Algren at Sea (55 page)

“I earned nothing for myself,” the old man told me—just as my balloon touched the blades and exploded as though exploding his lie.

“I was forced to sell without profit for myself, because I could not risk carrying it around any longer. I'm becoming too well known, my friend. I know you will not let my services go unrewarded.”

A tiny fragment of rubber, all that remained of my balloon, drifted downward toward the floor.

“What did you get for the set?” I asked him again. “Fifty dollars,” he lied in his teeth.

“Count it out,” I asked him.

He counted out fifty dollars in rupees. Close enough. I pocketed it.

“Not even cab-fare, my friend?” he begged.

I didn't bother to answer.

Passing down the dimness of the hall I was almost past the girl before I discerned her huddling against the wall.

“Old man think I cheat him,” she whispered, “old man think
everybody
cheat.”

“Well,” I asked, “
doesn't
everybody?”

She held her palm out to me.

“Was it you who informed on the old man?” I asked her.

She wriggled her fingers to tell me her hand was still empty.

“
Did
you?” I asked her; for I really wanted to know. And she wasn't getting a dime
until
she told me.

She nodded her head in confirmation and I put a dollar's worth of rupees in it. She examined the money.

“If you don't give me another dollar,” she told me, “he'll hit me.”

“Hit him back,” I suggested, and turned down the stair.

Into the gala day.

“Do priest kiss priest?” Alina had wanted to know in
The Lion of Kowloon—
“Do men kiss men?”

Between the abounding sensuality of the Hindu and the Puritanism of the Muslim, betwixt one race whose gods are all lovers and one whose God is a celibate soldier, an ancestral conflict is renewed each night in Kamathipura.

The women and girls who stand in stalls, with pitch-black eyes and brows blackened in ash-white faces, looking silently out at the street beneath the glare of sixty-watt mazdas, are merchandise as open to the view of buyers of the night as canned fish to buyers of the day. But the glare overhead keeps them from seeing the faces of those who stand and look.

They hear laughter of men but cannot see who is mocking them. They hear cries of defiance from girls in other cages; sometimes one curses one of the lookers and he swears back at her laughingly.

Other times the laughter comes more lightly by, from areaways where boys wearing earrings wait. By the light of flares that blow upward, like yellow saris in a twisting wind, old men move among them. Kamathipura is less mocking of earringed boys than of imprisoned girls.

For the Koran is terribly hard on a whore. “If any of your women be guilty of whoredom,” it teaches, “then bring four witnesses against them and shut them up in their houses until death do release them.” Early Islam simply walled the woman up alive—an unconscionable barbarity it later sternly revoked in order to stone her to death without qualms.

It looked more benignly upon the male sinner and looks more benignly yet: “If two men among you commit the same crime, then punish both, but if they turn and amend, then let them be, for God is He Who Turneth Merciful.”

Turneth Merciful is a God who turns on the mercy for men only. From
Woman He Turneth Away. Soldiers always give themselves the benefit of any doubt and Islam was a race of soldiers: women are for one thing only and now let's get back to barracks.

Weakness being shameful and Woman being weak, an open contempt of her is one means of feeling oneself a full man; and may disguise the fear of being inadequate. Islam lacked nothing of making a Playboy club in Mecca a going concern except affluence. It was so rich in disdain that there must have been enough inadequacy for everybody in town to have a bunny all his own.

Yet holding Woman in contempt contains the risk that, if you surrender to her, you yourself become contemptible. Holy men who would not harbor in their hearts neither fear of man nor contempt of woman beat the game by sleeping with one another and billing the bit as “Pure Love.” And what was pure enough for a priest was pure enough for a general: the process of purification spread down through the rank and file to the flaring areaways of Kamathipura.

