A Salty Piece of Land
“Like to Egypt,” Cleopatra said in a dreamy voice. “Pharos Island.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Pharos Island was situated at the mouth of the Nile River near Alexandria. It is said that the priests who lived there fueled beacon fires in a six-hundred-foot tower that could be seen thirty miles out into the Mediterranean. For fifteen hundred years, wood fire, smoking by day and glowing at night, guided ships from all over the world.” She paused and looked at the tower. “Maybe even from here.”
“I don’t know about the theory, but I sure like the story.”
“Me too. So what did you lighthouse detectives find out about the windows to the world?” Cleopatra asked.
“It’s pretty amazing. When you put lanterns into the windows in a certain order, they deflect beams of light out across the water. The precise spot where both beams line up is the old natural opening to the reef—not the man-made channel that you entered through. The trick is knowing how to line the lights up. It’s like one of those Rubik’s Cubes. Dr. Walker figured that the knowledge of how to get through the channel was important stuff and was known only to certain priests.”
“Like navigators on ships back in the old days.”
“Exactly,” I said. “It seems that they were the only ones who knew which lights in which windows would get you through the channel. A wrong light in a wrong window puts you high and dry.”
“And I suppose now you possess this ancient information,” Cleopatra said.
“Me and Ix-Nay.”
“Who’s Ix-Nay?”
“He’s a shaman fishing guide I work with, and he’s my best friend.”
“And you ran this channel?”
“That we did. It was our job to follow the light beam and check the depth.”
“So can you run this channel, even at night?”
“Dr. Walker believed that the system was designed to work at sunrise and that the bearing of the sun and the small temple over there on the north shore was involved in the calculation as well. But we ran it with just the lights lining up, and it seemed to work,” I said with a sense of pride.
Cleopatra unhooked her clip and slowly climbed out of the crow’s nest and into the rigging. “I’d like to do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Run that channel,” she said calmly. “We came in through the dull, old, well-marked, dredged-out ship channel that any one-eyed drunken shrimpin’ boat captain could get through. I think we should do it like we did in the old days. Sail off the hook and trust in God and a good local pilot.” She poked me in the chest with her bony finger. “That, Mr. Mars, would be you.”
I nearly fell out of the rigging, laughing at what Cleopatra had said. I was sure she was joking. I also thought of the consequences of attempting to wake the heavily armed Hector in the wee hours from a tequila dream. “And I’d like to catch a twenty-pound bonefish on an eight-weight line, but that’s impossible.”
“Oh, is it?” Cleopatra said. “Well, since you possess a secret of the ancients, Tully Mars, let’s have a little wager. You get me a light show at dawn, and I will give you a ride on my boat.”
The words came out of my mouth before I had time to think about what I was saying. “My Jeep is stuck in the mud thirty miles from here, and I could use a lift home.”
Cleopatra was silent for a few seconds, and then she laughed. “You’ve got balls, son,” she said, “and you’re on.”
“What time would you like to leave?” I asked.
“We’ll have a little dinner first, and then a show.”
17
The Dance of Life and Death
Let’s face it, you don’t run into characters like Cleopatra Highbourne every day. I was so excited about the fact that I might possibly sleep in the guest cabin and be taken back to Punta Margarita on this ship that I couldn’t really think about eating. I did manage a shower, a shave, and a fresh change of clothes, which I was told by Solomon was part of the drill when you had dinner with the captain.
I thought I looked kind of spiffy in my blue Bermudas and white Polo shirt until I headed down the companionway to the dining room. Solomon greeted me with a smile. He was dressed in khakis and had on a tie, as did the male half of a collegiate-looking couple whom Solomon introduced to me as the other guests. The Estrellas were a newlywed pair of Incan history professors from Costa Rica. They were traveling with Cleopatra to the Caribbean side of Panama, where they would leave the boat and return to San José.
