Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

Toni went away. He could not endure the glances and the allusions made by Doña Cinta. And as though this emotion were not enough, he received the news a few hours later of his captain's wretched condition,—news which obliged him to make the trip to Marseilles immediately.

On entering the quarters of the hotel frequented by the officials of merchant vessels, he found Ferragut seated near a balcony from which could be seen the entire harbor.

He was limp and flabby, with eyes sunken and faded, beard unkempt, and a manifest disregard of his personal appearance.

"Toni!… Toni!"

He embraced his mate, moistening his neck with tears. For the first time he began to weep and this appeared to give him a certain relief. The presence of his faithful officer brought him back to life. Forgotten memories of business journeys crowded in his mind. Toni resuscitated all his past energies. It was as though the Mare Nostrum had come in search of him.

He felt shame and remorse. This man knew his secret: he was the only one to whom he had spoken of supplying the German submarines.

"My poor Esteban!… My son!"

He did not hesitate to admit the fatal relationship between the death of his son and that illegal trip whose memory was weighing him down like a monstrous crime. But Toni was discreet. He lamented the death of Esteban like a misfortune in which the father had not had any part.

"I also have lost sons…. And I know that nothing is gained by giving up to despair…. Cheer up!"

He never said a word of all that had happened before the tragic event. Had not Ferragut known his mate so well, he might have believed that he had entirely forgotten it. Not the slightest gesture, not a gleam in his eyes, revealed the awakening of that malign recollection. His only anxiety was that the captain should soon regain his health….

Reanimated by the presence and words of this prudent companion, Ulysses recovered his strength and a few days after, abandoned the room in which he had believed he was going to die, turning his steps toward Barcelona.

He entered his home with a foreboding that almost made him tremble. The sweet Cinta, considered until then with the protecting superiority of the Orientals who do not recognize a soul in woman, now inspired him with a certain fear. What would she say on seeing him?…

She said nothing of what he had feared. She permitted herself to be embraced, and drooping her head, burst into desperate weeping, as though the presence of her husband brought into higher relief the image of her son whom she would never see again. Then she dried her tears, and paler and sadder than ever, continued her habitual life.

Ferragut saw her as serene as a school-mistress, with her two little nieces seated at her feet, keeping on with her eternal lace-work. She forgot it only in order to attend to the care of her husband, occupying herself with the very slightest details of his existence. That was her duty. From childhood, she had known what are the obligations of the wife of the captain of a ship when he stops at home for a few days, like a bird of passage. But back of such attentions, Ulysses divined the presence of an immovable obstacle. It was something enormous and transparent that had interposed itself between the two. They saw each other but without being able to touch each other. They were separated by a distance, as hard and luminous as a diamond, that made every attempt at drawing nearer together useless.

Cinta never smiled. Her eyes were dry, trying not to weep while her husband was near her, but giving herself up freely to grief when she was alone. Her duty was to make his existence bearable, hiding her thoughts.

But this prudence of a good house-mistress was trampling under foot their conjugal life of former times. One day Ferragut, with a return of his old affection, and desiring to illuminate Cinta's twilight existence with a pale ray of sunlight, ventured to caress her as in the early days of their marriage. She drew herself up, modest and offended, as though she had just received an insult. She escaped from his arms with the energy of one who is repelling an outrage.

Ulysses looked upon a new woman, intensely pale, of an almost olive countenance, the nose curved with wrath and a flash of madness in her eyes. All that she was guarding in the depths of her thoughts came forth, boiling over, expelled in a hoarse voice charged with tears.

"No, no!… We shall live together, because you are my husband and God commands that it shall be so; but I no longer love you: I cannot love you…. The wrong that you have done me!… I who loved you so much!… However much you may hunt in your voyages and in your wicked adventures, you will never find a woman that loves you as your wife has loved you."

Her past of modest and submissive affection, of supine and tolerant fidelity, now issued from her mouth in one interminable complaint.

"From our home my thoughts have followed you in all your voyages, although I knew your forgetfulness and your infidelity. All the papers found in your pockets, and photographs lost among your books, the allusions of your comrades, your smiles of pride, the satisfied air with which you many times returned, the series of new manners and additional care of your person that you did not have when you left, told me all…. I also suspected in your bold caresses the hidden presence of other women who lived far away on the other side of the world."

She stopped her turbulent language for a few moments, letting the blush which her memories evoked fade away.

