Ship of Fools (47 page)

Tito exchanged a quick glance with Lola and Amparo, who moved a little nearer draping their mantillas over their arms. He gave a good imitation of the German salute, clicking his patent-leather pump heels smartly, and said, smiling, in a rattling fire of Spanish: “Whether you like it or not, you stinking German sausage made of old women's behinds, we are going to have our show and you are going to help pay for it.” Lola and Amparo broke into screams of helpless laughter, and applauded his performance. He swung into step with them, they moved away together and stood at some distance laughing, Tito bending over and holding his narrow waist with both hands. Frau Rittersdorf, who had not understood, or could not believe what she had seemed to hear, suspecting the worst, even a little frightened for she had seen in dismay that he really was a
maquereau
capable of anything, flushed a deep painful red and leaned back in her chair.

“God in Heaven,” she said, turning towards Lizzi as to a known being who could offer her reassurance, “God in heaven, what can one do with such people?”

“One can always dance with them!” said Lizzi, and Frau Rittersdorf felt her malice flickering out of her very pores like electric sparks.

Seeing Frau Rittersdorf's chin tremble at this, Lizzi went on in a tone of false sympathy. “They really are making fun of you, the little pigs.… Look at them, Frau Rittersdorf, did you ever see such impudence? They are all but thumbing their noses at you. What could that fellow have said, I wonder? I did not catch it, but it sounded frightful.”

Frau Rittersdorf began at once correcting her terrible error in giving Lizzi such a brilliant opportunity to display her peculiar gifts. “I am not the only one, perhaps,” she said. “It may be your turn next, if you have not had it already!”

Lizzi fanned herself with her magazine. “Oh, one of them—not that fellow, the one they call Manolo—and one of the women, I don't know which, approached me this morning—it seems their plan is well under way … you really had not heard?”

“No,” said Frau Rittersdorf, faintly, “no one told me.”

“I was happy to bribe them for peace,” Lizzi confessed smugly. “It cost me only four marks to be rid of them. It would have been worth twice as much.”

“They can laugh at you for another reason, then,” said Frau Rittersdorf. “At least, they cannot make a dupe of me!”

“Do you think I would really go to their low little party?” asked Lizzi. “I gave them the money as I would give it to a beggar.”

“I shall not go to their party, either,” said Frau Rittersdorf, recovering her spirits slowly. “And I shall not pay a pfennig for my right to stay away!”

The two women fell silent and watched with deep resentment the flying feet of the Spaniards disappearing around the upper end of the deck. Their magpie voices floated back only to deepen the gloom around the two stiff figures stretched in the deck chairs.

Frau Rittersdorf opened her diary and went on with her account of events. After a little thought, pen suspended, she wrote resolutely: “That little mealsack of a Frau Schmitt, my cabin mate, who has not one claim to any consideration whatever from anyone, has within the past few days commenced to show signs of a changed character. She monopolizes the washhand stand and the looking glass. She sits quite coolly and powders her face and dresses that mouse-colored hair of hers in a bun as leisurely as if she were not keeping me waiting. I consult my watch from time to time, remark how late it is getting, and that I, too, must dress. But it has no effect so far. Incapable as I am of rude behavior to anyone, I shall be forced to take steps to correct her bad manners. It is an offense against morality to overlook or condone insolence in an inferior. The effective practice of severity—I learned this with those beastly English children—lies in ceaseless, relentless, utter persistence, never an instant's letdown, but vigilance, vigilance, all the way, or they will be upon you like a pack of hyenas.” She considered this, and added: “
Note Bene
: I must be especially on my guard with certain very low elements on this ship, who mean no good to anyone. Vigilance, vigilance.” Frau Rittersdorf felt very tired, famished as if she had not eaten for days, she longed for the dear homely sound of the dinner bugle. Her mind was full of thoughts that did not belong there, strange ideas were bumping around colliding and threatening her with a headache. She added a line before closing her diary. “All this can be very wearing, but I must suppose it is necessary, and that the meaning of it will become clear later.”

“Those greasers are up to something,” Denny remarked to David. “They got a plan on foot.” He was examining three new pimples on the underside of his jaw in his shaving glass, which magnified the disasters of his skin fivefold and kept him in a state of perpetual alarm. “My God,
look
at these things!” he said to his cabin mates, holding up his chin.

