in white linen with a colorful parasol but there were no girls in white and no parasols parading on the quay that morning.
Greene turned away. He determined to search for the Captain. “Sven, or Svenson, they said,” he muttered to himself. “A Swede.”
He found Svenson on the bridge. The Captain was short, almost dwarfish. He wore a blue peacoat despite the heat. It was soiled with engine grease and drippings of what Greene thought must be congealed soup, or vomit.
Greene wondered what language to use. He ventured English.
“Ya!” exclaimed Svenson. “They tell me ’bout you!”
The Captain opened a wide grin. His molars on one side were capped with gold, on the other mottled grey with decay.
Greene asked, “Can you direct me to my quarters?”
Svenson squinted and muttered something inaudible.
“Sorry, say again?”
The Captain glared at the young man with one eye. Greene supposed the other might be glass. “Fo’c’sle’,” he shouted.
“Oh, fo’c’sle’, of course, thank you.”
Svenson grinned again. A patchy white beard seemed to grin too. With one hand, the Captain wielded a stick like a long version of an orchestra baton; with his other, he pounded the ship’s railing.
“A good ship, she,” he shouted. “Good ship…rusty…but she make time.”
Greene nodded in appreciation. The Captain, he decided, wanted somebody to talk to, even if it wasn’t in his native language.
“In Belfast, they make her…1910,” said the Captain. “Still good. They do good work before the Great War…now…not so much.” His attention veered elsewhere. Below decks, men shouted; there was a clatter of machinery and the smell of oil.
Greene smiled and fled.
Airless and gloomy, the forecastle was a latticework of bunks where Greene would sleep with a dozen other men. He tossed his duffle bag onto a top bunk then determined to roam the promenade deck.
Up top, the men bustled; most were shirtless in the heat. Greene thought he heard German or, perhaps, Swedish; he picked out the throaty European version of Portuguese. He imagined the Captain cursed in at least three languages.
Bells sounded. Svenson barked orders from the bridge. The Celtic Hope was underway. Her engines clanked and hummed; they made the bulwark rattle. Greene’s nostrils filled with the smell of tar and ammonia.
The vessel glided into the channel. A yellow haze veiled salt marshes in the distance where tiny figures like children labored to dig snails and crabs from the teeming mud. Beyond, the wide sea.
Greene glanced at his shipmates. Nine or ten roamed the deck; he was the sole passenger, a courtesy extended to the venerable firm of Tate and Lyle. Mr. Thatcher had said the Celtic Hope would carry the last shipment of Pernambucan sugar of 1932, and maybe 1933, and 1934. “What about these niggers?” Greene said to himself. “They’re not black but they’re niggers just the same.”
He felt a keen knot of sympathy in his chest.
His revery was disturbed by the approach of two sailors. They were stripped to the waist.
“You meet Svenson?” said one. He was hirsute; his black beard dripped sweat. He spoke colloquial Portuguese.
Greene nodded. The other sailor, skinny and pale, broke into a comical grin.
“You see that stick he carries?” said the bear-like sailor.
“Yes.”
The skinny one spoke up: “You might say he holds his prick in his hands!” He began to laugh hysterically.
“Yes, he holds his prick in his hands, and he uses it to beat us,” said his companion. “He pleasures himself that way.”
“I see,” said Greene.
“You sleep with us in the fo’c’sle’?” asked the bear-like sailor.
Greene nodded.
“The captain sleeps alone,” said the sailor. His skinny companion launched into an obscene stroking motion with his hand and laughed comically.
The bear-like sailor narrowed his eyes; he turned from dry to stern. “When you sleep with us, you change these stupid clothes,” he said. Greene was wearing a linen dress shirt with an olive green cravat. The sailor fondled the cravat with greasy fingers, then flicked it in the air.
“You get me?”
Greene understood it was not a rhetorical question.
“I do,” he said.
The men moved on. The skinny one turned back, repeating the obscene pantomime with his hands.
Greene was not angry. He understood the men were roughnecks. The canecutters he knew in the Pernambucan agreste were roughnecks, the sugar mill hands, the Recife stevedores, even the police and the fiscal authorities. Greene fancied himself sympathetic to niggers, but these, decidedly, weren’t his kind of niggers. He would keep his dignity, and his distance.
Greene glanced skyward as if imploring a benevolent God to grant him patience. Then, behind him, he felt a current of hot breath and the odor of sweat. He turned. A barrel-chested, shirtless sailor with a moon face and a black beard stood before him. The sailor smiled placidly.
“They bother you? No mind,” he said in English. “I am Roberto.” He flashed a warm grin. “Italian…but I speak good English. You help me with English; I teach you things.”
“Thank you,” said Greene. “I will take you up.”
***
At dusk, Greene dined in the dingy Captain’s cabin.
Svenson motioned toward a shelf of books. One or two were in Portuguese, a couple in what must have been Swedish; there were a few works by Conrad in English. The Captain pulled down a volume.
“I no ‘secret sharer’,” he said. The Captain laughed under his breath. He handed the book to Greene, who grasped it eagerly. “Take it…read.”
The Captain pulled down another. He flipped pages with clumsy fingers then shoved the book at Greene. “Good!” he said, with another wheezy laugh. The cover featured a lurid illustration of a half-naked sailor tied up and whipped on the deck of a schooner. A burly mate wearing a bandana and sporting a sadistic leer wielded the whip. Crewmen scattered in the background showed horror, and some, perverse pleasure.
Greene waved him off. “I’ll just take the one,” he said. “Conrad, a fine companion.”
“Ya, good companion.”
They sat on stools before a metal trestle. A black cabin boy in an immaculate white blouse with brass buttons served plates of rice, black beans, and spongy pork slices. The only pleasure came from a bowl of yellow carambola. The trestle wobbled as the boy handled cutlery and trays. The Captain and the boy exchanged no words. Greene wondered whether they shared a common language at all, or perhaps they had narrowed speech down to just a few meaningful grunts and sighs.
The Captain poured rum. It tasted of burnt sugarcane and scorched Greene’s palate, but the rum made Svenson loquacious.
Greene commented on the economic slump.
“Bad…bad…bad…but will change,” said the Captain. “This Heiler in Germany will set things right.”
He made the name sound like High-ler or Healer.
“I think you mean Hitler,” Greene said.
“Ya…Hitler…he bring down the Jews; then Swedish shippers own all the boats!” At this the Captain gave a full-throated laugh, displaying his shadowed teeth. Greene caught a whiff of pork breath and rum.
Greene let the Captain rattle on about politics. Salazar appeared to be his favorite; he made an exception for the Italian dictator, pronounced “Moo-zellini,” whom he accused of being a poseur.
When asked, Greene said he harbored no particular political views.
Greene extended his thanks and retired.
In the forecastle, a circle of sailors squatted on the deck tossing dice. The silence of tense concentration was broken by the clunk-clunk of the dice and then a raucous outburst. Money changed hands. The sailors pulled on hand-rolled cigarettes that filled the cabin with caustic smoke. They downed shots of sugar whisky. One of the men invited Greene to join the game. Greene declined. The man sneered angrily. Greene realized he had violated an unwritten law—passengers should offer a token, however modest, to the laborers. He determined that, tomorrow he would play, and lose.
Greene ascended to his bunk. There, he removed his cravat, dress shirt and navy blue trousers, which he carefully folded and placed in a deep recess of his duffle bag. He drew on white long-johns with Fortnum and Mason stenciled in robin’s egg blue.
Despite the dim, sooty veil of smoke, the noise, and his vague dread of the dirty ship and its crude men, Green managed to find sleep. The remote clank-clank of the ship’s engines helped.
At midnight, the clank-clank ceased.
***
The Captain and the Engineer labored frantically all the next day to repair the disabled engines. There was little for the other men to do. They huddled on the promenade deck playing cards or, half naked, sunned themselves like turtles. Greene, pressed against the bulwark, contented himself with the cloudless sky and the blue ocean. There was no landmass in sight.
Roberto strode toward him. The Italian sailor smiled broadly. He bore a jumble of skinny white ropes that looked like a barrister’s wig. He was shirtless.
Greene smiled back, but it was a wary smile, the kind of smile imposed by an uncomfortable arrangement like that of distant relatives asking for shelter. Nor was his companion’s smile convincing. It was sickly, over friendly, the smile of someone you can’t get rid of, someone who befriends you more than you befriend them.
Greene wanted to turn away but he thought, “This may be the only friend I’ve got.” He greeted Roberto. He asked about the skinny white ropes.
