Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  After this I lay awake all night because I had used the word faithful. This might queer the whole deal, with its implied accusation and the hint or shadow of forgiveness. But I had really meant no harm. I was betwixt and between. I mean, if I were a true hypocrite I wouldn’t forever be putting my foot in my mouth. On the other hand, if I were a real innocent, pure in heart, I wouldn’t have to fret the night out over Renata’s conduct in Milan or her misinterpretation of my wire. But I lost a night’s sleep for nothing. The wording of the message didn’t matter. She didn’t reply at all.

  So that night, in the romantic dining room of the Ritz where every bite cost a fortune, I said to the Señora, “You’ll never guess who’s been on my mind today.” Without waiting for an answer I then uttered the name “Flonzaley!” as a surprise assault on her defenses. But the Señora was made of terribly hard material. She seemed hardly to notice. I repeated the name. “Flonzaley! Flonzaley! Flonzaley!”

  “What is this loudness, what is the matter, Charles?”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s the matter. Where is Mr. Flonzaley?”

  “Why should his whereabouts be my problem? Would you mind asking the camarero to pour the wine?” It was not only because she was the lady and I the gentleman that the Señora wished me to speak to waiters. She was fluent in Spanish all right, but her accent was pure Hungarian. Of this there was no doubt now. I learned a thing or two from the Señora. For instance, did I think that people concluding their lives would all be in a fever to come to terms with their souls? I went through agonies of preparation before I blurted out Flonzaley’s name and then she asked for more wine. And yet it must have been she that masterminded the plan to bring Roger to Madrid. It was she who made certain that I was pinned down here and prevented me from rushing to Milan to burst in on Renata. For Flonzaley was there with her, all right. He was mad for her and I didn’t blame him. A man who met more people on the mortuary slab than he met socially could not be blamed for losing his head that way. A body like Renata’s was not often seen in the living flesh. As for Renata, she complained of the morbid element in his adoration, but could I be altogether sure that it was not one of his attractions? I was certain of nothing. I sat trying to make myself drunk on a bottle of acid wine, but I made no headway against my bitter sobriety. No I didn’t understand.

  The activities of higher consciousness didn’t inevitably improve the understanding. The hope of such understanding was raised by my manual—Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. This gave specific instructions. One suggested exercise was to try to enter into the intense desire of another person on a given occasion. To do this one had to remove all personal opinions, all interfering judgments; one should be neither for nor against this desire. In this way one might come gradually to feel what another soul was feeling, I had made this experiment with my own child Mary. For her last birthday she desired a bicycle, the ten-speed type. I wasn’t convinced that she was old enough to have one. When we went to the shop it was by no means certain that I would buy it. Now what was her desire, and what did she experience? I wanted to know this, and tried to desire in the way that she desired. This was my kid, whom I loved, and it should have been elementary to find out what a soul in its fresh state craved with such intensity. But I couldn’t do this. I tried until I broke into a sweat, humiliated, disgraced by my failure. If I couldn’t know this kid’s desire could I know any human being? I tried it on a large number of people. And then, defeated, I asked where was I anyway? And what did I really know of anyone? The only desires I knew were my own and those of nonexistent people like Macbeth or Pros-pero. These I knew because the insight and language of genius made them clear. I bought Mary the bike and then shouted at her, “For Christ’s sake, don’t ride over the curbs, you’ll bust hell out of the wheel.” But this was an explosion of despair over my failure to know the kid’s heart. And yet I was prepared to know. I was all set up to know in the richest colors, with the deepest feelings, and in the purest light. I was a brute, packed with exquisite capacities which I was unable to use. There’s no need to go into this yet once again and tickle each mandolin note ten times as that dear friend of mine accused me of doing. The job, once and for all, was to burst from the fatal self-sufficiency of consciousness and put my remaining strength over into the Imaginative Soul. As Humboldt too should have done.

