Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop’s starving.

  “In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . .”

  “But-but bobwire,” Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin’ away, “that’s progress—you, you can’t have open range forever, you can’t just stand in the way of progress—” yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who’s springing for his meal.

  Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice. “In ordinary times,” he wants to explain, “the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can’t be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times . . . this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it.”

  “Sure. For how long?”

  “It won’t last. Of course not. But for a few months . . . perhaps there’ll be peace by the autumn—discúlpeme, the spring, I still haven’t got used to your hemisphere—for a moment of spring, perhaps. . . .”

  “Yeah but—what’re you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it? They’ll run you right off, podner.”

  “No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless.” Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling— “So is our danger.”

  The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain, staying submerged for much of the day, spending nights on the surface to charge batteries, sneaking in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi won’t go into the fueling arrangements in much detail, but there are apparently connections of many years’ standing with the Republican underground—a community of grace, a gift of persistence. . . . Squalidozzi is in Zürich now contacting governments that might be willing, for any number of reasons, to assist his anarchism-in-exile. He must get a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word is relayed to Spain and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zürich. He is being watched. He can’t risk betraying the contact in Geneva.

  “I can help you out,” Slothrop licking off his fingers, “but I’m short of cash and—”

  Squalidozzi names a sum that will pay off Mario Schweitar and keep Slothrop fed for months to come.

  “Half in front and I’m on the way.”

  The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for the check. They arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days. “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock, a fading of light.

  The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside. He wakes up curled among the cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration through his bones . . . red light filtering very faint back through a bulkhead from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window and looks out. Alps in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as he figured on. Oh, well. . . . He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed, lighting up one of Squalidozzi’s corktips thinking, Jeepers, not bad, guys just jump in the airplane, go where they want . . . why stop at Geneva? Sure, what about—well, that Spain? no wait, they’re Fascists. South Sea Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well Africa’s the Dark Continent, nothing there but natives, elephants, ’n’ that Spencer Tracy. . . .

  “There’s nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere.” The figure is huddled against a crate, and shivering. Slothrop squints through the weak red light. It is the well-known frontispiece face of insouciant adventurer Richard Halliburton: but strangely altered. Down both the man’s cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks, in whose symmetry Slothrop, had he a medical eye, could have read drug reaction. Richard Halliburton’s jodhpurs are torn and soiled, his bright hair greasy now and hanging. He appears to be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being. No more. No more.

  Slothrop reaches, puts the cigarette out on the deck. How easy these angel-white wood shavings can go up. Lie here in this rattling and wrenched airplane, lie still as you can, damn fool, yup they’ve conned you—conned you again. Richard Halliburton, Lowell Thomas, Rover and Motor Boys, jaundiced stacks of National Geographics up in Hogan’s room must’ve all lied to him, and there was no one then, not even a colonial ghost in the attic, to tell him different. . . .

  Bump, skid, slew, pancake landing, fucking washouts from kite-flying school, gray Swiss dawn light through little windows and every joint, muscle, and bone in Slothrop is sore. It’s time to punch back in.

  He gets off of the plane without incident, mingling into a yawning, sour flock of early passengers, delivery agents, airfield workers. Cointrin in the early morning. Shocking green hills one side, brown city on the other. Pavements are slick and wet. Clouds blow slowly in the sky. Mont Blanc sez hi, lake sez howdy too, Slothrop buys 20 cigarettes and a local paper, asks directions, gets in a tram that comes and with cold air through doors and windows to wake him up goes rolling into the City of Peace.

  He’s to meet his Argentine contact at the Café l’Éclipse, well off the trolley lines, down a cobblestone street and into a tiny square surrounded by vegetable and fruit stalls under beige awnings, shops, other cafés, window-boxes, clean hosed sidewalks. Dogs go running in and out of the alleys. Slothrop sits with coffee, croissants, and newspaper. Presently the overcast burns off. The sun throws shadows across the square nearly to where he’s sitting with all antennas out. Nobody seems to be watching. He waits. Shadows retreat, sun climbs then begins to fall, at last his man shows up, exactly as described: suit of Buenos Aires daytime black, mustache, goldrim glasses, and whistling an old tango by Juan d’Arienzo. Slothrop makes a show of searching all his pockets, comes up with the foreign bill Squalidozzi told him to use: frowns at it, gets up, goes over.

  Como no, señor, no problem changing a 50-peso note—offering a seat, coming out with currency, notebooks, cards, pretty soon the tabletop’s littered with pieces of paper that eventually get sorted back into pockets so that the man has Squalidozzi’s message and Slothrop has one to bring back to Squalidozzi. And that’s that.

