And so was I: ugly and terrible and sad. “This damn wind. This damn wind.” We regained the road. We were sheltered for the moment, and he took out the bottle and we drank. It was fiery stuff. “Talk about my Milan brandy,” I said. “That damn wind. That damn wind. That damn wind.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
“You’ve got them.”
“I gave them to you.”
“You’re a goddamn liar. You didn’t.” He found them in his pocket. But I didn’t wait, “Don’t you want one? Better light it here, while we are…” I didn’t wait. The road rose, became flush with the field. After a while I heard him just behind me, and we entered the wind. I could see past my shoulder his cigarette shredding away in fiery streamers upon the unimpeded rush of the mistral, that black chill wind full of dust like sparks of ice.
Divorce in Naples
I
WE WERE SITTING at a table inside: Monckton and the bosun and Carl and George and me and the women, the three women of that abject glittering kind that seamen know or that know seamen. We were talking English and they were not talking at all. By that means they could speak constantly to us above and below the sound of our voices in a tongue older than recorded speech and time too. Older than the thirty-four days of sea time which we had but completed, anyway. Now and then they spoke to one another in Italian. The women in Italian, the men in English, as if language might be the sex difference, the functioning of the vocal cords the inner biding until the dark pairing time.
The men in English, the women in Italian: a decorum as of two parallel streams separated by a levee for a little while.
We were talking about Carl, to George.
“Why did you bring him here, then?” the bosun said.
“Yes,” Monckton said. “I sure wouldn’t bring my wife to a place like this.”
George cursed Monckton: not with a word or even a sentence; a paragraph. He was a Greek, big and black, a full head taller than Carl; his eyebrows looked like two crows in overlapping flight. He cursed us all with immediate thoroughness and in well-nigh faultless classic Anglo-Saxon, who at other times functioned in the vocabulary of an eight-year-old by-blow of a vaudeville comedian and a horse, say.
“Yes, sir,” the bosun said. He was smoking an Italian cigar and drinking ginger beer; the same tumbler of which, incidentally, he had been engaged with for about two hours and which now must have been about the temperature of a ship’s showerbath. “I sure wouldn’t bring my girl to a dive like this, even if he did wear pants.”
Carl meanwhile had not stirred. He sat serene among us, with his round yellow head and his round eyes, looking like a sophisticated baby against the noise and the glitter, with his glass of thin Italian beer and the women murmuring to one another and watching us and then Carl with that biding and inscrutable foreknowledge which they do not appear to know that they possess. “E innocente” one said; again they murmured, contemplating Carl with musing, secret looks.
“He may have fooled you already,” the bosun said. “He may have slipped through a porthole on you any time these three years.”
George glared at the bosun, his mouth open for cursing.
But he didn’t curse. Instead he looked at Carl, his mouth still open. His mouth closed slowly. We all looked at Carl.
Beneath our eyes he raised his glass and drank with contained deliberation.
“Are you still pure?” George said. “I mean, sho enough.”
Beneath our fourteen eyes Carl emptied the glass of thin, bitter, three per cent beer. “I been to sea three years,” he said. “All over Europe.”
George glared at him, his face baffled and outraged. He had just shaved; his close blue jowls lay flat and hard as a prizefighter’s or a pirate’s, up to the black explosion of his hair. He was our second cook. “You damn lying little bastard,” he said.
The bosun raised his glass of ginger beer with an exact replica of Carl’s drinking. Steadily and deliberately, his body thrown a little back and his head tilted, he poured the ginger beer over his right shoulder at the exact speed of swallowing, still with that air of Carl’s, that grave and cosmopolitan swagger. He set the glass down, and rose. “Come on,” he said to Monckton and me, “let’s go. Might as well be board ship if we’re going to spend the evening in one place.’
Monckton and I rose. He was smoking a short pipe. One of the women was his, another the bosun’s. The third one had a lot of gold teeth. She could have been thirty, but maybe she wasn’t. We left her with George and Carl. When I looked back from the door, the waiter was just fetching them some more beer.
II
THEY CAME into the ship together at Galveston, George carrying a portable victrola and a small parcel wrapped in paper bearing the imprint of a well-known ten-cent store, and Carl carrying two bulging imitation leather bags that looked like they might weigh forty pounds apiece. George appropriated two berths, one above the other like a Pullman section, cursing Carl in a harsh, concatenant voice a little overburred with v’s and r’s and ordering him about like a nigger, while Carl stowed their effects away with the meticulousness of an old maid, producing from one of the bags a stack of freshly laundered drill serving jackets that must have numbered a dozen. For the next thirty-four days (he was the messboy) he wore a fresh one for each meal in the saloon, and there were always two or three recently washed ones drying under the poop awning. And for thirty-four evenings, after the galley was closed, we watched the two of them in pants and undershirts, dancing to the victrola on the after well deck above a hold full of Texas cotton and Georgia resin. They had only one record for the machine and it had a crack in it, and each time the needle clucked George would stamp on the deck. I don’t think that either one of them was aware that he did it.
It was George who told us about Carl. Carl was eighteen, from Philadelphia. They both called it Philly; George in a proprietorial tone, as if he had created Philadelphia in order to produce Carl, though it later appeared that George had not discovered Carl until Carl had been to sea for a year already. And Carl himself told some of it: a fourth or fifth child of a first generation of Scandinavian-American shipwrights, brought up in one of an identical series of small frame houses a good trolley ride from salt water, by a mother or an older sister: this whom, at the age of fifteen and weighing perhaps a little less than a hundred pounds, some ancestor long knocking his quiet bones together at the bottom of the sea (or perhaps havened by accident in dry earth and become restive with ease and quiet) had sent back to the old dream and the old unrest three or maybe four generations late.
“I was a kid, then,” Carl told us, who had yet to experience or need a shave. “I thought about everything but going to sea. I thought once I’d be a ballplayer or maybe a prize fighter. They had pictures of them on the walls, see, when Sis would send me down to the corner after the old man on a Saturday night. Jeez, I’d stand outside on the street and watch them go in, and I could see their legs under the door and hear them and smell the sawdust and see the pictures of them on the walls through the smoke. I was a kid then, see. I hadn’t been nowheres then.”
We asked George how he had ever got a berth, even as a messman, standing even now about four inches over five feet and with yet a face that should have followed monstrances up church aisles, if not looked down from one of the colored windows themselves.
