Ship of Fools (4 page)

An inconspicuous slender woman in early middle age, conventionally dressed in dark blue linen, with a wide blue hat shading her black hair and small, rather pretty face and intent dark blue eyes, regarded the Spaniards with some distaste while raising the short sleeve over her right arm, to glance again at the place where the beggar woman had pinched her. A hard knot had formed in the soft arm muscle, already blotchy with purple and blue. The woman felt a wish to show this painful bruise to someone, to say lightly as if she were talking about someone else, This is surely not a thing that really happens, is it? But there was no one, and she smoothed down the rumpled linen. That morning she had set out from the hotel after a cold bath, and plenty of hot coffee beastly as it was, feeling a little less ghastly after sleep, for another visit to the Migrations Bureau. The beggar woman was sitting, back to the wall, knees drawn up in a profusion of ragged skirts, eating a hot green pepper rolled in a tortilla. She stopped eating when she saw the American woman, transferred her food to her left hand, scrambled up and came towards her prey with lean shanks flying, her yellow eyes aimed like a weapon in her leather-colored face.

“Give me a little charity at once in God's name,” the beggar woman said threateningly, rapping the foreign woman sharply on the elbow; who remembered the pleasant, clear little thrill of righteous anger with which she had answered in her best Spanish that she would certainly do nothing of the sort. It was then that the beggar woman, fiercely as a pouncing hawk, had darted out her long hard claws, seized a fold of flesh near the shoulder and wrung it, wrung it bitterly, her nails biting into the skin; and instantly had fled, her bare feet spanking on the pavement. Well, it had been like a bad dream. Naturally things like that can't happen, said the woman in the blue dress, or at least, not to me. She drooped, rubbed her handkerchief over her face, and looked at her watch.

The fat German in dusty black and his fat wife leaned their heads together and spoke secretly, nodding in agreement. They then crossed the square with their lunch basket and their dog, and seated themselves on the end of the bench opposite the motionless Indian. They ate slowly, taking glazed white paper off huge white sandwiches, drinking turn about from the cover of a large thermos bottle. The fat white dog sat at their feet with his trusting mouth turned up, opening and closing with a
plop
over the morsels they gave him. Solidly, gravely, with dignity, they ate and ate, while the little Indian sitting near them gave no sign; his shrunken stomach barely moved with his light breathing. The German woman wrapped up what was left of the broken food with housewifely fingers and left it lying on the bench near the Indian. He glanced at it once, quickly, and turned his head again.

The Germans with their dog and their basket came back to their table and asked for one bottle of beer with two glasses. The maimed beggar rose from under the tree sniffing, and crawled towards the smell of food. Rising a little, he embraced the bundle with his leather-covered stumps and brought it down. Leaning against the bench, he hunched over and ate from the ground, gobbling and gulping. The Indian sat motionless, looking away.

The girl in the blue trousers reached out and patted the white bulldog on the head and stroked him. “That's a sweet dog,” she said to the German woman, who answered kindly but vaguely, not meeting the stranger's eyes, “Oh, my poor Bébé, he is so good,” and her English was almost without accent, “and so patient, and I am only afraid sometimes he may think he is being punished, with all this.” She poured a little beer on her handkerchief and wiped his big face, tenderly, and almost tenderly she ignored the unsightly, improperly dressed American girl.

The crop-haired young woman in the green gown startled everyone by leaping to her feet screaming in German, “Oh, look what is happening! Oh, what are they doing to him?” Her long arms flurried and pointed towards the great tree in the square.

A half dozen small Indian men came padding across from out the shadow of the church. They carried light rifles under their arms, and they moved with short light steps, not hurrying, towards the Indian sitting on the bench. He watched them approach with no change of expression; their faces were without severity, impersonal, secret. They stopped before him, surrounded him; without a word or a glance or pause he rose and went away with them, all noiseless in their ragged sandals and white cotton drawers flapping around their ankles.

The travelers watched the scene with apathy as if sparing themselves a curiosity that would never be satisfied. Besides, what happened to anyone in this place, yes, even to themselves, was no concern of theirs. “Don't trouble your head,” said the pig-snouted man to the green-clad girl, “that is nothing unusual here. They're only going to shoot him, after all! Could be he stole a handful of chilis! Or it might be just a little question of village politics.”

