The Colossus of Maroussi (18 page)

I’m going to leave you now,
Madame
, to wither in your own trimmed lard. I leave you to fade away to a grease spot. I leave you to let a song go out of my heart. I’m on my way to Phaestos, the last Paradise on earth. This is just a barbarious passacaglia to keep your fingers busy when you fall back on the drop stitch. Should you wish to buy a second-hand sewing machine get in touch with Murder, Death & Blight, Inc. of Oswego, Saskatchewan, as I am the sole, authorized, living agent this side of the ocean and have no permanent headquarters. As of this day forth, in witness whereof, heretofore solemnly sealed and affixed, I do faithfully demit, abdicate, abrogate, evaginate and fornicate all powers, signatories, seals and offices in favor of peace and joy, dust and heat, sea and sky, God and angel, having to the best of my ability performed the duties of dealer, slayer, blighter, bludgeoner and betrayer of the Soiled & Civilized Sewing Machine manufactured by Murder, Death & Blight, Inc. of the Dominions of Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Yucatan, Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and other allied, subjugated provinces registered under the Death and Destruction Act of the planet Earth during the whilomst hegemony of the Homo sapiens family this last twenty-five thousand years.

And now,
Madame
, since by the terms of this contract we have only a few thousand more years to run, I say
bink-bink
and bid you good-day. This is positively the end.
Bink-bink!

Before the rice diet got properly under way it began to rain, not heavy rains, but moist, intermittent rains, a half hour’s sprinkle, a thunder shower, a drizzle, a warm spray, a cold spray, an electric needle bath. It went on for days. The aeroplanes couldn’t land because the flying field had become too soggy. The roads had become a slimy yellow mucus, the flies swarmed in dizzy, drunken constellations round one’s head and bit like fiends. Indoors it was cold, damp, fungus-bitten; I slept in my clothes with my overcoat piled on top of the blankets and the windows closed tight. When the sun came out it was hot, an African heat which caked and blistered the mud, which made your head ache and gave you a restlessness which increased as soon as the rain began to fall. I was eager to go to Phaestos but I kept putting it off for a change of weather. I saw Tsoutsou again; he told me that the prefect had been inquiring about me. “He wants to see you,” he said. I didn’t dare to ask what for, I said I would pay him a visit shortly.

Between drizzles and downpours I explored the town more thoroughly. The outskirts of the city fascinated me. In the sun it was too hot, in the rain it was creepily cold. On all sides the town edged off abruptly, like an etching drowned in a plate of black zinc. Now and then I passed a turkey tied to a doorknob by a string; the goat was ubiquitous and the donkey. There were wonderful cretins and dwarves too who wandered about with freedom and ease; they belonged to the scene, like the cactus, like the deserted park, like the dead horse in the moat, like the pet turkeys tied to the doorknobs.

Along the waterfront there was a fang-like row of houses behind a hastily made clearing, strangely reminiscent of certain old quarters in Paris where the municipality has begun to create light and air for the children of the poor. In Paris one roams from quarter to quarter through imperceptible transitions, as if moving through invisible beaded curtains. In Greece the changes are sharp, almost painful. In some places you can pass through all the changes of fifty centuries in the space of five minutes. Everything is delineated, sculptured, etched. Even the wastelands have an eternal cast about them. You see everything in its uniqueness—
a
man sitting on
a
road under
a
tree:
a
donkey climbing
a
path near
a
mountain:
a
ship in
a
harbor in
a
sea of turquoise:
a
table on
a
terrace beneath
a
cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as if for the first time; it won’t run away, it won’t be demolished overnight; it won’t disintegrate or dissolve or revolutionize itself. Every individual thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space. The shrub is the equal of the donkey; a wall is as valid as a belfry; a melon is as good as a man. Nothing is continued or perpetuated beyond its natural time; there is no iron will wreaking its hideous path of power. After a half hour’s walk you are refreshed and exhausted by the variety of the anomalous and sporadic. By comparison Park Avenue seems insane and no doubt is insane. The oldest building in Herakleion will outlive the newest building in America. Organisms die; the cell lives on. Life is at the roots, embedded in simplicity, asserting itself uniquely.

