Steamers sailboats barges all kinds of craft and immense rafts of logs
A yellow vapor rises from the toowarm water of the river
It’s by hundreds now that the ’gators play round us
You can hear the dry snap of their jaws and can make out very well their small fierce eyes
The passengers pass the time shooting at them with rifles
When a particularly good shot manages to kill or mortally wound one of the beasts
Its fellows rush at it and tear it to pieces
Ferociously
With little cries rather like the wail of a newborn baby.
In Kodak there are poems about New York, Alaska, Florida, hunting wild turkey and duck in a country of birchtrees off in the direction of Winnipeg, a foggy night in Vancouver, a junk in a Pacific harbor unloading porcelain and swallowsnests, bambootips and ginger, the stars melting like sugar in the sky of some island passed to windward by Captain Cook, elephant-hunting in a jungle roaring with torrents of rain; and at the end a list of menus featuring iguana and green turtle, Red River salmon and shark’s fins, sucklingpig with fried bananas, crayfish in pimento, breadfruit, fried oysters and guavas, dated en voyage 1887–1923. 1887 must be the date of his birth.
Dix Neuf Poèmes Elastiques, Paris. After all, Paris, whether we like it or out, has been so far a center of unrest, of the building up and the tearing down of this century. From Paris has spread in every direction a certain esperanto of the arts that has “modern” for its trademark. Blaise Cendrars is an itinerant Parisian well versed in this as in many other dialects. He is a kind of medicineman trying to evoke the things that are our cruel and avenging gods. Turbines, triple-expansion engines, dynamite, high tension coils. Navigation, speed, flight, annihilation. No medicine has been found strong enough to cope with them; in cubist Paris they have invented some fetishes and gris-gris that many are finding useful. Here’s the confession of an enfant du siècle, itinerant Parisian.
So it is that every evening I cross Paris on foot
From the Batignolles to the Latin Quarter as I would cross the Andes
Under the flare of new stars larger and more frightening
The Southern Cross more prodigious every step one makes towards it emerging from the old world.
I am the man who has no past.—Only the stump of my arm hurts,—
I’ve rented a hotel room to be all alone with myself.
I have a brand new wicker basket that’s filling up with manuscript.
I have neither books nor pictures, not a scrap of æsthetic bricabrac
There’s an old newspaper on the table.
I work in a bare room behind a dusty mirror,
My feet bare on the red tiling, playing with some balloons and a little toy trumpet;
I’m working on THE END OF THE WORLD.
I started these notes on the little sunny balcony at Marrakesh with in front of me the tall cocoa-colored tower of the Koutoubia, banded with peacock color, surmounted by three gilded balls, each smaller than the other; and beyond, the snowy ranges of the high Atlas; I’m finishing it in Mogador in a shutin street of houses white as clabber where footsteps resound loud above the continual distant pound of the surf. It’s the time of afternoon prayer and the voice of the muezzin flashes like brass from the sky announcing that there is no god but God and that Mahomet is the prophet of God; and I’m leaving at six in the morning and there’s nothing ahead but wheels and nothing behind but wheels. O Thos. Cook and Son, who facilitate travel with long ribbons of tickets held between covers by an elastic, what spells did you cast over the children of this century? The mischief in those names: Baghdad Bahn, Cape to Cairo, Trans-Siberian, Compagnie des Wagons Lits et des Grands Expresses Européens, Grand Trunk, Christ of the Andes; Panama Canal, mechanical toy that Messrs. Roosevelt and Goethals managed to make work when everyone else had failed, a lot of trouble for the inhabitants of the two Americas you have damned up within your giant locks. The flags, the dollars and Cook’s tours marching round the world till they meet themselves coming back. Here in Morocco you can see them hour by hour mining the minaret where the muezzin chants five times a day his superb defiance of the multiple universe.