  I don’t know who the other gentlemen in the Ritz may have been dining with, the human scene was too pregnant and dense in complications for me at this moment, and all I can say was that I was glad the aims of the pimping old bitch across the table were merely conventional aims. If she had gone after my soul, what was left of it, I would have been sunk. But all she wanted was to market her daughter at her finest hour. And was I through? And was it over? For a few years I had had it good with Renata—the champagne cocktails, the table set with orchids, and this warm beauty serving dinner in feathers and G string while I ate and drank and laughed till I coughed at her erotic teasing, the burlesque of the amorous greatness of heroes and kings. Good-by, good-by to those wonderful sensations. Mine at least had been the real thing. And if hers were not, she had at least been a true and understanding pal. In her percale bed. In her heaven of piled pillows. All that was probably over.

  And what could you be at the Ritz but a well-conducted diner? You were attended by servitors and chefs and maîtres and grooms, waiters, and the little botónes who was dressed like an American bellhop and was filling the glasses with crystalline ice water and scraping crumbs from the linen with a broad silver blade. Him I liked best of all. There was nothing I could do under the circumstances about my desire to give a sob. It was my heartbreak hour. For I didn’t have the dough and the old woman knew it. This tunicate withered bag the Señora had my financial number. Flonzaley with his corpses would never run out of money. The course of nature itself was behind him. Cancers and aneurysms, coronaries and hemorrhages stood behind his wealth and guaranteed him bliss. All these dead, like the glorious court of Jerusalem, chanting, “Live forever, Solomon Flonzaley!” And so Flonzaley was getting Renata while I yielded a moment to bitter self-pity and saw myself very old and standing dazed in the toilet of some tenement. Perhaps like old Doc Lutz I would put two socks on one foot and pee in the bathtub. That, as Naomi said, was the end. It was just as well that the title to those graves in Waldheim had turned up in Julius’s desk. I might just need them, untimely. Tomorrow, heavy of heart, I was going to the Prado to look for the Velasquez, or was it the Murillo that resembled Renata—the one mentioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Downing Street. So I sat in this scene of silver service and brandy flames and the superb flash of chafing dishes.

  “I wired Renata yesterday and asked her to marry me,” I said.

  “Did you? How nice. That should have been done long ago,” said the relentless Señora. “You can’t treat proud women like this. But I would be happy to have such a distinguished son-in-law and Roger loves you like his own daddy.”

  “But she hasn’t answered me.”

  “The postal system isn’t working. Haven’t you heard, Italy is breaking down?” she said. “Did you telephone too?”

  “I tried, Señora. I hesitate to call in the middle of the night. Anyway there’s never an answer.”

  “She may have gone with her father for the holiday. Maybe Biferno still owns his house in the Dolomites.”

  “Why don’t you use your influence for me, Señora,” I said. This capitulation was a mistake. To appeal to certain peculiar powers is the worst thing you can do. These vulcanized hearts, they only become more resistant when you ask for mercy. “You know I’m in Spain to work on a new type of Baedeker. After Madrid Renata and I, if we got married, would be going on to Vienna, Rome, and Paris. I’m going to buy a new Mercedes-Benz. We could hire a governess for the boy. There’s a great deal of money in this.” I now dropped names, I bragged of my connections in European capitals, I babbled. She was less and less impressed. Maybe she had had a talk with S
zathmar. I don’t know why, but Szathmar loved to give my secrets away. Then I said, “Señora, why don’t we go to the Flamenco Cabaret—the whatch-amacallit that advertises all over the place? I really love strong voices and people hammering with their heels. We can get a sitter for Roger.”

  “Oh, very good,” she said.

  So we spent the evening with gypsies, and I splurged and behaved like a man with plenty of money. I discussed rings and wedding gifts with the crazy old woman at every interval in the guitar music and hand-clapping.

  “What have you seen, going back and forth in Madrid, that might appeal to Renata?” I asked her.

  “Oh, the most elegant leather and suède. Coats and gloves and bags and shoes,” she said. “But I found a street where they sell exquisite cloaks and I talked with the president of the International Cloak Society, Los Amigos de la Capa, and he showed me, with hoods and without hoods, the most stunning velvet dark-green items.”

  “I’ll buy one for her first thing tomorrow,” I said.

  If the Señora had given even the slightest hint of discouragement I might have known where I stood. But she gave me only a dry look. A blink crossed the table. It even seemed to come from the bottom of her eye upward, like a nictitating membrane. My impression was of a forest, and of a clearing from which a serpent departed just as I got to it on a dry and golden autumn afternoon fragrant with leaf mold. I mention this for what it may be worth. Nothing, probably. But I had been going around to the Prado, around the corner from the Ritz, looking at some strange pictures every free moment and especially the burlesque visions of Goya and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. My mind was prepared therefore for visiting images and even hallucinations.

