The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  He was like a passenger pigeon11 or the mysterious flamingo, whose freedom to wander has become a necessity, a law, but who must suffer much at the hands of greedy hunters. The rage to travel that possesses money-grubbing Americans, meanwhile, is all too similar to that of the buzzards on the Mississippi and the Ohio, who set themselves down on any carcass thrown up by the waves and, once their hunger has been stilled, return with fattened belly to their nests to rest a while and sleep with open eyes, lest any booty escape them during their slumber. The proper comparison between full-blooded Americans and our German guest is that of a buzzard to a passenger pigeon, between naked reality and poetry. It should be said in praise of the American, however, that they are birds of prey with gourmet tastes, and they do not settle upon just any carcass, but only on fresh, fat meat. The reasons we describe them as buzzards is best left to the reflection of the sympathetic reader, whose patience we do not wish to try any further with images of these birds.

  Our guest would already have been placed in a dubious light, so far as his German countrymen are concerned, by his service as chief agent of an important southern slave market. Yet, considering that he took this position at a time when he was in great financial need, it should not cast any shadow on his character. After the material discomfort had been somewhat relieved, one would hardly expect him to leave the agency right away and place himself in distress once more just to yield to childish scruples. In fact, he was often rather pleased with himself over what he himself described as a wildly romantic career. He was often nagged by his cousins over it, and there were all sorts of philanthropic skirmishes and duels, which Karl always won in the end. So the following brief conversation developed between him and Jenny while Frida was busy in the kitchen. It would soon be interrupted by a man known to us from the previous chapter.

  “Dear cousin, how nice it would be,” said Jenny, sitting at her embroidery, working on the design of an antique vase showing Agave in her glory,12 “if you found a permanent position in New Orleans, like our young architect from Saxony. Then you could visit us several times a day, brightening us through your happy temperament and sweetening many a bitter hour. How much finer an existence it would be for all of us if you could stay with us for a while. Your life is continually exposed to accidents on steamboats, and we are always worried that we shall lose you forever. Besides, dear cousin, yours is such an ugly business! Traveling salesman in woolly-heads! Just think, this does not match at all your character and sensitive heart. If I didn’t know you better, I would have despaired for you.”

  “You are a little egoist, cousin,” Karl responded, “I am supposed to give up a prosperous business and renounce travel, even endanger my health—since travel is second nature to me—all in order to remain close to you? I would never be able to settle down the way you want. But let us assume I would, what would I do? Tell me—perhaps I should roll cigars like my friend Schlicht in Valparaiso, or even become a barkeeper?” he added laughing. “No, I would be destroyed in no time at all by such boring occupations. So far as my present occupation goes, everything but the travel repels me, and I would exchange it for another in a minute if I could get the same money. We are, after all, in America, my dear, and money is not at all unimportant. Besides, you know that I do not love money for its own sake, but only in order to guarantee me a free existence in the future.”

  “More than a Jesuit,” Jenny called out in jest, “for you the ends justify the means. If only Frida had heard that! She would hate you forever!”

  Instead of denying this, Karl confidently looked at her with his large blue eyes and pressed her hand meaningfully. The lively cousin responded to his pressure by whispering, “What I read in your eyes makes me surrender to the sweet hope that you have come to New Orleans to stay with us forever.”

  “You are a clairvoyant, Jenny; your prophecy is correct and true.”

  “Now look at the bad man who talks that way!” the charming young woman said with a light blush. “One would think that he was sacrificing the favor of his women-friends to a whim.”

  Karl and Jenny loved each other like siblings. The guileless eyes that attached themselves on her cousin had darkened when he spoke of leaving. Karl was anything but handsome, indeed he was rather to be called ugly. A disproportionate stump of a nose and a mouth no smaller deformed his strong and vigorous face, shadowed by a strong red beard. But whoever looked into his eyes had to love him, and after spending time with him one completely forgot his ugliness. Besides, he possessed a supple and mobile body, which will always win more victories with women than the most handsome, regular face.

  Karl had long been composing plans for the future in secret. He of course did not want to give up his position as agent, but he did want to cease traveling for a while and take the subordinate position of second agent in New Orleans, which was always open to him. He would make less money, but there was the positive prospect of being able to recover from his repellent business in the company of beloved and loving persons.

  The arrival of the architect, who had just entered with Frida, disrupted any further intimate conversation. One could describe Karl’s greeting as quite friendly, even loving, but Albert greeted his friend in a cold manner. The architect apologized to the ladies that he had been unable to complete the drawing by the agreed time, saying he had been indisposed. He continued the conversation without warmth, speaking monosyllabically, and Albert soon excused himself despite pressure from both the sisters and Karl to spend the afternoon with them. His tanned face looked pale and distorted today, and a careful observer would have been able to read more from it than mere indisposition.

