Read Ebook: A Pushcart at the Curb by Dos Passos John

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Ebook has 450 lines and 32669 words, and 9 pages

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WINTER IN CASTILE 13

NIGHTS AT BASSANO 65

VAGONES DE TERCERA 109

QUAI DE LA TOURNELLE 139

ON FOREIGN TRAVEL 163

PHASES OF THE MOON 185

WINTER IN CASTILE

The promiscuous wind wafts idly from the quays A smell of ships and curious woods and casks And a sweetness from the gorse on the flowerstand And brushes with his cool careless cheek the cheeks Of those on the street; mine, an old gnarled man's, The powdered cheeks of the girl who with faded eyes Stands in the shadow; a sailor's scarred brown cheeks, And a little child's, who walks along whispering To her sufficient self. O promiscuous wind.

A long grey street with balconies. Above the gingercolored grocer's shop trail pink geraniums and further up a striped mattress hangs from a window and the little wooden cage of a goldfinch.

Four blind men wabble down the street with careful steps on the rounded cobbles scraping with violin and flute the interment of a tune.

People gather: women with market-baskets stuffed with green vegetables, men with blankets on their shoulders and brown sunwrinkled faces.

Pipe the flutes, squeak the violins; four blind men in a row at the interment of a tune ... But on the plate coppers clink round brown pennies a merry music at the funeral, penny swigs of wine penny gulps of gin peanuts and hot roast potatoes red disks of sausage tripe steaming in the corner shop ...

And overhead the sympathetic finch chirps and trills approval.

A boy with rolled up shirtsleeves turns the handle. Grind, grind. The black sphere whirls above a charcoal fire. Grind, grind. The boy sweats and grits his teeth and turns while a man blows up the coals. Grind, grind. Thicker comes the blue curling smoke, the moka-scented smoke heavy with early morning and the awakening city with click-clack click-clack on the cobblestones and the young winter sunshine advancing inquisitively across the black and white tiles of my bedroom floor. Grind, grind. The coffee is done. The boy rubs his arms and yawns, and the sphere and the furnace are trundled away to be set up at another caf?.

A poor devil whose dirty ashen white body shows through his rags sniffs sensually with dilated nostrils the heavy coffee-fragrant smoke, and turns to sleep again in the feeble sunlight of the greystone steps.

Women are selling tuberoses in the square, and sombre-tinted wreaths stiffly twined and crinkly for this is the day of the dead.

Women are selling tuberoses in the square. Their velvet odor fills the street somehow stills the tramp of feet; for this is the day of the dead.

Their presence is heavy about us like the velvet black scent of the flowers: incense of pompous interments, patter of monastic feet, drone of masses drowsily said for the thronging dead.

Women are selling tuberoses in the square to cover the tombs of the envious dead and shroud them again in the lethean scent lest the dead should remember.

Above the scuffling footsteps of crowds the clang of trams the shouts of newsboys the stridence of wheels, very calm, floats the sudden trill of a pipe three silvery upward notes wistfully quavering, notes a Thessalian shepherd might have blown to call his sheep in the emerald shade of Tempe, notes that might have waked the mad women sleeping among pinecones in the hills and stung them to headlong joy of the presence of their mad Iacchos, notes like the glint of sun making jaunty the dark waves of Tempe.

In the street an old man is passing wrapped in a dun brown mantle blowing with bearded lips on a shining panpipe while he trundles before him a grindstone.

The scissors grinder.

Rain slants on an empty square.

Across the expanse of cobbles rides an old shawl-muffled woman black on a donkey with pert ears that places carefully his tiny sharp hoofs as if the cobbles were eggs. The paniers are full of bright green lettuces and purple cabbages, and shining red bellshaped peppers, dripping, shining, a band in marchtime, in the grey rain, in the grey city.

VI BEGGARS

The fountain some dead king put up, conceived in pompous imageries, piled with mossgreened pans and centaurs topped by a prudish tight-waisted Cybele spurts with a solemn gurgle of waters.

