Ship of Fools (3 page)

“Not if we just sit and let them swarm over us,” said the older man.

“They never win,” said the younger man. They walked on.

Those left behind began to drift slowly away from the terrace, leaving their newspapers on the tables. The streets, they observed with distaste, were again beginning to crawl with the latest lot of people in town for the next boat, birds of passage from God knew where, chattering their ungainly tongues. Even the Spanish was not the Spanish of Mexico. As for the women among them, except for the occasional soft beauty of some real Mexican girl, they were always the same, no matter of what freakish nationality: middle-aged painted scarecrows too fat or too thin: and young flat-chested loud-voiced things with cropped hair striding around in low-heeled shoes, their skirts shortened to show legs never meant to be seen by any eye but God's. If any exceptions to these rules occurred, they were quite simply ignored; all strangers as such were odious and absurd. The people of Veracruz never tired of the pastime of ridiculing the looks of the foreign women, their costumes, their voices, their wild unwomanly ways—the North American ones more especially. Rich and important persons sometimes arrived and departed by those boats; but being rich and important, they hardly showed themselves except in swiftly moving motors, or in lordly pauses among their clutter of expensive luggage on dock or platform. Their looks did not so much matter, anyway; they were ridiculed on other and higher grounds.
They
—all unconscious and at ease as they seemed, surveying a world made for them and giving orders to everybody in sight without turning a hand themselves—
they
were marked for destruction, so the labor leaders told their followers, and could already be regarded with some curiosity as a disappearing race. The new crowd, the watchers decided, was regular—no better, no worse, but there were always a few amusing variations.

The clerk of the hotel came out for a glimpse of daylight, and the waiters in their stained rumpled white jackets began slapping dust and crumbs off the tablecloths in preparation for lunch. They observed with contempt that their particular share of the day's travelers was straggling in again for a rest after swarming all over the town all morning.

Certainly the travelers were not looking their best. They had crept off the train which brought them from the interior, stiff from trying to sleep fully clothed in their chairs, sore in their minds from the recent tearing up of their lives by the roots, a little gloomy with some mysterious sense of failure, of forced farewell, of homelessness no matter how temporary. Imperfectly washed, untidy and dusty, vaguely not-present in eyes dark-circled by fatigue and anxiety, each one carried signed, stamped papers as proof that he had been born in a certain time and place, had a name of his own, a foothold of some kind in this world, a journey in view for good and sufficient reasons, and possessions worth looking into at international frontiers.

Each hoped that these papers might establish for him at least a momentary immunity from the hazards of his enterprise, and the first thought of each was that he must go instantly, before the rest of that crowd could arrive, and get his own precious business settled first at the various bureaus, consulates, departments of this and that; it was beginning to resemble not so much a voyage as an obstacle race.

So far they were all alike, and they shared a common hope. They lived individually and in mass for the sole purpose of getting safely that same day on board a German ship then standing in dock. She had come from South America the long way round and she was going to Bremerhaven. Alarming rumors had sped to meet the travelers even before they left Mexico City. There were serious hurricanes all along the coast. A revolution or a general strike, time must decide which, was going on at top speed in Veracruz itself. A light epidemic of smallpox had broken out in several coastal towns. At this piece of news, the travelers had all rushed to be vaccinated, and all alike were feverish, with a crusted, festering little sore above the knee or elbow. It had been said also that the German ship might be delayed in sailing, for she had lost time getting stuck for three days on a sand bar off Tampico; but the latest word was that she was in harbor and would sail on time.

They were to travel, it appeared, more than ordinarily at their own risk, and their presence in Veracruz proved that necessity and not the caprices of a pleasure voyage drove them to carry out their intentions in face of such discouragements. They were all of them obviously in circumstances ranging from modestly comfortable to uncomfortably poor, but each suffered from insufficiency in his own degree. Poverty was instantly to be deduced by a common anxiety about fees, a careful opening of wallets and handbags, a minute counting of change with wrung brows and precise fingers; a start of terror by a man who put his hand into his inside coat pocket and feared, for one shattering instant, that his money was gone.

