The Drifters (46 page)

The ladies withdrew, and when they were well out of hearing I said, ‘I ought to wallop you,’ and she said, ‘Life is too goddamned short.’

Cato was profiting in many ways from his stay in Europe. He had updated his wardrobe so that except for his color he was indistinguishable from the better-dressed
Frenchmen and Germans. He listened to the observations of others and was acquiring an insight into European and African problems; most of all, he ingratiated himself with people of the most diverse quality.

Apart from the occasional southern soldier who wanted to steal Monica, he got along fine with Americans from the deep south, outraging them one time with his frank statements of belief, enchanting them the next with his assurances that in the next generation there would be many blacks like him, willing to talk seriously, willing to make necessary concessions to keep the ball game going. He loved to talk with Europeans who sought information about America; with them he was brutally frank, feeding their animosities at one moment, appalling them with his challenges the next. I got the feeling that he was trying out his powers, finding how far he could go with people and what led to success in debate. I had no idea what he had in mind, but I was sure that he was slowly generating a picture of himself and deciding what he could accomplish with that picture.

Often he infuriated me. He had now picked up about six good accents: gutter Philadelphia, deep-south Geechee, University of Pennsylvania high society; debonair French, grandee Spanish, and what can only be called put-on—the flamboyantly funny and aggravating speech with which he kidded anyone who asked questions that probed too deeply into his Negro consciousness. He could really be most exasperating.

But no matter how irritated I became with Cato, and he could be infuriating, one aspect of his behavior commanded my respect: in his relations with Monica he took pains always to be decent. Many young men who conduct affairs with girls better positioned than they, feel driven to compensate by giving the girls a difficult time; not Cato. Or a man who goes with a girl who has more money than he, often needs to affirm his manhood by treating her meanly; not Cato. That she was the daughter of a titled Englishman did not impel him to humiliate her, and the fact that she was white did not make it necessary for him to denigrate her in public. He remained a normal, sex-driven, amiable young man, and I found much fun in being with him and his girl.

For example, one night an American newspaperman, learning that the young fellow who had shot up the Llanfair
church was in town, sought him out at the Alamo, and while the regular customers sat in an admiring circle, interviewed Cato, who perversely adopted the role of a pansy Negro gone French. His answers were hilarious and we had to control ourselves to keep from giving him away.

The newspaperman asked gravely, ‘Do you see the black revolution as sweeping all parts of America?’

With ultra precision Cato replied, ‘So far I have been permitted to visit only Philadelphia and New York, with an occasional visit to the brothers in Newark, but couriers reach me continuously from the provinces, and piecing together what they tell me …’ He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of defeat and said, ‘California is totally lost … lost … lost. Those filthy Mexicans with their goddamned grapes have stolen the play from us. You could explode seven tons of TNT in the middle of Watts, and it wouldn’t make that much difference.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Those goddamned Mexicans horning in.’

When the reporter tried to zero in on just what the revolution was trying to accomplish, Cato cut him short: ‘What I said about California applies even more strongly, I fear, to New York.’ One of the soldiers started to laugh at the ‘I fear,’ but his friends muzzled him. ‘In New York it’s the goddamned Puerto Ricans. They’re taking the play completely away from us. If you’re a Pureto Rican, you get the headlines. If you’re black, who cares? But in places like Birmingham and Tupelo we rate. So from what my friends tell me, we’ve written off California and New York. Let the spics have them. But you can tell your white readers this. When we strike our blow we are really going to strike.’

By now we could see that the reporter realized he was dealing with a put-on, but he kept at Cato, obviously hoping to get some usable quotes on how Negroes felt about Spanish-speaking people. Again Cato cut him short: ‘What’s this Whitey word Negroes? Who’s Negro? I’m no Negro. That’s a filthy imperialist word dreamed up by Bible-spouting white folks and kept alive by the captive press. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, using a word like that in what I thought was to be a friendly interview.’ He ranted in a French accent and so confused the reporter that the discussion fell apart.

