Our ship—a British freighter that hauled Christmas trees and small machinery from New York Harbor down through the Antilles to South America and up the Amazon—had scarcely left Pier B in Red Hook when an amusing fight broke out between the occupants of one of her two cabins. Since it was I who occupied the other (at the behest of the travel associations, I was composing a brochure on freighter travel), and I liked things to myself, I had no wish to alter our arrangements, nor was I—I’ll be candid—in the least anxious that these natural enemies escape each other, since the forty-day voyage that lay ahead promised little enough in the way of entertainment.
Horace, shrill with good cheer in the Lord, was a Baptist missionary returning to his glum flock in the jungle. The morose Hassid, a Lebanese merchant who shrugged constantly, resignedly, in awareness of the whole world’s weight on his soft shoulders, was impelled by a sallow destiny toward Belém, at the river’s mouth, where customs required that he appear in person with his wares—television sets and small refrigerators, together with two gigantic outboard motors. Hassid was fluent in four languages, having traveled widely in the world—the sure mark of a fly-by-night in the eyes of Horace, who had traveled scarcely anywhere beyond Mato Grosso and east Tennessee. In response to the missionary’s brash inquiries regarding his religious affiliations, “if any,” Hassid mentioned a Protestant grandmother, a Freemason father, and a lingering acquaintance with the Church in Rome. Horace referred to this suspicious figure as “the Turk,” making it a point never to use his name, while Hassid used his tormentor’s name at every opportunity, deeming this sufficiently insulting.
The Baptist was a sprightly boyish sort with a snap-on pink bow tie. For hours at a time he hunched over his new shortwave radio, “awaiting orders from on High,” his roommate said, although all he was doing, I’d discovered, was crooning accompaniment to the latest tunes from Finland and Cambodia.
“Enjoys music,” I assured Hassid. “He’s quite harmless.”
“He is very harmful to me,” Hassid snarled.
These cabin mates’ one common bond had placed them instantly in competition, and our first meal was a sorrowful affair. Just recently the Lebanese had suffered the removal of an abscess from his nose, which he stroked continuously, his moist brown eyes appealing for commiseration. The missionary, not to be outdone, described in detail to the table—where sat at that moment, in addition to ourselves, the First Mate and the Chief Engineer, observing the new passengers in some alarm—the even more recent excision of some pesky hemorrhoids, a triumph over the Forces of Darkness for which he gave full credit to the Lord. Horace had an odd squawking voice and a sudden shrieking laugh perhaps more pleasing to the Antichrist than to his Maker. Uttered now for no apparent reason, it confounded the poor Levantine, who took his slighted nose into both of his soft hands and peered through his ringed fingers at his shipmate.
“What is it you call yourself?” the Turk hissed finally. “Horse ass?”
“Hor-ace,” said Horace. “An upright Christian name.”
“With a W?” Hassid inquired archly, directing this question to me. He winked just to bedevil Horace, knowing the missionary would not acknowledge such a joke even if he got it. From that point on, as the friend of these two enemies, I served them as both referee and foil, tossing in small provocations just to keep things lively.
“Turk,” mused Horace, chewing carefully.
“Whore-ass,” Hassid murmured here and there during the meal, shaking his head in gloomy wonderment, while the two Britons huddled over their food.
OUR SHIP SAILED OUT that evening into North Atlantic storms, and by next day Hassid’s soiled complexion had turned sickly. Propped up at the mess table, he looked embalmed. At the noon meal, Horace informed him that he looked “poorly,” at which Hassid put his whole face in his hands. “I been noticin them li’l beads of sweat on yo’ upper lip,” Horace continued, just before Hassid bolted from the table. “Smell that fish?”
Horace complained about the fish smell in the galley. He could not bear the sight or smell of fish. The Lord ate fish, I reminded him, stirring things up to rally Hassid, who was losing their struggle by default, but Horace put me nicely in my place.
“He probably liked it,” Horace said, and Hassid had the ingratitude to smile.
The Turk did his best to appear at meals, since the Chief had told him that food was the best cure for seasickness. The long days of rough seas had “knocked us back a bit,” in the Chief’s phrase. The slow pace exasperated Hassid when he was well enough to feel emotion, since he’d already missed a swifter ship owing to the operation on his nose. If he got “indisposed” even once again, he’d quit this ship of fools at the next port and fly to Belém.
“How to kill this time?” Hassid begged each day, rolling his soft eyes heavenward in supplication. “How to kill this time?” He was the only man I ever knew who tore his hair—I thought this habit had gone out of fashion. In fair weather, he crouched up in the bow, staring away toward southern destinies, in hope of nothing. The Chief responded to his ceaseless plaints by saying that a man had best be patient about arriving anywhere. “What is a day, a week, even a month, after all?” he once inquired—an old, sad, touching observation that the Turk misconstrued in his great misery as an affront.
