A Long Petal of the Sea(35)

Victor, Roser, and the baby were among the first to embark. The ship was an old nine-thousand-ton cargo boat that brought goods from Africa and had been used as a troop ship in the Great War. Built to accommodate twenty seamen for short voyages, it had been converted to take more than two thousand people for a month. Triple bunks had been built in the hold, and a kitchen, dining room, and sick bay with three doctors had been installed. As soon as the Dalmau family arrived on board they were assigned to their sleeping quarters: Victor with the men in the prow, Roser with the women and children in the stern. Over the next few hours, the lucky passengers finished coming on board, while several hundred other refugees had to remain at dockside as there was no more room.



At nightfall the Winnipeg weighed anchor with the high tide. On deck, some were weeping silently; others had their hands on their hearts as they sang the Catalan song of the emigrant: Dol?a Catalu?a pàtria del meu cor quan de tu s’allunya / d’enyoran?a es mor. Perhaps they knew in their hearts they would never return to their homeland. Pablo Neruda stood on the quay waving a handkerchief until they disappeared from view. That day was engraved on his memory too, and years later he would write: Critics can erase all my poetry if they wish. But this poem, that I recall today, cannot be erased by anyone.

The bunks were like niches in a cemetery: the refugees had to crawl into them and lie without moving on straw mattresses. Even so, this seemed to them the height of luxury compared to the holes they had made in the wet sand of the concentration camps. There was a latrine for every fifty people and three sittings for the dining room, which were strictly respected. Coming, as most of the passengers did, from wretched conditions and near starvation, they thought this was paradise: they had not had a hot meal in months. On the boat the food was very simple but tasty, and they could have second helpings of as many vegetables as they liked. They had been tormented by lice and bedbugs, and could now wash in basins with clean water and soap. They had been prisoners of despair, and now were sailing toward freedom. There was even tobacco! And beer and spirits in a small bar for those who could afford them. Almost all the passengers volunteered to help with the work on board, from the engine room to peeling potatoes or scrubbing the deck. On their first morning at sea, Victor introduced himself to the doctors in the sick bay. They greeted him warmly, lent him a white coat, and told him that several of the refugees showed symptoms of dysentery and bronchitis; there were also a couple of cases of typhus that had escaped the health authorities’ attention.

The women organized themselves to look after the children. They put up some barriers on deck to create room for a kindergarten and school. From the first day there was a nursery, games, art, exercise, and classes—an hour and a half in the morning, and an hour and a half in the afternoon. Like almost everybody else, Roser was seasick, but as soon as she could get up she began teaching the little ones to make music with a xylophone and drums made out of buckets. Once she had begun her lessons, the first mate, a Frenchman from the Communist Party, approached with the good news that Neruda had arranged for a piano and two accordions to be brought on board for her and anyone else who could play them. Some other passengers had a couple of guitars and a clarinet. From then on there was music for the children, concerts and dances for the adults, and a stirring Basque choir.



Fifty years later, when Victor Dalmau was interviewed on television about the odyssey of his exile, he said that the Winnipeg had been the ship of hope.



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FOR VICTOR, THE SEA journey was a pleasant holiday, but Roser, who had spent several months comfortably installed in her Quaker friends’ house, suffered at first from the crowded conditions and the smells. She never dreamed of mentioning it (that would have been the height of discourtesy) and she quickly became so used to them she didn’t even notice. She put Marcel in a makeshift sling and went everywhere with him on her back, even while she was playing the piano. Victor took turns with the baby whenever he wasn’t working in the sick bay. Roser was the only one who could breastfeed—the other malnourished mothers could count on a reliable supply of bottles for the forty babies on board. Several women offered to wash clothes and diapers for Roser so that she wouldn’t spoil her hands. One peasant woman, toughened by years of hard toil, examined Roser’s hands in amazement, mystified as to how she could play the piano without looking at the keys. Her husband had worked collecting cork before the war, and when Neruda had told him there were no cork oaks in Chile, he replied drily: well, there will be. The poet thought this was a splendid riposte, and so accepted him on board, together with fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual laborers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas. Neruda simply ignored that instruction: it made no sense to leave behind men and women who had defended their ideals so heroically. In his heart of hearts he was hoping they would rouse his country from its insular somnolence.



The migrants stayed out on deck until very late each evening, because down below the ventilation was awful and there was little room to move around. They created a newspaper with news from the outside world; this grew steadily worse as Hitler continued to occupy more territory. After nineteen days at sea, when they learned of the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, many of the communists who had fought against Fascism in Spain felt badly betrayed. The political divisions that had split the Republican government persisted on board. Occasionally fights broke out due to blame and past resentments; these were rapidly stifled by other passengers before the ship’s captain could intervene. Captain Pupin was a man of right-wing beliefs who had no sympathy for the passengers he was transporting, but did have an unshakable sense of duty. The Spaniards, blind to this aspect of his character, suspected he might betray them, change course, and take them back to Europe. They kept their eye on him as well as on the route the ship was taking. The first mate and most of the seamen were communists, so they also had Pupin in their sights.