Ship of Fools (72 page)

His stomach burning, he dabbled in his thin soup, afraid of his food which had a way of turning and rending him. So—these Spaniards were no news to him even before he picked up the gossip and rumors about them from his table guests. It had all been abysmally beneath his notice, they were so obviously pimps with their prostitutes disguised as dancers in order to get proper passports, up to their shady tricks night and day. Anything would do, from scrounging money from passengers to stealing right and left from shops in Santa Cruz—he understood now the meaning of that howling leaping madwoman on the pier as the ship drew away; and the only question was, how had they managed to blackmail so many people, how had they got themselves seated at his table, where they had no right on earth to be, and what criminal effrontery had given them the notion in the first place? And what—this was the painful question, not to be answered: what had he been thinking of, to let such disorder thrive under his very eyes, and to consider it of no importance, something for the women to gossip about?

He resisted an impulse to leave the table then and there. It would be better to stay, to observe them further, to let their impudence run its course, and to chastise them publicly with his contempt at the right moment. The one thing necessary with such people was to control them, to keep them firmly in their place. Once you allowed them the smallest impertinence, they would edge in and crowd you out like that camel who got his nose into the Arab's tent, and after that, there was only one course to take: they must be put down with fire and sword.

The Captain was fascinated by American gangster films full of gunfights, raids on night clubs, wild motor chases between police and bandits with screaming sirens and spouting machine guns; abductions, roadside murders, bullet-riddled bodies streaming blood sprawled about the streets, with only now and then at long intervals a lone gangster being led to the death chamber in the last scene. He now entertained himself with dreaming, as he sometimes did, that he was turning one of those really elegant portable machine guns on a riotous mob somewhere, always from a splendidly advantageous position, swiveling it in a half circle, mowing them down in rows. At this point there was some confusion in his mind, though not enough to interfere with the enjoyment of his fantasy; for though he could not imagine himself as being on any side except that of established government, he had in fact noticed that it was nearly always the gangsters who were shown operating the machine guns. There was no good reason why this should be so, and it was a state of affairs which could only exist in a barbarous nation like the United States. It was true that all the Americans were devoted to crime and criminals, to indecent dancing and drug-taking in low Negro jazz cellars, a debased people who groveled in vice, and left their police to depend mostly on tear gas bombs, or hand grenades or revolvers, all more awkward and less effective than machine guns. Even supposing that an American policeman might possibly be an honest man, though very unlikely, why put him at such a disadvantage? If it had not been for the constant gangster warfare among themselves, killing each other off in great numbers, they might easily have taken the country over entirely, years ago! But it was common knowledge that American gangsters and police were in close partnership, one could not thrive without the other. The leaders on both sides divided the power and the spoils, and they took in everything, from highest government posts to labor unions to the gayest night clubs and even the stock market, the food crops—yes, and the international shipping, God knows! All all was one vast gangster's paradise, where only petty criminals and stupid policemen and decent workmen got killed or beaten and cheated. Besides the moving pictures which told him all this, the newspapers every day told him the same. In a word, the whole country was run by mobs of gangsters, there was not a single law in the land that they could not break as they pleased, and not a single man who would have dared to oppose them.

The Captain, from his eminence of perfectly symmetrical morality, a man who steered by chart and compass, secure in his rank in an ascending order of superiors so endless the highest was unknown, invisible to him, took deep pleasure in his apocalyptic vision of the total anarchic uproar of the United States, a place he had never seen, for no ship of his carried him into any port more interesting than Houston, Texas, with its artificial canal in a meadow in a part of the country far removed from any marks of civilization. It was narrower and duller than the river Weser that took him into Bremerhaven.

