13.
After so long, I have made a fire again. What a flaming! What a light it causes.
It started with some thickness of wood I pulled away from the Maria. I had the need to whittle, I had a necessity for carving, and with Harald’s jackknife (which is none too sharp) I went about it for perhaps three hours, turning the wood round and round, inspecting it closely at times, at others from a distance, that I might know it well and judge it truly.
It is hard for me to explain the small ecstasy of woodworking: the gouging, the chiseling, the shape coming; O joy of hunching over and turning the wood into something other. I do accomplish this metamorphosis. Perhaps I am a genius, after all, and—here is the pain of my glory—no others but I are aware of it.
I took that shipwood and carved a flame. The flame atop a torch, a beacon flower, a great warmth. A beautiful flame that, to my eyes, did truly seem to flicker and curve. I made movement out of lump. I carved a fire and it warmed me, as the exertion heated my muscles, even caused me to sweat a little.
True, my flame gives off no real heat. But it shall last longer than any fire. It is the illusion of flame, and that illusion is worth more to me than any real inferno. It is an idea, you see, my portable wooden warming. Sometimes I am sure I hear it crackle and spit! This one log might last me a thousand years.
Does it warm, in truth? No, no, I am still cold. I think I shall never be warm again. But I huddle me now, around my wooden fire, as if it were my child’s wooden heart, and I find some moments’ peace.
Did I hurt my boy, I wonder now. With the screw eye—did it pinch? And that hook, I wonder? I shall sit me now, around my fire, and stare into the flaming like an old whaler contemplating his extinguished seas.
The Maria, there can be no doubt, she is coming apart.
The ill-face has taken the forecastle and the wheelhouse. I fear to go out to that part. It is all black and charred. There’s no life in Maria, not that part. It has grown strange black roots—lying branches, snakes of rot and disease. And all black. The black, it is spreading. It is sprawling, twisting. The darkness is ever creeping.
Laura. The last in my inventory of women. I must now write down Laura.
(Am I truly to count Laura as one of the loves of my life? I think I might. I lay down the suggestion here, but I place it in parenthesis. It is for the reader to decide. I have told no one of her before, and write it down now with considerable anxiety.
I fear so much the telling of Laura. She seemed to me so very true, so absolutely real . . .
No, no, I do go about it in the wrong way. Let me explain.
Back when I had a little home, a room, gas was introduced to our town. It was the business of the town mayor, Alberto Crespi his name: the undertaker’s son, who once spied me with Agnese and told on us. Now this boy, grown to mayor, strove to make the town modern. He wished to boast of his own modernity—Collodi stumbling into the nineteenth century—and my room, being a portion of the town almshouse, was under his jurisdiction. If I did not keep up with my rent, my next falling should be the workhouse.
At Crespi’s direction, pipes were put in. Wall sconces—nothing elaborate, mind, but the cheapest available. I turned the tap and there came the smell and then the blue flame. Mostly I continued to candle-light my nights, but still it was there. I could hear it at times, very quietly, whispering. A little shushing it was, suggesting I might like to take a little nap. Sssh, sssh, it went. Sometimes I had headaches. They were new to me, these growing poundings upon my skull.
I had been with the gas perhaps the whole of a month when, one dull morning, there she was sitting on the end of my bed: Laura.
She had a neat black dress with a white lace collar. She wore sensible black shoes, like a governess. She sat very upright. Her hair had a central parting. Her lips were slightly blue, but there was an overall greenness about her, as if she were not completely well. Her eyes were larger than any other eyes I have seen in a human head.
She was there. So clear. But if I moved very close she was gone from me.
When they came to our street—my neighbor had reported a problem and they checked all the houses—they inspected mine with too much proficiency. They caught the whispering and they suffocated it. They murdered it.
Laura, my dear Laura—I named her so myself—was a gas leak. She was all methylethylene.
After they sealed off the gas, there was never more Laura anywhere. I called out for her, sat by the places she used to sit. How I missed her! Even if she was slowly poisoning me, what a beautiful, what a heartbreaking poison she was.
Laura, who never really lived, and yet I was in love.
Sometimes, lately, I fancy I see her here inside the fish, always just a little too far away for certainty, just out of grasp, just out of candlelight. Laura on the forecastle deck. Laura in the messroom, rocking back and forth, sitting in the black. Laura at the foot of my bed. Laura deep within the belly of the shark. Laura whispering and shushing. With the ill-face.