Herr Glocken was curled up in the lower bunk, waiting for the two young men to change their shirts and ties before dinner. “From here I can't even see them,” he said, meaning to reassure.

“Maybe you're nearsighted,” said Denny, who did not intend to have anyone make light of his afflictions. Herr Glocken reached in his jacket pocket and put on his spectacles. “Even so,” he said, peering keenly, “I can barely make them out.”

David, buttoning his shirt, did not turn his head. “What ‘greasers'?” he asked. He detested Denny's vulgar habit of calling all nationalities but his own by short ugly names; yet even for his own he had a few favorites—“cracker” for example, but that applied strictly to people of the state of Georgia; “white trash” was another, specifically applied to persons of low social station combined with financial insolvency, and in general to anybody whose attitude towards him or his point of view he found unsympathetic.

“Those Spanish dancing greasers,” said Denny, suspecting an implied rebuke in David's tone; Denny suspected often that David Scott disapproved of any number of things, though he could never be quite certain what they were. But this hoity-toity voice about the word “greaser,” now—

“Well, what do
you
call 'em?” he asked. “Wops? Dagos? No, that's Italians. Polacks? No. Guineas? No, they're from Porto Rico, ain't they? Or is it Brazil? They're not niggers. Nor kikes. Kike is the name the Jews made up for a low-life Jew. Like that Löwenthal, for instance. But he's not a bad guy. I've talked to him. Did you know I never saw a Jew in my life until I was fifteen and went away to school? Or if I did see one I didn't know what he was. We didn't have a thing against Jews in our town—we didn't even have any Jews!”

“Maybe you were so busy lynching niggers you couldn't take time out for Jews,” remarked David in a tone so remote and unheated, Denny's mouth dropped open and he shut it with a snap.

“Where are you from?” he asked, after a loaded pause.

“Colorado,” said David. Denny tried to remember what he had ever heard, if anything, about Colorado except silver mines. He could not recall any traits of character of the people of that state, and so far as he knew, they had no nickname, like Hoosier or Cajun. You couldn't hardly call him a Yankee.

“Mining?” he ventured.

“Sure,” said David, “timekeeper in a mine in Mexico.”

“I thought you said you're a painter,” said Denny.

“I am. Timekeeping in a mine was the way I made my living, so I could work,” said David. Denny thought this over a while, and then said: “Look, that's something I can't understand—you spend time working at something you can't make a living at, and then you take a job so you can make enough money to go on working at the work you can't live on—it gets me down,” he said. “And you call yourself a painter, but why aren't you just as much a timekeeper in a mine? Why can't you call yourself a timekeeper?”

“Because I really am not one,” said David, “I just make my living that way, or did.… Now I'm going to try to make a living painting, but if I can't, why, I can always get some kind of job, to keep me while I paint.”

Herr Glocken uncurled himself, ran his hand over his face and hair before the looking glass, pulled his tie knot a touch to center, gave himself a slight shake to straighten his rumpled clothes, and was ready to go. “Ah well,” he said to Denny, “that is the heroic life! That is the way men who trust themselves can afford to live! Me—I never had courage. Me, I run my little stand, my newspapers and magazines and birthday and Christmas cards, yes and ink and pens and writing paper, and every day I have the small change running through my hands, and every night when I close shop I have made my day's living, yes and a little more, and that I invest so a few more pfennigs—
centavitos
—will be coming in always, a little more and a little more, for I have had no life—I only exist! And I have no existence coming except old age, and if I am not careful, I shall die under a bridge, or in a pauper's hospital …”

“Maybe I shall too,” said David cheerfully, though Herr Glocken's sudden flood of confidences chilled him.

“Maybe,” said Herr Glocken. “No man knows his end! But you will not have to die in despair because you never had courage to live! You have taken hold of your own life, for that no man can ever make you sorry!”

He spoke with such fervor the two young, straight-backed, lucky men had perhaps their first emotion in common: a twinge of apologetic shame, as if they owed him some reparation for the misfortune of his body, some explanation of why it was easy for them to have courage—for Denny felt that he too was launching out, taking hold; it was a fact that a trained engineer had forty good jobs waiting for him, but he had the right to choose the one that would take him farthest from home and deepest into adventure—that freedom at least he had. He couldn't see the point in being plain foolhardy, though—David Scott struck him as just being plain foolhardy, and that poor hunchback was buttering him up about it as if he envied him; he spoke up:

“It's not the shape of your body but your mind that shapes your life,” he said, and he heard his own philosophical statement with amazed delight—he hadn't known that he thought that. “I'll bet no matter what, you'd have wound up with a newsstand,” he said. “I tell you something, I believe we get what we want!”