“I teach you sailor’s knots,” he said. “What you call?…nautical knots.” He pronounced “nautical” carefully as ‘know-to-call.’ He smiled again. This time the smile seemed more genuine. Greene nodded. He thought, “Roberto is like the Captain. He needs someone to talk to.”
“Is better than cards or dice,” said Roberto. He glanced over his shoulder and frowned at the lounging sailors scattered around the deck. Yesterday’s burly sailor and his skinny companion frowned back.
“I show you,” said Roberto. He sat on the deck, spreading the white ropes before him like a snake charmer. Greene sat in front of him. The ship was becalmed; there was no breeze, no shade; the sun beat down.
Roberto stared at his companion. He flipped the hem of Greene’s shirt. “Take it off!” he said. He laughed and then, in an elaborate pantomime, demonstrated how Greene should pull the shirt over his head and toss it aside.
“Everybody here bare to waist!” Roberto shouted. He seemed ready to pound his own hirsute chest like a gorilla. “Throw into ocean!”
Greene felt acutely embarrassed. Yesterday’s burly sailor shouted something. Greene didn’t understand the words but the ugly tone was clear; it made the skinny companion laugh hysterically. Greene saw the Captain charge the railing. Svenson was carrying his baton; he surveyed the promenade below like a prison warden, then disappeared below decks. The baton tapped on the metal stairs like a blind man’s cane.
Greene was in a quandary. He examined his reasoning. He realized that tossing his shirt aside would make him less distinguishable from the sailors. He would be as one of them, seeming, to them–or to anyone outside the crude little circle of the Celtic Hope and its crew–an equal, but, to himself, he could never be an equal; he could never become a vice-driven roughneck. Tossing aside his shirt was like tossing off his skin, like surrendering himself to an evil whose horror he could barely perceive.
Roberto looked at him with a wide, juvenile grin. He spread his fleshy arms as if to say, “What’s keeping you?”
Greene rolled his eyes. He hoped the effect would seem comical to anyone looking. He said to himself, “Snakes shed their skin; so, can I.”
He jerked off his shirt, then, carefully folding it, placed it under his thigh. He was self-conscious of his skinny torso and nearly hairless chest.
Roberto smiled with satisfaction then he turned his attention to the jumble of ropes before him like a magician. He selected one. He showed it to Greene with a keen eye. “Stopper knot,” he said. In a blur of fingers and white strips, he transformed the rope into a figure eight. “Very useful,” he said, holding the rope up like a captive snake. “Now this,” he said, selecting another skinny strip from the deck. With another blur, he had attached the two strips with a knot looking as sound as an anchor chain. “Is called bend knot,” he said.
Successively, he demonstrated the hitch knot, the sling knot, the bowline loop and the double bowline. Greene was awestruck. Roberto the magician made the little ropes conform to his will. Loop knots, especially, slithered through the sailor’s adroit fingers like pale snakes.
Roberto took notice of Greene’s fascination. He drew evident satisfaction from it. “This how snakes make love!” he said and issued a belly laugh that brought foul-tempered heckles from the lounging sailors. Roberto shouted back at them in Italian, accompanied by an obscene gesture that made his flabby arms slam against his sides with a smack. A perfume of sweat arose. Greene read an anger in the sailor’s eyes, a fathom of rage and self-loathing, he had not perceived before.
“I am not like them,” Greene repeated to himself. “I will never be like them.”
Roberto turned to him. He pointed to the other sailors. “I not like them,” he said. Greene was startled in a way he thought Roberto would never understand. He nodded in agreement. “No,” he said. “You’re not like them.”
Roberto leaned forward. “Now you,” he said. He offered a white strip. Greene accepted it with wonder like a string of pearls. He toyed with it for a moment and shrugged his shoulders.
“I show you,” said Roberto.
The sailor guided and cajoled Greene’s clumsy fingers as he explained, commanded and then shadowed each maneuver in the rendering of a knot. They reviewed the entire repertoire. Roberto would lean toward Greene, a study in concentration. He would narrow his eyes and squeeze his lips into an oval like a tenor. He would guide Greene’s unsteady fingers through each exercise, poking at gaps made by the skinny ropes, whispering in Italian. Roberto’s fat breasts would wobble like a girl’s; he would roll his belly with frustration or delight. Greene was sometimes overpowered by the odor of sweat as Roberto leaned into him. The sailor’s breath was a mash of fish and cigarettes.
Greene forgot the time. Hours passed. He learned a little about his companion, how Roberto grew up in a fishing village one of 11 children, how he had become estranged from his family. There was a vague incident involving the parish priest, anger and recrimination, bullying, and then the chance to make a life at sea, a life he took a distinct pride in.
They worked together. It was tedious but rewarding. Gradually, Greene learned his nautical knots.
***
At midnight, the engines of the Celtic Hope belched and rumbled. They were underway. At 2 a.m., silence again.
Next morning, the mood on deck was sour. The men shuffled through their chores. The Captain stormed back and forth from the engine room to the bridge swearing in Swedish and Portuguese; he dragged the long baton behind him like a frustrated child with a broken toy.
Greene settled his back against the gunwale on the promenade deck. He practiced his knots. He knew the men were watching him. He wanted them to; he wanted them to appreciate his skill with the shiny white ropes. He was shirtless, like them, but pale and skinny, his chest hairless as a girl’s. He knew he was provoking them; he was the soft, high-paid clerk posing as a sailor, but as skilled in the nautical arts as anyone on board. He knew what they were thinking. They supposed the contemptuous young man bound for Liverpool was getting back at them after losing his shillings at dice the night before. Greene wanted them to think that; he wanted them to think his shillings were pearls strewn with imperious generosity before a briny huddle of swine.
Roberto joined him. Greene ripped through his repertoire of knots. Roberto gaped in awe; he poked and pulled at the completed knots, pronouncing them sound; he applauded with absurd, juvenile glee.
Greene felt pride. It was, for an instant, a selfless pride, unconnected to his swelling conceit and his secret fear of the mob of sailors.
Then Roberto leaned toward him. Greene stiffened against the gunwale, overpowered by foul breath; droplets of sweat fell from the Italian’s hirsute chest onto Greene’s trousers. Roberto cupped his hand around Greene’s ear. “Last night, I dream of you,” he whispered. Roberto drew back. He grinned with innocent satisfaction.
Greene was speechless. But he was quickly distracted from his shock.
The sailors had seen Roberto’s intimate gesture. They had not heard the whispers but they didn’t need to. Three or four began shouting. Roberto shouted back. Greene didn’t understand a single phrase. He imagined they were cursing in Italian or Swedish or maybe some other language or even a mixture of languages unintelligible to anyone.
Roberto again leaned toward his companion. He whispered, “I tell them I put my mouth where I want. They say, no, I put my tongue where I want. I tell them go to Hell!”
Roberto stood up. He shouted in a jumble of Italian, English, and one or two other languages. Greene picked out “Hell,” “Hole,” and “Whore.” The rest was a slur of vowels, spit and aggrieved ejaculations.
The sailors jeered. More scrambled to their feet. They swaggered toward Roberto; they wagged their fingers; their voices descended to a rumble of threats and curses.
Roberto whipped off his belt. He grasped the buckle in his palm then wound the leather around his wrist like a prize fighter. He drew up to the burly sailor with the sweaty black beard. He began beating the sailor with his right fist; the tail of the leather belt smacked the sailor’s bare chest like a whip. The sailor laughed recklessly; he grabbed Roberto’s fat neck with both hands, shuttering the windpipe with his thumbs, shaking and compressing until the carotid veins stuck out and Roberto began to drool.
The sailors gathered in a semi-circle, jeering, stamping on the deck with their bare feet, slapping each other with open palms against bare skin.
Greene stood back. He could hardly see the jousters until the burly sailor, releasing his grip on Roberto, flung him into the fervid mob. The gang of sailors parted; Roberto, enraged but breathless, stumbled backwards until he crashed into the bulkhead. Two of the sailors approached him, smiling with false sympathy; they grabbed him by the hips and pulled down his denim trousers.
The mob howled. Roberto wore only a shiny elastic cup around his genitals; his trousers were heaped around his ankles. The sailors slapped their thighs.
The words flashed through Greene’s mind: “naked to mine enemies.”
Roberto waddled forward a few steps like a clown; then he bent down to pull up his pants.
The pale skinny sailor, like the clown’s foil in a circus act, shouted, “Watch out, Roberto, somebody might try to slip it up your ass!”
The sailors bayed like wolves.
A whistle blew.
Two or three looked up toward the railing. They nudged their companions. The Captain glared at them. A silence spread. The Captain tapped the railing with his baton.