All believed they were bound for a place for some reason more desirable than the place they were leaving, but it was necessary to make the change with the least possible delay and expense. Delay and expense had been their common portion at the hands of an army of professional tip seekers, fee collectors, half-asleep consular clerks and bored Migrations officials who were not in the least concerned whether the travelers gained their ship or dropped dead in their tracks. They saw too many of the kind all day, every day, with that disturbing miasma of financial and domestic worry rising steamily from their respectable-looking clothes. The officials did not care for the breed; they had enough such troubles of their own.

For almost twenty-four hours the anonymous, faceless travelers, their humanity nearly exhausted, their separate sufferings, memories, intentions and baffled wills locked within them, ran doggedly (for there was a taxicab drivers' strike), sweating, despairing, famished (there was a bakers' strike, and an icemen's strike), from hotel to Migrations to Customs to Consulate to the ship's side and so once more back to the railway station, in a final series of attempts to gather up the ragged edges of their lives and belongings. Each one had his luggage seized by a porter at the station, who took charge at once with a high hand, laying down the grimly one-sided laws of the situation; these fellows all then disappeared with the property into thin air, and where had they gone? When would they come back? Everybody began to miss his hairbrush, clean shirts, blouses, pocket handkerchiefs; all day grubbily they ran, unrefreshed even by clean water.

So the travelers fretted, meeting up with each other again and again in all the uncomfortable places where they were all fated to be, sharing the same miseries: almost unbearable heat, a stony white rage of vengeful sunlight; vile food, vile beyond belief, slapped down before their sunken faces by insolent waiters. All of them at least once had pushed back a plate of some greasy substance with a fly or a cockroach in it, and had paid for it without complaint and tipped the waiter besides because the very smell of violence was in the air, at once crazed and stupefied. One could easily be murdered for an irrelevant word or gesture, and it would be a silly end. All had taken to a diet of black coffee, lukewarm beer, bottled synthetic lemonade, damp salted biscuits in tin boxes, coconut milk drunk directly from the shell. Their porters came back at unexpected times to heckle them, giving wrong advice and demanding more tips for correcting their own errors. The steady trivial drain upon their purses and spirits went on like a nightmare, with no visible advance in their pressing affairs. Women gave way to fits of weeping, men to fits of temper, which got them nowhere; and they all had reddened eyelids and badly swollen feet.

This common predicament did not by any means make of them fellow sufferers. On the contrary, each chose to maintain his pride and separateness within himself. After ignoring each other during the first feverish hours, there crept into eyes meeting unwillingly, for the twentieth time, a look of unacknowledged, hostile recognition. “So there you are again, I never saw you before in my life,” the eyes said, flickering away and settling stubbornly upon their own matters. The travelers witnessed each other's humiliations, rehearsed their private business in everybody's hearing, answered embarrassing questions again and again for some sticky little clerk to write down once more. They paused in small groups before the same sights, read signs aloud in chorus, asked questions of the same passers-by, but no bond was established between them. It was as if, looking forward to the long voyage before them, they had come to the common decision that one cannot be too careful of chance-met, haphazard acquaintances.

“Well,” said the desk clerk to the waiters nearest him, “here come our burros again!” The waiters, dangling their greasy rags, aimed spiteful stares meant to be noticed at the badly assorted lot of human beings who took silent possession of the terrace, slumping about the tables and sitting there aimlessly as if they were already shipwrecked. There, again, was the unreasonably fat woman with legs like tree trunks, her fat husband in the dusty black suit and their fat white bulldog. “No, Señora,” the clerk had told her with dignity the day before, “even if this is only Mexico still we do not allow dogs in our rooms.” The ridiculous woman had kissed the beast on his wet nose before turning him over to the boy who tied him up in the kitchen patio for the night. Bébé the bulldog had borne his ordeal with the mournful silence of his heroic breed, and held no grudges against anybody. His owners now began at once to explore the depths of the large food basket they carried everywhere with them.