“Oh!” said Herr Glocken with a groan, and he began moving towards the door. “Oh no, excuse the strong word, it is not for you, but for this so-false belief—it is one of the great lies of life! Ah no, no—for I wanted only one thing in the world—” He paused to make his effect.

“What was that?” asked David, obligingly.

“To be a violinist!” said Herr Glocken as movingly as if he expected them to shed tears.

“But why was that impossible?” asked David.

“You can wonder in such a way, after one look at me?” Herr Glocken's eyes were stricken … “Ah, well,” he ended, “it is impossible to make one understand. But I had the soul,” he said, patting himself lightly on the pointed misshapen ribs of his chest, “and I have it yet, and that consoles me a little.” He smiled his painful jester's smile, and vanished.

“Well,” said Denny, “that's that, I hope,” and not another word was said about Herr Glocken.

“You never did tell me the nickname for Spaniards,” said Denny.

“I don't know what they call each other when they want to be insulting in Spain,” said David, “but in Mexico, the Indians call them
Gachupín
. It means a spur, really, or a boot that stings like a viper, the Aztec roundabout for the spur.”

“Too good for them,” said Denny.

“What do you think they're up to?” asked David, returning to the zarzuela company. “I see them about buttonholing people and talking but they haven't come near me yet. The gossip is they're getting up some kind of show, and a raffle with chances, and so on: a kind of old-fashioned
feria
on shipboard, which will be a novelty. I can't say I like their looks or ways …”

“That Arne Hansen has blown his top about that Amparo,” said Denny, with unconcealed envy. “They've got
something
I could use right now. That Pastora …”

He stopped, teetering dizzily on the edge of giving himself away by telling the true story of his encounter that very afternoon with Pastora. He thought better of it, for he wished to maintain the view of his character he hoped he had built up in David Scott's mind, of himself as a man not to be taken in by women, who were every last one of them after nothing in God's world but money. And it should be the positive pleasure of any man in his right mind to see that she didn't get a nickel she hadn't earned the hard way.… But he drew back into himself and saw it happen again: Pastora, who had never bothered to hide her contempt for him, met him head-on in the promenade around the deck, and suddenly stretched her arm at full length towards him with a frank graceful gesture, and stopped him in full stride, her hand on his necktie. Her deep eyes wide open, she smiled in the most inviting way, and said in childish English: “Come help us make our fiesta! We will dance, we will sing, we will have games, we will kiss, why not?”

“How much?” he heard himself asking, but he felt like a bird gazing into the eyes of a serpent.

“Oh nothing almost!” said Pastora, winsomely. “Two dollar, three, five—ten—what you like.”

Denny had broken into a light sweat, he felt he ought to say, “Make it two dollars then, that'll suit me,” but he was afraid if he let this chance slip, he wouldn't get another. “Have a drink?” he asked recklessly. They sat together in the bar for a good while over a bottle of German imitation champagne, at twelve marks a bottle, he noticed; but Pastora sipped with great pleasure, their feet nestled together under the table, and Denny, who thought champagne, even the best, tasted like thin vinegar with bubbles in it, was so wrought up and full of anticipation he could hardly swallow. Pastora also wanted cigarettes. “Have one of these,” offered Denny, producing his Camels. Pastora could not smoke that kind of cigarette. She wanted a slender gold-tipped jasmine-scented cigarette in a purple satin box stamped in gilt lettering: “La Sultana.” Denny hastily figured out the exchange from marks to dollars—one dollar ninety cents a box of twenty. He bought it. And then Pastora sold him two tickets for the raffle, at five marks a ticket—one mark more than the printed price. Denny paid for them and did not notice the deception until much later. Pastora had slipped her foot out of its narrow black shabby little satin slipper, and her tiny foot ran caressingly up within his trouser leg, the little toes pressing and twiddling delicately as fingers on his calf muscles. “When—when is this party going to come off?” he inquired, trying not to squirm in mingled pleasure and embarrassment. “Oh not until just before Vigo,” she told him. “But when are
we
to—to—get together?” he stuttered.