Leviathan
Prologue:
The Death of Oliver James
Fate never made a vessel more sacred than the Leviathan when the first sun of spring killed the captain at his wake. The sun rose softly and gloriously, and the men contemplated her with sheer reverence, in the same manner they would a perfect nude woman. Nature paused and not a single word was spoken, nor a single sound awakened. Then when the light touched us, we did not know if our eyes watered from our damaged sight meeting the rays or joy. Some men closed their eyes, others smiled, some cried, and for a little while, we were all boundless and free. In this hell that we had suffered individually, this instant was of unanimous existence - of childlike awe covered in the warm, golden blanket of life.
But this was the first sun, and in this white nothing at the corner of the globe, such is always a brief visit. It took a few minutes until she made a short half circumference close to the horizon and then sunk in a glow. Then it ended. Seamen in the main deck sighed in nostalgia and for strength as their vision adjusted back to the darkness. Sails rolled up in the foremast swayed in the gales and clashed against it. The hull wailed by wood and nail hugged by the steady force of ice. The wind howled against the bowsprit. Frost broke at the moving wheel. The ship remained trapped and tortured and so did we with her. We had grown accustomed to this reality, but it was particularly painful to return to it after having escaped it, even if only in our minds.
I lingered for a moment on the top deck gazing at the shining dimming in the horizon. It reminded me of the glow left by the scorching of the city where I was born as I sailed away in the arms of my father in amazement at the beautiful bonfire. It reminded me of the blaze of the town that would thereafter adopt me as I paused my walk alone in dread and looked back again at the beautiful bonfire. I would have sunk deeper in this contradiction if not for broken glass, shattering in the great cabin. It was then that I noticed the absence of Pete in the short morning that transpired. Through sickness and madness, he had been no more than a foot away from the captain who, for the last weeks, laid in his bed at the great cabin spousing speeches of either transcendental wisdom or complete nonsense. Death came to him that morning in the same sensual manner that freedom came to us. With a rays shining through his window, beams bended into rainbows on naval instruments and tunnels of lights revealing dust flying like snow on February, colors lighter and truer and textures so plain they looked alive, shadows longer and bolder and the true color of Pete’s eyes, brown not black. One cannot understand the euphoria that took place in the frail mind of that once terrifying man, and before he could himself, he felt the sun on his face and the tenderness of life in its warmth, and once everything rhymed at last, he died.
A moment after, I walked into the room searching for Pete, but instead of the sun, a wool blanket laid on his body and face, I looked at him and Pete at me and few seconds passed, and Pete just said: “yes.” This was yesterday, March 18th.
Part I:
The Storm
Book I:
"The value of life can only be measured by death." Paolo mentioned that to me in The Leviathan after a brief silence diverging from his characteristic unstoppable rambling. I would later understand that he was not talking to me but himself and this was a flash of honest introspection from a sick man who knew death was close and was forced to dialogue with it but in the ignorance of this tender reality, I could only think of myself. Those words carried a different story for me, although they reminded me of a thought equal in its meaning, they had arrived in my mind six months prior as I contemplated a crucified Jesus in a chapel, and thus I had given them the connotation of divine origin. I would have treated this coincidence as a repetition of wisdom, which is more common the greater the truth, but, in a twist of fate, one could say with not much doubt that this idea was the seed of this journey we were then together surviving, the primal mover now making an appearance for comedy or holy interpretation. So I smiled at the thought for a moment before remembering the oppressive heat of that day it came to me and almost feeling like the memory could warm my bones so the frost on my flesh would thaw. Of course, it could not, but I found comfort nonetheless in the memory. By all means, that was a good day although I was not grateful for it until I lost myself in the chapel and then forgot after I had left it. It seems obvious to me now as I write and it seemed slightly less than clear to me when I first recalled it that the load of blessings that transcurred that day were precisely equal to my inability to see them, and this realization made the first time it lived as a memory painful from its starkly contrasting sweetness. This was also the first time I found myself profoundly nostalgic for a time not so much removed from the now, and in spite of the impossibility of recalling such a complicated and heavy emotion with any real truth when removed from it, I do remember it felt as a sort of intense self-betrayal. It was because I did not know the danger of tender memories when dipped in melancholy, that at that moment I let myself slide ever so cavernously into a narrative of softness that unraveled grey counter emotions.
