The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

DECADENCE Romain Gary

We had already been over the Atlantic five hours and Carlos had been talking all the time. I’m not even sure he knew he was speaking to us: at times I had the feeling he was merely thinking aloud, under the influence of a deep emotion that was becoming more and more evident as the plane neared Rome.

The imminence of the coming reunion had us all pretty nervous, but with Carlos you could feel something deeper, something that often sounded like a mixture of awe and love. For all of us who knew him well—one of the toughest men around—it was truly impressive to hear the accents of reverence and almost of humility in his voice as he evoked for us the legendary figure of Mike Sarfatti, the Hoboken giant who rose one day on the New York waterfront and scared the hell out of every union boss there, and no one can say that they were men who scared easy.

You should have heard Carlos pronounce that name. He lowered his voice and an almost tender smile softened the heavy face that 40 years in the thick of the social struggle had turned to stone.

“It was a crucial period—crucial, that’s the word for it. The Syndicate was at a turning point: we were going social. We were stepping into the longshoremen’s union fight and it was rough; nobody had ever given us much trouble before. It often looked as if we weren’t going to make it, as if the unions on the New York waterfront were strong enough to look after themselves and didn’t feel like being protected by us. The press was dragging us in the mud, the federal authorities were sniffing around and the dockers themselves were sore as hell; dues had just been set at 20 percent of their pay, and everyone was trying to get control of the cashbox and milk the unions for himself.

“Even so, we were moving in, but it was rough, as I said, and getting rougher. In the port of New York alone, there were seven different headquarters fighting over the cake, and the union old-timers would rather have police protection than us. Yes, that’s the point it had reached. They were getting quite hysterical.

“Well, it took Mike only a year to straighten things out, and he didn’t work like the other bosses in the protection racket, the Guziks, the Musicas, who paid their men to do the work. No, Mike was always the first in the front line; he always took a hand himself. The day someone gets the idea of raking the bottom of the Hudson around Hoboken, they’ll find about a hundred tons of cement down there in the slime, and Mike was always around in person when they put the guys in the cast.

“More often than not they were still alive and kicking. Mike liked it that way; he liked to give them a chance to express themselves. He liked it if they argued when they poured the cement over them—it made them look interesting when the stuff set. They would be caught in all sorts of attitudes. Mike said one day it would be like the people in Pompeii when they found them in lava 2,000 years later; he used to call it ‘working for posterity.’ When one of the guys got too noisy, Mike always tried to reason with him. ‘What have you got to bellyache about, sonny?’ he would say. ‘You’re going to be part of our cultural heritage.’

“At the end, Mike even got very fussy. He had to have special cement, more like plaster, the kind that set right away, so that he could see what he was doing, while the work was in progress. In Hoboken we usually just stick the guy in the cement when he’s ready, nail on the top of the barrel, roll it into the river, and forget about it. But not Mike. With him it was something else, something artistic. He wanted to see the expression of the face and the position of the body, and he wanted him to look like a statue.

“Sometimes, as I told you, the guy would twist and turn a little during the job, and then the results would often be quite striking. But usually he would just have one hand on his head and his mouth open, pleading and swearing that he hadn’t tried to fight the Syndicate, or split the unions, that he was all for workers’ unity and innocent as a lamb, and Mike didn’t like that, because then they all looked just the same, same faces, same gestures, and that wasn’t what he wanted. ‘Pig work,’ he called it.

“All we cared about was getting the guy into the barrel as fast as we could, drop the barrel into the river and think of something else. Not that there was much danger; the docks were covered by guys from headquarters, the police never stuck their noses into anything—they were not supposed to know about it, and it was only dog eating dog, anyway, but we didn’t like the job: a guy covered with cement from head to foot and screaming while he was already all white and turning hard, with only the black hole of the mouth still broadcasting—you really had to be artistic to like it.

