Portraits and Observations Read online

  Her first exhibit was an illuminated bibelot cabinet. “This,” she said, pointing to a bit of Chinese porcelain, “is Mummy’s ancient vase she paid Gump’s three thousand dollars for. And that’s her gold cocktail shaker and gold cups. I forget how much they cost, an awful lot, maybe five thousand dollars. And you see that old teapot? You wouldn’t believe what it’s worth …”

  It was a monstrous recital, and toward the end of it, Nora, looking dazedly round the room for a change of topic, said, “Such lovely flowers. Are they from your own garden?”

  “Heavens, no,” replied the little girl disdainfully. “Mummy orders them every day from the most expensive florist in Beverly Hills.”

  “Oh?” said Nora, wincing. “And what is your favorite flower?”

  “Orchids.”

  “Now really. I don’t believe orchids could be your favorite flower. A little girl like you.”

  She thought a moment. “Well, as a matter of fact, they aren’t. But Mummy says they are the most expensive.”

  Just then there was a rustling at the door; Miss C. skipped like a schoolgirl across the room: her famous face was without make-up; hairpins dangled loosely. She was wearing a very ordinary flannel housecoat. “Nora, darling,” she called, her arms outstretched, “do forgive my being so long. I’ve been upstairs making the beds.”

  Yesterday, feeling greedy, I remembered ravishing displays of fruit outside a large emporium I’d driven admiringly past a number of times. Mammoth oranges, grapes big as ping-pong balls, apples piled in rosy pyramids. There is a sleight of hand about distances here, nothing is so near as you supposed, and it is not unusual to travel ten miles for a package of cigarettes. It was a two-mile walk before I even caught sight of the fruit store. The long counters were tilted so that from quite far away you could see the splendid wares, apples, pears. I reached for one of these extraordinary apples, but it seemed to be glued into its case. A salesgirl giggled. “Plaster,” she said, and I laughed too, a little feverishly perhaps, then wearily followed her into the deeper regions of the store, where I bought six small, rather mealy apples, and six small, rather mealy pears.

  It is Christmas week. And it is evening now a long time. Below the window a lake of light bulbs electrifies the valley. From the haunting impermanence of their hilltop homes impermanent eyes are watching them, almost as if suddenly they might go out, like candles at last consumed.

  Earlier today I took a bus all the way from Beverly Hills into downtown Los Angeles. The streets are strung with garlands, we passed a motorized sleigh that was spinning along spilling a wake of white cornflakes, at corners sweating woolly men rustle bells under the shade of prefabricated trees; carols, hurled from lamppost loudspeakers, pour their syrup on the air, and tinsel, twinkling in twenty-four-karat sunshine, hangs everywhere like swamp moss. It could not be more Christmas, or less so. I once knew a woman who imported a pink villa stone by stone from Italy and had it reconstructed on a demure Connecticut meadow: Christmas is as out of place in Hollywood as the villa was in Connecticut. And what is Christmas without children, on whom so much of the point depends? Last week I met a man who concluded a set of observations by saying, “And of course you know this is the childless city.”

  For five days I have been testing his remark, casually at first, now with morbid alarm; preposterous, I know, but since commencing this mysterious campaign I have seen less than half a dozen children. But first, a relevant point: a primary complaint here is overpopulation; old-guard natives tell me the terrain is bulging with “undesirable” elements, hordes of ex-soldiers, workers who moved here during the war, and those spiritual Okies, the young and footloose; yet walking around I sometimes have the feeling of one who awakened some eerie morning into a hushed, deserted world where overnight, like sailors aboard the Marie Celeste, all souls had disappeared. There is an air of Sunday vacancy; here where no one walks cars glide in a constant shiny silent stream, my shadow, moving down the stark white street, is like the one living element of a Chirico. It is not the comfortable silence felt in small American towns, though the physical atmosphere of stoops and yards and hedges is very often the same; the difference is that in real towns you can be pretty sure what sorts of people there are hiding beyond those numbered doors, but here, where all seems transient, ephemeral, there is no general pattern to the population, and nothing is intended—this street, that house, mushrooms of accident, and a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.

  1. A teacher here recently gave a vocabulary test in which she asked her students to provide the antonym of youth. Over half the class answered death.

