Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [9]
He rambled and repeated himself; he seemed to be confused by emotion. His English began to slip and bits of Spanish seeped into his speech. I knew some Spanish, and his enunciation was so fine that I could make out most of what he said. On a certain level, in matters of love, honor, and conscience, all languages are similar.
Nemecio was much better in Spanish. He could make a moral drama of the word consideración. Apesadumbrar, which means “to afflict, vex, or grieve,” was a beautiful word, too, but it was I, not Sheri, who was afflicted. And each time Nemecio used the word caballero, I wanted to say, But I am a caballero sin caballo.
I had studied Spanish in school and kept it alive in Spanish Harlem, where I used to go to the Park Plaza on 110th and Fifth to hear the music. When the band played a particularly good piece, the whole audience would cry, ¡Fenómeno! or ¡Arrolla!—which means “to gyrate or spin.” Now, without thinking, I cried ¡Fenómeno! ¡Arrolla, hombre! ¡Así se habla!
Nemecio looked at me in astonishment. He hadn’t realized that I spoke Spanish, and this put an entirely different complexion on the matter. I was a compadre of sorts, a more civilized creature than he had supposed. He felt that it was impossible now to carry on the deception. His eyes turned to Sheri in a mute appeal. He looked like an exquisite dog, an Afghan or saluki.
Even I, blinded as I was by her, could see that she had put him up to it. After Dick, she got the idea of asking Nemecio too to come over and denounce me. She might even have encouraged Dick in the first place.
Nemecio gave up. He drooped like a flower. Perdóneme, Anatole, he said. I have been a fool.
It takes a brave man to be a fool, I said. I was so relieved that I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. And then he was gone.
Well, I thought, what now? On the bathtub cover again? No—absolutely not. I wasn’t going to be played with like this. I refused to enter into the game. I refused for all of five minutes.
4
Five or six weeks after moving in with Sheri, I opened a bookshop on Cornelia Street. This was something I had decided to do while I was in the army. It started with some money I made on the black market in Tokyo, where a suit of GI long Johns brought $120. I was thinking about what I might do with the money.
I was working the night shift in Yokohama harbor and I was lonely, cold, and bored. Yokohama was a sad place that had been flattened by bombs and the inhabitants were living in shacks made of rubble, propped up in fields of rubble. Since they couldn’t lock up these shacks, they took all their belongings with them when they went out. They carried their whole lives on their backs, wrapped in an evil-smelling blanket or a sack that made them look like hunchbacks.
My outfit, a stevedore battalion, had arrived right after MacArthur, and my first job as a dock officer was to scrape a solid crust of shit off a dock a quarter of a mile long. I didn’t realize at first that it was human shit. As I figured it out later, Japanese stevedores and embarking soldiers had had no time for niceties toward the end and had simply squatted down wherever they stood. The entire dock was covered with a layer that was as hard as clay. The rain and traffic had packed it down.
I had my own company of 220 men to supervise the job and I was given 1,500 Japanese who would actually chop the stuff away. We provided them with axes, shovels, sledgehammers, picks, crowbars—whatever we could find. We had no bulldozers. They chopped and scraped for three days and then the Medical Corps hosed down the dock with chemicals.
It was on this same dock, where you could still smell the chemicals, that I was working the night I got the idea of the bookstore. I had two gangs unloading the forward hatches of a ship and I was leaning on the rail, under the yellowish