  Following the catastrophe already noted, Albert had gone to bed in the morning hours and awaited the break of day with impatience. Claudine did not appear at the usual hour, and he had breakfast alone. When he asked why she did not appear, the maid informed him that her mistress was unwell and would be spending the entire day in bed. At first Albert was determined to go to his wife, but he changed his mind after some consideration. A perverse pride prevented him from making the first move to a reconciliation. He remained in his room and occupied himself with trivial things. Although he had already conceded that he could not keep his promise to the ladies in Algiers, since the plan still lay complete, he did not want to miss visiting them; he in fact decided to spend the whole day with them in order to have some petty revenge against Claudine for not appearing at breakfast. The unexpected appearance of Karl had upset his plans. The vain man could not stand having to share the sisters’ attention with him. In addition to that, Albert knew of Jenny’s attraction to her cousin; when he encountered Frida emerging from the kitchen and learned from her that her cousin had arrived and was with Jenny upstairs, jealousy seized him in no small way.

  Unbeknownst to Jenny, the architect had conceived a feeling for her—she who had been condemned to widowhood even while her husband was alive—a feeling so tender that it disturbed their calm. The young, beautiful widow was infinitely attractive to him, and he had already been conceiving a more intimate relationship for some weeks. But now his clumsy imagination immediately painted everything black, and he saw in the cousin a dangerous competitor. So we can see him leaving the sisters’ house after the usual formalities of courtesy and wandering the streets of New Orleans. Fortunately for him, his rapid departure raised no remark, since his own comments about indisposition provided an explanation. Even Jenny could see no more than that in his frosty conduct.

  The rest of the day passed like a beautiful dream. With music and song, with joking, kissing, and hugging, the evening loomed without anyone noticing it, and it seemed that they had not passed such untroubled hours in such beautiful and pure harmony in a long time. Through a westward window one could see the sun already halfway beneath the horizon, bathing with its rosy light the furry sheep that were accompanying it to sleep. The warm evening breezes nuzzled with the dark leaves of orange and magnolia, rustling the drapes at the open windows. The parrot stilled it
s cries, and in the place of songbirds the nocturnal butterflies pierced the warm air, striking the walls of the cottage and zigzagging back and forth through the tops of the arbor vitae trees and the lilacs. In the east, the moon rose, hanging like a cheerful fireball above the highest mast of a majestic merchantman. Hundreds of little barges and sailboats plowed the Mississippi, rejoicing in the beautiful evening. But within the cottage, the occupants huddled closer together, bidding one another farewell with handshakes and kisses.

  Chapter 6

  DON JUAN IN HELL

  By the Cid! One must see her in her

  white

  Nightgown, that splendid figure!

  You must see it, this beating, biting,

  When once she raves and bites at a

  kiss,

  Raving strange words!

  ………………….

  Up, Page, follow my footsteps!

  Forward to the sound of tambourine!

  This evening I will serenade

  So that the Alcaldes shall curse me

  All the way to the Guadalquivir!

  [Alfred de Musset13]

  Everyone agrees that there is only one New Orleans in the world. London is too smoky, New York too Yankee-Doodleish, Boston and Philadelphia too calculating, and Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, eats too much pork.

  “New Orleans is paved with Negro skulls,” says one American author. He would have done better to say that New Orleans is paved with beautiful women, although this would not disqualify the first observation.

  In the garland of women woven about the brow of the Sovereign of the Gulf are to be found all possible blossoms; alongside the flaming tuberose and crown imperial gleams the seductive camellia, who bids us stand before her door on a winter’s night without pity; the soft, white magnolia, who allows us no more than to lay a lovesick head in her lap; the bachelor button, so perilous to married men; and the evergreen Adelaide d’Orléans, whose glimpse can cause even a wholesale grocer to burn with love.

  Only two flowers are lacking in this colorful flora. They are rarely to be found here. Those who seek them should fly to the banks of the vineyard-crowned Ohio. They are called Measured Love and Male Fidelity.14

  Where are there more troubadours and paladins than in New Orleans? Only Madrid, Seville, and Barcelona have any right to compete as rivals.

  Among the knights of love ever ready to break a lance for the lady of their hearts, there are many Germans. It is only too bad that German clumsiness and ungainly prudishness often rip up the tender threads spun by the notes of a mandolin.

  Our Cocker, whose superficial acquaintance has already been made by our lovely lady readers, was precisely this sort of bad-luck bird.15

  Since Eliza had fled his friend with three hundred dollars, and Shellroad Mary had gulped down four dozen oysters and five bottles of London porter at Cassidy’s on his account,16 bankrupting him, he has taken it seriously and decided not to blow money on tambourine girls and dancers; he did not understand how useful it can be to run through his money that way.

  From then on, he drank his cocktails alone, unless a friend was paying for it.

  Since he still felt an irresistible urge to show his adulation for the fair sex, and since he often observed caballeros and messieurs of New Orleans under the windows of their beloved armed with guitar or mandolin, serenading, he wanted to try his luck this way, too. He saw at once that this could be useful, and it would also save him money.

