Book: The Enormous Room

E >> Edward Estlin Cummings >> The Enormous Room




_Soi-même_ reminds me of a pleasant spirit who graced our little company
with a good deal of wit and elegance. He was called by B. and myself,
after a somewhat exciting incident which I must not describe, but rather
outline, by the agreeable title of Même le Balayeur. Only a few days
after my arrival the incident in question happened. It seems (I was in
_la cour_ promenading for the afternoon) that certain more virile
inhabitants of The Enormous Room, among them Harree and Pom Pom _bien
entendu_, declined to _se promener_ and kept their habitat. Now this was
in fulfilment of a little understanding with three or more girls--such as
Celina, Lily and Renée--who, having also declined the promenade, managed
in the course of the afternoon to escape from their quarters on the
second floor, rush down the hall and upstairs, and gain that landing on
which was the only and well-locked door to The Enormous Room. The next
act of this little comedy (or tragedy, as it proved for the participants,
who got _cabinot_ and _pain sec_--male and female alike--for numerous
days thereafter) might well be entitled "Love will find a way." Just how
the door was opened, the lock picked, etc., from the inside is (of
course) a considerable mystery to anyone possessing a limited
acquaintance with the art of burglary. Anyway it was accomplished, and
that in several fifths of a second. Now let the curtain fall, and the
reader be satisfied with the significant word "Asbestos," which is part
of all first-rate performances.

The Surveillant, I fear, distrusted his _balayeur_. _Balayeurs_ were
always being changed because _balayeurs_ were (in shameful contrast to
the _plantons_) invariably human beings. For this deplorable reason they
inevitably carried notes to and fro between _les hommes_ and _les
femmes_. Upon which ground the _balayeur_ in this case--a well-knit
keen-eyed agile man, with a sense of humour and sharp perception of men,
women and things in particular and in general--was called before the bar
of an impromptu court, held by M. le Surveillant in The Enormous Room
after the promenade. I shall not enter in detail into the nature of the
charges pressed in certain cases, but confine myself to quoting the close
of a peroration which would have done Demosthenes credit:

"_Même le balayeur a tiré un coup!_"

The individual in question mildly deprecated M. le Surveillant's opinion,
while the audience roared and rocked with laughter of a somewhat
ferocious sort. I have rarely seen the Surveillant so pleased with
himself as after producing this _bon mot_. Only fear of his superior, the
ogre-like Directeur, kept him from letting off entirely all concerned in
what after all (from the European point of view) was an essentially human
proceeding. As nobody could prove anything about Même, he was not locked
up in a dungeon; but he lost his job of sweeper--which was quite as bad,
I am sure, from his point of view--and from that day became a common
inhabitant of The Enormous Room like any of the rest of us.

His successor, Garibaldi, was a corker.

How the Almighty French Government in its Almighty Wisdom ever found
Garibaldi a place among us is more than I understand or ever will. He was
a little tot in a faded blue-grey French uniform; and when he perspired
he pushed a _kepi_ up and back from his worried forehead which a lock of
heavy hair threateningly overhung. As I recollect Garibaldi's terribly
difficult, not to say complicated, lineage, his English mother had
presented him to his Italian father in the country of France. However
this trilogy may be, he had served at various times in the Italian,
French and English armies. As there was (unless we call Garibaldi
Italian, which he obviously was not) nary a subject of King Ponzi or
Carruso or whatever be his name residing at La Ferté Macé, Garibaldi was
in the habit of expressing himself--chiefly at the card table, be it
said--in a curious language which might have been mistaken for French. To
B. and me he spoke an equally curious language, but a perfectly
recognizable one, i.e., Cockney Whitechapel English. He showed us a
perfectly authentic mission-card which certified that his family had
received a pittance from some charitable organisation situated in the
Whitechapel neighbourhood, and that, moreover, they were in the habit of
receiving this pittance; and that, finally, their claim to such pittance
was amply justified by the poverty of their circumstances. Beyond this
valuable certificate, Garibaldi (which everyone called him) attained
great incoherence. He had been wronged. He was always being
misunderstood. His life had been a series of mysterious tribulations. I
for one have the merest idea that Garibaldi was arrested for the theft of
some peculiarly worthless trifle, and sent to the Limbo of La Ferté as a
penance. This merest idea is suggested by something which happened when
The Clever Man instituted a search for his missing knife--but I must
introduce The Clever Man to my reader before describing that rather
beguiling incident.

