The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

absently at a piece of cigarette paper that clung to his lip while again and again his mind moaned: how could I have talked so goddam badly!
    He hadn’t been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean’s swell. Whenever he tried to talk about those things, he failed. If there were times when he felt he was worthless, there were others when something like the magnificence of the sunset over Manila Bay sent its radiant fire through him and he knew that he had been chosen to tower above other men. But he hadn’t been able to tell the woman his conviction. He remembered her asking: “Why haven’t you ever married?” And he remembered his simpering answer: “It’s not easy to find a woman who is willing to be a sailor’s wife.”
    What he had wanted to say was: “All the other officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away—there’s no hope for them any more. I’ve never done much, but I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I’m right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance—and I’ll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That’s why I’ve never married. I’ve waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.”
    But he hadn’t said anything like that; partly because he doubted a woman would understand. Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes—an unseen Pandarus—and lures them into the preordained embrace. This fantasy was probably a product of the hyperbole of popular songs. But over the years it had taken on substance in some recess of his mind and merged there with other things: the shrieking of a tidal wave, the ineluctable force of high tide, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal. . . .
    And he had been certain that the woman before him was the woman in the dream. If only he had found the words to say it.
    In the grand dream Ryuji had treasured secretly for so long, he was a paragon of manliness and she the consummate woman; and from the opposite corners of the earth they came together in a chance encounter, and death wed them. Outdistancing tawdry farewells then, with streamers waving and strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” and far from sailors’ fickle loves, they were to descend to the bottom of the heart’s great deep where no man has ever been. . . .
    But he hadn’t been able to share even a fragment of his mad dream. Instead, he had talked of greens: “Every once in a while when you’re on a long cruise and you pass the galley you catch just a glimpse of radish or maybe turnip leaves. And you know, those little splashes of green make you tingle all over. You feel like getting down on your knees and worshipping them.”
    “I can imagine. I think I know just how you must feel.” Fusako agreed eagerly. Her voice oozed the joy a woman takes in consoling a man.
    Ryuji asked for her fan and shooed the mosquitoes away. Lamps on distant masts twinkled like ocher stars; bulbs in the eaves of the warehouses directly below stretched in regular, bright rows.
    He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death. But far from finding words for that, he volunteered an account of the hardships he had known, and clucked his tongue.
    His father, a civil servant, had raised him and his sister singlehanded after their mother’s death; the sickly old man had worked overtime in order to send Ryuji to school; despite everything, Ryuji had grown up