The Chief was an amiable old Scot, gone bald and a bit bleary with hard use. Though scarcely garrulous, he doubtless was considered so by the First Mate, whom we never saw except across the table. The First was a rufous, blocky man who detested anything not known in Liverpool, but happily he talked little while he dined. Having stuffed his gob with thick bread gobbets until his soup was set before him, he proceeded doggedly through the little menu, taking all choices in the order listed, plate after plate, like somebody packing a bag. The one dish he would not consume was “American mutton,” a weekly entrée which lent our menu its one hint of international cuisine. (I asked him once what distinguished “American” mutton. “Different animal altogether,” huffed the First.)
In Bermuda, our first port of call, Horace passed the day at a small white table in an ice-cream parlor, writing sappy postcards to his wife and drinking soft, sweet drinks. Hassid sat with him, head in hands, in an ennui that would persist another fortnight, all the way, in fact, to Port-au-Prince. “Got your sea legs yet?” Horace would ask him every little while, and wink at me. I suggested reading as a cure, but the Turk’s sole interests were young girls and commerce. Reading, he said, made him nervous, and as it happened, a dislike of books was the one thing he and Horace would agree upon. Despite their enmity, he had acquired a taste for Horace’s company, having doubtless perceived that his dark dream of undoing this man’s moral superiority was all that stood between him and his monstrous boredom. For his part, the missionary clung to some fond hope of redeeming the sybaritic Turk, whom he preached to nightly.
And so, to amuse myself, I set one upon the other, confident that both secretly enjoyed this. “Their claws,” as someone once remarked of a somewhat more auspicious pair, “were set so deep into each other that if they pulled apart, they would soon bleed to death.”
BOUND FOR HAITI, our freighter trailed smoke south through the horse latitudes, where in other times dead horses were heaved overboard from ships becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. Horace, still cheerful to a fault, had held the upper hand on the bounding main of the North Atlantic, but in the pewter calms of the horse latitudes his companion began to stir into dull life, and ashore in Haiti, where seasickness no longer stayed him, Hassid moved very quickly to the fore. Scarcely had his slippered foot touched land—and land, moreover, where his favorite tongue was the official language—when he stood full-blown before us, a true bon vivant whose delicate French and urbane manner made him the natural leader of our little party. Who then if not the bold Turk dismissed Port-au-Prince as unworthy of our custom? No, no, quoth he, we would hire a conveyance and escape the sea, à la campagne, à la montagne! So enchanted was he by this inland prospect that he waved his arms in fine Gallic abandon, inadvertently inciting to near hysteria the hordes of jobless Haitians who rushed along with us, desperate to attend to every need.
The human din, the forceful smells, the ribald colors of the waterfront juxtaposed with grinding poverty and filth, drove Horace to condemn the Roman Church, which he blamed—with bitter looks at Hassid—for the plight of this beautiful, unhappy country. Politically oblivious, Hassid ignored him, having commenced dealings with a sober-suited native who had persevered so with his winks and hisses as to commend himself at last to the Turk’s attention. Even now our new Haitian acquaintance was revealing the existence of another friend, almost as dear to him as we were, who knew more about Haiti than anyone since Toussaint l’Ouverture. As luck would have it, this same friend was the master of a splendid car designed perfectly for whatever purpose les gentilshommes might have in mind. This friend, said he, might be engaged upon short notice, and sure enough, a spavined Ford came forward even as he spoke, honking and backfiring along the curb. Its clairvoyant chauffeur turned out to be none other than Charles (“Tous mes amis Americains m’appellent Shar-lie”), the international authority on Haiti, who swore he would place his awesome expertise at our disposal for a prix d’ami that was nothing short of laughable. In proof of this he laughed, more or less merrily, hurling his car door wide to show us in.
Gold-toothed and fragrant in a many-colored shirt, Charlie was as festive as Pierre was somber, and his black skin shone in the very places where Pierre’s old hide looked gray and dull. Adjusting his tone from the first instant to the whims of Hassid, he said, Yes! Yes! We would make a tour de ville, and afterward un petit séjour à la campagne, à la montagne—and afterward? Here Charlie permitted himself a discreet pause, an elevation of the eyebrow, recognized at once by the worldly Turk, who fetched poor Horace a whack across the back. It now transpired that Charlie’s rate had been set so ludicrously low owing to his confidence that après?… his new friends would refresh themselves at a private club of his acquaintance where nice clean girls of eighteen were awaiting us.
“Cloob?” Horace whimpered.
“Maison de rendezvous!” Hassid exulted, embarking at once on a spirited discussion of what lay in store for us. “They don’t call you Whore-ass for nothing!” he told the missionary—for my benefit, since Horace would never in a month of Sundays understand this subtle jeu de mot.
