Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  “The town!” said Helen. “But what about the train?”

  The grandmother looked like a Sibyl as she sat in her corner, turning her small face up, perfectly certain, matter-of-fact. “This train,” she said, raising her hand, palm forward, the wrinkled, small palm waving from side to side, “this train isn’t going to move, anymore.”

  “JUST A MINUTE,” said Helen. “I’ll bring something back.”

  She wanted to be in the town. The crowd on the station platform was banked thick, as if it were fair-day. She saw the pregnant blonde walking in the other direction now, with a young man whose head appeared over the rest, rough black. The woman would look sidelong at the train, hardly noticing it, as if it were some public building, and continue with her peculiar sailing gait. The little boys were at the coach-windows again, appealing and beggar-faced, calling “¡Cigarrillos! ¡Cigarrillos!”

  The grandmother was quiet; she knew these towns. “It’s not necessary,” she told the girl again. But Helen was already outside, behind the thick line of passengers, whose legs and rears filled the corridors like the hindquarters of domestic animals caged at a feeding-trough. They were hanging from the windows of the train, talking to the people on the near platform. On this side, the crowd was not so heavy, but there were many more guns: armed men stood in groups, smoking. The black sashes, the dark furious hair low over their foreheads, their rope sandals, their controlled silences, contrasting with the train’s conversation and acrobatics and the town’s promenading, all contributed to one effect. They took on the keepings of a secret romantic soldiery, they seemed to her, struck with the strangeness, to conceal a clue that she must have.

  The regular soldiers, in their olive and yellow, had gone. The town and the train faced each other alone.

  Once on the platform, in the broad heat, the focus changed: The men with guns were about their business, they were townspeople, they hung around, waiting beneath the row of yellow flowering trees, watching the train. From here, it was the train that was out of place, lying dead in the station. Tourists were leaning from all the windows, even up in first class.

  The engine, near the front of the station, was fuming, a gentle ineffectual line of steam ascending.

  Hurrying through the crowd, she was very afraid of being left. There were no words. How could she reach any of them without language? She turned to one of the guards, and said, in French, hesitantly, “if the train . . . leaves, will you . . . ?” She saw he did not understand, and pointed, signaling the train, town, herself, the train, the motion that would take it through the station.

  The guard laughed, and shook his hand once toward the train, disgusted. “You can go ahead,” he told her.

  Helen crossed the little concrete square behind the restrooms. The station gate was snapped open, facing a short wide street that led to the main roadway. On one side, diagonally, a row of houses presented their balconies and gardens to the station. On the other, more impressive ornate buildings confronted the platform, separated by grillwork or a strip of grass. At the end of this short street, the little iron tables of the café covered the sidewalk. They were crowded. Colors snapped in the hot air, filling in the street corner. She walked up, entered the bright crowd, hearing the foreign calls after her, the disjunctive music of the radio, the receding station noises. The street ended immediately. This was the Calle Mayor, crowded in both directions.

  Sunday noon!

  The whole town was out.

  There was not a single empty table, you had to thread your way between, escape the tangle of families, the childrens’ games. But Helen could see through the low windows; the inside of the café was quite empty. She split the fringe of long beadstrings that curtained the door.

  The café was big and shadowy. An old container, painted a shiny synthetic orange, stood on the counter, unused. But deep in the room, the bar itself took shape, ghostly-white. The proprietor was washing glasses; they flashed quickly. He looked up, his high-domed head stood sharply out; dark glasses, long wine bottles filled the shelves behind him.

  Helen saw the piled peaches, the flush of fruit color on the bar. The proprietor asked a question in Catalan, the soft burring sounds and the mixture of x’s confusing her immediately, throwing her off, by a trick of wrenched concentration fixing her whole attention on the opening words so that she was deafened to the rest. She lost every bit of language. God, she thought! Why should I care about speech this much? The blood pushed up behind her eyes, in her poverty; and then she was over it. She laughed with the man, pointed at the peaches, counted twelve on her fingers.

  The proprietor jerked his head back at the train. “Extranjeros,” he commented.

  A hoot, from the shadow, turned them both, shaken. It was the radio: a man, up a ladder at the side doorway, was rigging up an extra loudspeaker. It hooted again. He turned it down until there was nothing but an even, boiling sound, came down the ladder, winding wire in his hand, and crossed the bar.

  The proprietor gave Helen her peaches and change in the new-feeling Spanish coin, and gave the man his glass of wine. As she turned the beadstring aside at the door, she saw him bent over the radio behind the bar.

  ON THE STREET, they were standing at their tables.

  One man lifted his little soft-colored child up to the chair so that he could see.

  An open truck stood in the middle of the street. The Ford signature on its hood sprang out, plain as a movie-title.

  There were nine boys standing in the truck. None of them could be over nineteen. One had a heavy double-barreled hunting piece, five of them carried unmatched rifles, and the rest held their revolvers ready, self-consciously. No two of the weapons were alike.

  Helen stood in the doorway, holding the peaches loose in her arms, still feeling as if her tongue were cut out. No speech, no words to reach any of this. She looked at the truck.

