Ship of Fools (10 page)

The cabin was empty except for the other passenger's luggage. Herr Löwenthal put his sample case out of the way, laid out his modest toilet articles, got into the lower berth and said his prayers, wondering what sort of cabin mate he had drawn. Perhaps the fellow would be quite pleasant. After all, in a business way at least he had known some very decent Gentiles. Maybe this would be one. He lay there with the light on, unable to settle down, waiting and watching for what kind of man would open the door. At last, at the sound of entry, he lifted his head eagerly. “
Grüss Gott
,” he said, almost before he got a glimpse of the fellow.

Herr Rieber stopped short. Almost instantly a deep look of repulsion set itself upon his snubby features; he drew his brows down and pursed his lips.

“Good evening,” he said, with immense, cold finality of dismissal.

Herr Löwenthal fell back upon his pillow, knowing the worst as if he had always known it. “My God, the luck! and for such a long voyage,” he mourned. “And yes, there is no doubt, he looks like a pig even more than a Gentile.” But he would be careful, he could look out for himself, he would see that that fellow did not get the advantage of him. “Let's just see what he does next, after this start. Now I know what to expect, I should be ready for him. I know most of their tricks … he can't surprise me.”

So he worried and fretted, turning over and over, suppressing sighs; yet he slept after a while, his brows still knitted, but very deeply and restfully in spite of Herr Rieber's snores.

By nine o'clock the lighted decks were empty, the bar and writing rooms nearly deserted. No life was apparent except some movement on the Captain's bridge and a few calm-faced sailors going about their routine duties. In the depths of the ship, the bakers began setting, kneading, rolling and baking the breakfast bread; and still lower, in the engine room, stout fellows labored and sweated freely all night keeping the ship to her regular speed of twelve knots. She would do a little better when the Gulf Stream got behind her.

Life on shipboard in only two days had begun to arrange itself with pleasant enough monotony, but on the third there was repeated the excitement of being in port again, in Havana. This time, the travelers had nothing to worry about, nothing to do for once but to enjoy the scene so far as they were able. Fresh hot-weather dress appeared on all shapes and sizes, and there was a rush for the gangplank before it had fairly settled.

Even Herr Glocken went ambling down the dock by himself, wearing a gay necktie frayed at the knot, smiling like a gargoyle as he dodged with practiced quickness a bold young woman who darted forward to touch his hump for luck.

The ladies of trade, arriving at home from their business trip to Mexico as casually as though returning from a day's shopping in town, walked away together in white linen backless dresses and fine wide-brimmed Panama hats. William Denny, a discreet distance behind, followed them determinedly, to find out if possible what sort of roof sheltered these haughty creatures on their native heath. He was soured and baffled by their resolutely unbusinesslike behavior towards him.

“Women peddling tail don't usually carry it so high, where I come from,” he remarked to David Scott. “It's just cash on the barrelhead and no hurt feelings.”

David merely remarked that he thought that could easily be a bore. So Denny set out by himself, resolved to track them down to their lair and boldly invite himself inside. Along a narrow street of shops one of them turned about unexpectedly to look into a window, saw Denny, nudged the other. They both looked back then, and breaking into high girlish screams of derisive laughter, they darted through a narrow shop doorway and disappeared once for all. Denny, scalded bitterly, let a pale sneer cover his face for the benefit of some possible witness, and an ugly short epithet form in his mouth for his own satisfaction; then, like a man who had plans of his own, he took a small map meant for tourists out of his pocket and began a search for Sloppy Joe's.

Though it was only four o'clock in the afternoon, the troupe of Spanish dancers appeared dressed for the evening, in serviceable black of daring cut, the gentlemen wearing wide pleated red silk belts under their short jackets, the ladies gallantly exposed as to breast and shoulder. Amparo's ear lobes were half again their natural length, trailing the weight of immense imitation rubies. They all limped a little in their cruel footgear as they set out stubbornly in discomfort and bitter bad temper for an evening of professional gaiety. The twins, left on the ship, at once began to shriek and hoot and run circles in a kind of demon dance around the wheel chair of the small sick man, until the golden-haired boy pushing the chair drove them away with loud curses in German. They then ran to the rail, climbed up and leaned out and screamed desperately, “
Jai alai
, Mama! Mama,
jai alai
!” A good distance away, at the sound all four of the women whirled about, and the one they called Lola shouted harshly, “Shut up!”

