Barnacle Love (2 page)

“Your supper will be ready soon,” and she slammed the door.

They had not spoken. The night before he left, his mother had locked herself in her room. He found a package, brown folded paper tied neatly with trussing string, outside her bedroom door. He knew she wouldn’t come out. It had been too painful the first time, fifteen years back, when she had wrapped some cheese, bread,
chouriço
, and a few loose sheets of paper and bundled them all together with an embroidered dishtowel before she embraced her husband Antonio for the last time.

Manuel untied the knots, their whorls flicking against the parcel. He stood in front of her door, hoping she’d hear the rustling of paper. He was mindful of refolding the paper and rolling the string into a ball—his mother could use it again. In the parcel, Manuel found a yellowed fisherman’s sweater smelling of ocean and, in a tiny envelope made of tin wrap, his father’s gold crucifix and chain. They were the only things that she had left of her husband; his body had been buried at sea. There were no words written on the paper or in the folds. He checked. He tried knocking, then stopped after three soft raps and put his lips to the door, touching the grain.

“
Adeus, Mãe
,” he whispered.

He couldn’t recall exactly what his father looked like, only his blue-gray eyes and warm smile. But he did remember sitting on his father’s knee and looking for the gleaming crucifix buried in his father’s chest hair. This was the same chain that he now placed around his neck. He swung the sweater under his arm and tossed his duffel bag over his shoulder, his fingers whitened by the strain. Later, tucked in his socks or wrapped in his underwear, Manuel would discover the gifts secretly offered, for fear of their mother’s disapproval, by his siblings: Albina’s embroidered
M
handkerchief, the copper whistle Jose used to herd cattle, and Mariano’s pocket knife. Also in his bag, pressed between his cotton undershirts, was a black-and-white photograph of
Candida, lips pursed like a Hollywood actress caught in a hazy cloud of smoke. Manuel walked down the silent corridor and out the front door.

He arrived in the cobbled square of Ponte Delgada before daybreak. The rigged ships waited, tethered to the docks; their white sails reflected the morning moon but barely rippled in the early breeze behind the makeshift altar. The altar had been constructed on the docks and bore the symbol of an intertwined cross and anchor. The sails would form the backdrop for the traditional farewell mass. Soon the square would be filled with crowds pushing their way up to the front, wanting to be touched by the priest, blessed by his hand.

Manuel once understood that desire and need. He had reached out as a young boy when faced with the loss of his father. But his trust had been betrayed and his want silenced. He hadn’t thought of Padre Carlos for a while. Some things were best pushed far back into the dark places of the mind. But the impending voyage, his mother’s inability to understand his decision, had awakened the loneliness he had felt as a boy.

“Those who serve me, serve God,” Padre Carlos had whispered.

He could still feel the priest’s hot breath behind his ear.

“It’s between us and God. Do you understand?”

He shook his head, trying to drive away the fear and anger he still held for the priest his mother had entrusted with her young son.

He opened his eyes to the early sky, ribbons of gold and pink, and the sounds of families trickling in to claim the coveted spots closest to the altar. The altar boys were busy preparing for mass, and the pesky vendors with their bloated and teetering carts encircled the square, droning, “
Pequeno almoço! … Pão torrado, queijo! … Pequeno almoço!
” Manuel responded to the stabs of the man’s nasal voice announcing breakfast by fumbling in his pocket for some
escudos.

“And as these brave men leave for the cold and foggy seas, we pray for them—for their work and sacrifice.” The priest paused for effect, then the homily continued toward its crescendo.

“And we stay behind: mothers, wives, children. We remain! … And with us remains the promise that only God can return them safely to us.” He lowered his head.

Manuel looked around.
Maybe they came
, he allowed himself to hope. He stopped himself by swinging his duffel hard over his back.

He would be one of fifty-three men on board. Together, they would spend days thrown against the ship’s hull, stomachs churning with only the veined whites of their eyes exposed to the bitter spring cold. He was the first to walk past the embracing clusters, the wailing women and the oblivious children. He boarded the
Argus
, made his way down into her belly to begin the 1954
campanha.
Unlike the other men on board who ventured and risked their lives for God, country, and family, Manuel knew that he would risk his life for a new beginning. He didn’t look back.