  Back to Zürich on an afternoon train, sleeping most of the way. He gets off at Schlieren, some ungodly dark hour, just in case They’re watching the Bahnhof in town, hitches a ride in as far as the St. Peterhofstatt. Its great clock hangs over him and empty acres of streets in what he now reads as dumb malignity. It connects to Ivy League quadrangles in his distant youth, clock-towers lit so dim the hour could never be read,
and a temptation, never so strong though as now, to surrender to the darkening year, to embrace what he can of real terror to the hour without a name (unless it’s . . . no . . . NO . . .): it was vanity, vanity as his Puritan forerunners had known it, bones and heart alert to Nothing, Nothing underneath the college saxophones melding sweetly, white blazers lipsticked about the lapels, smoke from nervous Fatimas, Castile soap vaporizing off of shining hair, and mint kisses, and dewed carnations. It was being come for just before dawn by pranksters younger than he, dragged from bed, blindfolded, Hey Reinhardt, led out into the autumnal cold, shadows and leaves underfoot, and the moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else—that none of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last. . . .

  What better place than Zürich to find vanity again? It’s Reformation country, Zwingli’s town, the man at the end of the encyclopedia, and stone reminders are everywhere. Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his “intelligence” network, which operates these days under the title “Office of Strategic Services.” But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone. . . .

  Next day, when Slothrop meets Mario Schweitar at the Sträggeli to front him half his fee, he asks also for the location of Jamf’s grave. And that’s where they arrange to close the deal, up in the mountains.

  Squalidozzi doesn’t show up at the Kronenhalle, or the Odeon, or anyplace Slothrop will think to look in the days that follow. Disappearances, in Zürich, are not unheard of. But Slothrop will keep going back, just in case. The message is in Spanish, he can’t make out more than a word or two, but he’ll hold on to it, there might be a chance to pass it on. And, well, the anarchist persuasion appeals to him a little. Back when Shays fought the federal troops across Massachusetts, there were Slothrop Regulators patrolling Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigs of hemlock in their hats so you could tell them from the Government soldiers. Federals stuck a tatter of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in those days were not yet so much involved with paper, and the wholesale slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green, against the dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side they’d been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland ignorance on the subject.

  Back behind him now, wind blows through Jamf’s crypt. Slothrop’s been camped here these past few nights, nearly out of money, waiting for word from Schweitar. Out of the wind, huddled inside a couple of Swiss army blankets he managed to promote, he’s even been able to sleep. Right on top of Mister Imipolex. The first night he was afraid to fall asleep, afraid of a visit from Jamf, whose German-scientist mind would be battered by Death to only the most brute reflexes, no way to appeal to the dumb and grinning evil of the shell that was left . . . voices twittering with moonlight around his image, as step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches. . . . waitaminute up out of sleep, face naked, turning to the foreign gravestones, the what? what was it . . . back again, almost to it, up again . . . up, and back, that way, most of the early night.

  There’s no visit. It seems Jamf is only dead. Slothrop woke next morning feeling, in spite of an empty stomach and a runny nose, better than he had in months. Seemed like he’d passed a test, not somebody else’s test, but one of his own, for a change.

  The city below him, bathed now in a partial light, is a necropolis of church spires and weathercocks, white castle-keep towers, broad buildings with mansard roofs and windows glimmering by thousands. This forenoon the mountains are as translucent as ice. Later in the day they will be blue heaps of wrinkled satin. The lake is mirror-smooth but mountains and houses reflected down there remain strangely blurred, with edges fine and combed as rain: a dream of Atlantis, of the Suggenthal. Toy villages, desolate city of painted alabaster. . . . Slothrop hunkers down here in the cold curve of a mountain trail, packing and lobbing idle snowballs, not much to do around here but smoke the last butt of what for all he knows is the last Lucky Strike in all Switzerland. . . .

  Footfalls down the trail. Clinking galoshes. It is Mario Schweitar’s delivery boy, with a big fat envelope. Slothrop pays him, chisels a cigarette and some matches, and they part. Back at the crypt Slothrop relights a small pile of kindling and pine boughs, warms up his hands, and begins to thumb through the data. The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an odor, one he knows but can’t quite name, an aura that threatens to go epileptic any second. The information is here—not as much as he wanted (aw, how much was that?) but more than he hoped, being one of those practical Yankees. In the weeks ahead, in those very few moments he’ll be allowed to wallow in his past, he may even have time to wish he hadn’t read any of it. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  Mr. Pointsman has decided to spend Whitsun by the sea. Feeling a bit megalo these days, nothing to worry about really, never gets worse than, oh perhaps the impression, whilst zooming along through the corridors of “The White Visitation,” that all the others seem to be frozen in attitudes of unmistakable parkinsonism, with himself the only alert, unpalsied one remaining. It is peacetime again now, no room for the pigeons in Trafalgar Square on V-E Night, everyone at the facility that day mad drunk and hugging and kissing, except for the Blavatskian wing of Psi Section, who were off on a White Lotos Day pilgrimage to 19 Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood.