"I loathed it all," she continued. "I know the men of the sea; I am a sailor's daughter. Many times I saw my mother weeping and pitied her simplicity. There is no use weeping for what men do in distant lands. It is always bitter enough for a woman who loves her husband, but it has no bad consequences and must be pardoned…. But now…. Now!…"

The wife became irritated on recalling his recent infidelities…. Her rivals were not the public women of the great ports, nor the tourists who could give only a few days of love, like an alms which they tossed without stopping their progress. Now he had become enamored with the enthusiasm of a husky boy with an elegant and handsome dame, with a foreign woman who had made him forget his business, abandon his ship, and remain away, as though renouncing his family forever…. And poor Esteban, orphaned by his father's forgetfulness, had gone in search of him, with the adventurous impetuosity inherited from his ancestors: and death, a horrible death, had come to meet him on the road.

Something more than the grief of the outraged wife vibrated in Cinta's laments. It was the rivalry with that woman of Naples, whom she believed a great lady with all the attractions of wealth and high birth. She envied her superior weapons of seduction; she raged at her own modesty and humility as a home-keeping woman.

"I was resolved to ignore it all," she continued. "I had one consolation,—my son. What did it matter to me what you did?… You were far off, and my son was living at my side…. And now I shall never see him again!… My fate is to live eternally alone. You know very well that I shall not be a mother again,—that I cannot give you another son…. And it was you, you! who have robbed me of the only thing that I had!…"

Her imagination invented the most improbable reasons for explaining to herself this unjust loss.

"God wished to punish you for your bad life and has therefore killed Esteban, and is slowly killing me…. When I learned of his death I wished to throw myself off the balcony. I am still living because I am a Christian, but what an existence awaits me! What a life for you if you are really a father!… Think that your son might still be existing if you had not remained in Naples."

Ferragut was a pitiful object. He hung his head without strength to repeat the confused and lying protests with which he had received his wife's first words.

"If she knew all the truth!" the voice of remorse kept saying in his brain.

He was thinking with horror of what Cinta could say if she knew the magnitude of his sin. Fortunately she was ignorant of the fact that he had been of assistance to the assassins of their son…. And the conviction that she never would know it made him admit her words with silent humility,—the humility of the criminal who hears himself accused of an offense by a judge ignorant of a still greater offense.

Cinta finished speaking in a discouraged and gloomy tone. She was exhausted. Her wrath faded out, consumed by its own violence. Her sobs cut short her words. Her husband would never again be the same man to her; the body of their son was always interposing between the two.

"I shall never be able to love you…. What have you done, Ulysses? What have you done that I should have such a horror of you?… When I am alone I weep: my sadness is great, but I admit my sorrow with resignation, as a thing inevitable…. As soon as I hear your footsteps, the truth springs forth. I realize that my son has died because of you, that he would still be living had he not gone in search of you, trying to make you realize that you were a father and what you owe to us…. And when I think of that I hate you, I hate you!… You have murdered my son! My only consolation is in the belief that if you have any conscience you will suffer even more than I."

Ferragut came out from this horrible scene with the conviction that he would have to go away. That home was no longer his, neither was his wife his. The reminder of death filled everything, intervening between him and Cinta, pushing him away, forcing him again on the sea. His vessel was the only refuge for the rest of his life, and he must resort to it like the great criminals of other centuries who had taken refuge in the isolation of monasteries.

He needed to vent his wrath on somebody, to find some responsible person whom he might blame for his misfortunes. Cinta had revealed herself to him as an entirely new being. He would never have suspected such energy of character, such passionate vehemence, in his sweet, obedient, little wife. She must have some counselor who was encouraging her complaints and making her speak badly of her husband.

And he fixed upon Don Pedro, the professor, because there was still deep within him a certain dislike of the man since the days of his courtship. Besides, it offended him to see him in his home with a certain air of a noble personage whose virtue served as foil for the sins and shortcomings of the master of the house.

The professor evidently considered Ferragut on a level with all the famous Don Juans,—liberal and care-free when in far-away homes, punctilious and suspiciously correct in his own.

"That old blatherskite!" said Ulysses to himself, "is in love with Cinta. It is a platonic passion: with him, it couldn't be anything else. But it annoys me greatly…. I'm going to say a few things to him."

Don Pedro, who was continuing his daily visits in order to console the mother, speaking of poor Esteban as though he were his own son, and casting servile smiles upon the captain, found himself intercepted by him one afternoon, on the landing of the stairway.

The sailor aged suddenly while talking, and his features were accented with a vigorous ugliness. At that moment he looked exactly like his uncle, the Triton.

With a threatening voice, he recalled a classic passage well known to the professor. His namesake, old Ulysses, upon returning to his palace, had found Penelope surrounded with suitors and had ended by hanging them on tenterhooks.

"Wasn't that the way of it, Professor?… I do not find here more than one suitor, but this Ulysses swears to you that he will hang him in the same way if he finds him again in his home."