Conceive a tall, well-dressed, rather athletic, carefully kept, clean and
neat, intelligent, not for a moment despondent, altogether superior man,
fairly young (perhaps twenty-nine) and quite bald. He wins enough every
night at _banque_ to enable him to pay the less fortunate to perform his
_corvée d'eau_ for him. As a consequence he takes his vile coffee in bed
every morning, then smokes a cigarette or two lazily, then drops off for
a nap, and gets up about the middle of the morning promenade. Upon
arising he strops a razor of his own (nobody knows how he gets away with
a regular razor), carefully lathers his face and neck--while gazing into
a rather classy mirror which hangs night and day over his head, above a
little shelf on which he displays at such times a complete toilet
outfit--and proceeds to annihilate the inconsiderable growth of beard
which his mirror reveals to him. Having completed the annihilation, he
performs the most extensive ablutions per one of the three or four pails
which The Enormous Room boasts, which pail is by common consent dedicated
to his personal and exclusive use. All this time he has been singing
loudly and musically the following sumptuously imaginative ditty:

"mEEt me tonIght in DREAmland,
UNder the SIL-v'ry mOOn,
meet me in DREAmland,
sweet dreamy DREAmland--
there all my DRE-ams come trUE."

His English accent is excellent. He pronounces his native language, which
is the language of the Hollanders, crisply and firmly. He is not given to
Gottverdummering. In addition to Dutch and English he speaks French
clearly and Belgian distinctly. I daresay he knows half a dozen languages
in all. He gives me the impression of a man who would never be at a loss,
in whatever circumstances he might find himself. A man capable of
extricating himself from the most difficult situation; and that with the
greatest ease. A man who bides his time; and improves the present by
separating, one after one, his monied fellow-prisoners from their
banknotes. He is, by all odds, the coolest player that I ever watched.
Nothing worries him. If he loses two hundred francs tonight, I am sure he
will win it and fifty in addition tomorrow. He accepts opponents without
distinction--the stupid, the wily, the vain, the cautious, the desperate,
the hopeless. He has not the slightest pity, not the least fear. In one
of my numerous notebooks I have this perfectly direct paragraph:

Card table: 4 stares play banque with 2 cigarettes (1 dead) & A
pipe the clashing faces yanked by a leanness of one candle
bottle-stuck (Birth of X) (where sits The Clever Man who
pyramids,) sings (mornings) "Meet Me..."

which specimen of telegraphic technique, being interpreted, means: Judas,
Garibaldi, and The Holland Skipper (whom the reader will meet _de
suite_)--Garibaldi's cigarette having gone out, so greatly is he
absorbed--play _banque_ with four intent and highly focussed individuals
who may or may not be The Schoolmaster, Monsieur Auguste, The Barber, and
Même; with The Clever Man (as nearly always) acting as banker. The candle
by whose somewhat uncorpulent illumination the various physiognomies are
yanked into a ferocious unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The
lighting of the whole, the rhythmic disposition of the figures, construct
a sensuous integration suggestive of The Birth of Christ by one of the
Old Masters. The Clever Man, having had his usual morning warble, is
extremely quiet. He will win, he pyramids--and he pyramids because he has
the cash and can afford to make every play a big one. All he needs is the
rake of a _croupier_ to complete his disinterested and wholly nerveless
poise. He is a born gambler, is The Clever Man--and I dare say that to
play cards in time of war constituted a heinous crime and I am certain
that he played cards before he arrived at La Ferté; moreover, I suppose
that to win at cards in time of war is an unutterable crime, and I know
that he has won at cards before in his life--so now we have a perfectly
good and valid explanation of the presence of The Clever Man in our
midst. The Clever Man's chief opponent was Judas. It was a real pleasure
to us whenever of an evening Judas sweated and mopped and sweated and
lost more and more and was finally cleaned out.