Svenson descended to the promenade deck with the deliberation of a hangman. His gaze focused only on Roberto. The sailors opened a path as if the Captain were a shaman or a monarch.
Svenson strode toward Roberto. He swung his baton and, with a horrifying whoop, it crashed across the sailor’s back. Svenson swung it again and again until Roberto clapped his hands together as if in prayer and knelt on the deck. The Captain shifted position. He hadn’t spoken a word. With another chilling whoop, the baton streaked across Roberto’s shoulders. It left red dots on his shoulder blades. The Captain rained more blows on the prone figure until Roberto was left huddled and shaking. The whiplashes were the only sounds.
When the blows ceased, Greene could hear Roberto sobbing. The broken sailor made the sign of the cross—the tip of his belt drooped, then fluttered across the wooden slats of the deck–and whispered a prayer in Italian.
The Captain showed no anger. He turned to the mob of sailors. “Take him away,” he said. His voice betrayed no emotion, as if the order were a matter of nautical routine.
The ship’s air horn blared. Greene felt a slight vibration under his feet. The funnel coughed up a ribbon of brown dust.
The Captain looked up.
“Good,” he said.
***
Greene ate alone.
The Captain called for him at four bells.
Svenson wore a white smock, open to the sternum. It revealed a blue chest tattoo. The smock was smeared with engine grease.
The Captain was blunt. “I vill put Roberto off my ship,” he said.
“Why?”
The little Swede stared at Greene. He was stern but not angry. His glass eye floated in a white sea.
“I keep watch on him long time.”
“And for what cause?”
“Stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Stories like time in Madagascar he climb into bunk with cabin boy…Indochinee…boy scream like…how you say it?…banshee!…stories…other stories…plenty stories.”
“And you believe them?”
“Don’t matter…the men believe them.”
“And you’re willing to condemn someone to pain and humiliation because of half-told tales and stupid prejudice?”
The Captain smiled: “You Englishmen always talk like lawyers.”
“I’m not an Englishman.”
“Too bad.”
“Nor am I a lawyer.”
“That’s better.”
Despite a pause, Greene was aware their conversation was not over. Suddenly, he was self-conscious. He was shirtless and barefoot, like the mob of sailors above decks. Outwardly, he was indistinguishable from them. But Greene was also aware that his standard of value had shifted. He felt common, rank, vicious. The only difference was the object of his base design—the congeries of sailors; he would whip and beat them, if he could, like Svenson with his slinking bamboo baton or the bosun’s mate of the lurid paperback.
“If Roberto is so bad, why did you keep him?” Greene ventured.
“I don’t ‘keep’ him…I get rid of him…now…good riddance…and you too.”
“What?“
“You bad luck.”
“What in the Devil is that supposed to mean?”
“The men don’t like you…they think you a ‘pretty boy.'”
“I am no such thing.”
The Captain looked him up and down with a critical gaze. “You’re right…no such thing…not soft, like a girl…hard, but you are still young…and you are foolish.”
“I will seek out Tate and Lyle in London, you may be sure. I will tell them about the Celtic Hope and its Captain, the heartless Svenson.”
“Do it!”
“You will be blacklisted.”
The Captain barked a laugh: “So I don’t carry no more sugar for Tate and Lyle?”
“Precisely.”
“Greene, there is no more sugar for Tate and Lyle, not Pernambuco, not Cuba, not nowhere. Celtic Hope become Celtic Wreck. Captain Svenson, he smoke his pipe in Fiskeback and, like the song you sing, ‘watch the clouds roll by.'”
Greene bowed his head: “You would humiliate me.”
“Two things sink ships like Celtic Hope…typhoons…and bad luck…pretty girl too, but you never see one…bad luck boy just as bad.”
“This is grossly unfair.”
“It is.”
“How do you justify it?”
“I don’t. I am the Captain; I am the law.”
Greene was not satisfied.
The Captain said, “Listen to me, boy. What do you care? When the sea comes up, she wash over the deck, don’t she? But do the ship sink? No! The ship push the water away, like you say, ‘down Davy Jones’ Locker’, out of sight. The ship don’t care! The ship take care of herself. Like you. You take care of yourself. I put you off, then you take the next boat. Nobody knows nothing.”
“Where are you putting us off?”
“An island…is called Fernando de Noronha…off the coast of Brazil. It is the first place in Brazil to see the sunrise.”
“How romantic…I’ll return on my honeymoon.”
“I vish you all the happiness!”
“How do I get from Fernando What’s-its-Name to Liverpool?”
“Packet boat from Recife…comes every week on Tuesday…tomorrow…There is a flagpole at the dock. You hang Brazilian flag and packet boat will stop. You find flag, and provisions—plenty–in shed by the dock.”
Greene turned away. He found the arrangement disturbing. On the other hand, the men of the Celtic Hope hated him. He had lost the confidence of the Captain. He decided not to press the issue. As for Roberto, against vague rumors spread by sailors, he would take his chances.
“Why do they call me that…a ‘pretty boy’?” Greene asked.
The Captain laughed; he pounded his chest, projecting gobs of grease from his shirtfront. He slapped his hand against Greene’s bare skin, making the young man recoil with a sense of violation as if dirty fingers and palm prints might corrupt his flesh. “Ha! You got no hair on your chest…they hate that!”
“Or maybe they love it.”
Greene sensed his comment had brought an end to the interview. As he had recoiled at the Captain’s touch, now Svenson seemed to freeze at the young man’s insinuation, as if it had scratched a half concealed wound in the Captain’s own hide. Greene thought, “dirty little man,” but he was sufficiently in control of himself to resist saying it. “I’m not a savage,” he thought; vaguely in the back of his mind rumbled the sequel, “not like them.”
***
Two sailors dressed in full whites rowed Roberto and Greene toward the dock on a small out island of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago. The Celtic Hope idled. A ribbon of brown smoke from the ship’s funnel streamed oddly forward. No one appeared at the railing or the bridge.
The two dutiful sailors rowed in silence. They tied up at the dock, waited wordlessly for the passengers to disembark, then returned to the Celtic Hope.
Roberto scuttled into the shed. Greene stayed on the dock. He watched the lifeboat plod toward the waiting freighter. He watched the two sailors clamor aboard; he watched the lifeboat winched up to the aft deck and awkwardly shuttled back to its cradle. The sounds echoed across the water with distinct pings and clunks. He watched as the Celtic Hope built steam, as the ribbon of brown smoke turned black and became a torrent, as the vessel began laboring toward the wide horizon.
Greene felt a tightness in his chest. It troubled him; he didn’t want to be a child again.
Greene heard a metallic crash from inside the shed, then Roberto’s voice, but he couldn’t make sense of it at first until he realized that Roberto was laughing. He turned. The sailor was standing in front of the shed like a satisfied housewife holding aloft a tin can in one hand and a clutch of burlap bags in the other.
“Ham! Beans! Coffee!” he said and opened a wide grin. “We eat like kings!”
The shed was tiny, no more than a galley with a gas ring and a wooden table and two chairs. Shelves sagged with equipment—tools, lanterns, coiled rope, pots and pans—and provisions. Svenson was not lying—a man could live for months on the island and want for nothing except a Girl Friday. Outside was a patio of crumbling concrete, a few trees, a margin of brush and a beaten path into the rainforest. A shabby latrine stood handy.
The shed smelled of rust and mold. Roberto busied himself in the galley. He was stripped to the waist. He opened the doors to invite a draft and air out the stuffy shelter. He hummed as he worked up a makeshift meal.
Greene found the Brazilian flag folded up on a shelf. “Our salvation,” he crowed. He showed it to Roberto. The sailor shrugged his bare shoulders. Greene found it odd.
“I’ll pin it to the dock,” Greene said. “The packet boat will see it and pick us up. We only have to spend one night in this God-forsaken place.”
Roberto stopped humming. Greene felt he had ruined the mood. “I’m going out,” he said. “I’m going to explore a little.” He felt like a husband leaving behind an ill-humored wife toiling in the kitchen.
The pathway led through brush to a beach. Greene found the scene forbidding, even ugly. The beach was strewn with pebbles, the sand a mixture of grey and black, making the shallow waters, lapping at the margins, seem dirty as if roiled by crude oil. The distant landscape–rocky towers and a lush green canopy–was more promising.
