第68章 THE DAY WE CELEBRATE(1)

"In the tropics" ("Hop-along" Bibb, the bird fancier, was saying to me)"the seasons, months, fortnights, week-ends, holidays, dog-days, Sundays, and yesterdays get so jumbled together in the shuffle that you never know when a year has gone by until you're in the middle of the next one.""Hop-along" Bibb kept his bird store on lower Fourth Avenue.He was an ex-seaman and beachcomber who made regular voyages to southern ports and imported personally conducted invoices of talking parrots and dialectic paroquets.He had a stiff knee, neck, and nerve.I had gone to him to buy a parrot to present, at Christmas, to my Aunt Joanna.

"This one," said I, disregarding his homily on the subdivisions of time --"this one that seems all red, white, and blue -- to what genus of beasts does he belong? He appeals at once to my patriotism and to my love of discord in colour schemes.""That's a cockatoo from Ecuador," said Bibb."All he has been taught to say is "Merry Christmas." A seasonable bird.He's only seven dollars; and I'll bet many a human has stuck you for more money by making the same speech to you."And then Bibb laughed suddenly and loudly.

"That bird," he explained, "reminds me.He's got his dates mixed.He ought to be saying '_E pluri bus unum_,' to match his feathers, instead of trying to work the Santa Claus graft.It reminds me of the time me and Liverpool Sam got our ideas of things tangled up on the coast of Costa Rica on account of the weather and other phenomena to be met with in the tropics.

"We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main with no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about either.We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a fruit steamer from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged, after we got there, for lack of evidence.There was no work suitable to our instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum of the country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown.It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future or recourse.Between steamers the town slept and drank rum.It only woke up when there were bananas to ship.It was like a man sleeping through dinner until the dessert.

"When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul wouldn't speak to us we knew we'd struck bed rock.

"We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop and a ladies' and gents' restaurant in a street called the _calle de los_Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints.When our credit played out there, Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of _noblesse oblige_, married Chica.This kept us in rice and fried plantain for a month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning sadly and earnestly for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down from the stone age, and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver.That night we signed an engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid banana fancier of the place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles out of town.We had to do it or be reduced to sea water and broken doses of feed and slumber.

"Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don't malign or inexculpate him to you any more than I would to his face.But in my opinion, when an Englishman gets as low as he can he's got to dodge so that the dregs of other nations don't drop ballast on him out of their balloons.And if he's a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he's got to look out for.Being a natural American, that's my personal view.But Liverpool and me had much in common.We were without decorous clothes or ways and means of exist ence; and, as the saying goes, misery certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.

"Our job on old McSpinosa's plantation was chopping down banana stalks and loading the bunches of fruit on the backs of horses.Then a native dressed up in an alligator hide belt, a machete, and a pair of AA sheeting pajamas, drives 'em over to the coast and piles 'em up on the beach.

"You ever been in a banana grove? It's as solemn as a rathskeller at seven A.M.It's like being lost behind the scenes at one of these mushroom musical shows.You can't see the sky for the foliage above you;and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves; and it's so still that you can hear the stalks growing again after you chop 'em down.

"At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge of a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employes of Don Jaime.There we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys squalling and the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon until daylight with only snatches of sleep between times.

"We soon lost all idea of what time of the year it was.It's just about eighty degrees there in December and June and on Fridays and at midnight and election day and any other old time.Sometimes it rains more than at others, and that's all the difference you notice.A man is liable to live along there without noticing any fugiting of tempus until some day the undertaker calls in for him just when he's beginning to think about cutting out the gang and saving up a little to invest in real estate.

"I don't know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two or thee rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of thee pairs of sail-cloth trousers.All the money we earned went for rum and tobacco;but we ate, and that was something.