Ship of Fools, Page 3

  The crop-haired young woman in the green gown startled everyone by leaping to her feet screaming in German, “Oh, look what is happening! Oh, what are they doing to him?” Her long arms flurried and pointed towards the great tree in the square.

  A half dozen small Indian men came padding across from out the shadow of the church. They carried light rifles under their arms, and they moved with short light steps, not hurrying, towards the Indian sitting on the bench. He watched them approach with no change of expression; their faces were without severity, impersonal, secret. They stopped before him, surrounded him; without a word or a glance or pause he rose and went away with them, all noiseless in their ragged sandals and white cotton drawers flapping around their ankles.

  The travelers watched the scene with apathy as if sparing themselves a curiosity that would never be satisfied. Besides, what happened to anyone in this place, yes, even to themselves, was no concern of theirs. “Don’t trouble your head,” said the pig-snouted man to the green-clad girl, “that is nothing unusual here. They’re only going to shoot him, after all! Could be he stole a handful of chilis! Or it might be just a little question of village politics.”

  This remark roused the gaunt blond man with the huge hands and feet. He unfolded his long body, uncrossed his legs and ranged his fixed scowl upon the pudgy man. “Yes,” he said in German with a foreign accent, his big voice rolling, “politics it may well be. There is nothing else here. Politics and strikes and bombs. Look how they must even bomb the Swedish Consulate. Even by accident as they say—a lie! Why the Swedish Consulate of all places, may I ask?”

  The pig-snouted man flew into a rage and answered in a loud common voice, “Why not the Swedish Consulate, for a change? Why should not other people sometimes have a little trouble, too? Why must it be always the Germans who suffer in these damned foreign countries?”

  The long rawboned man ignored the question. He sank back, his white eyelashes closed over his pale eyes, he drew the limeade before him through the straw in a steady stream. The Germans about stirred uneasily, their features set hard in disapproval. Untimely, unseemly, their faces said prudishly; that is the kind of German who gives us all bad reputations in strange lands. The little man was flushed and swollen, he seemed to be resenting some deep personal wrong. There followed a long hot sweaty sunstricken silence; then movement, a rising and pushing back of chairs, a gathering up of parcels, a slow drift towards dispersal. The ship was to sail at four, it was time to go.

  Dr. Schumann crossed the deck with the ordered step of an old military man and stood firmly planted near the rail, relaxed without slackness, hands at his side, watching the straggling procession of passengers ascending the gangplank. He had a fine aquiline nose, a serious well-shaped head, and two crookedly healed dark dueling scars on his left cheek. One of these was a “beauty,” as the Germans call it, the enviable slash from ear to mouth perfectly placed that must once have laid the side teeth bare. Healed all these years, the scar still had a knotty surface, a wide seam. Dr. Schumann carried it well, as he carried his sixty years: both were becoming to him. His light brown eyes, leveled calmly upon a given point where the people approached and passed, were without speculation or curiosity, but with an abstract goodness and even sweetness in them. He appeared to be amiable, well bred and in perfect possession of himself, standing against a background of light-haired, very young, rather undersized ship’s officers in white, and a crew of big solid blunt-faced sailors moving about their duties, each man with the expressionless face and intent manner of a thoroughly disciplined subordinate.

  The passengers, emerging from the mildewed dimness of the customs sheds, blinking their eyes against the blinding sunlight, all had the look of invalids crawling into hospital on their last legs. Dr. Schumann observed one of the most extreme forms of hunchback he had ever seen, a dwarf who, from above, appeared to have legs attached to his shoulder blades, the steep chest cradled on the rocking pelvis, the head with its long dry patient suffering face lying back against the hump. Just behind him a tall boy with glittering golden hair and a sulky mouth pushed and jostled a light wheel chair along, in which sat a small weary dying man with weak dark whiskers flecked with gray, his spread hands limp on the brown rug over his knees, eyes closed. His head rolled gently with the movement of the chair, otherwise he gave no sign of life.

  A young Mexican woman, softened and dispirited by recent childbirth, dressed in the elegant, perpetual mourning of her caste, came up slowly, leaning on the arm of the Indian nurse who carried the baby, his long embroidered robe streaming over her arm almost to the ground. The Indian woman wore brightly jeweled earrings, and beneath her full, gaily embroidered Pueblo skirt her small bare feet advanced and retreated modestly. A nondescript pair followed, no-colored parents of the big girl walking between them, taller and heavier than either of them, the three looking about with dull, confused faces. Two Mexican priests, much alike in their grim eyes and blue-black jaws, walked briskly around the slow procession and gained the head of it. “Bad luck for this voyage,” said one young officer to another, and they both looked discreetly away. “Not as bad as nuns, though,” said the second, “it takes nuns to sink a ship!”

