Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “You’ve told me.”

  “I can’t get over it. You know the color of rivers that run through cities—the East River, the Thames, the Seine? He was that shade of gray.”

  Renata had nothing to say to this. As a rule her own reflections satisfied her perfectly and she used my conversation as a background to think her own thoughts. These thoughts, so far as I could tell, had to do with her desire to become Mrs. Charles Citrine, the wife of a Pulitzer chevalier. I therefore turned the tables on her and used her thoughts as a background for my thoughts. The Boeing tore off through shawls of cloud, the hurtling moment of risk and death ended with a musical Bing! and we entered the peace and light above. My head lay on the bib and bosom of the seat and when the Jack Daniel’s came I strained it through my irregular multicolored teeth, curling my forefinger over the top of the glass to hold back the big perforated ice cubes—they always put in too many. The thread of whisky burned pleasantly in the gullet and then my stomach, like the sun outside, began to glow, and the delight of freedom also began to expand within me. Renata was right, I was away! Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness—it feels so free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object but incorporated with the rest, with universal sapphire, purplish blue. For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and the galaxy which are also there.) At the center of the beholder there must be space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing but a nothing reserved for everything. You can feel this nothing-everything capacity with ecstasy and this was what I actually felt in the jet. Sipping whisky, feeling the radiant heat that rose inside, I experienced a bliss that I knew perfectly well was not mad. They hadn’t done me in back there, Tomchek, Pinsker, Denise, Urbanovich. I had gotten away from them. I couldn’t say that I knew really what I was doing, but did it matter so much? I felt clear in the head nevertheless. I could find no shadow of wistful yearning, no remorse, no anxiety. I was with a beautiful bim. She was as full of schemes and secrets as the Court of Byzantium. Was that so bad? I was a goofy old chaser. But what of it?

  Before leaving Chicago I had had a long talk about Renata with George Swiebel. We were exactly of an age, and approximately in the same physical condition. George was wonderfully kind. He said, “You’ve got to blow now. Get out of town. I’ll take care of the details for you. You just sit on that plane, pull off your shoes, order a drink, and take the fuck off. You’ll be okay. Don’t worry.” He sold the Mercedes for four thousand dollars. He took charge of the Persian carpets and made me an advance of another four. They must have been worth fifteen because they had been appraised by the insurance company at ten. But although George was in the building-repairs racket, he was utterly honorable. You couldn’t find a single cheating fiber in his heart.

  We drank a bottle of whisky together and he made me a parting speech about Renata. It was full of his own kind of Nature-wisdom. He said, “All right, friend, you’re going away with this gorgeous chick. She belongs to the new swinging generation and in spite of the fact that she’s so developed she just isn’t a grownup woman. Charlie, she doesn’t know a prick from a popsicle. Her mother is a gloomy sinister old character, a real angler. That mother is not my kind of people at all. She figures you for a cunt-crazy old man. You were once a winner with a big reputation. Now you’re staggering a bit and here’s a chance to marry you, grab off a piece of you before Denise gets it all. Maybe even rebuild you as a name and a money-maker. You’re a bit mysterious to those types because there aren’t many of you around. Now Renata is her mother’s big, big, big prize apple from the Washington State Fair, a perfect Wenatchee, raised under scientific conditions, and she’s hell-bent on cashing in while she’s in her prime.”

  Working himself up, George got to his feet, a broad healthy figure of a man, rosy and vigorous, his nose bent like an Indian’s, and his thin hair centered like a scalp lock. As always when he expounded his Nature-philosophy he started to shout. “This is no ordinary cunt. She’s worth taking a chance on. All right, you might be humiliated, you might have to take a lot of shit, you might be robbed and plundered, you might lie sick with nobody looking after you or have a coronary or lose a leg. Okay, but you’re alive, a flesh and blood brave instinct person. You’ve got guts. And I’ll be standing by you. Cable me from anywhere and I’ll arrive. I liked you all right when you were younger, but not the way I love you now. When you were younger you were on the make. You may not realize it but you were damn clever and canny about your career. But now, thank God, you’re in a real dream and a fever over this young woman. You don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s just what’s great about it.”

  “You make it sound much too romantic, George.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Now Renata’s ‘real father’ bit is baloney. Let’s figure this out together. What does a broad like that need with a real father? She’s already got this old pimp mother. Renata wouldn’t know what to do with a father. She’s got just the daddy she needs, a sex daddy. No, the whole thing was hoked up to get these trips to Europe. But that’s just the finest part of it. Go on and blow all your money. Go broke, and the hell with the whole courthouse gang. Now you told me before about April in Paris with Renata but brief me again.”