Greene ventured in from the beach, but the going was treacherous; there was no more path, only slippery, washed down earth, rivulets of water and sharp rocks. He followed the water until he came to a wall of stone. Weeds grew in the cracks; water streamed down the rockface. He explored the wall; to one side, it rose toward a leafy plateau; to the other, it dipped into a field of rubble that skirted the beach. There, the sunlight picked out metallic highlights, like garish mirrors, from the scattered rocks. A path, now overgrown and broken, seemed to zig-zag through the field. There were few birds, little sound and only the slightest scent, which Greene supposed was decomposing vegetation. The scene was unnerving. Greene could appreciate its stoic beauty but the jumbled landscape and bizarre effects, full of barriers and illusions, made him weary. The sun was setting. Within minutes, it would veil the scene in darkness. He made his way back to the shed.
Roberto was serving up a meal of tinned ham, rice and black beans. He had boiled the rice, smothering the galley with steam and a sickly smell of gas. He had unearthed a bottle a Portuguese wine. The bottle was dusty, its label blackened, but the wine was robust and fruity. They drank from tin cups. The sun set and they lit an oil-burning storm lantern.
The wine made Greene sleepy, but Roberto became animated. He rattled on in Italian and English. He congratulated Greene on his prowess with “now-to-call” knots, his diplomacy with wicked Captain Svenson, his coolness before the ruffian crew. He was happy they were “to-geth-her”; it was “a blessing in de skies.” Greene paid no attention; he let his companion ramble. He was looking forward to a good night’s sleep, coffee in the morning, and salvation by noon.
They discovered hammocks rolled up in a corner of the shed. Outside, they found trees with the appropriate hooks. They strung up the hammocks with little difficulty; each held the storm lantern for the other to tie the ropework to the hooks. Roberto cooed in praise of Greene’s skill with the knots.
Roberto’s hammock was two or three meters from the shed and parallel to it; Greene’s was farther off. Greene kicked off his shoes and plunged into his hammock fully clothed. He found it awkward and wondered whether he would be able to sleep. Roberto carried the storm lantern into the shed. It cast a zig-zag of highlights and monstrous, overlapping shadows on the wall as he trod the broken surface of the patio. The wall was little more than wooden planks set in a row like a picket fence with garden tools and coils of rope hanging from hooks.
When Roberto emerged from the shed, the only light came from a crescent moon riding low on the horizon. Greene was disappointed. The moonlight was fractured into white specks by brush; above, the rainforest canopy obscured the stars. Greene had hoped to find the Southern Cross in a coral sky; instead, it was rustling leaves and a hint of mist whipped up by the ocean breeze. “I am,” he thought, “in the middle of nowhere; this island is a dot on a map and I am a dot on the island.” He had never felt so alone.
Greene not so much decided as felt compelled to address his companion: “You know, if we die here no one will care. If the wind knocks down that flag on the dock no one will even know about us.”
Roberto snorted. “You think silly thoughts.”
Greene watched in the dim light as Roberto removed the rest of his clothing, piling it in a heap on the ground, and jumped naked into the hammock. His handling of the swinging canvass was more adroit than Greene’s. He disappeared like a diver then, suddenly, his head popped up and he was grinning and refreshed.
Greene’s mind kept churning up ‘silly thoughts.’ “What would happen if we died here?” he asked himself. “In Ireland, my family would wonder. They would consult Tate and Lyle. The company, after some prodding from solicitors, would make inquiries. They would contact the shipper and, eventually, learn about the Celtic Hope‘s odd deviation from course. That would bring the packet boat! But what about Roberto? Who would make inquiries about him, a sailor gone missing in the south seas? Is there a family who can afford solicitors? A family that even cares?“
Greene became aware that Roberto was staring at him. The sailor was humming to himself; he was grinning; in the pale moonlight, Greene imagined whisps of hair curling up from his bare chest. Roberto was smiling at him with his eyes, like a needy child.
“You are John,” Roberto said. His tone was wistful, almost adoring, the tone of a pilgrim addressing the image of a saint after a long journey. Greene turned away.
“No,” said Roberto in a voice both plaintive and commanding. “Look at me…Listen.”
“Alright, I’ll listen.”
“You are John, a young man named John, like Saint John, not the Baptist–I always think a hairy violent man, John the Baptist, an ape—but John the Apostle, Saint John the Divine. He was young, like you…fair…a boy…the favorite of Jesus…Jesus says, ‘you are the one I love.'”
Roberto pronounced “love” like “loav” as if he were saying “loaves of bread.”
Greene remained silent. He hated this kind of talk. He considered it common, cloying, just a step above self-pity or, worse, a demanding and intolerant profession of faith.
“I read the Bible,” Roberto went on. “I loav the Bible. Saint John the Apostle was Divine because he was Christ’s favorite. Jesus loaved him. They say he was young, maybe just 18, like you, but he was ready to be loaved, wasn’t he?”
“I’m not 18,” Greene said. “I’m 24.”
“But I’m 33!” said Roberto. He laughed.
“I’m going to try to sleep now,” said Greene.
“No don’t…talk…come to me…come here…sit by me…to talk.”
“I’m tired, Roberto. I need to sleep. Tomorrow the packet boat comes.”
“I’m sorry,” said Roberto. There was an edge of bitterness in his voice. He turned away.
“Good night, Roberto.”
“I sleep too,” said Roberto. “I dream of you, just like before.”
Greene would later estimate he had slept about two hours before the shock of awakening to the sight of his companion hovering inches from his face. Roberto had pulled gently on the hem of Greene’s hammock. The sailor was kneeling on the moist ground. He was naked. He seemed to be shivering. His manner was pleading, almost desperate, an amalgam of frustration and anger. Greene shook himself awake; he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Roberto’s visage, in the pale light, was bizarre, almost monstrous. Greene, for the first time, was afraid; he realized he had misjudged the burly sailor, misjudged the depth of Roberto’s self-pity and resentment, misjudged the real meaning of his good humor and intentions; maybe he had misjudged the times he lived in, the overhanging anger and peril abroad in the world, the bloodshed in China, the vice and corruption of the Italian fascists, the distorted, escalating anger in Germany; maybe he had misjudged his race, his humanity, his God and his God’s capacity for caprice and punishment.
Roberto was trying to speak. He was choking on his words. Tears began to stream down his face. The crescent moon had ascended in the night sky and the sailor’s tears glistened like whitecaps at sea.
Roberto half spoke and half gestured. “I explain,” he said. “I try to speak English…to you…an Englishman.”
“I’m not an Englishman.”
“I don’t care who you are. I explain myself.” He pointed to his bare chest with both hands. “I wait…I wait so many months…for someone to loav…and to be loaved.”
“Roberto, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t give up!” There was real anger in Roberto’s voice. He seemed to advance a few inches toward the swinging hammock on his bare knees. “When I loav, I don’t give up! You never loav before?”
“Yes.”
“Then, why you alone?”
“I was betrayed.”
“Me too!”
“Not by me.”
“I am betrayed by the world, by the whole world. The whole world hates me, hates me, like I the Devil.” Roberto pounded his chest with both hands like a gorilla after a conquest.
Greene thought, “I am literally between the Devil and the deep blue sea.” He began to laugh at the juxtaposition. He laughed uncontrollably. He laughed knowing Roberto would think he was laughing at him. Maybe he was laughing at the fat, naked Pagliacci with the tears streaming down his cheeks. He thought, “There’s a fine line between ‘loav’ and ‘loath.'” That made him laugh even harder. He wanted to face Roberto and say, “I loath you too” but he thought better of it.
“Don’t laugh!” Roberto shouted. “You stupid! Stupid! You like those men on ship, like men on all the ship, all you know is to laugh, you laugh at Roberto, call him ‘big lug’ and ‘queer’ and ‘monster’! You are the monster! You rich English from rich schools where boys…how do you say?…bugger…yes, they bugger all day, the teacher bugger them…the teacher bugger each other…you are so civilized…so Christian…but I am the Christian…I read Christ’s life and I loav Him. Do you not loav Him?”
Greene had stopped laughing. He was afraid. He knew an attempt to get out of the hammock would ensnare him in canvass and ropes; then he would be a prisoner in the grasping hands of the angry ape.
“I don’t know,” Greene managed. “I don’t know if I love Him.”
