U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [414]
Bilbao go to the Sevil a-Biltmore and I
dance of the mil ions or not lackofmoney has raised its customary head inevitable as visas
in the whirl of sugarboom prices in the Augustblister-ing sun yours truly tours the town and the sugary nights with twenty smackers fifteen eightfifty dwindling in the jeans in search of lucrative
and how to get to Mexico
or anywhere
-242-MARGO DOWLING
Margo Dowling was sixteen when she married Tony.
She loved the trip down to Havana on the boat. It was very rough but she wasn't sick a minute; Tony was. He turned very yel ow and lay in his bunk al the time and only groaned when she tried to make him come on deck to breathe some air. The island was in sight before she could get him into his clothes. He was so weak she had to dress him like a baby. He lay on his bunk with his eyes closed and his cheeks hol ow while she buttoned his shoes for him. Then she ran up on deck to see Havana, Cuba. The sea was stil rough. The waves were shooting columns of spray up the great rocks under the lighthouse. The young thinfaced third officer who'd been so nice al the trip showed her Morro Castle back of the lighthouse and the little fishingboats with tiny black or brown figures in them swinging up and down on the huge swel s outside of it. The other side the pale caramelcolored houses looked as if they were standing up right out of the breakers. She asked him where Vedado was and he pointed up beyond into the haze above the surf. "That's the fine residential section," he said. It was very sunny and the sky was ful of big white clouds.
By that time they were in the calm water of the harbor passing a row of big schooners anchored against the steep hil under the sunny forts and castles, and she had to go down into the bilgy closeness of their cabin to get Tony up and close their bags. He was stil weak and kept saying his head was spinning. She had to help him down the gangplank. The ramshackle dock was ful of beadyeyed people in white and tan clothes bustling and jabbering. They al seemed to have come to meet Tony. There were old ladies in'shawls and pimplylooking young men in straw hats and
-243-an old gentleman with big bushy white whiskers wearing a panamahat. Children with dark circles under their eyes got under everybody's feet. Everybody was yel ow or cof-feecolored and had black eyes, and there was one grey-haired old niggerwoman in a pink dress. Everybody cried and threw up their arms and hugged and kissed Tony and it was a long time before anybody noticed Margo at al . Then al the old women crowded around kissing her and staring at her and making exclamations in Spanish about her hair and her eyes and she felt awful sil y not under-standing a word and kept asking Tony which his mother was, but Tony had forgotten his English. When he final y pointed to a stout old lady in a shawl and said la mamá
she was very much relieved it wasn't the colored one. If this is the fine residential section, Margo said to her-self when they al piled out of the streetcar, after a long ride through yammering streets of stone houses ful of dust and oily smel s and wagons and mulecarts, into the blisteringhot sun of a cobbled lane, I'm a mil iondol ar heiress. They went through a tal doorway in a scabby peeling pinkstucco wal cut with narrow barred windows that went right down to the ground, into a cool rankishsmel ing ves-tibule set with wicker chairs and plants. A parrot in a cage squawked and a fat piggy little white dog barked at Margo and the old lady who Tony had said was la mamá came forward and put her arm around her shoulders and said a lot of things in Spanish. Margo stood there standing first on one foot and then on the other. The doorway was crowded with the neighbors staring at her with their mon-keyeyes.
"Say, Tony, you might at least tel me what she's say-ing," Margo whined peevishly.
"Mother says this is your house and you are welcome, things like that. Now you must say muchas gracias, mam