Genoa (23 page)

Washing at the hand basin, I headed again for the shop. The rain had stopped, but cold wind blew off the river, pouring down the streets that led away from it.

A customer was just leaving and Carl was alone when I arrived. He suddenly decided to close, hustled me out, and locked the door, before anyone else showed up.

For several blocks we walked aimlessly, Carl—without coat or hat, his shirt open—sniffing the air like a dog. Then he stopped, clutched my elbow, and pointed . . . we turned and headed east,
toward the river. A summer excursion boat was drawn up on the brick embankment, tilting at an angle. Together, just for the hell of it, we clambered aboard, laughing like kids, getting our feet soaked. I almost fell overboard when my foot slipped: Carl’s hand flashed out, thrusting for my arm, and I got up safely.

Arms outstretched, balancing ourselves on the tilting planks, we made our way to the prow, and stood for some moments. The wind drove down on us from the north . . .

Melville:

          
“Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlour men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotallers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shelled Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.

                
“As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, basswood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours
them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”

Carl faced north, his whitened knuckles gripping the rail. I turned away, headed toward the vacant cabin, the river flowing south. In a moment he followed me, put his arm on my shoulder, and I felt again an animal affection. Huddled in my overcoat, tilted against the angle of the deck, I stood by him . . .

All at once, his body drew in upon itself; he gathered his jacket to his throat, clutched it with his free hand . . . he was chilled and threadbare, and the scrubby look of poverty came over him . . .

Melville:

          
“In the forward part of the boat, not the least attractive object, for a time, was a grotesque negro cripple, in towcloth attire and an old coal-sifter of a tambourine in his hand, who, owing to something wrong about his legs, was, in effect, cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good-natured, honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people’s thighs as he made shift to shuffle about, making music, such as it was, and raising a smile even from the gravest. It was curious to see him, out of his very deformity, indigence, and houselessness, so cheerily endured, raising mirth in some of that crowd, whose own purses, hearths, hearts, all their possessions, sound limbs included, could not make gay.

                
“‘What is your name, old boy?’ said a purple-faced drover, putting his large purple hand on the cripple’s bushy wool, as if it were the curled forehead of a black steer.

                
“‘Der Black Guinea dey calls me, sar.’

                
“‘And who is your master, Guinea?’

                
“‘Oh, sar, I am der dog widout massa.’

                
“‘A free dog, eh? Well, on your account, I’m sorry for that, Guinea. Dogs without masters fare hard.’

                
“‘So dey do, sar; so dey do. But you see, sar, dese here legs? What ge’mman want to own dese here legs?’

          
“‘But where do you live?’

                
“‘All ’long shore, sar; dough now I’se going to see brodder at der landing; but chiefly I libs in der city.’

                
“‘St. Louis, ah? Where do you sleep there of nights?’

                
“‘On der floor of der good baker’s oven, sar.’

                
“‘In an oven? whose, pray? What baker, I should like to know, bakes such black bread in his oven, alongside of his nice white rolls, too. Who is that too charitable baker, pray?’

                
“‘Dar he be,’ with a broad grin lifting his tambourine high over his head.

                
“‘The sun is the baker, eh?’

                
“‘Yes, sar, in der city dat good baker warms der stones for dis ole darkie when he sleeps out on der pabements o’ nights.’

                
“‘But that must be in the summer only, old boy. How about winter, when the cold Cossacks come clattering and jingling? How about winter, old boy?’

                
“‘Den dis poor old darkie shakes werry bad, I tell you, sar. Oh, sar, oh! don’t speak ob der winter,’ he added, with a reminiscent shiver, shuffling off into the thickest of the crowd, like a half-frozen black sheep nudging itself a cosy berth in the heart of the white flock.”

Moving to the down-tilted side where we had climbed aboard, Carl and I clambered ashore, soaking our feet again. At the top of the embankment we turned, shivering in the wind, and looked back at the boat . . .

. . . it seemed shrunken, a toy, helpless on its perch of bricks.

We headed back into the city, chattering, half-running with cold. Carl made straight for a neon sign, with the word
BAR
. . .

We had some drinks, and wandered on . . . I tried to talk with him, or get him to talk, but his eyes looked beyond me, his mind held to no thought . . . he took one drink at a bar, and was off again.

Then again he turned to me, all warmth and consideration, his hand on my shoulder, the gesture affectionate, and firm . . .

As we wandered, the buildings became poorer, dirtier, more populous. Strange figures huddled in hallways, clustered around the doors of taverns—their lips thinned, thirsty, bitten back with poverty.

. . . at some time in the evening, we stood at the stage door of the burlesque theatre, while Carl tried to talk his way in . . . there was a glimpse of a near-naked girl . . .

Later, Carl ran out of money. I tried to loan him or give him some, offered him my wallet, everything I had—but he protested fiercely, the evening was to be his. The penurious, pinched look came over him . . . he reached into his pocket, took out a couple of linty crackers, and shared them with me . . .