Where the sun is warmest their backs against the greystone basin sit, hoarding every moment of the palefaced sun, Pan a bearded beggar with blear eyes; his legs were withered by a papal bull, those shaggy legs so nimble to pursue through groves of Arcadian myrtle the nymphs of the fountains and valleys; a young Faunus with soft brown face and dirty breast bared to the sun; the black hair crisps about his ears with some grace yet; a little barefoot Eros crouching to scratch his skinny thighs who stares with wide gold eyes aghast at the yellow shiny trams that clatter past.

All day long they doze in the scant sun and watch the wan leaves rustle to the ground from the yellowed limetrees of the avenue. They are still thine Cybele nursed at thy breast; . They have not scorned thy dubious bounty for stridence of grinding iron and pale caged lives made blind by the dust of toil to coin the very sun to gold.

Footsteps and the leisurely patter of rain.

Beside the lamppost in the alley stands a girl in a long sleek shawl that moulds vaguely to the curves of breast and arms. Her eyes are in shadow.

A smell of frying fish; footsteps of people going to dinner clatter eagerly through the lane. A boy with a trough of meat on his shoulder turns by the lamppost, his steps drag. The green light slants in the black of his eyes. Her eyes are in shadow.

Footsteps of people going to dinner clatter eagerly; the rain falls with infinite nonchalance ... a man turns with a twirl of moustaches and the green light slants on his glasses on the round buttons of his coat. Her eyes are in shadow.

A woman with an umbrella keeps her eyes straight ahead and lifts her dress to avoid the mud on the pavingstones.

An old man stares without fear into the eyes of the girl through the stripes of the rain. His steps beat faster and he sniffs hard suddenly the smell of dinner and frying fish. Was it a flame of old days expanding in his cold blood, or a shiver of rigid graves, chill clay choking congealing?

Beside the lamppost in the alley stands a girl in a long sleek shawl that moulds vaguely to the curves of breast and arms.

A brown net of branches quivers above silver trunks of planes. Here and there a late leaf flutters its faint death-rattle in the wind. Beyond, the sky burns fervid rose like red wine held against the sun.

Schoolboys are playing in the square dodging among the silver tree-trunks collars gleam and white knees as they romp shrilly.

Lamps bloom out one by one like jessamine, yellow and small. At the far end a church's dome flat deep purple cuts the sky.

Schoolboys are romping in the square in and out among the silver tree-trunks out of the smoked rose shadows through the timid yellow lamplight ... Socks slip down fingermarks smudge white collars; they run and tussle in the shadows kicking the gravel with muddied boots with cheeks flushed hotter than the sky eyes brighter than the street-lamps with fingers tingling and breath fast: banqueters early drunken on the fierce cold wine of the dead year.

Green against the livid sky in their square dun-colored towers hang the bronze bells of Castile. In their unshakeable square towers jutting from the slopes of hills clang the bells of all the churches the dustbrown churches of Castile.

How they swing the green bronze bells athwart olive twilights of Castile till their fierce insistant clangour rings down the long plowed slopes breaks against the leaden hills whines among the trembling poplars beside sibilant swift green rivers.

O you strong bells of Castile that commanding clang your creed over treeless fields and villages that huddle in arroyos, gleaming orange with lights in the greenish dusk; can it be bells of Castile, can it be that you remember?

Groans there in your bronze green curves in your imperious evocation stench of burnings, rattling screams quenched among the crackling flames? The crowd, the pile of faggots in the square, the yellow robes.... Is it that bells of Castile that you remember?

The Tagus flows with a noise of wiers through Aranjuez. The speeding dark-green water mirrors the old red walls and the balustrades and close-barred windows of the palace; and on the other bank three stooping washerwomen whose bright red shawls and piles of linen gleam in the green, the swirling green where shimmer the walls of Aranjuez.

There's smoke in the gardens of Aranjuez smoke of the burning of the years' dead leaves; the damp paths rustle underfoot thick with the crisp broad leaves of the planes.

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