The Koran went down before the
Mahabharata.
Yet the Muslim aristocracy maintained its tradition of homosexuality by keeping pages. That these young studs solaced the master's harem as often as they solaced the master can be safely assumed. And that some resisted the master altogether is recorded by a seventeenth-century traveler, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, telling of a singular occurrence at Patna:

“An officer disgraced a young boy who was in his service. The boy, overwhelmed by grief, chose his own time to avenge himself. Being out hunting with his master, and removed from other attendants, he drew his sword, came up behind the master and severed his head with a single cut. Then, crying aloud he had slain his master, he rode full speed to the governor's house; who placed him in prison. Although relatives of the slain man demanded the page's execution, the sympathy of the people for the boy was so strong that, after six months, the governor pardoned him.”

As the Moors, whose deserts had lent them ferocity sufficient to conquer Spain, became so softened when cut off from their deserts that they changed to a race of scholars, so the desert-men of Mohammed were softened by the grandeur and reverence with which the Hindu civilization surrounded womanhood.

The Indian prostitute was not originally, like the Muslim, an abandoned woman, but a dedicated one. The Devi-Dasi was a temple harlot
dedicated to the service of a god. When she was married to the god, the marriage was honored by a festival. As a dancing girl the Devi-Dasi served both man and god, and the man who shared her bed shared it with a god. Rather than feeling corrupted by woman, the Hindu felt uplifted.

Prostitution became womanhood organized. The elaborateness and efficiency with which the king of the Hindu state of Vijanagar had set up the establishment of prostitution stunned Abd-Er-Razzak, an ambassador of a fifteenth-century Persian Shah:

“Opposite the mint,” he wrote, “is the house of the governor, where are stationed twelve thousand soldiers as a guard, who receive every day a payment of twelve thousand
fanom,
levied upon the receipts of houses of prostitution. The magnificence of places of this kind, the beauty of the young girls collected therein, their allurements and their coquetry, surpass all description.

“Immediately after mid-day prayer they place before the doors of the chambers, which are decorated with extreme magnificence, thrones and chairs, on which the courtesans seat themselves.

“Each of these women is bedecked with pearls and gems of great value, and is dressed in costly raiment. They are all extremely young, and of perfect beauty. Each one of them has by her two young slaves, who give the signal of pleasure, and have the charge of attending to everything which can contribute to amusement. Any man may enter this locality, and select any girl that pleases him, and take his pleasure with her. Each of the seven fortresses contain places of prostitution, and their general proceeds amount to twelve thousand
fanom.”

The proceeds of the holy whorehouses, it would appear, were turned over to the military before midday prayer and spent back in the houses in sacred copulation that same night. If the girls were thus kept content while the state was being protected, everyone shared in the general prosperity, nobody got up before noon and all were too busy screwing after to dissent from anything, is it any wonder that the king kept laughing his head off?

A Portuguese traveler, Duarte Barbaso, perceived, behind this grandeur, a fearful savagery. (It must be borne in mind that he came of a Christian country which denied womanhood to women: either she married for the advantage of her house or was locked into a deathly vise of enforced chastity.)

“Many women,” Barbaso reported, “through superstition dedicate the maidenhead of a daughter to one of their idols here; as soon as she reaches
puberty she is taken to a house of worship, accompanied, with exceeding respect, by all her kindred holding festival for her as though she were to be married. Outside the gate of the church is a square block of black stone of great hardness of the height of a man, shut in by gratings.

“Upon these oil-lamps burn all night; and they are ceremonially decorated by many pieces of silk that folk outside may not be able to see within. Upon the said stone is yet another, the height of a stooping man; in the middle of which is a hole into which a sharp-pointed stick is inserted.

“The maid's mother takes her daughter, and other kinwomen within the grating. After ceremonies have been performed the girl takes her own virginity with the stick and sprinkles blood on the stones. Therewith the idolatry is accomplished.”

How Barbaso found out so much without putting an eye under the grating is a problem only posterity can resolve.

What seems more pertinent is that these idolatrous women knew that the vagina was intended for
use:
an idea which now so completely confounds the American woman that she attaches it to a two-car garage instead. And then can't understand why years of searching for her femininity through analyst's offices end by leaving through the same door by which she came in—except that her husband is less masculine than when she entered.
Wow.

