The Metaphysical Ukulele (6 page)

Chet leaned his ukulele against a café chair back. He pulled out his wallet and unearthed five thousand-franc notes. He slapped them on the table in front of Baldwin.
“Whatever you have to say about Dick, you have to admit he was the first American black writer to break into the big time. When he did that, he convinced all of us sons of slaves that it was possible to contribute to the world's literature.” Chet grabbed Baldwin's whiskey and emptied it in a gulp. He pointed at the francs on the table in front of Baldwin. “Pay me back as soon as you can. I'm not a goddamn bank.”

Himes stormed out of the terrace. He clomped down Rue Bonaparte with his ukulele tucked under his arm, having sold one story and bought another.

2.

Money was running out in Mallorca. Chet sat in his back garden. He plunked the ukulele he'd swindled off the Parisian house band a year earlier. He'd gotten into the habit in the previous months of waking at five, brewing coffee, and writing as the first rays of sun broke through the Mallorquin sky. It had been the best writing of his life. He'd told the story of his affair with Vandi, his white debutante ex-girlfriend. He'd put himself in the novel: the old ex-con and tuft hunter, who had consorted with pimps and whores and Harlem society matrons in his time, yet was shocked by Vandi's sexual adventurousness. He'd put in the sex. His black body, still strong like an aging prizefighter, all muscle and hips, graced the pages for all those fay fetishist mother-rapers. He'd spent siesta hours recreating those scenes with Alva, his current white debutante girlfriend. Alva seemed to lose her puritanical upbringing during afternoons on the
Spanish Riviera.

But for all the joy of writing and sex and even plunking a ukulele under a fig tree, the money was still running out. It would be gone by the end of the month.

With the second cup of coffee down and the sun rising higher into the sky, the worst moment of every day here in Deya caught up with Chet. He set his ukulele down. He walked through a narrow path between his building and the neighbors' and into the basement of the adjoining apartment house. His apartment had been divided in a haphazard fashion with this adjacent house. The result was his toilet's placement in the next-door basement. The toilet was dirty and stinking and crawling with dark things. The kerosene Chet had poured over the seat and into the cesspool had only moved the slugs onto the concrete floor.

He crushed them under his sandals and sat on the toilet. No sooner had he sat than the trap door in the ceiling opened. One of the new tenants who had just moved into the neighboring apartment house dumped her trash down the vent and onto his head.

Chet took the opportunity to teach her every profane phrase he knew in English, Spanish, and French.

Chet was waiting when Pedro Canales dropped by for the rent. He'd bathed and used olive oil to flush all the trash out of his hair, but he was still stinking mad.

Canales walked into the garden with all the pretentiousness of a small Spanish property owner. He was a large,
middle-aged man with a slight stoop. A small dried face between two huge ears gave him a monkeyish look and his yellow skin was blotched with large brown freckles. “Good afternoon, Mr. Himes,” he said. He was very proud of his English.

“Good afternoon, my ass,” Chet said. “Did you know that the roof of the toilet is the goddamn trash chute for the apartment next door?”

Canales waved the comment away. “I don't own the apartment next door. Their trash chute is none of my business.”

“But you own the toilet where the trash lands. That's the toilet I use. I can't have them dumping trash on my head when I take a shit.”

“It's their floor,” Canales said. “I cannot interfere.”

“It's your ceiling,” Chet pointed out.

Canales shrugged.

Chet walked into the kitchen and grabbed a large knife. He met Canales back in the garden. He slammed a handful of pesetas on the wooden garden table and stabbed his knife into them. The blade stood on its own. Chet said, “You'll get your rent when you fix that trash chute.”

Canales didn't offer the knife even the slightest glance. “If you don't pay the rent,” he said. “I'll cut off your electricity.”

“If you cut off my electricity, I'll cut off you head.”

Canales shot Chet a look with his sharp blue eyes. He stormed back home to get a ladder. Chet didn't storm anywhere. He already had the knife.

The flies in Deya swarmed so thick they sometimes cast the town in a shadow. Chet sat under a fig tree, though the locals claimed the shade of it was deadly. He killed flies and tossed them into ant piles and watched the ants carry the flies.