I remembered the church was a small establishment and not too many people frequented it from what I had seen in a handful of days, it was modest but pious enough to be compelled into authenticity, thus only artists and honest Christians attended it in spite of greater options. By conscious hand or nature's course, the limitations of the construction combined with the devotion of its makers had created an atypical place of prayer, where it seemed that instead of a desire to adorn and augment the presence of God it sought to find it in the simplicity of humanity. The ceiling was peeling paint of a deep blue with dots of white, like a twilight sky, and curved into domes low enough for an oversized man to be forced into kneeling prayer out of discomfort, the stone slabs on the wall were textured and often inconsistent in size until it met the floor as an uneven collection of terracotta clay. Then it opened upwards at the altar, and the building turned from half a floor to three, like a wide tower at one of its ends. There, a plain stone block of white marble stood as an altar, preceded by a life-sized crucified Christ sculptured only real in spirit, free of academic realism or complex techniques or adored in beauty. It was only a young man forcibly nude and suffering torture, pleading towards the sky for forgiveness, the emotion so true you could see truth in him and then in yourself, and for a moment peace could be made within and without. This is when I was overwhelmingly free, thus the only moment in the day when I was conscious enough to see it.
However deep this passion was, it was feeble in its perseverance, as evidenced by its stifling from the presence of a once pirate now priest whom I had only met a few times previously but whose openness, madness, and agreeableness had made me spend enough enjoyable time with him to almost call him a friend; although I would not ever call him so as that was the last day I saw him.
I must mention that, independent to profound religious experiences that usually occurred on an empty stomach such as that day, my desire to attend this humble class of institutions laid primarily on my fascination with its visitors, which with time and experience I slowly began to recognize as the kindest of the mad. It was, as fate willed it, outside of one of these chapels in the outskirts of New Orleans that I first met Paolo, but this is a very different story.
The ex-pirate waited for my prayer to culminate as I decided to stitch one together before my time was spent in measureless dialogue, or more likely an interrupted monologue. He sat next to me on the pew with his arms and legs crossed folding his always unexpectedly pristine robe, his perfect posture exuding patience but his constant rearranging of his long mustache betraying the image. Aside from four visible scars on his face and a noticeably careless demeanor perpetually on the edge of impoliteness, whoever would have now recognized him as a once pirate would have been suspect of being one themselves. He was, by all measures and in his own unorthodox way, a man of the Lord to the world and to himself, and although I once questioned his faith as an act, I later realized that he was unable to embody anything other than himself.
I had first met him grumbling about the quality of the stone in the chapel, to which he then countered it with a proclamation of the luxury of the quarries’s stone that formed the cathedral where he practiced, then he remarked the insult to the paint by the weathering of the walls, which he followed with a praise to the great artists that had decorated and maintained the frescoes on his church and this continued with every crevice of the building. Somewhere in this monologue that was undesirably directed at me, part from honest interest and part from hostile rhetoric, I asked him in a muted tone made poignant by its accompanying stare, why would a man linger in a place he did not find beautiful? At this, he paused for a moment, looked at the celestial blue roof and then at the altar, and said softer than any words he uttered before or after, “It reminds me of my childhood, of a church on an island that sunk”.
But the last day I saw him, he came to me with a stranger thing than any personal anecdote he had priorly unraveled in dreamlike narrative, a voyage he described with floral vocabulary entailing,, by all accounts, the biggest naval raid memory could recall or imagination is willing to envision. By that time, I knew the name of its captain well, he was wrapped in mythical origins and legendary glory, the type of success whose memory seems impervious to failure and, for this, I didn’t trust him. I thought a man who was willing to allow legends of him to be traded like folk stories was a man who needed his shadow to be greater than his person. Of course, this estimation was profoundly incorrect, but that would only be clear in the storm. Thus, although the priest’s perspective was skewed to his glory, his words in my ear did not seduce me in spite of their great quantity, if there were any that did, they were those that came to me minutes before in religious epiphany united by my zealous desire to know the weight of life.