“Let's be real tourists this once,” said Jenny angel to David darling, for so they were feeling towards each other for the moment. “I have no prejudice against tourists—I consider that a low form of snobbism. I envy them savagely, lucky dogs with money to spend and time on their hands, all dressed up and on their way! I always have to work. If I wasn't on a job I wouldn't
be
there, wherever I am: I'm doing a job or running an errand for some editor … even in Paris if I ever get there, I'll still have to do those silly drawings for somebody's foul little stories. Now David darling, don't tell me I'm riddled with self-pity …”

“You always say that, I never have said it.”

“All right, you liar,” said Jenny, tenderly, “but just the same never in my whole life since I was a child have I ever gone anywhere merely to look at the scenery. Now is the moment; let's take a Fordito and see the sights, such as they may be. I've passed through Havana this is the fourth time and it may be the last, and I've never seen the beach and that famous Drive, what's its name?”

David lapsed into what Jenny called his speaking silence; she saw by the expression drifting over his face that the notion appealed to him. They had not far to seek, for there on the first corner was an aged Negro with a crippled Ford car—“a real Fotingo if there ever was one!” said Jenny fondly—it was a Mexican popular name for such a vehicle—and he was waiting and hoping for just such as they. The Negro's skin was the color of brown sugar; he had one light gray eye and one pale tan eye, he believed that he spoke English, and he had a high-flown speech of solicitation made up and learned by heart. They waited politely to the end before nodding their heads; he settled them at once in the back seat where the door rattled on its hinges and the stuffing was coming out in lumps. Setting off instantly with an impressive roar and clatter of mechanical locomotion, he gained an appalling speed almost at once, and began another set speech which flew back to them in fragments of loud croaks and low mutters as they whirled along the splendid white road beside the sea.

“We are passing … Monument,” he shouted, as they rushed by an incoherent mass of bronze, “WHICH COMMEMORATES …” he pronounced largely and carefully, then fell to a mutter. Then, “This,” his voice rose again, “… the war of … year of Our Lord … and afterwards,” he said clearly, “the Sons of Cuban Independence erected this noble monument for the view of strangers.” Mutter, mutter, mutter. “We are now passing …” and they spun perilously around a long curve, “the building called … erected for the view of strangers … TO YOUR LEFT!” he called warningly, and Jenny and David craned to the left instantly, but the spectacle was already far behind, “you see a tragic Memorial erected by the Sons of … for the view of strangers.”

They slowed down with dizzying suddenness, stopped with a hard jolt. Their guide pushed back his cap and pointed to a vast, nondescript edifice shining through tall palms and heavy treetops in a small park. “And there,” he said, in rather smugly censorious tones, “is the famous Casino, where rich North Americans gamble away, before the eyes of the starving poor, hundreds of thousands of dollars every night.”

His passengers gawked as they were expected to; then David said to Jenny in an aside, “I don't think so much of our touring, do you?” and in Spanish to the guide, who seemed to be regarding them with a certain possessiveness, “Now let's just drive back the same way, very slowly.”

“I understand English perfectly,” said the guide in Spanish. “Your touring is not a success yet because you have not seen all. There are monuments of the utmost grandeur and sentiment the whole length of this noble Carrera, some of them more expensive and important than those you have seen. You are paying to see them all,” he said virtuously, “I do not wish to defraud you.”

“I think our touring is perfect,” said Jenny. “It is just what I expected. Let's see them all!” They leaped away like a kangaroo in flight, saw all the monuments in shapeless flashes, and were set down again, wind-blown and flushed with sunburn, under palms on a fine terrace freshly washed and steaming, with great wicker bird cages along the wall and a banana tree in the patio. The waiter brought tall glasses of iced tea with rum in it.

