Orient Express (19 page)

And so he goes on piling up memories of torn hurtling metal, of trains of sixty locomotives at full steam disappearing in the direction of Port Arthur, of hospitals and who es and jewelry merchants, memories of the first great exploit of the Twentieth Century seen through sooty panes, beaten into his brain by the uneven rumble of the broad-gauge Trans-Siberian. Crows in the sky, bodies of men in heaps along the tracks, burning hospitals, an embroidery unforeseen in that stately panorama unfolding rivers and lakes and mountains in the greenish dusk of the shed at the Exposition Universelle.

Then there's
Le Panama ou Les Aventures de mes Septs Oncles,
seven runaway uncles, dedicated to the last Frenchman in Panama, the barkeep at Matachine, the deathplace of Chinamen, where the liveoaks have grown up among the abandoned locomotives, where every vestige of the de Lesseps attempt is rotten and rusted and overgrown with lianas except a huge anchor in the middle of the forest stamped with the arms of Louis XV.

It's about this time too that I read the history of the earthquake at Lisbon

But I think

The Panama panic is of a more universal importance

Because it turned my childhood topsyturvy.

I had a fine picturebook

And I was seeing for the first time

The whale

The big cloud

The walrus

The Sun

The great walrus

The bear the lion the chimpanzee the rattlesnake and the fly

The fly

The terrible fly

“Mother, the flies, the flies and the trunks of trees!”

“Go to sleep, child, go to sleep.”

Ahasuerus is an idiot

It's the Panama panic that made me a poet!

Amazing

All those of my generation are like that

Youngsters

Victims of strange ricochets

We don't play any more with the furniture

We don't play any more with antiques

We're always and everywhere breaking crockery

We ship

Go whaling

Kill walrus

We're always afraid of the tsetse fly

Because we're not very fond of sleep.…

Fantastic uncles they are; one of them was a butcher in Galveston, lost in the cyclone of '95; another washed gold in the Klondike; another one turned Buddhist and was arrested trying to blow up the Britishers in Bombay; the fourth was the valet of a general in the Boer War; the fifth was a cordon bleu in palace hotels; number six disappeared in Patagonia with a lot of electromagnetic instruments of precision; no one ever knew what happened to the seventh uncle.

It was uncle number two who wrote verse modelled on de Musset and read in San Francisco the history of General Sutter, the man who conquered California for the United States and was ruined by the discovery of gold on his plantation. This uncle married the woman who made the best bread in a thousand square kilometers and was found one day with a rifle bullet through his head. Aunty disappeared. Aunty married again. Aunty is now the wife of a rich jam-manufacturer.

And Blaise Cendrars has since written the history of General Johann August Sutter,
L'Or,
a narrative that traces the swiftest leanest parabola of anything I've ever read, a narrative that cuts like a knife through the washy rubbish of most French writing of the present time, with its lemon-colored gloves and its rosewater and its holy water and its
policier-gentleman
cosmopolitan affectation. It's probably because he really is, what the Quai d'Orsay school pretend to be, an international vagabond, that Cendrars has managed to capture the grandiose rhythms of America of seventy-five years ago, the myths of which our generation is just beginning to create. (As if anyone ever
really was
anything; he's a good writer, leave it at that.) In
L'Or
he's packed the tragic and turbulent absurdity of '49 into a skyrocket. It's over so soon you have to read it again for fear you have missed something.

But the seven uncles. Here's some more of the hymn to transportation that runs through all his work, crystallizing the torture and delight of a train-mad, steamship-mad, plane-mad generation.

