Читать книгу Smithereens - Terence Young - Страница 8

Halfway through the voyage, while I sleep below decks, the ferry turns around for some medical emergency,

so that when I wake, a little hungry, and venture upstairs for coffee, a muffin, I look outside to find our ship arriving

at a harbour I don’t recognize, lit up by the setting sun, a golden port out of the Odyssey—houses I’ve never seen

before, boats at anchor that look vaguely European, at least for the lovely five minutes my bearings are shattered, and I am

imagining a new life, enchanted—I hope literally—about to disembark on a foreign shore, perhaps in a parallel universe,

where every street is unknown, feeling a little like stout Cortez in Keats’s poem, when he first sees the Pacific:

Silent, upon a peak in Darien

though not as grand or literary, more like a kid who can’t believe his room contains a real secret passageway, almost blinking and

rubbing my eyes to see if the mirage will disappear, which it does, immediately, when the woman next to me complains how late

she’ll be now, thanks to this about-face, the early sailing not such a good idea after all in hindsight, unaware she has broken the most

vivid waking dream of my life and left me as disappointed as Keats must have been when some pedant pointed out it was Balboa, not

Cortés, who first set European eyes westward from that mountain top, a name that so spoiled the meter of his line he refused to change

it, certain till his death that facts had little to do with truth or beauty.