The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings

I can still see the opening smile, squared kindness of cheeks, eyes like cool keys—his heart always with the Sea.

The little Machine-Fixer (le petit bonhomme avec le bras cassé as he styled himself, referring to his little paralysed left arm) was so perfectly different that I must let you see him next. He was slightly taller than Garibaldi, about of a size with Monsieur Auguste. He and Monsieur Auguste together were a fine sight, a sight which made me feel that I came of a race of giants. I am afraid it was more or less as giants that B. and I pitied the Machine-Fixer—still this was not really our fault, since the Machine-Fixer came to us with his troubles much as a very minute and helpless child comes to a very large and omnipotent one. And God knows we did not only pity him, we liked him—and if we could in some often ridiculous manner assist the Machine-Fixer I think we nearly always did. The assistance to which I refer was wholly spiritual; since the minute Machine-Fixer’s colossal self-pride eliminated any possibility of material assistance. What we did, about every other night, was to entertain him (as we entertained our other friends) chez nous; that is to say, he would come up late every evening or every other evening, after his day’s toil—for he worked as co-sweeper with Garibaldi and he was a tremendous worker; never have I seen a man who took his work so seriously and made so much of it—to sit, with great care and very respectfully, upon one or the other of our beds at the upper end of The Enormous Room, and smoke a black small pipe, talking excitedly and strenuously and fiercely about La Misère and himself and ourselves, often crying a little but very bitterly, and from time to time striking matches with a short angry gesture on the sole of his big, almost square boot. His little, abrupt, conscientious, relentless, difficult self lived always in a single dimension—the somewhat beautiful dimension of Sorrow. He was a Belgian, and one of two Belgians in whom I have ever felt the least or slightest interest; for the Machine-Fixer might have been a Polak or an Idol or an Esquimo so far as his nationality affected his soul. By and large, that was the trouble—the Machine-Fixer had a soul. Put the bracelets on an ordinary man, tell him he’s a bad egg, treat him rough, shove him into the jug or its equivalent (you see I have regard always for M. le Surveillant’s delicate but no doubt necessary distinction between La Ferté and Prison), and he will become one of three animals—a rabbit, that is to say timid; a mole, that is to say stupid; or a hyena, that is to say Harree the Hollander. But if, by some fatal, some incomparably fatal accident, this man has a soul—ah, then we have and truly have most horribly what is called in La Ferté Macé by those who have known it: La Misère. Monsieur Auguste’s valiant attempts at cheerfulness and the natural buoyancy of his gentle disposition in a slight degree protected him from La Misère. The Machine-Fixer was lost. By nature he was tremendously sensible, he was the very apotheosis of l’ame sensible in fact. His sensibilité made him shoulder not only the inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes, had they not sprung from perfectly real causes, might have suggested a persecution complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving them—they could be relieved in only one way: by Liberty. Not simply by his personal liberty, but by the liberation of every single fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting, in his own case, of the Wrong—the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong—done to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of our common life. It was necessary, for its appeasement, that a shaft of bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.

B. recalls that the little Machine-Fixer said or hinted that he had been either a socialist or an anarchist when he was young. So that is doubtless why we had the privilege of his society. After all, it is highly improbable that this poor socialist suffered more at the hands of the great and good French government than did many a Conscientious Objector at the hands of the great and good American government; or—since all great governments are per se good and vice versa—than did many a man in general who was cursed with a talent for thinking during the warlike moments recently passed; during, that is to say, an epoch when the g. and g. nations demanded of their respective peoples the exact antithesis to thinking; said antitheses being vulgarly called Belief. Lest which statement prejudice some members of the American Legion in disfavour of the Machine-Fixer or rather of myself—awful thought—I hasten to assure everyone that the Machine-Fixer was a highly moral person. His morality was at times almost gruesome; as when he got started on the inhabitants of the women’s quarters. Be it understood that the Machine-Fixer was human, that he would take a letter—provided he liked the sender—and deliver it to the sender’s adorée without a murmur. That was simply a good deed done for a friend; it did not imply that he approved of the friend’s choice, which for strictly moral reasons he invariably and to the friend’s very face violently deprecated. To this little man of perhaps forty-five, with a devoted wife waiting for him in Belgium (a wife whom he worshipped and loved more than he worshipped and loved anything in the world, a wife whose fidelity to her husband and whose trust and confidence in him echoed in the letters which—when we three were alone—the little Machine-Fixer tried always to read to us, never getting beyond the first sentence or two before he broke down and sobbed from his feet to his eyes), to such a little person his reaction to les femmes was more than natural. It was in fact inevitable.

