Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Miller, Henry

  (We! Who did he mean by “we”?)

  “By the way,” he said, as if it were practically settled now, the contract signed, my bags packed. “By the way, do you know any languages—besides English? You have to speak a few other languages too.”

  To please him I said: “I know a little French, a little …”

  “Speak French to me!”

  “What would you like me to say?”

  “Anything! I understand everything. I speak French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Persian …”

  “T’es bien calé!” I barked.

  “What language is that?” he snarled.

  “Du français, espèce de con! Démerde-toi!”

  (Naturally he didn’t know I was making a prick of him.)

  “Où avez-vous apprendi le français?” he demanded.

  “Comme toi, à Paris. Panam!”

  “I speak only correct French. Polite French.” He looked at me askance as he muttered this. Apparently he was getting the drift of it.

  To which I replied: “A quoi bon continuer? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  “Ja wohl!” he exclaimed. “Je vous dite que je parle Arabe, Espagnol… and Greek and Turkish. A little Armenian too.”

  “Fabelhaft!”

  “Was meint das?”

  “Das meint extraordinary … fabulous. Kennen Sie nicht ein Wort wie fabelhaft? Vielleicht kennen Sie wunderbar.”

  “Wunderbar, ja! That’s German…. Now I will tell you another language I can speak—Dar-goon!”

  “Never heard of it.”

  He grinned. For just one moment I thought he was going to break down and say, “Neither did I!” But he didn’t.

  He looked away, as if studying the sea, the heaving kelp. When he turned around there was a blank look on his face.

  After what was meant to be an impressive pause, he asked: “Do you believe in a Creator?”

  “I do,” said I.

  “Good! Are you a Christian then?”

  “No,” I replied, “I have no religion.”

  “Are you a Jew?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But you believe in God?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me squintingly. It was obvious he didn’t believe me.

  “What do you believe in?” I asked.

  “The Creator!” he replied.

  “Have you a religion?”

  “No. I belong to the Bahai movement. That’s the only religion.”

  “So!” I made a clucking noise and preened my feathers.

  “You must get to know the Creator! Jesus Christ was just a man, not a god. Would God allow Himself to be crucified? All nonsense!” He turned abruptly and gazed straight up at the sun. He pulled me violently by the arm. “Look up there!” he commanded, pointing to the fiery orb. “Tell me, can you see what’s behind it?”

  “No,” said I. “Can you?”

  “Behind the sun, behind the stars and all the planets, behind everything that man can see with his telescopes, is the Creator. Nobody has eyes good enough to see Him. But he’s there…. You must believe in Him. It’s necessary. Otherwise——.”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise you’re lost. In India we have many religions, many worships, many idols, many superstitions … and many fools.”

  Full stop. I said nothing. Blank for blank.

  “Have you heard speak of the Nile?”

  “The what?”

  “The Nile! It’s a river … in Egypt.”

  “Oh, the Nile! Why, of course. Everybody knows the Nile.”

  He gave me a disdainful sidelong glance.

  “Yes, everybody knows the Nile, as you say, but do they know how many Niles there are?”

  “What do you mean by that?” said I.

  “Did you know that there is a white Nile, a blue Nile and a black Nile?”

  “No,” I replied, “I know only the green Nile.”

  “I thought so,” he said. “And now tell me, what is the Nile?”

  “You just told me … it’s a river.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “What, river?”

  “No, the Nile!”

  “If you mean etymologically,” said I, “I must confess my ignorance. If you mean symbolically, I must again confess ignorance. If you mean esoterically, then I am thrice ignorant. We’re at the quincunx now. Your serve!”

  Just as if I had said nothing at all, he informed me in his most pedantic manner that Nile meant—in Egyptian!—wisdom and fecundity. “Do you understand now?” he added.

  “I think so.” I murmured it most humbly.

  “And the reason for that (for what?) is that it lies quiet like a snake and then it vomits. I have been up and down the Nile many times. And I’ve seen the Sphinx and the Pyramids….”