It was by chance’s course that at the exact moment this revealing conversation was transpiring in the Chapel, one captain, four lieutenants, and a medic were having scallops as the penultimate dish of grand a dinner in the great cabin of a 124-gun French Man O' War sailing at 7 knots through the Atlantic close to Bermuda. With most of their attention deviated to the complicated art of absorbing scallops in a sophisticated fashion, they spoke casually about painting the upper gun deck in need of service since their last escort mission, and moving gunpowder from the interior of the ship in the magazine to every gunner deck as the war made the trading channels increasingly hostile and aggression necessitated swiftness. A hundred feet above, Pierre Cordova sat on the crow’s nest of the main mast as a lookout, his relief on the nest had fallen sick with scurvy two days prior, and now he had been awake on duty for 24 hours continuously, the only thing keeping him up: the withdrawal symptoms he was developing as he was a fervent tobacco smoker and a choppy wave had made his pile fall to the sea around half a day ago. In the galley, a hungry rat picked up from the port of Cadiz had successfully chewed into a barrel of rice before promptly being kicked by the main cook into another room and left for dead. Eight hundred miles away, in a port close to the city of Boston, Lieutenant Jose de la Paz transmitted the concern of the Captain to find a ship’s boy before setting sail to Lieutenant Vladimir Mardare who was tasked with finding a replacement after he shot the last one for alleged espionage. He told him to loosen up and assured him they would have one before midnight the next day.
Vladimir had paid the priest two dollars to quickly find a boy and now he was telling me, a clean rationale for his open and rapid divulgence. It seems attractive to say that when he made me the offer, I considered my chances at success on the voyage with great scrutiny, but I do not recall anything resembling logic passing through my mind before I accepted.
Book II:
The next day awoke slowly, it was as unusually hot as it had been for the whole of the summer that year in New England, I still remember the humidity in the air that made the sun’s rise that morning particularly oppressive. The dock where I was instructed to go in informal directions was a half-day ride from the center of Boston and a few hours distant from any type of concrete civilization. A dirt road, as wide as a stagecoach and a half, led to the place through a perceptibly untamed forest and before that a mostly barren prairie that extended for miles with some homesteads in between great flat gaps. The port was small, the space evidently erected for the use of canoes and small fishing boats, only a little natural gap separated the forest from the water, and in that space sat an old wooden hut and then a handful of docks. The water around that area seemed shallow enough for a passing eye to believe it could only host a modest vessel, but the shore was a veiled cliff, as deep as any major city port. Nobody would attempt to inspect here for pirates or corsairs, but if they did, they would not be difficult to find, for by the time we entered the forest that proved a prelude to the dock, the masts of the two ships were visible over the trees like the towers of a Catholic church on a religious town.
The ships were wooden behemoths in comparison to the canoes that sat on the soil preceding them. It was two frigates: The Leviathan and The Nephilim, they were long and compact and looked fast even docked, every crevice evidently maintained continuously from affection and for necessity. Although the aged wood and the roughness of the design of the Nephilim made clear that it was considerably older and had suffered more wounds than a lifetime of a ship requires, it still appeared seaworthy. Even I, an outsider to the sea, could tell plainly the mastery of these unique fabrications, as even on the journey to the Atlantic that followed that day or prior, I never saw one with so much flair or so much palpable power. Too much had been altered, too much care had flowed into them to think that these ships were anything but a child to whoever had sacrificed their life to them for there was no vanity in them only devotion.
Brown wood in paint of even velvet red, canons of bronze polished like greek sculptures, sails like silk from a foreign king rolled up on the freshly varnished masts subtly swaying against the adorned crown’s nest from the arctic winds. And the crew. All seamen on deck moved like a beehive, sails to deck, bowsprit to quarterdeck, cabin to cabin, all gliding past one another with some task, arriving for one’s assistance at exactly the moment they were needed and departing at exactly the instance they weren’t. Men uniformly dressed but all with different faces, different scars, different hands, and different accents, united some by valor and others by opportunism, and the most capable by both. These vessels seemed, for those more inclined to the art of contemplation, a great authentic museum, but as I learned the moment my hands felt the Leviathan and my eyes met the crew, it was a perfect fruit of complete despotism.