If there weren’t so many gods, tin gods, steel gods, gods of uranium and manganese, living gods—here’s Mrs. Besant rigging a new Jesus in Bombay, carefully educated at Oxford for the rôle—red gods of famine and revolution, old gods laid up in libraries, plaster divinities colored to imitate coral at Miami, spouting oilgods at Tulsa, Okla., we too might be able to sit on our prayercarpets in the white unchangeable sunshine of Islam which means resignation. The sun of our generation has broken out in pimples, its shattered light flickers in streaks of uneasy color. Take the train, they’re selling happiness in acre lots in Florida. So we must run across the continents always deafened by the grind of wheels, by the roar of airplane motors, wallow in all the seas with the smell of hot oil in our nostrils and the throb of the engines in our blood. Out of the Babel of city piled on city, continent on continent, the world squeezed small and pulled out long, bouncing like a new rubber ball, we get what? Certainly not peace. That is why in this age of giant machines and scuttle-headed men it is a good thing to have a little music. We need sons of Homer going about the world beating into some sort of human rhythm the shrieking hullabaloo, making us less afraid.
XIII. KIF
Gare St. Lazare. A man is sitting by the window of a restaurant eating alphabet soup. Outside through the twilight sifting pink sand over the grey-pilastered station, green omnibuses blunder, taxis hysterically honk, girls and young men with white twilight faces come up out of the Metro; there is a redfaced woman selling roses, a man with a square black beard unfolds Paris-Soir. From seaweed-garnished counters spread with seafood: oysters, scallops, seaurchins, mussels, clams, lobsters, snails, shrimps, prawns comes a surging tidal smell of the horizon. The man by the window of the restaurant eating alphabet soup against his will stirs the letters slowly with his spoon. Seven letters have come to the surface—GO SOUTH. Resolutely he eats them. Stirs with his spoon again; two letters left—G.O.
What was the story of the Irishman with the false teeth who was a spy for the British Intelligence who was eating alphabet soup in the little restaurant at the back of the mosque of Nouri Osmanieh in Stamboul? He was shot by a woman supposed to be a Russian and they said he had read his doom in the alphabet soup. Why are there always so many X’s in alphabet soup?
Among the crowds going in and out of the station stalk long resounding words of twilight. The city of gleaming asphalt is flat and tiny, desert under the last scaring expansion of the summer day.
The other station is full of light, a refuge from the empty dusk. The train is packed with people and valises. In the nick of time I slip into the eighth seat in a third-class compartment. There is not room in the compartment for sixteen legs of assorted sexes, for sixteen perspiring arms. In the aisle you can stand up and smoke and see the suburbs of Paris, devastated and smouldering with dusk, at last decently buried by the advancing night. The train rakes up a picturebook landscape with inquisitive fingers of light as it rattles along wailing like a banshee. The trucks rumbling over the rails sing a jiggly song: Mort aux vaches aux vaches aux vaches. Mort aux VACHES.
The train is racing neck to neck with another train, gaining; windows, faces, eyes blur and merge into memories gulped by the hollow roaring night, fade into other trains; the Congressional gnawing into the feverish Maryland springtime, slamming the picket doors of shanty yards full of the funeral swaying of lilacs; the Black Diamond; the nameless train from nowhere into nowhere, the bobbing tassels of the blueshaded lamp, the looking out through eyes stingingly weighed down with sleep at the red yellow vanishing flowers with twisting petals, dark bottle-shaped bulks and unexplained word, blastfurnaces; the train folding itself up into the ferry to cross the bright mica of the Gut of Canso; the speeding express of the Trans-Siberian speeding to Pekin that never left its shed. Too many trains, too many wheel
s clattering over crossings, strange names spelled out in the night, goodbys at ticket windows, last meals gulped hastily at lunchcounters, hands clasped over suitcases; the head of the girl at the crossing you see on the body of a trackwalker down the line, hungry eyes looking through grimed panes, smiling lips shattered into void at the next station, questioning eyes of brownarmed gangs resting on their picks.
I have slipped back into my place between the highbusted lady in serge who sleeps with a handkerchief over her face and the starched Annamite who sits bolt upright. Opposite, a newly married couple strangled by their new clothes are stickily asleep; her head leans against a pillow in the corner, her mouth is open; his red winedrinker’s face is burrowed into her shoulder. The windows are closed. You could dent the air with your finger.
Waking up with the sun in my eyes I sit watching the long blue shadows of black cypresses. At a spick-and-span creamcolored station the air smells of roses and garlic and dust: le Midi.
At Beni Ounif the air was sheer white fire. It was scaring to stumble off the beer-sticky diningcar into such hugeness. A black boy in a red fez carried my bag to Madame Mimosa’s. On a bed in a shuttered room I stretched out. The train was leaving the station, hooted, puffed, rumbled away into the rocky desert. From very far away the lessening sound of wheels over rails, then silence. Silence becoming dense with sleep.