  The Hungarians crushed in toward the truck. Toni admired the truck; his fist went up automatically, clenched to greet the boys.

  They turned to him, the cry in the throat of the very young one, enraged.

  One raked his hand down the air, clawing.

  The stocky boy raised his double-barreled gun, pointing it at Toni.

  He did not recoil, there were too many at his back; he stared up at their faces.

  “Aren’t you Communists?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Communists!” the youngest cried, and his voice broke.

  “We’re not—”

  The stocky one broke in. “We are Anarchists.” He was pompous, with a certain defiance.

  “We’re going to fight in Barcelona”

  “To fight!” said Toni. “What for? What do you want, if you’re Anarchists?”

  “Want?” the little one echoed, again.

  The others turned. The driver leaned far out from his cab.

  “We want no Fascists,” he said.

  “No Fascists,” they agreed, “no money, no law, no generals.”

  “All right,” said Toni, “no Fascists, that’s excellent. But the rest—”

  The driver opened his mouth.

  “Never mind,” he said, against his will, clamping his jaw. “We have a United Front.”

  Toni’s voice came up. The Hungarians were trying to pull him away.

  The radio turned on, savage loud, in the café. Shaking the entire street, the music walked through, mastering all motion, Beethoven, the Fifth coming tremendous on the scene.

  An old woman rushed frighteningly through the people attached to the back of the truck. From the wide sprung mouth, the cheeks’ distortion, it was seen that she was screaming. The music would not permit her shriek.

  She laid hold of one of the boys, dragging at his leg, stretching her cheeks again in that blotted-out cry. His face changed; his lips closed twice, mumbling, under the music, as he recognized his mother. No sound came, as if a wind were against them.

  The great music continued.

  The driver bent quietly over his wheel, reached d
own, and the truck started to roll, spreading the crowd back on itself.

  Dragging, the old woman stumbled a few steps with it, as the boy watched her holding his leg, still astonished, still motionless, unable to be heard.

  The truck picked up speed as it shifted gear; she was forced to let go; it moved toward Barcelona, out of the grasp of the crowd.

  Only the symphony occupied the air.

  Screaming above it, hooting, Helen heard—perhaps! the train whistle! She looked at the mother, to see if it might instead indeed be she; but the cheeks had gone loose, the mouth was shut.

  Helen ran back to the train, her arms heavy with the peaches, the strong music overriding everything but her fear that it had gone. There was no train whistle.

  The train had not moved.

  She climbed into the car.

  THE FAMILY WAS still sitting there, eating the sausage. Helen spilled her armful of peaches into the grandmother’s lap. “A truck has just gone off;” she was out of breath, and, feeling the childishness of language now, the complete childishness, in an undefined situation, waited for them to speak.

  The grandmother was master. “We will finish our meal, and then go into the town,” she stated. She wiped a peach off carefully, the bloom rubbing off, leaving the fruit smooth golden against her black skirt, and gave it to her grandson. He took it, nodding to Helen. His skin was only a shade of pink different, more even. Helen was very moved by the graceful turn of his shoulder, his head, refined and delicate, held precisely on the slim clear-oil neck.

  “Your son is very fine-looking,” she admired.

  The man was cutting meat for her. “Is his mother blonde?” she asked. The two heads were dark, of another race. The man nodded.

  “Yes, very blonde.”

  “How old is the boy? Twelve?”

  Toni was standing at the compartment, a tin cup in his hand, looking at the boy with his purpled, bitter stare. “Give him seven more years, then, and he’ll be old enough to be an Anarchist, and go off and fight.”

  The father looked up at him. “He could be worse,” he answered, the distinction and loyalty coming out in his words.

  A boy carrying a large wicker basket of bread came down the train, calling his sales.

  “Go after him, go,” said the father pushing his son with a little gruff gesture, poking him between the delicate shoulder-blades, sending him after bread. The son turned down the aisle without a word.

  “Are they going to war?” asked the old grandmother. She did not look at Toni, but offered almonds from a square of paper outstretched. “I cannot hear any guns,” she said. “Is there fighting near here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know; nobody says anything definite. Come out, Helen, the team sent the printer into town to find out how things were, and he’s going to report to all of us.”

  Bread came, the boy holding the long slender loaf; and they sat eating, passing the wine-cup between the women, passing the bottle of strong bitter wine. It rinsed away the heat and irritation of the train and stop and uncertainty.

  They finished. Looked at each other for confirmation.

  “Now shall we go?” Helen turned to Toni. “We must find out something.”

  The father put his hand on hers. “Come back with news,” he said. “Maybe the train will continue, after all.”

  Helen went down the steep steps. The Hungarian team was on the platforms, still waiting for the printer. He could be seen in the distance, running down the street along the platform. As they watched him come, the manager crossed to Helen. “You should find the other Americans,” he advised. “There’s a lawyer, with glasses, who’s looking for you. I told him you were on the train.”

  The printer was close now. He threw his arm up before him like an exhausted marathon hero. He brought news. Helen thought, what a child I am now! And then, as his hand went up, this is it, this the clue!

