“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It
is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important
thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.” The Dalai Lama
Through the ages by going though the pages
You think your pain and your
heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It
was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very
things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever
been alive. James Baldwin
A WILD SWAN by MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Here in the city lives a prince
whose left arm is like any other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing.
He and his eleven brothers were
turned into swans by their vituperative stepmother, who had no intention of
raising the twelve sons of her husband’s former wife (whose pallid, mortified
face stared glassily from portrait after portrait; whose unending pregnancies
had dispatched her before her fortieth birthday). Twelve brawling, boastful
boys; twelve fragile and rapacious egos; twelve adolescences—all presented to
the new queen as routine aspects of her job. Do we blame her? Do we, really?
She turned the boys into swans,
and commanded them to fly away.
Problem solved.
She spared the thirteenth child,
the youngest, because she was a girl, though the stepmother’s fantasies about
shared confidences and daylong shopping trips evaporated quickly enough. Why,
after all, would a girl be anything but surly and petulant toward the woman
who’d turned her brothers into birds? And so—after a certain patient lenience
toward sulking silences, after a number of ball gowns purchased but never
worn—the queen gave up. The princess lived in the castle like an impoverished
relative, fed and housed, tolerated but not loved.
The twelve swan-princes lived on
a rock far out at sea, and were permitted only an annual, daylong return to their
kingdom, a visit that was both eagerly anticipated and awkward for the king and
his consort. It was hard to exult in a day spent among twelve formerly stalwart
and valiant sons who could only, during that single yearly interlude, honk and
preen and peck at mites as they flapped around in the castle courtyard. The
king did his best at pretending to be glad to see them. The queen was always
struck by one of her migraines.
Years passed. And then… At long
last…
On one of the swan-princes’
yearly furloughs, their little sister broke the spell, having learned from a
beggar woman she met while picking berries in the forest that the only known
cure for the swan transformation curse was coats made of nettles.
However. The girl was compelled
to knit the coats in secret, because they needed (or so the beggar woman told
her) not only to be made of nettles, but of nettles collected from graveyards,
after dark. If the princess was caught gathering nettles from among tombstones,
past midnight, her stepmother would surely have accused her of witchcraft, and
had her burned along with the rest of the garbage. The girl, no fool, knew she
couldn’t count on her father, who by then harbored a secret wish (which he
acknowledged not even to himself) to be free of all his children.
The princess crept nightly into
local graveyards to gather nettles, and spent her days weaving them into coats.
It was, as it turned out, a blessing that no one in the castle paid much
attention to her.
She had almost finished the
twelve coats when the local archbishop (who was not asked why he himself
happened to be in a graveyard so late at night) saw her picking nettles, and
turned her in. The queen felt confirmed in her suspicions (this being the girl
who shared not a single virginal secret, who claimed complete indifference to
shoes exquisite enough to be shown in museums). The king, unsurprisingly,
acceded, hoping he’d be seen as strong and unsentimental, a true king, a king
so devoted to protecting his people from the darker forces that he’d agree to
the execution of his own daughter, if it kept his subjects safe, free of
curses, unafraid of demonic transformations.
Just as the princess was about to
be burned at the stake, however, the swan-brothers descended from the smoky
sky, and their sister threw the coats onto them. Suddenly, with a loud
crackling sound, amid a flurry of sparkling wind, twelve studly young men,
naked under their nettle coats, stood in the courtyard, with only a few stray
white feathers wafting around them.
Actually…
…there were eleven fully intact
princes and one, the twelfth, restored save for a single detail—his right arm
remained a swan’s wing, because his sister, interrupted at her work, had had to
leave one coat with a missing sleeve.
It seemed a small-enough price to
pay.
Eleven of the young men soon
married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled
everyone, right down to the mice in the walls. Their thwarted stepmother, so
raucously outnumbered, so unmotherly, retreated to a convent, which inspired the
king to fabricate memories of abiding loyalty to his transfigured sons and
helplessness before his harridan of a wife, a version the boys were more than
willing to believe.
End of story. “Happily ever
after” fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.
Almost everyone.
It was difficult for the twelfth
brother, the swan-winged one. His father, his uncles and aunts, the various
lords and ladies, were not pleased by the reminder of their brush with such
sinister elements, or their unskeptical willingness to execute the princess as
she worked to save her siblings.