At precisely the same moment my amazement was unfolding at the presence of the Leviathan and the Nephilim, in ‘Rougennui’, the aforementioned 124-gun Man o War, Pierre Cordova had now been awake for two consecutive sleepless days on duty. By chance or good camaraderie, a fellow crewmate by the name of Eric Toussaint, brought a few matches and a good amount of tobacco to roll, as Pierre had signaled him of his sickening necessity a few hours prior. Half an hour before, the rat that had successfully infiltrated the barrel of tomatoes in the kitchen, now exiled to the magazine, had tried its luck chewing dedicatedly through three barrels of gunpowder before giving up and moving to another parallel cabin in the vessel. Now, on the floor of every deck, a thin line of gunpowder laid a trail leading to the magazine from where the barrel that once carried it. Finally, on the upper gun deck, a large portion of the floor was in the process of drying as the wood had been healed and subsequently painted and varnished.
At approximately the same moment I first stepped on the Leviathan, Pierre Cordova, lookout of ‘Rougennui’, took a generous drag out of a makeshift cigar he had prepared, first smoke pervaded his lungs, then bliss his mind, he felt a ethereality smokers of the excessive variety like himself do not have the pleasure to encounter aside from unwanted abstinence. He sat down, lightheaded, satisfied, and incredibly somnolent, and the sweetness of this mixture made his smoke drift across his lower lip imperceptibly, tumbling once on the wood of the nest and falling down on a perfectly straight line, its lit fire unhindered by the wind as it cruised between two sails. The events that followed were both unstoppable and catastrophic.
The minute fire touched the floor letting a spark ignite the varnish on the upper deck with sufficient pace and vastness in combustion to beat the speed of reaction of the sailors nearby set ablaze immediately. Yet, a moment after, it held the rest of the crew’s attention enough to forgo a long but rapidly igniting trail of gunpowder into the magazine. As it happened, Henri Lejart was watching the Atlantic through a gunport in the lower deck, the sea was calm, the air was humid but the ocean breeze through the hole made, for a moment, the discomfort worthwhile, in this little heaven he was thinking of this earthly pleasure’s chance being replicated in Montpellier with his fiance by his side on the beach when he heard screams above him and, as he turned around, he saw a line of fire passing by and then below into the interior of the boat, then a sound too loud to be audible came from directly below and then the floor opened.
Lejart’s Interlude I:
Henri Lejart was born to Marie Lejart and Louis Mortaper in the spring of 1777 in an affluent stone house in the outskirts of Melun, a small commune a day's walk from Paris and sharing the waters of the river Seine with the city that overshadowed it both culturally and politically. He was the first child of a stoic mother who he did not remembered holding any occupation apart from her solitary devotion to him and her five children out of which only a brother and a sister would survive long enough for him to call them so. Throughout his boyhood, his tutors described him as astute but never smart and his doctors as sickly but perseverant. His brother and sister pointed to his artistry in lies and his impulsivity in his disdain for injustice. His mother, alternatively, almost solely highlighted his boundless curiosity. For reasons that he later deduced originated from the bitterness that is born from love and then betrays it, his father was almost never in their life after the early death of his second son and apart from a guilt-born yearly stipend to keep the family just above the poorest of the third state, he was immaterial to their everyday life until his death in the winter of 1788. All he knew of him was his occupation as either a Commodore of the French Navy or a Sargent in the King’s army although Henri would never know exactly as a consequence of a facade of disinterest he maintained as to not open a sore wound which remained for his and Marie’s entire relationship as both unspoken and perpetually palpable.
It was the time and consequence of this death which came to coincide and be transformed by the larger streams of history from a horribly timed tragedy to a synchronized fortune in the following years of his Henri’s still young life.
Book III:
I could chronicle the last ten years of my life in chapters each of seemingly high esteemed personalities I’ve served and only leave a few gaps of the time untold. For, as I have learned, it is hard for a life of ambitious aimlessness to end in only a few important acquaintances. All throughout the states, I’ve hunted snapping turtles with ambassadors of Portugal and England, helped a cook (of equal commemoration) make breakfast for nobility of France, and supper for diplomats of Spain. I’ve polished shoes and dusted coats for famous theater actors from Bohemia and broken dance slippers for well-known Russian valet dancers from Siberia. On most occasions, those who could only bring to the room their status on their name treated me as a transaction, something in between. These were usually the men and women distant from humanity, attached to nobles, businessmen, and politicians, people who, more than not, only concerned themselves with some variety of power and saw the rest as superfluous. But others, usually those of artistic disposition or adjacent to it, were distinctly more open and dramatically more interesting. Sometimes they would speak to me as a friend or a son, often they inquired about my life and the city, and I was almost always amazed attheir ability to see something in everyday life of transcendental beauty, although it was many times an antidote to the pain their own sensitivities enkindled. But as much as I enjoyed the company of the artistic celebrities, there was a sort of people I treasured above all others. The monarchs and magicians, those that claimed a greatness that was obviously false.
