在路上 英文版-21

the little darlings,. cried Dean, .but notice the old lady or the old man is always somewhere around inthe back usually, sometimes a hundred yards, gathering twigs and wood or tending animals.They’re never alone. Nobody’s ever alone in this country. While you’ve been sleeping I’ve beendigging this road and this country, and if I could only tell you all the thoughts I’ve had, man!. He wassweating. His eyes were red-streaked and mad and also subdued and tender - he had found peoplelike himself. We bowled right through the endless swamp country at a steady forty-five. .Sal, I thinkthe country won’t change for a long time. If you’ll drive, I’ll sleep now..I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, through Linares, through hot, flat swampcountry, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on. A great verdant jungle valleywith long fields of green crops opened before me. Groups of men watched us pass from a narrowold-fashioned bridge. The hot river flowed. Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert countrybegan reappearing. The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and 1 was alone in myeternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, orTexas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we wouldfinally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basicprimitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world fromMalaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to theselfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of theYellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted wallsof Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of theWorld. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos ofsilly civilized American lore - they had high cheekbones, and slanted f eyes, and soft ways; they werenot fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankindand the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks inthe desert are they in the desert of .history.. And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who wasthe son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of163.history. and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people willstill stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it allbegan and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as Idrove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.Earlier, back at San Antonio, I had promised Dean, as a joke, that I would get him a girl. It was abet and a challenge. As I pulled up the car at the gas station near sunny Gregoria a kid came acrossthe road on tattered feet, carrying an enormous windshield-shade, and wanted to know if I’d buy..You like? Sixty peso. Habla Espanol? Sesenta peso. My name Victor...Nah,. I said jokingly, .buy senorita...Sure, sure!. he cried excitedly. .I get you gurls, onny-time. Too hot now,. he added withdistaste. .No good gurls when hot day. Wait tonight. You like shade?.I didn’t want the shade but I wanted the girls. I woke up Dean. .Hey, man, I told you in TexasI’d get you a girl -all right, stretch your bones and wake up, boy; we’ve got girls waiting for us...What? what?. he cried, leaping up, haggard. .Where? where?..This boy Victor’s going to show us where...Well, lessgo, lessgo!. Dean leaped out of the car and clasped Victor’s hand. There was a groupof other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy strawhats. .Man,. said Dean to me, .ain’t this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It’s so much cooler thanDenver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?. he cried in Spanish. .Dig that, Sal, I’mspeaking Spanish...Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got ma-ree-wa-na?.The kid nodded gravely. .Sho, onnytime, mon. Come with me...Hee! Wheel Hoo!. yelled Dean. He was wide awake and jumping up and down in that drowsyMexican street. .Let’s all go!. I was passing Lucky Strikes to the other boys. They were gettinggreat pleasure out of us and especially Dean. They turned to one another with cupped hands andrattled off comments about the mad American cat. .Dig them, Sal, talking about us and digging. Ohmy goodness, what a world!. Victor got in the car with us, and we lurched off. Stan Shephard hadbeen sleeping soundly and woke up to this madness.We drove way out to the desert the other side of town and turned on a rutty dirt road that madethe car bounce as never before. Up ahead was Victor’s house. It sat on the edge of cactus flatsovertopped by a few trees, just an adobe cracker-box, with a few men lounging around in the yard..Who that?. cried Dean, all excited..Those my brothers. My mother there too. My sistair too. That my family. I married, I livedowntown...What about your mother?. Dean flinched. .What she say about marijuana...Oh, she get it for me.. And as we waited in the car Victor got out and loped over to the houseand said a few words to an old lady, who promptly turned and went to the garden in back and begangathering dry fronds of marijuana that had been pulled off the plants and left to dry in the desert sun.Meanwhile Victor’s brothers grinned from under a tree. They were coming over to meet us but itwould take a while for them to get up and walk over. Victor came back, grinning sweetly..Man,. said Dean, .that Victor is the sweetest, gonest, fran-ticest little bangtail cat I’ve ever in allmy life met. Just look at him, look at his cool slow walk. There’s no need to hurry around here.. Asteady, insistent desert breeze blew into the car. It was very hot..You see how hot?. said Victor, sitting down with Dean in the front seat and pointing up at theburning roof of the Ford. .You have ma-ree-gwana and it no hot no more. You wait...Yes,. said Dean, adjusting his dark glasses, .I wait. For sure, Victor m’boy..164Presently Victor’s tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page ofnewspaper. He dumped it on Victor’s lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod andsmile at us and say, .Hallo.. Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him. Nobody talked; it was fine.Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper)what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victorcasually lit it and passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling.It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat. We held our breaths and all let out just aboutsimultaneously. Instantly we were all high. The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly likethe beach at Acapulco. I looked out the back window of the car, and another and the strangest ofVictor’s brothers - a tall Peruvian of an Indian with a sash over his shoulder - leaned grinning on apost, too bashful to come up and shake hands. It seemed the car was surrounded by brothers, foranother one appeared on Dean’s side. Then the strangest thing happened. Everybody became sohigh that usual formalities were dispensed with and the things of immediate interest wereconcentrated on, and now it was the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together onthe desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores ofskins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world. So the Indianbrothers began talking about us in low voices and commenting; you saw them look, and size, andcompare mutualities of impression, or correct and modify, .Yeh, yeh., while Dean and Stan and Icommented on them in English..Will you d-i-g that weird brother in the back that hasn’t moved from that post and hasn’t by onecut hair diminished the intensity of the glad funny bashfulness of his smile? And the one to my lefthere, older, more sure of himself but sad. like hung-up, like a bum even maybe, in town, while Victoris respectably married - he’s like a gawddam Egyptian king, that you see. These guys are real cats.Ain’t never seen anything like it. And they’re talking and wondering about us, like see? Just like weare but with a difference of their own, their interest probably resolving around how we’re dressed sameas ours, really - but the strangeness of the things we have in the car and the strange ways thatwe laugh so different from them, and maybe even the way we smell compared to them. NeverthelessI’d give my eye-teeth to know what they’re saying about us.. And Dean tried. .Hey Victor, man whatyou brother say just then?.Victor turned mournful high brown eyes on Dean. .Yeah, yeah...No, you didn’t understand my question. What you boys talking about?..Oh,. said Victor with great perturbation, .you no like this mar-gwana?..Oh, yeah, yes fine! What you talk about?..Talk? Yes, we talk. How you like Mexico?. It was hard to come around without a commonlanguage. And everybody grew quiet and cool and high again and just enjoyed the breeze from thedesert and mused separate national and racial and personal high-eternity thoughts.It was time for the girls. The brothers eased back to their station under the tree, the motherwatched from her sunny doorway, and we slowly bounced back to town.But now the bouncing was no longer unpleasant; it was the most pleasant and graceful billowy tripin the world, as over a blue sea, and Dean’s face was suffused with an unnatural glow that was likegold as he told us to understand the springs of the car now for the first time and dig the ride. Up anddown we bounced, and even Victor understood and laughed. Then he pointed left to show whichway to go for the girls, and Dean, looking left with indescribable delight and leaning that way, pulledthe wheel around and rolled us smoothly and surely to the goal, meanwhile listening to Victor’sattempt to speak and saying grandly and magniloquently .Yes, of course! There’s not a doubt in mymind! Decidedly, man! Oh, indeed! Why, pish, posh, you say the dearest things to me! Of course!165Yes! Please go on!. To this Victor talked gravely and with magnificent Spanish eloquence. For amad moment I thought Dean was understanding everything he said by sheer wild insight and suddenrevelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness. In that moment, too, he looked soexactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt - some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain - that Idrew up in my seat and gasped with amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had tostruggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God. I was so high I had to lean my head back onthe seat; the bouncing of the car sent shivers of ecstasy through me. The mere thought of looking outthe window at Mexico - which was now something else in my mind - was like recoiling from somegloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bendinward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once. I gulped. I saw streams of goldpouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across myeyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. I looked out the window at the hot, sunnystreets and saw a woman in a doorway and I thought she was listening to every word we said andnodding to herself - routine paranoiac visions due to tea. But the stream of gold continued. For along time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing and only came aroundsometime later when I looked up from fire and silence like waking from sleep to the world, orwaking from void to a dream, and they told me we were parked outside Victor’s house and he wasalready at the door of the car with his little baby son in his arms, showing him to us..You see my baby? Hees name Perez, he six month age...Why,. said Dean, his face still transfigured into a shower of supreme pleasure and even bliss,.he is the prettiest child I have ever seen. Look at those eyes. Now, Sal and Stan,. he said, turningto us with a serious and tender air, .I want you par-ti-cu-lar-ly to see the eyes of this little Mexicanboy who is the son of our wonderful friend Victor, and notice how he will come to manhood with hisown particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyessurely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.. It was a beautiful speech. And it was abeautiful baby. Victor mournfully looked down at his angel. We all wished we had a little son likethat. So great was our intensity over the child’s soul that he sensed something and began a grimacewhich led to bitter tears and some unknown sorrow that we had no means to soothe because itreached too far back into innumerable mysteries and time. We tried everything; Victor smotheredhim in his neck and rocked, Dean cooed, I reached over and stroked the baby’s little arms. Hisbawls grew louder. .Ah,. said Dean, .I’m awfully sorry, Victor, that we’ve made him sad...He is not sad, baby cry.. In the doorway in back of Victor, too bashful to come out, was hislittle barefoot wife, with anxious tenderness waiting for the babe to be put back in her arms so brownand soft. Victor, having shown us his child, climbed back into the car and proudly pointed to theright..Yes,. said Dean, and swung the car over and directed it through narrow Algerian streets withfaces on all sides watching us with gentle wonder. We came to the whorehouse. It was a magnificentestablishment of stucco in the golden sun. In the street, and leaning on the windowsills that openedinto the whorehouse, were two cops, saggy-trousered, drowsy, bored, who gave us brief interestedlooks as we walked in, and stayed there the entire three hours that we cavorted under their noses,until we came out at dusk and at Victor’s bidding gave them the equivalent of twenty-four centseach, just for the sake of form.And in there we found the girls. Some of them were reclining on couches across the dance floor,some of them were boozing at the long bar to the right. In the center an arch led into small cubicleshacks that looked like the places where you put on your bathing suit at public municipal beaches.These shacks were in the sun of the court. Behind the bar was the proprietor, a young fellow who166instantly ran out when we told him we wanted to hear mambo music and came back with a stack ofrecords, mostly by Perez Prado, and put them on over the loudspeaker. In an instant all the city ofGregoria could hear the good times going on at the Sala de Baile. In the hall itself the din of the music-for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that itshattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to playmusic as loud as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. It blew and shuddered directly atus. In a few minutes half that portion of town was at the windows, watching the Americanos dancewith the gals. They all stood, side by side with the cops, on the dirt sidewalk, leaning in withindifference and casualness. .More Mambo Jambo,. .Chattanooga de Mambo,. .Mambo NumeroOcho. - all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon likethe sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming. The trumpetsseemed so loud I thought they could hear them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets hadoriginated anyway. The drums were mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the riverof Africa and the world; it’s really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom - oom-ta, ta-poo-poom.The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were like greatgasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongodrums, on the great mad Chattanooga record, froze Dean in his tracks for a moment till heshuddered and sweated; then when the trumpets bit the drowsy air with their quivering echoes, like acavern’s or a cave’s, his eyes grew large and round as though seeing the devil, and he closed themtight. I myself was shaken like a puppet by it; I heard the trumpets flail the light I had seen andtrembled in my boots.On the fast .Mambo Jambo. we danced frantically with the girls. Through our deliriums webegan to discern their varying personalities. They were great girls. Strangely the wildest one was halfIndian, half white, and came from Venezuela, and only eighteen. She looked as if she came from agood family. What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fairaspect, God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threwdown drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually,the idea also being to make us spend’ as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat inbroad afternoon, she frantically danced with Dean and clung about his neck and begged and beggedfor everything. Dean was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo. They ran offto the lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting girl with a puppy dog, who got sore at mewhen I took a dislike to the dog because it kept trying to bite me. She compromised by putting itaway in the back, but by the time she returned I had been hooked by another girl, better looking butnot the best, who clung to my neck like a leech. I was trying to break loose to get at a sixteen-yearoldcolored girl who sat gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her short shirty dressacross the hall. I couldn’t do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored skin and adress that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A good twenty men leaned inthat window, watching.At one point the mother of the little colored girl - not colored, but dark - came in to hold a briefand mournful convocation with her daughter. When I saw that, I was too ashamed to try for the oneI really wanted. I let the leech take me off to the back, where, as in a dream, to the din and roar ofmore loudspeakers inside, we made the bed bounce a half-hour. It was just a square room withwooden slats and no ceiling, ikon in a corner, a washbasin in another. All up and down the dark hallthe girls were calling, .Agua, agua caliente!. which means .hot water.. Stan and Dean were alsoout of sight. My girl charged thirty pesos, or about three dollars and a half, and begged for an extraten pesos and gave a long story about something. I didn’t know the value of Mexican money; for all I167knew I had a million pesos. I threw money at her. We rushed back to dance. A greater crowd wasgathered in the Street. The cops looked as bored as usual. Dean’s pretty Venezuelan dragged methrough a door and into another strange bar that apparently belonged to the whorehouse. Here ayoung bartender was talking and wiping glasses and an old man with handlebar mustache satdiscussing something earnestly. And here too the mambo roared over another loud* speaker. Itseemed the whole world was turned on. Venezuela clung about my neck and begged for drinks. Thebartender wouldn’t give her one. She begged and begged, and when he gave it to her she spilled itand this time not on purpose, for I saw the chagrin in her poor sunken lost eyes. .Take it easy,baby,. I told her. I had to support her on the stool; she kept slipping off. I’ve never seen a drunkerwoman, and only eighteen. I bought her another drink; she was tugging at my pants for mercy. Shegulped it up. I didn’t have the heart to try her. My own girl was about thirty and took care of herselfbetter. With Venezuela writhing and suffering in my arms, I had a longing to take her in the back andundress her and only talk to her - this I told myself. I was delirious with want of her and the otherlittle dark girl.Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the counter andjumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort. We bought him drinks. Hiseyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn’t accept any, being faithful to his wife. Dean thrust moneyat him. In this welter of madness I had an opportunity to see what Dean was up to. He was so out ofhis mind he didn’t know who I was when I peered at his face. .Yeah, yeah!. is all he said. It seemedit would never end. It was like a long, spectral Arabian dream in the afternoon in another life - AliBaba and the alleys and the courtesans. Again I rushed off with my girl to her room; Dean and Stanswitched the girls they’d had before; and we were out of sight a moment, and the spectators had towait for the show to go on. The afternoon grew long and cool.Soon it would be mysterious night in old gone Gregoria. The mambo never let up for a moment, itfrenzied on like an endless journey in the jungle. I couldn’t take my eyes off the little dark girl and theway, like a queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial taskssuch as bringing us drinks and sweeping the back. Of all the girls in there she needed the moneymost; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant/ sisters and brothers.Mexicans are poor. It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. Ihave a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her mademe flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the sameunmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the samereluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; herunimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that.At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross hisface as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped andfinally bowed his head. For she was the queen.Now Victor suddenly clutched at our arms in the furor and made frantic signs..What’s the matter?. He tried everything to make us understand. Then he ran to the bar andgrabbed the check from the bartender, who scowled at him, and took it to us to see. The bill wasover three hundred pesos, or thirty-six American dollars, which is a lot of money in any whorehouse.Still we couldn’t sober up and didn’t want to leave, and though we were all run out we still wanted tohang