Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

"It will be next time, sure!" he would say in order to console himself for having to part with his nephew's son; and after a few months had passed by, he would reappear, each time larger, uglier, more tanned, with a silent smile which broke into words before Ulysses just as tempestuous clouds break forth in thunder claps.

Upon his return from a trip to the Black Sea, Doña Cristina announced to her son: "Your uncle has died."

The pious señora lamented as a Christian the departure of her brother-in-law, dedicating a part of her prayers to him; but she insisted with a certain cruelty in giving an account of his sad end, for she had never been able to pardon his fatal intervention in the destiny of Ulysses. He had died as he had lived,—in the sea, a victim, of his own rashness, without confession, just like any pagan.

Another legacy thus fell to Ferragut…. His uncle had gone out swimming one sunny, winter morning and had never come back. The old folks on the shore had their way of explaining how the accident had happened,—a fainting spell probably, a clash against the rocks. The Dotor was still vigorous, but the years do not pass without leaving their footprints. Some believed that he must have had a struggle with a shark or some other of the carnivorous fish that abound in the Mediterranean waters. In vain the fishermen guided their skiffs through all the twisting entrances and exits of the waters around the promontory, exploring the gloomy caves and the lower depths of crystalline transparency. No one was ever able to find the Triton's body.

Ferragut recalled the cortege of Aphrodite which the doctor had so often described to him on summer evenings, by the light of the far-away gleam of the lighthouse. Perhaps he had come upon that gay retinue of nereids, joining it forever!

This absurd supposition that Ulysses mentally formulated with a sad and incredulous smile, frequently recurred in the simple thoughts of many of the people of the Marina.

They refused to believe in his death. A wizard is never drowned. He must have found down below something very interesting and when he got tired of living in the green depths, he would probably some day come swimming back home.

No: the Dotor had not died.

And for many years afterwards the women who were going along the coast at nightfall would quicken their steps, crossing themselves upon distinguishing on the dark waters a bit of wood or a bunch of sea weed. They feared that suddenly would spring forth the Triton, bearded, dripping, spouting, returning from his excursion into the mysterious depths of the sea.

CHAPTER IV

FREYA

The name of Ulysses Ferragut began to be famous among the captains of the Spanish ports, although the nautical adventures of his early days contributed very little to this popularity. The most of them had encountered greater dangers, but they appreciated him because of the instinctive respect that energetic and simple men have for an intelligence which they consider superior to their own. Reading nothing except what pertained to their career, they used to speak with consternation of the numerous books that filled Ferragut's stateroom, many of them upon matters which appeared to them most mysterious. Some even made inexact statements in order to enlarge the prestige of their comrade.

"He knows much…. He is a lawyer as well as a sailor."

Consideration of his fortune also contributed to the general appreciation. He was an important share-holder of the company by which he was employed. His companions loved to calculate with proud exaggeration the riches of his mother, piling it up into millions.

He met friends on every ship carrying the Spanish flag, whatever might be its home port or the nationality of its crews.

They all liked him:—the Basque captains, economical in words, rude and sparing in affectionate discourse; the Asturian and Galician captains, self-confident and spendthrift in strange contrast to their sobriety and avaricious character when ashore; the Andalusian captains, reflecting in their witty talk white Cadiz and its luminous wines; the Valencian captains who talk of politics on the bridge, imagining that they are going to become the navy of a future republic; and the captains from Catalunia and Mallorca as thoroughly acquainted with business affairs as are their ship-owners. Whenever necessity obliged them to defend their rights, they immediately thought of Ulysses. Nobody could write as he could.

The old mates who had worked their way up from the lower ranks, men of the sea who had begun their career on coasting vessels and could only with great difficulty adjust their practical knowledge to the handling of books, used to speak of Ferragut with pride.

"They say that men of the sea are an uncultivated people…. Here they have Don Luis who is one of us. They may ask him whatever they wish…. A real sage!"

The name of Ulysses always made them stammer. They believed it a nickname, and not wishing to show any lack of respect, they had finally transformed it into "Don Luis." For some of them, Ferragut's only defect was his good luck. So far not a single boat of which he had had command had been lost. And every sailor constantly on the sea ought to have at least one of these misfortunes in his history in order to be a real captain. Only landlubbers never lose their boats.

