The City of Pleasure

by Joseph Hergesheimer

THE CITY OF PLEASURE

Five Impressions

Joseph Hergesheimer

 

I

The Excursion Train

A BLUR of oily, black smoke on the clear, green sky, the stridulous escape of steam, clanking brakes, and the excursion train stops at its platform. People pour like a colored, yeasty mass from its doors. In an instant the platform is crowded to suffocation; a headlong rabble of humanity, red-faced or incurably pallid, already worn by the long, hot journey, the rise before dawn, struggle and hurry and cry out, in an agony of apprehension, a torment of soul, lest they should miss a moment's pleasure.

Flat-breasted women, calico clad, herd children in voices that eat like acid through the tumult, fretfully admonish spindling babies that wail persistently with blue and bubbling lips. The men, coat over arm, their vivid-colored shirts sticking wetly to their bodies, laugh harshly, laugh knowingly with obscene intent, nudging each other, winking leaden lids. Their pockets are distended with bottles of spirits: they drink, wiping the necks of the bottles with hardened palms … the liquor sends a livid flush, a purple veil of heat, over faces seared and pitted with poverty.

Hundreds of girls, gay in ribbands, in a momentary whiteness, eddy like butterflies over the sordid human stream, shining for a second on the streaked surface, fluttering for a moment in the sun—for a moment only, before they sink bedraggled, drowned. The voices of the girls rise thin and hysterical, staccato giggling mingles with the husky pleasantries of social youths; the merciless voices of the girls deride the makeshift hats, skirts, about them—they dissect their sisters' souls for the amusement of casual young men.

Furtive boys, with cunning eyes and soft, pale palms, flexuously thread the mob; mechanics, stupid, patient, their heavy shoulders bent under a hopeless burden of toil, pass with dragging feet; predatory women, bloodless as mummies, ladened with mephitic perfume, smile their sterile invitation; old men struggle impotently in the torrent, their senile faces working piteously, uttering quavering cries.

The turbid human stream, the stream unspeakably muddied and stained, writhes and vanishes from the platform with an uneasy, ceaseless mutter—as though it had broken from a morbific cavern—into the pellucid, the immaculate salt air.

 

II

The Beach

The ebb tide embroiders with filmy, white lace the far hem of the beach; the swinging flood of the sea sweeps opaque, jade-green, to the sparkling horizon; the sky burns with the molten, silver light of the summer sun at noon—and, where the sand is wet, it gleams like bright, shifting swords; higher up it is soft and gray, and hot.

Onto the luminous expanse the passing hour pours a horde of humanity, clad scantily, informally, for bathing—the men in gaudy jerseys; the older women in black, baglike garments; the younger with figures exposed, their legs thrust forward, their naked arms raised to their hair.

They sprawl on the beach, singly and in groups; they are all constrained, all uneasy, breathing by jerks, with labored lungs. Nowhere is there the repose, the immobility, of nature; no one rests save a few old men, nearing death, and drunkards with empurpled visages.

The men, bare to the pitiless light, white like bone, clasp calloused hands about their stringy knees; their feet are atrophied from misshapen shoes; their bodies cramped, shrunken, from garments rigid, unnatural, grotesque. Their bodies are scorified by the poisoned vapors of dye vats, from the deathheat of furnaces, the fumes of lead and sulphur; their bodies are bleached, sapped, from lives fed into machines in rooms closed like boxes.

There on the sand, before the cool tranquillity of the sea, the murmurous peace of its marge, the splendor of its horizon, the men betrayed, lured from happiness, from life, gaze dully downward, or—for a dazzled second—raise stony, blinded eyes to the sun.

The girls are without tenderness, without graciousness; they are without the bloom of scarlet blood coursing through free, white limbs, without the imperious urge of youth. Their desire is that of despair, of the torment of sex forced into perverse channels, of sex balked, betrayed.

The older women, parched by the gray dust of poverty, their souls netted in its cobweb of care, grimly outface the unaccustomed empty hour. … And, in and about, weave and play the children,—little, white, flickering flames barely alight in the blaze of the sun, the gigantic flood of noon.

 

III

The Idle Women

Through the clustered, white columns of the pavilion the sun streams on the idle women with busy fingers. The bandmaster, swaying sensuously to his lifted baton, envelops them in delicately-fluted sound, in the soft blare of golden horns floating above the shadowy depths of the bass.

The idle women are tropical in the streaming sun and wanton music: they are clad in heliotrope muslins, in saffron silks, in bizarre hats of dyed birds and gilded straw. Their ears are hung with carved metals, with coveted stones, stones bloody as greed, cold as deceit, green as feverish envy; their powdered throats are necklaced by pale, salt pearls, jades of aged Accad, the cerulean crystals of lost Hyksos kings. Their fingers, the busy fingers of the idle women, the nails pointed and enamelled with vermilion, sparkle with platinum and prismatic stones.