At the end, the reporter took Monica aside and asked her, ‘Does he always kid around like this?’ and she confided,
‘No. He’s usually quite coherent, but his wife is having a baby.’ ‘I didn’t know he was married,’ the newsman said. ‘Yes, to a very fine Spanish girl. Her family thought he was Moroccan … very dark. Now they’ve found out. They’re applying dreadful pressure on the poor girl, and Mr. Jackson’s afraid she’ll lose the baby.’ The reporter hesitated, looked at his notes and said, ‘Wait a minute! Three months ago he was in Philadelphia. Hadn’t even seen Spain.’ ‘I know,’ Monica said stiffly. ‘That’s the real tragedy of this affair. The father of the baby is a Finnish businessman. Mr. Jackson married her to save her good name.’ The reporter played it straight, saying to Cato as he left, ‘I hope your wife comes through all right,’ and Cato, suspecting that Monica had been up to some nonsense, replied almost instantaneously, ‘Thank God, they have transfusions these days.’ It was a great closing line for an interview with a revolutionary.

On this occasion Cato had a surprise for me, too, because when the reporter left, he and Monica came to sit at my table, and he said, ‘Guess who’s going to come through that door at midnight.’

When I said they’d have to give me a clue, Monica said, ‘The kid who uses the sleeping bag. The one we said was in Granada.’

‘When he told us he knew you,’ Cato said, ‘it was a real gasser.’

Shortly before midnight the door opened, and in the entrance stood Yigal Zmora in hiking shorts, blue knit shirt and Israeli idiot cap.
‘Shalom!’
he cried as he came to greet me. Spreading his arms to indicate the bar and its occupants, he said, ‘This is the way to study engineering!’ It was obvious that the American soldiers respected him as ‘that kid from Qarash.’

When I asked how he had met the others, Cato interrupted, ‘Same way I did. Stumbled into this joint for a drink, caught a glimpse of Britta, and fell in love with her.’

I happened to be looking at Yigal when these joking words were spoken, and when I saw the deep and automatic blush that confused him—red surging up into his ears—I realized that Cato had make a joke which to Yigal was not funny, nor would it ever be. He stared down at my beer mug while Britta served drinks at another table, and during the rest of that night he seemed afraid to look at her.

In speaking of Torremolinos, I have used phrases like ‘We were talking at the bar’ or ‘Someone said to me at the Alamo,’ but these words must be understood in a special way, because during every minute of its operation this bar, like all others in Torremolinos, was filled with a deafening cacophony of sound.

When the bar opened at eleven in the morning Joe would start a stack of records and until he closed at four the next morning, they would grind on, each giving the effect of being louder than its predecessor. If, by accident, a disk recorded at moderate volume did find its way onto the machine, someone in the bar was sure to yell, ‘Turn that goddamned volume up.’

We therefore had to talk above this Niagara of noise. It was constant and immutable, as if the young people of the world were afraid to be alone with mere thoughts. What did this cascade consist of? At first I could not have said. I had been trained in classical music, with a strong predilection toward Beethoven and Stravinsky. Two of the best concerts I had the good fortune to attend were a Toscanini performance in Boston at which he played the
Leonore Overture No. 3
, the
Fifth
and the
Ninth
, and that popular gala, often repeated at the Moscow ballet, in which they danced
The Firebird, The Rite of Spring
and
Petrouchka.
I knew most of Verdi by heart and had played recordings of
Carmen
and
Faust
so often that I could have conducted them.

I loved music. In my youth I had enjoyed the songs then popular, not so avidly as some of my companions, but enough to remember the major successes of men like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Lunceford. I was never much taken with vocalists, but I did like Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. Of the composers, Harold Arlen was my favorite, but I also liked some of the finest Rodgers and Hart inventions. My education had ended with
Pal Joey.

I was not able to study or comprehend the musical explosion after the war. It did not repel me—no music could do that—but it had shot off in new directions I did not care to follow. About the only songs I remembered from this bleck and noisy period were ‘Nel Blu Dipinto
del Blu’ and ‘Rock around the Clock.’ The first captivated me, as it did the whole world, for I understood what the author was trying to say; it was a fresh, authentic cry from a man imprisoned on earth in a job he did not like and surrounded by people who bored him: it was a real
cri de coeur.
‘Rock around the Clock’ I first heard at a skating rink under my hotel window in Austria; the proprietor had a stack of records three feet high, but it seemed that every third selection was this noisy, throbbing thing whose title I could not decode. Finally I went down to his establishment, where red-cheeked young Austrians were twirling over the ice, and asked him, ‘What’s that piece of music?’

