03December

The gentleman buccaneer

Bonnet
As kids we often saw him sitting in the tavern, next to the dark fireplace, all by himself. In the mornings when we were on our way to school we would catch a glimpse of this tall, gaunt gentleman standing in front of the roof window in the small upstairs apartment he rented from Mrs. Hartmann. There was always a mug of steaming coffee in his hand and his gaze was transfixed on some far-off point in the horizon as if it were searching for something. Many years later I came to realize that he wasn’t looking for something. He was merely embracing the beauty of the vastness with his eye – for there are truly amazing sights to behold when a man stops focusing on what the limit of his physical senses can behold and opens up his vision to the world of ideas.
 
Sometimes, on Saturday evenings, when we were at the funfair spending our last nickel and dime on Ferris Wheel rides and shooting tin ducks out of their rolling ramp, we would see him sipping whiskey from his silver flask as he patiently waited for customers inside the ticket box of the ‘live mermaid and nature’s freaks’ exhibit tent.
 
No one in town was quite sure where he was from or exactly how old he was or what he did for a living – for it had been years since anyone had set foot in his carnival exhibit. The price was too steep for us kids and as my father used to say ‘poppycock! There’s nothing to see in there except some really bad examples of taxidermy, an art altogether ghastly and disrespectable if you ask me’. 
 
He was an oddity in our midst, someone who didn’t quite fit. But after all, ours was peaceful little town: no questions were asked, no show of credentials was ever required. There was talking behind backs, for sure, but we liked to keep things lethargic and we upheld the countless unspoken agreements of our society with religious fervor. 
 
Our brightly-painted houses by the endless ocean had no tales to tell; no skeletons worthy of exhuming hung in our closets. The wavy hills that surrounded us had no noteworthy history, no past and no future. We all liked it that way. I suppose that the silent drinking gentleman was the only one who didn’t.
 
Despite being a port town it had been two generations since anyone last saw an actual ship come into the derelict harbor. My grandfather used to tell me stories about the time he was my age and there were many ships anchored in the docks. There were pirates and buccaneers and mariners of the crown in those days. They were loud and fearless, always eager to brave the swelling billows of the ocean and travel to distant shores always thirsty for adventure, lost Spanish gold and the clash of cutlasses. I can’t really say I believed him, but he definitely had a passion for storytelling and I loved him too much to show it. 
 
The only vessels we could boast of were three dozen small fishing boats. Nobody ventured farther than a few miles or so from the coast. We all liked our safety – and there were plenty of fish in the shallow waters to fill our bellies, so who would be foolhardy enough to venture out into the open sea? We preferred to keep adventure in our pub songs and bedtime stories. We were all sensible like that.
One Friday night in March a storm broke out. It was the most frightful thing our town had ever seen. Heaven was cleft asunder by lightning and the sea churned and heaved, its black waves rising taller than the hills. Yet nobody made any particular fuss about it, as was our usual way. Our little houses were made of bricks, with foundations of stone and could withstand the menace of the weather.
 
Some say that on that night they saw the wayward gentleman pacing up and down the beach, his arms outstretched to embrace the fierce gusts of wind coming from the sea, laughing even as tears of ecstasy streamed down his cheeks. 
 
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. All I know is that the morning after, when all was calm and bright once more, we saw that the sea had washed out from its depths a shipwreck. 
 
It was a pirate ship, covered in long-hanging patches of slimy sea moss and rows of black shellfish. It was nothing more than a dead hull: of course its sails were long gone and its masts were shattered; its decks were broken and only but part of it had survived the vicissitudes of the brine intact. The prow, however, was in decent shape. It was adorned by a wooden mermaid for good luck, on whose face an enigmatic half-smile could still be discerned underneath the veil of seaweeds covering her hair. Decay had eaten away at the luscious curves of her body but one thing the vicious depths had not managed to erase was the color of her eyes – a shade of honey-gold brown, a color which will always remind me of home.
 
We were all perplexed as to what was to be done about this bizarre relic. The mayor suggested we built a museum around it but the notion was quickly dismissed because no visitor ever came to our town to take in the sights, since we had none. Most sensible people were of a mind to take it apart and use it as firewood, once dried through the summer. A few romantic souls with a soft spot for botany put forward the notion to fill its cavities with dirt and manure and plant a flower garden in it. Wouldn’t it look pretty that way?
 
The gentleman, who had been standing quiet and unnoticed in the crowd, suddenly stepped forward.
“You will not have her!” he cried in a booming voice which commanded such respect and awe that everyone fell silent and were left staring at him with blinking eyes. “None of you deserve her.”
 
“Oh, and you do?” the mayor sniggered.
 
The gentleman glanced daggers at him.
 
