Ship of Fools (5 page)

The ship shuddered, rocked and heaved, rolled slowly as the pulse of the engines rose to a steady beat; the barking sputtering tugs nosed and pushed at her sides and there appeared a slowly widening space of dirty water between the ship and the heaving collision mats. All at once by a common movement as if the land they were leaving was dear to them, the passengers crowded upon deck, lined along the rail, stared in surprise at the retreating shore, waved and called and blew kisses to the small lonely-looking clusters on the dock, who shouted and waved back. All the ships in harbor dipped their flags, the small band on deck spanked into a few bars of “
Adieu, mein kleiner Garde
-
Offizier, adieu, adieu
—” then folded up indifferently and disappeared without a backward glance at Veracruz.

There emerged from the bar an inhumanly fat Mexican in a cherry-colored cotton shirt and sagging blue denim trousers, waving an immense stein of beer. He strode to the rail, elbowed his way between yielding bodies, and burst into a bull bellow of song. “
Adios, Mexico, mi tierra adoradal
” he roared, tunelessly, his swollen face a deeper red than his shirt, the thick purple veins standing out on his great sweating neck, his forehead and throat straining. He waved the stein and frowned sternly; his collar button flew off into the water, and he tore open his shirt further to free his laboring breath. “
Adios, adios para siempre
!” he bawled urgently, and faintly over the oily-looking waves came a small chorused echo, “
Adios, adios
!” From the very center of the ship rose a vast deep hollow moo, like the answer of a melancholy sea cow. One of the young officers came up quietly behind the fat man and said in a low voice, in stiff Spanish, his schoolboy face very firm, “Go below please where you belong. Do you not see that the ship has sailed? Third-class passengers are not allowed on the upper decks.”

The bull-voiced man wheeled about and glared blindly at the stripling for an instant. Without answering he threw back his head and drained his beer, and with a wide-armed sweep tossed the stein overboard. “When I please,” he shouted into the air, but he lumbered away at once, scowling fiercely. The young officer walked on as if he had not seen or heard the fat man. One of the Spanish girls, directly in his path, smiled at him intensely, with glittering teeth and eyes. He returned her a mild glance and stepped aside to let her pass, blushing slightly. A plain red-gold engagement ring shone on his left hand, the hand he raised almost instinctively as if to ward her off.

The passengers, investigating the cramped airless quarters with their old-fashioned double tiers of bunks and a narrow hard couch along the opposite wall for the unlucky third corner, read the names on the door plates—most of them German—eyed with suspicion and quick distaste strange luggage piled beside their own in their cabins, and each discovered again what it was he had believed lost for a while though he could not name it—his identity. Bit by bit it emerged, travel-worn, halfhearted but still breathing, from a piece of luggage or some familiar possession in which he had once invested his pride of ownership, and which, seen again in strange, perhaps unfriendly surroundings, assured the owner that he had not always been a harassed stranger, a number, an unknown name and a caricature on a passport. Soothed by this restoration of their self-esteem, the passengers looked at themselves in mirrors with dawning recognition, washed their faces and combed their hair, put themselves to rights and wandered out again to locate the Ladies' (or Gentlemen's) toilets; the bar and smoking room; the barber and hairdresser; the bathrooms, very few. Most of the passengers concluded that, considering the price of the tickets, the ship was no better than she ought to be—rather a poor, shabby affair, in fact.

All around the deck the stewards were setting out the reclining chairs, lashing them to the bar along the wall, slipping name cards into the metal slots on the headrests. The tall girl in the green dress found hers almost at once and dropped into it limply. The big-boned man with the frowning brow who had been angry about the bombing of the Swedish Consulate already sprawled in the chair beside her. She waved her little head about, cackled with laughter at him and said shrilly, “Since we are going to sit together, I may as well tell you at once my name. I am Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker, and I live in Hanover. I have been visiting with my aunt and uncle in Mexico City and oh, with what delight I find myself on this good German boat going back to Hanover again!”

The bony man without moving seemed to shrink down into his loose, light clothes. “Arne Hansen, at your service, my dear Fräulein,” he said, as if the words were being extracted from him with pincers.

