Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “I admit I like to shine when there are ladies.”

  He lifted his chin to get at his neck with the razor. The bulb of his pale nose was darkly lined. “Would you like to make it with Polly?” he said.

  “I? Is that an abstract question?”

  “Nothing abstract. You do things for me, I do things for you. Yesterday I bashed your car, I ran you around town. Now we’re on a different basis. I know you’re supposed to have a pretty lady friend. But I don’t care who she is and what she knows, compared to Polly she’s a bush leaguer. Polly makes other girls look sick.”

  “In that case, I ought to thank you.”

  “That means you don’t want to. You’re refusing. Take your razor, I’m finished.” He put the warm small machine into my hand with a slap. Then he stood away from the basin and leaned against the bathroom wall with his arms crossed and one foot posed on its toe. He said, “You’d better not reject me.”

  “Why not?”

  His face, the colorless-intense type, filled with pale heat. But he said, “There’s a thing the three of us can do together. You lie on your back. She gets on top of you and at the same time goes down on me.”

  “Let’s not have any more filth. Stop it. I can’t even visualize this.”

  “Don’t put on with me. Don’t be superior.” He explained again. “I’m at the head of the bed, standing. You lie down. Polly straddles you, leaning forward to me.”

  “Stop these disgusting propositions. I want no part of your sexual circuses.”

  He gave me a bloody-murder look but I couldn’t have cared less. There were lots of people ahead of him in the bloody-murder line—Denise and Pinsker, Tomchek and the court, the Internal Revenue Service. “You’re no puritan,” said Cantabile, sullen. But sensing my mood he changed the subject. “Your friend George Swiebel was talking at the game about a beryllium mine in East Africa—what is this beryllium stuff?”

  “It’s needed for hard alloys used in space ships. George claims he has friends in Kenya....”

  “Oh, he has an inside track with some jungle-bunnies. I bet they all love him. He’s so natural healthy and humane. I bet he’s a lousy businessman. You’d be better off with Stronson and the commodity futures. There’s a real smart guy. I know you can’t believe it but I’m trying to help you. They’re going to mangle you in court. Haven’t you stashed something away? You can’t be as dumb as all that. Haven’t you got a bagman somewhere?”

  “I never thought of one.”

  “You want me to believe you have nothing in your thoughts except angels on ladders and immortal spirits but I can see from the way you live that it can’t be true. First of all you’re a dude. I know your tailor. Secondly you’re an old sex-pot. . . .”

  “Did I talk to you that night about the immortal spirit?”

  “You sure as hell did. You said that after it gets through the gates of death—this is a quote—your soul spreads out and looks back at the world. Charlie, I had a thought this morning about you—shut the door. Go on, shut it. Now, listen, we could pretend to kidnap one of your kids. You pay the ransom, and I put the dough away in the Cayman Islands for you.”

  “Let me see that gun of yours now,” I said.

  He handed it to me and I pointed it at him. I said, “I’ll certainly use this on you if you try any such thing.”

  “Put that Magnum down. It’s only an idea. Don’t get all shook up.”

  I removed the bullets and threw them in the wastepaper basket, handing back the pistol. That he made such suggestions to me was, I recognized, my own fault. The arbitrary can become the pets of the rational. Cantabile seemed to recognize that he was my pet arbitrary. In some sense he played up to this. Maybe it was better to be a pet arbitrary than a mere nut. But was I so rational?

  “The kidnap idea is too gaudy. You’re right,” he said. “Well, how about getting to the judge? After all, a county judge has to be put on the ballot for re-election. Judges are in politics, too, and you’d better know it. There are little characters in the Organization who put ‘em on and take ‘em off the ballot. For thirty or forty Gs, the right guy will call on Judge Urbanovich.”

  I puffed, and blew the tiny clippings out of the shaver.

  “You don’t go for that either?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe the other side has already gotten to him. Why be such a gentleman? It’s like a kind of paralysis. Absolutely unreal. Behind the glass in the Field Museum, that’s where you belong. I believe you got stuck in your childhood. If I said to you, ‘Liquidate and go abroad,’ what would you answer?”

  “I’d say that I wouldn’t leave the USA just because of money.”