The king’s consort made jokes
about the swan-winged prince, which his eleven flawlessly formed brothers took
up readily, insisting they were only meant in fun. The young nieces and
nephews, children of the eleven brothers, hid whenever the twelfth son entered
a room, and giggled from behind the chaises and tapestries. His brothers’ wives
asked repeatedly that he do his best to remain calm at dinner (he was prone to
gesticulating with the wing while telling a joke, and had once flicked an
entire haunch of venison against the opposite wall).
The palace cats tended to snarl
and slink away whenever he came near.
Finally he packed a few things
and went out into the world. The world, however, proved no easier for him than
the palace had been. He could only get the most menial of jobs. He had no
marketable skills (princes don’t), and just one working hand. Every now and
then a woman grew interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly
drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could bring him back his
arm. Nothing ever lasted. The wing was awkward on the subway, impossible in
cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily,
feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a
linty, dispiriting gray.
He lived with his wing as another
man might live with a dog adopted from the pound: sweet-tempered, but neurotic
and untrainable. He loved his wing, helplessly. He also found it exasperating,
adorable, irritating, wearying, heartbreaking. It embarrassed him, not only
because he didn’t manage to keep it cleaner, or because getting through doors
and turnstiles never got less awkward, but because he failed to insist on it as
an asset. Which wasn’t all that hard to imagine. He could see himself selling
himself as a compelling metamorphosis, a young god, proud to the point of sexy
arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled
man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing.
Baby, these feathers are going to
tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest
of the way.
Where, he asked himself, was that
version of him? What dearth of nerve rendered him, as year followed year,
increasingly paunchy and slack-shouldered, a walking apology? Why was it beyond
his capacities to get back into shape, to cop an attitude, to stroll
insouciantly into clubs in a black lizardskin suit with one sleeve cut off?
Yeah, right, sweetheart, it’s a
wing, I’m part angel, but trust me, the rest is pure devil.
He couldn’t seem to manage that.
He might as well have tried to run a three-minute mile, or become a virtuoso on
the violin.
He’s still around. He pays his
rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle
age he’s grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, seen-it-all way. He’s
become possessed of a world-weary wit. He’s realized he can either descend into
bitterness or become a wised-up holy fool. It’s better, it’s less mortifying,
to be the guy who understands that the joke’s on him, and is the first to laugh
when the punch line lands.
Most of his brothers back at the
palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted
and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days
knocking golden balls into silver cups, or skewering moths with their swords.
At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.
The twelfth brother can be found,
most nights, in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater
to people who were only partly cured of their curses, or not cured at all.
There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who wasn’t specific enough when she
spoke to the magic fish, and found herself crying, “No, wait, I meant alive and
young forever,” into a suddenly empty sea. There’s the crownletted frog who
can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the
spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of
the comatose princess he’s meant to revive with a kiss, and has lately been
less devoted to searching mountain and glen, more prone to bar-crawling, given to
long stories about the girl who got away.
In such bars, a man with a single
swan wing is considered lucky.
His life, he tells himself, is
not the worst of all possible lives. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s what
there is to hope for—that it merely won’t get any worse.
Some nights, when he’s stumbled
home smashed (there are many such nights), negotiated the five flights up to
his apartment, turned on the TV, and passed out on the sofa, he awakes, hours
later, as the first light grays the slats of the venetian blinds, with only his
hangover for company, to find that he’s curled his wing over his chest and
belly; or rather (he knows this to be impossible, and yet…) that the wing has
curled itself, by its own volition, over him, both blanket and companion, his
devoted resident alien, every bit as imploring and ardent and inconvenient as
that mutt from the pound would have been. His dreadful familiar. His burden,
his comrade.
The beauty of B&W
Louis Boutan’s photograph of Emil Racovitza is the first submerged photograph ever taken. Banyuls-sur-Mer, France 1899
Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of pedestrians, New York, 1930
New York City, 1956. Leonard Freed.
New York, NY, Vivian Maier, date unknown
Paris, Photo by Tore Johnson, 1949
Police trade shots with barricaded suspect, Los Angeles, Feb. 17, 1938.
