Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz Bill Johnston

Author:Witold Gombrowicz, Bill Johnston [Witold Gombrowicz, Bill Johnston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 2011-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The Events on the Banbury

1

In the spring of 1930, I decided to undertake a trip by sea—for personal reasons—to do with health and relaxation. It was mainly that my situation on the European continent was becoming more disagreeable and indistinct with every day. So I wrote to a shipping magnate of my acquaintance, Mr. Cecil Burnett of Birmingham, to request that he find a berth for me on one of his numerous ships —and in no time at all I received a short reply by telegraph: “Berenice Brighton 17 April 09.00 sharp.” But at Brighton, at the docks, there were so many sailing ships and steamships at anchor, and my baggage hindered my movements so, that I was a little less than fifteen minutes late, and the sailors and stevedores starting calling out urgently, as they always do—“Over there, over there, hurry up, sir, you can still make it!—hurry, hurry—get a move on, sir! You’ll get there in time!” I caught up with the Berenice by motor launch, though without my luggage. A rope ladder was lowered, up which I climbed onto the deck, in my haste not reading the name painted in large letters on the port side of the hull.

It was a large three-masted brig with a capacity of at least four thousand tons—and, as I inferred from the arrangement of the sails and the design of the bowspit, was sailing to Valparaiso with a cargo of sprats and herring. Captain Clarke, an old sea dog with cheeks reddened by the wind, said straightforwardly:

“Welcome aboard the Banbury, sir.”

The first officer agreed for a small sum to let me have his cabin. But soon the seas began to swell, and I was beset by seasickness with an intensity I had never experienced before. I rendered to the sea all that I had to render, and I groaned, void as an empty bottle and unable to meet the demands of the element, which was insisting on more, more ... In a state of physical and moral torment, because of my unbearably empty stomach, I devoured my blanket, pillow, and window blind—but none of these objects remained inside me for longer than a second. I further devoured the bedsheets and the first officer’s underwear, which he kept in a trunk marked with the letters BBS—but that too stayed only temporarily in my innards. My groans passed through the cabin wall to the captain, who took pity on me and had a barrel of herring and a barrel of sprats rolled in. It was only toward the evening of the third day, after consuming three quarters of the barrel of herring and half the sprats, that I more or less came to, and the movement of the pumps that cleaned out the ship came to a halt.

We were passing the northwest coast of Portugal. The Banbury was drifting at an average rate of eleven knots with a favorable headwind. The sailors were scrubbing the deck. I gazed at the rocky land of Europe as it receded.

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