This remark roused the gaunt blond man with the huge hands and feet. He unfolded his long body, uncrossed his legs and ranged his fixed scowl upon the pudgy man. “Yes,” he said in German with a foreign accent, his big voice rolling, “politics it may well be. There is nothing else here. Politics and strikes and bombs. Look how they must even bomb the Swedish Consulate. Even by accident as they say—a lie! Why the Swedish Consulate of all places, may I ask?”

The pig-snouted man flew into a rage and answered in a loud common voice, “Why not the Swedish Consulate, for a change? Why should not other people sometimes have a little trouble, too? Why must it be always the Germans who suffer in these damned foreign countries?”

The long rawboned man ignored the question. He sank back, his white eyelashes closed over his pale eyes, he drew the limeade before him through the straw in a steady stream. The Germans about stirred uneasily, their features set hard in disapproval. Untimely, unseemly, their faces said prudishly; that is the kind of German who gives us all bad reputations in strange lands. The little man was flushed and swollen, he seemed to be resenting some deep personal wrong. There followed a long hot sweaty sunstricken silence; then movement, a rising and pushing back of chairs, a gathering up of parcels, a slow drift towards dispersal. The ship was to sail at four, it was time to go.

Dr. Schumann crossed the deck with the ordered step of an old military man and stood firmly planted near the rail, relaxed without slackness, hands at his side, watching the straggling procession of passengers ascending the gangplank. He had a fine aquiline nose, a serious well-shaped head, and two crookedly healed dark dueling scars on his left cheek. One of these was a “beauty,” as the Germans call it, the enviable slash from ear to mouth perfectly placed that must once have laid the side teeth bare. Healed all these years, the scar still had a knotty surface, a wide seam. Dr. Schumann carried it well, as he carried his sixty years: both were becoming to him. His light brown eyes, leveled calmly upon a given point where the people approached and passed, were without speculation or curiosity, but with an abstract goodness and even sweetness in them. He appeared to be amiable, well bred and in perfect possession of himself, standing against a background of light-haired, very young, rather undersized ship's officers in white, and a crew of big solid blunt-faced sailors moving about their duties, each man with the expressionless face and intent manner of a thoroughly disciplined subordinate.

The passengers, emerging from the mildewed dimness of the customs sheds, blinking their eyes against the blinding sunlight, all had the look of invalids crawling into hospital on their last legs. Dr. Schumann observed one of the most extreme forms of hunchback he had ever seen, a dwarf who, from above, appeared to have legs attached to his shoulder blades, the steep chest cradled on the rocking pelvis, the head with its long dry patient suffering face lying back against the hump. Just behind him a tall boy with glittering golden hair and a sulky mouth pushed and jostled a light wheel chair along, in which sat a small weary dying man with weak dark whiskers flecked with gray, his spread hands limp on the brown rug over his knees, eyes closed. His head rolled gently with the movement of the chair, otherwise he gave no sign of life.

A young Mexican woman, softened and dispirited by recent childbirth, dressed in the elegant, perpetual mourning of her caste, came up slowly, leaning on the arm of the Indian nurse who carried the baby, his long embroidered robe streaming over her arm almost to the ground. The Indian woman wore brightly jeweled earrings, and beneath her full, gaily embroidered Pueblo skirt her small bare feet advanced and retreated modestly. A nondescript pair followed, no-colored parents of the big girl walking between them, taller and heavier than either of them, the three looking about with dull, confused faces. Two Mexican priests, much alike in their grim eyes and blue-black jaws, walked briskly around the slow procession and gained the head of it. “Bad luck for this voyage,” said one young officer to another, and they both looked discreetly away. “Not as bad as nuns, though,” said the second, “it takes nuns to sink a ship!”