                                        
(and on the 4th voyage of Columbus the supply of biscuits became infested with worms . . . the men, refusing to remove these animals for fear of reducing the volume of food, took to eating only at night so they wouldn’t have to see them . . .

We passed another bar, and Carl brought me to a halt. He stood for a moment . . . then cautioned me to wait outside, while he went in.

I watched him approach the first customer, standing at the rear end of the bar. They shook hands, Carl slapped his back, put a foot on the rail. The man gradually warmed, his body shifting, his coat hanging looser . . . they had a drink together, and the customer turned his back suspiciously to the rest of the room, drew something from his pocket, and he and Carl talked. After some moments, Carl drew back, placed his hand familiarly on the other’s shoulder, his great head nodding assurances . . . and turned and came out the door. He said nothing. . . but at the next bar, he paid for drinks with a new $50 bill . . .

I have an image of the two of us—Carl stocky, broad-chested, jacket and shirt open to the rain, and I, slight, limping, hat and overcoat hanging sloppily on my frame—the two of us ambling side by side, drunk and speechless, a clown pair . . .

                                        
(“Good friars and friends, behold me here / A poor one-legged pioneer . . .”

The Melville line came to me as I pushed back the heavy door of a tenderloin tavern, the room cluttered with derelicts, sleeping, drinking, haranguing one another . . .

          
“. . . a limping, gimlet-eyed, sour-faced person—it may be some discharged custom-house officer, who, suddenly stripped of convenient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on government and humanity by making himself miserable for life . . .”

          
“. . . a lean old man, whose flesh seemed salted codfish, dry as combustibles; head, like one whittled by an idiot out of a knot; flat, bony mouth, nipped between buzzard nose and chin; expression, flitting between hunks and imbecile . . .”

          
“. . . a singular character in a grimy old regimental coat, a countenance at once grim and wizened, interwoven paralysed legs, stiff as icicles, suspended between rude crutches, while the whole rigid body, like a ship’s long barometer on gimbals, swung to and fro . . .”

Soaking, drinking in the words of T
HE
C
ONFIDENCE
-M
AN
, I leaned heavily across the bar, and turned to Carl. He seemed attentive, and I tried once more to get him to talk—asked him about the war, the
POW
camp, about Rico, Concha, and California . . . for a moment, he was serious and sad . . .

Then he pounded me on the back, waved his arm, and presented to me one of the characters, crippled and bearded, who had come to beg a drink . . .

Carl ordered for him, swerved himself to the old man’s misery:—a relation of hollow vowels, toothless and full of beer . . .

          
“After three years, I grew sick of lying in a grated iron bed alongside of groaning thieves and mouldering burglars. They gave me five silver dollars, and these crutches, and I hobbled off. I had an only brother who went to Indiana, years ago. I begged
about, to make up a sum to go to him; got to Indiana at last, and they directed me to his grave. It was on a great plain, in a log-church yard with a stump fence, the old gray roots sticking all ways like moose-antlers. The bier, set over the grave, it being the last dug, was of green hickory; bark on, and green twigs sprouting from it. Some one had planted a bunch of violets on the mound, but it was a poor soil (always choose the poorest soil for graveyards), and they were all dried to tinder. I was going to sit and rest myself on the bier and think about my brother in heaven, but the bier broke down, the legs being only tacked. So, after driving some hogs out of the yard that were rooting there, I came away, and, not to make too long a story of it, here I am, drifting down stream . . .” (Melville)

Other derelicts left their tables, sidled toward us, clustering, jostling gently . . . Carl’s arm swept out, gathered them in . . . every glass in the house was filled . . .

We passed the ruins of a cheap hotel, gutted by fire. Dark figures, cold and wet, stood about, staring at the stalagmites of charred wood . . . Carl spoke to one of them—he had been the night clerk, was still hovering over his job; he told us about the fire, about the man who drank rubbing alcohol, canned heat, and the like, and had managed to get his clothes soaked with the stuff, and then lit a cigarette—the bedding caught fire, the clerk had heard and seen him, screaming from his room, folded in blue flame . . .

Melville:

          
“. . . to the silent horror of all, two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips; and in a moment the cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames.

          
“. . . covered all over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly, crackled in the silence, the uncovered parts of the body burned before us, precisely like phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea.

          
“The eyes were open and fixed; the mouth was curled like a scroll, and every lean feature firm as in life; while the whole face, now wound in curls of soft blue flame, wore an aspect of grim defiance, and eternal death.”

Past midnight, Carl’s manner became secretive, mysterious. For the first time, he began to move as though he had a destination, and this assurance made him the more devious, so that he acted

like Columbus, 4th voyage, treating the Indians with suspicion, misleading even the Sovereigns as to his navigations and discoveries . . .

                                        
(“The seamen no longer carried charts because the Admiral had taken them all . . .”