Roberto stood up. He began muttering in Italian. His bare torso loomed over Greene, who looked down and glimpsed the sailor’s erect penis. “I teach you,” Roberto said. “I teach you to loav.” He raised his forearm like a fat hambone. Greene turned his head. He didn’t care if Roberto hit him. He would feel nothing; maybe it would knock the fear out of him. Roberto struck a glancing blow, more a slap than a punch, at Greene’s face. Greene heard a sharp crack; he felt a jolting shock but no pain; then he tasted blood from a split lip. Roberto grabbed the hammock with both hands and flung himself on top of Greene. The ropes snapped and the canvass collapsed onto the muddy ground. Roberto’s body slithered over Greene’s as he maneuvered to pin the younger man to the canvass; his forearms crushed Greene’s biceps; he tried to kiss Greene on the lips, tasted blood and spit it out with a harsh epithet in Italian. Roberto began to shimmy with his hips– he looked at Greene; he smiled; Greene wanted to heave from the sickly breath and churning fear—then the rampant sailor picked up the pace until his hips were grating against Greene’s belly and groin with bone-crushing force; Roberto closed his eyes, moaned, and then collapsed in a sprawl, his hands clutching at Greene’s arms, half his naked body lolling in the mud.
Greene felt nothing at first. He labored to settle his stomach and steady his hands. There was no pain, not even fear, just a slightly nauseous emptiness as if his body had been slit open and gutted like a fish. He waited, motionless, attentive. Soon, he realized the immediate danger had passed. Roberto was groggy, restless–his body twitched every so often like a beached shark—he muttered in Italian.
Greene slid gingerly from under the sailor’s bulk. Roberto rolled onto his side but with little animation, like a hibernating bear disturbed in his lair. Greene stood up. Roberto looked up at him with plaintive eyes. He raised his hand. “I sorry,” he said. “I loav you.”
Greene wanted to spit at the prone figure but thought better of it. “I’m sorry too,” he said. He stared at Roberto. He was disgusted by the sailor’s rummy eyes, the cloying words masking unspeakable brutality. He wanted to feel pity—the figure before him wallowed in mud like a plump pig—but all he could muster was scorn. Roberto seemed to sense Greene’s spreading contempt—he was about to break down in tears or tear at Greene’s limbs with muddy hands, or both–and Greene was seized by terror. He turned and fled down the path into the brush.
***
But Greene was barefoot. It was dark. A few steps into the brush, he was suddenly paralyzed by fear. What if he split open his foot on the sharp rocks? What if he slipped and fell sprawling in the mud? He might injure his hands or break an ankle or a wrist. He would be lost then, groping—or crawling—through a treacherous green hell of vines and vermin. The ‘silly thoughts’ accumulated—carrion birds and poisonous snakes might threaten him; Roberto could rape and kill him; if that didn’t do it, the tropical bacteria might be enough to finish him off…and it would be slow, without drugs, without a friend, raped twice a day, and not the slightest hope of succor.
He turned away from the path. He followed the moonlight toward the edge of the rainforest. There, he found a rocky promontory, with enough clearing to sit and even to rest his back, a few meters above the surf.
Greene surveyed his prospects. Without shoes, his world would shrink to the dock, the shed and a few square meters of beaten down earth…and it would be Roberto’s world, with one master and one slave. He considered scrambling back to the shed to recover his shoes but thought better of it. He imagined himself hobbling in the dark after injuring his feet only to confront the brute again. That would have to wait until morning.
He looked at himself. There was enough moonlight in the clearing for him to find the gleaming stains of semen on his shirt and pants. They were mixed now with dirt from the rainforest and the path. The stains looked innocent enough, as if tree sap had rubbed off on his clothes, but he hated the sight. He wanted to spit in Roberto’s face or slit his throat.
He asked himself if he was afraid. He wasn’t. It was strange. Nestled among rocks with the sea brushing gently back and forth across the beach below, he felt comforted, safe. It was not so much fear he felt as anxiety. He could not escape the coming trial. He would need intelligence and guile.
Did he feel dirty? He was dirty. But he felt less the sense of violation he had heard people talk about and more a gathering force of rage and hatred. He feared his own capacity for revenge. He doubted only his strength, and his luck.
He needed a plan.
Greene decided that, at first light, he would secure a fallen tree branch from the brush as a bludgeon. He would return to the shed, find his shoes and march to the dock, where he would guard the flag and await the afternoon packet boat. If Roberto threatened him, he would jump into the tidal pool. Just off the dock and waist deep in water he could harass Roberto or bludgeon him if he tried to dive in. He hoped that, like many sailors, Roberto might not know how to swim.
Would it work? Greene was seized by the sudden realization that he was in real danger of being raped and murdered. He had pushed away such thoughts until now, thoughts he could hardly articulate, thoughts he had struggled to tame or reject and words he had refused to utter.
What if it doesn’t work?
“Silly thoughts,” Greene said out loud.
A few hours later, John Ernest Greene was the first person in Brazil to witness the sunrise.
***
Greene stripped and trimmed a fallen tree branch into a suitable bludgeon. He stuffed some sharp stones into his pockets.
He approached the shed. He smelled bacon and coffee. Roberto, stripped as always to the waist, emerged from the shed. He smiled. In the face of Greene’s ugly demeanor, he offered a comic frown, like a circus clown in a sketch.
“Why the face?” he said.
Greene marched toward him. “Why? You know why.”
Greene halted. He stared at Roberto like a sergeant major.
Roberto said, “I cook you breakfast…we eat like kings, remember? What the matter? What trouble you?”
For a moment, Greene was disarmed, as if the danger had passed, as if the night’s horror had been a dream or a product of his imagination, as if he had been acting like a fool. He relaxed his grip on the crude bludgeon. “Where are my shoes?” he said in a voice meant to be neutral.
“What shoes?”
“I left my shoes behind last night.”
“I don’t know no shoes.”
Greene laid down his bludgeon. He searched the concrete patio, the area of beaten down earth, the mouth of the pathway, then the narrow galley in the shed. There were no shoes. He scanned the shelves. Nothing. The fear rose in him. He had been wrong to trust Roberto. He had let the brute deceive him again, this time with schoolboy excuses. Greene rushed to the dock in a panic. There was no flag either. Roberto appeared at the door of the shed.
“Where’s the flag? What have you done with the flag?” Greene demanded.
Roberto stared at him in wonder. “Nothing. I do nothing.”
“The flag is gone, Roberto. That flag was our salvation. We’re stranded here now…it might as well be forever…Is that what you want? Is it? Tell me, you stupid wog! Tell me, goddamit.“
“You no talk like that about God! I don’t know no flag.”
“I put the flag up yesterday. Now, it’s gone.”
“Maybe the wind take it,” Roberto said. “Maybe another flag inside! Heh? Let’s look.”
Greene brushed angrily past Roberto. Despair was beginning to overtake his rage. Tears were running down his cheeks. He thrust his hands into the shelves, tossing objects onto the floor, opening every box, unraveling every bundle. “NO…NO…NO,” he shouted. Greene stumbled through the door and into the bright sunlight that bathed the broken up patio behind the shed. He found his bludgeon, picked it up and swung it like a cricket bat. It made a satisfying whoosh.
Roberto appeared at the back door of the shed. “We have provision,” he said. “For many days…They come for us…sometime…how you say, ‘sooner or later.’ Until then, I no touch you, okay?”
Greene opened his mouth to speak but his mouth was dry and his throat constricted. He labored to compose himself. He closed his eyes for a moment. Later, he would understand how, in that moment, he had turned the tide. He dropped the bludgeon. He opened his eyes. He saw Roberto before him in a new light, what he fancied to be the ‘real’ Roberto, the ignorant half-damaged and half-brute slave of uncontrollable emotions, a man but also, and chiefly, an adversary. Greene understood, at that moment, his only hope was to defeat his adversary, not as a man but as an animal or a thing, and through nothing less than unconditional surrender. There could be no compromise. On the little island, there could only be masters and slaves.
It was then that he spied the coiled rope hanging from the wall of the shed.
***
Greene dropped the bludgeon. He wouldn’t need it. He accepted bacon and coffee from the hands of his foe but chose to eat alone on the dock, where there was a cool breeze and the scent of sea salt.
Roberto seemed more disappointed than angry. “You come around later,” he said. “We talk later.”
The bacon was satisfying. Greene was glad he could stomach food. The thought made him feel less desperate. Perhaps it was the plan evolving in his head that was settling his stomach and calming his nerves. He closed his eyes. He saw the blur of busy fingers, the snake-like ropes slithering in obedience. How extraordinary, he thought—the apprentice ensnaring the master! He whispered to himself, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first; and so it was two thousand years ago and so it shall be today.”
Roberto busied himself in the shed. He came and picked up Greene’s breakfast plate and mug from the dock. Greene didn’t look at him. Roberto seemed to be humming to himself. Greene leaned his back against the railing. He closed his eyes; he dozed for a few minutes but was unsettled by jumbled dreams. He woke up realizing his plan was not fully formed; that it might have flaws; that it might not work.