  2. No stylish Hollywood home is thought quite sanitary without a brace of modern masters to brighten up the walls. One producer has what amounts to a small gallery; he refers to paintings merely as good investments. His wife is less modest: “Sure we know about art. We’ve been to Greece, haven’t we? California is just like Greece. Exactly. You’d be surprised. Go over there and talk to my husband about Picasso; he can give you the real low-down.”

  The day I saw their famous collection I had a picture that I was taking to a framer, a small colored Klee lithograph. “Pleasant,” said the producer’s wife cautiously. “Paint it yourself?”

  Waiting for a bus, I ran into P., of whom I am rather admiring. She has the sort of wit that excludes malice, and, what is more uncommon, she has managed thirty years of Hollywood with humor and dignity. Naturally, she is not very rich. At the moment she is living above a garage. It is interesting, because by local standards she is a failure, which along with age, is unforgivable; even so, success pays her homage, and her Sunday coffee sessions are quite luminously attended, for above that garage she contrives a momentary sense of security, and for all a feeling of having roots. She is an inexhaustible scrapbook, too, the time sequence of her conversation shifting, sliding, until, as she fixes you with her cornflower eyes, Valentino passes lightly brushing your arm, the young Garbo hovers at the window, John Gilbert appears on the lawn, stands there like a twilight statue, the senior Fairbanks roars up the driveway, two mastiffs baying in the rumble seat.

  P. offered to drive me home. We went by way of Santa Monica, in order that she could drop off a present for A., that sad, jittery lady who once, after the departure of her third husband, threw an Oscar into the ocean.

  The thing about A. which most intrigued me was the way she applied make-up—such a brutally objective performance; cold-eyed, calculating, she wields her paints and powders altogether as if the face belongs to someone else, managing, in the process, to smooth away whatever time has given her.

  As we were leaving, the maid came out to say that A.’s father would like to see us. We found him in a garden facing the ocean; a knotty, phlegmatic old man with blue-white hair and skin browner than iodine, he was slumped in a patch of sunshine, his eyes closed, no sound to disturb him but the slumbering slap of waves, the dozy singing of bees. Old people love California; they close their eyes, and the wind through the winter flowers says sleep, the sea says sleep: it is a preview of heaven. From daybreak to dark A.’s father follows the sun around his garden, and on rainy days he whiles away the time by making bracelets of beer-bottle caps. He gave each of us one of these bracelets, and in a voice that hardly carried through the honeyed, blowing air, said, “A merry Christmas, children.”

  HAITI

  (1948)

  To look at, Hyppolite is perhaps an ugly man: monkey-thin, gaunt-faced, quite dark, he looks (through silver schoolmarm spectacles), listens with the steadiest, most gracious precision, his eyes echoing a subtle and basic understanding. One feels with him a certain safety; there is created between you that too uncommon circumstance, no sense of isolation.

  This morning I heard that during the night his daughter died, a daughter eight months old; there are other children, he has been married many times, five or six; even so, how hard it must be, for he is not young. No one has told me, I wonder if there i
s a wake. In Haiti they are extravagant, these wakes, and excessively stylized: the mourners, strangers in large part, claw air, drum their heads on the ground, in unison moan a low doglike grief. Heard at night, or seen suddenly on a country road, it seems so alien the heart shivers, and then one realizes that in essence these are mimes.

  Because he is the most popular of Haiti’s primitive painters, Hyppolite could afford a running-water house, real beds, electricity; as it is, he lives by lamp, by candle, and all the neighbors, old withered coconut-headed ladies and handsome sailor boys and hunched sandal makers, can see into his affairs as he can see into theirs. Once, some while back, a friend took it upon himself to rent Hyppolite another house, a sturdy sort of place with concrete floors and walls behind which one could hide, but of course he was not happy there, he has no need for secrecy or comfort. It is for this reason that I find Hyppolite admirable, for there is nothing in his art that has been slyly transposed, he is using what lives within himself, and that is his country’s spiritual history, its singings and worships.

  Displayed prominently in the room where he paints is an enormous trumpet-shaped shell; pink and elaborately curled, it is like some ocean flower, an underwater rose, and if you blow through it, there comes forth a howl hoarse and lonesome, a windlike sound: it is for sailors a magic horn that calls the wind, and Hyppolite, who plans an around-the-world voyage aboard his own red-sailed ship, practices upon it regularly. Most of his energy and all his money go into the building of this ship; there is about his dedication the quality frequently seen in those who supervise the plotting of their own funerals, the building of their own tombs. Once he sets sail and is out of land’s sight, I wonder if again anyone will ever see him.

