Free The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman Page A

angry,
fucks
and
mothuhfucks
but otherwise theycouldn’t understand a word he was saying. Then some of the others—looking up from the end of the pier or walking slowly towards him, eyes up to see what he was pointing at—began to shout and laugh too. A bottle smashed against the anchor windlass, near where Canario and Roque Balboa were crouching, glass spraying over their backs. Everyone pulled back from the rail when another bottle whizzed overhead. Esteban had been trying to picture the facial features of this one muchacha down at the end of the pier. It was too dark and she was too far away for him to see what she really looked like, but she’d so prettily hopped and flopped around, awakening something inside him that was screaming for prettiness and hopping and flopping, her eyes bright, her braids flying, sí pues, she’d really gotten him going for a bit, imagining the love affair, inviting her up into his cabin and finally running away with her into a new city life of hopping and flopping and fucking and everything else—But look, there she is screaming up and laughing at us too, I could drop a wrench right down into her mouth, smash those white teeth like glass too. In Nicaragua we end up not just screaming and throwing bottles, we slaughter each other. And they give us the best weapons on earth to do it. Y qué? What does any of that have to do with this?
    Some of los blacks seemed to come to the pier every night, and others came now and then or maybe even just once; they never came when it rained. The crew didn’t recognize anyone from the night they’d been attacked while crossing los proyectos—the one Esteban watched for was fat and wore a small gold loop in each earlobe. But now that they’d been discovered, los blacks grew more and more interested in the crew, actually seeming to absorb the crew’s silent, furtive presence up there on a darkened ship into what they came to the pier to do at night. Almost nightly at least someone took a turn shouting taunts up at them, usually incomprehensibly, though sometimes they understood,
“You fucked you fucked you po mothuhfucksfucked …,”
on and on like a chant. Then at least El Barbie shouting back that they could go fuck their putamadres and suck on their putamadres’ farts, always something elegant like that. Los blacks seemed to know something about the
Urus;
it was as if they’d somehow figured out what the crew’s situation was.They spray-painted DEATH SHIP on the grain elevator, and skulls over crossed bones, and another night someone even wrote, CAGUERO DE LA MUERTE , which seemed to mean “Shitter of Death,” though they probably meant “Cargo Ship of Death,” leaving out the
r
in
carguero,
but, the grain elevator being the crew’s latrine, maybe they did mean that. They scribbled with spray paint all over the generator and compressors’ shields.
    Esteban and the others talked it over at length one night. “This thing that is happening to us here,” said Esteban, trying to imitate the slow, somber, reasoning-out-loud tone of his political officer in the BLI, “seems funny to them. But it also seems to make them angry. Why? Bueno…,” and his index finger froze pensively over his lips—chocho, there was an impressive word his political officer might have used to explain this situation, what was it?
    “Because what is happening to us here, vos Piri”—El Barbie sneered—“is very funny, but it also makes them sick to live on the same planet with a bunch of helpless losers who don’t know how to fight back. The stone fits the frog, no?”
    The cook growled, “That is unjust.” And El Faro, squinting around at everybody without his eyeglasses and excitedly nodding, exclaimed, “Sí pues! Fight back!” While Bernardo glared at El Barbie the way he always does whenever anyone taunts Esteban with the name Piri.
    But Esteban was sitting on deck with his index finger still curled against his upper lip, because he’d suddenly