Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter Page A

no sign I’m trying to be primitive … Now don’t say that again! I love the Indians, I’ve got a weakness for them,” said Jenny. “I feel certain I learned something from them, even if I don’t know yet what it is.”
    â€œBut they didn’t love you,” said David, “and you know it. We keep on liking them one by one, as we do each other, but they hate us in a bunch simply as members of the other-colored, oppressor race. I get damn sick of it. And the only thing in this world they wanted from you was your broken-down old Fotingo, last year; and my cigarette lighter; and the portable phonograph. We love their beautiful straw mats because we don’t have to sleep on them, and they want our spring mattresses. There’s nothing to blame them for, but I’m sick of this sentimental yap about them.”
    Jenny laughed because she felt very melancholy and baffled. “I wasn’t looking for a new religion, either,” she said. “I suppose you’re right so far as you go, but there is something else.… I know I’m much too simple to be a good primitive.”
    â€œI don’t think they are any more complicated than we are,” said David. “They tie a different set of knots, that’s all.”
    â€œThat isn’t all, by any means,” said Jenny. “That is too simple.”
    David, hearing the thin edge in her voice, said no more, but reflected that no matter how he tried to explain his point of view to Jenny, about anything at all, he seemed always to go off at a tangent, or in a circle, or to get bogged down in a spot he had never meant to be in, as if Jenny’s mind refracted his thought instead of absorbing his meaning, or even his feelings about certain things—Indians, for example. He would give up from now on talking to Jenny about Indians, or about her painting, either; she was sentimental about the one, and obstinate about the other; let it go.
    They finished their second tea and rum in a comfortable-looking silence, wondered what time it was, had to ask the waiter because they complicated their lives on principle by refusing to wear watches; and strolled back toward the harbor.
    The heat was overwhelming, the life of the streets wandered torpidly in a sluggish dream, the charge of daylight was almost staggering, and sweat broke from every pore of every human being; the tongues of dogs streamed, and Jenny and David, in their cool-looking linen, were wet and streaked and almost gasping by the time they reached the dock. At the entrance to the long shed through which they must pass to the ship, they saw first a large thick cluster of people with frowzy dark heads and ragged clothing. There was no space to pass among them, for their bundles wrapped in hemp fiber sacks tied with rope lay on the ground, filled their arms and bulged from their shoulders. There were men and women of all ages, in every state of decay, children of all sizes and babies in arms. They were all unbelievably ragged and dirty, hunched over, silent, miserable. Several of them, seeing the two strangers, quietly pushed and nudged at each other and at their bundles in signal, until a narrow way was cleared.
    â€œPass if you please,” they murmured in Spanish, and “Thank you, thank you,” said Jenny and David, edging through carefully. The crowd thinned a little then, but the whole huge shed was filled with them. They sat huddled on the ground, they stood formlessly bowed, they leaned in tired arcs against the walls.
    The air was not air any more, but a hot, clinging vapor of sweat, of dirt, of stale food and befouled litter, of rags and excrement: the reek of poverty. The people were not faceless: they were all Spanish, their heads had shape and meaning and breeding, their eyes looked out of beings who knew they were alive. Their skins were the skins of the starved who are also overworked, a dark dirty pallor, with green copper overtones,