Richelieu Apartments before and after Hurricane Camille. It was the 2nd most intense tropical cyclone to hit the US. Mississippi, 14-22 August, 1969
The Milan Cathedral shrouded in fog, 1960s
Clearly B&W
Christmas store window , New York 1915
Diane Arbus Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962
Gilmore Oil’s “Gasateria” in Los Angeles, the First Self-Serve Gasoline Station in the USA. Fuelers saved 5 cents per gallon. LIFE Magazine, Oct 22, 1948.
Having a ball at a movie, 1958.
Italian police officers during the Red Brigades attack at the Christian Democracy headquarter in Piazza Nicosia, Rome, 1979
Jack Delano. Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas Island, Virgin Islands. A rainy day on the main square. 1941.
Karl Struss
Kids peek into the circus at the Ladywell Park in South London in June 1943.
Grant Green
Grant Green (June 6, 1935 –
January 31, 1979) was a jazz guitarist and composer.
Recording prolifically and mainly
for Blue Note Records as both leader and sideman, Green performed in the hard
bop, soul jazz, bebop, and Latin-tinged idioms throughout his career.
Critics Michael Erlewine and Ron
Wynn write, "A severely underrated player during his lifetime, Grant Green
is one of the great unsung heroes of jazz guitar ... Green's playing is
immediately recognizable – perhaps more than any other guitarist." Critic
Dave Hunter described his sound as "lithe, loose, slightly bluesy and
righteously groovy".
He often performed in an organ trio, a small
group with an organ and drummer.
Apart from guitarist Charlie
Christian, Green's primary influences were saxophonists, particularly Charlie
Parker, and his approach was therefore almost exclusively linear rather than
chordal. He thus rarely played rhythm guitar except as a sideman on albums led
by other musicians.
The simplicity and immediacy of
Green's playing, which tended to avoid chromaticism, derived from his early
work playing rhythm and blues and, although at his best he achieved a synthesis
of this style with bop, he was essentially a blues guitarist and returned
almost exclusively to this style in his later career
Lou Donaldson discovered him
playing in a bar in St. Louis. After touring together with Donaldson, Green
arrived in New York around 1959–60.
Lou Donaldson introduced Green to
Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records. Lion was so impressed that, rather than testing
Green as a sideman, as was the usual Blue Note practice, Lion arranged for him
to record as a group leader first. However, due to Green's lack of confidence
the initial recording session was only released in 2001 as First Session.
Despite the shelving of his first
session, Green's recording relationship with Blue Note was to last, with a few
exceptions, throughout the 1960s. From 1961 to 1965, Green made more
appearances on Blue Note LPs, as leader or sideman, than anyone else. Green's
first issued album as a leader was Grant's First Stand. This was followed in
the same year by Green Street and Grantstand. Grant was named best new star in
the Down Beat critics' poll, in 1962. He often provided support to the other
important musicians on Blue Note, including saxophonists Hank Mobley, Ike
Quebec, Stanley Turrentine and organist Larry Young.
Green spent much of 1978 in the
hospital and, against the advice of doctors, went back on the road to earn
money. While in New York to play an engagement at George Benson's Breezin'
Lounge, he collapsed in his car of a heart attack and died on January 31, 1979.
Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint (October 26, 1862 – October 21, 1944) was a Swedish artist and
mystic whose paintings were among the first Western abstract art. A
considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract
compositions by Kandinsky. She belonged to a group called "The Five",
a circle of women who shared her belief in the importance of trying to make
contact with the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.
Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation
of complex spiritual ideas. Af Klint's
work can be understood in the wider context of the Modernist search for new
forms in artistic, spiritual, political and scientific systems at the beginning
of the 20th century. One will find the same interest in spirituality in other
artists during this same period, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian,
Kasimir Malevitch and the French Nabis of which many were, like af Klint,
inspired by the Theosophical Movement. However, the artistic transition to
abstract art and the nonfigurative painting of Hilma af Klint would occur without
any contacts with the contemporary modern movements.
You build on failure
You build on failure. You use it as a
stepping stone. Close the door on the
past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it.
You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your
space. Johnny Cash
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
BY
O. HENRY
ONE dollar and eighty-seven
cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one
and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the
butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that
such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and
eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing
to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which
instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and
smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the
home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at
the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar
description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy
squad.