Don Pedro fled. He had always found the rude heroes of the Odyssey very interesting, but in verse and on paper. In reality they now seemed to him most dangerous brutes, and he wrote a letter to Cinta telling her that he would suspend his visits until her husband should have returned to sea.

This insult increased the wife's distant bearing. She resented it as an offense against herself. After having made her lose her son, Ulysses was terrifying her only friend.

The captain felt obliged to go. By staying in that hostile atmosphere, which was only sharpening his remorse, he would pile one error upon another. Nothing but action could make him forget.

One day he announced to Toni that in a few hours he was going to weigh anchor. He had offered his services to the allied navies in order to carry food to the fleet in the Dardanelles. The Mare Nostrum would transport eatables, arms, munitions, aeroplanes.

Toni attempted objection. It would be easy to find trips equally productive and much less dangerous; they might go to America….

"And my revenge?" interrupted Ferragut. "I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to doing all the evil that I can to the assassins of my son. The Allies need boats, I'm going to give them mine and my person."

Knowing what was troubling his mate, he added, "Besides, they pay well. These trips are very remunerative…. They will give me whatever I ask."

For the first time in his existence on board the Mare Nostrum, the mate made a scornful gesture regarding the value of the cargo.

"I almost forgot," continued Ulysses, smiling in spite of his sadness.

"This trip flatters your ideals…. We are going to work for the Republic."

They went to England and, taking on their cargo, set forth for the Dardanelles. Ferragut wished to sail alone without the protection of the destroyers that were escorting the convoys.

He knew the Mediterranean well. Besides, he was from a neutral country and the Spanish flag was flying from the poop of his vessel. This abuse of his flag did not produce the slightest remorse, nor did it appear as disloyal to him. The German corsairs were coming closer to their prey, displaying neutral flags, in order to deceive. The submarines were remaining hidden behind pacific sailing ships in order to rise up suddenly near defenseless vessels. The most felonious proceedings of the ancient pirates had been resuscitated by the German fleet.

He was not afraid of the submarines. He trusted in the speed of the Mare Nostrum and in his lucky star.

"And if any of them should cross our path," he said to his second, "just let them go before the prow!"

He wished this so that he could send his vessel upon the submersible at full speed, daring it to come on.

The Mediterranean was no longer the same sea that it had been months before when the captains knew all its secrets; he could no longer live on it as confidently as in the house of a friend.

He stayed in his stateroom only to sleep. He and Toni spent long hours on the bridge talking without seeing each other, with their eyes turned on the sea, scanning the heaving blue surface. All the crew, excepting those that were resting, felt the necessity of keeping the same watch.

In the daytime the slightest discovery would send the alarm from prow to poop. All the refuse of the sea, that weeks before had splashed unnoticed near the sides of the vessel, now provoked cries of attention, and many arms were outstretched, pointing it out. Bits of sticks, empty preserve cans sparkling in the sunlight, bunches of seaweed, a sea gull with outspread wings letting itself rock on the waves; everything made them think of the periscopes of the submarine coming up to the water's level.

At night time the vigilance was even greater. To the danger of submersibles must also be added that of collision. The warships and the allied transports were traveling with few lights or completely dark. The sentinels on the bridge were no longer scanning the surface of the sea with its pale phosphorescence. Their gaze explored the horizon, fearing that before the prow there might suddenly surge up an enormous, swift, black form, vomited forth by the darkness.

If at any time the captain tarried in his stateroom, instantly that fatal memory came to his mind.

"Esteban!… My son!…"

And his eyes were full of tears.

Remorse and wrath made him plan tremendous vengeance. He was convinced that it would be impossible to carry it through, but it was a momentary consolation to his meridional character predisposed to the most bloody revenge.

One day, running over some forgotten papers in a suit-case, he came across Freya's portrait. Upon seeing her audacious smile and her calm eyes fixed upon him, he felt within him a shameful reversion. He admired the beauty of this apparition, a thrill passing over his body as their past intercourse recurred to him…. And at the same time that other Ferragut existing within him thrilled with the murderous violence of the Oriental who considers death as the only means of vengeance. She was to blame for it all. "Ah!… Tal"

He tore up the photograph, but then he put the fragments together again and finally placed them among his papers.

His wrath was changing its objective. Freya really was not the principal person guilty of Esteban's death. He was thinking of that other one, of the pretended diplomat, of that von Kramer who perhaps had directed the torpedo which had blown his son to atoms…. Would he not raise the devil if he could meet him sometime?… What happiness if these two should find themselves face to face!

Finally he avoided the solitude of a stateroom that tormented him with desires of impotent revenge. Near Toni on deck or on the bridge he felt better…. And with a humble condescension, such as his mate had never known before, he would talk and talk, enjoying the attention of his simple-hearted listener, just as though he were telling marvelous stories to a circle of children.