I'm thirsty

Damn it

Goddam it to hell

I want to read the
Feuille d'Avis of Neufchâtel
or the
Pamplona Courrier,

In the middle of the Atlantic you're no more at home than in an editorial office

I go round and round inside the meridians like a squirrel in a squirrel cage

Wait there's a Russian looks like he might be worth talking to

Where to go

He doesn't know either where to deposit his baggage

At Leopoldville or at the Sedjerah near Nazareth, with Mr
.
Junod or at the house of my old friend Perl

In the Congo in Bessarabia on Samoa

I know all the timetables

All the trains and their connections

The time they arrive the time they leave

All the liners all the fares all the taxes

It's all the same to me

Live by grafting

I'm on my way back from America on board the
Volturno,
for thirtyfive francs from New York to Rotterdam

Blaise Cendrars seems to have rather specialised in America, in the U. S. preferring the happier Southern and Western sections to the Bible-worn hills of New England. Here's a poem about the Mississippi, for which Old Kentucky must have supplied the profusion of alligators, that still is an honorable addition to that superb set of old prints of sternwheel steamboats racing with a nigger on the safety valve.

At this place the stream is a wide lake

Rolling yellow muddy waters between marshy banks

Waterplants merging into acres of cotton

Here and there appear towns and villages carpeting the bottom of some little bay with their factories with their tall black chimneys with their long wharves jutting out their long wharves on piles jutting out very far into the water

Staggering heat

The bell on board rings for lunch

The passengers are rigged up in checked suits howling cravats vests loud as the incendiary cocktails and the corrosive sauces

We begin to see alligators

Young ones alert and frisky

Big fellows drifting with greenish moss an their backs

Luxuriant vegetation announces the approach of the tropical zone

Bamboos giant palms tuliptrees laurel cedars

The river itself has doubled in width

It is sown with floating islands from which at the approach of the boat waterbirds start up in flocks;

Steamers sailboats barges all kinds of craft and immense rafts of logs

A yellow vapor rises from the toowarm water of the river

It's by hundreds now that the 'gators play round us

You can hear the dry snap of their jaws and can make out very well their small fierce eyes

The passengers pass the time shooting at them with rifles

When a particularly good shot manages to kill or mortally wound one of the beasts

Its fellows rush at it and tear it to pieces

Ferociously

With little cries rather like the wail of a newborn baby
.

In
Kodak
there are poems about New York, Alaska, Florida, hunting wild turkey and duck in a country of birchtrees off in the direction of Winnipeg, a foggy night in Vancouver, a junk in a Pacific harbor unloading porcelain and swallowsnests, bambootips and ginger, the stars melting like sugar in the sky of some island passed to windward by Captain Cook, elephant-hunting in a jungle roaring with torrents of rain; and at the end a list of menus featuring iguana and green turtle, Red River salmon and shark's fins, sucklingpig with fried bananas, crayfish in pimento, breadfruit, fried oysters and guavas, dated
en voyage
1887–1923. 1887 must be the date of his birth.

Dix Neuf Poèmes Elastiques,
Paris. After all, Paris, whether we like it or out, has been so far a center of unrest, of the building up and the tearing down of this century. From Paris has spread in every direction a certain esperanto of the arts that has “modern” for its trademark. Blaise Cendrars is an itinerant Parisian well versed in this as in many other dialects. He is a kind of medicineman trying to evoke the things that are our cruel and avenging gods. Turbines, triple-expansion engines, dynamite, high tension coils. Navigation, speed, flight, annihilation. No medicine has been found strong enough to cope with them; in cubist Paris they have invented some fetishes and gris-gris that many are finding useful. Here's the confession of an enfant du siècle, itinerant Parisian.

So it is that every evening I cross Paris on foot

From the Batignolles to the Latin Quarter as I would cross the Andes

Under the flare of new stars larger and more frightening

The Southern Cross more prodigious every step one makes towards it emerging from the old world
.

I am the man who has no past.
—
Only the stump of my arm hurts,
—

I've rented a hotel room to be all alone with myself
.

I have a brand new wicker basket that's filling up with manuscript
.

I have neither books nor pictures, not a scrap of æsthetic bricabrac

There's an old newspaper on the table
.

I work in a bare room behind a dusty mirror,

My feet bare on the red tiling, playing with some balloons and a little toy trumpet;

I'm working on
THE END OF THE WORLD.

