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By Root 1112 0

and foe alike, straight to the bottom, and were tougher on to those who wanted to find a way to move the ship in its present situation … One day a topman, a certain Slim John, whether because the sun had gone to his head or what, I don't know, began to daydream over a coffeepot. If the steam lifted the lid of the coffeepot, said this Slim John, then our ship, if constructed like a coffeepot, would like-wise be able to move, and without sails … It was admittedly a somewhat incoherent line of thought, but perhaps if we had thought some more about it there was profit to be had there. But no: they chucked his coffeepot overboard and very nearly threw him out with it. These coffeepot fantasies, they said, were litde better than papist ideas … coffee and coffeepots were Spanish truck, not ours … Well, I didn't understand a thing, but so long as those pots moved, with that scurvy that was still carrying people off…’

‘And so, Uncle Donald,’ we cried, eyes shining with impatience, taking him by the wrists and shaking him, ‘we know you got away, we know you routed the Spanish galleon, but tell us how you did it, Uncle Donald!’

‘Ah yes, it wasn't that everybody saw eye to eye in the galleon either, not by a long chalk! Watching them through your eyeglass you could see that they had their people who wanted to get moving too; some wanted to fire their cannons at us and others had decided that the only way out was to join us, since a victory of Elizabeth's fleet would have given a big boost to trade, which had been falling off for some time… But like us, they also had their officers, and the officers of the Spanish Armada didn't want anything to change, oh no. On that point the commanders on our ship and on the enemy ship, loathe each other as they might, were wholeheartedly agreed. So that with no sign of any breeze blowing up, they began to send each other messages, with flags, from one boat to the next, as if they wanted to start talks. Except they never went further than a: Good morning! Good evening! Marvellous weather, no! and so on…’

‘Uncle Donald! Uncle Donald! Don't go back to sleep, please! Tell us how Drake's ship managed to get moving!’

‘Hey, okay, I'm not deaf you know! You have to understand, no one realized how long we would be becalmed there, off the Antilles, for years even, with the haze and humidity, the sky leaden and lowering as if a hurricane were about to break any moment. We were streaming sweat, all naked, climbing in the rigging, looking for a bit of shade under the furled sails. Everything was so still that even those of us who were most impatient for change, for something to happen, were motionless too, one at the top of the foretopmast, another on the main jib aft, another again astride a spar, perched up there leafing through atlases and nautical maps …’

‘So then what, Uncle Donald!’ We threw ourselves on our knees at his feet, begging him, hands together in supplication, then we shook his shoulders, yelling.

‘Tell us how it ended, for God's sake! We can't wait to find out! Go on with your story, Uncle Donald!’

Note 1979

I have re-read ‘Becalmed in the Antilles’. Perhaps this is the first time I've read the story since I wrote it. It doesn't seem dated, not only because it works as a story in its own right, quite apart from the political allegory, but also because the paradoxical contrast between bitter struggle and enforced immobility is a common condition, both in political-military and epic-narrative terms, at least as old as the Iliad, so that it seems only natural to refer it to one's own experience of history. As an allegory of Italian politics, when one thinks that twenty-two years have gone by and the two galleons are still there facing each other, the image becomes even more distressing. Of course these twenty-two years have been anything but becalmed as far as Italian society is concerned, on the contrary it has changed more than in the hundred years before. And the time we live in could hardly be described as ‘a dead calm’. So in that sense one can't really claim that the metaphor corresponds