The Pissant Hilton 72

H. Lowe Crosby and his wife checked out of the Casa Mona. Crosby called it “The Pissant Hilton,” and he demanded quarters at the American embassy.

So I was the only guest in a one-hundred-room hotel.

My room was a pleasant one. It faced, as did all the rooms, the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy, Monzano Airport, and Bolivar harbor beyond. The Casa Mona was built like a bookcase, with solid sides and back and with a front of blue-green glass. The squalor and misery of the city, being to the sides and back of the Casa Mona, were impossible to see.

My room was air-conditioned. It was almost chilly. And, coming from the blamming heat into that chilliness, I sneezed.

There were fresh flowers on my bedside table, but my bed had not yet been made. There wasn’t even a pillow on the bed. There was simply a bare, brand-new Beautyrest mattress. And there weren’t any coat hangers in the closet; and there wasn’t any toilet paper in the bathroom.

So I went out in the corridor to see if there was a chambermaid who would equip me a little more completely. There wasn’t anybody out there, but there was a door open at the far end and very faint sounds of life.

I went to this door and found a large suite paved with drop-cloths. It was being painted, but the two painters weren’t painting when I appeared. They were sitting on a shelf that ran the width of the window wall.

They had their shoes off. They had their eyes closed. They were facing each other.

They were pressing the soles of their bare feet together.

Each grasped his own ankles, giving himself the rigidity of a triangle.

I cleared my throat.

The two rolled off the shelf and fell to the spattered dropcloth. They landed on their hands and knees, and they stayed in that position — their behinds in the air, their noses close to the ground.

They were expecting to be killed.

“Excuse me,” I said, amazed.

“Don’t tell,” begged one querulously. “Please — please don’t tell.”

“Tell what?”

“What you saw!”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“If you tell,” he said, and he put his cheek to the floor and looked up at me beseechingly, “if you tell, we’ll die on the hy-u-o-ook-kuh! ”

“Look, friends,” I said, “either I came in too early or too late, but, I tell you again, I didn’t see anything worth mentioning to anybody. Please — get up.”

They got up, their eyes still on me. They trembled and cowered. I convinced them at last that I would never tell what I had seen.

What I had seen, of course, was the Bokononist ritual of boko-maru , or the mingling of awarenesses.

We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.

The basis for the foot ceremony is this “Calypso”:

We will touch our feet, yes,

Yes, for all we’re worth,

And we will love each other, yes,

Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.

Black Death 73

When I got back to my room I found that Philip Castle— mosaicist, historian, self-indexer, pissant, and hotel-keeper — was installing a roll of toilet paper in my bathroom.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“You’re entirely welcome.”

“This is what I’d call a hotel with a real heart. How many hotel owners would take such a direct interest in the comfort of a guest?”

“How many hotel owners have just one guest?”

“You used to have three.”

“Those were the days.”

“You know, I may be speaking out of turn, but I find it hard to understand how a person of your interests and talents would be attracted to the hotel business.”

He frowned perplexedly. “I don’t seem to be as good with guests as I might, do I?”

“I knew some people in the Hotel School at Cornell, and I can’t help feeling they would have treated the Crosbys somewhat differently.”

He nodded uncomfortably. “I know. I know.” He flapped his arms. “Damned if I know why I built this hotel —something to do with my life, I guess. A way to be busy, a way not to be lonesome.” He shook his head. “It was be a hermit or open a hotel — with nothing in between.”

“Weren’t you raised at your father’s hospital?”

“That’s right. Mona and I both grew up there.”

“Well, aren’t you at all tempted to do with your life what your father’s done with his?”

Young Castle smiled wanly, avoiding a direct answer. “He’s a funny person, Father is,” he said. “I think you’ll like him.”

“I expect to. There aren’t many people who’ve been as unselfish as he has.”

“One time,” said Castle, “when I was about fifteen, there was a mutiny near here on a Greek ship bound from Hong Kong to Havana with a load of wicker furniture. The mutineers got control of the ship, didn’t know how to run her, and smashed her up on the rocks near ‘Papa’ Monzano’s castle. Everybody drowned but the rats. The rats and the wicker furniture came ashore.”

That seemed to be the end of the story, but I couldn’t be sure. “So?”