  “Didn’t you tell me a while ago that you had been to Damascus?”

  “I said I was going there. Yes, I’ve been to Damascus too. I go everywhere. Why should we stay in one spot?”

  “You must be a rich man,” said I.

  He shook his head from side to side, rolled his eyes, made the cooing, clucking noise as before, and answered: “Tsch, tsch! I’m an artist, that’s what I am.”

  “An artist? What, a painter?”

  “I paint too. Sculptor, that’s what I am.”

  Wunderbar! thought I to myself. Fabelhaft! If he’s a sculptor, I’m an octoroon.

  “Do you know Bennie Bufano?” I gave it to him like a test question.

  Cautiously he replied: “I heard of him.” Then he added quickly: “I know all the sculptors—including the dead ones.”

  “How about Lipschitz?”

  “He’s not a sculptor!”

  “What is he then?”

  “An ironworker.”

  “And Giacometti?”

  “Tutti-frutti!”

  “And Picasso?”

  “A house painter! Doesn’t know when to stop.”

  I wanted to steer him back to Damascus. Had he been to Lebanon, I wanted to know.

  He had.

  “And Mecca?”

  “Yes! Medina too. And Aden and Addis Ababa. Any more places?”

  At this point my friend Fink intervened to ask for a light. The look he gave me said—how long are you going to keep up this game? He turned to Mr. Know-it-all and offered him a cigarette.

  “Not now!” said the latter, holding up his palms and making a mue of disgust. “When I am dry I shall ask you for one. It’s better to wait.”

  I could hear Fink mumbling “Fuck yourself!” as he walked away. Meanwhile, possibly in answer to my last question—or his own—his nibs had begun spouting. I missed the first few sentences. Tuned in just as he was saying “… they have no stores, no salesmen, nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Everything you want is free. Whatever you raise you bring to the square and put it there. If you want fruit, you take it from the tree. As much as you like. But you mustn’t fill your pockets….”

  Where in hell is this? I wondered to myself, but refrained from breaking his train of thought.

  “Very few people ever get there. At the border they stopped me. Took away my passport. While they were gone I made a portrait of the man I was going to see. When they came back I handed them the portrait. They saw that it was a very good resemblance. ‘You are a good man,’ they said. ‘We can trust you not to rob anybody.’ So they let me in. I didn’t need a penny. Whatever I asked for they gave me free. Most of the time I lived in the palace. I could have women too, if I wanted. But you shouldn’t ask for such things….”

  At this point I couldn’t resist asking what he was talking about. “What country is this?”

  “I told you—Arabia!”

  “Arabia?”

  “Yes. And who was my friend?”

  “How should I know?”

  “King Sa-oud.” He paused to let this sink in. “The richest man in the world. Every year he sells to America 500,000,000 barrels of oil. To Engl
and 200,000,000. To France 150,000,000. To Belgium 75,000,000. He sells it. He doesn’t deliver it. They have to come and get it. All he asks”—he threw me a weak smile—“is a dollar a barrel.”

  “You mean they have to bring the barrels with them?”

  “No, he pipes it out. The barrel is free. He charges only for the oil. A dollar a barrel. No more. No less. That’s his profit.”

  My friend Fink hove to again. He was getting fidgety. He pulled me to one side. “How much more of this can you take?”

  Our friend scuttled back to his tub. We collected our things and made ready to go. A sea otter poked its head through the glassy sea below us. We stayed a moment to watch its antics.

  “I say!” shouted our India-rubber friend.

  We turned around.

  “I want you to brush up on your German!”

  “Why?” I shouted.

  “Because you should know a few languages. Especially German.”

  “But I know German.”

  “Then study Arabic. It may come in handy.”

  “And what about Hindi?”

  “Yes, Hindi too … and Tamil.”

  “Not Sanskrit?”

  “No, nobody speaks it any more. Only in Tibet.”

  Silence for a moment. He’s splashing about like a walrus.

  “Remember what I said before—put more symbology into your writing!”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “And I should believe in the Creator, isn’t that it?”