In the Strait of Gibraltar he explained to him the great currents sent by the ocean into the Mediterranean, at certain times aiding the screw-propeller in the propulsion of the vessel.

Without this Atlantic current the mare nostrum, which lost through atmospheric evaporation much more water than the rains and rivers could bring to it, would become dry in a few centuries. It had been calculated that it might disappear in about four hundred and seventy years, leaving as evidence of its former existence a stratum, of salt fifty-two meters thick.

In its deep bosom were born great and numerous springs of fresh water, on the coast of Asia Minor, in Morea, Dalmatia and southern Italy; it received besides a considerable contribution from the Black Sea, which on returning to the Mediterranean accumulated from the rains and the discharge of its rivers, more water than it lost by evaporation, sending it across the Bosporous and the Dardenelles in the form of a superficial current. But all these tributaries, enormous as they were, sank into insignificance when compared with the renovation of the oceanic currents.

The waters of the Atlantic poured into the Mediterranean so riotously that neither contrary winds nor reflex motion could stop them. Sailboats sometimes had to wait entire months for a strong breeze that would enable them to conquer the impetuous mouth of the strait.

"I know that very well," said Toni. "Once going to Cuba we were in sight of Gibraltar more than fifty days, going backwards and forwards until a favorable wind enabled us to overcome the current and go out into the great sea."

"Just such a current," added Ferragut, "was one of the causes that hastened the decadence of the Mediterranean navies in the sixteenth century. They had to go to the recently discovered Indies, and the Catalan or the Genoese ships would remain here in the strait weeks and weeks, struggling with the wind and the contrary current while the Galicians, the Basques, the French and the English who had left their ports at the same time were already nearing America…. Fortunately, navigation by steam has now equalized all that."

Toni was silently admiring his captain. What he must have learned in those books that filled the stateroom!…

It was in the Mediterranean that men had first entrusted themselves to the waves. Civilization emanated from India, but the Asiatic peoples were not able to master the art of navigation in their few seas whose coasts were very far apart and where the monsoons of the Indian Ocean blew six months together in one direction and six months in another.

Not until he reached the Mediterranean by overland emigration did the white man wish to become a sailor. This sea that, compared with others, is a simple lake sown with archipelagoes, offered a good school. To whatever wind he might set his sails, he would be sure to reach some hospitable shore. The fresh and irregular breezes revolved with the sun at certain times of the year. The hurricane whirled across its bowl, but never stopped. There were no tides. Its harbors and water-ways were never dry. Its coasts and islands were often so close together that you could see from one to the other; its lands, beloved of heaven, were recipients of the sun's sweetest smiles.

Ferragut recalled the men who had plowed this sea in centuries so remote that history makes no mention of them. The only traces of their existence now extant were the nuraghs of Sardinia and the talayots of the Balearic Islands,—gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had passed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the strait which is its door.

The captain could imagine their rude craft made from trunks of trees roughly planed, propelled by one oar, or rather by the stroke of a stick, with no other aid than a single rudimentary sail spread to the fresh breeze. The navy of the first Europeans had been like that of the savages of the oceanic islands whose flotillas of tree trunks are still actually going from archipelago to archipelago.

Thus they had dared to sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence of islands by the vaporous knobs of the mountains which were outlined on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and energy than the discovery of America or the first voyage around the world…. These primitive sailors did not go forth alone to their adventures on the sea; they were nations en masse, they carried with them families and animals. Once installed on an island, the tribes sent forth fragments of their own life, going to colonize other nearby lands across the waves.

Ulysses and his mate thought much about the great catastrophes ignored by history—the tempest surprising the sailing exodus, entire fleets of rough rafts swallowed up by the abyss in a few moments, families dying clinging to their domestic animals,—whenever they attempted a new advance of their rudimentary civilization.

In order to form some idea of what these little embarkations were, Ferragut would recall the fleets of Homeric form, created many centuries afterwards. The winds used to impose a religious terror on those warriors of the sea, reunited in order to fall upon Troy. Their ships remained chained an entire year in the harbor of Aulis and, through fear of the hostility of the wind and in order to placate the divinity of the Mediterranean, they sacrificed the life of a virgin.

All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves. The abysses roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with their music, attracted ships in order to dash them to pieces. There was not an island without its particular god, without its monster and cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their most superstitious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of Mediterranean life. The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected prosperity. Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress contemporary with the Crusades. In other centuries these had been famous ports; before their walls had taken place naval battles; now from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain. The accumulating sand had driven the sea back miles…. On the other hand, inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.