(1) To send the South Americans a traveling exhibition of El Grecos, Murillos, Velasquez, Goyas, that our millionaires through their agents and dealers had swiped from the S.A.'s Spanish forebears—just to show them we owned the cream of their artistic output. N-a-a-a-h—
(2) A traveling exhibition of Puritan portraits, seventeen of which the museum director who presented that precious thought believed were available. (This was a conference on contemporary American art—remember?)
(3) An interchange of scholarships for fine arts professors to explain the work from lantern slides of our untraveled, unclothed, and underfed sculptors and painters
—and thus through a hundred and forty-seven more assorted museum directors, curators, art directors, art critics, scholars.
That conference ended as far as I was concerned with the longest drink of excellent Scotch and the shortest dab of soda I'd ever had—at a garden party given at a sumptuous estate in fashionable Georgetown. All the conference had been invited. At the resplendent open-air bar, as I bemoaned the fact with one of the other sculptors that none of the plastic artists present had been recognized by the chairman of the conference to state the contemporary artists' point of view, a footman had been pouring Scotch into the immense glass I held, waiting for me to say "when," and since I'd been busy bemoaning and couldn't figure out how he could get the Scotch back into his empty bottle, I asked for a dab of soda which he floated on top—"No ice, please"—and I wandered around those magnificent gardens sipping that quart of Scotch until it was dark, and I went home.
The brochures I received were a resume of that conference and could be handed out by these deflated but intellectually resuscitated Argentinian officials on the street comers of their main cities. . . .
Of course, I refer to the first series of brochures that were sent, not the later ones, which were sent after I had received a questionnaire listing thirty or forty subjects the State Department seems to think was taken up at their conference, and I was asked to check which of those I was interested in. I checked Art—and Scholarship Exchange—whereupon I received with some regularity the second series of brochures. They were headed for immediate release and told me that Dr. Yolda D'Costa Armaradillo, third assistant curator of medieval needlepoint of the San Del Amalga Museum, had arrived in the United States of North America (or had made his escape and was soon due to arrive) on an exchange Fine Arts Scholarship grant. Of course, I was always glad to hear that, but I couldn't understand what it had to do with me, and they never told what third assistant curator of medieval needlepoint from which museum they sent down there in trade for the Doctor— or did they send, say, two fourth assistant curators of seventeenth-century Castilian lace in exchange, to carry on the aims of the Conference on Contemporary Plastic Art?
So, it's the first series of brochures I suggest which should be passed out, and—who can tell?—our brothers and sisters in the Argentine might learn to love us for ourselves alone, and not for two pesos.
I waited at the end of the line going up to the Captain's deck with my seaman's passport to be checked out of Ingeniero White. I had dashed back to my cabin and got a clean pair of shorts on, just in case we were to have another physical checkup, and I'd intended to ask the doctor to look at my tonsils—en passant. They'd been troubling me lately. But the uniformed officials, after rolling through their long papers, finally found their reference to my earlier entry into Argentina—though when they asked me if I was "Luis Slopotzwiski" with a Spanish accent, no less, I just blinked—until Captain Brandt barked at me and I said I was, so they stamped my passport, and that's all. No physical checkup. Whatever we picked up in their country we could have free. One of our guys got plenty.
From all that ceremony up on the Captain's deck it was clear to the older guys in the crew that this was our last port in Argentina. They doubted whether we'd pick up any cargo—or ballast either—before we hit Montevideo, if we stopped there, or even further up the coast. Mush wasn't the only guy with a worried look when we got out beyond the smooth water of the harbor.
The wind was up and there was quite a heavy sea. Our empty hull bobbed dizzily on the point of every good-sized wave that came along. We'd plow ahead for a few minutes and then, lifted on the crest of one of those big babies, our propeller, clear of the water, churned helplessly in the air with the sound of a gigantic old-fashioned coffee grinder.
We went about our business glumly. The cargo booms had been lowered into their big collars while we were in port and the cables and other rigging stowed away. There was a little consolation in the contemplation the stuff hadn't been stowed away permanently and lay around as if there were plans to rig those booms again to take on cargo or maybe sand for ballast.
There was no question the crew was worried, not only Mush—with his lugubrious mug dragging on the deck with that "all is lost, Mother" expression. It seemed to me every time we rode high and our propeller whipped the air, of course, everybody's heart jumped up into his throat, and as we settled back into the water, we swallowed in unison. But Mush's heart must have bounded higher than that, because I'm sure I saw his popeyes pushed out into space until I could see the intricate red muscular structure that held his eyeballs in their sockets— a definite indication of palpitating pressure from within, and it wasn't only the wind that lifted his hat.
Then there was Perry, his eyes crossing and recrossing with rage as he was banged around on the heaving deck for the few minutes he did any work—the A.B.'s were back on watch, their regular stall.
He would mutter his bitter chant through a corner of his tight lips—on the lousy miserable asininity of the lousy brass-polishin' Mate, etc.—and "just wait till we hit port."
There was another audible contributor to our general misery—the fat Sailing Man who, now that we were out at sea, was his old, bellowing, sloppy self again. We day men had found the easiest and quickest way to move gear around that ship was to load, drape, and hang the various units (such as coils of cable, line, block and fall, etc.) on the old Sailing Man as he stood scowling and viciously cursing the Swede Mate. When he was all loaded down like a fat, double-trunked Christmas tree, he'd shuffle stiffly off with the rest of us holding up the loose ends so they wouldn't catch on the deck and throw him—our tangled ambulating Maypole, with a calliope attachment.
The officers standing on the upper decks heard him, but he was never ordered to pipe down. Maybe his loud-mouthed critical survey of their incompetence was just. I wasn't enough of a seaman to know, and their consciences wouldn't permit them to clamp down on him. But I didn't understand how they permitted his descriptive adjectives, participles and such attribute compliments!
Midships was worried too. Time and again we could see all three Mates (when two of them at least should have been off watch and asleep) up on the open bridge in consultation with Captain Brandt—and old One-Ton, the Chief Engineer, would be up there with them too, with his broken arm in a sling. I can't imagine how he made it. He had enough difficulty when he had two arms to help him negotiate those ladders. Maybe one of his ingenious black gang had rigged up an individual elevator in the form of an immense Bos'n's chair and hoisted him up through the fidley.
They stood up on that bridge and when the ship rolled they'd all not only have themselves to keep upright but they'd all make a wild scramble for One-Ton. His one puny good arm clinging to the rail wasn't enough to keep him from crashing up on that bridge deck.