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By Root 278 0

this since going through the Straits of Magellan as a young man, when the ship he was on had been surrounded by icebergs that came in every colour. Hastie was a “lifer” in the Merchant Navy, travelling to the Americas, the Philippines, the Far East, being altered, he claimed, by the men and the women he met. “I remember the girls, the silk … I don’t remember the work at all. I chose tough adventures. Books were only words then.” In the late-night air, Mr. Hastie was a nonstop talker. And what he told us, when we visited him by his yellow light on some of those evenings, put an excited fear into our hearts. He had worked for the Dollar Line, which passaged through the canal in Panama—the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Miraflores Locks, the Gaillard Cut. That, he said, was the realm of romance! He described the man-made excavations, and the portal cities at each end of the canal, and then Balboa, where he was seduced by a local beauty, got drunk, missed his ship, and married the woman, escaping five days later by signing up on the next Italian vessel.

Mr. Hastie spoke in his slow, dry voice, the cigarette hanging from his lips, the words whispered modestly through the smoke. We believed everything he told us. We asked to see a picture of his “wife,” who, he said, continued to follow him from port to port, never giving up, and he promised to “reveal her image,” although he never did. We imagined a great beauty, with blazing eyes, and a horse under her. For when Mr. Hastie signed on to his Italian ship out of Balboa, Anabella Figueroa had read his self-blaming but still dismissive letter too late to catch the vessel herself. She gathered two horses and rode without pause and in a fury to the Pedro Miguel Locks and boarded the steamer there as a first-class passenger—in order that she could be served a meal by him in his steward’s monkey jacket, and not even acknowledge his surprised face or his servile presence with one word or glance, until that evening when she entered the small cabin he shared with two other crew members, and leapt into his arms. Our dreams were busy that night.

And further tales would follow by the yellow stern light. Because sometime later, on another ship, after he had again admitted his hesitancy about their relationship, my cabinmate was watching a four-day-old moon, when she came silently up to him and knifed him twice through the ribs, missing his heart “by the width of a communion wafer.” It was only the cold air that kept him conscious. If she had been a larger woman, as opposed to South American petite, he was sure, she would have lifted him over the railings and dropped him overboard. He lay there and bellowed—perhaps his yells were louder because of the stillness of the night. Fortunately, a watchman heard him. Anabella Figueroa was arrested, and jailed for only a week. “Female despair,” Mr. Hastie explained. “They have a single word for it in the South American criminal code. It is the equivalent of ‘driving under the influence of hypnotism.’ Which is what love is, or at least what love was, in those days….

“There is a madness in women,” he tried to explain to the three of us. “You have to approach them carefully. They might be quaint and hesitant as wild stags, if you wish to lie with them, go drinking with them. But you leave them and it’s like plunging down a mine shaft you didn’t realize was there in their nature…. A stabbing is nothing. Nothing. I could have survived that. But in Valparaiso she was there again, released from jail. She hunted me down at the Hotel Homann. Luckily I had caught the typhoid, perhaps in the very hospital I was taken to with my knife wounds, and luckily she had an unreasonable fear of the disease, a fortune-teller had told her she might die of it, and she left me for good. So the knifing near to my left heart saved me from a permanent fate with her. I was never to see her again. I said left heart, for men have two. Two hearts. Two kidneys. Two ways of life. We are symmetrical creatures. We are balanced in our emotions….”

For years I believed all this.

“Anyway, in