  He had a guitar, and he was also a poet, and he had attended lectures on esthetics at Tübingen—he had only learned cocking shotguns since coming to America. He was a born fool, a student unfit for state service.

  He was about thirty-two years old, and although he insisted that he had been quite slender in Germany, he is not to be trusted on this. He could not have grown fat in New Orleans, which he had not left since his arrival in the New World. He had often used this assertion to exploit the gullibility of women when they remarked on the extent of his girth.

  The Cocker’s most attractive feature was his teeth, and in fact he thought himself quite handsome when he stood in front of the mirror and formed his coral lips into a sweet, pining smile.

  Often he was still somewhat concerned about his obesity, and on such occasions he would console himself by mumbling: “Well, even if I am not handsome, I am at least interesting, and how many times does one find that the most beautiful, celebrated women prefer ugly, interesting men to those who are handsome and uninteresting.” The fact that beauty makes one interesting, and that handsome, interesting men do exist, appears not to have occurred to him in his reflections.

  His gray eyes were not as small as they might seem at first glance. They were pressed together by the overhang of fat pressing down on his lids. Flat and sparkless when he was calm, his eyes glittered after he had taken on several brandy cocktails. At such a moment, he was capable of anything—that is, capable of whatever a good-natured man such as the Cocker would be able to do.

  He could make a scene, was easily irritated, boasted, and would go directly at the throat of anyone who injured him, naturally without doing his enemy any real harm. He made do with threats and noise, and his sword always remained in its sheath.

  One would have done him an injustice assuming that his corpulence came from too much eating. Actually, he ate very little, as is the case with anyone whose second nature is perpetually to drink too much.

  He would fall head over heels in love at the sight of a skirt, and a calf, even when wrapped in a stocking, could push him over the edge. For that reason he would hang halfway out of the window when it rained and the dirty streets forced the gentle sex to raise their skirts. There he would smirk with happiness and wish the sun would stay away.

  Although he thought himself a man of the world comme il faut, and he often compelled his friends to listen to his opinions on theater and music, often in the most pressing manner, still he had only been to the theater once in his seven years in New Orleans. On that occasion he did not even wait for the curtain to rise before lounging about in the barroom buffet, spending so much time there that his friends had to send the old chum home in a cab.

  The next day he could not censure the play severely enough, and he bestowed the most dramatic phrases on the despicable efforts of French actors.

  For several months Orleana, the most beautiful German Creole maid* who had ever seen the light of day in Louisiana, had been living in Toulouse Street.

  Her parents, both born in New Orleans, had been taken away by yellow fever in a day, and besides a prospering business, which Orleana gave over to other hands, they left her several valuable properties located in the busiest parts of town.

  A mere two months after her parents’ death, Orleana turned all the properties into cash at a considerable profit, bought a house after her own taste in Toulouse Street, and lived off the substantial interest of the remaining capital.

  If it is true that our reading betrays our level of education, then Orleana must have had a good education indeed, for her mantel boasted the poetry of Mrs. Hemans and the St. Helena memoirs of Las Casas, while she had Goethe’s Propyläen on her lap.17 A splendid Viennese horn, with a guitar hanging over it, attested to her musical sense.

  Orleana lived a quiet, chaste life, caring for her little household with the aid of an elderly female slave she had inherited from her parents. Her heart was still free, and no man could boast of having received the slightest preference or favor from her.

  She had several wealthy relatives in the city, whose company was always a burden because their only purpose was to convince her to accept an advantageous marriage. The sons of two respected merchants felt themselves particularly entitled to make claims on her hand. Yet she always managed to keep these pressing suitors at a suitable distance.

  Orleana was rich, young, and beautiful, qualities people were well able to hold in esteem.

  Even the Cocker had heard of Orleana, and since she was, as he would say, a compat
riot, he believed he had all the more right to rave for her and compete for her love.

  “For,” he declared to himself, “though it is conceded that I am not handsome, I am at least interesting, and on top of that a compatriot—what more does one need to win her heart?”

  Today he was determined to serenade his beautiful, wealthy compatriot. But first he must place himself in an elevated mood, for a song sung from a dry throat would not reach the heart, so far as he believed.

  But with what song should he surprise his compatriot? What would make the greatest impression on her?

  He was not short of songs, printed or written, for he had a veritable mountain of fraternity songs, including several fiery commercial ballads. He pored over his entire treasure, choosing now this, then that, for the serenade, and then rejected them all, until he thought he had found the right one after an hour of consideration and sweating. “Es zogen zwei Burschen wohl über den Rhein!”18 must exercise a magic without equal on her innocent heart, and he hummed and whistled the melody to himself several times. ‘“Es zogen zwei Burschen wohl über den Rhein’: how full of feeling, how sensitive!—properly presented, to the accompaniment of a guitar, it has to make an indelible impression on every spirit not yet defiled …”