Solomon hinted to me that dinner was never dull aboard the Lucretia. It was Captain Highbourne’s style to always have a collection of “young sprouts” on the ship. Her present mission kept a constant flow of scientists, students, and crackpots on board. It didn’t take long to figure out which category I fit into.
I asked the Incan experts if they were surfers. They just stared at me strangely as I tried to enlighten them about the world-class surf breaks in their country, but I might as well have been talking about beach houses on the moon.
A waiter appeared next to me with a tray of carrot sticks. I recoiled as if it were a platter of vipers.
“Good for the old eyesight, Mr. Mars,” Cleopatra said as she entered the cabin. She wore a flowered muumuu with a hibiscus behind her ear, and her gray hair was tied up in a bun on the top of her head. “I have heard that even condemned prisoners in the foulest dungeons dress for dinner every now and then. They say it keeps them sane and human. Be seated, everyone.”
I was thinking how much different she looked from the old salt with whom I had just crawled up the rigging. I still could not believe that she was more than a hundred years old.
“You’ve met my other guests, Mr. Mars?” Cleopatra asked.
“That I have.”
“Here, sit next to me. We have much to discuss this evening.”
I dropped down in my chair and nervously adjusted my seat under her gaze, then looked down the long table at Solomon, who was taking his seat at the far end. He gave me a reassuring wink.
“I must say, you clean up pretty good, Mr. Mars.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I answered as I unfolded the big linen napkin and dropped it across my lap.
On a normal night, I would have gobbled down the plate of avocados and fresh hearts of palm that were placed in front of me by the chef, but nothing about the last few days had been ordinary. I remembered to chew slowly as my brain sifted through several thoughts at once. I was wondering how to deal with Hector, the Hendrix-freak security guard. And then there was the idea of running the channel by myself without Ix-Nay and Dr. Walker. I did remember the basic elements of the setup, but I’d also had Dr. Walker in the tower, not Hector. Could I keep her in the deep water? Would Hector get the lights in the right windows? Did Bucky get my message about the Jeep? I stopped chewing and swallowed. That went well. I took a sip of the Chilean wine. It wasn’t Sammy Raye’s La Tâche, but it wasn’t bad. For a moment, all the questions went away, and I took another sip and tuned in to the music.
Like everything else on the Lucretia, the melody and the voice were old but stylish. It was the same tango that I had heard earlier, wafting through the hull as we approached the schooner. The source of the music was an antique record player, mounted on a gimballed device that kept the turntable balanced as the ship moved.
“Who is the singer?” I asked Cleopatra.
“That, my young friend, is Carlos Gardel, the songbird of Argentina.” There was reverence in her voice.
“My mother loved the tango,” I said.
“And you have never heard of Gardel?”
“I thought of it as my mother’s music, which made it something I didn’t want to listen to. Besides, there wasn’t a big demand for the tango in Wyoming,” I confessed.
The music set the mood for the evening, and the wine did its thing, slowing down the conniving part of my brain. Thoughts of Hector had been replaced by the voice of Carlos Gardel and the story Cleopatra told.
?
??I saw Carlos Gardel for the first time when I turned thirty. I had taken a shipment of polo ponies to a rich rancher outside of Buenos Aires. What a city that place was in those days. As a birthday present, my shipping agent took me to see Gardel at the Teatro Colón. Recordings are wonderful, but there is nothing like seeing a real performer work an audience live. The heat, the emotion in his voice, the miraculous fingers of the guitarist—and then there was the response of the audience, singing every word to every song. I tell you, that show was responsible for a long and serious visit to the confessional. This was back when I still believed all that dogmatic bullshit. I guess that might have been the start of my defection from Catholicism to the tango.”
“Is the tango a dance, or is it music, or both?” the lady scientist asked.
“It is life and death played out in a few verses and a good hook chorus.” There was a sad feeling in her voice as she spoke.
“What’s this song called?” I asked.
