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"Huh?—Nord?—Yeh—yes, ma'am. North American, of course. You see, this—"

But she wasn't listening to me any more. She had turned her head and spoken quietly to the group around her, at one side and then the other. They looked at me with a sneer and then, wrinkling up their noses as if there was a bad smell, they slowly broke up and walked back into the Teatro, looking over their shoulders at me as they went. The ushers had gathered into small glowering groups, their hands clasped behind their backs, and they watched me menacingly until I left the lobby of the Teatro Colon and gently closed the big doors that opened to the street.

Out in the safety of the cold, wet darkness I ran. Vaguely, I remembered the crowded streets and the dark, uniformed traffic cops topped by their spiked German helmets wearing large, white gloves and directing the crowds with their enameled white billies. I reached the railroad station with plenty of time and sat around waiting for that 10:30 train to Rio Santiago. Joe's watch was a little fast.

The trip back was colder and longer than that beer-studded journey to Buenos Aires that noon. The coach was heated by a pot-bellied stove at one end. A couple of naval cadets kept feeding it lumps of wood, but the wind blowing through that cracked wooden coach never let the heat accumulate. I must have dozed off—I can't remember much about my trip back from the Paris of the Western Hemisphere. I was happy to crawl into my dry bunk aboard the S.S. Hermanita. Never again on that trip did I try to have anything but a sailor's night out when I went ashore

19. Fo'castle Waltz

THE NIGHT BEFORE WE SHIPPED SOUTH FROM RIO SANTIAGO everybody was almost broke. We had exhausted our credit with Captain Brandt, and no one dared ask him for any further advance. We pooled our resources. Joe slid his cap along the supper table and we all dug up our last crumpled pesos and centavos and dropped them in. It made a small pile on the table when we counted up the money. It didn't amount to much. He pocketed it and went ashore. After a while he came back to the fo'castle where we waited for him, loaded down with twenty-two bottles of vino, a number of long loaves of bread, and a package of sliced, smoked ham. Joe had done well with the money and we were all proud of him.

It was quite a shindig—that fo'castle party. All the deck crew were in it and only Scotty and Birdneck from the black gang and Philip from the mess crew. Toward the end of the evening old Pat, the oiler, came in and sat in a corner, drunk and glowing. He'd been ashore drinking alone as usual The Bos'n stuck his head into the door later, too, and told us to quiet down and took a drink with us.

We had good wine. After the second coffee-cup full of that staining red-purple aniline, it tasted good—though its goodness lasted only while we were going up the hill of hilarity. When we'd rounded the bend of saturation the wine was like any other I've ever known—a dread, sour obligation. And we had good food, though we didn't want to eat. We had just finished supper, but we all felt duty bound to scramble about filling big hunks of bread with ham after a drink or two It was good ham. I never heard anyone ever say any ham was bad (a bit on the salty side, perhaps, or a mite briny or just a little stringy—but never bad). I'm not a ham addict. To me— and this sort of thing, I know, brings on pogroms-ham is al-ways a dull, dry, and distinctly flat-flavored meat.

There are many sections of the pig I prefer—hocks, ribs, snout, tail, and an occasional chop that has not been fried to a burnt sienna cinder or a greasy undercooked slab of trichinosis. I know—I know. There's Westphalian, Polish, Smithfield, Virginia—and I've recently met up with a Smithsonian ham.

A few summers ago a good friend of mine drove me down to Philadelphia to a big sculpture exhibition we'd both been invited to. I'd have preferred to have taken the train down because even more than long train trips I hate long auto rides. I piled in with him and his family and we rattled along through the hot afternoon and pulled up to the museum that housed the exhibit, tired, thirsty and bladderful, about sunset.

A local artist, an old friend of my friend, was leaving the show as we came along. He insisted we come over to his house for a drink and a spot of dinner and then we'd all return to the show for the reception in the evening. We drove off with him— some twenty odd miles out of the city back toward New York to his place. And needless to say, we never returned to see that show so I never saw my sculpture in place and have no adequate excuse why that piece was not sold during that exhibit—or since.

His place was one of those modem arty houses so fussed over and so original I felt, as I always do in such surroundings, that I was one of the lesser motifs in a picture hung in a non-objective show. Outside of some crudely painted atrocious deep-sea fish that goggled at you, the bathroom functioned normally. Though there was a disturbing and perfectly killing musical accompaniment that came with the toilet paper—a gentle tinkle of a Swiss music box and the toilet seat jingled Ravel's Bolero in a rising crescendo.

The artist, our host, after giving us a few niggardly drinks of lukewarm watered Scotch, worked up a castor-oily looking dressing which he poured over a tremendous salad of chickory, cucumbers and radishes, none of which I can digest. It looked tremendous because of the springy rising curl to the chicory, and we sat down to a five-sided table to dinner. Perhaps I should mention that our host had made this table himself. He was wonderful—he carved, worked terra cotta, designed furniture, painted, wove, embroidered—and there were many examples of his craft around. In fact, the whole house was full of it, but I didn't like any of it. Seems to me it was ausgekvecht —tasteless, senseless, and unpleasant—but different.

That table we sat down to on three-legged, five-legged, two-legged benches and chairs, had five sides, all different. It was roughly the shape of a lopsided coffin.

The piece de resistance of our dinner was to be a ham. All the way out to the house he had talked of this wonderful ham— how they got it, when they did, and the taste— tiens, tiens!

The ham was brought to the table. It was mainly a large mis-colored bone with a little wart of mahogany-tinted meat at one end. Our host whittled off a few slivers of it and served. As we gnawed at the fibrous, tasteless stuff he told us the history of that ham: how long it had lain buried in a pit of lime, sulphur (and molasses?) and the ash of good Carolinian white pine. How it was brought north—his wife had kinfolk down south (remember they're clannish and would never release such a treasure to any but their own flesh and blood). How long it lay in their cellar ripening and ripening and ripening, with a cut lemon resting on it. That lemon was to keep away the rats!

We were told we should have seen that lemon when they finally decided to carve and scrape away the sulphurous green mold and cook this ham. I had wetted down, ground up, and swallowed my chip of this venerable historic lump of decayed schweinefleisch and decided, as I did again in Rio Santiago and I do now, ham is dull. Bring on the Cossacks.

After the Hamites had sputtered their delight in that Argentine version of their favorite food, we called for music. The fat Sailing Man with shreds of ham dripping from his chin roared a chanty. We shouted him down and called for Chips. With some ceremony Chips brought out his beautiful, silver-inlaid, four-hundred-dollar accordion. But before he could get started on his regular march, Scotty had started a whirling fling on his harmonica and he hopped a sword dance over a couple of mop handles crossed on the deck. When he'd exhausted himself with his blowing and dancing, big Joe did one of his Island songs and hula'd. Everybody gave him room and he wiggled his path up and down the narrow fo'castle.