“Quite frankly, none of us cared for art that much. That was long before everybody got stinking rich and became art- and culture-conscious. Yes, ‘culture’ they began to call it. You had to have it, if you wanted to prove you had gone respectable and social. But Mike has always been a pioneer in everything, and he was the first in the Syndicate to go social and to realize that culture and art made you look good. So sometimes he took a hammer and chisel and touched up a few details himself. The guy I remember best of all was Big Bill Sugar, the Greek from San Francisco who wanted to keep the West Coast independent and refused to affiliate—the same thing Lou Dybic tried the year before in Chicago, with the slot machines; you all know what happened to him.

“Only the difference between Lou and Big Bill was that Big Bill Sugar was very strong on his home ground, backed by all the grass roots. Also, he claimed he was strictly non-political. And he knew all the smart shit talk all right. He claimed he was for unity and all that. He didn’t want to split the workers, but neither did he want the movement to be dictated to by the East Coast waterfront. Oh well, you know the line. And he was very careful. Before he would come east and talk the situation over with Mike, he wanted hostages; he asked for Mike’s brother who was on the accounting side, and a couple of other Syndicate workers. They went, and Big Bill came to Hoboken. Only when they got together, it was easy to see that Mike wasn’t interested in the discussion at all. He kept looking at Big Bill Sugar like he was dreaming, and you could tell he wasn’t listening. You know, the Greek was quite a guy, over six feet tall and good-looking—the girls were all crazy about him, that’s how he got his nickname, Sugar. Even so, they talked right through for about seven hours, and they went into the whole thing—labor unity and getting rid of the political shysters who wouldn’t just defend the professional interests of the workers but were trying to make the movement into an election platform, and all that time Mike never took his eyes off Big Bill Sugar. When they had a coffee break, he came over to me and all he said was: ‘Okay, there’s no use arguing with this bastard, let’s give him a bath.’

“I was about to remind him of his brother and the other two who were being held as hostages in San Francisco, but I kept my mouth shut. Mike always knew what he was doing and besides, the higher interests of the Syndicate were at stake. You have got to forget your personal feelings sometimes. They went on arguing, for form’s sake, and after closing time, when Big Bill left the shed with his party, we shot them all—him, his lawyer and the two blokes from the Oakland headquarters. That night, Mike supervised the job in person, and when the Greek was all nicely set in concrete, instead of rolling him into the Hudson, he stopped and looked at him sort of dreamily. Then he smiled and said: ‘Leave him here for a while. He has to dry out, and that’ll take a good day.’

“I didn’t quite see why he had to be dry before going into the water, but here again I didn’t feel like saying anything. So we left Big Bill Sugar in the shed under a tarpaulin, and a day or so later we all came back, and Mike looked at him again in that dreamy way, poked at the concrete, touched it up a little more with hammer and chisel, here and there, and in the end he seemed quite pleased. He straightened up, stepped back, stared at the cast a little longer, and then he said: ‘All right, put the bastard in my car.’

“At first we didn’t know what he meant, and he said again, ‘Put the bastard in my car. Next to the driver.’ We looked at each other, but we weren’t going to argue with Mike.

“We carried Big Bill Sugar to the Cadillac and put him in next to the driver, then we all got in and waited. ‘Okay, let’s go home,’ Mike said. So we got to his house on Park Avenue, stopped the car and looked at Mike. “Take him out.’ We took Big Bill out of the car, and the doorman smiled and took off his cap. ‘Nice piece of statuary you got there, Mr. Sarfatti,’ he said, respectfully. ‘At least you can tell what it is. Not like these modern things that have three heads and seven hands.’ “That’s right,’ Mike said, and he laughed. ‘It’s real classical. Greek, in fact.’

“We stuck Big Bill Sugar in the elevator and rode on up. Mike opened the door and we carried the statue inside. ‘In the living room,’ Mike said. We went into the living room and stood Big Bill up against a wall and waited. Mike looked all around the room, thought it over, and then he pointed. ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘over the mantelpiece.’ We didn’t get it right way, but Mike moved away the painting that was there.

“All right, we decided, no arguments. We put Big Bill Sugar on the mantelpiece, propped him up against the wall, and left him there. With Mike, there was no use trying to understand. Afterwards, of course, the rest of us talked about it a lot, trying to figure out why Mike was so anxious to have Big Bill Sugar on his mantelpiece, right there in his living room. Everyone had his own ideas about that, but no one knew for, sure.