  The four pretty, slatternly Spanish girls, their dark hair sleeked down over their ears, thin-soled black slippers too short in the toes and badly run over at high heels, took leisurely leave, with kisses all around, of a half dozen local young men, who had brought flowers and baskets of fruit. Their own set of four wasp-waisted young men then joined them, and they strolled up together, the girls casting glances full of speculation at the row of fair-haired young officers. The twins, smeary in the face, eating steadily from untidy paper sacks of sweets, followed them in a detached way. An assortment of North Americans, with almost no distinguishing features that Dr. Schumann could see, except that they obviously could not be other than Americans, came next. They were generally thinner and lighter-boned than the Germans, but not so graceful as the Spaniards and Mexicans. He also found it impossible to place them by class, as he could the others; they all had curiously tense, preoccupied faces, yet almost nothing of their characters was revealed in expressions. A middle-aged, prettyish woman in dark blue seemed very respectable, but a large irregular bruise on her arm below her short sleeve, most likely the result of an amorous pinch, gave her a slightly ribald look, most unbecoming. The girl in blue trousers had fine eyes, but her bold, airy manner spoiled her looks for Dr. Schumann, who believed that modesty was the most beautiful feature a young girl could have. The young man beside her presented a stubborn, Roman-nosed profile, like a willful, cold-blooded horse, his blue eyes withdrawn and secretive. A tall shambling dark young fellow, whom Dr. Schumann remembered as having embarked at some port in Texas, had gone ashore and was now returning; he lounged along in the wake of the Spanish girls, regarding them with what could only be described as a leer.

  The crowd was still struggling upward when Dr. Schumann lost interest and moved away, the officers dispersed, and the dock workers who had been loading the ship without haste began to shout and run back and forth. There remained luggage, children and adults not yet on board, and those on board wandered about in confusion with the air of persons who have abandoned something of great importance on shore, though they cannot think what it is. In straying groups, mute, unrelated, they returned to the docks and stood about idly watching the longshoremen hauling on the ropes of the loading cranes. Shapeless bundles and bales, badly packed bedsprings and mattresses, cheap looking sofas and kitchen stoves, lightly crated pianos and old leather trunks were being swung into the hold, along with a carload of Pueblo tile and a few thousand bars of silver for England; a ton of raw chicle, bundles of hemp, and sugar for Europe. The ship was none of those specialized carriers of rare goods, much less an elegant pleasure craft coming down from New York, all fresh paint and interior decoration, bringing crowds of prosperous dressed-up tourists with money in their pockets. No, the Vera was a mixed freighter and passenger ship,
very steady and broad-bottomed in her style, walloping from one remote port to another, year in year out, honest, reliable and homely as a German housewife.

  The passengers examined their ship with the interest and the strange dawning of affection even the ugliest ship can inspire, feeling that whatever business they had was now transferred finally to her hold and cabins. They began to move back towards the gangplank: the screaming girl in green, the fat pair with the bulldog, a small round German woman in black with sleek brown braids and a heavy gold chain necklace, and a short, worried-looking German Jew lugging a heavy sample case.

  At the latest possible moment, a bridal party appeared in a festival flurry at the foot of the gangplank: a profusion of lace hats and tender-colored gauzy frocks for the women, immaculate white linen and carnation buttonholes for the men. It was a Mexican wedding party with several North American girls among the bridesmaids. The bride and groom were young and beautiful, though at that moment they were worn fine and thin and their faces were exhausted with their long ordeal, which even yet was not quite ended. The bridegroom’s mother clung to her son, weeping softly and deeply, kissing his cheek and murmuring like a mourning dove, “O joy of my life, little son of my heart, can it be true I have lost you?”

  While his father supported her on his arm, she embraced her son, the bridegroom kissed her, patted her heavily rouged and powdered cheeks and whispered dutifully, “No, no, dear sweet little Mama, we shall be back in three months.” The bridegroom’s mother shrank at this, moaned as if her child had struck her a mortal blow, and sobbing fell back into the arms of her husband.

  The bride, in her bridelike traveling dress, surrounded by her maids, stood between her parents, each of them holding her by a hand, and their three faces were calm, grave, and much alike. They waited with patience and a touch of severity as if for some tiresome but indispensable ceremony to end; at last the bridesmaids, recalled to a sense of duty, rather shyly produced each a little fancy sort of basket of rice, and began to scatter it about, fixed smiles on their lips only, eyes nervous and watchful, feeling as they did that the moment for merriment in this affair seemed rather to have passed. At last the bride and groom walked swiftly up the gangplank; almost at once it began to rise, and the families and friends below formed a close group, waving. The bride and groom turned and waved once, a trifle wildly, to their tormentors, then holding hands, almost running, they went straight through the ship to the farther deck. They arrived at the rail as if it were a provided refuge, and stood leaning together, looking towards the sea.

  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.