In the vestibule below was
a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which
no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card
bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”
The “Dillingham” had been
flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was
being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they
were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But
whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was
called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced
to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and
attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked
out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would
be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She
had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty
dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had
calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many
a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine
and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the
honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier glass
between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier glass in an $8
flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a
rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of
his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from
the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but
her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her
hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions
of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was
Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other
was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft,
Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to
depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor,
with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his
watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della’s beautiful
hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It
reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she
did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood
still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown
jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the
brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the
stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign
read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and
collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the
“Sofronie.”
“Will you buy my hair?”
asked Della.
“I buy hair,” said Madame.
“Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”
Down rippled the brown
cascade.
“Twenty dollars,” said
Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
“Give it to me quick,” said
Della.
Oh, and the next two hours
tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the
stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It
surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any
of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob
chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance
alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It
was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be
Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both.
Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87
cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time
in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on
account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her
intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling
irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by
generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a
mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her
head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully
like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long,
carefully, and critically.
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,”
she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look
like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a
dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
At 7 o’clock the coffee was
made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the
chops.
Jim was never late. Della
doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the
door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on
the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of
saying a little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she
whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”
The door opened and Jim
stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was
only twenty-two—and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and
he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the
door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon
Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it
terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor
any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her
fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the
table and went for him.
“Jim, darling,” she cried,
“don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t
have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out
again—you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully
fast. Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a
nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”
“You’ve cut off your hair?”
asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even
after the hardest mental labor.
“Cut it off and sold it,”
said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair,
ain’t I?”
Jim looked about the room
curiously.
“You say your hair is
gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
“You needn’t look for it,”
said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy.
Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,”
she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love
for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”
Out of his trance Jim
seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard
with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction.
Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A
mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought
valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be
illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his
overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
“Don’t make any mistake,
Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a
haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But
if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at
first.”
White fingers and nimble
tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then,
alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the
immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the
set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway
window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade
to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew,
and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned
the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her
bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say:
“My hair grows so fast, Jim!”
And then Della leaped up
like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”
Jim had not yet seen his
beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull
precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent
spirit.
“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I
hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred
times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”
Instead of obeying, Jim
tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and
smiled.
“Dell,” said he, “let’s put
our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just
at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now
suppose you put the chops on.”
The magi, as you know, were
wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They
invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no
doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of
duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of
two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the
greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days
let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who
give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest.
They are the magi.
In uncertainty
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
chapter 1
Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk
going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The
lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m
drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all
night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and
saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were
fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my
kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen
corporal.
chapter 2
The first matador got the horn through his sword
hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull
caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held
the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the
wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy
drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but
he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have
more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the
sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd
was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and
then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape
over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.
chapter 3
Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople
across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the
Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No
end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men
and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza
was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the
bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the
procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors,
sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl
holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all
through the evacuation.
chapter 4
We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came
in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up
over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him.
He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the
garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all
came just like that.
chapter 5
It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an
absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big
old wrought iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you
could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely
topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They
rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely
perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out
when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.
chapter 6
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past
six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in
the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It
rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the
ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out
into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a
puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally
the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When
they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on
his knees.
chapter 7
Nick sat against the wall of the church where
they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the street. Both legs
stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and
dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big backed,
his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked
straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out
from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Two
Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were
other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well.
Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and
looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate
peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “Not patriots.”
Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a
disappointing audience.
chapter 8
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to
pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get
me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please
christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I
believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing
that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line.
We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day
was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did
not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he
never told anybody.
chapter 9
At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got
into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle
drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians
were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the
wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened when he found they
were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s
liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.
—They’re crooks ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re
wops ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?
—That’s all right maybe this time, said
Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?
Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.
chapter 10
One hot evening in Milan they carried him up
onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were
chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came
out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear
them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot
night.
Ag stayed on night duty for three months. They
were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the
operating table, and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the
anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so that he would not blab about anything
during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the
temperature so Ag would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few
patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Ag. As he walked back
along the halls he thought of Ag in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into
the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people
praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the
banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they
were married, but they wanted everyone to knew about it, and to make it so they
could not lose it.