“I’ll fix her up like new, you’ll see.”
 
“Can’t you see she’s broken, man?”
 
“Aye; her boards may be shattered and she’s missing her sails but her soul ain’t broken yet.” 
 
“And to what purpose will this restoration of yours serve, anyway?”
 
The gentleman’s eyes grew distant and dreamy.
 
“She was made to sail the high seas, unlike the lot of you! And that’s exactly where I intend to take her.”
 
There was a long moment of pause and then the hubbub of voices erupted. The man was clearly out of his mind. My father said ‘it was the whiskey talking’. Back then I couldn’t understand how liquor could talk. Mrs. Hartmann shook her head disapprovingly and observed it was disgraceful for a gentleman his age to act so childish.
 
In the end nothing happened. The crowd dispersed with much mumbling and everyone went back to their business. The fishing boats continued to sail at reasonable distances from the shore and very soon all about the washed-up shipwreck was forgotten. That was how I learned for the first time that the everyday man possess the mind-boggling ability to bypass even the greatest of wonders, be they under his very nose, if they do not conform with his preconceptions of reality.
 
But the gentleman did not forget. He was true to his word, and I suppose that’s one of the precious few qualities that actually made him a gentleman. 
 
Day after day he went down to the beach and worked on the ship. First he cleaned it, scrubbing the filth off the hull and decks, disentangling the mermaid from all the parasites that hid the work of art she truly was. Then there was the matter of repairs. Lumber was scarce to come by in our town. The gentleman offered to buy a few fishing boats to use them as spare parts but no respectable fisherman wanted to have any part in his deluded fancies. Besides, what would they do without their boats even if they took the money? They knew no other life and did not want to.
 
The gentleman therefore would disappear for weeks at a time, travelling beyond the low hills of home, and return hauling cartloads of lumber, tar and all the necessary supplies. The first time he came back his golden signet ring was missing; the second time his corsair earrings of mother-of-pearl; the third, his silk scarf and his long coat; the fourth, his feathered hat and his boots of shining camel leather.
 
He would work on the ship day and night barefoot and with only his linen shirt sticking on his back from the sweat. Every now and then he would pause, pour himself a cup of whiskey and smoke his pipe while observing the progress of his toils with the pleased smile of a lover watching his mistress slowly disrobe. 
 
The damp and the cold on that lonely beach which undoubtedly pierced his bones to the marrow must have been terrible, but he didn’t seem to mind. When he caught himself shivering it was then that he put even more effort into his work to keep warm.
 
We pretended to play on a dune nearby so that we would spy on him. A sense of amazement and awe would grip us when he would look up to us from time to time with his sad eyes and his thin lips were stretched to a smile full of hope. Sometimes during his pauses he would walk up to us, treat us to raisins from his pocket and ask us if we would like to one day become buccaneers ourselves and go off on our adventures. This, he said, was his adventure. We never worked up the nerve to answer him. We just shook our heads in such a way as it would seem like a reply but it wouldn’t be clear whether it was a positive or a negative one. My father said the gentleman was insane and that I should stay away from him. Billy’s father called him ‘a weirdo and a loser’ and urged us next time we went to the beach to throw rocks at him. We never did such a thing.
 
Months went by, turning into seasons and seasons turned into years. The constant sawing and hammering coming from the shipwreck had become a familiar background noise for all who passed by and no one paid any more attention to it than they would to the rustling of the wind through the leaves. I think that by then the wayward gentleman had been unanimously accept as the first town fool in our history. We were a very sensible lot and there had never been any town fools with us before.
 
It was on the morning of Christmas Eve of my last year of school when I took a stroll down to the beach. I had discovered that the solitude of the open space helped me think clearer. Our house was occupied by a throng of bickering relatives visiting for the holidays and never before had I experience more suffocating confusion than around our Christmas tree, all wrapped up as it were with its vulgar, glittering garlands of gold and sparkling red. I needed some room to breathe and put my thoughts in order. Back then I had no idea what to do with myself after school. 
 
Preoccupied as I was, completely caught up in the drama of my own ego, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was amiss. At first I didn’t notice anything. Then it hit me. That was it exactly: there wasn’t anything there. The shipwreck was gone and so was the gentleman.
 
Even to this day I like to believe I saw the faint silhouette of a pirate galleon fading away in the far horizon, Jolly Roger caught high in the morning breeze. The brisk air coming from the open sea smelled of freedom and adventure to me and I imagined I could see the gentleman buccaneer standing proud and tall atop the prow, smiling triumphantly, his raw and calloused hands caressing the wooden tresses of the mermaid with the brilliant eyes that the menace of years had failed to blind.

Article Published: Wednesday, 03 December 2014