“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Just something. Anything. As long as it isn’t ugly. I can’t … André! Guillermo is back. He came by tonight asking for you. I told him I didn’t know where you were.”
André said nothing.
“The police are looking for him. I don’t want you doing any drawings for him or giving him money. It’s not as if you were a communist.”
“Maldito! How could you tell him you didn’t know where I was?”
Guillermo was a small, agile man. The last time they had met, it was months now, had been in Cosmi’s Bar. Guillermo no longer wrote lovely sonnets celebrating love. “This is not the time, camarada. Now we must hate. It must be our religion.”
“Please don’t see him.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s coming up to my room tomorrow. André, please!”
André ran his hand through his hair and began to scratch nervously. He looked at her, his eyes slow and deepening, and she despised him for it. It was all right when he was angry or drunk, but when he turned inwards and faraway she lost all patience – it was unfair, unkind, for if they were lovers they should share everything.
“Do you still want to do something silly?” he asked tenderly.
She didn’t answer.
“We could yank Chaim out of bed and make him come swimming with us?”
“Don’t make concessions for me, André! I know what you are thinking!” Now all her gestures were quick, and she spit out her words. “You are thinking she is a woman and she doesn’t know about these things. But you are children! Ho, you and Guillermo are going to change things! Yes, you are revolutionaries. Sure, ‘we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.’ So my father – also a fine revolutionary – is dead. My brother is dead. My uncles are dead. And for wh …”
“Toni, I …”
“No, let me finish! You and Guillermo have discovered that there is poverty and injustice, you … pooh! There has always been poverty. You can do nothing, do you understand? Nothing! Why? What is the use of talking? Kill, and kill, and kill. Me, I would rather live on my knees. Now, I have said it!”
She was breathing quickly and that made her breasts prominent. He remembered them naked, lovely, soft like no other thing soft, and he wanted very much to lay his head on her breasts now, perhaps dragging on a cigarette, but slowly, easily, and she would stroke his hair, and she would say: “It is all right. It is all right.”
“I can think of nothing to say except that he is my friend.”
“That is no answer!”
“You are angry with me.”
“That also is no answer.”
I want only the clean things, she thought. I have had enough of the rest. “Love me, André,” she said.
He grinned, but impatiently.
“Love,” he thought. That is one of the words that is no longer any good. Like courage, soul, beautiful, honour, and so many others. Words that have become almost obscene because of the whoring of the hack writers.
She dropped her hand on his knee. Even his body was tight, she could feel such things. Already he is thinking about him, she thought. About what they will talk about. “All he had to do,” she said, “was to go down on his knees and cry, ‘Viva Franco!’ It was such a little thing! But he said no, never. The man who shot him was from Florence and he had studied for the priesthood.”
“They would have shot him anyway, Toni.”
“Perhaps.”
“Drink your cognac.”
“In the summer they would take us out in the boats and we would jump overboard and swim. The water was very cool, and there was always the taste of salt in our mouths. The priests said it was evil because we all swam and played together and we were often naked. My father laughed at the priests, he said they had filthy minds. At night there was always dancing on the quays, especially when there was a good catch. That night there was only the noise of the shooting.” Suddenly Toni laughed a quickly joyful laugh and her eyes were glad. “Are we going to make love tonight, guapo?”
“You want to come to Canada with me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why, yes?”
“Because it is good in Canada and there is lots of money, and girls like myself don’t have to work in cabarets.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“And what would we do in Canada?”
“You would paint great pictures. We would have a big family, and at night we would go for a drive in your father’s car.”
His shoulders slumped. “How do you know my father has a car?”
“Hasn’t he?”
“Yes. But he wouldn’t lend it to us. He isn’t sure that I’m his son. He thinks I might be the son of a guy named Serge.”
“Serge? Tell me about Serge.”
“Not now.”
“Yes. Now!”
André lit a cigarette. The street was empty. He blew a big puff of smoke into the damp night air and smiled tenderly at Toni. “Crazy, lovely Toni,” he said softly.
“Ahora!”
