Echoes From the Dead

Puerto Limón, October 1955

The town by the water is dark and noisy, and stinks of mud and dog piss.

Nils Kant has turned his back on it. He is sitting at his usual table on the veranda of Casa Grande, the harbor bar, with a bottle of wine in front of him; his face is turned toward the sea, the Caribbean outside Costa Rica. Even if the smell of silt and rotten seaweed isn’t much better than the stench that hangs over the narrow streets of the town, at least the water is not close.

During the day he often stands on one of the quays, gazing out over the sea as it sparkles in the sun.

The way home. The sea is the way to Sweden. When he has enough money, all Nils has to do is go home.

Worth a toast.

He picks up his glass of warm red wine and takes a deep draft, to forget the major problem regarding his journey home. Because the truth is that he no longer has enough money. It’s almost gone. He loads bananas and oil drums down in the harbor a couple of days a week, but that gives him just about enough for food and rent. He should really work more, but he doesn’t feel very well.

“Estoy enfermo,” he mutters into the night.

He often has stomach pains and headaches, and his hands have become shaky.

How many toasts to Sweden has he drunk on the veranda of the Casa Grande? To Öland? To Stenvik? And to his mother, Vera?

It’s impossible to count the toasts and the bottles he has emptied. This evening is like all the others in the bar, except for the fact that tonight Nils is celebrating his thirtieth birthday. But there isn’t actually anything to celebrate — he knows that, and it makes him feel even worse.

“Quiero regresar a casa,” he whispers into the darkness.

He has slowly learned to speak Spanish, and a fair amount of English, but it is Swedish that is still most alive within him.

He has been on the run for more than ten years now, ever since he sneaked aboard the cargo ship Celeste Horizon in the port of Gothenburg the summer after the war.

On board the Celeste Horizon he was given a cabin that was as narrow as a coffin, a coffin made of steel.

He has sailed on several old ships along the coasts of South America since then, but Celeste was definitely the worst. There wasn’t a single dry patch on board; the moisture from the sea penetrated everywhere, and anything that wasn’t wet and moldy was either broken or had fallen to pieces with rust. Water trickled or dripped from every surface. The light didn’t reach through the porthole in his cabin for over a month, because it was on the port side, and the constant leaks made the whole ship list to that side.

The engines throbbed day and night. Nils lay half dead from seasickness on a berth in the darkness, and District Superintendent Henriksson often stood mutely beside him with dark blood pouring from his chest; when that happened Nils would close his eyes and wish that the ship would hit a mine. The sea was full of them, despite the fact that the war was over — that bastard Captain Petri had reminded Nils of this fact several times. He had also made it clear that if the Celeste Horizon went down, Nils would be last in line for the lifeboat.

While the ship was loading in England, he’d had to stay in his cabin day and night for two weeks, and the isolation had almost driven him crazy before they finally set sail westward across the Atlantic.

At sea outside Brazil he had seen an albatross: a gigantic bird gliding above the crest of the waves with its wings outstretched, carefree and unrestrained in the warm air around the ship. Nils had taken it as a good sign, and decided to stay in Brazil for a while.

But in the port of Santos he had seen the bums for the first time, and they had filled him with terror. Pathetic creatures who came stumbling along the quay even before the Celeste Horizon had reached her mooring, with empty eyes and ragged clothes.

“Bums,” said a Swedish sailor contemptuously at the gunwale beside Nils, and added a piece of advice: “Throw lumps of coal at them if they come too close.”

The bums were the forgotten men, the alcoholics, who were at home neither on land nor at sea. Sailors from Europe who had drunk one round too many and been left behind when their ships sailed.

Nils was no bum, he could afford to stay in a hotel every night, and he remained in Santos for a few months, leaving the Celeste Horizon and Petri the madman without a single regret. He drank wine in bars the bums couldn’t afford to frequent, he wandered along the chalk-white beaches outside the town, learned a little Spanish and Portuguese, but didn’t speak to any more people than necessary. He lost some weight, but was still tall and powerful, and nobody ever tried to rob him. He constantly longed for his home on Öland. He sent his mother a postcard every month, with no sender’s name, to show her he was alive.

He traveled on up to Rio with a Spanish ship; there were more people there, poorer people, wealthier people, fatter cockroaches, and more bums in the port and on the beaches. And everything was repeated: the aimless wandering, the wine drinking, the longing for home, and finally a new ship away from it all. He made his money last longer by cleaning and washing up on board.

Nils visited a whole series of ports: Buenaventura; La Plata; Valparaiso; Chañaral; Panama; Saint Martin in the Caribbean, which was full of Frenchmen and Dutchmen; Havana in Cuba, which was full of Americans. And none of them was one iota better than the ones he’d left behind.

He sent a postcard to his mother as soon as he came ashore in a new place. No message or name; she just needed to know that Nils was alive and thinking about her. He kept out of trouble, didn’t throw money away on women, and almost never fought.

He wanted to get to the USA, and got a berth on a French boat across the gulf to the humidity of Louisiana. The lights of the bars in New Orleans were warm and golden — but he wasn’t allowed into the USA without a Swedish passport, that was just the way it was. He couldn’t afford to bribe anyone anymore, and had to travel south again on the ship.

He couldn’t stand the thought of returning to South America, and in any case it was getting more and more difficult to get across the borders there too. So he went ashore in Costa Rica, in the port of Limón. And stayed there.

He has lived in Limón for more than six years, between the sea and the jungle. In the steaming forests beyond the town there are banana trees and azaleas as big as apple trees, but he never goes out there. He misses the alvar. The tropical jungle smells like a moldy compost heap, and it suffocates him. Every time there’s a cloudburst, the arrow-straight streets of Limón turn into strips of mud, and the sewers overflow.

The days, the weeks, and the months have simply trickled away.

After a year or so in Limón, he wrote a proper letter to his mother for the first time, telling her something of what had happened to him and giving her his address in the town.

He got a reply with a little money enclosed, and wrote again. He asked his mother to help him get in touch with Uncle August. Nils wants to come home now. He has been away from Öland for more than ten years, and that must be punishment enough.

If anyone can get Nils home, it’s Uncle August. His mother wants him home, but she would never be able to organize his journey on her own.

It took time, but now Nils is sitting with an envelope on the table in front of him next to his wine, with his address in Limón written on it in ink, and a Swedish stamp worth forty öre. The letter arrived from Sweden three weeks ago, with a check for two hundred dollars, and he has read it over and over again.

It’s from his uncle August in Ramneby in Småland. August has heard from his sister Vera that Nils is in Latin America, and wants to come home.

You can never come home, Nils.

That’s what Uncle August writes. The letter is only one page long and consists almost entirely of scolding, but that short sentence is the one Nils reads over and over again.

You can never come home.

Nils tries to forget those words, but it’s impossible.

He reads the sentence again and again, and it feels as if dead District Superintendent Henriksson is standing behind him, smiling and reading over his shoulder.

Never, Nils.

He pours more wine from the bottle. Mosquitoes as big as a Swedish one-krona coin are humming above the beach, and a shiny cockroach is crawling along the wooden balustrade.

Loud laughter can be heard in the darkness from inside the bar; puttering motorbikes chug along the muddy streets of the town. It is never silent in Limón.

Nils drinks and closes his eyes. The world spins around; he’s ill.

“Quiero regresar a casa,” he mutters into the darkness.

Never.

Nils is only thirty — he’s still young.

He won’t listen to Uncle August. He’ll keep on writing to his mother instead. Beg her, plead with her. She’ll look after him.

You can come home now, Nils.

Those are the words he’s waiting for in a letter from her.

And they must come, soon.