Algren at Sea (23 page)

She must have been almost ten, and wore a castoff black rag for a dress. I saw her face, the mouth of innocence and the large dark eyes pressed to the bars. A face so young yet so old; that had come so far. Just to see an American eat. And she laid her hands lightly, palms up, between the narrow bars. I had never seen hands look so empty.

A child of one of those small whitewashed hovels behind the fish market of the Guadalquivir. A daughter of one of those men who come bearing life-sized sculptured images of Christ and the twelve disciples at The Last Supper, through the streets of Holy Week, with real food set out before them. But the Christ of Seville is a bejeweled colossus in the service of a medieval real-estate chain. A churchly syndicate which has changed the meaning of The Last Supper to: The Less Bread for the Children, the More for Us.

And this one wasn't invited to ours, either. A bit of fish on a clothless board makes a meal behind the fish market on the Guadalquivir, but what she saw before her, between the bars of the restaurant window, was fish soup
and
fish.
And
meat.
And
fruit.
And
flowers. And forks of silver and wine of two colors, all arranged, under a soft electric glow, on damask white as snow.

“We have a spectator,” I informed Mme. de Beauvoir on the other side of our table.

“Disregard the sight,” she told me, “I can't see it.”

I shifted in my chair, not to shut the child out of my sightline so much as to shut myself out of hers. But when the waiter refilled the wineglasses I felt her eyes. She was waiting for me to drink.

“Of all the people drinking manzanilla in Sevilla,” I complained, “she has eyes just for me.”

“Try giving her something.”

I put an open pack of cigarettes beween the bars. It touched her hand but her fingers didn't take it. In fact, she didn't even look at it. Yet her lips said,
“No, gracias.”

I took the pack back.

“She doesn't smoke,” I reported.

“Give her money.”

I found a peseta with a hole in the middle. Before I had it out her lips whispered again:

“She doesn't use money.”

Although Spain is an underdeveloped country, they know how to pour
kirsch
over pineapple in a way that is a distinct improvement over canned heat strained through a bandanna onto a piece of rye bread two days old. I thought of offering the girl a spoonful in the hope she'd get zonked and stagger home. But my hand was unsteady. I had to eat the stuff myself just to keep it from spilling.

“What
exactly
are you trying to do?”

“I was trying to give this girl something to eat.”

“Try sugar.”

I succeeded in getting two lumps of sugar onto the windowsill. As they were wrapped in paper I didn't spill a drop. But the waiter's shadow passed across my hand. He took the sugar back and replaced it on my saucer.

“No, señor,” he spoke firmly.

“I
offered
her money,” I explained.

“A Spanish child is not a beggar, señor.”

“I offered her cigarettes.”

“A Spanish child is not a gypsy, señor.”

“She isn't a beggar and she isn't a gypsy but she likes to eat, so I gave her sugar.”

“A Spanish child is not a donkey, señor.”

I took a flower out of the vase, handed it through the window; and still unsmiling, the little girl stuck the stem in her hair and said,
”Gracias, señor”
—and backed off, still unsmiling; her small face melting into the solemn darkness of the Calle de Sierpe. Where young men speak of bulls over thin-stemmed glasses.

We finished the meal with no further word. But the restaurant was not lit as brightly as it had been when we had entered. The eternal bells of The Cathedral rang, inviting all good children to Mass. Yet Seville itself was no longer smiling.

“Is everything alright, señor?” the waiter returned to ask.

A Frenchman can play a waiter's part flawlessly, an Italian may actually enjoy
service,
but your Spaniard isn't built for waiting on others, and when he pretends to humility it is worse than when he is his own arrogant self.

“Everything is
not
alright,” I assured him, regaining my own arrogant self; “there were feathers in the duck, the coffee was cold, and the wine had cork.”

“Why don't you have him fired,” my sarcastic friend suggested in English, “as you did the waiter in Paris who would not bring you an American soda?”

“I did
not
have him fired,” I was forced to correct her.

“You
wanted
to, and that is the same thing. For shame, a big man ordering a strawberry soda. I did not blame the man for refusing.”

