by Henry Miller
Yet always and anon he manages to hold on to his Swiss passport, his two valises, his slender sanity, his desperate hope of freedom.
“And what was in those valises that made them so precious?”
“Everything I cherish,” he answered.
“Like what?”
“My books, my diaries, my writings, my….”
I looked at him flabbergasted.
“No, Christ! You don’t mean to say….”
“Yes,” he said, “just books, papers, horoscopes, excerpts from Plotinus, Iamblichus, Claude Saint-Martin….”
I couldn’t help it, I began to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought I’d never stop laughing.
He was offended. I apologized.
“You lugged all that crap around like an elephant,” I exclaimed, “at the risk of losing your own hide?”
“A man doesn’t throw away everything that is precious to him—just like that!”
“I would!” I exclaimed.
“But my whole life was bound up in those encumbrances.”
“You should have thrown your life away too!”
“Not Moricand!” he replied, and his eyes flashed fire.
Suddenly I no longer felt sorry for him, not for anything that had ever happened to him.
For days those two valises weighed me down. They weighed as heavily on my mind and spirit as they had on Moricand’s when he was crawling like a bedbug over that crazy quilt called Europe. I dreamed about them too. Sometimes he appeared in a dream, Moricand, looking like Emil Jannings, the Jannings of The Last Laugh, the Grand Hotel porter Jannings, who has been sacked, who has lost his standing, who furtively smuggles his uniform out each night after he has been demoted to attendant in the toilet and washroom. In my dreams I was forever shadowing poor Conrad, always within shouting distance of him yet never able to make him hear me, what with the cannonades, the blitz bombs, the machine-gun fire, the screams of the wounded, the shrieks of the dying. Everywhere war and desolation. Here a shell crater filled with arms and legs; here a warrior still warm, his buttons ripped off, his proud genitals missing; here a freshly bleached skull crawling with bright red worms; a child impaled on a fence post; a gun carriage reeking with blood and vomit; trees standing upside down, dangling with human limbs, an arm to which a hand is still attached, the remains of a hand buried in a glove. Or animals in stampede, their eyes blazing with insanity, their legs a blur, their hides aflame, their bowels hanging out, tripping them, and behind them thousands more, millions of them, all singed, scorched, racked, torn, battered, bleeding, vomiting, racing like mad, racing ahead of the dead, racing for the Jordan, shorn of all medals, passports, halters, bits, bridles, feathers, fur, bills and hollyhocks. And Conrad Moriturus ever ahead, fleeing, his feet shod in patent leather boots, his hair neatly pomaded, his nails manicured, his linen starched, his mustache waxed, his trousers pressed. Galloping on like the Flying Dutchman, his valises swinging like ballast, his cold breath congealing behind him like frozen vapor. To the border! To the border!
And that was Europe! A Europe I never saw, a Europe I never tasted. Ah, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Erasmus, Duns Scotus, where are we? What elixir are we drinking? What wisdom are we sucking? Define the alphabet, O wise ones! Measure the itch! Flog insanity to death, if you can! Are those stars looking down upon us, or are they burnt holes in a filament of sick flesh?
And where is General Doppelgänger now, and General Eisen-hower, and General Pussyfoot Cornelius Triphammer? Where the enemy? Where is Jack and where is Jill? How I would like to put a message through—to the Divine Creator! But I can’t remember the name. I’m so utterly harmless, so innocent. Just a neutral. Nothing to declare but two valises. Yes, a citizen. A quiet sort of madman, nothing more. I ask for no decorations, no monuments in my name. Just see that the bags get through. I’ll follow afterwards. I’ll be there, even if I’m only a trunk. Moriturus, that’s my name. Swiss, yes. A légionnaire. Un mutilé de la guerre. Call me anything you like. Iamblichus, if you wish. Or just—“The Itch”!
