Álvaro Mutis often uses a declarative style, making authoritative pronouncements on the nature of life, sometimes with the voice of Maqroll but more frequently a third person voice which, in The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call, is Mutis’ own.
It’s the voice of someone speaking from an elevated distance — a ‘know-it-all’ voice. There is something aristocratic and elitist about it. It can be a bit irritating at times as the long, clause-filled sentences wind around to whatever it is they are stating and, sometimes, it can even be silly.
Weather is a purely personal matter. There is no such thing as a climate that is cold or hot, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. People take it upon themselves to create a fantasy in their imagination and call it weather. There’s only one climate in the world, but the message that nature sends is interpreted according to strictly personal, non-transferable rules.
Reading the above, I recall thinking, “I guess he’s never lived in Canada for any length of time.”
The heart of The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call is a story within a story, and the pompous voice is on full-display as a large introductory portion is from the perspective of Mutis. He comes across as a stuffed shirt, to use an old expression. I can’t help wondering if it is deliberate. Is his narrator a conceit of some kind?
In the story, the narrator has brief, poetic encounters with a tramp steamer — it comes to represent something to him. He then meets a man who both owned and sailed it. That man, a Basque sea captain, proceeds to tell Mutis his story of the tramp steamer and it’s this one that is the novella’s raison d’être. It’s a love story.
To be very brief, the captain is a co-owner of the steamer. The other owner is a woman he meets, a sister of Abdul Bashur named Warda. They fall in love and have a great affair. However, it can only last as long as the decrepit steamer does.
There are ostensible reasons for why the romance is doomed — the ages of the captain and Warda, their cultural backgrounds — but while they apply, the sense is that even if they didn’t it still would end. As always in the Maqroll stories, fate dictates the outcome.
The writing of The Tramp Steamer takes a different approach than the three earlier novellas. Here, Maqroll is in the background — he doesn’t even make an appearance till far into the story, and there only at a distance as a secondary character. However, his spirit is everywhere, particularly in the inevitability of the conclusion and the consequent melancholy.
This is the shortest of all the novellas in the Maqroll collection and appears roughly mid-point. I might have liked it better had I read it in isolation. I didn’t however and I think by the time I reached it, with several of the novellas behind me, the narrative tone was beginning to weigh on me. As a result, I found myself with a sense of irritation at the relentless emphasis on how foolish the world is and how Fate is an inexorable tyrant.
I feel I should have liked this story far more than I did.