Greene reviewed his position. Without shoes, his movements were tightly restricted. Even in daylight, he would never get beyond the pebble-strewn beach or the wall of stone surrounding it. Because of shoes, Roberto was the fleet-footed king in the land of the lame. What if Greene stole Roberto’s shoes? At night, the sailor placed them on the ground below his hammock with his carefully folded clothes piled on top. Greene could try to steal the shoes and the clothes, but if Roberto caught him his fate would be worse than rape. Besides, even supposing Greene could escape the circumscribed world of the dock and the shed, where would he go? How long would he be safe? Without food? Without shelter? The packet boat, even if it came, wouldn’t venture beyond the dock. Roberto could lie to them. He could escape on the packet boat and leave Greene to a desperate fate.
The disposition of forces imposed upon Greene a logic which, at first, he was loath to accept—for his plan to work he would have to wait for Roberto to go to sleep. For Greene to then execute his plan safely, Roberto would have to sleep soundly. That would only be possible if he were relaxed and confident in his surroundings, in short, if he were satisfied, wholly physically and emotionally satisfied. An angry, standoffish Greene would put Roberto on guard; he would sleep in fits and starts. Even worse, Roberto might become enraged; he might rape and then murder Greene without thought and without pity. If Greene tried to flee, he would represent a constant threat. Roberto might sleep but it would be a wary sleep; he would sleep with one eye open, perhaps armed with a bludgeon as Greene had fashioned a bludgeon for himself or a serving knife from the galley. No, it would be impossible to steal up upon the sailor under those conditions; Roberto was a man used to sleeping in shifts, to being aroused at all hours by alarms. The only way for Greene to free himself from the imprisonment of humiliation and fear was deceit…deceit and sacrifice.
He said out loud, “Knowing you’re going to be raped in two hours concentrates the mind.”
Greene resolved on the need to placate his tormentor. There was no other way. He waited for the lunch hour. Roberto began bustling in the galley. Greene joined him. He assumed a neutral expression. He laid out plates, utensils and tin mugs on the stained wooden table.
Roberto turned to him: “You eat with me?”
Greene nodded. He didn’t want to be over solicitous.
Roberto turned back to the gas ring. He began humming to himself. His fleshy arms and fat breasts swayed as he worked. Greene drew fresh water from the hand pump.
“Ham and beans!” announced Roberto, as if ready to serve a feast.
They sat down. Roberto bowed his head. He muttered a prayer in Italian. He turned to his companion: “I happy we to-geth-her.” He placed a sweaty paw on Greene’s forearm. Greene closed his eyes but he didn’t draw away from the disturbing touch even though it made his flesh crawl.
“No wine?” asked Roberto.
“Tonight,” Greene managed. He felt he had said and done enough. Wine, at night, suited his purposes.
Roberto tidied up. Greene helped him. Roberto lumbered onto the patio. Once outside, he took a deep breath. He surveyed the scene with expressive, perhaps theatrical, relish. He put his hands on his hips and, through the wind-tossed brush, gazed at the ocean. Greene recalled newsreel film of Mussolini inspecting the fleet at Tarento.
Roberto, Greene concluded, was regaining confidence in his companion.
Roberto began tidying up the patio, picking up brush and putting away stray belongings. “Maybe it rain,” he said, “and we go inside.”
Greene was suddenly terrified Roberto would remove the tools and the coiled rope hanging from the wall of the shed. Then his plan would collapse. Inside the shed would require a new plan and Greene’s patience, his guile and his will were quickly running thin.
Greene thought fast. “It won’t rain,” he said. “It’s not the season. The Captain told me.” He tried to make his voice sound casual.
Roberto seemed convinced. He invited Greene to help him re-string the hammocks. They worked together. Roberto smiled. Greene didn’t look at him but labored diligently. He fumbled a bit with the knots to make the sailor believe his nautical skills were fading.
Roberto announced he would use the latrine. Greene pretended to gaze at the ocean. When he heard the latrine door slam, he sprang into action. Greene removed the coiled rope from the hook. It was skinnier than he had imagined but longer. That was good news. He paid out a length equal to more than half the coil, ran it down the side of the wall, anchored it at the angle with rocks, then ran it along the ground, under Roberto’s hammock and all the way to the next tree, leaving another three or four meters of play. Fortunately, Roberto was humming to himself. Greene felt safe and advanced to the next step. He covered the rope with leaves, brush, fallen branches and scattered stones so if Roberto tripped he would think it was an accident not a trap.
Greene spent the afternoon on the dock, dozing, thinking, planning. Roberto fiddled in the shed, then he seemed to nap in his hammock. Once or twice, he came to Greene on the dock. Greene pretended to be asleep. Late in the afternoon, Greene saw the packet boat. He jumped up; he waved but the boat kept plodding on its way to the naval station on the main island of the Fernando de Noronha chain.
Greene’s anger rose but was soon replaced by despair. He leaned his back against the railing. He burst into tears. He almost hoped Roberto would find him. Then he could appeal to the sailor’s better self; they would talk, confess, commiserate about the evils of the world. He kept the thought before him long enough to settle his stomach. Then he examined it more carefully. He imagined the scene in detail. Roberto would turn to him with a face full of sympathy, tears running down his cheeks, and say, “I loav you!” No, Greene thought, Roberto’s desire for him would be inflamed, not diminished, by a display of intimacy. The sailor would take Greene’s frankness for “loav” but, beneath the surface, he would sense weakness and vulnerability. Greene would not be safe; he would be even less so than before; he would be a victim ready for sacrifice.
Greene’s only solace was the fact that such thoughts reinforced his resolve. He had a plan. He would stick to it. He would win.
Greene managed to doze off again around dusk. God woke him up.
Greene scanned the wide, frightening horizon as the light quickly faded. His little dock on his little rocky point was nothing but a pin prick thrust into the indifferent sea. He felt he could be swallowed up by it at any moment. “And no one would know,” he whispered to himself. He asked God, “Why have you abandoned me?”
God did not answer. He faded from Greene’s dreamscape as quickly as the tropical sun at dusk.
Greene asked himself, “Has God put an instrument of salvation in my way? Should I use it? After all, it comes from God. Everything comes from God. Or is it temptation? I give in and I’m condemned.” His thoughts were quick and desperate. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he thought. “This is just an ordeal; perhaps it’s not a matter of life and death at all. Roberto is not trying to kill me; he is only using me, humiliating me. Surely, I can stand that until the steamer comes…if it comes. But surely I’m justified in thinking he could kill me, in a fit of rage, before we’re saved…if we’re saved.”
Greene heard Roberto’s voice from inside the shed. The voice was hearty, gay, cordial. Roberto was inviting him to sit down to tinned sardines, beans and Portuguese ‘green’ wine. It left Greene disgusted. “Thus spake the Devil,” he whispered.
Greene, for a moment, felt overpowering rage, not at Roberto—the phrase “sick child” rushed through his mind—but at God. “God plays dice with us,” Greene thought. “We lose and go to Hell. Where does He go? He’s like the Casino in Ilheus; at the end of the day, the house always wins.”
They sat on the wooden chairs at the wooden table. They lit the storm lantern. Greene’s appetite was poor. Roberto ate most of the portions. That was good, Greene thought. Greene poured the Portuguese wine; he was careful to fill Roberto’s tin cup to the brim, his own only halfway. Roberto drank with pleasure, even gusto, as if the packet boat were due in the morning. Greene was encouraged.
They cleared the galley, as before.
Roberto snuffed out the storm lantern. Greene watched as he waddled across the patio, removed his clothing and plunged into his hammock; it made a squeaking sound as it rocked. A crescent moon glowed low on the horizon like a distant streetlight.
“Come,” said Roberto. Greene could spy the sailor’s bare arm motioning against the pale light. It made him think of a drowning man signaling for help.
Greene shuffled towards his hammock; he tried to seem tired, casual, concerned with nothing but a good night’s sleep. He slipped into the hammock fully clothed.
Roberto laughed. “Oh, come on, man; take off those clothes,” he said. “Take them off…they all dirty and sweaty, like you…hot night…be fresh, like me.” Roberto gazed at Greene with an expressionless moon face. There was a pause. Finally, Roberto said, “I not touch you, my friend…I promised. Remember? Trust me.” Greene almost believed him.
Roberto kept looking at him. He was smiling but with an edge of anticipation; Greene thought he glimpsed the lust and anger roiling below the surface.
“Alright,” Greene said. He maneuvered awkwardly inside the hammock, sighing with exaggerated frustration, as he pretended to take off his clothes. “There! It’s done! Satisfied?”
