John Passos - 1919

With the addition of a fellow named Sheldrake who was an expert on folkdancing and had been in the famous section 7, the grenadine guards dined in state at the Bristol. They continued the evening at the promenoire at the Apollo, that was so full of all the petite femmes in the world, they never saw the show. Everything was cockeyed and full of women, the shrill bright main streets with their cafés and cabarets, and the black sweaty tunnels of streets back of the harbor full of rumpled beds and sailors and black skin and brown skin, wriggling bellies, flopping purplewhite breasts, grinding thighs.

Very late Steve and Dick found themselves alone in a little restaurant eating ham and eggs and coffee. They were drunk and sleepy and quarrelling drowsily. When they paid, the middleaged waitress told them to put the tip on the corner of the table and blew them out of their chairs by calmly hoisting her skirts and picking up the coins between her legs.

“It’s a hoax, a goddam hoax…. Sex is a slotmachine,” Steve kept saying and it seemed gigantically funny, so funny that they went into an early morning bar and tried to tell the man behind the counter about it, but he didn’t understand them and wrote out on a piece of paper the name of an establishment where they could faire rigajig, une maison, propre, convenable, et de haute moralité. Hooting with laughter they found themselves reeling and stumbling as they climbed endless stairways. The wind was cold as hell. They were in front of a crazylooking cathedral looking down on the harbor, steamboats, great expanses of platinum sea hemmed in by ashen mountains. “By God, that’s the Mediterranean.”

They sobered up in the cold jostling wind and the wide metallic flare of dawn and got back to their hotel in time to shake the others out of their drunken slumbers and be the first to report for duty at the parked cars. Dick was so sleepy he forgot what he ought to do with his feet and ran his Ford into the car ahead and smashed his headlights. The fat lieutenant bawled him out shrilly and took the car away from him and put him on a Fiat with Sheldrake, so he had nothing to do all day but look out of his drowse at the Corniche and the Mediterranean and the redroofed towns and the long lines of steamboats bound east hugging the shore for fear of Uboats, convoyed by an occasional French destroyer with its smokestacks in all the wrong places.

Crossing the Italian border they were greeted by crowds of schoolchildren with palmleaves and baskets of oranges, and a movie operator. Sheldrake kept stroking his beard and bowing and saluting at the cheers of evviva gli americani, until zowie, he got an orange between the eyes that pretty near gave him a nosebleed. Another man down the line came within an inch of having his eye put out by a palmbranch thrown by a delirious inhabitant of Vintimiglia. It was a great reception. That night in San Remo enthusiastic wops kept running up to the boys on the street, shaking their hands and congratulating them on il Presidente Veelson; somebody stole all the spare tires out of the camionette and the Red Cross Publicity Man’s suitcase that had been left in the staffcar. They were greeted effusively and shortchanged in the bars. Evviva gli aleati.

Everybody in the section began to curse out Italy and the rubber spaghetti and the vinegary wine, except Dick and Steve, who suddenly became woplovers and bought themselves grammars to learn the language. Dick already gave a pretty good imitation of talking Italian, especially before the Red Cross officers, by putting an o on the end of all the French words he knew. He didn’t give a damn about anything any more. It was sunny, vermouth was a great drink, the towns and the toy churches on the tops of hills and the vineyards and the cypresses and the blue sea were like a succession of backdrops for an oldfashioned opera. The buildings were stagy and ridiculously magnificent; on every blank wall the damn wops had painted windows and colonnades and balconies with fat Titianhaired beauties leaning over them and clouds and covies of dimpletummied cupids.

That night they parked the convoy in the main square of a godforsaken little burg on the outskirts of Genoa. They went with Sheldrake to have a drink in a bar and found themselves drinking with the Saturday Evening Post correspondent who soon began to get tight and to say how he envied them their good looks and their sanguine youth and idealism. Steve picked him up about everything and argued bitterly that youth was the lousiest time in your life, and that he ought to be goddam glad he was forty years old and able to write about the war instead of fighting in it. Ellis goodnaturedly pointed out that they weren’t fighting either. Steve made Sheldrake sore by snapping out, “No, of course not, we’re goddamned embusqués.” He and Steve left the bar and ran like deer to get out of sight before Sheldrake could follow them. Around the corner they saw a streetcar marked Genoa and Steve hopped it without saying a word. Dick didn’t have anything to do but follow.

The car rounded a block of houses and came out on the waterfront. “Judas Priest, Dick,” said Steve, “the goddam town’s on fire.” Beyond the black hulks of boats drawn up on the shore a rosy flame like a gigantic lampflame sent a broad shimmer towards them across the water. “Gracious, Steve, do you suppose the Austrians are in there?”

The car went whanging along; the conductor who came and got their fare looked calm enough. “Inglese?” he asked. “Americani,” said Steve. He smiled and clapped them on the back and said something about the Presidente Veelson that they couldn’t understand.

They got off the car in a big square surrounded by huge arcades that a raw bittersweet wind blew hugely through. Dressedup people in overcoats were walking up and down on the clean mosaic pavement. The town was all marble. Every façade that faced the sea was pink with the glow of the fire. “Here the tenors and the baritones and the sopranos all ready for the show to begin,” said Dick. Steve grunted, “Chorus’ll probably be the goddam Austrians.”

They were cold and went into one of the shiny nickel and plateglass cafés to have a grog. The waiter told them in broken English that the fire was on an American tanker that had hit a mine and that she’d been burning for three days. A longfaced English officer came over from the bar and started to tell them how he was on a secret mission; it was all bloody awful about the retreat; it hadn’t stopped yet; in Milan they were talking about falling back on the Po; the only reason the bloody Austrians hadn’t overrun all bloody Lombardy was they’d been so disorganized by their rapid advance they were in almost as bad shape as the bloody Italians were. Damned Italian officers kept talking about their quadrilateral, and if it wasn’t for the French and British troops behind the Italian lines they’d have sold out long ago. French morale was pretty shaky, at that. Dick told him about how the tools got swiped every time they took their eyes off their cars. The Englishman said the thievery in these parts was extraordinary; that was what his secret mission was about; he was trying to trace an entire carload of boots that had vanished between Vintimiglia and San Raphael, “Whole bloody luggage van turns into thin air overnight… extraordinary…. See those blighters over there at that table, they’re bloody Austrian spies every mother’s son of them… but try as I can I can’t get them arrested… extraordinary. It’s a bloody melodrama that’s what it is, just like Drury Lane. A jolly good thing you Americans have come in. If you hadn’t you’d see the bloody German flag flying over Genoa at this minute.” He suddenly looked at his wristwatch, advised them to buy a bottle of whiskey at the bar if they wanted another bit of drink, because it was closing time, said cheeryoh, and hustled out.