Their sparkling fingers pass and repass over the squares of linen that form their task, their occupation, that absorb their energy, their time. They embroider the minutes, the hours and days, into the useless web in their busy hands; they embroider their inutile lives into the empty designs, link their vacuous imaginings in the stitches of the wasted threads.

They gather in council, conversing in half whispers sharp as steel, in words that burn whereon they fall like deathly acids; they nod their heads in corrosive malice, they nod the cold, dyed birds, the gilded straw. They smooth their sleek hips complacently, and lament the absence of their little dogs, their silky-white dogs with pink flesh and uxorious eyes. They dwell upon the painted men in exotic plays, the hermaphrodite heroes, the frozen prostitutes, of their favorite fictions.

They rub their over-ripe cheeks with carmine, their eyes glitter from amid purple pencillings; they dabble odorous ointment on their dry lips. A miasmic perfume swims from the idle women into the streaming sun. The bandmaster sways in sensuous abandon.

 

IV

The Cabaret

The smoke of countless cigarettes, coiling upward from the crowded tables of the transplendid café, veils the painted nudes and gilded cornices of the walls, the incandescence of the distant ceiling. Below champagne glows like golden tulips on slender stems of glass, the light burns sullenly in narrow flames of brandy, burns palely in cordials violet and silver, and gleams in crisp, amber beakers of beer. The men drink ceaselessly, served by a legion of waiters that converge in a sombre stream at the outlet to the bar, the men various yet alike, dull, insensible, blank; but the light of the glasses illuminates the dulness, the insensibility grows less evident—animation courses slowly, doubtfully, over the masks of the human commonplace; released from a thousand fetters, a thousand cautions and calculated fears, the voices rise, become spontaneous; a lyric note of laughter frees a score of hearts from the tyranny of the inevitable.

The clear chord of a piano, the vibrant note of a violin, sound from a platform against the further wall; after a momentary pause, in a bar of dusty light that falls diagonally from above, a woman appears, Castilian, in black and scarlet. One gleaming shoulder is bare, and a scant, fringed skirt is cut away from knees that show seductively in warm silk. A native hat rakishly shadows her countenance, out of which her gaze sweeps insolently over the attentive tables.

She advances to the edge of the platform, and, with a sudden stamp of her foot, to the beat of piano and violin, bursts into a song, a song with a provoking, delayed tempo, now explosive, now pensive, melodious. She abandons herself to the music, she is utterly free, utterly pagan; her arms are tense, relaxed, alluring.

The last traces of stolidity, of calculated caution, vanish magically from the men; they are freed from the hypocrisy, the material baseness, from the gaol that custom, that lies, that the struggle, pitiless, inhuman, for the cold counters of civilization, the empty symbols of success, have built about their hearts. For a moment youth, the youth of the world, of men, so soon slain on doubtful altars, stirs faintly, glows with a reflection of vanished warmth—an, anodyne from the dead past to the dead future.

Sharply, in a swirl of scarlet, of warm silken limbs, the song ends amid a tumult of approval, of lifted champagne like gold tulips on slender stems of glass. The dusty bar of light wavers, vanishes: from a shadowy corner of the platform, folded in a voluminous cloak—a gleam of scarlet, of pallid countenance, purple lips—the singer insolently gazes over the transplendid café.

 

V

A Curtain

Beyond the girdle of shining lights that encircle the City of Pleasure, beyond the thronged esplanade, the glittering cafés, the stately hostelries, the sea reaches out dark and still to the serene night. The moving, humming throng is gaily-colored, various, prodigal: the women are clad in silks, in carnation and mauve and blue, they are clad in white that clings closely to their soft limbs, that foams in lace upon their smooth shoulders. They smile slowly with ruby lips, they smile luminously with their eyes; they invite attention to their exotic bodies, to their hands, like the waxy petals of flowers, of frangipanni.

The men are opulent, flushed from the festival of the senses; they look masterfully at the gleaming lights, at the great hotels, the blazing cafés; at the material splendor that is the evidence of their success, of their importance, their domination. They look masterfully at the women, hung with barbaric ornaments, laced into provocative forms. The blinding spectacle of light, of living, of illimitable riches, seems to fill the earth, the sky … all time.

Then, slowly, the sea, that was so black, so withdrawn, turns gray, seems to rise in long quivering fingers, in fingers that grope blindly for the shore.

Streaming pennants of fog twist inward, hang curtains, hang cobwebs, over the lights, dimming their radiance into pale, ghostly flares. The fog drifts in and envelops the women; it veils them in a cold filament that cloaks their lustre, it blackens their lips, strews ashes on their vague countenances.

It wraps its chill about the men, extinguishing the fire of their blood, of their life. Slowly it blots out their edifices; the hotels vanish, the lighted cafés dwindle into an utter gray waste.

There is no sound, the voices are hushed, the footfalls stilled. Slowly, inexorably, all fade, all disappear, are lost: the sands are as blank as they were a thousand, thousand years ago, as they will be when a thousand, thousand, thousand years have fallen into the termless fog that absorbs all effort, all time.