  “Here it is,” I said. “Until Renata was twelve she thought her father was a certain Signor Biferno, a fancy leather-goods dealer from the Via Monte Napoleone, in Milan. That’s the big luxury-goods street. But when she was thirteen or so the old girl told her that Biferno might not be the man. The Señora and Biferno had been skiing in Cortina, she broke her ankle, her foot was in a cast, she quarreled with Biferno and he went home to his wife and kids. She revenged herself on him with a young Frenchman. Now when Renata was ten her mother had taken her to Milan to confront Biferno. They got all dressed up and made a scene on the Via Monte Napoleone.”

  “That old broad is one of the big-time troublemakers.”‘

  “The real Mrs. Biferno called the police. And much later, back in Chicago, her mother told Renata, ‘Biferno may not be your father after all.’ “

  “So you went to Paris to see the young Frenchman, who is now an old Frenchman? That was a hell of a thing for a mother to tell a girl just as she enters adolescence.”

  “I had to be in London anyway and we were at the Ritz. Then Renata said she must go to Paris to look over this man who was perhaps her father and she wanted to go alone. She planned to come back three days later. So I took her to Heathrow. She was carrying a large bag, which was open. Right at the top, like a large compact, was her diaphragm case.”

  “Why was she taking her birth control?”

  “You can never tell when the chance of a lifetime may present itself.”

  “Tactics, Charlie, just stupid tactics. Keep the fellow guessing. She was putting you off balance. I think she’s really okay. She just does certain stupid things. One thing I want to say, Charlie. I don’t know what our habits are but don’t let her blow you. You’ll be dead in a year. Now tell me the rest about Paris.”

  “Well, the man was homosexual, elderly, tedious, and garrulous. When she didn’t return to London on the fourth day I went to look for her at the Hotel Meurice. She said she hadn’t had the nerve to face him yet and she’d been shopping and going to the Louvre and seeing Swedish films—I Am Curious Yellow or something. The old guy remembered her mother and he was pleased to think that he might have a daughter but he was cagey and said that legal recognition was absolutely out of the question. His family would disinherit him. But he wasn’t the man anyway. Renata said there was no resemblance. I looked him over myself. She was right. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how nature does its stuff. An angry woman with a cast on her ankle gets a gay skier to make an exception for her, and they beget this beautiful daughter with the perfect skin and dark eyes and
those eyebrows. Think of an El Greco beauty raising her eyes to heaven. Then substitute sex for heaven. That’s Renata’s pious look.”

  “Well, I know you love her,” said George. “When she locked you out because she had another guy in there with her and you came to me crying—you remember what I said? A man your age sobbing over a girl is a man I respect. Furthermore, you’ve still got all your strength.”

  “I should have, I never used any of it.”

  “Well, okay, you saved it. Now you’re coming down the stretch and it’s time to pull ahead. Maybe you should marry Renata. Only don’t get faint on your way to the license bureau. Do the whole thing like a man. Otherwise she’ll never forgive you. Otherwise she’ll turn you into an old errand boy. Poor old Charlie with a watering eye going out to buy cigars for his missus.”

  twenty-six

  We made our approach over the steely patch of evening water and landed at La Guardia in the tawny sundown. We then rode to the Plaza Hotel imprisoned in the low seats in one of New York’s dog-catcher taxis. They make you feel that you have bitten someone and are being rushed to the pound, frothing with rabies, to be put down. I said this to Renata and she appeared to feel that I was using my imagination to spoil her pleasure, already somewhat damaged by the fact that we traveled, unlicensed, as a married pair. The doorman helped her out at the Plaza and, in her high boots, she strode under the heated marquee with its glowing orange rods. Over her mini-skirt she wore a long suède Polish coat lined with lambskin. I had bought it for her from Cepelia. Her beautifully pliant velvet hat inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch portrait painters was pushed off from her forehead. Her face, evenly and purely white, broadened toward the base. This gourdlike fullness was her only defect. Her throat was ever so slightly ringed or rippled by some enriching feminine deposit. This slight swell appears also on her hips and on the inside of her thighs. The first joint of her fingers revealed the same signs of sensual superabundance. Following her, admiring, thinking, I walked in the checked coat. Cantabile and Stronson had agreed that it gave me the cut of a killer. But I couldn’t have looked less killer-like than I now did. My hair was blown out of position so that I felt the radiant heat of the marquee on my bald spot. The winter air swept into my face and made my nose red. Under my eyes the pouches were heavy. Teatime musicians in the Palm Court played their swooning, ingratiating, kiss-ass music. I registered Mr. and Mrs. Citrine under a false Chicago address, and we went up in the elevator with a crowd of charming college girls down for the holidays. They seemed to give out a wonderful fragrance of unripeness, a sort of green-banana odor.

  “You certainly got a load of those darling kids,” said Renata, perfectly good-humored again—we were in an endless corridor of golden carpet, endlessly repeating its black scrolls and flourishes, flourishes and scrolls. My manner of observing people entertained her. “You’re such an eager looker,” she said.

