Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine Read online

  We stayed at anchor that day for the spring seeding, planting and grafting, and opened the dome windows wide to admit passing flocks of insect-eating birds, and the trees chattered happily as they went about their work. Unguentine discouraged overnight stays and nesting, however, and towards sunset he would go about the barge with a long pole and gently beat the branches until the little grey birds would fly away with a pathetic twig clutched in the bill and no doubt suffering under the illusion that there would be another barge such as ours within easy flying distance where they could rest in peace. Unguentine’s attitude being that we could not afford to feed them continuously; also we had a few pair of doves and pigeons. I was always saddened to see those flocks flutter through the windows and circle the barge a time or two before setting off in the dusk, a handful of peppercorns cast to the winds, and would have to rush down to the antechamber off the engine-room that was our bedroom to weep for the children I would never have, that being before I had the courage to do so in front of him. There I would lie in wait for him to note my absence. He would, in three or four hours. Finally when he climbed below deck after dark, wondering where his dinner was, perhaps with a storm come up and rough seas and blinding rains, I’d sulk and lure him into the warm and steamy darkness and from the hairs of his warm body I’d breed a myriad smiling, sparkle-eyed one-year-olds, my broods, my flocks. In the churning seas, below the waves, together inside our hammock woven in coarse sailcloth by Unguentine’s deft hands, a spherical webbed sack which hung and swivelled between the two walls of our bedroom, we would spin round and round with lapping tongues and the soft suction of lips, whirling, our amorous centrifuge, all night long, zipped inside against the elements. Now, years and years later, those nights, the thought and touch of them is enough to make me throw myself down on the ground and roll in the dust like a hen nibbled by mites, generating clouds, stars and all the rest.

  VII

  When was that morning I was out on the stern deck hanging up the wash on the line that ran from the distillation plant to the flagpole and back, thinking it no doubt not long enough to hold the huge basketful at my feet? When? Lost in futile reveries of far lands and times which seemed then more and more like erroneous transmissions from other lives, not mine, not of my time; and more so now. No matter when. All I know, it had been a long and exhausting decade. A wind had come up, a fitful thing that blew hard and then suddenly dropped, and there I was grappling with wet laundry as it flopped about and would not stay pinned to the line, and wondering what would blow off first into the sea, overalls, underwear, socks, or the whole line. I was bending over the basket when to my back a gust of wind blew open the stern door with a clatter. From inside the pilot-house there came a panicked shout from Unguentine. I raised my head. Drifting out of the doorway and tossed and turned up over my head by the wind, there sailed a large sheet of paper. In the nick of time I stretched to tiptoes and plucked it from the air. There were inscriptions, marks. I smoothed it out against a bulkhead. It was one of Unguentine’s maps. I had never looked so close up at one before. Fascinated, I let my eyes swim all over the bright mass of colour which depicted some hemisphere or other and which was scribbled with indications of sea-currents and trade winds and storm centers and mean annual temperatures, reefs, shoals, shallows. From the long hours I had seen him poring over them, I gathered that he was reworking them for precision and accuracy. A nice piece of draftsmanship, I thought. Some suitable, mellow hour, I would remind myself to compliment him. Then I realized there was something different about this map, something missing: it was land. There was not a scrap of land anywhere on it. Utterly bald. I gaped. Only water over all this quarter or half a globe? What? How? But soon he was at my side humming. Gently teasing the paper from my wet fingers. I let it go. The slam of the stern pilot-house door as he went back inside. So that was the way things were, I thought, and set about walking up and down the narrow walkways of the barge, snapping off a sprig of mint to press to my nose, pausing now and then before the long lists of nautical terms Unguentine had posted here and there for my instruction, in his concern that I use the right vocabulary while at sea. I memorized the lists, but to no effect. I had no one to talk to. Unguentine’s notes were terse, less than a dozen words each. It had been years since we had sighted another ship whole and intact, with living people on the decks, and I could no longer climb the dome and hang out great banners proclaiming certain unfortunate aspects of our marriage, inviting relief, rescue, consolation. Once I wrote a long letter to an old friend, tied it to the feet of one of our pigeons which I secretly dispatched in a midnight gale; next day I found Unguentine silently reading the letter in the pilot-house, his only comment being a grunt, the crackling sound of it being folded up, handed back. So I went on with my chores. What else could I do?