But The Skipper, I learned from certain prisoners who escorted the
baggage of The Clever Man from The Enormous Room when he left us one day
(as he did for some reason, to enjoy the benefits of freedom), paid the
mastermind of the card table 150 francs at the gate--poor Skipper! upon
whose vacant bed lay down luxuriously the Lobster, immediately to be
wheeled fiercely all around The Enormous Room by the Guard Champêtre and
Judas, to the boisterous plaudits of _tout le monde_--but I started to
tell about the afternoon when the master-mind lost his knife; and tell it
I will forthwith. B. and I were lying prone upon our respective beds
when--presto, a storm arose at the further end of The Enormous Room. We
looked, and beheld The Clever Man, thoroughly and efficiently angry,
addressing, threatening and frightening generally a constantly increasing
group of fellow-prisoners. After dismissing with a few sharp linguistic
cracks of the whip certain theories which seemed to be advanced by the
bolder auditors with a view to palliating, persuading and tranquilizing
his just wrath, he made for the nearest _paillasse_, turned it
topsy-turvy, slit it neatly and suddenly from stem to stem with a
jack-knife, banged the hay about, and then went with careful haste
through the pitifully minute baggage of the _paillasse's_ owner. Silence
fell. No one, least of all the owner, said anything. From this bed The
Clever Man turned to the next, treated it in the same fashion, searched
it thoroughly, and made for the third. His motions were those of a
perfectly oiled machine. He proceeded up the length of the room, varying
his procedure only by sparing an occasional mattress, throwing
_paillasses_ about, tumbling _sacs_ and boxes inside out; his face
somewhat paler than usual but otherwise immaculate and expressionless. B.
and I waited with some interest to see what would happen to our
belongings. Arriving at our beds he paused, seemed to consider a moment,
then, not touching our _paillasses_ proper, proceeded to open our duffle
bags and hunt half-heartedly, remarking that "somebody might have put it
in;" and so passed on. "What in hell is the matter with that guy?" I
asked of Fritz, who stood near us with a careless air, some scorn and
considerable amusement in his eyes. "The bloody fool's lost his knife,"
was Fritz's answer. After completing his rounds The Clever Man searched
almost everyone except ourselves and Fritz, and absolutely subsided on
his own _paillasse_ muttering occasionally "if he found it" what he'd do.
I think he never did find it. It was a "beautiful" knife, John the
Baigneur said. "What did it look like?" I demanded with some curiosity.
"It had a naked woman on the handle" Fritz said, his eyes sharp with
amusement.

And everyone agreed that it was a great pity that The Clever Man had lost
it, and everyone began timidly to restore order and put his personal
belongings back in place and say nothing at all.

But what amused me was to see the little tot in a bluish-grey French
uniform, Garibaldi, who--about when the search approached his
_paillasse_--suddenly hurried over to B. (his perspiring forehead more
perspiring than usual, his _kepi_ set at an angle of insanity) and
hurriedly presented B. with a long-lost German silver folding camp-knife,
purchased by B. from a fellow-member of Vingt-et-Un who was known to us
as "Lord Algie"--a lanky, effeminate, brittle, spotless creature who was
en route to becoming an officer and to whose finicky tastes the
fat-jowled A. tirelessly pandered, for, doubtless, financial
considerations--which knife according to the trembling and altogether
miserable Garibaldi had "been found" by him that day in the _cour_; which
was eminently and above all things curious, as the treasure had been lost
weeks before.

Which again brings us to the Skipper, whose elaborate couch has already
been mentioned--he was a Hollander and one of the strongest, most gentle
and altogether most pleasant of men, who used to sit on the water-wagon
under the shed in the _cour_ and smoke his pipe quietly of an afternoon.
His stocky even tightly-knit person, in its heavy-trousers and jersey
sweater, culminated in a bronzed face which was at once as kind and firm
a piece of supernatural work as I think I ever knew. His voice was
agreeably modulated. He was utterly without affectation. He had three
sons. One evening a number of _gendarmes_ came to his house and told him
that he was arrested, "so my three sons and I threw them all out of the
window into the canal."

I can still see the opening smile, squared kindness of cheeks, eyes like
cool keys--his heart always with the Sea.