  From the terrace where in the mornings I sit reading or writing, I can see the mountains sliding blue and bluer down to the harbor bay. Below there is the whole of Port-au-Prince, a town whose colors are paled into peeling historical pastels by centuries of sun: sky-gray cathedral, hyacinth fountain, green-rust fence. To the left, and like a city within this other, there is a great chalk garden of baroque stone; here is the cemetery, this is where, amid flat metal light and monuments like birdcages, they will bring his daughter: they will bring her up the hill, a dozen of them dressed in straw hats and black, sweet peas heavy on the air.

  1. Tell me, why are there so many dogs? to whom do they belong, and for what purpose? Mangy, hurt-eyed, they pad along the streets in little herds like persecuted Christians, all innocuous enough by day, but come night how their vanity and their voices exaggerate! First one, another, then all, through the hours you can hear their enraged, embittered, moon-imploring tirades. S. says it is like a reversed alarm clock, for as soon as the dogs commence, and that indeed is early, it is time to go to bed. You might as well; the town has drawn shutters by ten, except, that is, on rahrah weekends, when drums and drunks drown out the dogs. But I like hearing a morning multitude of cock-crows; they set blowing a windfall of reverberations. On the other hand, what is more irritating than the racket of car horns? Haitians who own cars seem so to adore honking their horns; one begins to suspect this activity of political and/or sexual significance.

  2. If it were possible, I should like to make a film here; except for incidental music it would be soundless, nothing but a camera brilliantly framing architecture, objects. There is a flying kite, on the kite there is a crayon eye, now the eye is loose and blowing in the wind, it snags on a fence and we, the eye, the camera, see a house (like M. Rigaud’s). This is a tall, brittle, somewhat absurd structure representing no particular period, but seeming rather to be of an infinitely bastard lineage: the French influence, and England in somber Victorian garb; there is an Oriental quality, too, touches that suggest a lantern of frilled paper. It is a carved house, its turrets, towers, porticoes are laced with angel heads, snowflake shapes, valentine hearts: as the camera traces each of these we hear a tantalizing sub-musical tap-rap of bamboo rods. A window, very sudden; a sugar-white meringue of curtains, and a lumplike eye, and then a face, a woman like an old pressed flower, jet at her throat and jet combs in her hair; we pass through her, and into the room, two green chameleons race over the chifforobe mirror where her image shines. Like dissonant piano notes, the camera shifts with swift sharp jabs, and we are aware of the happenings our eyes never notice: a rose leaf falling, a picture tilting crooked. Now we have begun.

  3. Comparatively few tourists come to Haiti, and a fair number of those who do, especially the average American couple, sit around in their hotels in a superior sulk. It is unfortunate, for of all the West Indies, Haiti is quite the most interesting; still, when one considers the objectives of these vacationers their attitude is not without reason: the nearest beach is a three-hour drive, night life is unimpressive, there is no restaurant whose menu is very distinguished. Aside from the hotels, there are only a few public places where late of an evening one can go for a rum soda; among the pleasanter of these are the whorehouses set back among the foliage along the Bizonton Road. All the houses have names, rather egotistical ones: the Paradise, for example. And they are uncompromisingly respectable, perfect parlor decorum is observed: the girls, most of whom are from the Dominican Republic, sit on the front porch rocking in rocking chairs, fanning themselves with cardboard pictures of Jesus and conversing in a gentle, gossipy, laughing way; it is like any American summer scene. Beer, not whiskey or even champagne, is considered de rigueur, and if one wants to make an impression, it is the drink to order. One girl I know can down thirty bottles; she is older than the others, wears lavender lipstick, is rumba-hipped and viper-tongued, all of which makes her a popular lady indeed, though she herself says she will never feel like a success until she can afford to have every tooth in her head converted into solid gold.

