The sailors finished the prayer as a chorus and Castillo headed to the captain’s quarters to have his dinner. I said amen quietly to myself. Hopefully, pride was not all I would be bringing home at the end of this quest. A title was my deepest desire. In my mind, I had been imagining what they would call me in history books one day: Luciano Mirasola, Righteous and Intelligent Navigator of Her Royal Highness’s Galleon, the Esperanza. If I was the one responsible for finding new land, perhaps I would be given this title or, better yet, a knighthood. As a knight, nothing in life would be barred to me. As a knight, life back in Europe would be heaven on earth. The crew dug into dinner, alternating between spooning stew into their mouths like they hadn’t eaten in months and telling stories as loud as they possibly could. I ate my stew in silence, preferring to listen to the conversations of my friends instead. “Oh yeah, back in Oporto, all the girls loved me,” Rafael was bragging on my right. He was my age, nineteen, and we had become fast friends in the first few weeks on the Esperanza. I considered him one of the most lively and confident people I had ever met in my entire life. As he painted stories of jealous love triangles and passionate romance, I noticed a stray lentil had come to sit on the corner of his mouth, making the other men hold back chuckles. Rafael took no notice, exclaiming, “They used to say not only was I named after an angel, but that I looked like one, too.” Everyone openly laughed as he flexed his biceps and raised his eyebrows in what I supposed he hoped was a seductive manner. “Alright, boy, that’s enough. You know they say about vanity on the sea, don’t you?” a voice called out. It was Santiago, one of our sailmakers, leaning against the mainmast just a few feet away. He was a swarthy man, thick as a bull with gold hoop in his ear just like one. He was distant from the group, literally and figuratively, never sharing opinions on anything we ever talked about until tonight. Rafael wiped his mouth with the tail of his shirt and glanced at Santiago, eyes widening when he realized who had spoken. “N-no. What d-do they say?” Santiago lumbered towards us and sat in the midst of the larger men of the group, directly across from where I sat. His bald head shone in the setting sun’s dying rays and his dark eyes watched all of us deliberately. Waiting. 38
“Back when I was your age, Rafael, I worked on a ship much smaller than this one. Only twenty men, and the cooks had barely enough food for all of us. I had just become a sailmaker and it was my first real journey onto the ocean so I was still used to land life. You see, I was vain. I believed that I should be fed more than the other men because I was the youngest, the strongest, the most handsome. I needed the sustenance, not the older men who would die soon anyways. “I began to steal food from the brig. I ate twice at day while the other men could barely have half a meal to themselves. I was sure that what I was doing was right and that it was a good thing. Then one day, the captain found me. He was furious, more than I’d ever seen him before. ‘Do you know what this means?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said because I thought what I was doing was right. ‘They will come for you,’ the captain said. ‘They smell your pride and they will feed off of it. They like the strong emotions: hate, fear, pride, love. It gives them strength.’ ‘Who, captain? Who will do this?’ I asked.” He paused for a moment to take a swig from his cask. All of us were leaned in, listening with eager ears. He drank for a good minute, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and looked back up at us. “ ‘Santiago, the sirens,’ he said. ‘They will know. They will always find you and they will feed off of what you feel the most.’ But the sirens never came. They never took me, never took my feelings. And here I am alive and well today, but I have learned my lesson: vanity is a man’s enemy.” We all stared silently at him. Quiet sat in the air like a thick fog, blanketing our uncomfortable natures. At last, Santiago laughed, a dark rumbling sound, and said, “You are all too serious. It was merrily a joke. That never happened, I just wanted to give you all a scare.” Everyone gave a half chuckle, uncomfortable from the weirdness of it all. Why did Santiago suddenly have a story to tell when all the other nights on the ship he never said a word? Why was the story so detailed if it wasn’t true? Santiago retreated back to the mainmast and chatter resumed among the men. Rafael looked at me and we both shook our heads. “That was odd,” I said, peering around Rafael to look at Santiago. He was 39