  I waited for a retort but he said nothing. He was soaping the cracks between his toes.

  I gave a shout, just as loud as I could.

  He looked up, cupped his ear, as if someone were whispering to him.

  “Now smile for me!” I said.

  He drew his lips back.

  “No, not that way. The way you did before. Roll your eyes. Move your head back and forth.” Then I went—“Tsch, tsch, tsch. Like that,” I said. “Come on now, do it for me before we go.”

  To my surprise, he did just as I wished.

  “Good!” I said. “I think now maybe you are a Hindu. I know lots of Hindus. I had many Hindu friends once—in New York. Good boys, all of them. A little wacky, some of them. … Did you ever hear of Mazumdar?”

  “Who?”

  “Mazumdar. Haridas Mazumdar. He was a genius.”

  “What is his first name again?”

  “Haridas.”

  “That’s not a Hindu name!”

  “No? Well, it isn’t Czech either. Let’s say it’s Bulgarian.”

  Pause.

  “By the way,” said I, “you never told me your name.”

  “It’s not important,” he replied. “Nobody knows me. I use any name I like—if it pleases me.”

  “That’s ducky. Just ducky. Tomorrow I am going to take the name Hounaman. Did you ever hear that name before? Tomorrow I’m going to call myself Sri Hounaman … and I’m going to have a hole cut in the seat of my trousers so that I can wag my tail if I feel like it. I want you to remember that! Do you understand me?”

  He put his head under water so as not to hear any more.

  “Come on, Bob,” I said, “let’s go. I’ve got to deliver a barrel of oil to the Prince of Monaco.”

  As we came alongside his tub he looked up, raised a forefinger, and with the solemnity of an ape, said: “You must not forget to go to India. I give you seven years to make up your mind. If you don’t go before that time you never will.”

  On that dixit we exeunted.

  15.

  “If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”*

  There are days when it all seems as simple and clear as that to me. What do I mean? I mean with regard to the problem of living on this earth without becoming a slave, a drudge, a hack, a misfit, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a neurotic, a schizophrenic, a glutton for punishment or an artist manqué.

  Supposedly we have the highest standard of living of any country in the world. Do we, though? It depends on what one means by high standards. Certainly nowhere does it cost more to live than here in America. The cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most gorgeous insane asylums, the most fabulous prisons, the best equipped and the highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst. There are more automobiles than one can count. And as for drugstores, where in the world will you find the like?

  We have only one enemy we really fear: the microbe. But we are licking him on every front. True, millions still suffer from cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis, epilepsy, colitis, cirrhosis of the liver, dermatitis, gall stones, neuritis, Bright’s disease, bursitis, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, floating kidneys, cerebral palsy, pernicious anaemia, encephalitis, locomotor ataxia, falling of the womb, muscular distrophy, jaundice, rheumatic fever, polio, sinus and antrum troubles, halitosis, St. Vitus’s Dance, narcolepsy, coryza, leucorrhea, nymphomania, phthisis, carcinoma, migraine, dipsomania, malignant tumors, high blood pressure, duodenal ulcers, prostate troubles, sciatica, goiter, catarrh, asthma, rickets, hepatitis, nephritis, melancholia, amoebic dysentery, bleeding piles, quinsy, hiccoughs, shingles, frigidity and impotency, even dandruff, and of course all the insanities, now legion, but—our men of science will rectify all this within the next hundred years or so. How? Why, by destroying all the nasty germs which provoke this havoc and disruption! By waging a great preventive war—not a cold war!—wherein our poor, frail bodies will become a battleground for all the antibiotics yet to come. A game of hide and seek, so to speak, in which one germ pursues another, tracks it down and slays it, all without the least disturbance to our usual functioning. Until this victory is achieved, however, we may be obliged to continue swallowing twenty or thirty vitamins, all of different strengths and colors, before breakfast, down our tiger’s milk and brewer’s yeast, drink our orange and grapefruit juices, use blackstrap molasses on our oatmeal, smear our bread (made of stone-ground flour) with peanut butter, use raw honey or raw sugar with our coffee, poach our eggs rather than fry them, follow this with an extra glass of superfortified milk, belch and burp a little, give ourselves an injection, weigh ourselves to see if we are under or over, stand on our heads, do our setting-up exercises—if we haven’t done them already—yawn, stretch, empty the bowels, brush our teeth (if we have any left), say a prayer or two, then run like hell to catch the bus or the subway which will carry us to work, and think no more about the state of our health until we feel a cold coming on: the incurable coryza. But we are not to despair. Never despair! Just take more vitamins, add an extra dose of calcium and phosphorus pills, drink a hot toddy or two, take a high enema before retiring for the night, say another prayer, if we can remember one, and call it a day.

