But first, I'd like to remind readers that today is the 98th anniversary of the Irish Easter Rising.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
January 1932
…Dangling from the top of a mast in the middle of the ocean, with a
pot of paint… and the smallest movement hits your heart so hard you close your
eyes involuntarily, feel you’ll fall any moment… then a little later you’re
panting, and have to take deep breaths as if you’ve been running…
I’ve only just come down from up there… we helmsmen never do that
sort of work, but Harry Viber the deck-hand died yesterday and it was just my
luck to be the first to stand in for him…
Stand-in for a dead man… a cold thought, really… I couldn’t stop
thinking about him all the time I was painting… he was a boy from Perth in
Scotland who loved the sea less than anything else in the world: he liked tea,
his pipe, and women, and he was always saying that as soon as he’d saved about
two hundred pounds he’d kiss the sea goodbye and go home to his own town…
Yesterday we sent him down to plumb the Indian Ocean with two lead
weights on his feet…
We’re crossing the worst part of the Indian Ocean today… we left the
Laccadive islands yesterday. Somewhere round here once in a sailing ship we
beat about for three whole days in a typhoon… when the wind dropped the sails
were just rags, and when the captain called the roll there were four missing…
A sailing ship… no-one understands what that can really mean… when
landsmen see them running before the wind, or coming into harbour all white and
proud, they’re jealous… I made a voyage in one that lasted eight whole months…
We left New York for Sydney one morning, with a cargo of empty
sacks. We were a crew of about ninety. On the sailing ships you can see time
passing without ever looking at a clock. That’s horrible, a torture…
Once when there was no wind we were stuck in the same place for
twenty whole days… twenty whole days in the middle of the sea… we ate little
and drank less, for fear the food and water would run out. We didn’t know what
to do. We fished. We climbed up the rigging… then when the wind blew we fell to
like cannibals, and a month later we were begging for another calm…
The voyage out took four months… when I finally went ashore I
staggered about like a drunk for hours.
I’d forgotten how to walk, and when I went into some joint that was
full of mirrors I got tired of seeing myself: some suspicious hairy character
in strange clothes.
On the way back, in Naples, I was like a lost creature who thought
it was a joy to wash in fresh water and eat with a knife and fork… I was like a
man who’d lost his personality for years from some strange illness, and was
finding it again bit by bit, day by day…
…………………………
In the Atlantic once, waiting for a wind, around the time the sun
went down into the sea a huge postal ship passed us, full of people, flowers,
music. It passed like a vision, so close we could see and hear the passengers
calling to us…
Covered in hair, paint, and dirt we watched as if hypnotised, and
when it disappeared into the sunset a lot of us started to cry; some of us were
so dazzled staring at the same spot we couldn’t focus on anything else for
hours…
…………………………
There’s a tragic story troubling me. Sailors have the worst faults
and commit the most fearful sins. I’ve got them all and I’ve done them all,
except for two…
He was a Spanish sailor. The Spaniards are always after that sort of
thing… I killed him with the very knife he’d given me himself… the captain
wrote it in his log and put me in irons until we reached harbour. In Ceylon
they handed me over to the Port Police and after they’d questioned me they let
me go at once.
I often see him in my dreams… with his crafty eyes and his evil
smile. Then I see the moment I killed him and I wake up. I’m not to blame… not
to blame.
…………………………
When I’m off duty for twelve hours I sit outside the fo’c’sle
thinking before I go to sleep.
I think about the things that have happened… Ah, how I’d like to go
back to the things that have happened. I’d give everything for one past moment,
if one past moment could ever come back.
For hours now I’ve felt like crying. I believe it’s good for a
person to cry… I remember when I was little I’d cry miserable in closed rooms,
I’d enjoy the feel of the warm tears on my cheeks… how I wish I could cry…
Once I had a cat… a little black cat. Black creatures always have a
special charm… she died, like every cat who sets its paws on the iron decks of
a ship… when I threw her in the sea and went to my usual place to sit and
think, I felt something trickling in my breast, for hours, and I realized I was
crying inside. It’s not good for a person to cry without tears.
I know how to read the cards. It’s a strange art. An old woman
taught me, in a brothel in Havana…
The way she taught me wasn’t the same as the way the gipsy women do
it in Europe. Often, when I read them by myself, I’m afraid. Afraid? How could
I be afraid! I’ve never been afraid of danger… I know what it feels like to be
drowning. I was in danger of it three times. It’s nothing terrible or special,
like people think. A short agony, just a few seconds… then it’s like falling
from a height, a great height, onto feathers. Then nothing more. Nothing…
Translation © Simon Darragh 2006.
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