The little Machine-Fixer (_le petit bonhomme avec le bras cassé_ as he
styled himself, referring to his little paralysed left arm) was so
perfectly different that I must let you see him next. He was slightly
taller than Garibaldi, about of a size with Monsieur Auguste. He and
Monsieur Auguste together were a fine sight, a sight which made me feel
that I came of a race of giants. I am afraid it was more or less as
giants that B. and I pitied the Machine-Fixer--still this was not really
our fault, since the Machine-Fixer came to us with his troubles much as a
very minute and helpless child comes to a very large and omnipotent one.
And God knows we did not only pity him, we liked him--and if we could in
some often ridiculous manner assist the Machine-Fixer I think we nearly
always did. The assistance to which I refer was wholly spiritual; since
the minute Machine-Fixer's colossal self-pride eliminated any possibility
of material assistance. What we did, about every other night, was to
entertain him (as we entertained our other friends) _chez nous_; that is
to say, he would come up late every evening or every other evening, after
his day's toil--for he worked as co-sweeper with Garibaldi and he was a
tremendous worker; never have I seen a man who took his work so seriously
and made so much of it--to sit, with great care and very respectfully,
upon one or the other of our beds at the upper end of The Enormous Room,
and smoke a black small pipe, talking excitedly and strenuously and
fiercely about _La Misère_ and himself and ourselves, often crying a
little but very bitterly, and from time to time striking matches with a
short angry gesture on the sole of his big, almost square boot. His
little, abrupt, conscientious, relentless, difficult self lived always in
a single dimension--the somewhat beautiful dimension of Sorrow. He was a
Belgian, and one of two Belgians in whom I have ever felt the least or
slightest interest; for the Machine-Fixer might have been a Polak or an
Idol or an Esquimo so far as his nationality affected his soul. By and
large, that was the trouble--the Machine-Fixer had a soul. Put the
bracelets on an ordinary man, tell him he's a bad egg, treat him rough,
shove him into the jug or its equivalent (you see I have regard always
for M. le Surveillant's delicate but no doubt necessary distinction
between La Ferté and Prison), and he will become one of three animals--a
rabbit, that is to say timid; a mole, that is to say stupid; or a hyena,
that is to say Harree the Hollander. But if, by some fatal, some
incomparably fatal accident, this man has a soul--ah, then we have and
truly have most horribly what is called in La Ferté Macé by those who
have known it: _La Misère_. Monsieur Auguste's valiant attempts at
cheerfulness and the natural buoyancy of his gentle disposition in a
slight degree protected him from _La Misère_. The Machine-Fixer was lost.
By nature he was tremendously sensible, he was the very apotheosis of
_l'ame sensible_ in fact. His sensibilité made him shoulder not only the
inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and
overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was
suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes, had they
not sprung from perfectly real causes, might have suggested a persecution
complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving
them--they could be relieved in only one way: by Liberty. Not simply by
his personal liberty, but by the liberation of every single
fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be
selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting, in his own case, of the
Wrong--the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong--done
to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that
abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of
our common life. It was necessary, for its appeasement, that a shaft of
bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and
material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful
selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.

B. recalls that the little Machine-Fixer said or hinted that he had been
either a socialist or an anarchist when he was young. So that is
doubtless why we had the privilege of his society. After all, it is
highly improbable that this poor socialist suffered more at the hands of
the great and good French government than did many a Conscientious
Objector at the hands of the great and good American government;
or--since all great governments are _per se_ good and vice versa--than
did many a man in general who was cursed with a talent for thinking
during the warlike moments recently passed; during, that is to say, an
epoch when the g. and g. nations demanded of their respective peoples the
exact antithesis to thinking; said antitheses being vulgarly called
Belief. Lest which statement prejudice some members of the American
Legion in disfavour of the Machine-Fixer or rather of myself--awful
thought--I hasten to assure everyone that the Machine-Fixer was a highly
moral person. His morality was at times almost gruesome; as when he got
started on the inhabitants of the women's quarters. Be it understood that
the Machine-Fixer was human, that he would take a letter--provided he
liked the sender--and deliver it to the sender's _adorée_ without a
murmur. That was simply a good deed done for a friend; it did not imply
that he approved of the friend's choice, which for strictly moral reasons
he invariably and to the friend's very face violently deprecated. To this
little man of perhaps forty-five, with a devoted wife waiting for him in
Belgium (a wife whom he worshipped and loved more than he worshipped and
loved anything in the world, a wife whose fidelity to her husband and
whose trust and confidence in him echoed in the letters which--when we
three were alone--the little Machine-Fixer tried always to read to us,
never getting beyond the first sentence or two before he broke down and
sobbed from his feet to his eyes), to such a little person his reaction
to _les femmes_ was more than natural. It was in fact inevitable.

Women, to him at least, were of two kinds and two kinds only. There were
_les femmes honnêtes_ and there were _les putains_. In La Ferté, he
informed us--and as _balayeur_ he ought to have known whereof he
spoke--there were as many as three ladies of the former variety. One of
them he talked with often. She told him her story. She was a Russian, of
a very fine education, living peacefully in Paris up to the time that she
wrote to her relatives a letter containing the following treasonable
sentiment:

"_Je mennuie pour les neiges de Russie._"

The letter had been read by the French censor, as had B.'s letter; and
her arrest and transference from her home in Paris to La Ferté Macé
promptly followed. She was as intelligent as she was virtuous and had
nothing to do with her frailer sisters, so the Machine-Fixer informed us
with a quickly passing flash of joy. Which sisters (his little forehead
knotted itself and his big bushy eyebrows plunged together wrathfully)
were wicked and indecent and utterly despicable disgraces to their
sex--and this relentless Joseph fiercely and jerkily related how only the
day before he had repulsed the painfully obvious solicitations of a
Madame Potiphar by turning his back, like a good Christian, upon
temptation and marching out of the room, broom tightly clutched in
virtuous hand.