“Of course it was a great victory for us. Big Bill Sugar was a dangerous guy, he wanted to split the movement and keep a piece of the pie for himself, and Spats Marcovitz thought Mike wanted to keep Big Bill for a trophy to remind him of the great victory he’d won. In any case, he kept him like that on his wall for years, until he was sent down for tax fraud, before being deported to Italy. Yes, that was all they could find against him: tax fraud, and even then it was a put-up job by the politicians who tried to infiltrate the movement.

“Before leaving the States, he gave the statue to the Museum of American Folklore in Brooklyn. It’s still there. Mike didn’t get Big Bill Sugar for peanuts—they found his brother’s body in a garbage can on the Oakland docks—but he wasn’t a man to discuss the price when the question of unity was at stake. Yes, he laid the first stone of unity on the docks and he did it all with his own hands, which didn’t keep the government from taking his passport away and deporting him to Italy when he got out of jail. So that’s the man you’re going to see in about an hour, young fellows —a giant. Yes, a giant; there’s no other word for him.”

There were three of us. There was Shimmy Kunitz, who was Carlos’ bodyguard, and whose only occupation outside of his physiological functions consisted of target practice with his Colt about five hours a day. That was his way of life. When he wasn’t shooting, he was waiting. I don’t know for what. The day they picked him up dead at Libby’s, maybe, with three bullets in his back.

Then there was Swifty Zavrakos, a little man with greying hair whose face was a kind of permanent exhibition of every known variety of nervous tic; he was our lawyer and a real walking encyclopedia of waterfront history; he could give you from memory the names of all the organizers, the sentences each had served and even the caliber of the guns they used.

As for me, I had been to college, had spent several years on Madison Avenue, and I was mostly there to keep an eye on appearances and take care of the public relations, and I worked hard to try to modify the too often unfavorable image created in the public’s mind by our leaders, largely due to their often more-than-modest social origins, and their lack of interest in questions of philanthropy, education and culture.

We were going to see Sarfatti in Rome for two reasons: first of all, because his deportation decision had just been reversed by the Supreme Court as the result of a legal flaw, and second, because the Syndicate was at another crucial point in its history. We were planning to move out of the harbors and into bigger things. The first decisive step was in the transportation sector—trucks, planes, boats, railroads. It was a big mouthful to swallow. The so-called legitimate unions were fighting us like mad, supported by the politicians and by the federal authorities, who hated the idea of workers’ unity anyway and who cared even less to see it organized by us, or, as they put it, “see it fall into criminal hands.”

We needed Mike more than we ever needed him before.

His name, the news of his return, would scare the hell out of our enemies and would sound an optimistic note of victory. It would create just the necessary psychological effect. After all, he had been the first to understand, perhaps instinctively, that traditional American capitalism was on the wane, and that the true source of wealth and power was no longer management but labor. Mike’s genius had been to realize that the days of the Chicago-type rackets were over, and that protection of the workers offered infinitely bigger possibilities than the kind of protection pioneers like Bugs Moran, Lou Buchalter or old Capone had once imposed on big business.

He had even cut himself off completely from the drug traffic, prostitution and slot machines, in order to concentrate all his energy on the labor movement, despite the opposition of the more conservative elements in the Syndicate, incapable of adapting themselves to the new historical conditions. Traditional unions, fighting for life, and with the complicity of federal authorities, had temporarily succeeded in slowing the march of progress by getting Mike deported; now his return to the front lines of the battle for control would panic the ranks of our competitors.

We reached Rome around the end of the afternoon. A Cadillac was waiting for us at the airport with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel and an excited old trout of an Italian secretary who spoke of Mike with throbs in her voice. Mr. Sarfatti was sorry, but he hadn’t left his villa in over six weeks. Carlos approved with a brief nod.