  4. The Estimé government has passed a law which forbids promenading in the streets sans shoes: this is a hard, uneconomical ruling, and an uncomfortable one as well, especially for those peasants who must bring their produce to market afoot. But the government, now anxious to make the country more of a tourist attraction, feels that shoeless Haitians might depress his potential trade, that the poorness of the people should not be overt. By and large, however, Haitians are poor, but about this poverty there is none of that vicious, mean atmosphere which surrounds the poverty that demands a keeping-up of appearances. It always makes me rather wretched when some popular platitude proves true; still, it is a fact, I suppose, that the most generous of us are those that have the least to be generous with. Almost any Haitian who comes to call will conclude his visit by presenting you with a small, usually odd gift: a can of sardines, a spool of thread; but these gifts are given with such dignity and tenderness that, ah! the sardines have swallowed pearls, the thread is purest silver.

  5. This is R.’s story. A few days ago he went out into the country to sketch; suddenly, coming to the bottom of a hill, he saw a tall, slant-eyed, ragged girl. She was tied to the trunk of a tree, wire and rope binding her there. At first, because she laughed at him, he thought it was a joke, but when he tried to let her loose several children appeared and began to poke at him with sticks; he asked them why the girl was tied to the tree, but they giggled and shouted and would not give an answer. Presently an old man joined them; he was carrying a gourd filled with water. When R. asked again about the girl, the old man, tears misting his eyes, said, “She is bad, monsieur, there is no use she is so bad,” and shook his head. R. started back up the hill; then, turning, he saw the man was letting her drink from the gourd, and as she took a last swallow she spat into his face; with a gentle patience the old man wiped himself and walked away.

  6. I like Estelle, and I must say I have come to care less for S. because he doesn’t: there is no brand of intolerance so tiresome as that which results in condemning characteristics you yourself possess: in the opinion of S., Estelle is lusty, vulgar, a fraud; S., to be sure, and except for the first mentioned, is not without these qualities himself. In any event, it shows a finer nature to be un
consciously vulgar than to be consciously virtuous. But of course S. is very much “in” with the American colony here, and their views, with a few isolated exceptions, are often gray and always severe. Estelle isn’t cherished by any group. “Who gives a damn?” says she. “Listen, egghead, there’s nothing wrong with me but the fact that I’m so almighty good-looking, and when a girl’s as good-looking as me and she won’t let a lot of crumbs crawl all over, well, thumbs down, get it?”

  Estelle is one of the tallest girls I’ve ever seen, an easy six feet; her face is strong and bony, in the Swedish manner, her hair rosy, her eyes cat-green: somehow there is always an aura about her which suggests that she has just been tossed about in a hurricane. She is several Estelles, actually. One of them is the heroine of a not-too-good novel: here today—gone tomorrow, hello, you heartache of a world, that school of antics. Another Estelle is a big puppy of a girl dizzy for love: she is always quite sure the most improbable people have the most honorable intentions. A third Estelle is not so much shady as she is shadowy: who is Estelle? what is she doing here? how long does she intend to stay? what is it that makes her get up in the morning? Now and then this third element of the multiple Miss E. will refer to her “work.” But the nature of her work is never labeled. Most of the time she sits in a café on the Champ de Mars and, at a cost of ten cents a round, drinks rum punches. The bartender is always asleep, and whenever she wants anything she swaggers over and thumps his head as though it were a ripe watermelon. There is a crazy little lop-eared dog that follows her everywhere, and usually she has some human crony with her, too. Her favorite is a pale, prim man who might be a Bible salesman; as it happens, he is a traveling entertainer who hops from island to island with a suitcase full of puppets and a head full of nonsense. On clear evenings Estelle sets up headquarters at a table on the sidewalk outside the café; many of the young native girls bring their love problems here to this table: about other people’s love she is serious and sad. Once she herself was married, when or to whom I do not know, she is so altogether vague, but, and even though she is only twenty-five, it must have been a very long time ago. Last night I passed by the café, and as usual she was sitting at her sidewalk table. But there was a difference. She was wearing make-up, which she seldom does, and a neat, conventional dress; there were two pink carnations burning in her hair, the sort of decoration of which I’d thought her incapable. Also, I’d never seen her really drunk before. “Egghead, hello, is it you? Yesyesyes,” she said, tapping me on the chest, “listen, kid, I’m going to give you proof positive, I’m going to show you it’s a fact, it’s a fact that when you love somebody that somebody can make you eat any goddamn thing. Look now”—and she yanked a carnation from her hair—“he’s nuts about me,” she said, thrusting the flower at the little dog crouched at her feet, “he’ll eat it just because I say to, damn if he won’t.”