Gorgeous East (34 page)

10

CAP’N CRUNCH

1.

B
lackness drew like a curtain across the sky in the minutes after sunset. Cold wind from the mountain sent snowflakes whirling on the open threshold. The prisoners lay in their hovel naked and freezing, wrapped only in their chains. Enforced nakedness, an ancient trick, is one of the simplest ways to control prisoners. Psychologically speaking, the naked man is always at the mercy of the man wearing clothes.

Smith, curled into a tight fetal ball, shivered violently in his sleep just before dawn. The colonel hung motionless, chained to a ring on the other side—he was awake, of course, he was always awake. He watched silently as the girl crept in from the outer dark, clutching a pointed object in her hand. He couldn’t raise his voice, couldn’t bring any words out of the fog. She squatted down and poked at Smith’s bare ass cheek with the object—a sharp, thorny stick.

“
Ow!
” Smith jerked upright, chains clanking, joints frozen, blinking sleep out of his eyes. “It’s you,” he mumbled in English. “What the fuck do you want?”

The girl shrugged, not understanding. She didn’t speak English or French or Spanish. They’d always communicated in a hash of rudimentary sign language and pidgin Hassaniya. She went veiled, like everyone else in the village, male and female, old and young (the Marabouts had taken Islamic notions of modesty to their furthest extreme), and it was impossible to know what she was thinking, or her age, exactly. Maybe twelve or thirteen, maybe twenty. She widened her dark eyes and made a gesture—palm under chin, fingers fluttering: sing.

“Too early!” Smith waved her off. “Still night out there!”

She wanted a private serenade. She came in every couple of days, bringing scavenged food; the week before a minuscule, if genuine, morsel of roast goat. Smith sang to her sweetly sotto voce for an hour to pay for that excellent meal.

The girl poked him again with the pointy stick. Sing!

“You want me to sing?” Smith said angrily. “Breakfast first!” He pointed to his mouth.

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. The girl managed to convey this notion in a complicated charade.

“No food, no sing!” Smith huffed. “I’m a professional. A biscuit or my mouth stays closed!”

And he pressed his lips together and would not open them no matter how much the girl poked. At last she scuttled out, waving her stick, making it clear that he was a diva, infidel trash, who ought to be tortured and skinned alive—or words to that effect.

“
Mon pauvre Milquetoast
,” Phillipe croaked when the girl was gone, his voice sounding dry and cracked and a thousand years old. “You are a performing seal. You sing for a herring. Exactly like a seal I saw once at the Cirque Medrano, in Paris when I was a kid. That seal could balance a ball on the end of his nose. Can you do such a thing?”

“Go to hell, Phillipe,” Smith said. But the injunction wasn’t necessary. The colonel was already there.

2.

Y
ou can learn a lot about someone naked and chained and forced to live at very close quarters, in this case a ragged enclosure of stone and dirt, no more than ten-by-ten, located in a secret Marabout village dug into the side of an unknown mountain. And Smith had learned that Phillipe de Noyer was absolutely crazy and getting crazier every day.

The man never slept, never closed his eyes for more than a blink. This chronic insomnia might be a product of his craziness or the craziness caused by his lack of sleep, Smith couldn’t say which. Certainly, the harsh conditions of captivity had made things worse. Phillipe now carried on loud, crazy arguments with the shadows or whispered words of unbearable intimacy to his absent wife, Louise. Or raved incoherently, often repeating the phrase
armée, tête d’armée
over and over again. And he hummed endlessly and off key, various things by Satie, chiefly
Mémoires d’un amnésique
, but also the notorious
Musique d’ameublement
, an irritating and atonal fragment composed by the maestro to be played exactly when people weren’t listening. These manic phases were inevitably followed by an abrupt collapse. After hours of whispering and arguing and humming, Phillipe’s eyes rolled back in his head and his head wobbled weirdly from side to side and he fell into a silence so deep it lasted for days; mental implosions, perhaps neurological in nature, and terrible to witness. For Smith it was like watching a proud old building, already half destroyed by fire, slowly fold in on itself.

But crazy or not, Phillipe had a point. Smith
was
a kind of performing seal. His career-topping performance during the last moments of the siege of Block house 9 had saved their lives: Marabout fighters closing in that disastrous afternoon stopped short of the kill and lowered their rifles at the opening lines of Berlin’s “Let’s face the Music and Dance.” They settled themselves comfortably in the dirt and listened to Smith sing number after number for nearly two hours, like cobras mesmerized before the snake charmer’s pipes. When Smith stopped singing at last from sheer exhaustion, he and Phillipe were seized, stripped, blindfolded, bound with heavy chains, and hustled into the Gueltas to await an unknown fate. Smith attributed this surprising stay of execution to his theatrical training, but there was more to it: It could be said they owed their lives to Broadway itself, to the fabulous, receding echo of all those fabulous shows, all those gone good times. To the great American songbook, to Cole Porter and George Gershwin, to Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Harburg and Lane. To Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, and Jerome Kern. To every romantic melody ever played as men and women swayed into each other on the worn parquet of bygone ballrooms, comfortably drunk on bourbon old-fashioneds and the possibility of love.

Now, in captivity, Smith was forced to sing Broadway standards for the assembled population once or twice a day. He stood on a granite slab halfway up the slope where the acoustics were good, his clear tenor ringing out across the stony chasms, echoing against the steep sides of surrounding cliffs. But scratch a savage, find a critic: Marabout villagers had too quickly developed the sophisticated tastes of jaded New York theatergoers. They would jeer, throw stones, and withhold food if they didn’t like a particular number—or if Smith’s performance lacked
duende
—and they were getting increasingly hard to please.