“You can’t be too careful,” he said. “He’s well guarded here?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the secretary assured him. “I see to that myself. No one disturbs him. He thought he’d have more time, but New York is very eager to have him return immediately, and he’s having to work twice as hard. It’s a great event in his life, of course. But he’s very happy you’re here. He’s often spoken of you to me. You knew him when he was still doing figurative work, I believe. Yes, Mr. Sarfatti enjoys talking about his artistic beginnings,” the secretary chatted on. “Apparently one of his works is in the collection of the American Folklore Museum, in Brooklyn. A statue called ‘Big Bill Sugar.’ “

Carlos caught his cigar just in time. Swiftly Zavrakos’ face blurred into a series of alarming twitches. I must have looked pretty funny myself! Only Shimmy Kunitz didn’t show the slightest emotion; he was so full of dope he didn’t seem to know he was there. He always looked so blank you ended up not seeing him.

“He told you about that?” Carlos asked slowly.

“Yes, certainly!” the woman exclaimed with a broad smile. “He often makes fun of his early efforts. Actually, he doesn’t disown them; he even thinks they’re rather amusing. ‘Contessa,’ he told me—he always calls me Contessa, I don’t really know why—’Contessa, when I first started I was very figurative—a kind of American primitive, like Grandma Moses, really naive, you know? Big Bill Sugar was probably the best thing I did along those lines—a nice example of what we call Americana—a gangster type bent over, clutching his stomach where the bullet went in, with his hat beginning to slip down over his eyes— but it wasn’t much. I hadn’t found myself yet, of course, I was only feeling my way. But if you ever go through Brooklyn, you should stop and see it all the same. Kids love it, I’m told. And you’ll find but how far I’ve come since.’ But I suppose you know Mr. Sarfatti’s work much better than I do____”

Carlos had got over his surprise. He was grinning. Old Mike knew how to put over a good joke.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “We sure know the work Mike’s done and we know he’ll do even bigger things now. Let me tell you, you’re working for a great man, a great man whose return all America is waiting for. Someday his name will be known all over the world. . . .”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it for a minute!” the secretary exclaimed. “Already Alto in Milan has devoted a most enthusiastic Article to him. And I can assure you that for two years he’s done nothing but prepare himself for this moment, so that he now really feels ready to return to the United States.”

Carlos nodded again and said nothing. It was never easy to know just what Swifty Zavrakos’ eyes were doing, with all his tics, but I had the feeling that he kept glancing at me. And I must say I wasn’t reassured—something wasn’t right, there was a misunderstanding somewhere—I felt a vague apprehension, a kind of foreboding.

The Cadillac was streaking across the Roman campagna with its ruined aqueducts and cypress trees. Then it turned into a park, drove for a moment down a tunnel of oleanders and stopped in front of a villa that seemed made out of nothing but glass and a strange, asymmetrical shape, a kind of screwy triangle. I had paid a few visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but I must confess that when I got inside, it was a shock all the same; it was hard to imagine that one of the greatest leaders in the history of American organized crime lived here.

All the photos of Mike Sarfatti I had seen showed him standing on the Hoboken dock, in a bold landscape of cranes, chains, bulldozers, crates and steel, which were his real element. Now I found myself in a kind of hothouse, among furniture with twisted shapes that looked as if they came out of a nightmare, under a luminous ceiling whose colors kept changing and from which hung iron objects that turned and swayed continuously while lumps of cement, with tubes, pipes and steel strips sticking out, loomed up menacingly in every corner, and on the walls, paintings—at least I suppose they were paintings, they had frames—tossed their blobs of sinister smears and their snaky lines at you until you felt like screaming.

I turned to Carlos. He was standing with his mouth hanging open, his eyes popping, his hat on the back of his head. I think he was scared.

As for Swifty Zavrakos, he must have gotten such a shock that his twitches had stopped; his face was frozen and you could see every feature; I had the feeling I was meeting him for the first time. Even Shimmy Kunitz had come out of his stupor, glancing around in every direction, his hand in his pocket, as if he expected someone to fire at him.

“What’s that?” Carlos rasped.

He was pointing at a kind of steel octopus that seemed to be opening its tentacles to trap us.

“That’s a Buzzoni chair,” a voice said.

