Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). Blasco Ibáñez Vicente
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