Algren at Sea Read online

  Well, how would you feel if you had been Zane Grey when James Jones came along?

  Not only that, but how would you feel hauling a stupid camera by a stupid strap and feeling stupider by the minute? It’s true nobody asked me to start a thing like this, but looking at it another way, I’d like to know who is going to stop me.

  Tomorrow I go up on the roofs. There must be something up there.

  The Porter-Who-Has-It-Almost-Made knocked this morning when I came out of the bathroom. The reason I came out was that there was no soap in there. The reason there is no soap, of course, is that the clown steals it and sells it on the black market. Sure enough, when I opened the door there he was, bearing a tray on which there rested a token of affection: a bar of Palmolive. I didn’t miss the point of the tray. But all I did was take the soap and slam the door. Later, I realized I hadn’t heard him walk away, and opened the door again. There he still stood, tray, smile, and all.

  “Arriba, España!” I told him, and shut it again.

  You’ll never reach a rooftop in Barcelona by going up a well-lighted stair, because buildings that take good care of themselves don’t let people climb onto their roofs. The stair you want is one in a building that don’t give a damn, lights or no lights, the hell with the broom and all like that, because that’s exactly the kind of house that leaves a little door, at the very top of its creaking rickety stair, open just enough so you can force it the rest of the way and there you are: On top of Barcelona.

  The first door I made was held by a wire from the outside, that I could have made sooner but for a dog who stuck his nose in the crack of light and pretended he was guarding Darryl Zanuck. A woman lifted the wire from the outside and took the pooch off. It was some roof. It was one hell of a roof.

  People had built shacks up there and on the roofs all around that made me wonder whether Hoover was running again. They had made them out of wine-barrel staves, orange crates, paper, iron and tar, and all the litter of the Barrio-Chino. A few pesetas to the concierja and what the landlord don’t know won’t hurt him was the idea.

  They even kept chickens up there. I didn’t see any hens but a rooster came out who looked married.

  The woman looked young but haggard, the way mountain women often look in the States. Well, we were pretty high up at that; maybe it’s altitude does it. Her husband came out and stood beside her and I offered him a pack of cigarettes. He took one and handed the pack back.

  “Gracias, señor.”

  They weren’t from New York, either.

  He asked me did I sprechen Deutsch and I said if I did it would come as a pure surprise as I wasn’t Deutsch, I wasn’t even German. It developed that if he had a choice of who should be on his roof, he would prefer a German; but if he couldn’t get one an American was better than nothing. The reason for this is that the Germans have a better record than we have here for fighting Communism. That is the thing you say you are doing here when you want to get cheap labor. It covers a surprising number of holds, all of which are unbreakable.

  The man didn’t want a photograph of himself and I hardly blame him. Besides, they were in the way of my sky and so was their damned rooster. I sent them all back to the shack, but told the rooster he could stay outside and peck at things. I wanted to see if he’d hit a worm. I hadn’t had breakfast myself and I couldn’t remember anyone saying Stay for lunch. Were they planning to surprise me? If they just had coffee and a spot of flour, I know how to make poor-do gravy. But I didn’t come to Barcelona for a good time, I came here to get a start in life.

  The reason I am a little late in getting a start is that just when I got my Pfc stripe, that war was over. One more week and I would have been an acting corporal!

  It goes that way for me for days at a time. Then it gets worse. The time it got really worse was when I left the dog tags on the bedpost and didn’t miss them until the M.P. asked me where they were. He was just a fellow who enjoyed making a bet on something now and then and had nobody to bet with, so he’d made a bet with himself that the next fellow coming out would have left his tags on a bedpost. He was as surprised as I was. Both of us were even more surprised when it turned out I didn’t have a pass either.

  In fact, I had no evidence, outside of a uniform, that I was in anybody’s army at all. Speaking English didn’t prove I was an American, as the English had an army around somewhere that was making a good thing out of singing Lili Marlene and smoking American cigarettes. (Nevertheless it had been recognized by Truman Capote.) What I demanded to know of the M.P. was whether he was for us or Churchill. Just because he spoke English didn’t make him an American either. He kept getting in deeper and deeper until he started feeling suspicious of himself. He felt he was either trying to arrest somebody from another army or was being a big fink for pinching an American.

  If I wasn’t in the right army, I wanted to know, what would I be doing carrying six cartons of Pall Malls around?

  He apologized, so I let him go. They never had any right to send me overseas in the first place, as I had contributed to democracy by writing book reviews for liberal periodicals.

  A woman one roof away was hanging clothes to dry. She had her back turned to me. Way, way up, very high, a couple of black oversized birds were wheeling. They were Portuguese buzzards looking for dead Africans.

  I never saw a sky so blue, so high. Across roof, tower, steeple and stack, the white light of old Greece came blowing. I looked below. And in every room the enormous hours had begun.

  No end to the blue overhead and no end to the anguish below.

