The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call by Álvaro Mutis - Book Four of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call - novella number four of seven forming The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by renounced Columbian author Álvaro Mutis. If there ever was a tale reminding me of Joseph Conrad, this is the one.

There is the old Tramp Steamer the narrator has seen first when at the port in Helsinki and then again at a number of other harbors over the years - in Costa Rica, in Kingston, in Jamaica.

There is the narrator himself, perhaps someone akin to Álvaro Mutis, since he refers to the poems he has been scattering in ephemeral magazines and books over the years.

There is Captain Jon Iturri who has a long history with the Tramp Steamer.

And there is Warda – “tall, and her perfect face had eastern Mediterranean features refined until they were almost Hellenic. Her large black eyes had an unhurried, intelligent gaze in which haste or an ostentatious display of emotion would have seemed an unthinkable lack of order. Her blue-black hair was as dense as honey and fell to shoulders as straight as those of the kouros in the Athens Museum. Her narrow hips, curving gently into long, somewhat full legs, recalled statues of Venus in the Vatican Museum and gave her erect body a definitive femininity that immediately dispelled a certain boyish air. Large, firm breasts completed the effect of her hips.”

The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call - crisscrossing stories across seas and rivers, across memories and dreams, across cultures. Who is the true protagonist? Some have suggested the Alción, that battered and trampled Steamer. Others cite the narrator. Still others, Captain Iturri.

However, what lingers with me isn’t death and destruction represented by the Tramp Steamer, nor the sad story of the Captain, nor again, the narrator himself. What has remained with me after reading this short novella, the shortest of the seven in the author's Maqroll the Gaviero cycle, is beautiful Warda.

Warda is a voracious reader and loves painting and art, a lady who moves through life in a half trance with confidence and is “as fully Oriental as any genie in the Arabian Nights.” But, alas, after living in a number of European cities and time traveling on the Tramp Steamer, the Lebanese genie from Beirut rejects the West and returns to her own country and Muslim culture.

Thus The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call is the story of the clash of cultures in the modern world, in many ways a tale speaking to one of the ongoing challenges and choices many women and men face today and in the years to come.




"At that moment I felt the stirrings of a warm solidarity for the tramp steamer, as if it were an unfortunate brother, a victim of human neglect and greed to which it responded with a stubborn determination to keep tracing the dreary wake of its miseries on all the world's seas."