Ag wrote him many letters that he never got
until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch and he sorted them by the
dates and read them all straight through. They were about the hospital, and how
much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how
terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go
home to get a job so they might be married. Ag would not come home until he had
a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would
not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only
to get a job and be married. On the train from Padova to Milan they quarrelled
about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye
in the station at Padova they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel.
He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Ag went
back to Torre di Mosta to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and
there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living
in the muddy, rainy town in the winter the major of the battalion made love to
Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote a letter to the
States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she
knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive
her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be
married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was
only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed
in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The Major did not marry her in the spring, or
any other time. Ag never got an answer to her letter to Chicago about it. A
short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl from The Fair riding
in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
chapter 11
In 1919 he was travelling on the railroads in
Italy carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written
in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much
under the whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way. He
used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and the train
men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no money, and they fed him
behind the counter in railway eating houses.
He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful
country he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked
much and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he
bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti.
Mantegna he did not like.
He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me
up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good
trip together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was a
Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done some bad things to
him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Italy, he believed altogether in
the world revolution.
—But how is the movement going in Italy? he
asked.
—Very badly, I said.
—But it will go better, he said. You have
everything here. It is the one country that everyone is sure of. It will be the
starting point of everything.
At Bologna he said good-bye to us to go on the
train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland. I
spoke to him about the Mantegnas in Milano. No, he said, very shyly, he did not
like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and the addresses of
comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was already looking forward to
walking over the pass. He was very eager to walk over the pass while the
weather held good. The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion.
chapter 12
They whack whacked the white horse on the legs
and he knee-ed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled
and hauled up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch
and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking
him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered jerkily along the
barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the monos held his bridle
and walked him forward. The picador kicked in his spurs, leaned forward and
shook his lance at the bull. Blood pumped regularly from between the horse’s
front legs. He was nervously wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to
charge.
chapter 13
The crowd shouted all the time and threw pieces
of bread down into the ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up
whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from so much bad sticking
and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla leaned
out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo. The crowd came
over the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and
some one cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran
away with it. Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown
face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I
am not really a good bull fighter.
chapter 14
If it happened right down close in front of you,
you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull
charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs tight
together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve behind. Then he
cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge his
feet firm, the muleta curving and each swing the crowd roaring.
When he started to kill it was all in the same
rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. He drew out the sword
from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to
the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a
moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over.
Villalta standing straight and the red kilt of the sword sticking out dully
between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull
roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.
chapter 15
I heard the drums coming down the street and
then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing.
The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped
the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when
they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them.
He was drunk all right.
You go down after him, said Maera, he hates me.
So I went down and caught up with them and
grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and
said, Come on Luis. For Christ sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon. He didn’t
listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.
I said, Don’t be a damn fool Luis. Come on back
to the hotel.
Then the music started up again and he jumped up
and twisted away from me and started dancing. I grabbed his arm and he pulled
loose and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.
I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the
balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back. He went inside when he
saw me and came downstairs disgusted.
Well, I said, after all he’s just an ignorant
Mexican savage.
Yes, Maera said, and who will kill his bulls
after he gets a cogida?
We, I suppose, I said.
Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the savages’
bulls, and the drunkards’ bulls, and the riau-riau dancers’
bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.
chapter 16
Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face
in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the
horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn
went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Someone had the
bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face.
Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him
toward the barriers through the gate out the passage way around under the grand
stand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went
out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the
corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his
hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera
wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt everything
getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and
larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to
run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was
dead.
chapter 17
They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the
morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow
with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had
been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the
five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very
frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The
other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head.
They came out onto the gallows through a door in
the wall. There were six or seven of them including two priests. They were
carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the
morning.
While they were strapping his legs together two
guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my
son,” said one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his
head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been
holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted. “How about a chair,
Will?” asked one of the guards, “Better get one,” said a man in a derby hat.
When they all stepped back on the scaffolding
back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on
ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight, the
younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped back
onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.
chapter 18
The king was working in the garden. He seemed
very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said.
She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a
table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good
whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not
allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I
believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though
shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been
altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is
not to be shot oneself!
It was very jolly. We talked for a long time.
Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.