“Serge was one of my mother’s lovers. He was a kind of poet, I guess. They edited a magazine together. She was madly in love with him. Serge, on the other hand, adored me and my mother’s Cadillac. I was young. I understood nothing about those things. Finally, mama gave him up for a painter.
“Although poor Serge suspected that he was altogether incapable, my parents believed that I was his son. My father because from the very beginning I was ‘unbalanced’ and rebellious and ‘gifted,’ my mother because it all would have been so utterly romantic. But none of it is true.”
“You are very ugly when you tell me these things.”
An old, stooping man made his way down the street picking up cigarette butts from the gutter. He found a piece of bread and bit into it.
Toni pinched the inside of his thigh. “Would you like me to have babies for you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Big, strong, Spanish babies.”
“No.”
“Hijo de puta! Why, no?”
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Okay, honey,” she said in English, pretending that she was chewing gum.
Coward, he thought.
They walked along slowly.
“Recite a poem for me, guapo.”
“I can only recite English poems, favorita.”
“I don’t care about the meaning. I like the sounds of the words. English words are so hard. You always look so serious when you recite. You make me laugh.”
“So I make you laugh, eh?”
“Si señor.”
They were on the Calle de Colón, not far from the gardens.
“Where are we going?”
“To the river.”
Always, he wanted to go down the river. Why did it fascinate him so? But she made no objection. She pushed him into a doorway and held him and kissed his lips and throat. She tickled his ribs playfully. Then she kissed him again, nipping at his ear. “You are not going to think about Guillermo. You are not going to be sad. If you are sad I’ll kick you where it hurts.”
He embraced her warmly.
They passed several fallas on their way down to the river, each one posturing like a predatory ogre in the darkness. The light of the lamp posts pasted a glistening sheen on the backs of the wooden structures, suggesting a sort of supernatural sweat. As far as he was concerned their construction hadn’t sprung from the spontaneous mischief of a fiesta-minded city but instead was part of the master plan of some diabolical spirit. As if they were not going to be burned, but had to be burned.
“Miguel was in tonight,” she said. “He is such a sweet boy, muy simpático. His parents are very strict, you know. It was his first time in a cabaret. He told me that he had dreamt about me and in his dream he owed me two hundred pesetas. All the time he was talking he was blushing like a girl. I told him he had dreamt about Carmen, and that she was very
pretty and would be overjoyed to get her two hundred pesetas. He understood. I introduced him to Carmen.”
She glanced at him coquettishly, anticipating an amusing remark. His face showed nothing.
I will not tell him now, she thought. It is not a good time.
Suddenly André stopped short. “Somebody as lovely as you! How in God’s name can you be a whore, Toni?”
“Guapo is excited and saying cruel things.”
“What do you think of when you’re in bed with a strange man? Do you say your beads?”
“Stop! Don’t talk like that.”
“I once made love to a slut in Barcelona and she crossed herself before she got into bed with me.”
“André!”
He grabbed her. He kissed her longingly, holding her hard against him. “Don’t pay any attention, Toni. Not when I talk badly. I …”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. He felt her nails digging into him. “I’m not a whore. I don’t sleep with strange men. I only dance with them. You know that. It’s the only job I can …”
“Please, darling. Don’t. I must be crazy to say such things.”
He lit a cigarette and gave her a puff.
Before them loomed the landscape of the Rio Turia. A belly of yellow weeds and burnt grass, anæmic sands and stones, trickling mosquito-ridden streams. O Turia! O turbulent river! How you had once been proud! Overflowing mighty banks, heaving chaos and destruction on the city. Drowsy workers had eaten of their noonday bread whilst dangling their legs over your banks. Children had swum, sometimes drowning, in your powerful currents. And the swollen barges, heaped up with oranges and figs and grapes, rolling down your pitching waters. Roman soldiers had stopped here to wet their heads, the voice of Seneca boomed across your banks, the Cid of whom all Spain sings knelt here to pray, and James the Conqueror, on his way to liberate the city, paused on this spot to water his majestic charger. Here the Knight of the Sad Countenance had sworn his fidelity to the incomparable Dulcinea while weary Sancho dreamed of his governorship under an olive tree. More recently still, German shells belching news of the modern world into the city, had dropped, momentarily sizzling, in your waters.… How many suicides? What did it matter whether they were Falangists or Reds when their young bodies toppled into currents swelling with the blood of revolution?