  Now there’s time again for holidays. Though Pointsman does feel a certain obligation to go relax, there is also, of course, The Crisis. A leader must show self-possession, up to and including a holiday mood, in the midst of Crisis.

  There’s now been no word of Slothrop for nearly a month, since the fumbling asses in military intelligence lost him in Zürich. Pointsman is a bit browned-off with the Firm. His clever strategy appears to’ve failed. In first discussions with Clive Mossmoon and the others, it seemed foolproof: to let Slothrop escape from the Casino Hermann Goering, and then rely on Secret Service to keep him under surveillance instead of PISCES. An economy move. The surveillance bill is the most excruciating thorn in the crown of funding problems he seems condemned to wear for the duration of this project. Damned funding is going to be his downfall, if Slothrop doesn’t drive him insane first.

  Pointsman has blundered. Hasn’t even the Tennysonian comfort of saying “someone” has blundered. No, it was he and he alone who authorized the Anglo-American team of Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo to investigate a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures. Budget was available, and what harm could it do? They went off practically skipping, obsessive as Munchkins, out into the erotic Poisson. Don Giovanni’s map of Europe—640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey but, but, but—in Spain! in Spain, 1003!—is Slothrop’s map of London, and the two gumshoes become so infected with the prevailing fondness out here for mindless pleasures that they presently are passing whole afternoons sitting out in restaurant gardens dawdling over chrysanthemum salads and mutton casseroles, or larking at the fruit monger’s—“Hey Speed, look, canteloupes! I haven’t seen one of them since the Third Term—wow, smell this one, it’s beautiful! Say, how about a canteloupe, Speed? Huh? Come on.”

  “Excellent idea, Perdoo, excellent.”

  “Uh . . . Oh, well you pick out the one you want, okay?”

  “The one?”

  “Yeah. This is the one,” turning it to show him as the faces of threatened girls are rou
ghly turned by villains, “that I picked out, see?”

  “But but I thought we were both going to—” gesturing feebly toward what he still cannot quite accept as Perdoo’s melon, in whose intaglio net now, as among craters of the pale moon, a face is indeed emerging, the face of a captive woman with eyes cast downward, lids above as smooth as Persian ceilings. . . .

  “Well, no, I usually, uh—” this is embarrassing for Perdoo, it’s like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grape into your mouth—“just, well, sort of, eat them . . . whole, you know,” chuckling in what he hopes is a friendly way, to indicate politely the social oddness of this discussion—

  —but the chuckle is taken the wrong way by Speed: taken as evidence of mental instability in this slightly bucktoothed and angular American, who is dancing now from stoop to English stoop, lank as a street-puppet in the wind. Shaking his head, he nevertheless selects his own whole canteloupe, realizes he’s been left to pay the bill, which is exorbitant, and goes skipping off after Perdoo, hippety hop both of them, tra-la-la-la slam right into another dead end:

  “Jenny? No—no Jenny here. . . .”

  “A Jennifer, perhaps? Genevieve?”

  “Ginny” (it could’ve been misspelled), “Virginia?”

  “If you gentlemen are looking for a good time—” Her grin, her red, maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-good! grin, is wide enough to hold them both right, shivering, smiling, here, and she’s old enough to be their Mother—their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs. Perdoo and Mrs. Speed—in fact she is turning now into just that, even as they watch. These wrecked seas are full of temptresses—it’s watery and wanton out here all right. As the two gawking soft-boiled shamuses are drawn along into her aura, winking right here in the street, brassy with henna-glare, with passion-flowers on rayon—just before the last stumbling surrender into the lunacy of her purple eyes, they allow themselves, for the sinful tickle of it, a last thought of the project they’re supposed to be here on—Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations (SEZ WHO)—a thought that comes running out in the guise of a clown, a vulgar, loose-ends clown bespangled with wordless jokes about body juices, bald-headed, an amazing fall of nose-hair out both nostrils which he has put into braids and tied with acid-green bows—a scrabbling dash now out past sandbags and falling curtain, trying to get back his breath, to garble to them in a high unpleasant screech: “No Jenny. No Sally W. No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine. No Lucy. No Gretchen. When are you going to see it? When are you going to see it?”