A tall thin young woman—a leggy “girl” with a tiny, close-cropped head waving on her long neck, a limp green frock flapping about her calves—strode in screaming like a peahen in German at her companion, a little dumpling of a man, pink and pig-snouted. A tall looseboned man with unusually large hands and feet, with white-blond hair clipped in a brush over his intensely knotted forehead, wandered by as if he did not recognize the place, turned back and sat by himself, relapsed into a trance. A delicate-looking red-haired boy of perhaps eight years was heaving and sweating in a Mexican riding costume of orange-colored leather, his brassy freckles standing out in the greenish pallor of his skin. His sick-looking German father and sad, exasperated German mother urged him along before them. The little boy was saying monotonously, “I want to go, mother—I want to
go
,” and he wriggled all over.

“Go where?” asked his mother, shrilly. “What do you want? Speak clearly. We are going to Germany, isn't that enough for you?” “I want to go,” said the little boy dismally, appealing to his father. The parents exchanged a glance, the mother said, “My God, my brain is giving way!” The father took the boy's hand and hurried him through the cavern of the lobby.

“Figure these tourists,” said the clerk to a waiter, “dressing a child in leather in August, making a monkey of him!” The mother turned her head away at these words, flushed, bit her lips, then quietly hid her face in her hands and sat there, perfectly still for a moment.

“Speaking of monkeys, what do you call
that?
” asked the waiter, with a barely perceptible flip of his rag towards a young woman, an American, who wore dark blue cotton trousers and a light blue cotton shirt: a wide leather belt and a blue figured bandanna around her neck completed her outfit, which she had lifted without leave from the workday costume of the town-dwelling Mexican Indian. Her head was bare. Her black hair was parted in the middle and twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck, rather old-fashioned-looking in New York, but very appropriate still in Mexico. The young man with her wore a proper-looking white linen suit and an ordinary Panama hat.

The clerk dropped his voice, but not quite enough, and spoke the deadliest insult he knew. “It's a mule, perhaps,” he ventured. As he moved away he observed with satisfied spite that the Americans understood Spanish also. The young woman stiffened, the young man's handsome nose turned white and pinched, and they stared at each other like enemies. “I told you to put on a skirt here,” said the young man. “You do know better.”

“Hush,” said the young woman, in a weary, expressionless voice, “simply hush. I can't change now until we get to the boat.”

Four pretty Spanish girls, dark-skinned, long-necked, with an air of professional impudence, their sleazy black skirts too tight around their slender hips, their colored petticoat ruffles showing shabbily over their graceful legs, had been all over the square, back and forth, up and down and sideways in the narrow streets between the low soiled white plaster walls pocked with bullet holes. They had rushed in and out of shops, they sat on the terrace in a huddle eating fruit and scattering the rinds, their urgent Spanish chatter going on noisy as a flock of quarreling birds. They were accompanied by an equal number of dark slim young men with silky black hair oiled to their narrow skulls, wide belts cinched to their tapering waists; and a pair of sallow precocious children, male and female, twins, perhaps six years old. They were the only travelers who had come out and taken part in the show of fireworks and dancing the evening before. They cheered when the rockets went up, they danced with each other in the crowd, and then had gone off a little way by themselves and danced again, the jota, the malagueña, the bolero, playing their castanets. A crowd had gathered round them, and at the end one of the girls had gone among them collecting money, holding her skirt before her to catch the coins, and swishing her petticoat ruffles.

The affairs of this company had required an inordinate amount of arranging. They ran in a loose imperfectly domesticated group, calling to the young, who disobeyed them all impartially and were equally slapped about and dragged along by all. Distracted with shapeless, loosely wrapped parcels, their eyes flashing and their hips waving in all directions, they grew more disheveled by the moment, but their spirits never flagged. Finally, rushing upon the terrace, they clustered tightly around one table, beat their fists upon it and shouted at the waiter, all screaming their orders at once, the children joining in fearlessly.