  “That’s right. You’re no Vesco. You love your country. Well, you’re not fit to have this money. Maybe the other guys should get it from you. People like the President pretended to be fine clean Americans from The Saturday Evening Post. They were boy scouts, they delivered the newspaper at dawn. But they were fakes. The real American is a freak like you, a highbrow Jew from the West Side of Chicago. You ought to be in the White House.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “You’d love the Secret Service protection.” Cantabile opened the bathroom door to check on Polly. She was not eavesdropping. He shut it again and said, low-voiced, “We could put a contract on your wife. Does she wanna fight? Let her have it. There could be a car accident. She could die in the street. She could be pushed in front of a train, dragged into an alley and stabbed. Crazy buffaloes are doing women in left and right, so who’s to know. She’s bugging you to death—well, how would it be if she died? I know you’ll say no, and treat it as a joke—Wildass Cantabile, a joker.”

  “You’d better be joking.”

  “I’m only reminding you this is Chicago, after all/’

  “Ninety-eight-percent nightmare, so you think I should total it? I’ll just assume that you’re kidding. I’m sorry Polly wasn’t listening to this. Okay, I appreciate your great interest in my welfare. Don’t offer any more suggestions. And don’t make me a horrible Christmas present, Cantabile. You’re casting about to make a dynamic impression. Don’t make any more criminal offers, you understand? If I hear another whisper of this I’ll tell the homicide squad.”

  “Relax. I wouldn’t lift a finger. I just thought I’d point out the whole range of options. It helps to see them from end to end. It clears your head. You know she’ll be damn glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.”

  “I don’t know any such thing,” I said.

  I was lying. She had told me exactly that herself. Really, to be having a conversation like this served me right. I had brought it on myself. I had rooted and sorted my way through mankind experiencing disappointment upon disappointment. What was my disappointment? I had, or assumed that I had, needs and perceptions of a Shakespearian order. But they were only too sporadically of that high order. And so I found myself now looking into the moony eyes of a Cantabile. Ah my higher life! When I was young I believed that being an intellectual assured me of a higher life. In this Humboldt and I were exactly alike. He too would have respected and adored the learning, the rationality, the analytical power of a man like Richard Durnwald. For Durnwald the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of thought. I had agreed, but I no longer thought in the same way. I had decided to listen to the voice of my own mind speaking from within, from my own depths, and this voice said that there was my body, in nature, and that there was also me. I was related to nature through my body, but all of me was not contained in it.

  Because of this kind of idea I now found myself under Cantabile’s gaze. He examined me. He also looked tender concerned threatening punitive and even lethal.

  I said to him, “Years ago there was a little kid in the funnies called Desperate Ambrose. Before your time. Now don’t you play Desperate Ambrose with me. Let me out of here.”

  “Just a minute. What about Lucy’s thesis?”

  “Curse her thesis.”

&nb
sp; “She’s coming back from Nevada in a few days.”

  I made no answer. In a few days’ time I’d be safely abroad— away from this lunatic, though probably mixed up with others.

  “One more thing,” he said. “You can make it with Polly through me. Only. Don’t try on your own.”

  “Rest easy,” I said.

  He remained in the bathroom. I suppose he was getting his bullets out of the wastepaper basket.

  Polly had the yoghurt and the egg ready for me.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, “don’t get mixed up in the commodity market. He’s losing his shirt.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “What do you think,” she said.

  “Then he’s bringing in new investors perhaps to make a deal to recover some of his losses?”

  “I couldn’t say. That’s beyond me,” said Polly. “He’s a very intricate person. What is that beautiful medal on the wall?”

  “It’s my French decoration, framed by my lady friend. She’s an interior decorator. Actually, the medal is a kind of phony. Major decorations are red, not green. They gave me the sort of thing they give to pig-breeders and to people who improve the garbage cans. A Frenchman told me last year that my green ribbon must be the lowest rank of the Legion of Honor. In fact he had never actually seen a green ribbon before. He thought it might be the Mérite Agricole.”

