Ah, he was not now on the ship. Nor was he at the tailor shop. This must be—home.
He sat up in bed, gazing at the enormity of things in the room. "Oh, Mama—" he cried, but no answer came. He jumped off the bed and dragged on his boots. He dressed and made for the door. He was struck once more by the glow of the bright Panama sun. The room opened out on a porch, not very wide, and there was no awning to cool it.
"Mama, a las siete!"
Down by the stairs a half-sick, half-clothed little child was crying. Standing above him was a lank, black, cruel-faced woman, brewing a cup of hot milk. As soon as the milk was shifted from one cup to the other, she would turn and stamp at the little boy on the floor.
"Where am I to get it from?" she screamed at him, "shut up, I say—shut up—before I cuff you—what do I care if you haven't eaten for two days—your stomach burning you—well go to sleep—you been already—well go again—sleep, sleep—it will do you good—it will make you forget you ever had a belly.
"Think I pick up smoked sausage? I've got to buy it. And what have I got to buy it with? Filth! May the heavens consume you! Shut up, I say! Who cares whether it is seven o'clock—or eight o'clock—or nine o'clock? Let me be! The baby's got to eat, and you'd better begone, you're too noisy. Seven o'clock! Sing it to the birds, sing it to the canary, sing it to the winds. Winds can wake up the dead. Go try—bawl it to the winds! But I've got my own song, I've got my own tune. I don't want to hear you, shut up, I say."
All this in a tongue musical to Gerald, but the cries of the little boy and the pox on his face and the sores making a batter of his toes unforgettably moved him.
At the cesspool he espied a girl. Her back was to him. She was of mixed blood, of assafetida brown, and had once had the smallpox. She was shouting at the top of her voice to the Chinaman downstairs to "giv' me wattah, yo' dam China-mang, you giv' me de wattah."
It took a long time for it to treacle upstairs. The water struggling up at last, she proceeded to bathe Madame's canary. To supervise the rite, Madame came herself—adding to the Cholo girl's swift parrot-like chatter words just as swift and as parrot-like.
Madame was a beauty. Wife of a Colombia rum merchant, she was fat and rosy and white. "Me white," she'd say to the West Indian lodgers in her tenement, "you no see fo' my skin?" The plate of her jeweled bosom soared high. Encountering it, one's first impulse would be not to lay one's head on it, but to cling, climb, sit safely and plumply on it. Her flat, wrinkled face had been smothered in some starch-like powder. She was white, as whites on the Isthmus went, but the flour or powder which she dabbed so thick on her face sometimes failed to accomplish its task. At intervals the wind or the latitudinous heat dissipated splotches of the starchy pallor, and Madame's neck, or the rim of Madame's mouth, or the balloons under Madame's eyes—would expose a skin as yellow as the breasts of the Cholo girl.