He reveled secretly in the notion of lawless murderous fury breaking out again and again at any time, anywhere—in some place he could not even fix on the map, but always among people whom it was lawful to kill, with himself at the center, always in command and control. Nothing worthy of his hopes of violence had ever occurred, not even in the war, where his part had been useful, honorable, if inconspicuous, as he was bound to admit, and altogether lacking in opportunities for him to exercise his real talents. This fate seemed to dog him: competent as he was to deal with the largest disorders and insubordination, here on his ship he dealt with silly rows, head-crackings in the steerage, a gang of petty knaves making themselves a nuisance: beneath his notice, yet he must deal with them.

He brooded on his vanished Germany, the Germany of his childhood and earliest youth, the only Germany whose existence he admitted in his soul—that fatherland of order, harmony, simplicity, propriety, where every public place was hung with signs forbidding this or that, guiding the people so there could be no excuse for anyone making a mistake; whoever did so disobeyed clearly with felonious intent. This made the administration of justice more swift and certain than in other countries. Set the very tiniest sign saying
Verboten
at the edge of a grass plot, and even a three-year-old boy who could not read should know better than to put his toe over the edge. He had not known, or perhaps had been guilty of inattentiveness to signs, because in childish ignorance or carelessness, he had put his toe over the edge of the grass plot near the little sign, and his father, who had taken him for his morning walk in the park, had whipped him with his walking stick until his back was welted blue all over then and there, on the very spot, so that the lesson might sink not only into the culprit's mind, but furnish a public demonstration of the discipline parents should practice on their young.…

The Captain shuddered, leaped out of his revery, glanced at his watch and said to the steward, “Pour my wine please, and bring the fish.”

At that moment the Spanish company erupted into the dining room in the full uproar of their professional native dress and arts, and bore in procession towards the Captain to the rhythmic strains of a popular bullfighter's entrance march, played on two guitars by Tito and Manolo to the light flutter of castanets on the fingers of the ladies, whose brilliantly smiling faces were masks in black, white and red. They wore flimsy red and white figured cotton gowns with long ruffled trains. High tortoise-shell combs filled out in front with cotton roses and draped with short black lace mantillas adorned their shining black hair. They glittered with sequined fans, jingled with necklaces, earrings and bracelets of colored glass and ornaments of gold-colored metal; their skirts, shorter in front, showed their beautiful ankles and feet in black lace stockings and red satin high-heeled slippers.

The men wore their uniforms of tight high-waisted black trousers, wide red sashes and short black jackets, their thin black dancing pumps with flat ribbon bows. Ric and Rac wore their bullfighter and Carmen costumes, a little disheveled from pulling each other back by clutching hair or garments, each wanting to go first in the parade.

The whole company circled around the table in a bright carnival of bowing and strumming and clacking and whirling, every face fixed in an intent smile. The Captain, monumentally remote, rose and returned the greeting with deadly courtesy. They responded as to an enthusiastic audience. At last the stewards pulled out the ladies' chairs, and they settled with excited little cries, like crows to a cornfield, Lola at the Captain's right hand, Amparo at his left; the others found their places at the much extended board and there at last after their long fight, they found themselves seated at the Captain's table, the high place they were determined to be even if only once in their lives, and not only to be there, but to prove their right to the place they had won. Their smiles faded, their eyes were hard, glittering, savagely triumphant as they glanced around at the other passengers, some of whom were still pretending to ignore them. Let them! Not for a moment did they forget the point of their victory. They had come to do honor to the Captain, and they did him honor at length and in profusion. As food was set before them, grew cold and was taken away, except for Ric and Rac, whose appetites never failed, they rose in turn with lifted glasses and made speeches, each expressing in a slightly different arrangement of florid phrases the burning hope that this beautiful occasion would serve to bring those two great martyred countries, Spain and Germany, closer to each other, that the old splendid order might be restored—the Spanish monarchy, the German Empire, in all their glory!