The sun had set. The sky had hardened into flaming zones, topaz, emerald, amethyst. Outside my door leaning against a pillar of the porch still warm from the sun, looking out into the vast desert square hemmed by low buildings with crumbling ochre-pink porches. In front of the crenelated station three toy freightcars. Nobody in sight, not even a dog. Size expands and contracts with the changing flare of the sky. Striding out of the tiny square, down the infinitesimal street, I trip over a purple mountain. I put out my hand to touch the white wall of a house; it is a mile away across the railroad tracks. The spiky cluster-headed grass is palmtrees striding in ranks through a gash in crimson rock. Beyond the houses the trodden stone falls away into an immeasurable canyon that turns out to be a sandy runnel made by irrigation water. Wondering whether I was still asleep I stumbled down a rocky path admiring the great river valley; I stepped in it. It was a little stream broad as my foot seeping through a crack in the mudwall of a dategarden. Meanwhile night was fast screwing down a glistening lid on a dimensionless chaos. A cool wind blew. Towards the town a few campfires were twinkling. A row of twitching mounds were camels asleep; there were muffled figures round the campfires. In doorways there were lamps, shadows about them. In a bare white room at a corner three Algerian soldiers were drinking against a green bar. They told me Madame Mimosa’s was on the next corner. There walking through a small conglomerate store you came into an empty diningroom lit by a hanging lamp tightly shuttered to keep the light from trickling out into the night.
After a supper of turkey and desert truffles and white wine from Philippeville to stride out of doors again into the street without footsteps. The low flatroofed houses are obliterated under the stars. Silence is stretched taut across the night. I walk gigantic above the flattened houses, suddenly shrink with a drop like an express elevator from under the soaring stars, tiny manikin tottering on infinitesimal pins, to the tiny throbbing of a heart, frail squirts of blood through a tangle of infinitesimally tiny pipes. On the taut night comes a dribbling of watery notes from a reed, the softest drumming of two tired hands. The man who ate alphabet soup against his will is forgotten. The Irishman with false teeth is forgotten. The cool bright notes of the reed ripple out of everywhere; the drumbeat rising, deepening, is modelling breathless stately landscapes out of darkness. The eastbound southbound American who ate alphabet soup against his will takes refuge in his room, beside the wide creaky bed, in the protection of the smoky lamp, out of the path of these moving dunes of sound. This is the solitude and the voices crying in the wilderness. He gets undressed, cleans his teeth, sorts his clothes, works out a few lines of Lucretius, pretends he’s in Buffalo, Savannah, Noisy le Sec, Canarsie. The trickle of the flute has parched away into the hurrying driven dunes of the drumbeat. St. Anthony alone in the wilderness of dark flesh, the intricately throbbing wilderness.
But the Irishman with the false teeth wasn’t killed in Stamboul. He didn’t dare go to a hospital, so the Russian woman and her husband took care of him in a shed in an old sheep corral in the outskirts of Top Hanep. They all three made jumpingjacks and the girl whose name was Olga sold them in the evening in front of the Tokatlian. She sold more than jumpingjacks, and all night the husband who had been an officer in the Russian navy without ever going to sea sat polishing his high boots and groaning. The Irishman groaned on account of the pain in his shoulder and for the loss of his false teeth. They talked in French the rest of the time, lying in abandoned army stretchers they used for beds. The Irishman, whose name was Jefferson Higgins, was a Gaelic pantheist. In a broken-down creamery in County Cork, he had had long talks with the Little People in his youth. The Russian officer believed in chastity, in macerating the flesh with alcohol to burn the devil out of it. In spite of that he never drank. Olga believed in hunger, fear, and the Virgin Mary. She hated men except those she loved. Through the long August days they lay in their stretchers talking of these things while the cicadas shrilled and kites wheeled in the cloudless sky. She loved them both and bought them food and washed their clothes and hung them to dry on the roof of the shed. She loved them both and petted them and called them her little grandchildren.
The naval officer blamed the misery of their days on what he called the helpless Russian soul; the Irishman blamed it on the British government; Olga blamed it on mankind. The two men, if it hadn’t been for their lice and for the difficulty of shaving, would have been completely happy.