"_M'sieu Jean_" (meaning myself) "_savez-vous_"--with a terrific gesture
which consisted in snapping his thumbnail between his teeth--"_CA PUE!_"

Then he added: "And what would my wife say to me if I came home to her
and presented her with that which this creature had presented to me? They
are animals," cried the little Machine-Fixer; "all they want is a man.
They don't care who he is; they want a man. But they won't get me!" And
he warned us to beware.

Especially interesting, not to say valuable, was the Machine-Fixer's
testimony concerning the more or less regular "inspections" (which were
held by the very same doctor who had "examined" me in the course of my
first day at La Ferté) for _les femmes_; presumably in the interest of
public safety. _Les femmes_, quoth the Machine-Fixer, who had been many
times an eye-witness of this proceeding, lined up talking and laughing
and--crime of crimes--smoking cigarettes, outside the bureau of M. le
Médecin Major. "_Une femme entre. Elle se lève les jupes jusqu'au menton
et se met sur le banc. Le médecin major la regarde. Il dit de suite 'Bon.
C'est tout.' Elle sort. Une autre entre. La même chose. 'Bon. C'est
fini'.... M'sieu' Jean: prenez garde!_"

And he struck a match fiercely on the black, almost square boot which
lived on the end of his little worn trouser-leg, bending his small body
forward as he did so, and bringing the flame upward in a violent curve.
The flame settled on his little black pipe, his cheeks sucked until they
must have met, and a slow unwilling noise arose, and with the return of
his cheeks a small colorless wisp of possibly smoke came upon the
air.--"That's not tobacco. Do you know what it is? It's wood! And I sit
here smoking wood in my pipe when my wife is sick with worrying....
_M'sieu! Jean_"--leaning forward with jaw protruding and a oneness of
bristly eyebrows, "_Ces grande messieurs qui ne foutent 'pas mal si l'on
CREVE de faim, savez-vous ils croient chacun qu'il est Le Bon Dieu
LUI-Même. Et M'sieu' Jean, savez-vous, ils sont tous_"--leaning right in
my face, the withered hand making a pitiful fist of itself--"_ils. Sont.
Des. CRAPULES!_"

And his ghastly and toylike wizened and minute arm would try to make a
pass at their lofty lives. O _gouvernement français_, I think it was not
very clever of you to put this terrible doll in La Ferté; I should have
left him in Belgium with his little doll-wife if I had been You; for when
governments are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them,
pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back the microscopic
knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts.

One day only did I see him happy or nearly happy--when a Belgian baroness
for some reason arrived, and was bowed and fed and wined by the
delightfully respectful and perfectly behaved Official Captors--"and I
know of her in Belgium, she is a great lady, she is very powerful and she
is generous; I fell on my knees before her, and implored her in the name
of my wife and _Le Bon Dieu_ to intercede in my behalf; and she has made
a note of it, and she told me she would write the Belgian King and I will
be free in a few weeks, FREE!"

The little Machine-Fixer, I happen to know, did finally leave La
Ferté--for Précigne.

... In the kitchen worked a very remarkable person. Who wore _sabots_.
And sang continuously in a very subdued way to himself as he stirred the
huge black kettles. We, that is to say, B. and I, became acquainted with
Afrique very gradually. You did not know Afrique suddenly. You became
cognisant of Afrique gradually. You were in the _cour_, staring at ooze
and dead trees, when a figure came striding from the kitchen lifting its
big wooden feet after it rhythmically, unwinding a particoloured scarf
from its waist as it came, and singing to itself in a subdued manner a
jocular, and I fear, unprintable ditty concerning Paradise. The figure
entered the little gate to the _cour_ in a business-like way, unwinding
continuously, and made stridingly for the cabinet situated up against the
stone wall which separated the promenading sexes--dragging behind it on
the ground a tail of ever-increasing dimensions. The cabinet reached,
tail and figure parted company; the former fell inert to the limitless
mud, the latter disappeared into the contrivance with a Jack-in-the-box
rapidity. From which contrivance the continuing ditty

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