Planus (17 page)

'Mammy,' I said to the fat pianist, who had sat down beside me and looked like one of those damned and drunken souls you meet so often in London pubs, though she was trying to pass herself off as a respectable lady who had fallen on hard times and was now burdened with responsibility for her girls, 'Mammy, you understand, we're carrying off the whole band. Have you got digs somewhere? Let's go there and have a drink and play some music.'

'Impossible, dear. We have an engagement. We are on duty till two in the morning. My girls are respectable.. . .'

'Of course, Adelaide, my old darling, everyone knows you never accept a drink from a strange man. But wait a minute while I pour some whisky into your glass, and we'll see if it doesn't trickle out of your eyes as champagne. Hurry up, we'll wait if we have to, and then we'll all go off and have a booze-up.'

The orchestra mounted the rostrum again and the five women played with
brio
the
William Tell
overture, whose imitative but poetic harmonies, and the exaggerated, high-flown sentiments it generates always delight a
petit bourgeois
audience. The real beauties of this skilful music pass unnoticed.

'Dandle, dandle, dandle . . .' sang Ginger during every intermission, when the women came to our table for a drink. Ginger always managed to keep the bottle balanced on his head an,d the audience applauded his antics. Then they called for more music. After another symphonic work there was a harp session, then the 'cellist played a piece by Chopin, and Will-o'-the-wisp played a Paganini solo, bringing it off very well, though somewhat exhaustedly, with a heart-rending anguish in the clef, and Mammy, by popular request, burped out some sentimental vocals at the piano.

When it was growing late and the tables were slowly emptying, more numbers on the trumpet were called for, and the trumpeter, a chubby, bosomy little blonde with a mop of curls, performed like a clown, virtuoso of the trumpet, the clarinet, the flute, the bassoon, and made us die of laughter with the tearful notes she managed to draw out of the
cor anglais
and the sliding, unexpected effects she drew from the wind instruments. At last the hour struck and we were able to leave, the double bass player, a hunchback, supporting the Bulgar.

The three top floors of the building were occupied by a hotel, the

Albergo del Vapore, and this was where the women lived. Our musicians' roost was at the very top and, like many old houses in Genoa, consisted of an enormous drawing-room and a loggia with triple arches on the facade. It was on this airy terrace, overlooking the port and giving a splendid view out to sea, that we installed ourselves: crazy women, drunken sailors, bottles emptying rapidly, instruments harmonizing and pouring out — even more than the bottles — love, sentiment, poetry, making the soul, the heart and the body brim over, all equally carefree and fanciful. Our sonorous and noisy orgy was to last a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, and during that time all lovers of
bel canto,
of laughter, wine and instrumental music, of gluttony and lively chatter or dirty jokes, could climb up from the street and join in, and all this was paid for, as well as a heavy fine for the quintet having broken their contract, by the incomparable Paragon pearl from my Isfahan cane, while the other two pearls, the two Princesses of splendid lustre, set as earrings, gleamed softly either side of the relaxed face of the moppet, Will-o'-the-wisp, who was rested at last and happy. I had dressed her like an Edwardian schoolgirl in a simple little plum-coloured dress, with a little round hat on her head, her pretty hair tied back in a great bow, a narrow white collar round her neck, and high boots, and as she sat like a good little girl in the fiacre that took me to the station (for I was off on my travels again) her resemblance to my dear cousin Rosy became more and more distressing at every turn of the wheel: 'Dearest, promise me you'll always keep those pearls, not as a keepsake for me, but because they'll bring you luck.'

Farewell, farewell to music! ...

I was not destined to conquer Paris on this occasion.

What did I know about it? After some time I fell more and more a prey to poetry, and I tore up my poems, tore them up as fast as I wrote them. What could I know? (page 14114)

At Toulon the usual bunch of sailors on leave got into the train, spread themselves out in the various carriages, sang, drank and heckled each other; at Marseille, as always, there was a scrimmage; at Avignon a young woman came into the carriage with dozens of little parcels and a beautiful baby in her arms. At Lyon and Laroche I saw nothing except this young woman, ensconced on the seat facing me, as, with a thousand delicate precautions, little gestures of modesty, and a divinely human smile, she gave her breast to her child; her scattered and bulging parcels contained napkins, compresses, feeding bottles, toilet articles, sponge, talcum powder, cotton wool, ointment, crepe bandages, nappy pins and a bottle of eau-de- Vals.