I called regularly at the vice consul’s home for my bowl of rice. Sometimes he had visitors. One evening the head of the merchant tailors’ association dropped in. He had lived in America and spoke a quaint, old-fashioned English. “Gentleman, will you have a cigar?” he would say. I told him I had been a tailor myself once upon a time. “But he’s a journalist now,” the vice consul hastily put in. “He’s just read my book.” I began to talk about alpaca sleeve linings, bastings, soft rolled lapels, beautiful vicunas, flap pockets, silk vests and braided cutaways. I talked about these things madly for fear the vice consul would divert the conversation to his pet obsession. I wasn’t quite sure whether the boss tailor had come as a friend or as a favored menial. I didn’t care, I decided to make a friend of him if only to keep the conversation off that infernal book which I had pretended to have read but which I couldn’t stomach after page three.

“Where was your shop, gentleman?” asked the tailor.

“On Fifth Avenue,” I said. “It was my father’s shop.”

“Fifth Avenue—that’s a very rich street, isn’t it?” he said, whereupon the vice consul pricked up his ears.

“Yes,” I said, “we had only the best customers—nothing but bankers, brokers, lawyers, millionaires, steel and iron magnates, hotel keepers, and so on.”

“And you learned how to cut and sew?” he said.

“I could only cut pants,” I answered. “Coats were too complicated.”

“How much did you charge for a suit, gentleman?”

“Oh, at that time we asked only a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five dollars….”

He turned to the vice consul to ask him to calculate what that would be in drachmas. They figured it out. The vice consul was visibly impressed. It
was
a staggering sum in Greek money—enough to buy a small ship. I felt that they were somewhat skeptical. I began talking carload lots—about telephone books, skyscrapers, tickertape, paper napkins and all the ignominious paraphernalia of the big city which makes the yokel roll his eyes as if he’d seen the Red Sea opening up. The ticker tape arrested the tailor’s attention. He had been to Wall Street once, to visit the stock exchange. He wanted to speak about it. He asked me diffidently if there weren’t men in the street who ran their own little markets. He began making deaf and dumb signs as they used to do in the curb market. The vice consul looked at him as if he were slightly touched. I came to his rescue. Of course there were such men, thousands of them, all trained in this special deaf and dumb language, I asserted vigorously. I stood up and made a few signs myself, to demonstrate how it was done. The vice consul smiled. I said I would take them inside the stock exchange, on the floor itself. I described that madhouse in detail, ordering myself slices of Anaconda Copper, Amalgamated Tin, Tel & Tel, anything I could remember of that crazy Wall Street past whether volatile, combustible or analgesic. I ran from one corner of the room to the other, buying and selling like a maniac, standing at the vice consul’s commode and telephoning my broker to flood the market, calling my banker to make a loan of fifty thousand immediately, calling the telegraph jakes to take a string of telegrams, calling the grain and wheat trusters in Chicago to dump a load in the Mississippi, calling the Secretary of the Interior to inquire if he had passed that bill about the Indians, calling my chauffeur to tell him to put a new spare tire on the back behind the rumble seat, calling my shirt-maker to curse him for making the neck too tight on the pink and white shirt and what about my initials. I ran across the seat and gobbled a sandwich at the Exchange Buffet. I said hello to a friend of mine who was going upstairs to his office to blow his brains out. I bought the racing edition and stuck a carnation in my button hole. I had my shoes shined, while answering telegrams and telephoning with the left hand. I bought a few thousand railroad stocks absent-mindedly and switched to Consolidated Gas on a hunch that the new pork barrel bill would improve the housewives’ lot. I almost forgot to read the weather report; fortunately I had to run back to the cigar store to fill my breast pocket with a handful of Corona-Coronas and that reminded me to look up the weather report to see if it had rained in the Ozark region.