The pounding of the sea was relentless. During the long days, the men talked of the foreign trawlers that hauled in thousands of pounds of cod while no man’s life was endangered.

“But we are Portuguese … we need to protect the traditions of the fisherman.” Manuel heard these words. His eyes caught the streaks of orange embers coming from their cigarettes, their bodies dark and unseen as their hands gesticulated in circles or slashes only to stop and glow with every inhalation. “One man, one boat, one line dropped to the depths of the ocean,” another man in the huddle finished the sentiment. Manuel had remained silent for days. When he wasn’t retching into a tin pail from the constant motion or covering his nose and mouth with his sweater to filter the dank odors that wafted beneath the deck, he listened and learned: heard the men call him
Boneco
—doll, because of his big blue eyes and round face.

Once off the Grand Banks, each man was assigned his own wooden dory that dangled precariously off the side of the mother ship. These fourteen-foot vessels would be their homes through the long days of fishing. The thrashing cod were the only guests invited on board. At four o’clock in the morning the men were lowered into the black ocean, to push off immediately from the vessel—once one hit water, a wave could be fatal, crashing the dory into the side of the
Argus
, destroying the craft and killing the man. For some of these old dorymen it was their fortieth voyage. Francisco Battista Rego was the
oldest. Inscrutable, at sixty-two he had visited the Grand Banks forty-three times, so often in fact he said that he had forgotten what a summer in his native Terceira was like. The seas called out to him, and for months he left his wife and children. For six months of the year—from May to October—these men were his family, a family he had come to know more intimately than his own.

One night, as the men slept up against each other so as to keep warm, Francisco
Golfinho
, the dolphin, snuggled up to Manuel
Boneco.

“I’ll watch over you,” Golfinho whispered.

He reached over and grabbed Manuel’s hand, pulled him closer.

“Don’t panic, show no fear—the panicked are dead.”

Manuel could see the man’s stubby fingers, made rounder by his missing fingernails, encase his own smallish hand—as a father’s would his son’s. He thought of his own father and was comforted by Francisco’s protective words that came when Manuel felt loneliest, most vulnerable. Other men had busied themselves with writing letters to wives, mothers, children, or brothers—someone back home who needed to know they were alive and well. He could not write home, not with the way things had been left. Only shattered images remained. But the act of writing soothed him, so Manuel began to write letters also. They all began with “Dear Big Lips …” Then, in the cool pink of daybreak, he’d move up on deck and let shredded pieces of paper slip from his fingers like confetti.

He was physically drained. Here they all were, hand-lining for cod from their dory boats all day, only to
return to the ship at sundown to begin splitting, gutting, and salting the day’s catch. It was the brandy, the songs, and the old yarns repeated by tired, dizzy men that kept them alive. And every morning they would once again prepare to descend into the sea, push off from the
Argus
and venture far through the thick fog to drop their lines two or three hundred feet into the abyss.

Manuel awaited the promise that the tedious months in their berths would be broken occasionally by a visit to St. John’s, when the ship would make a scheduled call to replenish supplies, make repairs to sails or engines, and provide shore leave. Other times there was a need to land injured men or just to seek some shelter from the storms that tore across the sheet of black water and tossed the White Fleet like toy boats. He had heard of how the fishermen became a prominent part of Newfoundland life. They visited the Fishermen’s Centre and window-shopped along Water and Duckworth streets with the bits of money they had to spend. They remembered their families back home, buying souvenirs: toys, stockings, perfume, toothpaste. At the post office, the men sent mail home or picked up parcels they had ordered the year before from the Eaton’s catalogue.

One Saturday morning, word spread along the crowded bunks that the fleet would finally call into St. John’s before returning home. Manuel could scarcely contain his excitement. A blend of joy and confusion tumbled among the men. Some howled with pleasure as they mockingly groped each other like passionate lovers, or practiced their English out loud: broken words and phrases like
how much?
or
you look beautiful today.
Many went
looking for comforts, a clean girl, and certain houses were glad to provide them.

