72
ALBERT
J.
GUERARD
to the cause. The cost of running off the leaflets is small, he insists,
considering the amplitude and generosity of their claims. He walks
toward the city: toward the fated misadventures and insults of
his
life, the arrests and betrayals. There are great moon stains at the
armpits of his coarse suit. He is destined to be ravaged and exploited
by all those he intends, in his patriotism, to exploit-the destiny surely
visible in the stubborn optimist's gait. A sturdy implacable crawl.
And visible too in the innocence of a face burnished and Indian,
glowing with political hope-innocence, in spite of the great razor
slash.
So we walked toward Bari, on the long swing back to our Free
City. For it is there I must find men rich enough to air their grievances
from the
Agracorinth
and Seguros find men not so rich, yet willing
to finance the Committee's zeal. But in Bari there is only scum: the
ruined driven southward by lemming hope, or who would rather
starve under blue skies than freeze in northern alleys among unat–
tainable sausages. I note that no progress has been made with the
Porto Vecchio. None ever will be made until all is leveled by a
greater explosion, possibly a miscalculated orange flare: some single
unmalicious blow, definitive as an earthquake. The long warehouse
adjoining the dogana still topples on its side, but now picked clean
to twisted ribs. And nearby looms, exactly where it hung months
before (but with more of the superstructure gone), a freighter as large
as the
Agracorinth.
It
pullulates with refugee life. Smashed upward
quite onto the dock, even its great rudder hangs free of the water.
Thin smoke issues from wounds in its sides, and strips of laundry
from the dark portholes. There are swarms of children on the deck;
more children on the dock, barefoot and chanting, holding hands in a
ring; still others among the rusted cranes at the water's edge, where
a long row of men fish, black and patient as crows.
A single carriage-taxi waits at the end of a long and empty
avenue. But the driver refuses to take us, since we have no food for
the market, of which he could have a share. What, he asks, is money
to him? The lean horse seems upheld by the shafts, rather than hold–
ing them up; on the seat beside the driver, a transistor whines patriotic
tunes. He advises us to get to the cathedral before dark. But that is
easier said than done. The old town surrounding the cathedral
is
a
labyrinth for the foiling of pirates, and the escape of neighborhood