  Yes, but for decades I had neglected my innate manner of doing it, my personal way of looking. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t resume it now. Who cared?

  “But what’s this?” said Renata as the bellhop opened the door. “What kind of room did they give us?”

  “These are the accommodations with mansard windows. The very top of the Plaza. The best view in the house,” I said.

  “We had a marvelous suite last time. What the hell are we doing in the attic? Where’s our suite?”

  “Oh, come, come, my darling. What’s the difference? You sound like my brother, Julius. He gets into such a state when hotels don’t give him the best—so haughty and furious.”

  “Charles, are you having one of your stingy fits? Don’t forget what you told me once about the observation car.”

  I was sorry now that I had ever made her familiar with Gene Fowler’s saying that money was something to throw off the back end of a train. That was journalistic Hollywood of the golden age, the boozy night-club magnificence of the Twenties, the Big-Spender Syndrome. “But they’re right, Renata. This is the best spot in the whole hotel for seeing Fifth Avenue.”

  Indeed the view, if you cared for views, was remarkable. I was very good myself at putting other people on to views for the purpose of absenting myself. Below, Fifth Avenue glowed with Christmas decorations and the headlights of the jammed traffic, solid between the Seventies and the Thirties, and shop illuminations, multicolored, crystalline, and like the cells in a capillary observed through a microscope, elastically changing shape, bumping and pulsatory. All this I saw in a single instant. I was like a deft girl, scooping all the jacks before the ball bounced back. It was as it had been with Renata last spring when we took the train to Chartres, “Isn’t that beautiful out there!” she had said. I looked and yes, it was indeed beautiful. No more than a glance was necessary. You saved yourself a lot of time that way. The question was what you were going to do with the minutes gained by these economies. This, I may say, was all due to the operation of what Steiner describes as the Consciousness Soul.

  Renata didn’t know that Urbanovich was about to rule on the impounding of my money. By the movement of her eyes, however, I saw that money thoughts were on her mind. Her brows often were tilted heavenward with love but now and then a strongly practical look swept over her which, however, I also liked very much. But then she gave her head a quick lift and said, “As long as you’re in New York, you may as well see a few editors and peddle your essays. Did Thaxter give them back?”

  “Reluctantly. He still expects to bring out The Ark.”

  “Sure. He himself is every kind of animal.”

  “He called me yesterday and invited us to a Bon Voyage party on the France.”

  “His aging mother is throwing him a party too? She must be quite an old dame.”

  “She understands style. For generations she’s arranged the coming out of debutantes and she’s connected with the Rich. She always knows where there’s a chalet vacant for her boy or a shooting box or a yacht. If he feels run-down she sends him to the Bahamas or the Aegean. You ought to see her. She’s skinny clever capable and she glowers at me, I’m low company for Pierre. She stands on guard for monied families defending their right to drink themselves to death, their ancient privilege to amount to nothing.”

  Renata laughed and said, “Spare me his party. Let’s get your Humboldt business over and go on to Milan. I have a deep anxiety about it.”

  “Do you think this Biferno really is your father? Better he than that queer Henri.”

  “Honestly I wouldn’t think about a father if we were married. My insecure position forces me to look for solid ground. You’ll say I have been married, but the ground with Koffritz wasn’t very solid. And now there’s my responsibility for Roger. By the way, we must send out toys to all the kids from F. A. O. Schwarz and I haven’t got a cent. Koffritz is six months behind in payments. He says I have a rich man-friend. I will not drag him into court though, or throw him in jail. As for you, you carry so many freeloaders and I don’t want to come under that heading. If I may say so, though, I at least care for you and do you some good. If you fell into the hands of that anthroposophist’s daughter, that little blonde fox, you’d soon known the difference. She’s a toughie.”

  “What has Doris Scheldt got to do with anything?”

  “What? You wrote her a note before we left Chicago. I read the impression on your note pad. Don’t look so truthful, Charlie. You’re the world’s worst liar. I wish I knew how many ladies you had in reserve.”

  I was not indignant over her spying. I no longer made scenes. Pleasant in themselves, our European trips also took me away from Miss Scheldt. Renata considered her a dangerous person and even the Señora had tried to scold me about her.

  “But Señora,” I had replied, “Miss Scheldt didn’t enter the picture until the Flonzaley incident.”

  “Now, Charles, the matter of Mr. Flonzaley must be dropped. You are not just a middle-class provincial person but a man of letters,” said the old Spanish lady. “Flonzaley belongs to the past. Renata
is very sensitive to pain and when the man was in agony what could you expect her to do? She cried the entire night he was there. He is in a vulgar business and there is no comparison between you. She simply felt she owed him the consideration. And as you are an homme de lettres and he is an undertaker, the higher person must be more tolerant.”