Taking advantage of the rainy season, we decided to break ground for a vegetable patch. We chose a spot that had never been dug up before. I began with a pick and my wife continued with the spade. I suppose Moricand felt slightly conscience-stricken to see a woman doing such work. To our surprise, he offered to do some spading himself. After a half-hour he was all in. It made him feel good just the same. In fact, he felt so good that after lunch he asked if we would put on some phonograph records—he was dying to listen to a little music. As he listened he hummed and whistled. He asked if we had any of Grieg’s music, Peer Gynt particularly. Said he used to play the piano long ago. Played by ear. Then he added that he thought Grieg was a very great composer; he liked him best of all. That knocked me for a loop.
My wife had put on a Viennese waltz. Now he really became animated. All of a sudden he went up to my wife and asked her if she would dance with him. I nearly fell off the chair. Moricand dancing! It seemed incredible. Preposterous. But he did, and with heart and soul. He whirled and whirled around until he got dizzy.
“You dance beautifully,” said my wife, as he took a seat, panting and perspiring.
“You’re still a young man,” I threw in.
“I haven’t done this since the year 1920 something,” he said almost blushingly. He slapped his thigh. “It’s an old carcass but it still has a bit of life.”
“Would you like to hear Harry Lauder?” I asked.
For a moment he was perplexed. Lauder, Lauder…? Then he got it.
“Certainly,” he said. Obviously he was in a mood to hear anything.
I put on “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.” To my amazement he even tried to sing. I thought perhaps he had had a little too much wine at lunch, but no, it wasn’t the wine or the food this time, he was just happy for once.
The horrible thing is that it was almost more pitiful to see him happy than sad.
In the midst of these pleasantries Jean Wharton walked in. She was living just above us now in a house which she had recently had built. She had met Moricand once or twice before, but merely to exchange greetings. This day, being in extraordinary good humor, he mustered enough English to carry on a little conversation with her. When she left he remarked that she was a very interesting woman, rather attractive too. He added that she had a magnetic personality, that she radiated health and joy. He thought it might be well to cultivate her acquaintance, she made him feel good.
He felt so good, indeed, that he brought his memoirs down for me to read.
All in all, it was a remarkable day for Moricand. The best day of all, however, was the day Jaime de Angulo came down from his mountain top to pay us a visit. He came expressly to meet Moricand. We had, of course, informed Moricand of Jaime’s existence, but we had never made a point of bringing the two together. To tell the truth, I didn’t think they would get along very well together, since they seemed to have so little in common. Besides, I was never certain how Jaime would behave after he had a few drinks under his belt. The occasions when he did visit us and leave without making a scene, without cursing, reviling and insulting everyone, were few and far between.
It was shortly after lunch that Jaime rode up, hitched his horse to the oak tree, gave it a punch in the ribs, and descended the steps. It was a bright, sunny day, rather warm for a day in February. As usual, Jaime wore a bright headband around his forehead—his dirty snotrag, probably. Brown as a walnut, gaunt, slightly bowlegged, he was still handsome, still very much the Spaniard—and still utterly unpredictable. With a feather in his headband, a little grease paint, a different costume, he might have passed for a Chippewa or a Shawnee Indian. He was definitely the outlaw.
As they greeted one another I could not help but remark the contrast they presented, these two figures (born only five days apart) who had passed their youth in a sedate, aristocratic quarter of Paris. Two “Little Lord Fauntleroys” who had seen the seamy side of life, whose days were now numbered,
and who would never meet again. The one neat, orderly, immaculate, fussy, cautious, a man of the city, a recluse, a stargazer; the other the exact opposite. The one a pedestrian, the other a cavalier. The one an aesthete, the other a wild duck.
I was wrong in thinking they had so little in common. They had much in common. Aside from a common culture, a common language, a common background, a common love of books, libraries, research, a common gift of speech, a common addiction—the one to drugs, the other to alcohol—they had an even greater tie: their obsession with evil. Jaime was one of the very few men I ever met of whom I could say that he had a streak of the Devil in him. As for Moricand, he had always been a diabolist. The only difference in their attitude toward the Devil was that Moricand feared him and Jaime cultivated him. At least, it always seemed thus to me. Both were confirmed atheists and thoroughly anti-Christian. Moricand leaned toward the antique pagan world, Jaime toward the primitive. Both were what we would call men of culture, men of learning, men of elegance. Jaime, playing the savage or the sot, was still a man of exquisite taste; no matter how much he spat on all that was “refined,” he never truly outgrew the Little Lord Fauntleroy he had been as a boy. It was only through dire necessity that Moricand had renounced la vie mondaine; at heart he remained the dandy, the fop, the snob.
