Kongo went ashore in Sète on Friday. It is the last thing he has done off this ship since.
Sète is a working fishing town on a sandbar between the Mediterranean and the Étang de Thau, cut through with canals and stacked with restaurants all serving the same excellent thing. There is not, if we are being honest about it, a tremendous amount to see. The monkey walked it anyway — canal, quay, market street, back again — in ninety degrees of hard white sunshine.
He drank, he believed at the time, enough water. He was wrong about that.
By that evening the monkey had a touch of stomach flu. By the middle of the night he had considerably more than a touch, and by morning he was in the ship’s medical bay explaining himself to a very calm doctor.
He was thorough. He swabbed him for norovirus, which is the word everybody on a passenger ship is thinking and nobody says out loud. He also looked at him for about four seconds and pronounced him dehydrated, which he was, and ran a liter of saline into his arm, which took an hour and turned him back into a functioning primate.The norovirus test came back negative.
The monkey was confined to his cabin for forty-eight hours.
Protocol
Kongo is not going to pretend he couldn’t see the logic. He spent a career in ships and has personally signed his name to orders that were deeply unpopular with the person receiving them. A few hundred people sharing a ventilation system and a buffet do not get to set public health policy according to how one passenger says he feels this morning.
The whole apparatus of maritime quarantine is built on nobody taking anybody’s word for anything. A ship arriving in port does not fly a flag saying we are sick — she flies one requesting free pratique, which is a formal way of asking permission to be believed. And the word itself comes from Venice, which used to hold arriving vessels for forty days. Kongo notes for the record that this is thirty-eight days longer than what he got, and declines to feel better about it.
Understanding a rule and enjoying it turn out to be two entirely separate skills.
So Cannes went by. Then Monaco.
Monaco was the one that stung. The ship lay off Port Hercule in exactly the kind of late gold light that photographers plan whole trips around, and Kongo stood on his balcony with a very good camera and photographed the principality from a few hundred meters out, like a man casing it.
The Cast
You get to know people.
Ali, from Indonesia, is the cabin steward, and over the course of four days he became the most important person in Kongo’s life by a considerable margin. Joseph brought the food — three times a day, and by the end without being asked, because he had worked out the pattern. Both were relentlessly cheerful about a job that consisted of waiting on a quarantined American who was no longer sick and had opinions about it. Kongo has been on the other side of that arrangement and knows what it costs. There is a note going to the hotel director.
Mrs. Kongo Reports
Mrs. Kongo did not have stomach flu. Mrs. Kongo was never going to have stomach flu. Mrs. Kongo was nevertheless designated a close contact partway through the proceedings, at which point the confinement became a two-monkey operation, and she received this news with a grace the monkey found, under the circumstances, faintly pointed.
She solved it inside an hour. The balcony next door belongs to friends. The partition between them is a barrier in the legal sense only. For two days there was a rolling salon over that divider — conversation, gossip, a complete accounting of what everybody had done ashore in Cannes — with wine glasses passed around the edge by hand, at height, with the care of a surgical team. Nobody in authority ever came to look.
Kongo, who has ordered quarterdeck watches for a living, was quietly impressed by the operational security. He also assumes the ship knew. The ship always knows.
We are released at five o’clock this evening. Tomorrow is a sea day, and after that Sicily — which the monkey intends to see from the ground, on foot, in the shade, drinking water like it is his job.
Travel safe. Have fun!