  Little, for life on our barge was not conducive to much more than just keeping it going, watering the plants and sailing on from climate to climate, and though there were times when I might wish for it all to sink with a muddy gurgle, there were also others, timeless, without cages, with only leaves and blooms and a silent man. From atop the dome whose prisms I daily polished the gardens were beautiful beyond any memory I might some day have of them. In the very center of the barge, Unguentine’s forty trees with an inner circle of evergreens, cool, dark, unchanging, and surrounded by a flowing ring of deciduous trees, the rounded and drooping boughs of sycamores, elms, oaks, horse-chestnuts, a beech with a white trunk, a red maple, a weeping willow and others whose leaves flashed from hue to hue several times a year. Beneath them, ferns and mosses and an assortment of tropical plants accustomed to a sunless housing, with freshwater ponds here and there with lotuses, water-lilies, watercress, cattails, and bright fresh-water fish, descendants of those netted from the mouth of a great tropical river we once sailed across. At night when all was illuminated by the powerful floodlights Unguentine had salvaged from an abandoned dredge, the dome as seen from inside reflected the gardens in its five hundred panes and faceted and rearranged all the leaves and flowers into patterns of nameless intricacy, kaleidoscopic. Nude we would caper then, eyes domewards, fascinated by the pornography of our disembodiment, as if beneath a leafy heaven and the limbs of lounging gods, as it used to be all painted.

  The barge, although sealed in against the elements, was always in need of refurbishment and improvement; we spent countless years towards its perfection. A vast increase in vegetation beneath the dome had ended up generating an acute problem of heat and humidity whose solution turned out to be splendid. The uppermost panes, two hundred in all, Unguentine uncaulked, removed, cleaned and silvered in such a way that a certain percentage of the sun’s rays would be deflected. With re-installation, the effect was successful. Also, he stripped down all the wooden casements and struts inside and out with a wire brush, treated the wood, then applied new coatings of a special hybrid lichen he had developed, a bluish growth which rendered the dome structure almost invisible in certain lights. It must have been during those long hours up on the dome, on the bamboo scaffolding, in the blaze of sunlight and atop the empty sea, the almost breezeless air, that he first conceived the way to rid ourselves of the steam-engine, whose ghastly fumes would fill up the dome in certain winds and cover all the leaves with soot, and whose ceaseless thumping all hours of the night often set off unnerving vibrations in the dome, angered the bees. Nor was there any hope of replacing the old engine, about to give out on account of the low-grade sea-scavenged fuel Unguentine fed it, and whose stop-gap repairs were consuming more and more of our time. So he set me to work spinning up several bales of fine cotton he’d found one day into a heavy thread which I then wove into three hundred yards of sailcloth on a huge spool; next I cut it into five hundred triangular shapes about two feet each on the hypotenuse, hemmed and shrunk the lot, and thus our sails were ready. Meanwhile, Unguentine rigged up cables all over the inside of the dome by day, and after dark pored over drawings and plans on the galley table in calculation of wind speeds, dr
ag, tensions, weights, control vectors, nautical aesthetics. With block and tackle and hydraulic jacks he laboriously moved the pilot-house astern two yards in order to have a better angle for the master control cable which was to be buried out of sight down the middle of the garden, secondary cables feeding out from it, also buried, like spines on a fishbone. Luck had it that out one day in his diving bell he hit upon a submerged cargo of pulleys, brought up more than the two thousand he needed and most in good condition. A few squeaked; he threw those away. Months passed. He excavated the garden to lay the conduits for the cables, a noisy and urban time with rows of ditches and heaps of raw earth, stacks of tile pipes, and the sea-driven cement mixer endlessly sloshing. The scars in the lawn were to last a year. Then, conduits laid, cables threaded and tested, the garden restored to order, and during a week predicted to be windless and sunny at our particular latitude and longitude, Unguentine mounted the outside of the dome and fastened down and hooked up the five hundred sails each the size of a manly handkerchief, each subtly controlled by the cable system from the pilot-house where he had installed a great lever, hand-carved and amazing, with which the sails might be trimmed at three speeds, Slow, Moderate, Fast.

