Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay

Author:Claude McKay [McKay, Claude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Titin was a son of country laborers, born and raised in a small village. It was while he was doing his service in the army that he got onto the tricks that eventually determined his career. His parents were too poor to send him even the smallest of remittances to help eke out his miserable army pay. Titin belonged to a group that had no cigarette money, no beer money, no money for loving while their comrades had.

Titin soon learned the ways of earning a percentage from the loving houses by procuring clients. By that means he obtained a little pocket money.

With his face prematurely caved in he was not at all a handsome type, but there was a fascination in his glassy beady eyes and spoonlike mouth. He possessed a tough little body and his manner was brusque. And so he was a good type to do business for a loving house. He picked up a store of knowledge about the secret desires of men and understood the mawkish weaknesses of the hetairai. And so when his military service was finished he just slipped from amateur to professional.

However, he was among the lesser fry in the loving business. The loving houses he frequented when he was a soldier were all small establishments in small towns. Titin did not possess the quality and the presence for the luxurious places. And so he had never reached above Quayside. Even in Marseille he was not associated with any of the big fellows who played his line.

But Aslima losing control of herself and getting madly angry because of Lafala convinced him that she might really be playing a double game and against such an eventuality he decided to enlist the help of the bigger fellows.

There was a fellowship in Quayside known as the Domino Association that usually met at a café called the Domino.1 It was an international association, a kind of loose federation of men of common mind and ideals who kept in touch with one another by secret correspondence, keeping tabs on their protégées, boycotting or hounding into submission or out of existence those who were refractory.

The president of the organization at Quayside was a Levantine sort of person,2 a thick-set, well-fed man with enormous jowls reminding one of the types of men pictured as guardians of harems, excepting that this man was not black, but had a complexion something like old yellow paint dirty with soot. He was a highly-honored personage in all the loving houses of Marseille. Formally he was known as a guide and commercial traveler. He was a great crony of the cavalier seamen who went to sea sometimes to prove that they were not sans profession, and through them he kept up a regular correspondence with those Near East ports that are as fascinating to the mind as Marseille.

Titin did not find this man at the Domino Café (so-called because the clients always gambled at dominoes, preferring it to any other game). He left the

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