Something clunked against the bricks of his apartment. “Alva,” Chet called. “Is that you?”

“No, mon ami. It's Canales. He's propping a ladder against our house.”

Chet launched from his chair, grabbed the kitchen knife still sticking out of the garden table, tucked the pesetas into the pocket of his white cotton trousers, and ran to meet Canales. In the spur of the moment, he'd forgotten his shirt.

Canales stood under the electrical wires with his feet on the first step of a ladder. Chet charged the ladder. The knife glistened in the Mallorquin sun.

“Pay the rent or I will cut off your electricity,” Canales said.

“Take one more step up that ladder, and I'll cut off your head.”

Canales took one more step up the ladder. Chet grabbed a fistful of Canales' stringy salt-and-pepper hair. He rose the knife to Canales' throat. Canales took two steps down the ladder. “Fine,” he said. “I'll call the
Guardia Civil
.”

Pedro Tous,
commandante
of the
Guardia Civil
, stopped by Chet's house that evening. Chet ushered him in, through
the master bedroom that cut the apartment in half, and into the kitchen in the back. With the door shut, the kitchen felt like a brick cave with a missing stone serving as a window. An electric bulb burned over the kitchen table. Flies gathered around it, obscuring the light. Alva sat under the bulb, swirling a few ounces of brandy around a snifter.

Tous joined Alva at the table. He was a young man with a fresh complexion and a pointed black mustache. The
commandante
uniform was the right size and cut for him, but it seemed as if it would never fit him to his liking. He smiled softly and cast his eyes down.

Tous did not speak English. Neither Chet nor Alva spoke Spanish. Through a bit of trial and error, Tous and Alva settled into a flawless French. Alva explained about the toilet and the rent. Tous asked her if he could see the toilet. In English, Alva said, “Chester, would you mind showing the
commandante
to our toilet?”

Chet led Tous through the back garden, down a narrow walk, and into the toilet. Tous shined a pocket torch onto the trap door. He followed the light down to a pile of trash gathered near the toilet. Underneath their feet, slugs climbed over their crushed brothers. Tous nodded and left the room.

Back in the kitchen, Tous spoke to Alva. Alva responded to Tous in French and turned to Chet. “He told us not to pay the rent until Canales builds a trash chute.”

Stone masons arrived the next day.

Still, the money was running out. Chet and Alva would have to leave Deya by the end of July. The book they'd written together about Alva's war experiences in Holland had been rejected by every publisher Chet knew in France, England, and the US. The novel he'd written in the back garden, under the shade of the fig, didn't seem to be faring any better. The World had offered him an eight-hundred-dollar advance for a short story collection called
Black Boogie Woogie
. He'd taken and spent the advance long ago. When the short stories they'd selected arrived for his approval, he threw them into the Mediterranean in a fit of rage.

Now he had to leave town with no money in his pocket, no money coming in, and no one left to borrow from. If there'd been a pawnshop, he would've hocked Alva's old engagement ring. He hadn't seen the three mythical golden balls since hitting land on Mallorca.

With no other options, he walked up the hill to Robert Graves' house. Graves, Chet knew, was in London. If he'd been in Deya, even this option would've dried up. Chet walked past the high walls grown over with climbing roses in full bloom, through the gate, and up to the small, new house at the front of the property. Graves' secretary lived there with his family. Before Chet could knock, he saw Graves' secretary sitting on a veranda overlooking the sea.

Chet called out, “Karl?”

The secretary turned, but did not stand.

Chet approached slowly, ukulele tucked under his arm. “I'm Chester Himes. I was here about a month ago with my
wife, Alva.”

“Oh, yes.” Karl nodded and turned his glance back toward the sea. “Your ‘wife.'”

Chet took a seat next to Karl. Sea breezes here at the top of the hill brushed aside the flies that gathered at Chet's place at the bottom of it. Shady spaces under the flanking avocado, lime, and lemon trees cooled the breeze. A date fell from a nearby palm. Chet set the ukulele on the table between him and the secretary.

“Graves isn't around?” Chet asked.

“He's in London, as everyone between here and Palma knows.”

“Of course.” Chet nodded. “Of course. I know he'll be disappointed. Alva and I have to leave town.”

