Ship of Fools (11 page)

“I don't think they are any more complicated than we are,” said David. “They tie a different set of knots, that's all.”

“That
isn't
all, by any means,” said Jenny. “That is
too
simple.”

David, hearing the thin edge in her voice, said no more, but reflected that no matter how he tried to explain his point of view to Jenny, about anything at all, he seemed always to go off at a tangent, or in a circle, or to get bogged down in a spot he had never meant to be in, as if Jenny's mind refracted his thought instead of absorbing his meaning, or even his feelings about certain things—Indians, for example. He would give up from now on talking to Jenny about Indians, or about her painting, either; she was sentimental about the one, and obstinate about the other; let it go.

They finished their second tea and rum in a comfortable-looking silence, wondered what time it was, had to ask the waiter because they complicated their lives on principle by refusing to wear watches; and strolled back toward the harbor.

The heat was overwhelming, the life of the streets wandered torpidly in a sluggish dream, the charge of daylight was almost staggering, and sweat broke from every pore of every human being; the tongues of dogs streamed, and Jenny and David, in their cool-looking linen, were wet and streaked and almost gasping by the time they reached the dock. At the entrance to the long shed through which they must pass to the ship, they saw first a large thick cluster of people with frowzy dark heads and ragged clothing. There was no space to pass among them, for their bundles wrapped in hemp fiber sacks tied with rope lay on the ground, filled their arms and bulged from their shoulders. There were men and women of all ages, in every state of decay, children of all sizes and babies in arms. They were all unbelievably ragged and dirty, hunched over, silent, miserable. Several of them, seeing the two strangers, quietly pushed and nudged at each other and at their bundles in signal, until a narrow way was cleared.

“Pass if you please,” they murmured in Spanish, and “Thank you, thank you,” said Jenny and David, edging through carefully. The crowd thinned a little then, but the whole huge shed was filled with them. They sat huddled on the ground, they stood formlessly bowed, they leaned in tired arcs against the walls.

The air was not air any more, but a hot, clinging vapor of sweat, of dirt, of stale food and befouled litter, of rags and excrement: the reek of poverty. The people were not faceless: they were all Spanish, their heads had shape and meaning and breeding, their eyes looked out of beings who knew they were alive. Their skins were the skins of the starved who are also overworked, a dark dirty pallor, with green copper overtones, as if their blood had not been sufficiently renewed for generations. Their bare feet were bruised, hardened, cracked, knotted in the joints, and their hands were swollen fists. It was plain they were there by no will or plan of their own, and in the helpless humility of complete enslavement they were waiting for whatever would be done to them next. Women nursed their starveling infants; men sat fumbling among their wretched possessions, tying them up more firmly; they picked at their feet or scratched in their hair; or they sat suspended in uneasy idleness, simply staring. Pale anxious children, miserable, uncomplaining, sat near their mothers and gazed at them, but asked for nothing.

Several officious-looking men were moving among them, counting them with pointing fingers, writing down something over each one, consulting with each other and steadying themselves as they felt their way between bodies by laying a hand upon the nearest head as if it were a newel or a doorknob. The strangest silence was over the whole scene—strange, thought Jenny, because the misery is so great and something so terrible is happening to them, you might think they would all be howling and crying and fighting to escape. “David, what can it be?” she asked, but he shook his head. They came out into the open air, and there was the ship looming up, the gangplank ready.

Almost everyone on shipboard forgot his reserve for the moment, and strangers were asking each other questions and getting answers full of rumor and conflicting theories. The young officers found themselves under a rapid fire of curiosity about the beggars on the dock who now seemed to be coming on board the
Vera
. The officers could only shake their heads. They were sorry, but they had no idea who the steerage passengers were, nor why there were so many, nor what their situation was precisely, except that anyone could see they were of the lowest class. No doubt everything would be known in time.