“It was not strawberry—I
despise
strawberry, it was
chocolate,
and he brought the people at the next table four of them.”

“They were Americans; they had the right to have American sodas.”

“What am I—a Persian, for God's sake?”

“When you are with a Frenchwoman on Champs Élysées, you are French.”

“I'm not French even if I'm in a tepee on top of the Eiffel Tower and I'm not a Spaniard and there
was
a feather in that damned duck.”

“I'll bring you fresh wine, señor,” the Falangist disguised as a waiter offered.

“Don't bother,” I told him.

“But
I
did not
send
for you, señor,” was what his shrug conveyed. “
Buenas noches,
” he told Mme. de Beauvoir.

“Let's get out of this peseta with the hole in the middle,” I decided.

It took four shots of wicky before I felt myself beginning to forgive the children and its restaurants, the waiters and the wine of churchly Seville.

Walking downhill we saw a small man coming up. He was bending under a load of firewood heavier than himself and kept his eyes, perforce, to the ground. He held to the middle of the street. As he did not see us, we parted to let him pass.

“When you see people doing the work of animals, that indicates you are in an undeveloped country,” the French philosopher pointed out.

“Oh, I thought that was Aristotle Onassis,” I thanked my companion, grateful for any shred of enlightenment.

I wonder whether I could have gotten a reaction by saying, “Oh, I thought that was Brigitte Bardot.”

But no, I realized sadly, Bardot wouldn't have worked either.

Once the dancing began, however, in some offstreet, gypsified dim-lit trap, it began to look to me as if that waspwaisted lightweight on the tiny stage, built into his suit and boots like a black knife into its sheath, was a serious waste of fighting talent. If someone could get a kid like that away
from the girl with the castanets and the dunce with the guitar, the American lightweight division would pick up class.

The whole trouble with all these Europeans, excepting the English, however, is that their power is in their legs instead of their arms where power rightly ought to be. They forget about their arms. They don't jab or hook or cross. They just let them hang.

The lighter races—French and Italian and Spanish—think that the way to win a fight is to kick the opponent in the stomach. The heavy races—Greek, Turkish, and Russian—think the main idea is to lean all your weight on him and when he goes down, stay on top and keep leaning. I don't know about the Germans, but my hunch is that their idea is to avoid physical contact altogether: just press a button or pull a lever and find out who won by phone. The more impersonal, the better, seems to be their thinking. But the Spanish idea is to do everything as personally as possible.

This is plain in the dancing, that is more than dancing: it is pride personified. The great insistence on dignity, the courage and the grace that, I had been told, I would see in the fighting of the bulls, was in the dancing. Well, I must have hit the bullring on the wrong day, because I failed to catch anything but the spectacle of some overdressed gypsies butchering several head of cattle to the sounding of horns blowing out of tune.

In the dancing I caught it, immediately, in the magical speed of the lightweight's foot moving faster than the eye could follow, that comes to a dead stop without perceptible pause. I saw a dance meaning: Let there be no folly.

Dancing that gave coherence to passion and emotion to form, where all feeling was wild yet sternly controlled.

And when the dancer was a girl in a red-and-black skirt doing an Aragonese village dance, I saw as though for the first time what true gayety can be. As well as what a girl can be.

Then, behind a massive gypsy woman as light on her feet as a fawn in the morning, the chorus mounted a slow clapping of hands, increasing in intensity till a single singer's voice broke through in some old lost Asiatic blues—then broke off on an upbeat wail as the dancer's feet came to that dead-still stop.

I'd been somewhere. A place to which I could go back.

Is it because such dancing, asserting that ancestral struggle of every
race, Bushman to Britisher, to give dignity to the phenomenon of finding oneself a human being, is more vivid in Spain than in any other land because the struggle has been fought here against such tragic odds so long?

Because whether the Spanish dancing is good dancing or bad dancing, it is always good dancing. For it says man is unconquerable.

They tell me the Greeks gave us the concept of beauty and the Romans sound rules for keeping order.

To me, the Spanish gift is the most precious.