The tailor was listening to me goggle-eyed. “That’s the truth,” he said excitedly to the vice consul’s wife who had just made another bowl of soggy rice for me. And then suddenly it occurred to me that Lindbergh was coming back from Europe. I ran for the elevator and took the express to the 109th floor of a building that hadn’t been built yet. I ran to the window and opened it. The street was choked with frantically cheering men, women, boys, girls, horse cops, motorcycle cops, ordinary cops, thieves, bulls, plainclothesmen, Democrats, Republicans, farmers, lawyers, acrobats, thugs, bank clerks, stenographers, floor-walkers, anything with pants or skirts on, anything that could cheer, holler, whistle, stamp, murder or evaginate. Pigeons were flying through the canyon. It was Broadway. It was the year something or other and our hero was returning from his great transcontinental flight. I stood at the window and cheered until I was hoarse. I don’t believe in aeroplanes but I cheered anyway. I took a drink of rye to clear my throat. I grabbed a telephone book. I tore it to pieces like a crazed hyena. I grabbed some ticker tape. I threw that down on the fly-specks—Anaconda Copper, Amalgamated Zinc, U. S. Steel—57½, 34, 138, minus two, plus 6¾, 51, going up, going higher, Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard Air Line, here he comes, he’s coming, that’s him, that’s Lindbergh, Hooray, Hooray, some guy, the eagle of the skies, a hero, the greatest hero of all time….

I took a mouthful of rice to quiet myself. “How high is the tallest building?” asked the vice consul.

I looked at the tailor. “You answer it,” I said.

He guessed about 57 stories.

I said—“A hundred and forty two, not counting the flagpole.” I stood up again to illustrate. Best way is to count the windows. The average skyscraper has roughly 92,546 windows back and front. I undid my belt and put it on again clumsily, as if I were a window-cleaner. I went to the window and sat on the sill outside. I cleaned the window thoroughly. I unhooked myself and went to the next window. I did that for four and a half hours, making roughly 953 windows cleaned, scraped and waterproofed.

“Doesn’t it make you dizzy?” asked the tailor.

“No, I’m used to it,” I said. “I was a steeplejack once—after I quit the merchant tailoring business.” I looked at the ceiling to see if I could do any demonstrating with the chandeliers.

“You’d better eat your rice,” said the vice consul’s wife.

I took another spoonful by way of politeness and absent-mindedly reached for the decanter in which there was the cognac. I was still excited about Lindbergh’s homecoming. I forgot that actually, on that day when he landed at the Battery, I was digging a ditch for the Park Department in the County of Catawpa. The Commissioner was making a speech at a bowling club, a speech I had written for him the day before.

The vice consul was completely at home now in the New World. He had forgotten about his contribution to life and letters. He was pouring me another drink.

Had the gentleman tailor ever gone to a ball game, I inquired. He hadn’t. Well, he surely must have heard of Christy Mathewson—or Walter Johnson? He hadn’t. Had he ever heard of a spitball? He hadn’t. Or a home run? He hadn’t. I threw the sofa cushions around on the parlor floor—first, second, third base and home plate. I dusted the plate with the napkin. I put on my cage. I caught a fast one right over the plate. Strike! Two more and he’s out, I explained. I threw off the mask and ran towards the infield. I looked up through the roof and I saw the ball dropping out of the planet Pluto. I caught it with one hand and threw it to the shortstop. He’s out, I said, it was a fly. Three more innings to go. How about a little popcorn? Have a bottle of pop, then? I took out a package of Spearmint and I stuck a rib in my throat. Always buy Wrigley’s, I said, it lasts longer. Besides, they spend $5,000,000,963.00 a year for advertising. Gives people work. Keeps the subways clean…. How about the Carnegie Library? Would you like to pay a visit to the library? Five million, six hundred and ninety eight thousand circulating subscribers. Every book thoroughly bound, filed, annotated, fumigated and wrapped in cellophane. Andrew Carnegie gave it to the City of New York in memory of the Homestead Riots. He was a poor boy who worked his way to the top. He never knew a day of joy. He was a very great millionaire who proved that it pays to work hard and save your pennies. He was wrong, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s dead now and he left us a chain of libraries which makes the working people more intelligent, more cultured, more informed, in short, more miserable and unhappy than they ever were, bless his heart. Let’s go now to Grant’s Tomb….

The tailor looked at his watch. It was getting late, he thought. I poured myself a nightcap, picked up the first, second and third bases and looked at the parrot which was still awake because they had forgotten to put the hood over the cage.