Roberto laughed. “I don’t see no clothes!”
Greene, of course, had expected this. It was, in a sense, part of the plan—a quiet afternoon, wine, a shared joke or two, a wary renewal of trust…and rape before dawn. Now, he fumbled within the hammock in earnest. With comic gestures, he tossed out each article of clothing until the beaten earth around the hammock was littered with garments like laundry day at a camp site.
“Satisfied, now?”
“Yes,” said Roberto. “And you? You fresh now?”
“Yes, Roberto, I’m fresh now…and tired; I’m longing to sleep.”
“No! We talk! What else to do here? Two friends…talking…with all the time in the world.”
Greene pretended to yawn. “All the time in the world,” he muttered. He pretended to turn over in the hammock. He pretended to sleep. He could hear Roberto’s voice but it was muffled now. Roberto was still talking but he wasn’t addressing Greene anymore; he was muttering to himself, at first in English, then a mish-mash of phrases and then Italian; there was a curse word, a joke, a prayer. The rambling tapered off.
Greene almost believed he was safe; he almost believed in Roberto again, that the whole episode was an illusion or a mistake; he almost believed, as Roberto’s voice faded into the night air, that he might be able to sleep.
Greene closed his eyes. He dozed off. He was tired. Later, he would estimate an interval of about 30 minutes before a rocking motion woke him up. For a moment, he thought he was still at sea. He looked up. Roberto’s twisted moon face was peering at him from above.
“What?” Greene said. “What do you want?”
“Talk…just talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“But we talk? No?”
“No.”
“Then, you turn over,” the sailor ordered. “I want you turn over!”
Greene had no time to think. With quick, crude motions the sailor twisted Greene’s body around inside the hammock. Greene heard him give a sigh of satisfaction like a man pleased with a whore after disrobing her. Roberto mounted the hammock. It rocked and creaked, then collapsed with a thud onto the beaten earth. Greene clawed at the dirt; his nostrils filled with the smell of rotting vegetation and gas; he tried to cry out but his throat constricted and he began to drool.
Roberto slithered and jerked; he spread himself over Greene’s naked body; his weight was crushing. He grabbed Greene by the hair, leaned in and whispered, “I loave you. Never forget. I loave you.”
When it came, it was not what Greene had imagined; he did not feel the penetration as a physical blow. The pain was in his straining neck and shoulders, in his elbows as the assailant’s bulk ground his naked form against the bare earth, abrading his skin and crushing his chest and groin. The whispers and gasps hurt most: “I loave you. I loave you.“
Roberto relaxed his grip on Greene’s scalp; then his body seemed to droop until he veiled Greene’s like a heavy quilt. Greene’s mind began to race. There was no pain; no disgust; no humiliation, none of the electrifying vengeance that had, up until now, fueled his hopes and designs; there was only fear, the terrifying realization that Roberto might fall asleep right there on the mud-splattered canvass; that would ruin Greene’s plan; the ropes, the knots, the rigging—everything–depended on the sailor falling into a satisfied sleep in his own hammock.
Greene decided on a desperate gambit, one that depended on a degree of falsehood he was not sure he could muster.
Greene rocked his own body back and forth until he rolled Roberto’s bulk to one side. The sailor opened his eyes. Greene looked at him. He forced a smile. He hoped it would look sincere. “Thank you,” he said. He touched Roberto’s face and hair as a lover would.
Roberto smiled back, the casual smile of the self-satisfied seducer.
It was all Greene could have hoped for. He touched the sailor’s face again; he almost meant it this time; it was the face of a child, a sickly, abandoned child glimpsing a tantalizing hope. Greene lowered his voice to a whisper. He spoke to Roberto as a caring mother might. “I’m going to sleep in the galley tonight,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Now, you go back to your hammock; it’s dirty here. We’ll talk in the morning. Alright?”
Roberto nodded. Greene stood up. He helped the sailor to his feet and walked him to his hammock. Roberto was thankfully docile, as if years of resentment and pain had been erased by a mechanical ejaculation of semen and a few kind words. He crawled into his hammock like a sleepy child. Greene caressed his hair and his cheeks, smiled and quietly withdrew. He was optimistic.
Greene did not go to the galley.
He sat under a tree. The crescent moon had risen above the brush. Greene could survey the little world of the shed and the patio with absolute clarity. He waited. He knew waiting was critical to the plan. He had to wait until he knew Roberto was sleeping soundly. He was not anxious. He felt, for a solemn moment, nothing, not fear, not hatred, not even longing, just a pleasant ‘nothing’, the kind of agreeable calm he imagined athletes experienced before a trial…or soldiers in a war.
His mind turned, once again, to the plan. He asked God about it, but God didn’t seem to have an opinion. He tried to imagine what Mr. Thatcher of the venerable firm of Tate and Lyle would say. He concluded Thatcher would vouch for his “right to self preservation.” He consulted his family—they were horrified—and his acquaintances in Recife, who applauded his volition.
He looked at Roberto and felt pity for the lonely child. He wondered why God has placed him, John Ernest Greene, in the path of such a broken man. Was it a test? What was God testing? Who was He testing? He looked at Roberto again and, this time, he was filled with revulsion. Because of Roberto, he was no longer himself; he was no longer a man with a name and a destiny. There was no Liverpool, no homestead in the western reaches of Ireland with dull but loving and expectant family. There was nothing but enslavement, submission to another’s will, lies, and a rough, rotten landscape with no means of escape.
The sailor was sleeping soundly.
Greene forced his mind to stop spinning; he determined to execute the plan.
He gathered his clothes, walked to the shed, pumped a basin full of water, washed the mud off his shirt and trousers and dressed himself. He would not stand naked over his foe. He selected three coils of rope and slipped back to the patio.
Roberto was snoring.
Greene placed the coiled ropes on the ground just below the indentation in the hammock made by the sailor’s heels. He fumbled for the rope he had buried earlier in the day, raised it, ran it noiselessly over the hook of Roberto’s hammock, formed it into a loop, then coiled the remaining length tightly around his waist. Greene took a deep breath. The next step was literally do or die. He stepped sidelong toward the middle of the hammock. He held the floppy loop in one hand while pulling tight, with his other, on the length of rope coiled around his belly. Roberto was sleeping belly up with both arms extended. Greene was in luck! He dropped the loop on top of Roberto’s body at the level of the elbows and heaved. The rope emitted a whooping sound followed by a sharp snap. It was secure at both ends, one under the rocks at the base of the shed, the other around Greene’s waist. The loop tightened around Roberto’s belly while pinning his arms to his sides; it left the middle of the hammock bunched and pleated like a corset.
Roberto screamed in shock. Greene stepped back toward the trees at the margin of the patio, pulling the rope tighter. Roberto began to kick; he was trying to rock the hammock but the hammock held; his head bobbed up and down; he looked at Greene with astonishment and fear; he yelled in Italian but the words were lost in unintelligible screams.
Greene reached the margin. He wrapped the coil of rope around a tree and secured it expertly with a slip knot. Methodically, he approached the swaying hammock, picked up one of the coiled ropes below Roberto’s feet, swung the rope over the hammock at the level of the sailor’s thighs, formed it into a loop with a bowline and yanked it tight. The hammock contracted into a second pleated corset. Roberto howled in pain. The kicking was reduced to a constricted trembling. Using a second coil, Greene placed a similar loop at the level of Roberto’s ankles and yanked.
Holding the remaining coil in his hands, Greene approached his nemesis.
Roberto was whimpering in Italian. Greene could make out ‘Madonna’ and a few other words. There was no more kicking, instead a spiritless trembling like a fish that has stopped fighting against the line.
Greene peered at the dark moon face, disfigured by fear. He hated it, not because of what it meant to him but merely because it was ugly. Roberto, he concluded, was not taking things well.
Greene brandished the coil of rope. “There is only one left,” he said.
Roberto shook his head. “No,” he managed. He tried to sit up. Greene yanked at the ropes. Roberto fell back in pain, moaning. “No,” he repeated. “I am man of God. Remember? I loav Him. I loav you!”
“No, you don’t…you hate me, just like you hate everything and everybody, like you hate yourself and the God who made you the way you are.”
“Don’t say about God! I spit at you!” Roberto tried to sit up and spit but was jerked back by the ropes and the spittle ran down his beard.
Greene laughed.
“No…No…No…You no laugh at me!”
“I’m not laughing at you, Roberto…I’m laughing at the world, the stupid world, the world of Svenson and his men, the world of Tate and Lyle, the world of my erstwhile ‘lover’ in Pernambuco. I’m laughing at all of them. Most of all, I’m laughing at God.”