“Well, this boy’s not ronday-vooin at no durn cloob,” Horace hollered. “Gonna ronday-voo right back to that durn boat!”
Fearful—as I thought at first—of losing his advantage, the Turk assured the highly agitated missionary that this talk of cloobs meant nothing whatsoever. “I suppose I’m used to folks who speak the truth,” said Horace, with a sniff of pinch-nosed sanctimoniousness that collapsed Hassid in silent harem mirth. He had not seen Horace wink at me.
Negotiations concluded, we set off in Charlie’s car, accompanied by the glum Pierre, who wished to keep an eye on his investment. Honking his way up the main street, our guide stopped at every shop to extol its ethnic wares. Only Horace bought a few peculiar odds and ends, to perk up his mission in Brazil, and Charlie’s repute must have suffered in these places. Relieved to whisk us from the city, he drove off in a scattering of dogs and children for Pétionville, up in the mountains.
At a quaint hostelry decked in poinsettias, Charlie disappeared into the kitchen, hoping we would decide to eat while we awaited him. He did not bother his head about Pierre, who perched his cadaverous frame on a kind of dunce’s stool just by the doorway, the better to watch our consumption of lean steak and local greens. Even the hard heart of Hassid was touched by Pierre’s mournful demeanor, but our offer of sustenance was declined with dignity. He required no food for himself, Pierre intoned, but if we wished, he would accept a monetary offering with which he might hope to feed his hungry children.
Charlie emerged, wiping his mouth, and we drove on. Burping a little, he discoursed freely on the subject of the ex-slave Dessalines, as well as on Pétion, Henri Christophe, Toussaint l’Ouverture—“Dat is my hero à moi,” said Charlie, pointing at himself—and other champions of Haitian independence. Not infrequently during our journey, this enterprising man with the gold incisor would shout pow-pow-pow! in wild patriotic fervor, to demonstrate how the Haitians of old shot down the French. Why modern Haitians did not do as much for their modern despots he would not say.
From atop a mountain, we gazed down upon Port-au-Prince and the great Gulf of Gonave, assailed the while by five musicians who stepped from a bush to coax hideous sounds from hollow gourds and other unpromising implements. Our freighter, loading a cargo of grain meal across the bay, was a mere white speck in the blue distance. At a shop which enjoyed our guide’s unqualified approval, the curios, though more costly, were otherwise identical to those in Port-au-Prince—sisal and mahogany, real voodoo fetishes, real voodoo drums conveniently inscribed “Souvenir of Haiti,” stuffed hawksbill turtles, crafted seashells, and other useful Caribbean gewgaws. The whole display was enshrined on film by Horace, who made the tortuous journey down the mountain more exciting by shouting at Charlie to stop on each blind turn so that he might “snap” the bright-clothed native women, the fruit baskets and flower-bedecked burros, swaying down against the sky and distant sea.
SINCE CHARLIE had flattered us as types sportifs, we permitted him to transport us to the cockfights, which were held on Saturdays and Sundays in a rickety arena on the city’s outskirts. The vivid plumage of cock and man was intensified that afternoon by the tropic sun that came pouring like gold air through the slats as through a stained-glass window—or so, at least, I read aloud to Hassid from what I was writing on the “local color” page in my field Horace, diverted momentarily from the fights, the bets, the reek of cane liquor, the wicked happy laughs of “fallen women,” denounced my irreligious simile in no uncertain terms as he changed film.
“Should a missionary witness such things?” Hassid asked Horace. “Blood sports and gambling? Scarlet women?”
“Lord Jesus did,” Horace informed him, adjusting his pink bow tie.
The cocks, shorn of combs and tail plumes, were rangy little roosters of starved and hard-bitten demeanor. Prior to the fight, their leg horns, or spurs, had been rasped to two sharp points, and water was now spat copiously upon them, lest they expire of heat prostration before winning money for their owners. For the first suspenseful moments, the two birds circled, beak to beak and taut as arrows. Then the doomed things jumped and fluttered, pecked and spurred until one dropped. The loser never learned from hard experience but went right on flailing at the stronger bird. When finally it toppled from exhaustion and loss of blood, the victor, itself close to death, squatted down and blinked.
Feeling ran high at the cockfight, each telling coup greeted with stamps and hoots, or loud cries of Bis, bis!—Again, again!—and another round of reckless betting. Between fights, the bird owners crowded pell-mell into the tiny ring, insulting one another at the top of their lungs as if to invigorate their charges. The cocks, which were wedged beneath their arms, facing backward, missed no chance to go at each other en passant.
The crowd of sinners made a glorious spectacle.
“Most of these poor lost souls are your feller Catholics,” Horace told Hassid, not bothering to come out from behind his camera. “We’ll title this one ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’ ”
“You seem to be enjoying this as much as they are,” Hassid nagged Horace.