‘ “Rrrruck around ze Cllllluck,” ’ he told me.

This left me still bewildered, so I asked if I might see the record when he was through this spinning, and he showed it to me with some pride. ‘From London,’ he said. ‘Very popular.’ The tune, having been hammered incessantly into my brain, was my introduction to rock-and-roll, and I predicted, ‘This can never last.’

I was, therefore, not well prepared for the music in which I was immersed at the Alamo. I heard only compulsive noise. Sometimes, when none of the young people I knew were present, I would sit in a kind of stupor trying to decipher what the music and its mumbled lyrics signified, but always I threw in the towel without having learned anything. At such times it was comforting to leave the noise and wander down the beach for a beer at the Brandenburger, where sensible German folk songs were featured. It was good to hear music with a tune and words with meaning.

Then one day as I sat in the Alamo waiting for Monica and Cato, doing nothing and with my mind at rest, a miracle happened. In order to explain it, I must explain how I learned French.

When I chucked my job with Minneapolis Mutual and moved over to World Mutual, it became obvious that if I wanted to function in Geneva, I would have to learn French. Fortunately for me, at about this time the French government awakened to the fact that French was no longer the premier intellectual language of the world, having been replaced by English, German and Russian, in that order. Therefore, a crash program was initiated at the University of Besançon, where, as I have said, a pure
French was spoken, and I came along just as these experts had decided on a daring new technique and were looking for older people on whom to try it.

I was introduced to Madame Trenet, a small, intense gray-haired woman of about fifty-five. My English-speaking intercessor told me, ‘Madame Trenet guarantees to have you speaking French within two weeks. She won’t say a word of English to you, but she asks me to tell you this. It’s a matter of breaking the sound barrier. You must have faith that the day will come when the sounds will fall into place—they will become not a jumble, but French. Everything she does will be directed toward that mysterious moment when the sound barrier falls away and you understand, somehow or other, what she’s saying.’

This sounded most recondite to me, and I hoped that he and Madame Trenet knew what they were doing. Within the first ten minutes I learned that she did.

She sat me in a chair in my hotel room and placed a watch on the table between us. She then, so help me God, launched into a lecture in French on the rivers of France. She gave me not a single clue in English as to what she was doing, but with a most compelling sense of drama—
joie de vivre
, suspense and intonation, her hands and face contributing all the time—she told me her feelings about the great French rivers and the landscape through which they passed.

How did I know that was what she was talking about? I heard the words,
Loire, Rhin, Rhône, Garonne
and
Seine.
I missed completely whatever it was she told me about the last four, but when speaking of the Loire she used the word
chateaux
, and as she spoke of certain magnificent buildings she had known as a little girl, her face became diffused with memory, and the spaciousness of what she had seen was transmitted to me, and for a brief second the French words, which I could not possibly comprehend, conveyed a message which was as clear and visible as a newspaper headline. Out of sixty minutes that first session, I heard about three seconds’ worth of French, but I heard it with an intensity I remember to this day.

On the second day Madame Trenet lectured me on the French cinema: Fernandel, Raimu, Brigitte Bardot, René Clair. In the middle of her discourse, when I was catching nothing, she happened to mention a name I knew, Arletty, and on the spur of the moment I cried, ‘
Oui
, Les Enfants
du Paradis.’ A lovely smile came over her face and she asked, ‘
Vous connaissez?
’ and I said,
‘Oui.’

Now for my money,
Les Enfants du Paradis
is the finest motion picture ever made, a long glowing account of what happened in and around Les Funambules, a vaudeville theater in Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. It introduced Jean-Louis Barrault to the world, and many critics cherish the scene in which, through miming, he solves a police problem. I know a philosopher in New York, who divides the world into two parts, those who have seen
Les Enfants
and those who haven’t; he categorizes the former group according to which character in the movie they prefer. I gave myself away when I confessed that among the glittering roles, I have felt closest to that stupid young man, his heart on fire with love for Arletty, who stands in the courtyard below her window making romantic and poetic love to her while the more practical-minded man-about-town—a wretch if there ever was one—has slipped into her bedroom and, unseen from the courtyard below, is about to haul her into the hay. One of my bosses, an austere, clean-living man, told me that he imagined himself as the baron who is murdered in the Turkish bath.