Nostalgia must always be a strange bedfellow, but an increasingly familiar one as we grow past the first years of pick-and-choose. In the case of the views of freighter life that follow, it seems natural that they stay together, instead of being slotted in their chronological rhythm. This bunching is not based as much on wistful remembrances as on a realistic look at some disparate happenings at sea that by now are plainly part of my own nostalgic pattern.
In the first one, which happened on the Italian Feltre somewhere off the west coast of Lower California or perhaps San Salvador in 1932, the flash of perception of great human dignity was shaking, and it will last all my life. That whole strange “sea change,” which I wrote about in The Gastronomical Me, culminated in the night of the Captain’s Dinner, with the sight of the carefully preserved sugar image of the Duomo di Milano being eased one more time up a sleazy narrow stairway to the deck. How could the tired old chef face it and us once more? I felt desperate for him and for his dogged pride, but he was much stronger and wiser than I. He won again, because he had learned not to doubt.
In the second and less sentimental report of being on a freighter, Dutch that time, everything was dated twenty years later in private and recorded calendars, and although my own emotions may have been as knife-edged as before, I was more disciplined to divert them. In this case, I was more concerned for the two little girls I traveled with, my daughters, and we were setting out on the first of several adventures. It is interesting, at this distance in reading, to see how odd were the new words we took for granted. By now most of them are strange again, except perhaps for Hudgee-pudgee: sometimes I play a variation or two on its delicious soggy theme.…
The third inclusion in this peculiar trilogy is what might be called a “sport” in a litter of otherwise normal pups, but it is not to my mind the runt of the batch. It is about another Italian ship my younger sister Norah and I went on. (She was very much on the Feltre when I was … a fine and often desperate companion.)
It might be good, here, to state that in my experience Italian vessels are not the most commendable in commercial navigation. Nevertheless, and knowing this full well, Norah and I have often seemed impelled to sail on them, to try them one more time. Perhaps our reasons are perverse. We are drawn to the ambiguous filth and the uncertainty of returning to a continent we would prefer not to hurry back to: our own. We are drawn by the taunting suspicion that this time there might be elegance, suavity, everything that we have almost laughingly sought out, and never found, in liners and tubs run either officially or covertly by the Italian government.
Whatever the reasons, we have foolishly returned to them. The last time we did so, tongue in cheek but still hoping, was because we wanted to dock in Cannes, from New York. Instead, we were diverted because of political troubles to Palermo, and then on to Naples, in several extra days of squalid splendor.… First class on a transatlantic princess instead of classless on a Canal Zone tramp! It was a costly mistake on all our parts, and after the crew had been calmed down enough to head for Buenos Aires without shore leave, while all the families and girlfriends stood waving impotently from the quais, the ship steamed out and we headed wearily for a long dull air trip through Rome to Cannes. (I mention this simply to add to my assertion that it is perverse folly to put even one foot onto an Italian deck, “in this day and age.”)
Well … in 1954 my sister and I brought our children home from some years in France, on an Italian freighter. We knew it was careless and impetuous of us. We were on the reclaimed Liberty ship for more than seventy days, instead of the scheduled thirty-four. When we stopped in Cádiz and planned to skip ship, without luggage, we found that the terrified captain never docked except on Sundays, when all the brothels were closed, and that passports were locked away with the crew’s papers until Mondays. In other words, we were prisoners, there, until San Francisco at least.
The story about Israfel is as much a straight report as the other two things about freighter life, although it is not in their form. Perhaps what they are saying is that although people can no longer roam on cargo ships (“The container is our guest, and the passenger is a pest …”), we have fellow travelers in several worlds.
It is probably wise not to look hard for them in our present wide-bodied jets-buses-trains-cars. Currently, people in transit tend to pull into themselves and turn remote and dry. This is called self-protection, and certainly I have found that in public transportation I am apt to speak little and feel rather shriveled, and in private vehicles limit my relationships discreetly.
What can we substitute for long slow looks at other voyagers? They are there. They are here. Are we being told not to be human anymore, since it is foolish and wasteful?
So these three views of an intimate contact with my fellows, my teachers, seem to focus on one thing, that we are all at sea. And that is why a possible evocation of other times took over, goaded perhaps by nostalgia, so that I have put them together instead of in chronological order.