  Below lay humanity’s own Barrio-Chino, the pit where the light barely filters down. Down there was where the millions who had come to life before time began, then had worked blindly so long to give time eyes. There, for untold Chinese ages, untold millions had sweated and suffered with no light to tell them why. Now in fishermen’s ships moving at night across the Mediterranean, waking at daybreak in the huts of Africa or in the rooms below, millions unknowingly yet make the truths of our own time. While wise men search the best hotels for news of Heaven.

  Never knowing that, every man being his own Barrio-Chino, true news of Man never comes but from below.

  No end to the everlasting light. No end to the dark below.

  The woman one roof away began singing something, but all I could catch was the one word paloma—only this was a lonelier song.

  My love is a dove with a broken wing

  My love has lost her way far out at sea

  The waves warn that the storm is coming

  My love has lost her way.

  The rooster came over, pecking at pebbles, and the dog came out and ran him off for me. The pooch wanted to show me he was sorry he had raised such a storm over nothing. He wanted to see how things were going, if I’d let him stick around. I told him Go back to bed you bum. He went back. He didn’t mind being called a bum. He knew.

  I figured if I could get over to the next roof that woman would ask me for dinner. I got one leg over the narrow abyss between buildings, so it was just a matter of getting the other leg over. The only trouble with that was that I have this thing about height. I should have remembered before I got one leg over. The position I was in, I couldn’t move either. It was a question of whether to advance or retreat, so I retreated. I got back on my own roof.

  For me it is easier to go down six flights and come up by the next staircase. What is even easier is to put my back up against a chimney and sun myself, so that was what I did. It was the chance I have always wanted, to think about getting a start in life.

  The way to begin, I realized, is to show yourself willing to work for nothing, as nobody ever got to be a millionaire by asking for one raise after another. The more work you’re willing to do for nothing, the surer you are to be able to retire at forty to lovely Miami and watch the moon rise over the ryebread trees until you die at forty-one. Having reached the age of fifty deeper in debt than I was when I was merely flat broke, I now find myself faced w
ith gathering doubt. My friends who took the risk of beginning at the very top are now so wealthy that they never travel with more than four dollars in pocket. When I say I liked that book about the big white shark I mean I really liked it. Now, how did that fellow get his start?

  God, how that Assyrian could write. I really wouldn’t want to write that good myself. The responsibility must be terrible.

  If I could just write as good as Orville Prescott I’d be content. If I could turn out one paragraph such as, “This novel is a distillation of a perfumed youth remembered in age. In reading it, the air about one is pervaded by the essence of the Ancien Régime. It brings the exquisite to the level of the excruciating.”

  If I could turn out a bit like that, by the time it hit the streets Dorothy Kilgallen would be on the phone inviting me to “a little after-theater dinner party,” where someone would say, “I would like to have you meet Mr. John Mason Nothing,” and there he’d be. I’d drop something. casual like “I hear Noel Coward is getting braver,” or “De Gaulle can kiss my Montparnasse.” After that there would be nothing to do but wait for the morning papers.

  I must in all modesty point out that the quarter of a century that I’ve been writing I’ve learned a few tricks of the trade myself; such as making a dot over the ‘i’ and adding an ‘s’ when you want to show there is more than one of something. I was born in the same week that Stanley Ketchel fought Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and to this very day nobody knows which one won.

  I stood up and looked over at the next roof to see why the woman over there had stopped singing but she had just gone inside to cook something. It smelled like chicken with rice. I looked around for the rooster and he was gone. He should have stayed on his own roof.

  I got one leg over again and you know what happened. That was the position I was in when this definition of literature hit me out of the blue. I am always in that position, figuratively straddling the abyss, when a definition of literature hits me. But this was the first time it had happened to me literally. “Any challenge to laws made by people on top, in the interest of people below,” I decided, “is literature.” Then I got the other leg back.

  What the hell, I thought, I’ll buy my own dinner.

  Once you start horsing around with American literature there is simply no telling in what position you may find yourself.

  There is also simply no telling when you may meet Frank Sinatra. When I do I’m not going to forget myself and holler: “Spit on me, Frankie! I’m in the very front row!” Like we used to do when we were kids.

  I decided to think about Spanish literature, as that may be the coming thing when the present run on Buddhism peters out. I figured it shouldn’t take long, as I am no better informed on Spanish literature than on American, my entire library consisting of the works of Max Shulman.

  Yet I can assure you that, at one time, I was well read. But that was before I consciously set forth on a course of knowing less and less, especially about literature. I had always before me the example of Paperfish The Footnote King, whose course had been to know more and more about literature and who succeeded so well he finally got steady work as a ventriloquist. I saw then that erudition may lead to nothing more than becoming an authority; so I settled for knowing less about books and more about people.

  Well, what would you have done if you had been Arch Oboler when Rod Serling came along?

  There is a fellow around Spain who fought as a mercenary for Franco, and he didn’t get a prize either. But after the war something happened to him and he began to write novels that are banned in Spain before they are even begun. The Chief of State is having some trouble trying to figure this out, as the man has a good war record from the present government’s point of view. So he has become the most important novelist in the world now writing in Spanish. His name is Camilo Cela.

  Cela’s novels are published, as is all the work of Spain’s best writers, in Argentina. But the censorship that weighs heaviest in Spain today is not upon its writers but upon those who have simply been censored out of any life at all except that lived out between the shafts of a two-wheeled cart. Or on the back between bedposts.