When I brought out the bottle and the glasses—the bottle only half-full, by the way—I anticipated trouble. It did not seem possible that these two individuals, having traveled such divergent paths, could get along together for long.
I was wrong about everything this day. They not only got along, they scarcely touched the wine. They were intoxicated with something stronger than wine—the past.
The mention of the Avenue Henri-Martin—they had discovered in the space of a few minutes that they had been raised in the very same block!—started the ball rolling. Dwelling on his boyhood, Jaime at once began to mimic his parents, impersonate his schoolmates, re-enact his deviltries, switching from French to Spanish and back again, acting now as a sissy, now as a coy young female, now as an irate Spanish grandee, now as a petulant, doting mother.
Moricand was in stitches. Never did I believe that he could laugh so hard or so long. He was no longer the melancholy grampus, nor even the wise old owl, but a normal, natural human being who was enjoying himself.
Not to intrude on this festival of reminiscence, I threw myself on the bed in the middle of the room and pretended to take a nap.
But my ears were wide open.
In the space of a few short hours it seemed to me that Jaime succeeded in rehearsing the whole of his tumultuous life. And what a life it was! From Passy to the Wild West—in one jump. From being the son of a Spanish grandee, raised in the lap of luxury, to becoming a cowboy, a doctor of medicine, an anthropologist, a master of linguistics, and finally a cattle rancher on the crest of the Santa Lucia range here in Big Sur. A lone wolf, divorced from all he held dear, waging a perpetual feud with his neighbor Boronda, another Spaniard, poring over his books, his dictionaries (Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, to mention but a few), raising a little fruit and vegetables, killing deer in season and out, forever exercising his horses, getting drunk, quarreling with everyone, even his bosom pals, driving visitors away with the lash, studying in the dead of night, coming back to his book on language, the book on language, he hoped it would be!—and finishing it just before his death.… Between times twice married, three children, one of them his beloved son, crushed to death beneath him in a mysterious automobile accident, a tragedy which had a lasting effect upon him.
Odd to listen to it all from the bed. Strange to hear the so-called shaman talking to the sage, the anthropologist to the astrologer, the scholar to the scholar, the linguist to the bookworm, the horseman to the boulevardier, the adventurer to the hermit, the barbarian to the dandy, the lover of languages to the lover of words, the scientist to the occulist, the desperado to the ex-Légionnaire, the fiery Spaniard to the stolid Swiss, the uncouth native to the well-dressed gentleman, the anarchist to the civilized European, the rebel to the well-behaved citizen, the man of the open spaces to the man of the garret, the drunkard to the dope fiend….
Every quarter hour the pendule gave out its melodious chimes.
Finally I hear them speaking soberly, earnestly, as if it were a matter of grave concern. It is about language. Moricand says but little now. He is all ears. With all his knowledge, I suspect that he never dreamed that on this North American continent there once were spoken so many varieties of tongues, languages, not dialects merely, languages great and small, obscure and rudimentary, some extremely complicated, baroque, one might say, in form and structure. How could he know—few Americans know—that side by side there existed tribes whose languages were as far apart as is Bantu from Sanskrit, or Finnish from Phoenician, or Basque from German. The idea had never entered his head, cosmopolite that he was, that in a remote corner of the globe known as Big Sur a man named Jaime de Angulo, a renegade and a reprobate, was spending his days and nights comparing, classifying, analyzing, dissecting roots, declensions, prefixes and suffixes, etymologies, homologies, affinities and anomalies of tongues and dialects borrowed from all continents, all times, all races and conditions of man. Never had he thought it possible to combine in one person, as did this Angulo, the savage, the scholar, the man of the world, the recluse, the idealist and the very son of Lucifer. Well might he say, as he did later: “C’est un être formidable. C’est un homme, celui-là!”
