Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero

Author:Mayra Montero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THEY’RE two old photographs, small but fairly clear. Your mother gave them to me, along with the letters, and asked me to throw them into the ocean. “From the plane,” she pleaded, “throw them far away.” I obeyed only in part: I threw away his letters—you can’t imagine the satisfaction I felt when I did that—but I decided to save the photographs. I still don’t understand why. Perhaps because they were photographs of kids, children from another time, who at the moment their pictures were taken were not responsible for the life they were fated to live. I supposed that after a few years somebody, even Estela herself would thank me for not destroying them. But your mother left this world soon afterward, and as for Frank, he never had any interest in seeing them. I mentioned them in a letter to him three or four years after he became a widower, and I confessed the truth to him: Estela had given them to me to throw in the ocean. He answered: “Then you were wrong to keep them.” And we never spoke of it again.

The photographs were in my house on St. Croix all that time, but it never occurred to me to look at them. When my father died and I decided to move to the house I inherited in Port Clyde, I took them with me. By then I’d come back from Korea and was taking steps to bring over my wife, a Korean woman with whom I’d had a son. I began to earn my living as I’d always earned it: carrying cargo back and forth in my plane, which was no longer the Parakeet Cessna but a Piper Comanche in which I’d invested the money my father left me. When the need arose, and if I was well paid, I’d transport a corpse, one of those sleepers that affected you so much and that, since we were in Maine, seemed colder to me and grayer, sunk deeper into their damn slumber than the sleepers in the Virgin Islands. Around that time the idea of transporting dead bodies in the plane began to make me uneasy, but unless they refused to pay what I deserved for flying with dead meat, I never said no. I didn’t even need the money, I did it for the discipline, in order not to allow myself to be conquered by fear or superstition.

I never showed the photographs to my wife, or to any friend, and certainly not to my son. And one of the many reasons I didn’t was that I thought nobody except you could be interested in seeing them. Before I came to see you, I looked for them; I opened the envelope where I kept them to see if they’d turned to dust, and when I found them still intact, I took them out carefully and looked at them for a long time; I bore into them with these eyes of a mortified old man who didn’t

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