THE VOYAGE OUT

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN'S NOVEL FINDS MAGIC REALISM ON THE BROOKLYN WATERFRONT

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 16, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

A Guatemalan-American writer who has spent the last two decades moving between Central America and New York, Francisco Goldman displayed this haunted, compassionate view of history in his first novel, ``The Long Night of White Chickens'' (1992). The purgatorial premise of his second work of fiction, ``The Ordinary Seaman,'' is taken from an actual event: An abandoned crew of Central American sailors was found floating aboard a ``rat-infested mystery ship'' on the Brooklyn waterfront. Goldman has transformed that dark little piece of reality into an abundant, beautifully imagined novel -- one where the dreams of a dispossessed sailor are as vibrant and true as the midnight streets he roams in Brooklyn.

The protagonist and one of several ordinary seamen in Goldman's novel is Esteban, a 19-year-old veteran of Nicaragua's civil war who fought for the Sandinistas; now he has leapt at an opportunity (he paid his own air fare from Managua) to join the crew of a ship called the Urus, scheduled to depart New York in four days. It is the summer of 1982 -- a cease fire has been declared in Nicaragua, though who knows for how long -- and Esteban is one of 15 Central American men who have forked over their fortunes to get work on the Urus; their pockets are empty, but they are living on the hope of a salaried life as sailors. Among them are two electricians, two mechanics, a cook, an elderly waiter (Bernardo, the moral conscience of the ship), and nine ordinary seamen -- some of whom have never been to sea. When they arrive at their broken-down, deserted pier in Brooklyn, they will find a 400-foot freighter salvaged from scrap, with no electricity, no rat guards and no legal papers for them to sign.

``The Ordinary Seaman'' is a story of survival, but its epic reach and its exquisite use of time give it the sheen and depth of several narrative realities taking place at once. Bernardo is wary from the moment they board the ship; a viejo lobo de mar, or old sea dog, he tries to take Esteban under his wing, to the young man's macho distress. Their nebulous captan, an impotent, New Age screw-up named Elias, appears from time to time with hot dogs or socks, bearing a new explanation about why no one's being paid. The men paint and rewire the Urus, banking on the promise of tomorrow and choking on rat-infested drinking water; as their optimism and food supply begin to wane, so, too, does their impetus to do anything about their plight. On their infrequent forays from the ship, they have been robbed and beaten and nearly lost in los proyectos, where the odious Elias and his sidekick, Mark, have warned them not to go. Only Esteban has the wherewithal to brave the Brooklyn nights: He has been to war and lost his beloved, Marta, to an enemy raid; not much is left on earth for him to fear, except the dishonor of giving up.

Esteban's courageous wanderings shatter the claustrophobic prison of the internal horrors of the Urus, but interwoven throughout that main narrative are the smaller stories of ``The Ordinary Seaman'': the feckless, privileged background of Elias; the family Bernardo left behind in Nicaragua; the official Ship Visitor from the Seafarers' Institute, who will finally, by serendipity, discover the ghostly drama being played out on the Urus. With his trust-fund marriage and his eco-fantasies, Elias is a hallucinogenic cowboy -- as much a cultural scavenger as he is a maritime fraud. It would have been easy to make this character a virile picture of imperialist evil; Goldman has done something far more creative by making Elias's marshmallow-soft center the man's most dangerous trait.

Among the lush descriptive scenes in ``The Ordinary Seaman'' are a few wonderful images that evoke the larger truths of the novel: a broken clock; a soldier clutching a childhood doll through the battles he always survives; a cache of goods Esteban finds while foraging for food, containing not manna from heaven but infinite Parcheesi games. Most extraordinary, though, is the intimate reality of this shipboard life, from the desolation of the crew's lonely pier to their sleepless nights and ceaseless days. They have brought with them their tattered photos and combat boots and dreams of a better life; by the end of summer, they are unsurprised by what they see in each other's faces: ``increasingly sad-eyed, shaggy and dirty as young corpses risen from graves.'' Vladimir and Estragon would be no strangers to the Urus; certainly the men there would take them in.

In his acknowledgments at the end of the novel, Goldman reveals his sources for the story as well as his own maritime adventures. Roughly 30 percent of this is illuminating, but Goldman goes on to give us an unsolicited interview, much of which is intrusive and irrelevant. (When did acknowledgments stop being simply, and tersely, acknowledgments?) Fortunately for the novel, he rarely makes such full errors of judgment in his story, though an unevenness shows in his neglect of several minor characters, as well as the occasional lapse into hurried prose (``they fell torridly in love''). But ``The Ordinary Seaman'' surges with the power of the imagination. Its gods are time and memory, and its humanity is more amorphous than what we normally associate with the political novel. All the hopelessness and failure of the infrastructure of New York are contained in one character's eyes, and it takes an indelibly literary vision to accomplish that.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, from ``The Ordinary Seaman''