“So some people got free furniture, and some people got bubonic plague. At Father’s hospital, we had fourteen-hundred deaths inside of ten days. Have you ever seen anyone die of bubonic plague?”

“That unhappiness has not been mine.”

“The lymph glands in the groin and the armpits swell to the size of grapefruit.”

“I can well believe it.”

“After death, the body turns black — coals to Newcastle in the case of San Lorenzo. When the plague was having everything its own way, the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle looked like Auschwitz or Buchenwald. We had stacks of dead so deep and wide that a bulldozer actually stalled trying to shove them toward a common grave. Father worked without sleep for days, worked not only without sleep but without saving many lives, either.”

Castle’s grisly tale was interrupted by the ringing of my telephone.

“My God,” said Castle, “I didn’t even know the telephones were connected yet.”

I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

It was Major General Franklin Hoenikker who had called me up. He sounded out of breath and scared stiff. “Listen! You’ve got to come out to my house right away. We’ve got to have a talk! It could be a very important thing in your life!”

“Could you give me some idea?”

“Not on the phone, not on the phone. You come to my house. You come right away! Please!”

“All right.”

“I’m not kidding you. This is a really important thing in your life. This is the most important thing ever.” He hung up.

“What was that all about?” asked Castle.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea. Frank Hoenikker wants to see me right away.”

“Take your time. Relax. He’s a moron.”

“He said it was important.”

“How does he know what’s important? I could carve a better man out of a banana.”

“Well, finish your story anyway.”

“Where was I?”

“The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.”

“Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.

“And Father started giggling,” Castle continued.

“He couldn’t stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?” asked Castle.

“Nope.”

“ ‘Son,’ my father said to me, ‘someday this will all be yours.’ ”

Cat’s Cradle 74

I went to Frank’s house in San Lorenzo’s one taxicab.

We passed through scenes of hideous want. We climbed the slope of Mount McCabe. The air grew cooler. There was mist.

Frank’s house had once been the home of Nestor Aamons, father of Mona, architect of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

Aamons had designed it.

It straddled a waterfall; had a terrace cantilevered out into the mist rising from the fall. It was a cunning lattice of very light steel posts and beams. The interstices of the lattice were variously open, chinked with native stone, glazed, or curtained by sheets of canvas.

The effect of the house was not so much to enclose as to announce that a man had been whimsically busy there.

A servant greeted me politely and told me that Frank wasn’t home yet. Frank was expected at any moment. Frank had left orders to the effect that I was to be made happy and comfortable, and that I was to stay for supper and the night. The servant, who introduced himself as Stanley, was the first plump San Lorenzan I had seen.

Stanley led me to my room; led me around the heart of the house, down a staircase of living stone, a staircase sheltered or exposed by steel-framed rectangles at random. My bed was a foam-rubber slab on a stone shelf, a shelf of living stone. The walls of my chamber were canvas. Stanley demonstrated how I might roll them up or down, as I pleased.

I asked Stanley if anybody else was home, and he told me that only Newt was. Newt, he said, was out on the cantilevered terrace, painting a picture. Angela, he said, had gone sightseeing to the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

I went out onto the giddy terrace that straddled the waterfall and found little Newt asleep in a yellow butterfly chair.

The painting on which Newt had been working was set on an easel next to the aluminum railing. The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley.

Newt’s painting was small and black and warty.

It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider’s web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

I did not wake up the midget who had made this dreadful thing. I smoked, listening to imagined voices in the water sounds.

What awakened little Newt was an explosion far away below. It caromed up the valley and went to God. It was a cannon on the water front of Bolivar, Frank’s major-domo told me. It was fired every day at five.

Little Newt stirred.

While still half-snoozing, he put his black, painty hands to his mouth and chin, leaving black smears there. He rubbed his eyes and made black smears around them, too.

“Hello,” he said to me, sleepily.

“Hello,” I said. “I like your painting.”

“You see what it is?”

“I suppose it means something different to everyone who sees it.”

“It’s a cat’s cradle.”

“Aha,” I said. “Very good. The scratches are string. Right?”

“One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”

“You don’t say.”

“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”

“Um.”

Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…”

“And?”

“No damn cat, and no damn cradle .”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 432