The Man Who Cried I Am Read Online Free Page B

bellman, she would be touching herself up a bit.
    Suddenly he wanted to listen to someone else’s rhythms; his own were sonorous, too labored. He paused. There was something he wanted, something … Ah, a paper. He had just picked up the Tribune when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, another Negro. How the eye catches color in a country where there is so little! Or how that same eye catches no color—an albino in Africa—where color abounds. Kiss my ass, Max thought, drawing back without knowing why, Alfonse Edwards.

2
    AMSTERDAM
    He sat waist-deep in the lukewarm water of his bath and watched it turn slowly from a clear to pinkish color. He could hear the trams ringing their bells as they pulled off from the stop in front of the hotel. Why, he wondered, couldn’t Alfonse Edwards be in Amsterdam too? What instinct (Negroes not only had that good old natural rhythm, but instinct too) had made him draw back? True, he had not liked Edwards from the first, from Nigeria. Even less since he had been with Harry when Harry died.
    Edwards had told it like this:
    He and Harry were walking out of Rue de Berri and paused at the corner waiting for a traffic light to change. Harry had gone down just like an FFI caught in the crossfire of snipers. Max imagined that crowds gathered and someone finally recognized that dark round face, the bitterness on it suddenly replaced by surprise, and shouted, “ Le M’sieu Ames, le romancier américain. ”
    â€œBoom, like that,” Edwards had said in Paris, his lean face suggesting rather than actually possessing sorrow. Max remembered that even then he wondered just why Harry would bother with a type like that. He must have been getting senile. Edwards was a black Ivy Leaguer. Close-cropped hair, for he wanted Europeans to know that he was American. The other Negroes let their hair grow long and bushy—nappy—in order to be mistaken for Africans. Not Edwards. American all the way. Red white and black.
    So, anyway, there was Harry down in the street at the corner where the Rue de Berri runs into the Champs-Elysées, with the Arc de Triomphe humped up through the noon haze. Harry was down and didn’t get up and later there was Edwards describing his death: “Boom, like that,” and Max also thought then, These hippies, Ivy League or Watermelon League, they never learn. English is limiting but it’s all we know well, and there are times and places when it should be used, such as when describing how Harry died. Harry would never die “Boom, like that.”
    Why not? Because he was too goddamned evil. And why else not? Because.
    Max had taken the morphine as much for the shock of Harry’s death as for the pain. He stood at the rear of the small, hastily assembled crowd within the walls of Cimetière du Montparnasse. Edwards was there. Charlotte, Harry’s wife was there, a few Americans, like Iris Stapleton of the nightclubs, painters and writers. There were some Africans, a few Indians. And it was only twenty hours after Harry had died. Very few of them had been summoned by Charlotte. The papers had announced his death, and they had come unbidden. Max stood there drunk with the drug, sick with pain and shock, and suddenly he noticed that Michelle Bouilloux, even more isolated from the small crowd than himself, was staring at him. He thought she was staring. Max turned back to listen once more to the eulogies. When he turned again to Michelle, he let his eyes roam; her husband wasn’t there. She seemed to have moved closer to him, and now he knew she was staring from under her veil. And she was doing something with her hands, he couldn’t tell what, because she was wearing black gloves and moving her hands against the background of a black suit. Then she took off one glove and one startlingly white hand showed, and one of its fingers curled back and forth at him. Her eyes seemed to come through the veil. Max thought,