Mike Sarfatti was standing on the doorstep. The image of 30 years of social struggle on the New York waterfront exploded before my eyes: 2,000 tons of rotting meat, in the sabotaged deep freezers on the docks, raising their stench higher than the Empire State Building; the bodies of Frankie Shore, Benny Stigman, Rocky Fish and other traitors who had tried to organize the infiltration of the longshoremen’s union by political elements, hanging from meat hooks at the door of the slaughterhouses; Sam Berg’s face burned by sulphuric acid the day after his article appeared denouncing what he called “the crime syndicate’s take-over of the labor movement”; the machine-gun attacks against Walter Reuther and Meany—all came back to me in a few lightning flashes of memory, while I stared at the hero of this victorious epic who was now standing in front of me.

He was wearing worker’s overalls and looked as if he had just come out of the yards. I had thought he was older; he couldn’t have been more than fifty. Powerful hands, a wrestler’s shoulders, and a face of brutal splendor whose features seemed to have been chopped out with an axe. But I was immediately struck by the haunted, tortured expression of his eyes. He seemed not only preoccupied but actually obsessed. You saw on his face a real stupor, a kind of astonishment that touched that fine Roman mask of his with a strangely lost, bewildered expression. You could tell, while he was talking to us, that he had something else on his mind, and something much more important to him. But he seemed glad to see Carlos all the same. As for Carlos, he had tears in his eyes. They stood embraced for a minute, gazing at each other affectionately and patting each other on the shoulders. The butler came in with a tray of drinks, and set it down on a table. Carlos drank down his martini, looking around him with obvious disgust.

“That’s a funny place you’ve got here,” he said.

Mike smiled.

“What ‘s that?” Carlos asked, pointing accusingly at the wall.

“That’s a Wols,” Mike said.

“What’s it supposed to be?”

“He’s an abstract expressionist.”

“A what?”

“An abstract expressionist.”

Carlos sneered. His lips closed around his cigar and he began looking offended, even nasty.

“I’ll give a thousand bucks to the first guy who can tell me what that’s supposed to be,” he said.

Mike seemed annoyed.

“You aren’t used to it.”

Carlos was sitting heavily in his chair, looking around him with hostility. Sarfatti followed his eyes.

“That’s a Miro.”

“A kid of five could do that,” Carlos said. “And what’s that one?”

“A Soulages.”

Carlos chewed on his cigar a minute.

“Yes, well, I’m going to tell you what it is,” he announced finally. “There’s a name for that . . . It’s called decadence.”

He stared at us triumphantly.

“Decadence. They’re all rotten in Europe. Everyone knows that. Completely degenerate. All the Communists have to do is give it a push and the whole Continent will collapse. I tell you, they don’t have any moral fiber left. Rotten, all of them. We shouldn’t leave our troops stationed here; it’s probably catching. And that . . . what’s that piece of garbage?”

He aimed his cigar at a piece of shapeless concrete bristling with huge, twisted needles and rusty nails that occupied the center of the room. Mike didn’t say a word. His nostrils were pinched and he stared hard at Carlos. He had steely grey eyes and it wasn’t pleasant to be on the receiving end of that stare. I noticed that he was clenching his fists. Suddenly I was looking at the Mike Sarfatti of the legend, the king of the Hoboken docks, the man who had outsmarted Guppo, Fazziola, Luciano, Kutzakis, the five Anastasia brothers and even Dirty Spivak, the man who for 15 years had been the only master after God on the New York waterfront.

“The guy who made that’s completely nuts, Carlos declared assertively. “They should put him away.”

“It’s one of my latest works,” Mike said. “I made it.”

There was a deathly silence. Carlos’ eyes were bulging out of his head. Swifty Zavrakos’ face was twitching as if he had received a thousand electric shocks; it looked as if his features were trying to get away from him.

“I made that,” Mike repeated.

He looked really furious now. He stared at Carlos with the attention of a beast of prey. Carlos seemed to hesitate. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, but the instinct of self-preservation was strongest.

“Oh, well,” he said. “If you made it. . . . Well, then I suppose it’s all right.”

He glanced in disgust at the sculpture, then, evidently, decided to forget it.

“We came to talk business, Mike,” he said.

Mike wasn’t listening to him. He was staring proudly at the mass of concrete bristling with nails and needles, and when he began talking it was with a strange gentleness— a kind of awe—in his voice, and again that expression of astonishment, almost of naïveté, passed over his features.