  “I don’t think it was very nice of him to tell you that,” said Polly.

  nineteen

  Renata was punctual, and she had the engine of the old yellow Pontiac idling, waiting to be off. I shook hands with Polly and told Cantabile, “I’ll be seeing you.” I didn’t introduce them to Renata. They tried hard to get a look at her but I got in, slammed the door, and said, “Go!” She went. The crown of Renata’s large hat touched the roof of the car. It was amethyst felt and of the seventeenth-century cut you see in portraits by Frans Hals. She was wearing her long hair down. I preferred it in a bun, showing the shape of her neck.

  “Who are your pals, and what’s the big hurry?”

  “That was Cantabile, who did in my car.”

  “Him? I wish I’d known. Was that his wife?”

  “No, his wife is out of town.”

  “I watched you coming through the lobby. She’s quite a number. And he’s a good-looking man.”

  “He was dying to meet you—trying to get a load of you through the window.”

  “Why should you be so flustered by that?”

  “Just now he offered to have Denise rubbed out for me.”

  Renata, laughing, shouted, “What?”

  “A hit man, a mechanic, he suggested a contract. Everybody knows the lingo now.”

  “It must have been a put-on.”

  “I’m sure it was. On the other hand there’s my 280-SL in the shop.”

  “It’s not as though Denise didn’t deserve it,” said Renata.

  “She is a maddening pest, that’s true enough, and I always laughed when I read how old Mr. Karamazov rushed into the street when he heard that his wife was gone shouting, ‘The bitch is dead!’—But Denise,” said Citrine the lecturer, “is a comical, not a tragic personality. Besides, she shouldn’t die to gratify me. Most important are the girls, they need a mother. Anyhow it’s idiotic to hear people say kill, murder, die, death—they haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. There isn’t one person in ten thousand that understands the first thing about death.”

  “What do you suppose will happen downtown today?”

  “Oh, the usual thing. They’ll mobbalize me, as we used to say in grammar school. I’ll represent human dignity, and they’ll give me hell.”

  “Well, must you do the dignity bit? You’re stuck with it, while they have all the fun. If you could find some way to crush ‘em, it would be so nice. . . . Well, here’s my client on the corner. Isn’t she built like a bouncer in a clip joint! You don’t have to take part in the conversation, it’s enough that she bores and badgers me. You just tune out and meditate. If she doesn’t choose her upholstery material today I’ll cut her throat.”

  Immense and fragrant in black and white silk, large polka dots covering her bosom (which I could, and did, visualize), Fannie Sunderland got in. I withdrew to the back seat, warning her about the hole in the floor, covered by a square of tin. The heavy samples carried by her salesman ex-husband had actually worn out the metal of Renata’s Pontiac. “Unfortunately,” said Renata, “our Mercedes is in the shop for repairs.”

  In the mental discipline I had recently begun, and of which I already felt the good effects, stability equipoise and tranquillity were the prerequisites. I said to myself, “Tranquillity, tranquillity.” As on the racquet ball court I said, “Dance, dance, dance!” And it always had some result. The will is a link which connects the soul to the world as-it-is. Through the will the soul frees itself from distraction and mere dreams. But when Renata told me to tune out and meditate she struck a note of malice. She was needling me about Doris, the daughter of Dr. Scheldt, the anthroposophist from whom I had been getting instruction. Renata was terribly jealous of Doris. “That baby bitch!” Renata cried. “I know she couldn’t wait to jump into your bed.” But this was Renata’s own fault, her very own doing. She and her mother, the Señora, had decided that I needed a lesson. They shut the door in my face. By invitation, I came to Renata’s apartment for dinner one night and found myself locked out. Someone else was with her. For several months I was too depressed to be alone. I moved in with George Swiebel and slept on his sofa. I would sit up suddenly in the night with a crying fit, sometimes waking George who came out and turned on a lamp, his wrinkled pajamas baring powerful legs. He made this measured statement: “A man in his fifties who can break up and cry over a girl is a man I respect.”

  I said, “Oh hell! What are you talking about! I’m a moron. It’s disgraceful to carry on like this.”

  Renata had taken up with a man named Flonzaley....