And now, opulent Turia, where is your glory?
Starving workers, bellies bloated big with grief, farm splotches of your desiccated bed. Dead, debauched giant! Rendezvous for pauper lovers! Unemployed newlyweds beget dead children in the niches and apertures at the bottom of your concrete sidings, lost men cook dead rats over twig fires, talk of life and death and revolution, finally crawling into the damp dark caves to huddle against the cold of night.… Are these the men who write Arriba España! Siempre Franco! in a neat unhurried script on the concrete walls? Are the dogs who paint the slogans the ones who careen crazily over towards the bridge when a butt is tossed out of the window of a speeding car?
Walking down the concrete steps hand in hand they were both immediately aware of the stink of stale human excrement and damp urine. They held their breath until they had walked out on the river bed.
Toni knelt down, peering into a tiny stream of stagnant water that weaved its way snakily in and out of a sandbank. The pool swarmed with mosquitos and squeaking frogs. It exhilarated her somehow, this tiny stream. She looked up. He seemed distant.
“Tell me something about America,” she said.
It was no longer dark. The sky was grey. Pulpy clouds lifted themselves up by a faint violet glow that clung to their bottoms. He stood rigidly upright, pretending he was of the big sky, no longer of the earth.
I have a right to forget, he thought. I love her. We are young. The world owes the young certain rights.
“The sky isn’t like this in America,” he said. “It is like a prison roof painted blue. Here, it’s different. Unfinished, like a Goya. There’s always something more important than anything in it. But it’s missing.”
“Do you think your mother would like me?”
“She never likes anyone I like. Especially a woman.”
Slowly the violet hue was swallowing up the clouds. The big eastern sky was full of burning orange and pink lights. Climbing, slowly climbing higher. The pallid disc of a white moon was fading away, dissolving into a copper mist dimly.
She had captured a frog. Clutching it in her tiny fists she pushed it under his nose. Suddenly the frog, its quick legs outspread, leaped out of her hand and bounded across the air into the stream, making a plop as it hit the water.
She turned to him. “Oh, I’m so happy, darling. How beautiful to be in the country!” Quickly she slapped him on the tail of his jacket and ran off. “Catch me, André. Come on!”
Sadly he watched her run off, over the muddy bed and across the splotches of dry grass. Suddenly he was afraid.
He noticed that a tall man was standing on the bridge and watching them. It was the same man who had been following him for the last week or so. When André looked up the man turned away.
He hurried off after her. “Toni! Toni!”
A hundred yards off she had fallen down giggling, rolling over on a patch of grass. He tumbled down beside her and grasped her firmly in his arms. “Toni, I love you.”
He had never said it before. Not even to Ida. Now he felt ashamed and silly. It was such a cliché! Toni, I love you.
She kissed him passionately, crushing herself against him.
And she felt fear because she loved him with a hopeless beautiful love, knowing, always knowing, that he could not love, that something ugly and bitter within him would always stifle any love he felt for her.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You are going to die.”
“What? What, my darling?”
She kissed him again.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, but …”
She embraced him tightly, urgently, pulling his head down to her lips. “Nothing, my darling. Nothing.”
BOOK TWO
SUNDAY
Men frequently think that the evils in the world are more numerous than the good things; many sayings and songs of nations dwell on this idea. They say that a good thing is found only exceptionally, whilst evil things are numerous and lasting. Not only common people make this mistake, but many who believe they are wise. Al-Razi wrote a well-known book On Metaphysics (or Theology). Among other mad and foolish things, it contains also the idea, discovered by him, that there exists more evil than good. For if the happiness of man and his pleasure in the times of prosperity be compared with the mishaps that befall him – such as grief, acute pain, defects, paralysis of the limbs, fears, anxieties, and troubles – it would seem as if the existence of man is a punishment and a great evil for him.
