Fo'castle Waltz

It was good beer—un-iced. Seems there was a large German colony down in Argentina and I'd been told that the heavy black beer was brewed as well there as it was anywhere in Deutschland. Since I've never traveled in the homeland of those beer makers, I just pass this on for what it's worth. Since then I've drunk a finer, heavier beer in Holland which I think surpassed this Argentine-German product, but I might have been prejudiced. I like the Dutch, and that maniac paperhanger had just begun to spew his filth in those Munich beerhalls at the time.

I don't remember how much those bottles cost and how many more we downed before the wooden coach train finally rattled into the station, nor do I remember much about that train ride to Buenos Aires, outside of the recollection that the engine stopped with a great crash almost every three minutes to rest three. And my kind little guides, the hoary old beachcombers, would suggest we'd stretch our legs, and again we'd find a station shack that sold more bottles of black beer.

Not every one of those forty-some-odd milk-can stations to Buenos Aires had a beer shack, but almost every other one of them did, and my guides found them. My pesos were wearing thin, but I figured it was a good investment. Here I had not one but two guides to lead me around a strange country. They could act as interpreters, since they'd been on the beach there for some twenty years and could make their wishes and mine understood. They knew the right places. I'd been warned prices are hoisted for tourists; these shrewd little men couldn't be fooled—they knew how to get things cheaply, since their life on the beach was so sparse. And then it had come to the point where we all smelled sort of beery and I no longer minded nor could I distinguish their own rather sour aroma.

It took our train almost three hours before we finally clanged, crashed, and banged to a stop in the station at Buenos Aires. We didn't waste a minute, dug our hands into our pockets, and hiked off in a slightly wiggly beeline for the American Consul—first thing.

We walked about ten blocks, and the Consul's office, they told me, was just a few more straight ahead. We had stopped in front of a corner bar, so we went in for one last mug of beer. The old guys wiped the froth off their whiskers, and I licked my mustache clean, and we were off again. About a dozen blocks further on we stopped again for another last spot of beer, then on and again and again, until my feet began to give. A glance at Joe's dollar watch told me it was four o'clock. We'd been hiking and drinking our way to the American Consul's office for about an hour.

I asked my silent little friends when the Consul closed for the day. They told me about five. Well, I wouldn't have time to get to any of the museums today, but I could spend the night and the first thing in the morning. . . ,

But we still shuffled along that narrow long street. The character of the buildings had changed. It seemed we were in the business district with large wholesale dry goods shops on either side of us. For a number of blocks now I'd noticed the large proprietor signs over the windows seemed to have developed a familiar cast. One read DePina & Bernstein, another, Gonzales & Berkowitz—del Soto & Lichtman, Juan Ruamos & Cohen. There was a strange nostalgic quality about those large black signs with their large gold letters of familiar names at the after-end of the sign—names not unlike those I'd seen in our garment center in New York.

Not that I didn't trust these kind little bewhiskered fellows who'd adopted me and had milked a lot of my pesos away into bottles and mugs of black beer, but they were old and maybe their memory wasn't too good any more. So when I saw a particularly homey-looking sign over one of the shops, De Riviera Castilliano and San Horowitz, I left my little friends standing on the curb and entered that establishment with the hope of contacting the junior partner, San Horowitz. There had been a Sam Horowitz who had a delicatessen near my studio. Maybe this Argentinian member of the family would trade some information in exchange for a "gris" from a landsman—or maybe even a cousin.

I entered the big shop. I didn't have to try to get the junior partner. A stout gentleman wearing a hat on the back of his head and a full, curly, grayish beard fanning out over his chest stood talking with both hands to one of the clerks. He understood the language of all Horowitzes and Slobodkins, so I threw my badly mangled muttersprache at him:

"Pliss, vol is de Americanische Consul's plotz?"

He looked at me, keeping one of his hands gestured to pick up his interrupted conversation. I guess that "pliss" got him— that's a New York addition to the international jargon of Yiddish. Then, swinging his unoccupied hand out, he pointed back in the direction from which I'd just come, or had been led.

"Geht man asoi direct.''