“Have mercy, Lord”—click—“they know not what they do.”
“I hate you,” Hassid said, with sudden feeling.
“Forgiveness is divine,” said Horace. “I forgive you.”
From the cockfights we repaired once more into the countryside, to the coastal villages and bright green rice paddies along the southern shore of La Gonave. The haunted appearance of thin country folk, the strangled graveyards on the silver bay, made me ask Charlie if any real voodoo was still practiced. After some muttering about “way back in de mountain,” Charlie changed the subject, not because I had struck a hidden vein of native folkways but because he had been distracted from his purpose, which very shortly came to light.
Without warning, he ran the old Ford off into a rutted side road, nearly killing an old woman who was trying to cross. Ignoring Horace’s frantic queries, he drove up smartly to a villa on the shore where a large group of lightly clad young ladies (members of the cloob, I assured Horace) were taking the air of afternoon under the palms.
“Drive on! Drive on!” cried Horace, gaze averted.
I assured him that there were colors, shapes, and sizes for even the most spiritual taste, all wearing the most angelic smiles imaginable. A few now rose and sashayed forward, as Hassid flared his nostrils in anticipation. “Whore-ass, you have come to the right place,” he gloated, poking the forefinger of one hand through the fist of the other.
“Drive on!” Horace implored him. “Please. Drive on!”
Just then, a girlish voice rose above the dulcet clamor. “Hey, Joe!” the siren called, “I yam a virgin!”—an unpardonable donable insult to the Turk’s intelligence, it appeared, since he immediately frowned and turned away. Yet what he had heeded, I realized later, was the anguished yelp of a soul about to be cast down into perdition—was it that, or was it Horace’s use of his first name?
“Please, Hassid,” Horace had whispered, leaning forward and pressing his brow to the back of the front seat.
Hassid stared straight ahead and did not speak. Then, shrugging his shoulders in apology, he asked me gently, “All right, my friend? What is a day, a week, a month, after all …?” And to our astonishment, he folded his arms on his chest and sat back with a lordly sigh.
“Drive on,” he said.
Poor Pierre, half-turned in the front seat, shook his bony skull in unashamed grief. Failing to avail ourselves of these young women, his expression said, might prove a mortal blow to his poor children. As for Charlie, he gave vent to his outrage in a furious burst of speed that nearly wrecked his car in the deep ruts. Pursued by a large and savage dog—nowhere to be seen as we drove up—we hastened away to the coast road and the harbor, our entire sojourn having occupied less than a minute.
Horace, by his own fervent statement, had never had carnal knowledge of a woman other than her to whom he had cleaved in holy matrimony. To his dismay, the wicked Turk, regretting, perhaps, his kindly gesture, spoke lightly of a carnal caper in the morgue. These revelations, which came to light in the high excitement that followed our departure from the private club, engaged our attention all the way back to the ship.
Under hard lights, in the steaming air, soft sacks of meal tumbled by stevedores raised a fine dust from the freighter’s hold. The day aboard ship, the Chief confided, had been uneventful save for one thrilling event: The First, intoxicated, had attempted to descend a rope boarding-ladder without troubling to secure it properly beforehand, and had descended farther than he might have wished, into the bay.
DOMINICA, SAINT LUCIA, Barbados, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad. Horace no longer went ashore except to mail letters to his wife and pay calls on the local missionaries. He had produced a thin mustache which did not suit him, and a pair of shorts which suited him still less, and perhaps these accoutrements dissuaded his peers from offering him the opportunity to preach that his heart desired. The nearer he drew to wife and children, the more he gave way to abject homesickness. Try as we would to tease him out of it by promising him young girls at Port of Spain, he did not rise up to denounce us, as he once had, but only complained disspiritedly of the smell of fish, which had escaped its unknown source and trailed him everywhere. And still he wrote daily to his wife, even when our journey was so advanced that no letter would reach her before he did.
“What do you tell?” Hassid would yell, tearing his hair. “Excuse me, I don’t get it! You reveal how many pieces of meat you ate up at your dinner, or what is it? What happened to you on this stinking ship between yesterday and now? What can you possibly be saying to her? What?”
“You would know that, Hassid, if you’d ever found a wife,” Horace said pityingly. He winked at me, but Hassid did too. I felt an unexpected twinge of isolation.
We left the Windwards in our wake, cleared Port of Spain. Day after day, down the long and empty coast of the wild continent, the freighter rolled southeastward through an olive sea, against the might of the equatorial current. The long meals were purgatorial, the white sun mute; the cargo gave off a sweet reek, the warm air thickened. Once again Hassid was seasick and depressed, and took such comfort as he could from reviling Horace. In the iron bow, hands fluttering like birds, they shrieked their love song to the wind, stick figures lifted toward the far light of heaven, plummeting again, on the oily clouds of the vast tropic horizon.
1959