Trial and error and a relentless performance schedule had given Smith the measure of his audience: Cole Porter and George Gershwin had always been his favorites—he used to perform a medley of both, a kind of musical point-counterpoint, popular during his stint at a Brooklyn piano bar back when he and Jessica lived in Park Slope. But there didn’t seem to be enough room for Porter and Gershwin side by side in the Marabout’s insurgent hearts. They preferred Gershwin’s more strident style; they also liked Irving Berlin. Cole Porter’s witty melodies drew only a lukewarm response and they were left cold by Harold Arlen—this a blow to Smith, who preferred the elegant Arlen to Porter and even Berlin. Fortunately, contemporary musicals, which Smith generally detested, held no appeal for the Marabouts. Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber—
Cats
,
Phantom
, and
Les Misérables
,
Hair
,
Jesus Christ Superstar
,
Godspell
,
Rent
—were quickly weeded from his mountainside repertoire.

Smith found he drew his most favorable response from the big, brassy Broadway scores of the forties and fifties, though here again the Marabout villagers expressed definite preferences: They liked
Pal Joey
,
The Pajama Game
,
Finian’s Rainbow
, and
Brigadoon
; didn’t like
Annie Get Your Gun
,
Carousel
,
Oklahoma!
, or
Hello, Dolly! Fiddler on the Roof
drove them to rage and throwing stones. Smith chalked this violent reaction up to the Jewish-Muslim divide, rather than any problem with the score. They were crazy about Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
South Pacific
and Adler and Ross’s
Damn Yankees
and went gaga over Frank Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
, which worked well for Smith because he also loved
Guys and Dolls
, thought that it might be the greatest piece of musical theater of all time, and once had a great run as Skye Masterson at the Center Stage of Central Florida in Orlando.

From that show, the villagers preferred “Luck Be a Lady”—Smith’s personal favorite—“Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat!” and the eponymous number, always a showstopper. After singing these three tunes back to back with particular
duende
before lunch one day, the villagers threw bits of warm bread and chunks of fresh sheep’s cheese, which Smith immediately gobbled down. He considered this impromptu bread and cheese feast one of the great artistic triumphs of his career, second only to his LORT A run in
My Fair Lady
at the Guthrie—though that now seemed like an episode from the life of another Smith in a different lifetime, in Minneapolis, in the snow, on the other side of the world.

3.

T
he girl returned the next morning bearing a small water gourd filled with coffee and a ragged scrap of flat bread that had been dipped in last night’s grease. Smith ate half the bread, drank half the coffee and offered the colonel the rest—but sunk into one of his eyes-wide-open catatonic states, Phillipe couldn’t be roused, even by food and drink. Then, Smith cleared his throat and sang a favorite from
Brigadoon
in a quiet falsetto. He sang directly to the girl, as tenderly as he could make it. As if he loved her, as if his heart were breaking under the burden of his love for her. The girl’s dark eyes shone in exaltation as she squatted there, watching him, listening.

“Can’t we two go walking together out beyond the valley of trees . . .”

Next he sang a couple of numbers from
Finian’s Rainbow
and finished with “My Funny Valentine” from
Pal Joey.

Recital over, Smith dropped chin to chest, a mock-thespian bow. “I thank you,” he murmured to the imagined applause. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart. . . .”

The girl squatted back on her heels and studied him for a long time, eyes unreadable. Smith felt self-conscious beneath this scrutiny, more pointed than her poking stick. It might be possible for someone who has gone around naked all their lives to grow accustomed to wearing clothes, but the reverse did not hold true. No matter how hard he tried to forget his nakedness, he couldn’t. He’d been swaddled within moments of birth, habitually wore pajamas, and except for brief periods in the shower or in bed with a woman, had remained clothed ever since.

At last, the girl put a finger over her lips to indicate secrecy and glanced over her shoulder to make sure no spies were lurking along the path outside.

“I have news,” she whispered in passable French. “Al Bab is coming and you will soon be judged. They must not hear me tell you such a thing. They will feed me to the horrible bees if they hear.”

Smith gaped at her. She could speak French! Then he felt a coldness in his gut that was more than just dismay over her weeks of dissimulation. The Man himself! Mystical Imam of the Marabouts! Their Jesus, their Buddha, their Joseph Smith!

“
Al Bab, lui-même?
”

“
Oui, il vient.
” The girl nodded. “
Demain soir.
”

“You speak French well. Why did you trick me?”

“Al Bab forbids us to speak French. He allows us only to speak Hassaniya, which he says is a holy language, the language of the prophet, peace be upon him. But the kind nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières taught me French at the camp at Tindouf, which is in Algeria. Remember, many people speak French in Algeria.”

“Are we in Algeria now?”

The girl shook her head. “We are in the mountains of the Galtat Zemmur. It is not Morocco, it is not Algeria. It is the land of the Saharoui Berbers.”

“You mean Western Sahara. The SADR?”

“Call it what you want,
je m’en fiche
! I hate it here. I wish to go somewhere else, entirely. To Milan perhaps.”

“Milan, Italy?”

The girl nodded. “The women in Milan wear beautiful clothes and are very happy without so many terrible bees. I have carefully hidden a magazine of fashion from Milan given to me by one of the kind nurses at Tindouf. There are pictures of many beautiful women with many beautiful clothes. Do you know such a magazine?”

“Yes.” Smith grinned. “But I don’t subscribe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

“It is a fine magazine.”

“Yes.”

“The beautiful women in the magazine go with their face uncovered,” she continued. “Here that would mean death by so many stones, here—”

“Do you know what’s going to happen to us?” Smith interrupted.