When his mother died, Ulysses was very undecided about the future, not knowing whether to continue his sea life, or undertake something entirely different. His relatives at Barcelona, merchants quick to understand and appraise a fortune, added up what the notary and his wife had left him and put with that what Labarta and the doctor had contributed, until it amounted to a million pesetas…. And was a man with as much money as that to go on living like a poor captain dependent upon wages to maintain his family!…

His cousin, Joaquin Blanes, proprietor of a factory for knit goods, urged him repeatedly to follow his example. He ought to remain on shore and invest his capital in Catalan industry. Ulysses belonged to this country both on his mother's side and because he was born in the neighboring land of Valencia. There was great need of men of fortune and energy to take part in the government. Blanes was entering local politics with the enthusiasm of a middle-class man for novel adventure.

Cinta never said a word to influence her husband. She was the daughter of a sailor and had accepted the life of a sailor's wife. Furthermore, she looked upon matrimony in the light of the old familiar traditions:—the woman absolute mistress of the interior of the home, but trusting outside affairs to the will of the lord, the warrior, the head of the hearth, without permitting herself opinions or objections to their acts.

It was Ulysses, therefore, who decided to abandon the seafaring life. Worked upon by the suggestions of his cousins, it needed only a little dispute with one of the directors of the shipping firm to make him hand in his resignation, and refuse to reconsider it, although urged by the protests and entreaties of the other stockholders.

In the first months of his existence ashore, he was amazed at the desperate immovability of everything. The world was made up of revolting rigidity and solidity. He felt almost nauseated at seeing all his possessions remain just where he left them, without the slightest fluctuation, or the least bit of casual caprice.

In the mornings upon opening his eyes, he at first experienced the sweet sensation of irresponsible liberty. Nothing affected the fate of that house. The lives of those that were sleeping on the other floors above and below him had not been entrusted to his vigilance…. But in a few days he began to feel that there was something lacking, something which had been one of the greatest satisfactions of his existence,—the sensation of power, the enjoyment of command.

Two maids were now always hastening to him with a frightened air at the sound of his voice, or the ringing of his bell. That was all that was left to him who had commanded dozens of men of such ugliness of temper that they struck terror to all beholders when they went ashore in the ports. Nobody consulted him now, while on the sea everybody was seeking his counsel and many times had to interrupt his sleep. The house could go on without his making the rounds daily from the cellars to the roof, overseeing even the slightest spigot. The women who cleaned it in the mornings with their brooms were always obliging him to flee from his office. He was not permitted to make any comment nor could he extend a gold-striped arm as when he used to scold the barefooted, bare-breasted deck-swabbers, insisting that the deck should be as clean as the saloon. He felt himself belittled, laid to one side. He thought of Hercules dressed as a woman and spinning wool. His love of family life had made him renounce that of a powerful man.

Only the considerate treatment of his wife, who surrounded him with assiduous care as though wishing to compensate for their long separations, made the situation bearable. Furthermore, his conscience was enjoying a certain satisfaction in being a land-father, taking much interest in the life of his son who was beginning to prepare to enter the institute, looking over his books, and aiding him in understanding the notes.

But even these pleasures were not of long duration. The family gatherings in his home or at his relatives' bored him unspeakably; so did the conversations with his cousins and nephews about profits and business deals, or about the defects of centralized tyranny. According to them, all the calamities of heaven and earth were coming from Madrid. The governor of the province was the "Consul of Spain."

These merchants interrupted their criticisms only to listen in religious silence to Wagner's music banged out on the piano by the girls of the family. A friend with a tenor voice used to sing Lohengrin in Catalan. Enthusiasm made the most excitable roar, "the hymn … the hymn!" It was not possible to misunderstand. For them there was only one hymn in existence, and in a trilling undertone they would accompany the liturgic music of Los Segadores (The Reapers). [The revolutionary song of Catalunia, originated by a band of reapers in the seventeenth century.]

Ulysses used to recall with homesickness his life as commander of a transatlantic liner,—a wide, universal life of incessant and varied horizons, and cosmopolitan crowds. He could see himself detained on deck by groups of elegant maidens who would beg him for new dances in the coming week. His footsteps were surrounded with white fluttering skirts, veils that waved like colored clouds, laughter and trills, Spanish chatter that appeared set to music:—all the frolicsome jargon of a cage of tropical birds.