The Captain began to squirm slightly as oratory piled upon oratory; when the political trend of their words became clearer, he turned pale with rage. He had never ceased to mourn the Kaiser; he loathed with all his soul the debased pseudo-republicanism of defeated Germany, and was shocked to discover that this ragtag bobtailed lot were claiming as it were relationship with him, calling themselves Royalists; they were toasting a high glorious cause to which by the very nature of things they had no right to adhere—they were only to live under it, as under the whip of their master. Royalists? How did they dare to say the word, much less call themselves that? They were the beggars whose place it was to line the streets and cheer when royalty passed, to scramble for the money thrown at the cathedral door after royal weddings, to dance in the streets at fairs and pass the basket afterward.

The Captain could hardly find the will to raise his glass, he felt he would choke if a drop of wine passed his lips in such infamous company. He suspended it a few inches above his plate with a nearly imperceptible flourish, nodded stiffly without looking up and set it down again. The zarzuela company rose stormily as if in a delirium of admiration, crying, “Long live your mother!” at which indecent familiarity the Captain blushed in deepest resentment. His mother had been dead for more than twenty years, and he had not liked her much when she was alive. As his invaders closed in upon him, leaning in until the beads of black wax on the women's eyelashes, the almost liquid oiliness of the men's hair, the intolerable stench of their perfumes, seemed to be rubbing off on his skin, tainting him forever, his grudging pretense of acknowledgment vanished altogether. His face grew sharper and dryer, he sat back with his hands on the arms of his chair. His former guests began to suffer for him, and their eyes began to meet from their scattered places in the salon, with a kind of unanimous agreement among them, for the first time: even Lizzi and Frau Rittersdorf shook their heads and frowned together, even the purser and Dr. Schumann, who had come in late, exchanged looks of disapproval. The young Cuban married pair, who had put their children to bed after an early supper, invited the Mexican diplomat's wife, little Señora Ortega, to join them at the table assigned to them, since she had been turned away from her own, and they were all looking for respectable company in the emergency. They watched the performance of the dancers around the Captain's table for a few minutes. The young husband remarked: “It is most inappropriate. When I bought those tickets for their raffle, I had no notion they were planning such impudence as this!”

“It makes one almost ashamed of being Spanish, doesn't it?” asked Señora Ortega, well aware of what the Spanish of Spain, even the lowest of them, thought about the Spanish of Mexico and Cuba … mongrels speaking a parrot Spanish, their veins rotted with Indian and Negro blood. “These are lower than Indians,” she said.

“Ah well,” said the young man, “they are only gypsies, from Granada.”

“I was told,” said his wife, “that they are even worse than gypsies—they are Spaniards calling themselves gypsies.”

“Yes, and behaving like it!” said Señora Ortega. “But how I pity that poor Captain, and I never expected to feel sorry for him! I have always found all Germans very unsympathetic. After knowing so many Germans in Mexico, I say often to my husband, ‘Oh, please be careful and never get yourself sent to Germany!'”

“My great-grandfather was a German, a businessman of Havana,” said the young Cuban wife, rather unpleasantly.

“Oh,” said Señora Ortega, dismayed. “I'm
so
sorry.” They went on with their dinner in silence.

At the Captain's table, Lola took charge of the ceremonies by right. She turned, her eyes blazing with fury, and brandished her wine glass in all directions like a weapon, calling out in her deep voice: “Silence! I wish to propose a toast! To the eternal friendship of our two great nations, the Kingdom of Spain and the Empire of Germany, and to the great leaders who are restoring order and government to these countries in distress!
Viva
!” and “
Viva! Viva
!” shouted the others, in chorus, drinking down their wine. The Captain did not move, and not a glass was lifted except their own. Then Lola shouted again, her voice brassy with rage: “And to all selfish, obstructive, inhuman people who refuse to contribute their share or take part in this occasion meant to do homage to courage, to leadership, to nobility of mind and heart, to—in short—to
you
, my Captain,” she said, bowing towards the Captain with her most brilliant smile, “to all who have tried to destroy the joy and beauty of this homage, eternal shame and confusion and dishonor!”