  I asked Camilo Cela how it happened that his work, like that of Hemingway, Sartre, and the Goytisolos, is banned in Spain, while that of Albert Camus is acceptable and, indeed, popular. Cela’s explanation is that there is nothing in the work of Camus that cannot be presented as a little lecture in how to be well behaved in a world where there would be less violence if there were only less protest.

  This conversation occurred in the same week that Chessman was executed in California. As the man had been reprieved two months before, for political reasons, the execution struck me as an act of complete cynicism. Cela, however, felt that the execution was in a realm beyond that of the merely cynical. A cynical act, Cela felt, was one which is made in awareness of moral values, but refutes them. The act involving Chessman, however, seemed to him to be one carried out without an awareness of any values. It was not an act of cynicism, an act of vengeance, or an act of sadism, but simply the disposal of a man because he was in the way of a legal decision. He was killed simply because there was nothing better to do. There was no longer a way of justifying his execution, Cela felt, so Chessman was simply put out of the way to put an end to the matter.

  But the smell of death hung over that California execution chamber as though the executioners had died there. For the smell came over the ocean and pervaded Spain.

  Cela smelled it, for he knows the odor.

  The lives going uphill here to nowhere and downhill without hope, the odor of death, begins in that great glassy showcase named Madrid.

  The odor of death, the smell of lifelessness that flavors all Spanish life down to La Paloma Blanco, that great barnlike brothel of Barcelona where women sit knitting, naked upon a platform, and men stand against the walls watching them knit. Once in a while, in the bar of the Paloma Blanco, one snaps his fingers toward one of the women; she puts down her knitting and walks before him past a cashier’s window, where the man pays one of two prices, depending on how many minutes he wishes to purchase, and is handed a towel.

  No word need be spoken, love is not required. Here at last life has been reduced to its barest needs. As it has been reduced everywhere in Spain:“Two little boys, five to six years old, are playing at trains between the tables, wearily and without any enthusiasm. When they’re going toward the back of the café, one is the engine and the other the carriages. On the way back to the entrance they change places. Nobody ever takes any notice of them, but they go on stolidly, joylessly, running backward and forward with immense seriousness. They are a pair of thoroughly logical disciplinarians, two small boys who play at trains though it bores them stiff because they have decided to have fun, and, to have fun, they have decided that come what may they are going to play at trains the whole afternoon. If they don’t get any fun out of it it is not their fault. They are doing their best.

  “. . . playing at trains without faith, without hope, and even without charity, as though carrying a painful duty.”3

  I asked Cela, hypothetically, what he would do if his worst political enemy were to be pursued by police and come to Cela’s house for refuge. “I would hide him,” Cela replied without hesitation.

  This is, of course, the wrong answer for Rear-Echelon Liberals Against Fascism. It is the wrong answer for literary mercenaries with shaky Garands and New York sub-critics who know one can’t be too careful. But it is the right answer for people who care about people.

  There is but one crime in modern society, to Cela, and that is to cooperate with the contemptuous waste our Western civilization makes of the lives of ordinary men and women.

  When the sun was straight up, I had had enough of literature and got off the chimney.

  I looked over to the woman one roof away whom I’d never see again. When she came closer to where I was standing, I pointed to the camera, meaning, could I come over and take pictures?

&n
bsp; She shrugged, meaning she didn’t share my enthusiasm but wouldn’t pull a knife if I insisted. Then she turned her face to me and spoke gravely:

  “Subir y bajar como Ud. con una camera fotográfica puede ser divertido. Pero, para nosotros, que subimos y bajamos todo el santo día, es el infierno.”

  (For you it is amusing to climb up and down with a camera, but for us, for whom there is no end of climbing up and going down, it is sheer hell.)

  I took the streetcar called Atarazanas back down the Rambla, but I didn’t take pictures. When the car passed the Café El Kosmo I saw that Encarnación had come to work early. She was sitting out front waiting for someone to buy her a beer. When the car stopped I called her name, and waved. She looked up and saw me but she didn’t wave back. I knew they would like me in Barcelona.

  The impression of bigness, out of all proportion to its size, that Spain leaves upon visitors is due, I believe, not only to its great variation of climate and scene. It is due also to an awareness that everything that happens in Spain happens to men everywhere.

  Spain is the spiritual center of humanity, affecting all other parts. When Ireland bleeds only Ireland grows weak. But when Spain loses, Mankind loses. When the Spanish people were forced back into the Middle Ages in the 1930’s, they pulled the world back with them. Anyone who tells you we’re out of the Middle Ages today is somebody whose mind has snapped.

  The corruption of the legalized tyranny at present holding the Spanish people under its cold control begins with the big-business brass. The generalship of any fascism does not begin with generals, but with men in business clothes who never handled a gun and never will. Generals can always be found.

  Here its corruption extends to its officer caste, and has reduced its bishops to mere defenders of gold-inlaid entities, edifices built upon usury called cathedrals; that tacitly bless the degradation of Spain’s young womanhood.