Captain of the Sleepers: A Novel - Hardcover

Mayra Montero is the author of a collection of short stories and seven novels, most of which are available in English. She was born in Cuba and lives in Puerto Rico.

Edith Grossman is the translator of many books by Latin American and Spanish writers. She lives in New York City.

Excerpted from Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero. Copyright © 2002 by Mayra Montero. Translation copyright © 2005 by Edith Grossman. Published in September 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

I’M in the last place on earth I’d like to be. Waiting for the last person in this life I thought I’d ever see again. It’s almost six. I’m sipping beer at the bar of the Pink Fancy, a hotel on St. Croix where I arrived just a few minutes ago, carrying a small week end bag.
When I arrived I was registered by a woman who didn’t stop laughing. She was young and fairly heavy, and apparently she could not forget the joke that another employee-a man who was looking over some papers and laughing quietly too-had just told her. I asked about my reservation, and with a thin, high-pitched voice she answered in the kind of correct English that was unusual on this island. Then she handed me a brochure with a map of the city (she didn’t give me time to explain that I could walk around Christiansted with my eyes closed), drew a circle around one of the restaurants, and recommended that I be sure to eat there. I agreed with a smile that I’m afraid she thought was mocking. She drew back, behaved like an offended butler, and told me drily that my room was on the second floor. Before I went up I asked her for Mr. Bunker’s room number, John Timothy Bunker; I stressed each syllable and seemed to hear my father’s voice: “J.T.,” which he pronounced in English, not Spanish. That’s what he always called the Captain of the Sleepers.
I went upstairs and took a deep breath before I picked up the phone. How long had it been since I’d heard his voice? Fifty years, fifty-one in a few months. The last time I talked to him I was twelve years old, standing in the entrance to my father’s small hotel. In the midst of all that sorrow it was where I took refuge, and the Captain tousled my hair as he passed by; he usually did that. He took a few steps, and then he stopped to see if I’d say anything to him. But I didn’t open my mouth, I went on shuffling the cards I’d been playing with, so he decided to speak even though his voice sounded different. He said: “It’s how you grow up, son.” I didn’t understand the meaning of that sentence until many years later. By then, I’d begun to wonder if what I saw was really what I saw. And I’d also begun to wonder if it was really worth killing the Captain, which was what I’d sworn to do no matter where I found him.
The listless voice of a frail old man answered the phone. “This is Andres,” I said. “I’m here.”
I didn’t count on his beginning to sob. That was my first impression, and then I thought perhaps they weren’t sobs. Maybe sitting up, picking up the phone, or simply speaking was a great effort for him. Especially speaking; he himself had told me that the cancer had reached his throat. He paused and murmured: “Thank you for coming.” I didn’t answer, and he went on to say that he’d arrived the day before from Maine and was exhausted, but we could meet in an hour at the bar. I assured him I’d be there. I had a hunch he was going to say something else, but I didn’t give him the chance. I hung up; I was panting and had the feeling I’d been running for my life; yes, to save it, but for how long?
I turned on the TV; hung up my clothes-a jacket, a pair of trousers, the shirts Gladys had been folding as she told me not to go to St. Croix-and opened a bottle of water. Then I lay down on the bed, and as soon as my head touched the pillow I decided I had to move quickly. I took the key and walked out to the corridor. I went down to the bar and ordered a beer. I couldn’t permit myself the luxury of just going down and finding the old man waiting for me. To begin with, I didn’t want him to say that now I looked even more like my father, and when he saw me come in, with the light behind me, he imagined it was his friend Frank walking toward him. Though my father didn’t live to see sixty, and I’m sixty-two. Sixty-two years that I don’t carry very well; I’m sure I look older, which I don’t care about one way or the other. I felt old, I got used to being old from the time I was a boy.
The Captain, by my estimate, must be eighty-three, too old for that uncomfortable flight from Maine, stopping in San Juan and changing planes for the Virgin Islands. But I must confess I wouldn’t have agreed to see him anywhere but the Pink Fancy.