“God! No!” Roberto’s lips quivered as he raced through a whispered prayer.
“Yes,” said Greene. “God, the God who, in his infinite wisdom, brought us to-geth-her.”
Roberto looked away.
“Now, I’m going to talk to you, Roberto, and you’re going to listen.”
Greene uncoiled the rope. With one hand, he pinched Roberto’s nose, forcing the sailor to open his mouth; with his other hand, Greene stuffed a length of rope between Roberto’s teeth. The sailor snarled and shook his head.
“You don’t need to talk,” Greene said. “I’ll do the talking for both of us. You see, I already know what you’re going to say. I know it even before you say it, even before you think it.”
Roberto shook his head vigorously. Greene was pleased; the sailor would soon tire; he would stop fighting the line again; he would deliver himself; all Greene had to do was reel him in. Greene told himself he had become “a fisher of men” and laughed.
“Let me ask you a question,” Greene said. “You can just shake or nod your head; it’s an easy question. Do you promise to restore my shoes to me?”
Roberto nodded.
“The packet boat comes again next week; we can rig up a flag of some kind and hang it from the dock. Will you help me?”
Yes, the sailor nodded.
“Do you promise not to molest me again?”
Roberto nodded vigorously.
“Of course you do,” Green said, his voice dripping with reassurance. “There’s only one problem—I don’t believe you.”
Roberto’s eyes widened; he shook his head.
“Nor would anyone, under the present circumstances, believe you. You would do anything to save yourself and you’ve already shown yourself a liar. That, then, leaves me with a problem—what to do with you? I could try to imprison you, but you’re a much bigger and stronger man than I am. I would have to bind you in chains, if I could find any, and spoon feed you. I wouldn’t be able to sleep for fear you’d free yourself and, if you succeeded, there is no doubt you would rape and murder me. I can hardly try to flee myself, without shoes and without food. You’d let me die in the rainforest or come after me and rape and kill me. Even if I could survive in the forest, how would I ever get back to the packet boat when you control the shed and the dock? You see my problem?”
Greene looked into Roberto’s eyes and saw only disbelief and terror.
“Nor can I simply free you now as a gesture of good will; you hate and distrust me and will demand not only revenge but security. So, you see, there is only one solution,” Greene said. “I think you’ll understand the logic of it. I cannot let you live.“
Roberto shook his head with desperate vigor. He made the ropes hiss and rasp as he writhed like a cornered snake. Greene could see him trying to form words. His lips were trying to say, “But I loav you.”
“I love you too, Roberto,” said Greene. Mouthing the platitude brought a surge of hot tears to Greene’s face. He lurched forward as if ready to vomit, as if urging himself to puke up the days and nights of pent up fury from the anger and fear knotting his gut and crawling under this skin. He whispered, “I love you as a brother, as I love all men.”
Roberto’s eyes pleaded with him. Greene stiffened. “But I have the right to preserve my own life,” he said. “Doesn’t Abel have the right to kill Cain in self-defense?”
Roberto shook his head in terror.
“No, Roberto, it’s clear that, if I free you, you would be obliged to kill me. Here, you can make me fear you, but out there…” Greene pointed to the ocean. “If we are picked up together by the packet boat, you will fear me! What if I tell my story? To the authorities? Here? Or in England? To the ship’s owners?”
Roberto shook his head.
“Yes, Roberto, face the truth. People will believe me, the Tate and Lyle clerk straight out from Trinity College to the dumb tropical wilderness, from civilization to the jungle. They’ll believe me as against the queer Italian ruffian from a stinking banana boat. So, you see, Roberto, there is only one solution…I have to kill you.“
Roberto turned away.
“Now, look at it from my perspective,” Greene continued. “The risk, for me, is extremely low, almost nil. The packet boat will come and pick up only me. They will know nothing of the Celtic Hope, which will, in any case, be long gone. I will tell them a story and they will believe it…if they even care. Maybe, someday, someone will ask about the queer Italian sailor Roberto who has gone missing, but by then the Celtic Hope will be scrap, Svenson will be fishing in Sweden and the hateful crew scattered across the seven seas. Roberto will be forgotten…and no one will miss him.”
Tears filled Roberto’s eyes, streamed down his cheeks and cut rivulets into his beard.
Greene looked at him with tender pity, like a mother sitting with a sick child. “I am your savior, Roberto,” he said. “I am John the Divine. I’m sending you back to the God who made you. I’m ending your shame and taking all the guilt onto myself. All you have to do is beg forgiveness for your sins ‘and this day you will see Paradise.'”
Roberto tried to mouth a prayer.
“Good,” said Greene. “That’s good.”
The time had come. Greene withdrew the rope from Roberto’s mouth. The sailor took a series of deep breaths. His chest heaved. He smiled as if expecting deliverance.
“No, Roberto,” Greene said. “It must be so.”
Greene turned away, formed the rope into a loop, as before; he dropped the loop onto the hammock at the level of Roberto’s neck. He stepped away, as before, and yanked the rope until the noose jerked tight. Roberto cried out, a shrill, high-pitched whistle like a mad dog yelping. Then Greene heard a sharp, bone-crushing snap. He realized he had broken Roberto’s neck like a hangman.
“Better still,” he thought. “Quicker, less painful.”
Greene tied off the fatal loop with a bowline. He leaned toward Roberto. The sailor was still breathing but his head and neck were stiff. The breathing slackened. There was no death struggle, no commotion, no stiffening or relaxing of muscles, just shallow breaths that became less and less frequent and then ceased.
Greene gazed at the dead sailor’s face. Roberto gazed back at him. His mouth was open, not as if gasping for air, more like forming words into a question. Roberto’s pain, Greene concluded, was mental, not physical, a pain which had now been thankfully assuaged, perhaps in the only way possible, leaving Greene with almost no regret.
He took one final look.
“I loav you too,” he said and laughed, a giggly, nervous laugh that was hard to restrain, that made him forget where he was and what he had done, that put him in mind of misbehaving schoolboys in a washroom.
***
Greene had nearly a week on the island before the next packet boat.
He stuffed Roberto’s shoes with rags so he could walk again on the beach.
He found garden tools in the shed, dug a grave and buried Roberto in the forest.
He found a sewing kit and some blue navy uniforms. He ripped apart his green duffle bag with the yellow stripe and cut white strips from a spare hammock. At considerable expenditure of time and labor, he used the sewing implements to transform his collection of rags into the green field of the Brazilian flag with its yellow diamond and blue globe in the center. He ran a white canvass strip across the globe and peppered the blue sphere with appropriate white stars. He burnt a wooden serving spoon on the gas ring and employed its charred tip to scrawl “Ordem e Progresso” on the white sash.
He concocted a story as a lone English scientist conducting research. He determined to bury Roberto’s shoes on the last day and meet his saviors barefoot. He knew they would accept his story; he knew they wouldn’t really care.
He prepared meals and drank wine.
He read Conrad.
He walked to the headlands on the other side of the rock field and glimpsed, in the distance, the larger islands of the Fernando de Noronha chain.
He watched birds gather; he gazed at the surf.
He bathed regularly in the tidal pool by the dock. He found shaving lather and blades on a shelf in the shed. He shaved every day but allowed his mustache to grow in.
Some days, he felt profound remorse, sympathy, even attachment to the crude sailor. He would visit the sailor’s grave like a friend or relation, pat the mound of fresh earth, and toss flowers on it. He contemplated telling his story to the authorities, or to his family, or, like the Ancient Mariner, to anyone who would listen. But he always thought better of it. “If I have the right to preserve my own life,” he told himself. “I also have the right to preserve my reputation.” He asked God what to do, but God, as before, was silent.
On other days, he was consumed by revulsion at the thought of sharing a restricted world with a brutal master amid little hope of escape. He would contemplate spitting on the sailor’s grave, or even disturbing it, disinterring his victim and feeding his flesh to the fish. But these thoughts left him bereft, unwilling and unable to seek either God’s vengeance or his forgiveness.
He tried to banish such thoughts; he tried not to think of Roberto.
On the appointed day, he hung out the flag.
This time, the packet boat stopped. Two sailors in full whites rowed a lifeboat to the dock. Wordlessly, they took Greene on board. At the packet boat, he was whistled on deck and greeted by a white-bearded Brazilian Navy captain.
The captain addressed him in English: “Is there anyone else?”
“No,” Greene answered. “No one else.”
Thomas Murphy is a retired journalist. He is a permanent resident of Brazil, a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and married with two adult children.