Ex-presidents of the South American republics,—generals or doctors who were going to Europe to rest,—used to relate to him on the bridge, with Napoleonic gravity, the principal events in their history. The business men starting out for America confided to him their stupendous plans:—rivers turned from their courses, railroads built across the virgin forests, monstrous electric forces extracted from huge waterfalls varying in breadth, cities vomited from the desert in a few weeks, all the marvels of an adolescent world that desires to realize whatever its youthful imagination may conceive. He was the demi-urge of this little floating world: he disposed of joy and love as the spirit moved him.

In the scorching evenings around the equator, it was enough for him to give an order to rouse things and beings from their brutish drowsiness. "Let the music begin, and refreshments be served." And in a few moments dancers would be revolving the whole length of the deck, and smiling lips and eyes would become brilliantly alight with illusion and desire. Behind him, his praises were always being sounded. The matrons found him very distinguished. "It is plain to be seen that he is an exceptional person." Stewards and crew circulated exaggerated accounts of his riches and his studies. Some young girls sailing for Europe with imaginations seething with romance were very much aghast to learn that the hero was married and had a son. The solitary ladies stretched out on a chaise-longue, book in hand, upon seeing him would arrange the corolla of their petticoats, hiding their legs with so much precipitation that it always left them more uncovered; then fixing upon him a languishing glance, they would begin a dialogue always in the same way.

"How is it that any one so young as you has already become a captain?…"

Ah, the misery of it!… He who had gallantly passed many years cruising from one extreme of the Atlantic to the other with a rich, gay, perfumed world, at times resisting feminine caprice through mere prudence, yielding at others with the secrecy of a discreet sailor, now found himself with no other admirers than the mediocre tribe of the Blanes, with no other hallucinations than those which his cousin the manufacturer might suggest, when waxing enthusiastic because the great apostles of politics were taking a certain interest in the captain.

Every morning, on awaking, his taste now received a rude shock. The first thing that he contemplated was a room "without personality," a dwelling that was not characteristic of him in any way, arranged by the maids with excessive cleanliness and a lack of logic that was constantly changing the situation of his things.

He recalled with longing his compact and well-ordered stateroom where there was not a piece of furniture that could escape his glance nor a drawer whose contents he did not know down to the slightest detail. His body was accustomed to slip without embarrassment through the spaces of his cabin furnishings. He had adapted himself to all incoming and outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the winding curves of its shells. The cabin seemed formed by the secretions of his being. It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on approaching the polar seas.

His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ashore in most curious and foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his photographs fixed on the walls. The daily spectacle of seas and lands was always changing—the temperature, the course of the stars, and the people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of another hemisphere…. Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the variations of this world.

Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in the bottom of an enchanted lake. The sun traced over the whiteness of his ceiling and sheets a restless network of gold whose meshes constantly succeeded each other. This was the reflection of the invisible water. When his ship was immovable in the ports, there always came in through his window the whirling noise of the cranes, the cries of the stevedores and the voices of those who were in the neighboring vessels. On the high sea the cool and murmuring silence of immensity used to fill his sleeping room. A wind of infinite purity that came perhaps from the other side of the planet—slipping past thousands of leagues, over the salty deserts without touching a single bit of corruption—would come stealing into Ferragut's throat like an effervescent wine. His chest always expanded to the impulses of this life-giving draught as his eyes roved over the sparkling, luminous blue of the horizon.

Here in his home, the first thing that he saw through the window upon awaking was a Catalunian edifice, rich and monstrous, like the palaces that the hypnotist evolves in his dreams,—an amalgamation of Persian flowers, Gothic columns, trunks of trees, with quadrupeds, reptiles and snails among the cement foliage. The paving wafted up to him through its drains the fetidity of sewers dry for lack of water; the balconies shed the dust of shaken rugs; the absurd palace appropriated, with the insolence of the new-rich, all the heaven and sun that used to belong to Ferragut.