I was suckled on the black nipple of an Egyptian fellah, and I wonder to what extent the ass's milk from this buxom wet-nurse instilled into me an age-old taste for death, its cult and its mysteries? I say the
taste,
meaning that which is most unconscious in the heredity of a race, a coloured race, to whom, like Moses (but then the Hebrew did not drink of their milk), I have remained a stranger....

Paris .. . Paris. .. .

'All change!'

What a book one could write about all those young unknowns who came to conquer Paris, from Victor Hugo to Juliette Drouet, from La Paiva to Offenbach, from Captain Dreyfus or Mata Hari to Field-Marshal Joffre, from Willy to Colette and from Coco Chanel to Pierre Reverdy, from Monsieur Ritz, Saint-Exupery to that quilted star stitched into the sky of Paris, this cradle, which not even a jet-propelled, supersonic aircraft could cross, from
Petit Chose
to
Sappho
, from poetry to action! This is not literature, it is life. My life. Their life. The lives of all of us.
De profundis.

NOTES
(for the unknown reader)

1.

2.

In this way, the crystallization of my recollections around a phantasm may have falsified the chronological account of events, but these events were real enough and took place just as I have described them, although I cannot specify the exact year.

3.

4.

   'Effortlessly absorbing knowledge, they adapt marvellously to new situations. They are liable to change their employment frequently, or else their career, which is under the 'transformation' sign, will constantly renew itself in different aspects. Brilliant success is likely in the running of a restaurant.

'Their lives are based on these four words: Knowledge, Will, Daring, Silence.' — Abel Leiga

3. Dear Gerard de Nerval, man of the crowds, night-prowler, unrepentant dreamer, neurasthenic lover of the little theatres of the capital and the great necropoli of the Orient, architect of Solomon's temple, translator of Faust, private secretary to the Queen of Sheba, Druid and sage, tender vagabond of the Ile-de-France, last of the Valois, golden-tongued child of Paris, you hanged yourself from a grating after launching your poetry towards the sky, against which your shadow sways and grows unceasingly between Notre- Dame and Saint-Merry, your fiery Chimeres which traverse this square of sky in all directions like six wild and wonderful comets. By calling upon the New Spirit, you have disturbed forever the modern sensibility: no man today can live without this anguish:

9)

In the darkness of the tomb, O my comforter,

Restore to me Posilippo and the Italian sea,

The flower that delighted my grieving heart,

And the arbour where the vine-branch and the rose entwine.

ii: 5-8)

4. The other day was my sixtieth birthday, and it is only today, as I draw towards the end of the present work, that I begin to believe in my vocation as a writer. . . .Rotterdam
To Henry Miller

In memory of the poverty he was struggling with in Paris when I knew him, at the beginning of the second third of the twentieth century, and to remind him of the teeming inferno of a capital and its lower depths, in the desert of Big Sur, California (USA), where he was confined on his return from Greece in 1940, a desert as dreadful, and as full of minerals, as that of Nitrie in Egypt, where, in the year 340, at Pispir, the Holy Fathers inaugurated the anchorite life in an attempt to 'climb up to God'. Their leader was Saint Anthony, that hermit who cried out in his prayers: 'O Sun, why dost thou trouble me?'

With the hand of friendship,

Blaise Cendrars

Every capital in the world has its days of feasting or its nights of folly : carnival week in Rio de Janeiro; the three days of San Pedro in Mexico; New Year's Eve in New York, where the Negroes from Harlem invade Broadway with bells and rattles whose clamour is amplified by the canyon-like walls of the skyscrapers, or in Peking, where the Chinese, rich and poor alike, let off firecrackers and release over the countryside outside the walls, which resembles a vast cemetery wallowing in the mud, their incendiary fire-kites in honour of the Dragon of the Sky; Piedigrotta in Naples, a day and night of popular feasting, with a grand song contest, processions, tarantellas, and a torchlight tattoo, which never ends without a sensational murder; in Marseille and Limoges, Good Friday and Saint Martial's day, the day when the butcher-boys go on the spree; all the nights the Good Lord has given us in Montmartre, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Shanghai, in the bars and dance-halls, brilliantly lit up and more numerous than the Saints' days in the calendar, when suddenly, amongst the constellations of ice-buckets, the popping of champagne-corks and the glug-glug of adulterated whisky, a bloody battle flares up amongst the swaying dancers, and accounts are settled between gangsters, night-club hostesses, drug addicts, pimps, prostitutes, apprentice burglars and young drug pushers, in a sudden black-out; days and nights of madness when it is safer to go out with a revolver in your pocket, and this is what Peter Van der Keer, the ship's writer, recommended me to do when the ship docked in Rotterdam, on that Christmas Eve.

