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Homer in his work the ‘Odyssey’ describes the ocean as the wine-dark sea. Much later Haddock will learn that there was once a time that the words for the dark blue and blustering colour of the ocean had yet to be invented, and that perhaps Homer had been more intentional than colour in his use of the phrase. Haddock will learn this in a vast library that belonged to his ancestor while sitting by the fire with a ginger tuft and his irritating dog for company. But now, swollen with drink, glass loosely pinched between fingers in his one hand and a shuffle of cards pressed into his palm by a smiling Allan, it soaks into the mildew that is his brain.
Allan smiled when he said it, when Haddock dared to ask what the sea looked like. He could never forget the ocean, seawater in his veins as much as blood, but the drink made him not remember for a moment, and he’d been locked inside for so long, and the bottle had filled him up like a sponge wet and heavy, pressing against the inside of his skull.
“She’s her usual self, Captain, a frothing wine-dark sea. That’s why you’re safe in here.” He leaned closer to Haddock, pressing his mutinied Captain’s wrist into the table. The glass remained steady in Haddock’s hand; he’d never willingly spill any. “Cause if I let you up, you’ll fall overboard tryna drink her all.” There was his howling laughter after that. There was howling after he left too, though Haddock could not tell if it was his weeping or the wind’s.
While the drink made a lot of things clear, like how he was a weak miserable wretch, it also made a lot of things blurry. Like how anyone could call the sea dark like wine, or how exactly he lost his place at the bridge or why a baby-faced stowaway and an albino rat tumbled into his cabin through a porthole on the open ocean. He wouldn’t try to drink the sea no matter how much he craved it or how much it looked like alcohol. He could steer, he could, and one day he’d go up there and show them, right after this glass, just after swallowing this mouthful, so wasteful to just leave it on the sideboard, billions of blue blistering barnacles you can’t just leave your drink sitting about!
Then the back of his head explodes and the boy reporter tumbles into his life, so very much not like a loose rum decanter might, but rather like a perpetual fire cracker. And why this boy burns so much, why it nearly blinds Haddock, why he finds himself seeing the walls of a cave he’s only been feeling with aching knuckles, his addled thinking cannot make a drunk tongue put words to.
Somehow in the sway of the Karaboujan on the sea that might be wine, Haddock knows this answer he can’t find at the bottom of the bottle.
So, he runs with the fire cracker boy.
Haddock no longer calls Tintin the fire cracker boy. He’s still a magnet for trouble. Haddock suspects he always will be, even long after his seadog bones will be in a grave. But now the trouble changes. Drug runners and gangs and crime kingpins are now suddenly a lot more complicated that they once were. Trouble fluctuates between a stone’s throw away from home and a journey across the seas that Haddock remembers from when he was a boy.
Tintin remains himself, but he changes too. He’s no longer a firework going off in the dark. Rather he becomes a flare and Haddock finds himself fighting to keep going, to push to reach the light, to cradle it in his hands and to run with it as fast as he can back to Moulinsart. The newspaper articles become fewer but longer, and Haddock thinks of the Odyssey, of the never-ending quest to come home as the typewriter battles into the night. He wonders if Allan ever read it that he should know about wine-dark seas. He wonders perhaps if the maggot Rastapopolous did. He wonders if Castafiore might have seen a copy lying about during her time aboard his vessel in his persona of Di Gorgonzola or Da Gronola or whatever it might have been.
Had she known then what she does now, Rastapopolous would not have needed to fake a drowning, for the Milanese Nightingale would surely have held him under water until he stopped moving herself. For all the wretched things about her, Bianca is tolerable. Sitting by the warm fire, he finds himself humming to the tune of the Jewel Song from Faust. Curse Calculus and his blasting of her records all day. What a way to live. Assault of the Millipede Nightingale by day and haunting of the vengeful typewriter by night. Why he doesn’t sell the place, buy a houseboat and live out the rest of his life on the silent wine-dark sea is beyond him.
In the smoke curling in Moulinsart’s chimney, Haddock knows this answer without visiting the bottom of the bottle.
So, he waits for the ribbon to ding and loudly announces that Nestor has brough a fresh pot of tea. He finds himself engrossed in Tintin’s explanation of why, for one’s first attempt at reading anything by Homer, you shouldn’t hope to immediately understand. Sometimes, you have to wait.