Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos Read Free Book Online Page A

unnecessary!’
    In the hall they came upon the fair young man quietly vomiting into a firebucket under an artificial palm.
    ‘Oh let’s leave him,’ she said wrinkling up her nose.
    ‘Quite unnecessary,’ said the Colonel.
    Emile brought their wraps. The redhaired girl had gone home.
    ‘Look here, boy.’ The Colonel waved his cane. ‘Call me a cab please… Be sure the horse is decent and the driver is sober.’
    ‘De suite monsieur.’
    The sky beyond roofs and chimneys was the blue of a sapphire. The Colonel took three or four deep sniffs of the dawnsmelling air and threw his cigar into the gutter. ‘Suppose we have a bit of breakfast at Cleremont. I haven’t had anything fit to eat all night. That beastly sweet champagne, ugh!’
    Fifi giggled. After the Colonel had examined the horse’s fetlocks and patted his head, they climbed into the cab. The Colonel fitted in Fifi carefully under his arm and they drove off. Emile stood a second in the door of the restaurant uncrumpling a five dollar bill. He was tired and his insteps ached.
    When Emile came out of the back door of the restaurant he found Congo waiting for him sitting on the doorstep. Congo’s skin had a green chilly look under the frayed turned up coatcollar.
    ‘This is my friend,’ Emile said to Marco. ‘Came over on the same boat.’
    ‘You havent a bottle of fine under your coat have you? Sapristi I’ve seen some chickens not half bad come out of this place.’
    ‘But what’s the matter?’
    ‘Lost my job that’s all… I wont have to take any more off that guy. Come over and drink a coffee.’
    They ordered coffee and doughnuts in a lunchwagon on a vacant lot.
    ‘Eh bien you like it this sacred pig of a country?’ asked Marco.
    ‘Why not! I like it anywhere. It’s all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.’
    ‘Questo paese e completamente soto sopra.’
    ‘I think I’ll go to sea again…’
    ‘Say why de hell doan yous guys loin English?’ said the man with a cauliflower face who slapped the three mugs of coffee down on the counter.
    ‘If we talk Engleesh,’ snapped Marco ‘maybe you no lika what we say.’
    ‘Why did they fire you?’
    ‘Merde. I dont know. I had an argument with the old camel who runs the place… He lived next door to the stables; as well as washing the carriages he made me scrub the floors in his house…His wife, she had a face like this.’ Congo sucked in his lips and tried to look crosseyed.
    Marco laughed. ‘Santissima Maria putana!’
    ‘How did you talk to them?’
    ‘They pointed to things; then I nodded my head and said Awright. I went there at eight and worked till six and they gave me every day more filthy things to do… Last night they tell me to clean out the toilet in the bathroom. I shook my head… That’s woman’s work… She got very angry and started screeching. Then I began to learn Angleesh… Go awright to ‘ell, I says to her… Then the old man comes and chases me out into a street with a carriage whip and says he wont pay me my week… While we were arguing he got a policeman, and when I try to explain to the policeman that the old man owed me ten dollars for the week, he says Beat it you lousy wop, and cracks me on the coco with his nightstick… Merde alors…’
    Marco was red in the face. ‘He call you lousy wop?’
    Congo nodded his mouth full of doughnut.
    ‘Notten but shanty Irish himself,’ muttered Marco in English. ‘I’m fed up with this rotten town…’
    ‘It’s the same all over the world, the police beating us up, rich people cheating us out of their starvation wages, and who’s fault?… Dio cane! Your fault, my fault, Emile’s fault…’
    ‘We didn’t make the world… They did or maybe God did.’
    ‘God’s on their side, like a policeman… When the day comes we’ll kill God… I am an anarchist.’
    Congo hummed ‘les bourgeois à la lanterne nom de dieu.’
    ‘Are you one of