I had a good friend once, a beggar for food and never coin in Chinatown in New Orleans, where in invariable fashion, he wore a set of rags of yellow, green, and red and wore the greatest mustache anatomically plausible. He claimed to be the true descendant of the crown of Troy to anybody who would lend him his ear, a fact I imagined was manufactured to be as unbelievable as irrefutable. For a very long time, I talked to him with enough recurrence for words closer to truth to escape him every once in a while as he broke oration, stumbled on his words and his eyes watered. That’s how I knew he loved a rich woman once while working as a rural guard in the outskirts of Gibraltar. A woman he called Helen of Troy and was married to an ambassador from a nation in the far east. For four months he planned to murder the husband by manufacturing convoluted rivalries between the families so as to cover his assassination.
He was from Lecce and he had already killed a man before running away from the vineyard where his family worked and lived as a child but he didn’t talk about that too much.
The day of the assassination, it snowed more than it had in decades in both Lecce and Gibraltar. In the morning, the Trojan King was inspecting a forest for a lead on a string of fires lit playfully by a clan of children in the woods when he saw an apple on the white snow-covered soil. He talked about its red hue like it was the last time he ever saw that color. He stepped down from his saddle and picked up the apple for his stead and then he was shot in the head and then the shoulder. The horse galloped away and the snow turned cherry red. He did not see his Helen after that day, and you could still see a scar on his top lip whenever he turned his mustache up at the end of the anecdote. A year later, after I last saw him in New Orleans, he joined the crew of the Leviathan, he carried no rags but only a sailor’s outfit and he never spoke of the story again, nor did he show another soul on the ship his scar; but he told me his name: Paolo di Lecce.
Just like him, every corner of the country held a few of these people for those open enough to let them talk. I hunted with a woman who lived in the bayou of Louisiana, and was more stoic than a general, claim her marriage with an alligator had granted her immunity from the predators of the area; and in a twist of reason, was a notable hunter there. I served the cheapest wine at a tavern to an artist from France who mostly dressed in a Roman senatorial tunic and stated the dirty color of the Mississippi River was a consequence of his refusal to paint it. I met an English pirate while cleaning the floors of a cathedral, rich and retired after having married the most notable prostitute of her time, preaching a sermon, and later bragging about robbing the king in his younger years. If one ever cared about squandering time in meaningless conversation, one would only spend time with these folk.
. Doubtlessly, this is not from a lack of inconceivable plots. Just a week earlier, he had spoken to me about an expedition to the Arctic, where a war with Innuits had left them provisionless and left for a week to survive on a diet of leather from their boots. Two days prior he had disclosed to me in a hushed tone about a pendant of pearls he had stolen from Marie Antoinette just a week before her execution and quickly corrected his narrative to a trade made between the deposed queen and himself to grant her freedom, a deal which, out of a combination of flexible virtues and abstract moral firmness he did not follow but accepted just to keep the pearls as an effort he deemed revolutionary, as he had in this act redistributed the wealth of a monarch down to the third state. And a week before, he spoke about his wife with a strange mixture of unconditional affection and ranging anger, the anger born out of the maddening conundrum authentic love creates between the heart you give and the one you keep. He was almost defeated in his irritation at his spouse’s desire to return to the trade that had once made her unabsorbably wealthy and later on himself as an attachment to her. She was, in times not so far removed from then and certainly still in reputation, the most distinguished prostitute of her time and by the end of her career perhaps the most exorbitant in the continent and her success, as it was clear to her clients, proceeded her fondness for the art of sex but more specifically seduction. Many years before she was a wife, she was described to me with so much fervor by a man in a trance, that I was finally compelled to accept the Trojan wars as a fruit of visceral desire for she was undoubtedly a Helen and wherever she went was Troy. But a pirate had traded for her the sea thus, in spite of her perpetual expressions of transgressive desires, she knew her part of that bargain they had made on an island in the Caribbean on the night they married, and she would never cross it.
Still, that last day he came to me with a stranger thing, a proposition
Part II:
The Ship
Part III:
The March