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I sat behind the two fragrant chatting ladies. We turned into Forty-seventh Street, the boundary between rich man’s Kenwood and poor man’s Oakwood, passing the locked tavern which lost its license because a fellow had gotten twenty stab wounds there over a matter of eight dollars. This was what Cantabile meant by “crazy buffaloes.” Where was the victim? He was buried. Who was he? Nobody could tell you. And now others, casually regardant, passed the place in automobiles still thinking of an “I,” and of the past and the prospects of this “I.” If there was nothing in this but some funny egoism, some illusion that fate was being outwitted, avoidance of the reality of the grave, perhaps it was scarcely worth the trouble. But that remained to be seen.

  George Swiebel, that vitality-worshiper, thought it was a wonderful thing that an elderly man should still keep up an active erotic and vivid fluent emotional life. I did not agree. But when Renata called me up, weeping on the phone, and said she had never cared for this Flonzaley, she wanted me back, I said, “Oh, thank God, thank God!” and hurried straight over. That was the end of Miss Doris Scheldt, of whom I had been very fond. But fond was not enough. I was a nymph-troubled man and a person of frenzied longings. Perhaps the longings were not even specifically for nymphs. But whatever they were, a woman like Renata drew them out. Other ladies were critical of her. Some said she was gross. Maybe so, but she was also gorgeous. And one must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine. From George Swiebel’s poker game, at which I drank so much and became so garrulous, I carried away one useful idea—for an atypical foot you need an atypical shoe. If in addition to being atypical you are fastidious—well, you have your work cut out for you. And is there still any typical foot? I mean by this that such emphasis has fallen on the erotic that all the eccentricity of the soul pours into the foot. The effects are so distorting, the flesh takes such florid turns that nothing will fit. So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can
’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul. This is the position as I saw it. The interpretation given by Renata, something of an astrologer, was that my sign was to blame for my troubles. She had never come across a more divided screwed-up suffering Gemini, so incapable of pulling himself together. “Don’t smile when I talk about the stars. I know that to you I’m a beautiful palooka, a dumb broad. You’d like me to be your Kama Sutra dream-girl.”

  But I hadn’t been smiling at her. I smiled only because I had yet to read any account of the Gemini type in Renata’s astrological literature which was not entirely correct. One book in particular impressed me; it spoke of Gemini as a mental feeling-mill, where the soul is sheared and shredded. As to her being my Kama Sutra girl, she was a very fine woman, I still say that, but she was by no means fully at ease in sex. There were times when she was sad and quiet and spoke of her “hang-ups.” Now we were going to Europe on Friday, our second trip this year. There were serious personal reasons for these European flights. And if I couldn’t offer mature sympathy to a young woman, what did I have to offer? As it happened I took a genuine interest in her problems, I sympathized fully with her.

  Still, I owed it to common realism to see the thing as others might see it—an old troubled lecher was taking a gold-digging floozy to Europe to show her a big time. Behind this, to complete the classic picture, was the scheming old mother, the Señora, who taught commercial Spanish in a secretarial college on State Street. The Señora was a person of some charm, one of those people who thrive in the Midwest because they are foreign and dotty. Renata’s beauty was not inherited from her. And on the biological or evolutionary side Renata was perfect. Like a leopard or a race horse, she was a “noble animal” (see Santayana, The Sense of Beauty). Her mysterious father (and our trips to Europe were made to discover just who this was) must have been one of those old-time strongmen who bent iron bars, pulled locomotives with his teeth, or supported twenty people on a plank across his back, a grand figure of a man, a model for Rodin. The Señora I believe was really a Hungarian. When she told family anecdotes I could see her transposing from the Balkans to Spain. I was convinced that I understood her, and for this claim I gave myself a strange reason; this was that I understood my mother’s Singer sewing machine. At the age of ten I had dismantled the machine and put it together again. You pushed the wrought-iron treadle. This moved the smooth pulley, the needle went up and down. You pried up a smooth steel plate and there found small and intricate parts that gave off an odor of machine oil. To me the Señora was a person of intricate parts and smelled slightly of oil. It was on the whole a positive association. But certain bits were missing from her mind. The needle went up and down, there was thread on the bobbin, but the stitching failed to occur.