Fo'castle Waltz

THERE WAS A FLASH OF BRASSY ARGENTINIAN OFFICIALDOM up on the Captain's deck in the late afternoon. Uniformed port officials—at least three of them with brief cases and large stapled documents clutched in their hands—golden watch-chained civilians, pompous black-suited Argentinians with more brief cases and more papers; and they fussed, frowned, coughed, counted noses, rattled their papers, stamped ours, shook hands with the Captain, and we shoved off.

As I stood in the lineup on the Captain's deck to be counted with the rest of the crew, just to be sure none of us had had a romantic urge and had stolen away to become a Gaucho or a tango dancer—or that we hadn't stepped off the road in Ingeniero White and been swallowed up by the mudflats and quagmires—I pondered on an intensely interesting aesthetic problem, i.e., the logic of certain plastic forms in relation to their functional necessity. Why the curious geometric setup which seems prevalent among all the Argentinian civilian officials that I had seen?

Why did they all swell through the torso, thorax and abdomen running together into one smooth tight round shape, and that riding above their thin close-fitted trouser legs—a puffy sphere on two inverted cones? They gave the effect of always rising on their toes, yet their bull-nosed shoes rested splayfooted on the deck. It couldn't only be the food and drink they absorbed. Maybe because of the tumultuous pressure of official business their food didn't digest properly (they all knit their brows and talked with a burpy sound) and gases were formed that swelled them out that way—and like any other gas-filled unit they tended to rise and pull away from their moorings.

Maybe they wore lead in their high-heeled, heavy-soled shoes which clattered with such metallic importance on the decks. Lead for ballast.

Yeah, ballast—that's what our ship needed. Why were there so many officials aboard anyway for our dinky empty ship? Perhaps Captain Brandt had planned it. ... It wouldn't be a bad idea to shanghai that bunch, using them as ballast till we hit our next port or the States. If we held on to them till we reached the States, that might not be a bad idea. There it might be arranged that a secondary clerk from the State Department could lead them around and give them a good look at our Nord Americano way of life and culture.

Look—our doors have air brakes on them. They don't smash against walls even if you're strong. Look—our Chinese restaurants understand English when you order chop suey. Look —we have heat on our trains, sometimes even too much. Look— our American money. It's hard to get but it doesn't fall apart when you get it. Look—there are other things to eat besides steak Caballero. Look—we have shops that display "habla Espanol" signs on them. Of course, you'll be gypped—that extra percentage is worth it for the linguistic convenience of protesting comprehensively. Why don't you try a few "habla English" signs on your gyp joints? Look—we have bars that are bars, not floozie traps. We call a floozie trap a floozie trap —etc., etc. I bet we do a lot for Pan-American relations (all this having been thought out up on the Captain's deck before P.A.R. became G.N.P.—Good Neighbor Policy).

Then having done that, if we haven't succeeded in completely deflating those puffed-up Argentinian officials, we could cut them loose from their moorings, these lead-filled shoes, and let them rise and float back home. If they didn't make it and landed somewhere else, it would do them good. If the representative from the Section of Cultural Relations of our State Department did succeed in impressing and deflating those guys down to normal they could be sent home aboard one of our warships with a handful of those informative brochures the Section of Cultural Relations has been mailing me ever since; I paid my own fare down to Washington to attend (a recent and I very special invitation) a conference on the Interchange of' Culture through the Contemporary Plastic Arts—or some such title—run by that section of the State Department, and I listened with three other sculptors and ten painters to a hundred and fifty museum directors, professors of fine arts, artt critics, etc., tell us that the best exchange of Contemporary Plastic Art and Culture would be:

(1) To send the South Americans a traveling exhibition of El Grecos, Murillos, Velasquez, Goyas, that our millionaires through their agents and dealers had swiped from the S.A.'s Spanish forebears—just to show them we owned the cream of their artistic output. N-a-a-a-h—

(2) A traveling exhibition of Puritan portraits, seventeen of which the museum director who presented that precious thought believed were available. (This was a conference on contemporary American art—remember?)

(3) An interchange of scholarships for fine arts professors to explain the work from lantern slides of our untraveled, unclothed, and underfed sculptors and painters