I could not think of signing up for a ship, and anyway I had conceived an intense dislike of the profession. I had no aim to strive for.
I did not consider going back to Glencoe. I did not keep up a correspondence, like many sailors do who want to fool themselves when they arrive in a faraway foreign harbour with a piece of paper sent from a place where they were once at home, a piece of paper containing the invariable words written without heart or attention, as ridiculous formulae of a ceremony lacking all basis in reality.
The Irish on board hated the English, but I could not even draw closer to them in their hatred, since I wasn’t a real Irishman. But I couldn’t get on with the English either; I was even less of a real Englishman. So I was left alone and had only the occasional almost wordless friendships with the inhabitants of the Baltic coast and fjord fishermen who often find their way into tramp shipping when the catch is poor or their own poor country cannot fit out enough ships.
Yes, if the Trafalgar hadn’t run aground, if that cliff had not been on its slightly off-course route (the steering was bad and careless on that ship, one of the wettest I have ever known), things would have gone on like that until my old age. I would have muddled along, signalled along, listened along, until I had gone deaf, which in this business usually happens before you reach fifty.
The shipwreck had disrupted my life at this low, easy level. The impact could have helped me rise above it, and start a life of my own on shore after all. But I went under; the languor of my race, aggravated over the years, was dragging me down to the lowest point. I was only interested to know where that point was. And I started thinking about the how and the why and the whence. That is dangerous work for a person not firmly anchored by family ties; that is putting to sea without charts and taking soundings off an unknown coast.
I could live at this cheap hotel for a few months from my emergency funds if I spent nothing else. I did so and waited to see what would happen if I did nothing else. I stayed in that hotel, in that room for a long time. It had one great attraction for my body, which for years had been accustomed to heat: an open fire. When the sun set, I piled on the logs, set them alight and sat at it, in the attitude of devotion adopted by a sun-worshipper turned fire-worshipper. First I automatically dozed off. The evenings grew long and I tried all kinds of liqueurs. Were my efforts crowned with success? I will pass over that in silence, in my case not the “only true greatness”, but the admission of a humiliating defeat.
I cannot remember the date of my deepest decadence, but it must have been the year of the great earthquake that largely destroyed Lisbon. I remember that because it gave me the only feeling of joy I knew at that time. It was like the wreaking of a vengeance that had been waiting for centuries. It may seem odd and yet that was how it was. Every new report on the many victims and ever-mounting destruction gave me a thrill. When it was too dark to read, I picked up the newspaper and stroked the columns where the earthquake was reported, until my fingers became sticky with printer’s ink. Then I slung the paper into the fire and, as it blazed, I saw houses curl up, towers topple, people scorched. Then there was a crackle and it was over.
I slowly began to recover. From the only window I saw the sun languishing, the last brown leaves withering on the protruding branches of the beeches that moaned in my sleep at night. During the day I sometimes walked along the curve of the bay in the hope that the sun would once more shine fiercely over the foothills, but I never saw it again. I had to content myself with the moon, which in the evening would sometimes accidentally slide out from among the clouds; then I would sit at the fire again and fall asleep, wake with a shudder in the night, stare at the glowing embers, too tired to undress, and would roll onto my mattress and go back to sleep.
One day a woman I had known in the past came to see me there. I didn’t know how she had managed to find me and I never asked. She simply stayed. Sometimes I possessed her, with my eyes squeezed shut, on the floor or the window seat, just as it happened, but I didn’t lose a minute’s sleep over her. It had become too raw to go out. I now constantly read a book on the history of the three empires, which had the advantage that you never finished it, since by the end you had forgotten the beginning. The woman — strangely! — did not feel I was living in the underworld; she was quite content like this. I sometimes told her that she might just as well go, but she stayed.
One afternoon there was less wind. I walked alone down the road to the big port city that — how long ago was it? — I had fled. Then I felt that the sickness that had taken hold of me and rendered me powerless as long as I was on shore had left me, but strangely I felt not relieved, but rather very lonely, as if a trusted friend had gone for ever without saying goodbye. I would never see him again in this world. Was that not a cause for happiness? But it was as if the wind were rustling through the gaunt palms which do not really belong at this latitude, just as I do not, and were saying: “Gone away, gone away…” I leant against a trunk for a long time and came back home late at night. Much later, one afternoon when she and the weather almost matched each other in colour: her dull blond hair had the hue of the fading wood, her eyes that of the sky beyond, her voice did not rise above the pouring rain — I crept away. The light was fading and her presence in the room was no more than that of a ghost. Perhaps mine was too, and she did not notice my leaving, but I felt that my strength was now sufficient to reach the port city.
The sun was still shining briefly above the horizon, like a life lived in vain that is about to be extinguished and flares up again for a moment for one last time, as if the draught is blowing up from the grave and fans it before it is smothered. The wind began to worry at the palms and leafed through their ranks. I remember a paradise that I had wilfully abandoned, a garden sloping down to the sea, evergreen towards the ever-rustling sea, a cool abode containing sufficient for the frugal needs of one blissfully happy. What was I still doing there? I would be bored there now, since in the meantime I have been damned, but not according to the rules of the barren hopeless faith that had been introduced to the coasts of Northern Ireland by the dominant British (who have it so cushy here on earth that they can paint the hereafter in colours as ghastly as they wish). This faith deprived the indigent coast-dwellers of the only thing that, even as a delusion, could bring them a little joy. In southern and central Ireland people live drunkenly and happily, in the northwest soberly and disastrously.
No, being damned means being bored everywhere, except in the most wretched places. That explains the consuming yearning for polar regions, deserts and endless seas.
I walked on again with my head empty of thoughts. The next morning I was in Me…e…. The whole day long I walked along the quay, and at night I slept behind a few chests, woke feeling shattered, almost determined to return to S… where there was at least a bed, an open fire and silence. But again I walked along the quays; a big ship was about to depart, the cranes had already stopped working, but the gangplank had not yet been pulled up, and a body was carried ashore on a stretcher. I pushed forward and heard “They can’t sail now, radios have just been made compulsory. We can’t find anyone qualified.”
Radio? How long ago was it since I had sat in a narrow cabin with headphones on and my hand on the key? It was very difficult in my tattered clothing to get through to anyone in command, but once I unfolded a few sheets of paper from my pocket — carefully, as they were falling apart — and my identity and status became known, I was welcomed and signed up on the spot. So I again left my old life behind me and assumed my previous one. Forward, or rather backward, to the deserted kingdoms of the Far East with a longing equal to the hate with which I had once left them.