One morning Olga came home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto. It was in three languages, Russian, Armenian and Georgian. It had been given her by a taxi-driver from Odessa who had been an ornithologist. He had taken her to his room and set her up to a meal, but in the morning he had had no money to give her, so he had given her a copy of the Communist Manifesto.
They translated it for Higgins the next day. The husband and wife cried and kissed each other. They must have a faith, they told each other. From now on they would work for Russia, for the communist Christ, savior of mankind. They must work to go home. Olga would have to give up the Virgin Mary, she was too much like the czarina. They would work as carpenters and make furniture for the new Russia. He would stop making jumpingjacks; she would never prostitute her body again. If necessary they would starve. Immediately he started building a kind of settee out of a few old boards, to get his hand in; she watched him with bright eyes.
Meanwhile Jefferson Higgins walked up and down gnawing his ragged sandy moustache with toothless gums. The wound wasn’t healing properly; he suspected he had syphilis. He wanted a new set of false teeth, cleanliness and fresh linen and Piccadilly and the military club. He was sick of the unceasing chatter of the two Russians; if he’d had a gun he would have shot them both dead.
When he had Olga alone he asked her with tears in his blue eyes to take him to a communist meeting. There must be communist agitators among all the Russians in Constant’. His life had entirely changed since that night when she had shot him in the shoulder. Thank God she hadn’t killed him, she broke in, kissing him on the forehead. He would never work for the British again. He would go home and fight for Irish freedom. He would hand over all the secret codes of the Intelligence Department to the Bolos. The naval officer came home and found them in each other’s arms. He wants to join the communist party, she explained. The Russian grabbed the Irishman and kissed him several times on the head.
Next day Jefferson Higgins with a cigar in his mouth and a panama hat on the back of his head sat in a small room in the Pera Palace typing a report with one hand. He was clean shaven, his moustache was neatly trimmed. He wore a neat grey flannel suit. His arm was strapped to his chest with clean band
ages. He had a mouthful of teeth; they didn’t fit very well but they were teeth. He was typing out the description of a Bolo plot to assassinate the High Commissioners, spread mutiny in the Allied armies and with the help of the discontented Turks seize Constantinople for the Soviet government. Occasionally he stopped typing and blew smoke rings. There was a soft triple knock on the door—Kitchener, said Jefferson Higgins in a low voice. A stout grizzled man in the uniform of a British colonel came in—It’s not Kitchener today, it’s Baden-Powell, growled the colonel—But I knew your voice. He picked up some typewritten sheets off the table and let the breath go out in a whistle between his teeth—It’ll be a jolly fine bag I’ll tell you.… We’ll clean the blighters up. The High Commissioner’ll feel pretty cheap when he sees this. You know where to leave it?—Yes, sir. Without another word the colonel laid on the table an American passport, handsomely outfitted with visas and made out for Fernald O’Rielly, travelling for a Chicago manufacturer of agricultural machinery, and a letter of credit on Lloyd’s Bank—Report December 15th in Shanghai according to orders 26b, was the last thing the colonel said as he left the room.
Jefferson Higgins typed and typed. When he had finished the cigar he rang the bell for a whisky and soda. The waiter was a Bulgarian and read English perfectly. While he was making change he glanced at the typewritten sheets. Certain names on it were familiar to him. When he got down to the bar again he sent out a compatriot of his who was washing glasses in back to deliver a message to a bearded man sitting beside the mechanical piano in a small bar in a side street in Galata playing backgammon with a onearmed Greek sailor. As a result when the British military police went round at midnight to make the arrests certain of the more weighty birds had flown.
But Jefferson Higgins was already far down on the Sea of Marmora on the steamboat of the Lloyd Triestino. It was a moonlight night. He felt molten and tender as he used to feel as a boy when he thought of the Little People and the high kings of Ireland. His Gaelic was a ladle skimming rich thoughts off the milkwhite sky. The girl with the white arms working the butterchurn. The way a white shoulder sometimes peeped out from her dress. He began humming “Kathleen Mavourneen,” shouted to the barman to bring him a gin fizz, went back to humming “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Marseilles ’ld be the first place he could get a decent meal. The Bristol. He must find a nice sympathetic girl. Getting too old to care for the wild ones. For a week he’d live like a sultan. Then he’d settle down, look up Makropoulos and make some investments. About time he started thinking of the future, of his old age. He sat watching the great dry curves of the hills shining in the moonlight. The boat was going through the Dardanelles.
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