The correlation between our rising incidence of homosexuality and our increasing indifference to the suffering of others is partially accountable by the proximity of cruelty to effeminacy; these shade into each other because both overvalue pain. And both are rooted so deeply in Puritanism that we have become more tolerant of homicide than lovemaking.

The thirty-eight witnesses to the murder of Miss Genovese were not uniquely worse than any other thirty-eight window-watchers between Schenectady and Sausalito—had a couple been making love on that walk instead of a woman being stabbed to death, there would have been a surge of outraged citizens upon them like buffalo stampeding.

Of the ancestral savagery of India much remains in Kamathipura; but nothing at all of the grandeur. The tradition of the temple harlot has brought the devi-dasis to the stalls and the sons of the poor to the areaways.

Between the areaways and the stalls, peddlers of ices and toters of pots, seamen going up stairs that lean and other seamen coming down, sellers of condoms and hawkers of gum, riders of bikes between fly-buzzed cafés,
taxis, gharries, hay wagons, drivers and bringers, changers and criers, all are borne past the cages in a diffused light lit by occasional flares. And carried on waves of sound now loud, now soft, now far, now near: of rock-'n'-roll from jukeboxes, transistor-jazz amid a thin bleating of dying balloons; and of a doorbell being buzzed again and again and again.

And all move on a tide of cheap perfume pervaded by urine, face powder, onions frying, burning oil and decaying fruit, a sea of smells, scents and odors diverging; then merging into the single smell of thronging humanity.

Between hush-hush whisperings of the night
—
“
Come to me here you—Papa you give—Short-term-long-term—You speak-Joe-you-like-nice-boy—Papa-I -show-you-good-place-you-do-what-you-like-Papa—
I heard a whole night-universe begging Americans for their lives.

Between the cold white glow of the stalls and the hotter light of the areaways, I saw a woman coming toward me; whose eyes, I saw, were crossed.

I'd never before been accosted by a cockeyed whore. It was my first time.

We sat down at a rickety table in front of a café that cast a pale blue light. When a boy came out bowing and scraping I ordered tea before he could start saluting.

She would have been passably good-looking but for those incredibly crossed eyes: I mean this girl was
completely
cockeyed. And wearing a smile so foolish it was pitiful.

“No short-term,” I told her, “no long-term.” And shook my head with infinite regret.

She shook her head regretfully as well.

Then took my hands as though to read my palms. But, instead, began matching my fingers with hers, finger for finger. When she had ten apiece, and had established that we both had the same number, I cocked my head toward her to see what she had in mind.

She cocked her head at me in turn.

If this kid wasn't demented then she had a going sense of humor.

I stuck out my tongue.

She reddened, rose and was gone in the misty light of Kamathipura. I called the waiter out to pay him for the tea.

“That girl no can talk, sor,” he assured me.

“Why can't she talk?”

“Her Papa very rich Arabian, sor.”

“Why can't she talk?”

“Her name, Kusum, sor.”

“Why can't she talk?”

“She Singapore gel, sor.”

“
Why can't she talk?
”

“Japan soldier take her from Papa. When give gel back to Papa, gel no can talk. Japan soldier cut off tongue. Papa no like gel no more. You think she
see
out them eye, sor?”

I spent the rest of that night talking to the women of the cages of Kamathipura, of whom many spoke English brokenly. Some spoke not at all, but merely held out a palm.

Several spoke of Kalyani, the woman who'd spoken for them to Ghandi. And who still spoke for them to the continual parade of reforming committees which visit Kamathipura. Men and women of goodwill who come to take count of incidence of the V.D. rate to see whether syphilis is on the rise or declining; to determine the percentage of women who become prostitutes of their own will or by kidnapping; and to determine from what provinces of India these women have come. Because there is nothing to do about Kamathipura except to chase the pimps off the corners for an hour and take a fresh count.