“I heard. Half of the town has sided with Canales in your little tiff.”

“Well, luckily that leaves the other half siding with me.”

“And further rumor travels up here about you taking a swing at the bus driver's son.”

Chet nodded. He had. The whole silly event added to his list of local enemies.

“I hear that many of the townspeople were ready to take up arms against you that night.” Karl's eyes stayed glued to the sea. A malicious smile played across his lips.

Chet reminded himself of all his empty accounts. He countered with a reticent smile. “I thought they were going to beat the black off me.”

Karl nudged the ukulele with his elbow. “And what of
this little guitar that sits between us. Surely it is a prop delivered to elicit further conversation.”

“I told Robert I'd bring it by,” Chet said. “Fats Waller gave it to me as a gift at the Cotton Club one night. He mistook me for Richard Wright. Wanted to thank me for writing
Black Boy
.”

“Yet, as I recall, you play no instrument besides the radio.” Karl turned his gaze to Chet. He had the blackest eyes Chet had ever seen on a white man. “In fact, you said you are offended when every white Englishmen automatically assumes that every black American plays jazz.”

There had been that confrontation a month earlier, inside this very property, when Graves had made just that assumption and Himes made just those assertions. Chet cast aside the shame. He welcomed in the old street hustle. He took the ukulele from its case and said, “You don't play this instrument. It plays itself.”

Chet ran through some jazz chords flavored with ornamental notes. He launched into the Fats Waller mainstay, “Ain't Misbehavin'.”

The malice left Karl's face, but the smile stayed. When Chet finished, Karl asked, “How much?”

“A hundred…” Chet started. Karl rose from his chair. Chet tacked on a quick, “…and fifty.”

Karl nodded and vanished into the main house.

Chet ran through a rag and a rendition of “My Four Reasons” while he waited. Before he could start a third song, Karl returned with a stack of five-thousand-peseta notes.

“The exchange rate is less than you'll get on the black market,” Karl said. “But you'll find it's fair.”

Chet returned the ukulele to its case and lifted the peseta notes.

3.

The money was gone. Alva was gone. Marlene, the girlfriend to replace Alva, was gone. Dick was in Ghana. Chet had gotten his advances on all the novels he'd written and none were paying royalties. If he thought he'd hit bottom in Deya, Paris was becoming a whole new layer of hell.

His main occupation was the search for money. He ran from publishing house to publishing house in France with the first hundred pages of the novel
Mamie Mason
. At Gallimard, he ran in to Marcel Duhamel, the French translator of Chet's first novel,
If He Hollers, Let Him Go
. Marcel invited Chet into a small office and offered him a seat in a metal chair with a torn cushion. Marcel sat behind the metal desk, pushing aside manuscripts so the men could see eye-to-eye. He was a slight Frenchman with a wispy mustache and round, cloudy eyeglasses. He said, “Lucky for me you are here. I wanted to see you, Chester. I want you to write for me.”

Chet leaned back in his chair. The metal front legs rose a few inches off the ground. “Write what?”

“I do a series of detective novels. I want you to write for me a crime novel. Put it in Harlem. Bring some
américains noires
to my
Série noire
.”

Chet ran a hand through his too-long, reddish-black kinks. He didn't trust French barbers and hadn't cut his hair himself in some time. He told Marcel, “I would write a crime novel if I knew how.”

“What about
If He Hollers, Let Him Go
? That was a crime novel.”

Chet said, “It started out that way, but I couldn't name the white man who was guilty because all white men were guilty.”

Marcel nodded. “This is what I am talking about. Write like you did in that novel. Short, terse sentences. All action. Perfect style for a detective story.”

Chet shook his head. He glanced back at the door. It was an old wooden model with sheet of frosted glass. With Marcel Duhamel's name painted across the glass in thick black letters, it looked like the door to a detective's office. Chet grazed his fingers across his empty pockets. “I don't know.”

Marcel asked, “What's to know? It's simple. Get an idea. Start with action, somebody does something—a man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down the hall… Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don't give a damn who's thinking what—only what they're doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another. Don't worry about making sense. That's for the end. Give me two hundred and twenty typed pages.”