The four pretty, slatternly Spanish girls, their dark hair sleeked down over their ears, thin-soled black slippers too short in the toes and badly run over at high heels, took leisurely leave, with kisses all around, of a half dozen local young men, who had brought flowers and baskets of fruit. Their own set of four wasp-waisted young men then joined them, and they strolled up together, the girls casting glances full of speculation at the row of fair-haired young officers. The twins, smeary in the face, eating steadily from untidy paper sacks of sweets, followed them in a detached way. An assortment of North Americans, with almost no distinguishing features that Dr. Schumann could see, except that they obviously could not be other than Americans, came next. They were generally thinner and lighter-boned than the Germans, but not so graceful as the Spaniards and Mexicans. He also found it impossible to place them by class, as he could the others; they all had curiously tense, preoccupied faces, yet almost nothing of their characters was revealed in expressions. A middle-aged, prettyish woman in dark blue seemed very respectable, but a large irregular bruise on her arm below her short sleeve, most likely the result of an amorous pinch, gave her a slightly ribald look, most unbecoming. The girl in blue trousers had fine eyes, but her bold, airy manner spoiled her looks for Dr. Schumann, who believed that modesty was the most beautiful feature a young girl could have. The young man beside her presented a stubborn, Roman-nosed profile, like a willful, cold-blooded horse, his blue eyes withdrawn and secretive. A tall shambling dark young fellow, whom Dr. Schumann remembered as having embarked at some port in Texas, had gone ashore and was now returning; he lounged along in the wake of the Spanish girls, regarding them with what could only be described as a leer.

The crowd was still struggling upward when Dr. Schumann lost interest and moved away, the officers dispersed, and the dock workers who had been loading the ship without haste began to shout and run back and forth. There remained luggage, children and adults not yet on board, and those on board wandered about in confusion with the air of persons who have abandoned something of great importance on shore, though they cannot think what it is. In straying groups, mute, unrelated, they returned to the docks and stood about idly watching the longshoremen hauling on the ropes of the loading cranes. Shapeless bundles and bales, badly packed bedsprings and mattresses, cheap looking sofas and kitchen stoves, lightly crated pianos and old leather trunks were being swung into the hold, along with a carload of Pueblo tile and a few thousand bars of silver for England; a ton of raw chicle, bundles of hemp, and sugar for Europe. The ship was none of those specialized carriers of rare goods, much less an elegant pleasure craft coming down from New York, all fresh paint and interior decoration, bringing crowds of prosperous dressed-up tourists with money in their pockets. No, the
Vera
was a mixed freighter and passenger ship, very steady and broad-bottomed in her style, walloping from one remote port to another, year in year out, honest, reliable and homely as a German housewife.

The passengers examined their ship with the interest and the strange dawning of affection even the ugliest ship can inspire, feeling that whatever business they had was now transferred finally to her hold and cabins. They began to move back towards the gangplank: the screaming girl in green, the fat pair with the bulldog, a small round German woman in black with sleek brown braids and a heavy gold chain necklace, and a short, worried-looking German Jew lugging a heavy sample case.

At the latest possible moment, a bridal party appeared in a festival flurry at the foot of the gangplank: a profusion of lace hats and tender-colored gauzy frocks for the women, immaculate white linen and carnation buttonholes for the men. It was a Mexican wedding party with several North American girls among the bridesmaids. The bride and groom were young and beautiful, though at that moment they were worn fine and thin and their faces were exhausted with their long ordeal, which even yet was not quite ended. The bridegroom's mother clung to her son, weeping softly and deeply, kissing his cheek and murmuring like a mourning dove, “O joy of my life, little son of my heart, can it be true I have lost you?”

While his father supported her on his arm, she embraced her son, the bridegroom kissed her, patted her heavily rouged and powdered cheeks and whispered dutifully, “No, no, dear sweet little Mama, we shall be back in three months.” The bridegroom's mother shrank at this, moaned as if her child had struck her a mortal blow, and sobbing fell back into the arms of her husband.

The bride, in her bridelike traveling dress, surrounded by her maids, stood between her parents, each of them holding her by a hand, and their three faces were calm, grave, and much alike. They waited with patience and a touch of severity as if for some tiresome but indispensable ceremony to end; at last the bridesmaids, recalled to a sense of duty, rather shyly produced each a little fancy sort of basket of rice, and began to scatter it about, fixed smiles on their lips only, eyes nervous and watchful, feeling as they did that the moment for merriment in this affair seemed rather to have passed. At last the bride and groom walked swiftly up the gangplank; almost at once it began to rise, and the families and friends below formed a close group, waving. The bride and groom turned and waved once, a trifle wildly, to their tormentors, then holding hands, almost running, they went straight through the ship to the farther deck. They arrived at the rail as if it were a provided refuge, and stood leaning together, looking towards the sea.