Only here do I have the courage to face what he’s going to tell me. Courage, and the kind of foreboding that lets you throw everything overboard. This hotel, almost as old as I am, tells me everything. I came here often as a child; I played here on vacation, and during those years it was my favorite place. In fact, I once asked my father if we could pain the windows and eaves of our little hotel on Vieques blue and change its name instead of Frank’s Guesthouse we could call it the Blue Fancy. But Papa refused, and now I find it logical that he wouldn’t have wanted to. He told me to get my own hotel when I grew up and call it whatever I liked. I didn’t do that. I studied law, and- it never occurred to me to run a small hotel on the beach. I suspect it’s too late now to try to open one.
“Too late,” I repeat, and instinctively I look at my watch. I’m in the last place I want to be, it’s six-fifteen, and I’ve finished my first beer. I’m getting ready to order the second when I see him coming toward me. How far can a man fall without collapsing completely? The Captain is wearing the kind of hat he always wore-a dark panama-very wide khaki trousers, and a white polo shirt that’s too tight and mercilessly reveals his sharp pointed bones. He looks everywhere except at me, though for the moment I’m the only person sitting at one of the little tables in the deserted bar. Not for an instant does he attempt to look at me, though he recognizes me, of course. He recognizes the boy he stopped seeing but has always seen. A nightmare recurs and torments him, a terrible one in which he sees my eyes, I’m sure about that. If not, he wouldn’t have done anything to meet me here.
I stand and hold out my hand. He does the same, and as we shake hands I detect the stink of vomit. The smell comes from his clothes, perhaps from his skin; I suppose he was vomiting just before he came down to see me. By the time we sit down, I’m better able to confront his ruination. That’s the word to describe his face, which has been distorted in the worst possible way: a lizard’s eyes in violet-colored sockets, devastated ears like those of a leper, sunken cheeks tinged with gray.
“This is what cancer’s like,” he says with a smile, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking.
I wonder how he sees me. Fifty years have gone by and I can’t declare a victory. Not much of that suntanned twelve year-old boy, with his curly hair and cleft chin, could be recognized in this pale, flabby, totally bald old man. A mortar shell in Vietnam almost tore off my leg. They managed to save it, but I walk with a limp. When it’s going to rain, I limp and feel pain and a kind of rage that makes me tighten my lips involuntarily; the rest of the time I barely notice my limp.
“Do you shave your head?” the Captain. asks.
“Hardly at all,” I reply. “There’s not much to shave up there.” He starts to laugh, and again it’s as if he were sobbing. “I’m not feeling very well,” he confesses. “I finished a cycle of chemotherapy three days ago.”
“You already know why I’ve come,” I say, unmoved. “I don’t want you to feel worse.”
The Captain shakes his head. The waitress comes over and asks what we’d like to drink. He orders whiskey in a brandy snifter. I ask for another beer.
“I’m almost as old as you,” I say, trying to maintain a neutral, almost mild tone. “I could have died years ago, when I was in Vietnam, or last year, when I collapsed in the middle of the street; I came out of that with a pacemaker. Take a look at me, J.T. Don’t you think I have a right to know what happened?”
I could swear the Captain looks at me joyfully. He tightens the line of his mouth, where there are no longer lips or anything that resembles them. Though I’m seeing them in my mind. I see his mouth, his lips full and well-defined beneath his slim mustache, and his determined jaw, the classic jaw of a fearless redhead. Which is what the Captain was.
“Ask whatever you like,” he says defiantly, raising his voice and narrowing his eyes, as if he suddenly could not bear the humble light of the world. It’s begun to grow dark.
“Just tell me if you did it.”
“Yes, I did something.” He spits out the words slowly, like seeds that he’s been sucking. “I won’t be sorry when I’m dead.”
He says dead, and I recall the word death on his lips. “You don’t talk about death.” That’s what he said to me the first time I got into his plane, a Parakeet Cessna (my mother gave it that name because it was green and blue). As soon as I knew I was flying and looked down at the beach-the beach, and the gray spot my father had turned into-I asked him if we were going to fall. He didn’t answer, and I repeated the question in a louder voice, using different words: I asked him if we were going to die. He stopped laughing and concentrated on the sky: “In my plane you don’t talk about those things. You don’t talk about death.” I must have been about seven, and my father, who had insisted on my flying with the Captain, came with us to Roca Esco...