“They reproduced it in Alto,” he said. “On the cover. It’s the best art magazine over here. They say I succeeded in suggesting the fourth dimension—the space-time dimension. Einstein, you know. I hadn’t thought of that, of course; you never know exactly what it is you’re doing; they say there’s always an element of mystery in it. The subconscious, of course. ... It made quite a stir. Since I finance the magazine, there were all kinds of stupid remarks. But those guys are incorruptible. You can’t buy them. They have principles. It’s the most advanced thing I’ve done, but I have other pieces out in the studio. Come, I’ll show you.”

“We’re here to talk business, Mike,” Carlos repeated, in a choked voice.

I had the feeling he suddenly felt too weak to stand up. But Mike was already at the door.

“Coming?” he shouted impatiently.

“Yes, Mike,” Carlos answered. “Yes, we’re coming.”

We crossed a kind of exotic garden with peacocks and flamingos strutting around loose among the stone monsters Mike caressed as he passed.

“That’s a Moore nude,” he said. “That’s a Branco. Of course, it’s a little old-fashioned. I bought them three years ago. They were pioneers, precursors; they lead directly to my work. But I’m the one who truly breaks new ground now. That’s what all the critics say.”

Carlos shot me a desperate look. At the other end of the garden there was a glass pavilion whose aluminum roof began at the ground and made a kind of roller-coaster loop into the air before coming back down again.

“Fissoni did that,” Mike said. “The best Italian architect, if you ask me. A Communist. But you know, Communism here has nothing to do with the kind at home. It’s not subversive. It’s all in the mind. Intellectual. Almost all the best painters and sculptors here are Communists.”

Carlos emitted a kind of asthmatic whine. He still didn’t dare speak, but he looked at us, darted a finger toward Mike’s back and then touched his own head. We went into the pavilion. Inside, around a vat of concrete there were crates, barrels, sacks of plaster and tools of all kinds; it was like being in a construction yard. And everywhere, too, were Mike’s “works.” What the “works” were supposed to be and what they were worth I don’t know to this day and no doubt I never will. All I saw, speaking personally, were lumps of concrete in strange shapes out of which stuck pieces of iron and twisted pipe.

“It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, does it?” Mike asked proudly. “The critics in Alto say I’ve discovered entirely new forms. They say I’m the spearhead of spatialism—I bet in America they don’t even know what that is.”

“No, Mike,” Carlos said gently, the way you talk to a sick person. “No, they don’t know what it is yet.”

“Well, they’ll find out soon,” Mike said with satisfaction. “All my works—there are exactly thirty now—are leaving for New York tomorrow. I’m having a show at the Meyerson Gallery.”

I’ll never forget Carlos’ face when Mike said that. At first an expression of incredulity, then of panic, while he turned toward us, as though to make sure his ears hadn’t betrayed him. But what he probably read on our faces— well, on mine and Shimmy Kunitz’, because the twitches running over Swifty Zavrakos’ face kept anyone from seeing what was happening there—must have confirmed his worst fears, and the expression of astonishment and panic was soon followed by one of frightening calm.

“You’re going to show this in New York, Mike?”

“Yes,” Mike Sarfatti said. “And I can promise you it’ll cause a sensation.”

“That’s for sure,” Carlos answered warmly.

At that moment, I must admit that I really admired the mastery over himself that Carlos displayed. Because it wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if Mike Sarfatti, the man who was the incarnation of all our hopes and ambitions at a particularly dramatic moment of the Syndicate’s history, returned to New York not to impose his iron grip on the unions once more, but to organize an exhibition of abstract art in a Manhattan gallery. A real tidal wave of mockery and derision—the legendary hero was going to be the object of one of the biggest laughs that had ever shaken the bellies of the labor bosses. Yes, even today I have to admire Carlos’ calm. Maybe he sweated just a little; he had taken out a new cigar and lighted it, and now he was staring at Mike, his hands in his pockets, kindness in his eyes.

“The catalogue’s already printed,” Mike said. “I’ve had them run off five thousand copies.”

“Oh, fine,” Carlos said. “That’s just fine.”

“We’ll have to send them to all our friends.”