MOSES MAIMONIDES
I
MADAME! CONSIDER for a moment the world at large. Coming up sun filling in the empty sky. A just so-so morning (really). Greenwich reports the stars of last night succumbed in an ordinary way. Ditto the moon. It will be, by all reports, an ordinary day. As per usual people sleep. (Some snoring, some not.) In Pittsburgh, U.S.A., Mr. Peter Kalowski, who in twenty-seven years of service with Ajax Dairies, Inc., has never been late for work, creeps out of bed for his breakfast at three a.m. In the kitchen he notices that Mrs. Kalowski has forgotten to prepare his sandwiches. He takes the carving knife down from the wall. He re-enters the bedroom and stabs fat Mrs. Kalowski to death. (Tomorrow in court he will plead temporary sanity and get off with 199 years to life.) In Dwing, Herts, the outraged (Minister) George Barrin, writes (to be mailed to The Daily Express at nine a.m.):
Walter Jacks deserves suspension for putting a Sunday dinner before worship of God (Daily Express, April 8) and encouraging others to do the same.
There is no need to miss one’s dinner. For years I have had the pleasure of my wife’s company in the House of God on Sunday morning and still had a h
ot, well-cooked dinner at 12:30.
Foresight and a regulated cooker helps a lot.
Regardless of the revolution and the absence of American recognition Mr. Ching-Tsu lies on the floor of his straw hut in Ping-Ling rattling with death in a scientifically approved manner. Mrs. Ching-Tsu, a rice-bowl Christian, kneels on the straw, praying to an unlistening crucifix of a slant-eyed Christ hanging from the wall. (Nearby, Reilly, the missionary, sleeps. A chink, he thinks, is something to convert, like the red injuns was.) In New York, Local 231 of the Toy Makers Union is working overtime to meet the big demand for atomic hats ($3.95 per doz/whsl) for the over-privileged kiddies of American damnocracy. (You, Bershenko of Kiev, that sore in the back of your throat wasn’t concocted on Wall St. It’s cancer, comrade.)
It is now 11:30 a.m., Sunday, April 18, 1951.
Valencia, Spain.
On the corner of the Calle San Fernando a man is playing a guitar and singing. His fingers are spilling, splashing, over the strings.
Manolete, Manolete,
El mejor matador de España.
But Roger Kraus – favouring his left leg which was broken in two places in the wrestling matches in Berlin and carrying two ounces of lead slug that hit him with an unforgettable impact at Cuatro Caminos in November, 1937 – hears (staring ahead of him and into nothing), and does not hear, hears and remembers other songs. Remembers:
Die Fahne hoch,
Die Reihen fest geschlossen,
S.A. marschiert
Mit ruhig festem Schritt.
Kameraden, die Rot Front und Reaktion erschossen,
Marschiern im Geist In unsern Reihen mit.
remembers,
Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,
Über alles in der Welt,
Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze
Brüderlich zusammenhält.
and remembers Alfred’s song,
Die Heimat ist weit
Doch wir sind bereit
Wir kämpfen und siegen für dich
Freiheit!
For he, Roger Kraus, had been present with 5,599 others in the Zirkus Krone, Munich, on that historic and grey and rainfilled night of February 8, 1921, when after the ineffectual Drexler had spoken, the angry man in the brown trenchcoat gesticulating wildly, his voice hysterical, his grammar bad, had told 5,600 souls the truth about the “International Jewish Stock Exchange Parties” and about “Future or Ruin.” So Roger Kraus – failure as a student, dreamer of yearning dreams and wanting badly to wanton, born October 8, 1899, into a family of minor officials, veteran, inarticulate, in love with his sister who despised him for his stupidity and was having an affair with a communist, discharged from three jobs, the last (in a Jew bank) because he had startled Fräulein Freida, poor, hungry, ridiculed all through gymnasium by rimless-glasses Jew intellectuals, Aryan, confused, sometimes following girls home at night – found (February 3, 1921, Munich) that he too had a place and a time and a card to show that he was a member.
The Acrobats Page 5