One night he surprised his relatives by informing them that he was about to return to the sea. Cinta assented to this resolution in painful silence, as though she had foreseen it long before. It was something inevitable and fatal that she must accept. The manufacturer, Blanes, stammered with astonishment. Return to his life of adventures, when the great gentlemen of the district were becoming interested in his personality!… Perhaps in the next elections they might have made him a member of the municipal council!

Ferragut laughed at his cousin's simplicity. He wanted to command a vessel again, but one of his own, without being obliged to consider the restrictions of the ship owners. He could permit himself this luxury. It would be like an enormous yacht, ready to set forth according to his tastes and convenience, yet at the same time bringing him in untold profits. Perhaps his son might in time become director of a maritime company, this first ship laying the foundation of an enormous fleet in the years to come.

He knew every port in the world, every highway of traffic, and he would be able to find the places where, lacking transportation facilities, they paid the highest freight rates. Until now he had been a salaried man, brave and care-free. He was going to begin an absolutely independent life as a speculator of the sea.

Two months afterwards he wrote from England saying that he had bought the Fingal, a mail packet of three thousand tons that had made trips twice a week between London and a port of Scotland.

Ulysses appeared highly delighted with the cheapness of his acquisition. The Fingal had been the property of a Scotch captain who, in spite of his long illness, had never wished to give up command, dying aboard his vessel. His heirs, inland men tired by their long wait, were anxious to get rid of it at any price.

When the new proprietor entered the aft saloon surrounded with staterooms,—the only habitable place in the ship,—memories of the dead came forth to meet him. On the wall-panels were painted the heroes of the Scotch Iliad,—the bard Ossian with his harp, Malvina with the round arms and waving golden tresses, the undaunted warriors with their winged helmets and protruding biceps, exchanging gashes on their shields while awaking the echoes of the green lochs.

A deep and spongy arm chair opened its arms before a stove. There the owner of the ship had passed his last years, sick at heart and with swollen legs, directing from his seat a course that was repeated every week across the foggy winter waves tossing bits of ice snatched from the icebergs. Near the stove was a piano and upon its top an orderly collection of musical scores yellowed by time,—La Sonnambula, Lucia, Romances of Tosti, Neapolitan songs, breezy and graceful melodies that the old chords of the instrument sent forth with the fragile and crystalline tinkling of an old music box. The poor old captain with sick heart and legs of stone had always turned to the sea of light for distraction. It was music that made appear in the foggy heavens the peaks of Sorrento covered with orange and lemon trees, and the coast of Sicily, perfumed by its flaming flora.

Ferragut manned his boat with friendly people. His first mate was a pilot who had begun his career in a fishing smack. He came from the same village as Ulysses' ancestors, and he remembered the Dotor with respect and admiration. He had known this new captain when he was a little fellow and used to go fishing with his uncle. In those days Toni was already a sailor on a coast-trading vessel, and his superiority in years had then justified his using the familiar thee and thou when talking with the lad Ulysses.

Finding himself now under his orders, he wished to change his mode of address, but the captain would not permit it. Perhaps he and Toni were distant relatives,—all those living in that village of the Marina had become related through long centuries of isolated existence and common danger. The entire crew, from the first engineer to the lowest seaman, showed an equal familiarity in this respect. Some were from the same land as the captain, others had been sailing a long time under his orders.

As shipowner, Ulysses now underwent numberless experiences whose existence he had never before suspected. He went through the anguishing transformation of the actor who becomes a theatrical manager, of the author who branches out into publishing, of the engineer with a hobby for odd inventions who becomes the proprietor of a factory. His romantic love for the sea and its adventures was now overshadowed by the price and consumption of coal, by the maddening competition that lowered freight rates, and by the search for new ports with fast and remunerative freight.

The Fingal which had been rebaptized by its new proprietor with the name of Mare Nostrum, in memory of his uncle, turned out to be a dubious purchase in spite of its low price. As a navigator Ulysses had been most enthusiastic upon beholding its high and sharp prow disposed to confront the worst seas, the slenderness of the swift craft, its machinery, excessively powerful for a freight steamer,—all the conditions that had made it a mail packet for so many years. It consumed too much fuel to be a profitable investment as a transport of merchandise. The captain during his navigation could now think only of the ravenous appetite of the boilers. It always seemed to him that the Mare Nostrum was speeding along with excess steam.