  If the foregoing seems too complicated, here is a simple regimen to follow: Don’t overeat, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t work too much, don’t think too much, don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t complain, above all, don’t get irritable. Don’t use a car if you can walk to your destination; don’t walk if you can run; don’t listen to the radio or watch television; don’t read newspapers, magazines, digests, stock market reports, comics, mysteries or detective stories; don’t take sleeping pills or wakeup pills; don’t vote, don’t buy on the instalment plan, don’t play cards either for recreation or to make a haul, don’t invest your money, don’t mortgage your home, don’t get vaccinated or inoculated, don’t violate the fish and game laws, don’t irritate your boss, don’t say yes when you mean no, don’t use bad language, don’t be brutal to your wife or children, don’t get frightened if you are over or under weight, don’t sleep more than ten hours at a stretch, don’t eat store bread if you can bake your own, don’t work at a job you
loathe, don’t think the world is coming to an end because the wrong man got elected, don’t believe you are insane because you find yourself in a nut house, don’t do anything more than you’re asked to do but do that well, don’t try to help your neighbor until you’ve learned how to help yourself, and so on….

  Simple, what?

  In short, don’t create aerial dinosaurs with which to frighten field mice!

  America has only one enemy, as I said before. The microbe. The trouble is, he goes under a million different names. Just when you think you’ve got him licked he pops up again in a new guise. He’s the pest personified.

  When we were a young nation life was crude and simple. Our great enemy then was the redskin. (He became our enemy when we took his land away from him.) In those early days there were no chain stores, no delivery lines, no hired purchase plan, no vitamins, no supersonic flying fortresses, no electronic computers; one could identify thugs and bandits easily because they looked different from other citizens. All one needed for protection was a musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. A dollar was a dollar, no more, no less. And a gold dollar, or a silver dollar, was just as good as a paper dollar. Better than a check, in fact. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were genuine figures, maybe not so romantic as we imagine them today, but they were not screen heroes. The nation was expanding in all directions because there was a genuine need for it—we already had two or three million people and they needed elbow room. The Indians and the bison were soon crowded out of the picture, along with a lot of other useless paraphernalia. Factories and mills were being built, and colleges and prisons and insane asylums. Things were humming. And then we freed the slaves. That made everybody happy, except the Southerners. It also made us realize that freedom is a precious thing. When we had recovered from the loss of blood we began to think about freeing the rest of the world. To do it, we engaged in two world wars, not to mention a little war like the one with Spain, and now we’ve entered upon a cold war which our leaders warn us may last another forty or fifty years. We are almost at the point now where we may be able to exterminate every man, woman and child thoughout the globe who is unwilling to accept the kind of freedom we advocate. It should be said, in extenuation, that when we have accomplished our purpose everybody will have enough to eat and drink, be properly clothed, housed and entertained. An all-American program and no two ways about it! Our men of science will then be able to give their undivided attention to other problems, such as disease, insanity, excessive longevity, interplanetary voyages and the like. Everyone will be inoculated, not only against real ailments but against imaginary ones too. War will have been eliminated forever, thus making it unnecessary “in times of peace to prepare for war.” America will go on expanding, progressing, providing. We will plant the Stars and Stripes on the moon, and subsequently on all the planets within our comfy little universe. One world it will be, and American through and through. Strike up the band!