This answer raised greater curiosity all around. Professor and Frau Hutten, who had persuaded their seasick bulldog Bébé out for a breath of air on solid earth, had been told by someone in town that the strange people were political malcontents and were being deported as dangerous and subversive elements. Professor Hutten, observing them carefully, remarked that they seemed to be quite harmless though unfortunate people. Herr Lutz, the Swiss hotelkeeper, told the Professor that he had heard that the people were returning to Spain because of a new sudden demand for labor in that country: since the Spanish had thrown the king out, Spain, it was said, was lining up for progress, catching up with the modern world. “Same old story,” said Herr Lutz, “the grass looks greener in the next pasture until you get there. It is the first I have heard of prosperity in Spain.”

Herr Rieber and Lizzi Spöckenkieker pranced onto the deck, and Lizzi screamed out to little Frau Otto Schmitt, whose tender heart was plainly to be surmised in her soft pink face: “Oh, what do you think of this dreadful fellow? Can you guess what he just said? I was saying, ‘Oh, these poor people, what can be done for them?' and this monster—” she gave a kind of whinny between hysteria and indignation—“he said, ‘I would do this for them: I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas.' Oh,” she said weakly, doubling over with laughter, “isn't that the most original idea you ever heard?”

Herr Rieber stood by smiling broadly, quite pleased with himself. Frau Schmitt went a little pale, and said in a motherly, severe tone, “There may be such a thing as too much originality—for shame, I don't think that is funny!” Herr Rieber's face fell, he pouted.

Lizzi said, “Oh, he did not mean any harm, of course; only to fumigate them, isn't it so?”

“No, I did not mean fumigate,” said Herr Rieber, stubbornly.

“Well, then, you are not very nice,” said Lizzi, in a tone so indulgent, indeed more than forgiving, he braced up again at once; she smiled at him and he smiled back, and they left the atmosphere of Frau Schmitt's moral disapproval for the freedom of the bar.

At last the afternoon papers appeared on deck, and there was the whole story, quite straight, and nothing so unusual after all. It had something to do with the price of sugar in the world market. The bottom had fallen out, it seemed. Cuban sugar, because of international competition, had fallen in price until the sugar planters could no longer afford to gather and market their crops. There had been strikes and riots too, and demands for higher wages at the very moment of crisis as always, due to the presence of foreign labor agitators among the workers. The planters were burning their crops in the fields, and naturally this had thrown thousands of sugar workers in the fields and refineries out of employment. A great number of these were Spanish, mostly from the Canaries, Andalusia, the Asturias, who had been imported during the great days of Cuban sugar.

This policy of importation, to which there had been in the beginning some local opposition, had turned out to be a farsighted one, for if these laborers had been Cubans, what could have been their fate except reliance on charity, beggary, or a temporary haven in the public jails and hospitals? As it was, the government had acted with speed and good judgment to forestall the inconvenience of so many idle foreigners on the island. Arrangements had been made to send them back to their native land, their fares had been raised by public subscription, everything was being done for their comfort, and the first lot, consisting of exactly eight hundred and seventy-six souls, were already safely on their way. Thus, the newspaper stories and editorials agreed, Cuba was setting an example to the world in disposing of its labor problems in the most humane yet practical manner.

The eight hundred and seventy-six souls formed a straggling procession and moved across the gangplank leading to the steerage, while a dozen or more first-class passengers lined up above to watch them. Herded carefully on either side by sailors and the officious men who had been counting them, the people came on with some nervous jostling, thumping of feet, hesitations when the whole mass would be agitated, clotted in one spot; then it would smooth out and go forward. Among the watchers a new uneasiness rose, and Frau Rittersdorf mentioned it first.

“There is great danger of infectious disease among such creatures,” she said to Herr Baumgartner at her elbow. “I am wondering—should we not complain to the Captain? After all, we did not engage to travel on a cattle boat.”

Herr Baumgartner's pained face leaped into new lines of anxiety. “My God,” he said, “I was thinking the very thought. I was thinking, you can almost smell the diseases among them. No, it is not right. We should have been warned.”