“Oh, Danish!” she shrieked in delight.

“Swedish,” he said, flinching visibly.

“What is the difference?” screamed Lizzi, tears rising mysteriously to her eyes, and she laughed as if she were in pain. Hansen uncrossed his long legs, braced his hands upon his chair arms as though he would rise, then fell back in despair, his eyes almost disappearing in his knotted frown. “It is not a good ship,” he said glumly, as if talking to himself.

“Oh, how can you say that?” cried Lizzi. “It is a beautiful, beautiful—oh, here again is Herr Rieber, look!” and she leaned far out and flung both arms above her head as signal to the advancing pig-snouted little man. Herr Rieber returned the salute gallantly, his eyes mischievously twinkling. He speeded up at sight of her, his trousers stretched tight over his backsides hard and round as apples, and over his hard high belly. His pace was triumphant, he was a little shortlegged strutting cock. The afternoon light shone on the stubby light bristles of his shaven skull full of ridges. He carried a dirty raincoat, with a folded newspaper in one pocket.

Herr Rieber, giving no sign that he had ever seen Hansen before, choosing to ignore the little scene on the terrace at Veracruz, stopped and peered at the card above Hansen's head and spoke, first in French, then in Russian, then in Spanish and at last in German, saying the same thing in each language: “I am sorry to trouble you, but this is my chair.”

Hansen raised one eyebrow, wrinkled his nose as if Herr Rieber smelled badly or worse than badly. He unfolded himself and rose, saying in English, “I am a Swede,” and walked away.

Herr Rieber, very pink in the face, his snout quivering, shouted after him valiantly, “So, a Swede? Is that a reason why you should take my chair? Well, in such things, I can be a Swede too.”

Lizzi cocked her head at him and almost sang: “He did not mean you any harm. You were not sitting in your chair, after all.”

Herr Rieber said fondly, “Since it is next to yours, I want it always to be free for me.” Grunting a little, he eased himself down, took the old copy of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
out of the raincoat pocket and shuffled it about restlessly, his underlip pursed. Lizzi said, “It is not a nice way to begin a long voyage, quarreling.”

Herr Rieber put down his paper, shoved the raincoat away. He eyed her sweetly, roguishly. “It was not, and you well know it, about the chair that I quarrel with that big ugly fellow,” he told her. Lizzi instantly grew more roguish than he.

“Ah, you men,” she screamed joyously, “you are all alike!” She leaned over and whacked him three times on the skull with a folded paper fan. Herr Rieber was all ready for a good frolic. How he admired and followed the tall thin girls with long scissor-legs like storks striding under their fluttering skirts, with long narrow feet on the ends of them. He tapped her gently on the back of her hand with his forefinger, invitingly and with such insinuation she whacked him harder and faster, her teeth gleaming with pleasure, until the top of his head went florid.

“Ah, what a wicked girl,” he said, dodging punishment at last but still beaming at her, unvanquished—indeed, quite stimulated. She rose and pranced along the deck. He rolled out of his chair and bounced after her. “Let's have coffee and cake,” he cried eagerly, “they are serving it in the bar now.” He licked his lips.

Two inordinately dressed-up young Cuban women, frankly ladies of trade, had been playing cards together in the bar for an hour before the ship sailed. They sat with crossed legs in rolled-top gauzy stockings to show their powdered knees. Red-stained cigarettes sagged from their scarlet full mouths, smoke curled towards their narrowed eyes and heavily beaded lashes. The elder was a commanding beauty; the younger was smaller, thinner, apparently in frail health. She observed the other attentively and played her cards as if she hardly dared to win. The tall shambling young Texan, whose name was William Denny, came in and sat in a corner of the bar and watched them with a wary, knowing eye. The ladies ignored him; though they paused in their game now and then to sip their pousse-cafés and glance haughtily about the comfortably crowded bar, they never once glanced at Denny, who felt it as a personal slight. He rapped sharply on the bar as if calling the barman, still staring at them, a mean cold little smile starting in his face. Chili Queens. He knew their kind. He had not lived most of his life in Brownsville, Texas, for nothing. They were no treat to him. He rapped again, noisily.