After Laura left me, so alone in my days, mourning her, I decided I must find some more solid companion, that it was indeed not good for me to remain alone. I thought of the puppets I had seen in Palermo, I wanted something astounding like that. I needed some other human form in my little room. And so it was that I called upon my friend Cherry, with whom I’d been at school all those years ago, he who gave the teacher so much trouble, he who now has five rooms to himself. [His real name is Antonio, but they call him Cherry on account of his entirely red nose—the drink, you see.] I asked him if I might have some wood, for I longed to make a person, a companion, a fellow traveler. A jointed child that could dance and fence and make great impossible leaps. And who might also earn me my living, for the workhouse had never felt closer.
It was then, when I was least expecting it, that I summoned life.)
The blackness has come down the captain’s corridor. Ill-face is taking over. A black root under the door.
“Come, come now.”
Thank you, Mrs. Tugthus.
And what became of Otto, do we think? I think I know now. I have the ending.
Let us quickly pull back time again, to the moment when he was still there, in the highest regions of his parents’ homestead. Up in the attic, from the window, Otto saw different things from before, when he lived at ground level. From that height there was a good view of the harbor and the boats and all the fish business. And he loved to look there and longed to be out there with them, but feared to go downstairs and out the door. He had never once been outside, not in all his life; his parents would never allow it. They were hard people, you see, intractable.
One day, his brother came to the highest door. “Otto! Otto, let me in.”
“Who is there?”
“Massimo, your loving brother. Let me in.”
So he did! And it was a weeping reunion. Otto hugged his brother hard; there was the sound of a crack, but no sign of it upon him though they searched, and certainly nothing had fallen. How much good it did them, to see each other then. Afterward, Mimo would come often, he would go upstairs to the attic and always there was a crack, but not yet more than that.
“I want to go out,” Otto said. “They will not let me, but I want to go.”
“Come down the stairs with me now. We’ll go out together.” Mimo was employed as a dockworker by then. He had the run of the harbor, and he longed to show it to his brother.
“They shall never allow it.”
“Defy them!”
“It would break me. I could never do such a thing. I try always to be a good boy. It is not in my nature. I would come apart.”
So he stayed in the attic, looking out the window at all the ships from all over the world. Until, at last, after so many seasons, he could bear it no longer. When Mimo next came—“Otto! Otto, let me in”—he let him in as usual, only this time he said:
“Hug me, Mimo. Hard.”
Again the cracking, but louder this time. (How the Maria does crack as I write this! It crackles and spits as if it were aflame, until I am scared to go out. I have heard ill-face creak just the other side of this door.)
“Hug me, Mimo, until I shatter. Then take me far from here. Scatter me and show me all the world. Let me go free. Hug me, Mimo, very hard.”
When Mimo did, there was a small explosion, and his brother fell to bits.
Mimo was devastated at what he had done, though it had been his brother’s command. In mourning, he began to distribute the pieces of his brother among all the ships in the harbor. He contrived to stow each shard secretly away, to hide them on board as he carried in the cargo. Days later, those ships all sailed off for the distant lands of the world. And so off went Otto, severally, to Tasmania and Ceylon and the Cape Verde Islands and Saint Helena, to Nootka Sound and the Barents Sea and to Cape Town and Cape Horn and the Lizard and the Arctic and the Bosporus and the Aegean. And though he had blown all over the world, I, that am an old man hidden inside a shark, was able to collect him when everyone else had forgotten. He came to me, in pieces, and I made him whole. My very best work. Save the one.
I have put in the last piece. Here he stands, companion—family! Made from sea pottery. Otto! There you are at last.
But, I confess, after all, he worries me, too. This is not the companion I asked for. It is not him at all.
Otto? You come from all over the world. Will you not move? Show just a little life? You keep so still.
Sometimes now, when I hear a crack, I assume it is the ill-face—only to turn and see small pieces of Otto falling to the floor. My fish glue is not perfect; this place is damp. Or perhaps it’s the work of ill-face after all, pulling the pieces off.
Either way, Otto lives not. Not for me.
I had hoped he might. I put his hands out in order to let him hug. But he is a stupid, dull Otto, and he does not understand. No, he is no pine-son, no tree-life.
Do I love him, poor cold Otto, when he snubs me so, insults me?
How can I, when all my love goes to my Pino.
Perhaps that is why Otto cannot move.