Women, to him at least, were of two kinds and two kinds only. There were les femmes honnêtes and there were les putains. In La Ferté, he informed us—and as balayeur he ought to have known whereof he spoke—there were as many as three ladies of the former variety. One of them he talked with often. She told him her story. She was a Russian, of a very fine education, living peacefully in Paris up to the time that she wrote to her relatives a letter containing the following treasonable sentiment:

“Je m’ennuie pour les neiges de Russie.”

The letter had been read by the French censor, as had B.’s letter; and her arrest and transference from her home in Paris to La Ferté Macé promptly followed. She was as intelligent as she was virtuous and had nothing to do with her frailer sisters, so the Machine-Fixer informed us with a quickly passing flash of joy. Which sisters (his little forehead knotted itself and his big bushy eyebrows plunged together wrathfully) were wicked and indecent and utterly despicable disgraces to their sex—and this relentless Joseph fiercely and jerkily related how only the day before he had repulsed the painfully obvious solicitations of a Madame Potiphar by turning his back, like a good Christian, upon temptation and marching out of the room, broom tightly clutched in virtuous hand.

“M’sieu Jean” (meaning myself) “savez-vous”—with a terrific gesture which consisted in snapping his thumbnail between his teeth—“ÇA PUE!”

Then he added: “And what would my wife say to me if I came home to her and presented her with that which this creature had presented to me? They are animals,” cried the little Machine-Fixer; “all they want is a man. They don’t care who he is; they want a man. But they won’t get me!” And he warned us to beware.

Especially interesting, not to say valuable, was the Machine-Fixer’s testimony concerning the more or less regular “inspections” (which were held by the very same doctor who had “examined” me in the course of my first day at La Ferté) for les femmes; presumably in the interest of public safety. Les femmes, quoth the Machine-Fixer, who had been many times an eye-witness of this proceeding, lined up talking and laughing and—crime of crimes—smoking cigarettes, outside the bureau of M. le Médecin Major. “Une femme entre. Elle se lève les jupes jusqu’au menton et se met sur le banc. Le médecin major la regarde. Il dit de suite ‘Bon. C’est tout.’ Elle sort. Une autre entre. La même chose. ‘Bon. C’est fini’…. M’sieu’ Jean: prenez garde!”

And he struck a match fiercely on the black, almost square boot which lived on the end of his little worn trouser-leg, bending his small body forward as he did so, and bringing the flame upward in a violent curve. The flame settled on his little black pipe, his cheeks sucked until they must have met, and a slow unwilling noise arose, and with the return of his cheeks a small colorless wisp of possibly smoke came upon the air.—“That’s not tobacco. Do you know what it is? It’s wood! And I sit here smoking wood in my pipe when my wife is sick with worrying…. M’sieu! Jean”—leaning forward with jaw protruding and a oneness of bristly eyebrows, “Ces grands messieurs qui ne foutent pas mal si l’on CREVE de faim, savez-vous ils croient chacun qu’il est Le Bon Dieu LUI-Même. Et M’sieu’ Jean, savez-vous, ils sont tous”—leaning right in my face, the withered hand making a pitiful fist of itself—“ils. Sont. Des. CRAPULES!”