 

The next morning we drank a goodbye
carraquillo
to Seville.

So farewell, sunny Soho, glamorous metropolis of hospitable Spain, where the dark-eyed señorita smiles down on her faithful caballero after being out all night with an American ensign. Farewell, busy capital of modern Iberia where the new contrasts with the old and the rich contrasts with the poor. Farewell, historic Seattle.

And farewell, child of the fish market behind the Guadalquivir, who declined my peseta with the hole in the middle.

CRETA TRAVEL BUREAU—“Opposite city air terminal”—the folder informed me, offered “excursion with experienced guide speaking English, French and German in luxurious motor coach.”

As I had never heard anyone speaking three languages in a luxurious coach, I hurried to the terminal and paid 180 drachmas to get the whole deal.

I could have gotten by for 150, but that was without lunch and I wanted to be among the ones who would be eating while the others stood around and watched.

The only luxurious appointment of the coach was the driver, a Greek millionaire affecting raggedy pants, a rained-on cap, a windworn face and careworn eyes so he would look like a peasant driving a bus. He had a good act and he might have gotten by with it if he had shaved. The three-day stubble was a dead giveaway.

Although there were thirty seats for eight passengers and the bus wasn't due to leave for half an hour, everybody raced to get a seat the second the driver opened the door; with the result that I got wedged fast with an American girl of good family who had been dispatched to Greece to pick up Hellenic culture and a husband of any old culture at all.

When we got unwedged she claimed that her name was Milly, that she was studying the history of art, and that this was the first time she'd been wedged. I assured her it was the first time I'd wedged a historian, and we were off and winging. I offered her the window seat and, by sliding into it in front of her, discovered Milly was a slow-breaker. Once she broke, however, Milly made up ground. She talked so fast it sounded like she'd taken a course in advanced chattering.

She had just come from Athens and was put out with a French utility
magnate, name of Malraux, who'd obtained the lighting and sound rights to The Acropolis. All I could make of it was that Milly felt the rights should have been retained by the Greeks. I comforted her by assuring her that the Greeks would be getting a kickback from Mister Malraux and what we really had to watch out for was Englishmen sifting the rubble.

Milly was dead serious about The Glory That Was Greece, and wanted me to be serious about it too. The moment she chose was on a narrow, climbing run, growing steeper, narrower, and more winding by the moment.

The morning papers had carried a front-page story about a coachload of people going over a sheer drop of 3,455 kilometers straight down without a pause, somewhere in Turkey. I couldn't for the life of me see how The Glory That Was Byzantium had been of any more use to them then than The Glory That Was Greece would be to me if the millionaire in the driver's seat dozed off.

Even on a three-lane highway, I can't get serious about The Glory That Was Greece because at the time they were being glorious, the Greeks themselves didn't know it. All they were doing was trying to please their wives and stay out of jail. The glory thing wasn't put down until after their scene had been blacked out for a millennium. The claim of the present occupants of the peninsula has no more to do with ancestral Greece than with The Old Ashmolean Marching Society and Single Ladies Band. If not less.

But Milly was so sure of herself I had to take the side of the Turks, in war or peace, even to the point of insisting that Turks are better drivers than Greeks. She didn't believe this as she had seen the morning papers too, and as it was the fifth time, since the first of the year, that a Turkish bus had gone over a cliff, while the Greeks have a perfect safety record since Venus rose from the waves.

The Greeks might have a perfect safety record, I conceded, but to anyone, such as myself, who has had the experience of asking an Athenian cab driver to take him to The Parthenon and then having the man ask where it was, a good safety record doesn't cut butter. Milly replied that when the Turks could produce anyone who could sing like Maria Callas she'd buy a ticket. I didn't tell her about Eartha Kitt, but I did happen to recall an East St. Louis chick by name of Marie Kallas who used to sing
If I Can't Sell It I'll Keep Settin' on It I Just Won't Give It Away,
at the Rock
Garden Club on the river, who married a Greek, and I wondered if it could be the same chick stepping up. Milly said she had heard Mme. Callas
was
engaged to a Greek fellow at that.