The Glass Ocean(19)
• • •
My father has proven a tolerable sailor. Somehow his small, compact form is an advantage at sea: lower center of gravity. There is, though, so little for him to do, during the long hours of rotten weather. He is unoccupied; but then, they all are. And so he sketches, furtively. What is he drawing? This I cannot say. I can see him, though, hunched over the pad of paper that is his constant companion, the gentle, self-referential movement of the pencil, this is how he comforts himself: a bulwark against all that blue and green and grey. He combats infinity with a pencil point. Or tries to. At a table in the workroom, or maybe in the saloon. Approach and he pulls the sketch pad close, into his body, or leans over, shields it in the crook of his arm. Such a furtive creature. What has he got to hide? He is nineteen at most, perhaps twenty. Too young yet to have a history. When the others talk he is quiet. He comes from Whitby, he has told them that much. The city that stinks of rendered blubber. Carved out of it. Ships in the harbor heavy with paper and ambergris, cramped little whitewashed houses creeping tenaciously up their crack in the cliff, up toward the wrecked medieval abbey that reigns over all. The breakwater with its two lights. And the Scaur, which passes there for a shore, a bed rather of stone and wrack, the grim spine of the earth exposed—laid bare, like bone at the stroke of a cleaver, by the sudden ebbing of the tide. My father broke his boots on it as a boy, on that humped black spine of rock in which fossils are embedded, ammonites in pyrite, garnet, amethyst. Snake-stones, they call them: St. Hilda’s work. Old things, interesting things, things that have been lost; buried things, pushing up like unstoppable rebellion from beneath cracked and compromised ribs of bedrock. A repository of the living and the dead.
Its breath the ancient stinking breath of the sea.
My father loved to inhale it, standing in his boots on the humped rock in spite or perhaps even because of his mother’s aversion and her fear.
That would be Gentilessa, my grandmother. The fearful one. I picture her in the small house on Henrietta Street, shivering in a woolen wrap. She is always cold; cannot adjust to this cold place. Her hands are red and sore, cracked. This is from the cold to which she cannot become accustomed and from constant scrubbing. The house on Henrietta Street is always clean, spotlessly clean. Gentilessa scrubs, scours, sweeps, fumigates. Drags the mattresses out into the sun when there is sun to drag them into. Scalds the wash, then wrings it, then smokes it to rid it of bedbugs. This, at least, she can do.
How she hates it there!
They came from Italy, from a place on the Adriatic, a place of green and blue and gold, to this place of black stone. To this place of surreptitious Catholicism, where even in a creeping minority redoubt they are a minority. Crazy filthy furriners. Crawthumpers. Pikeys. To break a living out of the rock, form it into obsequious memorials, brooches, earrings, lockets, mourning-wear. Emilio Dell’oro is very good at that. He is an artist, a craftsman, a slyly obsequious salesman who succeeds, despite all, and prospers, in this place of bitter rains and hard rock and cold, unyielding unacceptance.
My other grandfather, that would be. The one with the little, round spectacles, the rather severe manner. I’ll never meet him either.
My father, though, is having none of this. He has chosen the sea instead. He has his reasons.
And does everything he can to avoid her.
It’s a wonder I’ll ever be born, at this rate. Such ineptitude on his part. Also on hers.
Yet, of course, it’s inevitable, it’s going to happen. For am I not here, at the edge of the world, getting ready to jump off it, the whole ginger length and breadth of me? My father feels this inevitability, he senses it, feels me, perhaps, readying my leap, and hunches all the more tightly over his pad of paper, clutches tight to his pencil, as if this will make him safe, and me, too.
Mr. Dell’oro, what is that you are drawing? Is it a portrait of me? Or is it a porcupine fish? I’m sure you are a very talented artist, Mr. Dell’oro! Won’t you let me see?