  The printer could not wait to reach them. He called out, in a hoarse, important voice:

  “General Strike!”70

  CHAPTER THREE

  At the frontier getting down, at railhead drinking hot tea waiting for pack-mules, at the box with three levers watching the swallows . . . The fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun.

  —W.H. Auden71

  GENERAL STRIKE.

  The words at the end of a poem, the slogan shouted, the headline for gray industrial scenes, waterfront blue-gray, the black even in the air over mines, the dark sidewalks before factories, covered with lines of gray parading people. Words printed, painted out, broadcast in handbills. Not like this.

  She looked about the platform.

  There, the young pregnant blonde turned, and began her slow walk toward the head of the train, weighted, undisturbed; the Hungarians began to talk at top speed in their own language, a very beautiful one with heavy eyebrows, the grasping printer, the manager, Toni staring, and the anonymous rest; the boys called out from the yellow trees; the pavement was fairground, distinguished and made serious only by the guards near each door of the train. The near guard came closer to the team, and nodded yes in answer to their question.

  “Huelga General,” he substantiated.

  And the scene was intensely foreign, it was a new world indeed, with these words true.

  The train, the frontier.

  Now the train was held, as surely as if the tracks before and behind had been blown up, as one rumor said; as surely as if the engineer had refused ever to move again, as Peapack must be thinking; or as if the searching party had found, not photographs, but spy incriminations; more surely.

  The anonymous passengers!

  “What will you do?” Helen asked Toni.

  “The team must decide,” he told her. The printer was talking to the manager, repeating the whole story of what the mayor had told him, had told the American who had been outraged, it seemed, at the mention of the words.

  What American?

  “Not the lawyer,” the manager said. “Better find him. He speaks seven languages, too.”

  “I’ll tell the family,” Helen suggested to Toni, thinking of the grandmother.

  GENERAL STRIKE.

  They were already wrapping the rest of the sausage in the newspaper, pulling down the great wicker hamper again, preparing to move. The news had come through.

  “Where will you go?” she asked them.

  “We’ll find places in the town,” the father said. “Come with us, it won’t be good to sleep on the train.” He looked around the compartment, at the stiff wooden benches, the walls, the metal heat of sun on still wood.

  She thanked them. “But I’d better find the others,” she insisted, “the American woman is alone, too, and they tell me there are other Americans here.”

  “Yes,” said the grandmother. “You’ll have to find them. We’ll ask at the café about a place to sleep, and, if you want us, the café will know where we went. Here—” she plucked at her son’s elbow. He reached for the heavy black suitcase, and set it on the bench.

  “Better go up to first,” he advised, the slow unshaven smile channeling his cheeks. “There are cushions there, anyway.”

  They were ready to leave.

  The fair-haired boy took the package of food and slung it over his shoulder. He was still eating almonds, and his pointed teeth glittered. As he took his grandmother’s hand, he turned suddenly to Helen, with a volunteer look in the startling iodine eyes. “Goodbye,” he said rapidly, trying the word in English.

  SHE KICKED THE suitcase before her through the connection between the cars, kicking it against the feet of a stranger whose thick glasses seemed over-smooth and blazing on his heavily pitted face.

  He dodged to the side, escaping apologies.

  “Are you American?”

  “No,” he answered, still in French. “I am Swiss. There is a Swiss team on the train,72 but I’m not with it. Are you looking for the Americans who are going to the Olympics in Barcelona?”<
br />
  She was speaking eagerly, the words falling on each other. If only I were fluent, now, she thought, I need words now!

  “They’ve been looking for you, too,” the Swiss told her. “They heard there were two more Americans on the train.73 You must be the other woman . . .”

  “Do you know about the General Strike?”

  “Really?” the Swiss exclaimed, his look of surprise sunk deep in the pockmarked forehead. “Is that what it is?”

  He picked her suitcase up easily, and turned.

  “Come on through,” he said, “I’ll show you where they are. They’ll want to hear.”

  He led the way through the empty corridor of the first-class car. Voices came from one of the doors, half rolled back on its little groove. He swung it back all the way.

  “May I introduce the American lady?” he said, with mock-formality. “And the news: it’s General Strike!”

  “WE JUST HEARD,” the man answered, pronouncing in careful French, his mouth shaded by the brown mustache on the long, sensitive lip. He sat against one window, his head thrown back against the antimacassar, his hand stretched out over the clasped hands of the woman who was next to him. “Hello!” he said, in English, to Helen. “Nice day.” And grinned. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Yes,” the dark woman beside him agreed. “They’ve given us at least five different descriptions of you, and none of them fit. Her cheeks caught shadow, her curly hair turned over her forehead, the broad planes of her face missed being Negroid because of the sharp mouth.

  “I was in third,” Helen said, looking at the two other women who sat across from the couple.

  One was tall, and the red blouse she wore pulled, with its color, at the pointed collarbones, the greenish throat and face; the other shrank, rather sickly, beside her, with her head on one side, listening.

  “Wait a minute, I can’t hear,” interrupted the tall one nearest the window, “the radio’s started again.”