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By Root 261 0

came on board, and guided us out of the harbour. In his unconcerned manner he was similar to the man who had led us into the Canal with whistles and yells. I imagined them as twins, or at least brothers. Completing his task, the pilot strolled away from the bridge, his two-rupee sandals snapping at his heels, and climbed down into the launch that had followed us out. The harbour pilots from now on would be more ceremonial. In Marseilles one came on board in a long-sleeved shirt, white trousers, and blancoed shoes. He hardly moved his lips as he whispered instructions to bring the ship into harbour. The pilots I was used to wore shorts and seldom removed their hands from their trouser pockets. Their first request was usually for a cordial and a fresh sandwich. I would miss their air of loafing, the way they appeared like necessary jesters who felt they could stroll safely and behave as they wished for an hour or two in the court of a foreign king. But now we had entered European waters.

IT WAS IN PORT SAID THAT MR. MAZAPPA also left us. I waited for his return up the gangplank, even after it was concertinaed and rolled away. Miss Lasqueti was there beside us as well, but she slipped off silently when the departure bell began ringing endlessly, like an insistent child. Then the gangway dislocated itself from the dock.

I have realized only recently that Mr. Mazappa and Miss Lasqueti were young. They must have been in their thirties that year, when he disappeared from our ship. Max Mazappa had been the most exuberant member of the Cat’s Table until about the time we left Aden. He had herded all of us around with a lighthearted rudeness, insisting we be a vocal dinner table. He was public, even when whispering something questionable. He had shown us that joy existed in adults too, though I knew the future would never be as dramatic and joyous and deceitful as the way he had sketched it and sung it for Cassius, Ramadhin, and me. He was Homeric with his list of feminine charms, as well as vices, and the best piano rags and torch songs, illegal acts, betrayals, gunshots by musicians who defended the honour of their faultless playing, and the possibility of a whole dance floor yelling the word “Onions!” during the brief pause of a jazz number by Sidney Bechet. And there always would be men Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits. What life there was in the diorama he constructed for us.

So we did not, and could not, understand what had invaded him so privately. Something dark seemed to have entered this protégé of Le Grand Bechet. What did I not understand about Mr. Mazappa? Had I not sensed accurately the growing friendship between him and Miss Lasqueti? In our turbine room discussions we’d concocted a great romance—the way they politely excused themselves between courses at dinner and disappeared on deck for a smoke. It would still be light outside, so we could see them leaning over the wooden rail, exchanging whatever wisdoms they knew about the world. Once he covered her bare shoulders with his jacket. “I thought she was a blue-stocking, at first,” he had said of her.

For a day or so after Mazappa left the Oronsay there were re-evaluations of him. Why had he needed two names, for instance? And the issue was raised again of his having children. (Someone at our table brought up “The Breast-feeding Conversation.”) So, I began to wonder if these children had already heard the same jokes and advice that he had been giving us. It was also suggested that he was possibly the kind of man who was joyous only when he was free, between this and that point of land. “Or maybe he has been married several times,” Miss Lasqueti inserted quietly, “and when he dies there will be several simultaneous widows.” We hung on to the silence that followed her remark, wondering if he had also proposed to her.

I had expected her to be shattered at Mr. Mazappa’s departure, and to wear an ashen look at our table. But Miss Lasqueti, as the journey continued, was to become the most enigmatic and surprising one among our companions. We were seeing a sly humour