  The success of the sails was so absolute and stunning that Unguentine immediately took apart the old steam-engine and dropped it into the sea, piece by piece. With each sail being the equivalent of one horsepower in a brisk wind, no telling what in a good gale, the barge was now capable of higher speeds in addition to being fumeless and vibration-free and became a far better place to live on, its climate improving markedly and the sailing of it a thing of glorious sensations. In calm weather the sails could be folded out of sight in such a way as not to obstruct the passage of sunlight on its way into the dome to our plants; with sails extended fully, taut and billowing and shimmering, the whole dome would creak and sing in the wind at the sky beyond, concealed behind a white mask which admitted only cracks of blue whose bright crescents played over the trees and flowers in the garden, glowing somberly green under this strange new daylight so much like life beneath an umbrella at the beach, as a child. Come autumn in some corner of the barge and piles of dead leaves we had no room for composting, Unguentine would trim the north-west sails, open the windows beneath them and all the leaves would whisk away as if sucked out by a great vacuum cleaner. Likewise, rain-showers outside could be directed and concentrated to anywhere within the garden down to an area three by four. At certain latitudes and usually late in the afternoon, the barge would generate spectacular mirages of itself on the horizon, sometimes two and three at a time, upside-down and banana-shaped, countless points of light blinking and neon, gaudy beyond all belief. I saw them often while atop the dome repairing sails, my new job in addition to cleaning the glass, and by far my favourite. When control lines broke, I spliced them back together again. When a sail needed replacing, it was I who fetched a new one from the hamper and scaled the outer fence of the dome. Many hours I spent up there alone and singing with the wind. Hanging on to my little bucket. My squeegee. My sail-mending kit. Replacement halyards, eyehooks, brass swivels, grommets. The mallet. The little block of hardwood, souvenir of the Maple Rowena, felled by blight, against which I pounded with one hand, the other clutching a strut, a ripped sail flapping in the wind. The view, when I had time, exhilarating and grand. There might even seem, as I would lift a sail and peep through the glass at the garden three stories below, the goat grazing at a pile of brush, ducks waddling from one pond to another, nothing else I could possibly desire.

  However, such was not the case. My anguish concerning certain aspects of our long life together always struck me most forcefully at the breakfast table. Warm mornings we would take breakfast to the very end of the stern deck behind the pilot-house, sometimes sit on the deck itself, legs dangling overboard, as seagulls threaded back and forth over our white wake and eyed our movements, our toast, fried eggs. Or more often we would throw open the back doors and sit just inside the dome and gaze out upon the seascape framed by the wistaria that grew around the distillation plant, and perhaps in the distance the glinting fins of playful dolphins. We always rose early and ate just before sunrise in the mists like mildew on the surface of the sea, on colourless waters, on waters lightly tinted blue or pink, sometimes yellow, calm waters flecked here and there with blue leaves and silver lips where a breeze would drive a ripple up. Several hundred yards out, that white line of foam which marked the border between fresh water and salt, for the vegetation of our barge generated so much fresh water that we were perpetually ringed by a sort of inner tube of it, a lake floating in the sea, over seventy feet deep, and where swam the hundreds of carp-like descendants of goldfish that once lived in our fish-ponds, also minnows, guppies, angelfish, bluegills. At night they would gain the shelter of the tangle of roots of Unguentine’s thirty specially grafted aquatic pines that grew out over the decks all around the barge, trunks and boughs cantilevered over the water by cables attached to the dome struts; though those roots, I cursed them often for the way they sprawled all over the decks and down into the water, being hard to sweep around and easily tripped over. Unguentine invariably woke with a frown. It usually lasted through breakfast. The way he raised his lower eyelids so that his eyes seemed to be peeping over walls. His expression thus fixed and while his coffee went cold and toast grew brittle, he would linger over the morning’s readings from the meteorological instruments, wind speed, the night’s precipitation if any, the behaviour of currents, air and water temperatures, the barometer, cloud-patterns on the horizon as compared to his home-made cloud chart. Now and then he would look up, nibble at a piece of toast, inserting the rest into his slingshot and speeding it through the air far out into the salt water, for those four or five aged sea-fish of his that kept following the barge. Croakers, I believe. During these pauses, I might try to attract his attention. Suddenly whipping out my make-up kit to re-apply my lipstick or correct an eyeshadow. At best he would notice, would knit his fingers into a basket for his chin, thrust his head forward and stare at me blankly while I did my face. I might seize the opportunity to utter a cheerful word or two. Ho! Ho! Such. But from him, no comment. He would lean back in his chair and plunk an elbow on the table, its riot of dirty dishes gleaming in the rising sun, and dab a drop of coffee from his white beard, squinting into the distance. His manner was usually to vanish for the remainder of the day; the skill with which he did this never ceased to startle me. His brusque departures seemed to be timed to the split-second to coincide with the kettle coming to the boil, or with that moment when the table-cloth was billowing away and about to drop into the water, or just as the cat was jumping up on the breakfast table, or at any of the other innumerable instants when a gesture would have to be made, when the reflex machinery could not be stopped, when I was totally absorbed in some brief action. The glass doors would slam with a clatter, and he would be gone. I was not to follow. The squeaky tread of tennis shoes dying in the distance. Or those little noises of his from the pilot-house, his grunts, coughs, the hum, the snapping of fingers.