Yes, he was indeed that, a man, dear Jaime de Angulo! A beloved, hated, detested, endearing, charming, cantankerous, pesky, devil-worshiping son-of-a-bitch of a man with a proud heart and a defiant soul, filled with tenderness and compassion for all humanity, yet cruel, vicious, mean and ornery. His own worst enemy. A man doomed to end his days in horrible agony—mutilated, emasculated, humiliated to the very core of his being. Yet even unto the end preserving his reason, his lucidity, his devil-may-care spirit, his defiance of God and man—and his great impersonal ego.
Would they ever have become bosom friends? I doubt it. Fortunate it was that Moricand never carried out his resolution to walk to the top of the mountain and offer a hand in friendship. Despite all they had in common they were worlds apart. Not even the Devil himself could have united them in friendship and brotherhood.
Reviewing their encounter that afternoon in my mind’s eye, I see them as two egomaniacs hypnotized for a few brief hours by the mingling of worlds which overshadowed their personalities, their interests, their philosophies of life.
There are conjunctions in the human sphere which are just as fleeting and mysterious as stellar ones, conjunctions which seem like violation of natural law. For me who observed the event, it was like witnessing the marriage of fire and water.
Now that they have both passed beyond, one may be pardoned for wondering if they will ever meet again, and in what realm. They had so much to undo, so much to discover, so much to live out! Such lonely souls, full of pride, full of knowledge, full of the world and its evils! Not a grain of faith in either of them. Hugging the world and reviling it; clinging to life and desecrating it; fleeing society and never coming face to face with God; playing the mage and the shaman, but never acquiring wisdom of life or the wisdom of love. In what realm, I ask myself, will they meet again? And will they recognize one another?
One bright day as I was passing Moricand’s cell—I had just dumped some garbage over the cliff—I found him leaning over the lower half of the Dutch door as if in contemplation. I was in an excellent mood because, as always when dumping the garbage, I had been rewarded by a breath-taking view of the coast. This particular morning everything was bright and still; the sky, the water, the mountains stared back at me as if reflected in a mirror. If the earth weren’t curved I could have gazed right into China, the atmosphere was that clean and clear.
“Il fait beau aujourd’hui,” said I, depositing the garbage can to light a cigarette.
“Oui, il fait beau,” said
he. “Come in a minute, won’t you?”
I stepped in and took a seat beside his writing table. What now? I wondered. Another consultation?
He lit a cigarette slowly, as if debating how to begin. Had I been given ten thousand guesses, I could never have guessed what he was about to say. However, I was, as I say, in a most excellent mood; it mattered little to me what was disturbing him. My own mind was free, clear, empty.
“Mon cher Miller,” he began in an even, steady tone, “what you are doing to me no man has a right to do to another.”
I looked at him uncomprehendingly. “What I am doing to you…?”
“Yes,” he said. “You don’t realize perhaps what you’ve done.”
I made no reply. I was too curious to know what would follow to feel even the least indignation.
“You invited me to come here, to make this my home for the rest of my days…. You said I did not need to work, that I could do anything I pleased. And you demanded nothing in return. One can’t do that to a fellow-man. It’s unjust. It puts me in an unbearable position.” It was undermining, he wanted to say.
He paused a moment. I was too flabbergasted to make reply immediately.
“Besides,” he continued, “this is no place for me. I am a man of the city; I miss the pavement under my feet. If there were only a café I could walk to, or a library, or a cinema. I’m a prisoner here.” He looked around him. “This is where I spend my days—and nights. Alone. No one to talk to. Not even you. You’re too busy most of the time. Moreover, I feel that you’re uninterested in what I am doing…. What am I to do, sit here until I die? You know I am not a man to complain. I keep to myself as much as I can; I occupy myself with my work, I take a walk now and then, I read … and I scratch myself continually. How long can I put up with it? Some days I feel as if I will go mad. I don’t belong….”