I started these notes on the little sunny balcony at Marrakesh with in front of me the tall cocoa-colored tower of the Koutoubia, banded with peacock color, surmounted by three gilded balls, each smaller than the other; and beyond, the snowy ranges of the high Atlas; I'm finishing it in Mogador in a shutin street of houses white as clabber where footsteps resound loud above the continual distant pound of the surf. It's the time of afternoon prayer and the voice of the muezzin flashes like brass from the sky announcing that there is no god but God and that Mahomet is the prophet of God; and I'm leaving at six in the morning and there's nothing ahead but wheels and nothing behind but wheels. O Thos. Cook and Son, who facilitate travel with long ribbons of tickets held between covers by an elastic, what spells did you cast over the children of this century? The mischief in those names: Baghdad Bahn, Cape to Cairo, Trans-Siberian, Compagnie des Wagons Lits et des Grands Expresses Européens, Grand Trunk, Christ of the Andes; Panama Canal, mechanical toy that Messrs. Roosevelt and Goethals managed to make work when everyone else had failed, a lot of trouble for the inhabitants of the two Americas you have damned up within your giant locks. The flags, the dollars and Cook's tours marching round the world till they meet themselves coming back. Here in Morocco you can see them hour by hour mining the minaret where the muezzin chants five times a day his superb defiance of the multiple universe.

If there weren't so many gods, tin gods, steel gods, gods of uranium and manganese, living gods—here's Mrs. Besant rigging a new Jesus in Bombay, carefully educated at Oxford for the rôle—red gods of famine and revolution, old gods laid up in libraries, plaster divinities colored to imitate coral at Miami, spouting oilgods at Tulsa, Okla., we too might be able to sit on our prayercarpets in the white unchangeable sunshine of Islam which means resignation. The sun of our generation has broken out in pimples, its shattered light flickers in streaks of uneasy color. Take the train, they're selling happiness in acre lots in Florida. So we must run across the continents always deafened by the grind of wheels, by the roar of airplane motors, wallow in all the seas with the smell of hot oil in our nostrils and the throb of the engines in our blood. Out of the Babel of city piled on city, continent on continent, the world squeezed small and pulled out long, bouncing like a new rubber ball, we get what? Certainly not peace. That is why in this age of giant machines and scuttle-headed men it is a good thing to have a little music. We need sons of Homer going about the world beating into some sort of human rhythm the shrieking hullabaloo, making us less afraid.

XIII. KIF

Gare St. Lazare. A man is sitting by the window of a restaurant eating alphabet soup. Outside through the twilight sifting pink sand over the grey-pilastered station, green omnibuses blunder, taxis hysterically honk, girls and young men with white twilight faces come up out of the Metro; there is a redfaced woman selling roses, a man with a square black beard unfolds
Paris-Soir.
From seaweed-garnished counters spread with seafood: oysters, scallops, seaurchins, mussels, clams, lobsters, snails, shrimps, prawns comes a surging tidal smell of the horizon. The man by the window of the restaurant eating alphabet soup against his will stirs the letters slowly with his spoon. Seven letters have come to the surface—GO SOUTH. Resolutely he eats them. Stirs with his spoon again; two letters left—G.O.

What was the story of the Irishman with the false teeth who was a spy for the British Intelligence who was eating alphabet soup in the little restaurant at the back of the mosque of Nouri Osmanieh in Stamboul? He was shot by a woman supposed to be a Russian and they said he had read his doom in the alphabet soup. Why are there always so many X's in alphabet soup?

Among the crowds going in and out of the station stalk long resounding words of twilight. The city of gleaming asphalt is flat and tiny, desert under the last scaring expansion of the summer day.

The other station is full of light, a refuge from the empty dusk. The train is packed with people and valises. In the nick of time I slip into the eighth seat in a third-class compartment. There is not room in the compartment for sixteen legs of assorted sexes, for sixteen perspiring arms. In the aisle you can stand up and smoke and see the suburbs of Paris, devastated and smouldering with dusk, at last decently buried by the advancing night. The train rakes up a picturebook landscape with inquisitive fingers of light as it rattles along wailing like a banshee. The trucks rumbling over the rails sing a jiggly song: Mort aux vaches aux vaches aux vaches. Mort aux
VACHES.