“More and more,” said David, feeling again for a few moments that repose of pure sympathy and well-being he had with Jenny now and then—not long enough or often enough for any continuous illusion, but good when it happened—“more and more I am convinced it is a great mistake to do anything or make anything for the view of strangers.”

“Let's not ever,” said Jenny, in a glow still from their foolish escapade along the beach. “Let's have a wonderful private life that begins in our bones, or our souls even maybe, and works out.”

She hesitated and then spoke the word “soul” very tentatively, for it was one of David's tabus, along with God, spirit, spiritual, virtue—especially that one!—and love. None of these words flowered particularly in Jenny's daily speech, though now and then in some stray warmth of feeling she seemed to need one or the other; but David could not endure the sound of any of them, and she saw now the stiff, embarrassed, almost offended look which she had learned to expect if she spoke one of them. He could translate them into obscene terms and pronounce them with a sexual fervor of enjoyment; and Jenny, who blasphemed as harmlessly as a well-taught parrot, was in turn offended by what she prudishly described as “David's dirty mind.” They were in fact at a dead end on this subject.

After a dismal pause, David said carefully, “Yes, of course; always that precious private life which winds up in galleries and magazines and art books if we have any luck at all—should we go on trying to fool ourselves? Look, we live on handouts, don't we? from one job to the next, so maybe we should look at all this monument stuff like this—every one of them meant a commission and a chance to work for some sculptor.”

“But
what
sculptors,” said Jenny intolerantly, “such godforsaken awful stuff. No, I'll do all the chores I can get, but there is something you can't sell, even if you want to, and I'm glad of it! I am going to paint for myself.”

“I know, I know,” said David, “and hope that somebody else likes it too, likes it well enough to buy it and take it home to live with. There's simply something wrong with our theory of a private life so far as work is concerned.”

“You are talking about public life,” said Jenny. “You're talking about the thing on the wall, not when it's still in your mind, aren't you?—I want good simple people who don't know a thing about art to like my work, to come for miles to look at it, the way the Indians do the murals in Mexico City.”

“That was a great piece of publicity all right,” said David, “you good simple girl. These good simple Indians were laughing their heads off and making gorgeously dirty remarks; then they went out in the Alameda and scrawled pubic hair on the copy of Canova's Pauline Bonaparte—that elegant marble dream! Didn't you ever notice any of this? Where were you?”

“I was there,” said Jenny, without resentment. “I expect I was looking and listening for something else—I saw and heard a lot of other things, too. I don't blame the Indians really. They have something better of their own, after all.”

“Better than what? Canova? All right. But better than Giotto let's say or Leonardo? It's not better than a lot of things, even things they've done themselves. It's debased all to hell now—after all, they find their really good stuff in buried cities. But I do like it, too, and it's plain they prefer it to anything else. But look, Jenny angel, what good does all this do us? We are on our own; let's not go fake primitive, we couldn't fool even ourselves …”

“David, just because I don't do any underdrawing is no sign I'm trying to be primitive … Now don't say that again! I love the Indians, I've got a weakness for them,” said Jenny. “I feel certain I learned something from them, even if I don't know yet what it is.”

“But they didn't love you,” said David, “and you know it. We keep on liking them one by one, as we do each other, but they hate us in a bunch simply as members of the other-colored, oppressor race. I get damn sick of it. And the only thing in this world they wanted from you was your broken-down old Fotingo, last year; and my cigarette lighter; and the portable phonograph. We love their beautiful straw mats because we don't have to sleep on them, and they want our spring mattresses. There's nothing to blame them for, but I'm sick of this sentimental yap about them.”

Jenny laughed because she felt very melancholy and baffled. “I wasn't looking for a new religion, either,” she said. “I suppose you're right so far as you go, but there is something else.… I know I'm much too simple to be a good primitive.”