Professor Hutten remarked to his wife, “I was told by the purser the steerage contains accommodations for only three hundred and fifty, and yet look, still they come. I am interested to see what accommodations can possibly be made for such a number. Infants, too,” he said, and clicked his tongue in deprecation. His wife sighed and shook her head, accepting once more the sad truth that there is no cure for the troubles of life, no peace nor repose anywhere. Her comfortable fat quivered with some intimation of suffering, but she could not bear to think of it. “Come,” she said, “let's not spy upon them. Suppose they should look up and see us gazing?” She moved away, her face tender and vacant. Bébé, somewhat improved in spirits, followed on a loose leash.

William Denny, who had made his way safely to Sloppy Joe's and had there swallowed rapidly several daiquiris with increasing depression of mood, leaned on the rail and spoke at random in loud indignation. “Poor devils, they don't deserve it,” he said, almost tearfully. “After all, why should they be kicked out? They're not dirty Reds, the papers said so.”

Mrs. Treadwell, who had found herself once or twice in some passing talk with the young man, whom she considered odious, was standing almost next to him; she knew well that no matter what he thought or felt it was none of her affair, but spoke just the same on impulse, which she also knew very well was not her style, and always got her into some kind of difficulty.

“Why always ‘dirty' please,” she said in her light agreeable voice, “and why always ‘Red' and what do you really know or care about it?”

Denny's head rolled a trifle; he stared at her as if he had never seen her before. “Are you a Red?” he asked. Without removing his folded arms from the rail he slid along toward her, turned sideways and inspected her as if she were a horse he was thinking of buying. His gaze ran like a hand to her ears, her neck, over her breasts, down her thighs, and his mouth was tight as if he did not like what he saw, but could not control the roving of his eyes. Mrs. Treadwell made a determined effort to catch and fix his gaze with hers, but he would not look at her face, where a rather too-girlish prettiness lingered under the mask of middle age.

“Do you know the meaning of the word?” she inquired coldly, moving from him along the rail as he approached. She regretted now the three planters' punches she had drunk with Wilhelm Freytag in Havana; for to tell the truth, she did not know the meaning of the word herself—it was just that she resented that stupid Denny to the point where she could have enjoyed slapping him. She had never known a Red and did not expect to know one ever.

“I know what I'd do to them if I were running the government,” he said, in a heavy rage, peering into the front of her blouse. Mrs. Treadwell pulled herself together resolutely. How typical—here she was, about to get into an altercation with a drunken stranger,
une espèce de type
at that, on a topic of which both of them were totally ignorant, and she at least hadn't the faintest desire to learn anything. She turned her head aside, wheeled about and walked away, smiling into the air and trying not to hurry.

The ship, full of fetid port air and swarming with mosquitoes, got under way late in the evening. A fair number of new passengers had been added to first class, and were rather regarded at first as interlopers by the original voyagers, who had got already a proprietary interest in the ship. A half dozen noisy, mongrel-looking Cuban students made themselves conspicuous until a late hour. Several married pairs brought with them an assortment of normally troublesome children. After dinner the students formed a parade and marched around deck chairs containing soberer folk who wished only to be left in peace, through the ship where people were reading or playing cards, around deck dozens of times past windows of people trying to sleep, bawling verse after verse about
La Cucaracha
, the poor little cockroach who could not run about any more because she had no marihuana to smoke, second because she had no money to buy it, third because she had no feet anyway, fourth because nobody loved her, and endlessly the students rehearsed her misfortunes as they tramped in a line, hands on each other's shoulders. They ranged in height from short to tall, but they were all very stringy. They all wore baggy “Oxford” trousers, rather lumpy below the knees, identical in cut but of fascinating variety in pattern: tartans, stripes, squares, zigzags, and improbably tinted tweeds. They wore tennis shoes and T shirts. Occasionally they wove sinuously in line, imitating a serpent. Again, they leaped rhythmically in turn, beginning at one end of the line and working forward or backward in an ocean wave effect.