around with our lovely girls in this strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end ofthe hard, hard road. But night was coming and we had to get on to the end; and Dean saw that, andbegan frowning and thinking and trying to straighten himself out, and finally I broached the idea ofleaving once and for all. .So much ahead of us, man, it won’t make any difference..168.That’s right!. cried Dean, glassy-eyed, and turned to his Venezuelan. She had finally passed outand lay on a wooden bench with her white legs protruding from the silk. The gallery in the windowtook advantage of the show; behind them red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere Iheard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographichasheesh daydream in heaven.We staggered out; we had forgotten Stan; we ran back in to get him and found him charminglybowing to the new evening whores, who had just come in for night shift. He wanted to start all overagain. When he is drunk he lumbers like a man ten feet tall and when he is drunk he can’t be draggedaway from women. Moreover women cling to him like ivy. He insisted on staying and trying some ofthe newer, stranger, more proficient senoritas. Dean and I pounded him on the back and draggedhim out. He waved profuse good-bys to everybody - the girls, the cops, the crowds, the children inthe street outside; he blew kisses in all directions to ovations of Gregoria and staggered proudlyamong the gangs and tried to speak to them and communicate his joy and love of everything this fineafternoon of life. Everybody laughed; some slapped him on the back. Dean rushed over and paid thepolicemen the four pesos and shook hands and grinned and bowed with them. Then he jumped in thecar, and the girls we had known, even Venezuela, who was wakened for the farewell, gatheredaround the car, huddling in their flimsy duds, and chattered good-bys and kissed us, and Venezuelaeven began to weep - though not for us, we knew, not altogether for us, yet enough and goodenough. My dusky darling love had disappeared in the shadows inside. It was all over. We pulledout and left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us, and it didn’t seem like a badday’s work. The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks. It was all over. .Good-by, Gregoria!.cried Dean, blowing it a kiss.Victor was proud of us and proud of himself. .Now you like bath?. he asked. Yes, we allwanted wonderful bath.And he directed us to the strangest thing in the world: it was an ordinary American-typebathhouse one mile out of town on the highway, full of kids splashing in a pool and showers inside astone building for a few centavos a crack, with soap and towel from the attendant. Besides this, itwas also a sad kiddy park with swings and a broken-down merry-go-round, and in the fading redsun it seemed so strange and so beautiful. Stan and I got towels and jumped right into ice-coldshowers inside and came out refreshed and new. Dean didn’t bother with a shower, and we saw himfar across the sad park, strolling arm in arm with good Victor and chatting volubly and pleasantly andeven leaning excitedly toward him to make a point, and pounding his fist. Then they resumed thearm-in-arm position and strolled. The time was coming to say good-by to Victor, so Dean wastaking the opportunity to have moments alone with him and to inspect the park and get his views onthings in general and in all dig him as only Dean could do.Victor was very sad now that we had to go. .You come back Gregoria, see me?..Sure, man!. said Dean. He even promised to take Victor back to the States if he so wished it.Victor said he would have to mull this over..I got wife and kid - ain’t got a money - I see.. His sweet polite smile glowed in the redness aswe waved to him from the car. Behind him were the sad park and the children.1696Immediately outside Gregoria the road began to drop, great trees arose on each side, and in thetrees as it grew dark we heard the great roar of billions of insects that sounded like one continuoushigh-screeching cry. .Whoo!. said Dean, and he turned on his headlights and they weren’t working.’.What! what! damn now what?. And he punched and fumed at his dashboard. .Oh, my, we’ll haveto drive through the jungle without lights, think of the horror of that, the only time I’ll see is whenanother car comes by and there just aren’t any cars! And of course no lights? Oh, what’ll we do,dammit?..Let’s just drive. Maybe we ought to go back, though?..No, never-never! Let’s go on. I can barely see the road. We’ll make it.. And now we shot ininky darkness through the scream of insects, and the great, rank, almost rotten smell descended, andwe remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Gregoria the beginning of the Tropic ofCancer. .We’re in a new tropic! No wonder the smell! Smell it!. I stuck my head out the window;bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenlyour lights were working again and they poked ahead, illuminating the lonely road that ran betweensolid walls of drooping, snaky trees as high as a hundred feet..Son-of-a-bitch!. yelled Stan in the back. .Hot damn!. He was still so high. We suddenlyrealized he was still high and the jungle and troubles made no difference to his happy soul. We beganlaughing, all of us..To hell with it! We’ll just throw ourselves on the gawd-damn jungle, we’ll sleep in it tonight, let’s