Manuel had dressed carefully and made his way to the deck. He held on to the smooth railing, leaned his torso over the open sea as if to breathe in churning air. Some of the men ran naked on the upper deck, drew up cold sea water and doused themselves, rubbed their goose-pimpled limbs and their stubbled necks with amber bars of glycerin soap. Manuel closed his eyes and then opened them again to catch the rhythmic beacon atop the outline of a distant shore. It was
Cabo de Espera
, the “cape of waiting,” as the Portuguese had named it. He had waited so long and it was only now that it had become so palpable. Manuel smiled.

Many of the veteran fishermen seemed amused by the frenetic energy that consumed the younger men. Manuel couldn’t help but think they were recalling a time when they would have been swept into the madness. Now, they appeared content to save their money and make a bit more by sitting on the piers, mending sails or repairing the long lines of hooks as they smoked and drank Portuguese wine. Many of the residents bought things from the fishermen, indulgences like cigarettes and wine. Some men had even developed relationships with families in St. John’s.

Before coming up on deck Manuel had allowed himself to feel a moment of guilt for abandoning his mother’s dream. He had carefully made his bed, the way he had been taught. He was afraid, and yet he knew it was the only way in which he could construct a future, for him and for them.

The
Argus
’s hull kissed the pier’s concrete side. Manuel scanned the enormous wharves, looked up toward the city of St. John’s as the ship’s horn blew and a group of pigeons lighted and flew across his view like a net cast against the open sea.

He stepped onto the gangway and slowly descended. The morning sun bathed the regular facades of the port buildings, with their pitched roofs and masonry walls, that stood along the road. With every step his eyes caught the white or yellow gabled trim, the paved roads and flash of glass. Angular shadows that splayed across sidewalks. He looked up to the teetering city built in tiers, splattered with green, vermilion, and white clapboard houses. It was so different from the whitewashed world he came from, and the moment his feet touched solid ground he knew that this place was his promised land.

It wasn’t difficult to find his way around. Manuel simply followed the throngs of fishermen as he dodged the cars and trucks that sputtered past on both sides of the narrow road. His first stop was at the Arcade store, where a pile of white shoes greeted him. He was told that the locals called these Portuguese sneakers, something even the poorest of fishermen could afford. Manuel was stunned by the sheer amounts of clothing and food; shelves stocked all the way to the edge, some things piled two or three high. The weight on these shelves made their centers sag close to the worn wooden floors. He didn’t know where to begin.

“Can I help you?”

Manuel turned to meet an attractive woman with a slight overbite that made her upper lip look full when her
mouth was closed. She was slightly older than Manuel, twenty-five or so, he thought. She did not look at him, simply looked down, held her thin fingers clasped in front of her, and swung her body from side to side.

“Thank you,” Manuel managed to say.

He crouched to look up into her eyes. His inquisitive gesture made her smile. Her eyebrows were thin and penciled. Her mossy green eyes were set wide apart, made wider by the way her hair was pulled into a ponytail.

“Is that the size you want?” she asked, pointing at the shoes he held tucked under his arm.

“
Irmão. Irmão.
”

“Mary!” she called out. She then lowered her voice when she saw him twitch. “Mary, he’s talkin’ in Portuguese. Don’t know what I’m saying,” she added.

“Brother. For my brother,” came out of his mouth, as if in answer.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now what size is your brother? What size, though?”

He looked down at her gold name tag:
Linda.
He pointed to her name and mouthed the word in a nervous stutter. When she smiled he continued, “Is mean beautiful in Portuguese.” Her face flushed red and her head tilted to the side.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

Linda had wrapped the gifts he had purchased in their own separate packets: shoes for his brothers and slips and stockings for his sisters—he smiled to himself remembering the embarrassing gestures made to Linda in his attempt to describe what he wanted. For his mother he had found a tortoiseshell hair comb, encrusted with small
crystals along its scalloped edge. He knew that she would think it was too dear for her to wear, but he wanted her to have something nice. Manuel had insisted that Linda clearly write the names of his siblings on their respective packets. He couldn’t help but notice her relief when he used the word
sister
as she scrawled Albina and Candida on the stiff brown parchment. Everything needed to be wrapped well, for the packets would be sent home by mail. Linda directed him to the post office.