“‘Tomo y Obligo,’” Cleopatra answered promptly. “It was the last song Gardel sang before he was killed in a plane crash.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Oh, God, before you were born, son. He played his last concert in Medellín, Colombia. His final show ended shortly after midnight, and some time in the morning hours, he was killed in a plane crash. It was probably the longest and saddest funeral procession in history. They sent his body first from Colombia to New York on an ocean liner, and then to Argentina. I flew to Buenos Aires on the old Pan Am Clipper. I couldn’t really enjoy the magic of the flight. It was a sad time, you know—Gardel dead, and war coming. But the music lives on. Even to this day, there is a fanatical group of fans who keep his legend blazing by playing his songs every day at the Cementerio de la Chacarita in Buenos Aires and placing a lit cigarette in the hand of the life-size statue in front of his tomb.”
“Kind of like Graceland,” I said.
“Better,” Cleopatra responded. “I mean, I have nothing against Elvis. I really liked all his early work before the goddamn corporate creeps in America decided to cool his jets and ship him off overseas, but Gardel . . . well, there is a saying in Argentina about Gardel. Cada día canta mejor.”
“He sings better every day,” I interpreted.
Cleopatra pointed her wineglass in the direction of the Victrola, and I joined her in a silent toast to this haunting voice from the past.
“Exactamente!”
Dinner aboard the Lucretia was like attending a fascinating lecture series. Cleopatra was the professor of living long and wise. The vast amount of knowledge she imparted was simply amazing. I now knew the nautical terminology for the mast and rigs of this schooner, having had them indelibly printed in my brain as I touched and climbed through the rigging. I had learned from the Costa Rican archaeologists that back in the heyday of Incan civilization, the big-cheese Inca himself had fresh fish delivered to him from the sea to his palace in Cuzco every day, and we are not talking about a Domino’s truck as a delivery vehicle. They explained that a series of runners were stationed along a path that ran two hundred miles from the ocean to the palace—from sea level to eleven thousand feet. I had also heard the music of Gardel, which I would now be able to recognize as easily as that of Van Morrison when I heard it.
Well, you would have thought from those beginnings that the conversation would have naturally evolved toward universal theories and philosophies, but true to form, Cleopatra took an unexpected, extreme tack, and instead we began to talk about Cuban baseball.
“Did you know that when Fidel Castro marched out of the Sierra Maestra, headed for Havana and the life-and-death struggle with his oppressors, he stopped in a grocery store in the small town of Guisa to talk with local fans about the World Series up in Milwaukee?”
“No,” the bewildered scientists answered in unison.
To say that Cleopatra Highbourne is a baseball fan is an extreme understatement. She is as shameless in her lust for baseball as a fundamentalist preacher is about selling prayers for money on television, and she is just as maniacal when it comes to converting the “unsaved” to the game of baseball as played by the Cubans—and in particular by a young pitcher who goes by the name of El Cohete. The Rocket.
The rest of dinner was spent discussing the career of El Cohete from the time he was a child up to his dramatic appearance in the Olympic Games. He attended them despite the death of his father, for whom he pitched a perfect game and led his team to a gold medal. All of this could have been Arabic to the other dinner guests, and over brandy Cleopatra pointed out a framed photo of herself beside a very tall, handsome young man wearing a baseball uniform with INDUSTRIALES stitched across the front in faded red letters. They were standing at home plate in the stadium in Havana.
“I guess it’s because I’m really Cuban that baseball is in my blood,” Cleopatra explained to the Estrellas. “Baseball came to Cuba from America shortly before the American Civil War, and it quickly became a symbol of being Cuban. The Spanish rulers, who had followed the conquistadors ashore and ran the colony, despised the game. They called it a rebel game.
“Baseball also came from the United States and was modern and progressive,” she continued. “It was a way to denounce the Spanish traditions that bullfighting represented. Baseball eventually became the darling sport of the Spanish Creoles, but what began as a middle- and upper-class leisure activity was quickly absorbed by all social classes all over the island, and it has remained that way through conquests, hurricanes, and revolutions.”