“You have your beer, sir,” said the barman. “Anything else, please?”

The ladies glanced at him then, their contemptuous eyes fixed upon him as if he were a drunken hoodlum making trouble in a bar. His gaze quivered, his smile vanished; he dived into his mug of beer, drank, lighted a cigarette, leaned over and examined his own shoes intently, fumbled for his handkerchief, which wasn't there, and at last he gave up and broke for the open air, like a man on urgent business. There seemed nowhere to go, though, and nothing much to do, unless he went back to his cabin to start unpacking a few things. Might as well try to settle down.

Already he was beginning to feel exhausted from his efforts to maintain his identity among strange languages and strange lands. Challenged as he felt himself to be, to prove his own importance in every separate encounter, he was badly confused as to what appearance that importance should assume. The question presented itself not for the first time but most sharply when he reached Veracruz. In the small town on the border where his father was a prominent citizen, mayor for many years and rich from local real estate, the lower classes consisted of Mexicans and Negroes, that is, greasers and niggers, with a few polacks and wops but not enough to notice; and he had always relied simply on his natural superiority of race and class, backed by law and custom. In Veracruz, surrounded by a coastal race of Negro-Indian-Spanish, yellow-eyed, pugnacious people, whose language he had never troubled to learn though he had heard it all his life, he had taken the proper white man's attitude towards them and they had responded with downright insolence. He had begun by feeling broadminded: after all, this was their country, dirt and all, and they could have it—he intended to treat them right while he was there. He had been made to realize his mistake almost at once: when he was polite to them, they thought he was patronizing them; when he was giving a perfectly legitimate order, they let him see he was trying to treat them like slaves; if he was indifferent and let things go, they despised him and played tricks on him. Well, damn it all, they
are
inferior—just look at them, that is all you need. And it won't do to let the bars down for a minute. At the Migrations, he had called the little clerk Pancho, just as back home he would have called a taxi driver Mac or a railway porter George, by way of showing good will. The little nigger—all those coast Mexicans had nigger blood, somebody had told him—stiffened as if he had been goosed, his face turned purple and his eyes red. He had stared at Denny and said something very short and quick in his own lingo, then in good English had asked Denny to sit down, kindly, for a few minutes until the papers could be filled out. Denny, like a fool, had sat there streaming with sweat and the flies buzzing in his face, while the clerk looked after a whole line of people who had come in later than he. It came over him slowly that he was being given the hot-foot. That taught him something though. He had got up and gone to the head of the line and shouldered in towards the clerk and said very distinctly and slowly, “I'll take those papers now,” and the clerk instantly produced and stamped them and handed them over without even a glance at Denny. That was what he should have done in the first place and the next time he'd know.

Opening the door of his cabin, he noted three names instead of two. Herr David Scott, said the sign, Herr Wilhelm Denny, and surprise Herr Karl Glocken. He looked in upon a crowded scene. The tight-faced medium-sized young man he had seen running around Veracruz with that bitchy-looking girl in the blue pants was cleaning the washhand basin with something that smelled like carbolic acid. There were two strange suitcases and a battered leather bag on Denny's berth, the lower. His ticket called for the lower, and he was going to have it; no use starting out letting himself get gypped. The young man raised his eyes briefly, said, “How do you do?”

“Fairly,” said Denny, moving inside one step. The young man went on washing the basin. Seated upon a footstool, Herr Glocken was fumbling among the contents of a clumsy duffel bag. He was the most terribly deformed human being Denny had ever seen, except perhaps the maimed beggar in the square at Veracruz. Bending over as he was, his body was so close to the floor his long arms could stretch further than his out-spread legs. He got up with an apologetic air, and stood almost four feet tall, his long sad face cradled in a hunch high as his head, and backed into that end of the lower berth not occupied by the luggage. “I'll be out of here in just a minute,” he said, with a pained smile. He then eased himself down upon the edge of the mattress among the luggage and appeared to faint. David Scott and William Denny exchanged unwilling looks of understanding; they were obviously stuck with this fellow, and there was nothing to be done about it that either could see at the moment.