“’Ta bom. All right, Scotty. Do not have an attack of the heart over it.” He moved to the section of railing that had been removed from the promenade deck, allowing access to the unstable gangway, leaning over, raising his voice, speaking slowly to clarify his enunciation. “All right, chicos. You can aboard.” He strengthened his voice, making it stern, trying to sound older than his years and fairly proud of his success. At his side the blue eyes of the Scotsman twinkled. “But no begging off from — I mean, no begging off — the passengers. Are you understood?”
“Right, mon. We don’t beg.” It was the large man who had been in the prow of the rowboat, the spokesman, the obvious leader. The one with the deep voice whose intonations seemed to be calculated but never offensive. “No begging. Hear that, chaps? That’s a rule! Only music. Real island steel drum!”
They scampered up the gangplank, released, the last one holding the dipping rowboat as his companions spurned it with easy grace in favor of the angled steps, and then casually tying the boat to a pipe stanchion of the heaving platform with enough slack to prevent their transportation from swamping in the wash of a passing vessel. The cook on the freighter across the roadstead shrugged, spat over the taffrail for luck, and went back inside to a companionway leading below. In the growing darkness the gulls screamed and dove for the refuse he had strewn.
The four from the rowboat made it to the promenade deck, the first arrivals standing to one side to allow their leader to be the first to appear on deck and take charge. Their steel drums hung from their necks like forgotten albatrosses. The head man came up the steps silently and swiftly, stepping on deck; the others followed quietly, forming a small circle about him. The deck officer was surprised to see they weren’t as young or as small as they had appeared from the height of the towering deck. Actually, while they weren’t young, they weren’t very old either — in their early twenties, he supposed, not much younger than himself, and they looked much tougher. Heavy ropy muscles bulged the short legs of the tight pants that came halfway up the thick calves; open-throated shirts loose and colorful, billowing sleeves wrist-tight completed the scant costumes. Unlike many ashore they had eschewed the broad-brimmed seaman’s hat native to Barbados; they were bareheaded. Their large feet, also bare, slapped on the pegged planks of the deck, still warm from the heat of the afternoon. The deck officer had a brief moment of trepidation, a wonder if he had made a mistake, but this feeling disappeared once the four had pulled their wrapped mallets from their tight waistbands and begun to play.
For they could play steel drums! How they could play! They could really play! And with their black faces as frozen as ice, large eyes wandering only from their instruments to the face of the big man, their leader. Slowly the music seemed to even relax them, to remove whatever tension they had been under; they began to bend to the sound of it, holding their drums closer as if to ingest the music from them, asking the drums to be kind, to be good, as if they were independent of the men playing them. Their bodies now began to move, to react, amazed at the sounds they themselves were producing, wrists loosening, fingers fluttering, wrapped sticks flashing from side to side as if without volition. It was surprising, incredible, the muted sweetness of the music they could draw from the crudely hammered cut-down oil drums. Intricate harmony complemented the various themes, threading through the vibrant thrumming, each player picking his proper range and part without any visible sign from another.
They played the music of the islands, music of Carnival evoked ages before in distant lands for different purposes, added to, embellished in the islands — music to drink rum by, to kill by, to beat a woman by, or to make love to her by, music to forget or remember by — happier times, more exciting times, or sadder times, times when one would have been better off stepping in front of the perimetral bus or swimming out to meet a shark halfway — or facing a husband because it would have been worth it.
The ship across the roadstead now bristled with men at the rail listening avidly; even the cook had returned and was watching, a cigarette between his lips, pasted there. On the Porto Alegre a voice called from the swimming pool area at the end of the promenade deck — an American accent, one of a group there who had either elected to stay aboard for the evening, or were planning on catching the lighter ashore after dinner, assuming it showed up on schedule, or at all.
“You! Boy!”
“Mon?”
No pause in the pulsing beat of the music, merely a slight diminution in volume through which the raised voices could carry.
“How about bringing that entertainment down this way, eh?”
“Right, mon. Right now, sir. A pleasure.”
Volume back up again, raised by all four equally and at the same time, again with no apparent sign from anyone in the group. Well trained as well as skillful. They bobbed their heads in unison at the deck officer and the engineer and started to move down the deck.
“Remember what I told,” the deck officer said in a low voice. “No begging. I am too serious.”
“No begging, mon. I mean, sir. My word on it.”
It was the large man, the leader, his white teeth flashing in the growing dimness of the evening. Colored lights suddenly sprang into being along the windowed saloon wall, hanging in loops, the bulbs like beads, casting blues and yellows and greens and reds over the deserted deckchairs. Beneath them the leader of the group seemed to loom even larger, his shadow leading the shadows of his companions down the deck toward the pool. He paused to turn, studying the deck officer, grinning almost childishly.
“Maybe tips, though, sir? They force them to us, like, mon?”
The deck officer turned to the engineer with a faint frown of nonunderstanding.
“Tips?”
“Gorjetas.” The engineer didn’t know too much Portuguese, but gorjetas was a word you learned quickly in Brazil or you didn’t eat, at least not in restaurants.
The deck officer sighed helplessly in face of that wide hopeful grin. “No begging, but all right, I guess. Tips.” He watched the four move toward the swimming pool.
“The old man won’t hang you,” the Scottish engineer said dryly, and removed his cigar to spit in the ocean. He was careful to direct it well away from the small craft rising and falling rhythmically at the end of the ship’s ladder.
“You mean he won’t hang you,” said the deck officer in Portuguese, and grinned.
The steel-drum band played their tantalizing music all around the promenade deck, pausing for the group at the pool, and later for another group of people on the lee side of the ship, staring somberly at the last fan-shaped shafts of light sent up by the dying sunset to fringe the low-lying clouds on the horizon with crimsons and purples. They were an elderly group, lying back in their deckchairs as if determined to avoid the pleasures of Carnival — or even the sight or sound of it ashore — at any cost. The Americans sitting about the pool had been noisy, but they had tipped generously. The group on the lee side of the ship had not tipped at all. The four steel-drum players honored their promise not to beg.
They carried their soft throbbing beat through the main saloon, their bare toes sinking luxuriously into the thick, rich carpeting. They danced as they played now, short mincing steps first to one side, then to the other, their lithe bodies swaying in accompaniment, sleeves billowing, eyes rolling in ecstasy exaggerated or real. They played and danced past the surprised bartender idly shining glasses at the curved, deserted bar — normally crowded at this cocktail hour but empty this Carnival night — past the abandoned bandstand, piano closed and locked, bass fiddle tilted drunkenly against the wall as if sleeping standing up, with the polished parquet of the oval dance floor cool beneath their feet. They played past the door to the ship’s library, also locked, and the empty card room, back on carpet once again, then through the wide glass doors to the area before the ship’s shop, closed in port by law, their bare feet enjoying cold linoleum now. They twisted and pranced and quietly pounded their rippling rhythm down the broad staircase to the main deck and the purser’s square, empty except for an assistant purser sitting behind the desk, reading a novel in lieu of something more exciting to do. There are always martyrs among the crew when a ship is in port, at least one from the purser’s staff.