The scientists had had enough brandy and baseball and passed on coffee. They politely excused themselves with a perfectly good alibi about having to look at some research material.
That left me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I spooned down the coconut sorbet and doubled up on coffee. My chance to win my trip home would start at three in the morning, and I decided to shoot on through the night.
Several crew members in white dinner jackets busied themselves with clearing the table, and Cleopatra guided me back up to the doghouse, where I sat on a daybed as she fooled with the dials on one of the big radios. She finally stopped on a station playing salsa music. She dropped down on the bunk across from me and put her feet up on a pillow. “Great reception tonight. It must be a station from the Isle of Pines. You want a cigar?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“They’re Cuban,” she told me with a smile.
“Somehow smoking is one of the few vices that I inadvertently avoided in my youth, but God knows how.”
“I wasn’t that lucky,” Cleopatra said as she lit up a fat cigar shaped like a small torpedo. She held the cigar out of the doghouse hatch, and the thick smoke was carried off by the breeze.
“Tully the navigator. It has an ancient and very confident sound to it, don’t you think?”
“Well, I’m not really a navigator, but I would like to be.”
“That could be arranged,” she said, leaving me with a questioning expression on my face. Cleopatra checked her watch. “So we have eight minutes until the baseball game starts. Would you like the short version of why a one-hundred-and-one-year-old woman is completely off her rocker about a baseball player from a Communist country who is young enough to be my grandson?”
“The question has entered my mind.”
Cleopatra puffed on the cigar and blew a smoke ring. “If we’re lucky, we can hang on to a piece of our childhood forever. The soft feel of a favorite blanket or teddy bear; the look on the face of your first puppy; the sound of the music played by the ice-cream truck. If we are lucky, these are the kinds of memories that keep us from growing old too fast. Chocolate—I would add that to the list. His grandfather was the great love of my life.
“His name was Luis Villa, and he was a switch-hitting first baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. All Cuban players have nicknames. Luis’s was Mantequilla. The fans thought his swing was as smooth as butter. He came from the tiny fishing village of Chocolate, near the easternmost po
int of Cuba.
“Chocolate got its name because the village lay in the middle of a forest of cocoa trees protected by the Baracoa mountains. There are still no roads to Chocolate to this day. You can only reach it by boat. The winds of fortune blew me there on a voyage from Port Antonio, Jamaica, to Tampa with a hold full of Blue Mountain Coffee. We ran into a hell of a storm off Cabo Babo, and it took us the better part of two days to round the east end of Cuba. When the storm finally let up, there, sitting right off the port bow, was a tiny fishing boat. Its mast had been blown away, and the helpless little boat was barely afloat. On board was a very preoccupied young fisherman who was bailing the boat with his bare hands. When he saw us, he dove for the life ring we had thrown to him.
“We managed to get him on board and warmed up. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, and he told us that he had gone fishing alone and had hooked a giant tuna that had pulled him from the waters of his native village of Chocolate out to sea. So we took him home.
“When we arrived, a double rainbow appeared, framing the Lucretia as she lay at anchor in the harbor.
“There was quite a celebration that night, and the next morning, as we prepared to leave and continue on to Florida, I walked out of my cabin and couldn’t believe my eyes. Against the backdrop of the misty green jungle mountains, the rickety town pier had been painted the colors of the rainbow.
“It looked as if everyone in the whole village was standing on the dock to see us off. A lone fishing boat approached us from the shore, and a very tall, good-looking man was at the tiller. When he came alongside he spoke to me in perfect English. He said that the boy we had rescued was his little brother. He handed me a small box. Inside was a silver cross embedded with tiny emeralds. The man told me that according to legend, the crucifix came from one of Columbus’s ships. He said the village wanted me to have it as a token of their appreciation for saving his little brother.”