“Sure, leave that to us.”

“It has to get into the papers. We’ve got to move into the cultural field. It’s a matter of prestige—very important. Culture! That should be our next conquest. We must bring culture to the masses. What the Syndicate should do right now is build a culture center in Hoboken.”

Carlos looked a little shaken.

“A . . . what?”

“A culture center. The Russians build them everywhere for the workers. We’re wrong to criticize the Communists so blindly. They’ve done some good things—and we should follow their example. Besides, the guy who wrote the preface to my catalogue, Zuccharelli, he’s a Communist. And that doesn’t keep him from being the best art critic alive.”

“A Communist, eh?” Carlos murmured.

“Yes, and I owe him a lot. He’s given me encouragement when I needed it most. Without him, I wouldn’t ever have thought of having this show in New York.”

“Is that so?” Carlos said.

“And he’s really helped me find my way to what I wanted to do. He says it just right here, in his preface. Listen to this: ‘A truly spatial sculpture must express the Einsteinian notion of space-time, by constantly modifying its nature before our eyes in a kind of controlled mutation of matter. Sarfatti’s work, rejecting immobility, refusing to commit itself to a single well-defined structure, is rooted in movement, in change, and achieves a clear break with the reactionary tradition of artistic stagnation, which, not unlike capitalism in the social field, seeks to immobilize forms by fixing them forever. In this sense it can be called truly progressive.’”

I wiped away the drops of cold sweat that had burst out on my forehead: I felt I was watching something like the entrance of the worm into the fruit. It was clearly no longer possible to bring Mike back to his senses in time; and to lock him up in a mental institution at this vital moment of our social struggle would spell disaster for our prestige. We had to forget about the man. The only thing that mattered now was his legend. He was a living myth, and his name was still invaluable to us. At all costs, we had to preserve the myth of the giant of Hoboken, save his name from a ridicule that would make us the laughing stock of every union local in the States. This was one of those moments in the affairs of men when the greatness of the cause suddenly prevails over all other considerations, when the importance of the end justifies the means. The only question—was our moral fiber still intact, were we still determined enough and firm enough in our convictions, or had years of prosperity and easy living damaged our will?

In other words, had decadence set in?

But a glance at Carlos’ face, where an expression of grim resolution had already drowned out the anger and the outrage, completely reassured me: I felt that the old warrior had already made up his mind. I saw him nod suddenly to Shimmy Kunitz. Mike was standing at the edge of the vat of cement where his last “work,” probably still unfinished, raised a stump bristling with barbed wire. The expression on his face had something pathetic about it: a mixture of megalomania and a kind of boundless astonishment.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Carlos said. “You must have caught it here.”

“I want all our friends to come and see this. I want them to be proud of me.”

“Yes, Mike,” Carlos said. “Yes, son. Your name will stay big, the biggest, just as it’s always been. I’ll take care of that.”

“They’re still accusing us Americans of being barbarians,” Mike said. “They’ll see. We can’t let Europe have a monopoly on culture.”

Carlos and Shimmy Kunitz fired together. Mike threw back his head, spread his arms, stood up to his full height, in the dynamic, tensed attitude which his statue standing today in the hall of our union local in Hoboken has caught so well. Then he fell forward into the cement. I heard a strange sound and quickly turned my head. Carlos was crying. Tears were flowing down the heavy face that pity, anger, shame and confusion wrought into a mask of tragic greatness.

“They got him,” he murmured. “They got the best of us all. I loved that boy like a son. But at least he’s no longer suffering. Now, all that counts is his life’s work. Mike Sarfatti’s name can still remain a guidance and an inspiration to us all. It will last as long as the Hoboken waterfront—and that’s where he’ll have his statue. We’ll just ship him home in one of these crates, since they’re leaving tomorrow. He’ll be all set when he gets there.”

He took off his coat and got to work. We helped him as best we could, and soon the impressive, indomitable statue that everyone can admire today in the hall of our Hoboken local began to take shape. Now and then Carlos stopped, wiped his eyes and glanced with hatred at the shapeless lumps of cement around us.

“Decadence,” he murmured. “Decadence, that’s what it is.”