'Come with me. We'll spend Christmas Eve at my sister's. But don't forget to slip your revolver into your pocket because, on the way back, we'll have to pass through the Jordaan, and the whole district will be in an uproar, celebrating. It's traditional to have a brawl tonight, a great brawl, a Christmas brawl! We may have to fight our way back to the ship.'

It was my last voyage on the
Volturno,
destination New York, where I was to leave the ship and settle on dry land.

We had been the last to leave the Baltic before the convoys formed up behind the Russian ice-breakers, at Libau, our port of

i45

embarkation, and the onslaught of the cold on the high seas, and then in the North Sea, where we had been diverted to Rotterdam to take on some kind of cargo, had been so intense that the ship, emerging from the thick fog to tie up at the quay, looked like a vessel from some Arctic expedition, the bows caparisoned and the deck coated with a thick sheet of ice, all the ship's tackle knotted with dripping stalactites, the crew frozen stiff and grumbling, stretchers stacked up on the port quarter (for some of the immigrants and two or three members of the crew had suffered falls and there were a number of arms and legs broken), and the disabled cursing and blaspheming and growling in the cold, impatient to take their places in the ambulances lined up on the dock, and to leave that accursed ship for the peace and quiet of hospital.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Darkness was falling swiftly. The arc-lamps were lighting up erratically. Floodlights were being set up. Ropes and cables were being unwound. The hawsers had been made fast. Already stevedores of the night shift were coming aboard and being swallowed up by the open holds which gave off a hot and pestilential breath. They would have to hurry. We were to sail at four in the morning. There was a great scurrying to and fro on the gangway. Behind the docks, the cranes, the masts, the factory chimneys, and above the rooftops, a yellowish fog, a veritable pea- souper, was dripping soot and making poultices of the snow fallen from the window-ledges and blown off the gables by the first squalls of a southwester. It was beginning to thaw. Our feet squelched and slithered in the mud, and the sky itself seemed to flounder in muddy water; the ribbons on our caps, the tails of our raincoats and the hoods of our reefer-jackets flapped in the wind like the banks of low cloud that ripped apart and tore themselves out of the sky, dripping constantly.

Rotterdam, one of the most cheerless and gloomy ports in existence, was more forbidding than ever. Only Van der Keer wore a cheerful smile, for it had been years and years since he had had the chance to set foot in his own country. It seemed to him too complicated to visit his folk from Antwerp, our home-port, and besides, it would have meant his taking the train, a humiliation for a lad who had left his village at the age of fourteen to become a sailor and see the world.

•You see,' Peter said to me, 'it's nearly ten years since I left home. The old folks have died in the meantime. I have only one sister, she's married and she's got children, her husband works on the railway; every time we come into port, I buy toys for the kids, because I knew I'd come back one day and see my nephews and nieces, but I don't know how many little ones Hanna has had.

Don't worry though, we'll be welcome even if there are more than half a dozen of them, because I've got a sackful of toys, and no ordinary toys either, they're exotic knick-knacks, Japanese dolls and Mexican clay figures for the Christmas crib, some big Polynesian fetishes and some silly little Negroes with a bit of mirror in their stomachs, shell necklaces and glass beads, and some Indian birds with dazzling plumage that you can hang up on an invisible thread, and they seem to fly because the least draught makes them spin, frogs from Guatemala that croak and turn somersaults when you wind up the elastic coil in their stomachs, and some splendid little clockwork cars I bought for the boys last time I was in New York. Hey, you know, we're going to have a jolly good time! I'll be delighted to see the family again. Hurry up, are you coming?'