la juerga
alas the young buck from Bilbao the one with the diamond ring suffers amidships (westbound the ancient furies follow in our wake) a kick from Venus’s dangerous toe retires to bed we take our coffee in his cabin instead of the fumoir the ladies interest themselves in his plight
two gallegos loosemouthed frognecked itinerant are invited up from the steerage to sing to the guitar (Vichy water and deep song argyrol rhymes with rusiñol)
si quieres qu’el carro cante
mójele y déjele en rio
que después de buen moja’o
canta com’ un silbí’o
and funny stories a thousand and one Havana nights the dance of the millions the fair cubanas a ellas les gustan los negros
but stepping out on deck to get a breath of briny afternoon there’s more to be seen than that rusty freighter wallowing in indigo el rubio the buck from Bilbao who has no diamond ring beset with yelling cubans la bella leads with heaving breast a small man with grey sideburns is pushed out at el rubio they shove at him from behind
escándalo
alternately the contestants argue with their friends who hold them back break loose fly at each other with threshing arms are recaptured pulled apart
shipsofficers intervene
pale and trembling the champions are led away he of the sideburns to the ladies’ drawingroom el rubio aft to the fumoir
there we masticate the insults what was it all about? no señor no el rubio grabs a sheet of the notepaper of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique but fingers refuse to hold the pen while he twined them in his long curly hair an unauthorized observer who had become involved in the broil misspelled glibly to his dictation
a challenge
and carried it frozenfaced to the parties in the ladies’ drawingroom coño
then we walk el rubio back and forth across the palpitating stern discuss rapiers pistols fencingpractice
now only the westbound observer appears at meals el rubio mopes at the end of the bunk of his beclapped friend and prepares for doom the ship’s agog with dueltalk until mon commandant a redfaced Breton visits all parties and explains that this kind of nonsense is expressly forbidden in the regulations of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and that the musical gallegos must go back to the steerage from whence they sprang despair
enter with martial tread mi general expert he says in affairs of honor un militar coño vamos may he try to conciliate the parties
all to the fumoir where already four champagnebottles are ranked cozily iced in their whitemetal pails coño sandwiches are served mi general clears up the misunderstanding something about los negros and las cubanas overheard in the cabin of the bucks from Bilbao by listening vamos down the ventilator many things were that better were unsaid but in any case honor insulated by the ventilator was intact gingerly the champions take each others hands coño palmas sombreros música mi general is awarded the ear
in the steerage the gallegos sing and strum
el rubio at the bar confides to me that it was from la bella of the pink jabbing finger and the dainty ear at ventilators that he with the diamond ring received the
and that he himself has fears coño una puta indecente
arrival in Havana an opulentlydressed husband in a panamahat receives la bella the young bucks from Bilbao go to the Sevilla-Biltmore and I
dance of the millions or not lackofmoney has raised its customary head inevitable as visas
in the whirl of sugarboom prices in the Augustblistering sun yours truly tours the town and the sugary nights with twenty smackers fifteen eightfifty dwindling in the jeans in search of lucrative
and how to get to Mexico
or anywhere
Margo Dowling
Margo Dowling was sixteen when she married Tony. She loved the trip down to Havana on the boat. It was very rough but she wasn’t sick a minute; Tony was. He turned very yellow and lay in his bunk all the time and only groaned when she tried to make him come on deck to breathe some air. The island was in sight before she could get him into his clothes. He was so weak she had to dress him like a baby. He lay on his bunk with his eyes closed and his cheeks hollow while she buttoned his shoes for him. Then she ran up on deck to see Havana, Cuba. The sea was still rough. The waves were shooting columns of spray up the great rocks under the lighthouse. The young thinfaced third officer who’d been so nice all the trip showed her Morro Castle back of the lighthouse and the little fishingboats with tiny black or brown figures in them swinging up and down on the huge swells outside of it. The other side the pale caramelcolored houses looked as if they were standing up right out of the breakers. She asked him where Vedado was and he pointed up beyond into the haze above the surf. “That’s the fine residential section,” he said. It was very sunny and the sky was full of big white clouds.
By that time they were in the calm water of the harbor passing a row of big schooners anchored against the steep hill under the sunny forts and castles, and she had to go down into the bilgy closeness of their cabin to get Tony up and close their bags. He was still weak and kept saying his head was spinning. She had to help him down the gangplank.
The ramshackle dock was full of beadyeyed people in white and tan clothes bustling and jabbering. They all seemed to have come to meet Tony. There were old ladies in shawls and pimplylooking young men in straw hats and an old gentleman with big bushy white whiskers wearing a panamahat. Children with dark circles under their eyes got under everybody’s feet. Everybody was yellow or coffee-colored and had black eyes, and there was one greyhaired old nigger-woman in a pink dress. Everybody cried and threw up their arms and hugged and kissed Tony and it was a long time before anybody noticed Margo at all. Then all the old women crowded around kissing her and staring at her and making exclamations in Spanish about her hair and her eyes and she felt awful silly not understanding a word and kept asking Tony which his mother was, but Tony had forgotten his English. When he finally pointed to a stout old lady in a shawl and said la mamá she was very much relieved it wasn’t the colored one.
If this is the fine residential section, Margo said to herself when they all piled out of the streetcar, after a long ride through yammering streets of stone houses full of dust and oily smells and wagons and mulecarts, into the blisteringhot sun of a cobbled lane, I’m a milliondollar heiress.
They went through a tall doorway in a scabby peeling pinkstucco wall cut with narrow barred windows that went right down to the ground, into a cool rankishsmelling vestibule set with wicker chairs and plants. A parrot in a cage squawked and a fat piggy little white dog barked at Margo and the old lady who Tony had said was la mamá came forward and put her arm around her shoulders and said a lot of things in Spanish. Margo stood there standing first on one foot and then on the other. The doorway was crowded with the neighbors staring at her with their monkeyeyes.
“Say, Tony, you might at least tell me what she’s saying,” Margo whined peevishly. “Mother says this is your house and you are welcome, things like that. Now you must say muchas gracias, mamá.” Margo couldn’t say anything. A lump rose in her throat and she burst out crying.
She cried some more when she saw their room, a big dark alcove hung with torn lace curtains mostly filled up by a big iron bed with a yellow quilt on it that was all spotted with a brown stain. She quit crying and began to giggle when she saw the big cracked chamberpot with roses on it peeping out from under.
Tony was sore. “Now you must behave very nice,” he said. “My people they say you are very pretty but not wellbred.”