  “I congratulate you on finally making sense,” said the old woman. She didn’t say, mind you, that I had done this in time. She said, “I brought Renata up to make a perfect wife to a serious man.”

  A born patsy, I concluded from this that I was the serious man she meant and that these women had not yet reached an irrevocable decision. I celebrated this possibility by drinking a large amount of Lepanto brandy. As a result I slept soundly and woke rested. In the morning I opened the high windows and enjoyed the traffic wheeling in the sun, the dignified plaza with the white Palace Hotel on the far side. Delicious rolls and coffee were brought with sculptured butter and Hero jam. For ten years I had lived in style, well tailored, with custom-made shirts and cashmere stockings and silk neckties, esthetically satisfying. Now this silly splendor was ending but I, with my experience of the great Depression, knew austerity perfectly well. I had spent most of my life in it. The hardship was not living in a rooming house but becoming just another old guy, no longer capable of inspiring the minds of pretty ladies with May-December calculations or visions of being mistress of a castle like Mrs. Charlie Chaplin, having ten children by an autumnal-to-wintry husband of great stature. Could I bear to live without having this effect on women? And then possibly, just possibly, Renata loved me well enough to accept conditions of austerity. On an income of fifteen thousand dollars, promised by Julius if I were to invest fifty thousand with him, something very nice could be arranged in Segovia. I could even put up with the Señora for the rest of her life. Which I hoped would not be long. No hard feelings, you understand, but it would be nice to lose her soon.

  I tried to reach Thaxter in Paris—the Hotel Pont-Royal was his address there. I also put in a call for Carl Stewart in New York. I wanted to discuss the cultural Baedeker with Thaxter’s publisher myself. I also wanted to make certain that he would pay my bill at the Ritz. Thaxter was not registered at the Pont-Royal. Maybe he was staying with his mother’s friend, the Princesse de Bourbon-Sixte. I was not disturbed. Having discussed the details of my New York call with the switchboard I gave myself ten minutes of tranquillity by the window. I enjoyed the winter freshness and the sun. I tried to experience the sun not as a raging thermonuclear pile of gases and fissions but as a being, an entity with a life and meanings of its own, if you know what I mean.

  Thanks to penicillin, Roger was well enough to go to the Retiro with his grandma, so I had no responsibility for him this morning. I performed thirty push-ups and stood on my head; then I shaved and dressed and strolled out. I left the grand boulevards and found my way into the back streets of the old city. My object was to buy a beautiful cloak for Renata but I remembered Julius’s request for a marine painting and since I had lots of time I went into antique shops and art galleries to have a look. But in all the blue and green, foam and sun, calm and storm, there was always a rock, a sail, a funnel and Julius wasn’t having any of that. Nobody cared to paint the pure element, the inhuman water, the middle of the ocean, the formless deep, the world-enfolding sea. I kept thinking of Shelley among the Euganean Hills:

  Many a green isle needs must be

  In the deep wide sea of Misery ...

  But Julius didn’t see why there needs must be anything in any sea whatever. Like a reverse Noah he sent out his dove brother, beautifully dressed, greatly troubled, anguishing over Renata, to find him water only. Shop assistants, girls, all of them, in black smocks, were bringing up old seascapes from the cellars because I was an American on the loose with traveler’s checks in his pocket. I didn’t feel foreign among Spaniards. They resembled my parents and my immigrant aunts and cousins. We were parted when the Jews were expelled in 1492. Unless you were very stingy with time, that wasn’t really so long ago.

  And I wondered how American my brother Ulick was after all. From the first he had taken the view that America was that materially successful happy land that didn’t need to trouble its mind, and he had dismissed the culture of the genteel and their ideals and aspirations. Now the famous Santayana agreed, in a way, with Ulick. The genteel couldn’t attain their ideals and were very unhappy. Genteel America was handicapped by meagerness of soul, thinness of temper, paucity of talent. The new America of Ulick’s youth only asked for comfort and speed and good cheer, health and spirits, football games, political campaigns, outings, and cheerful funerals. But this new America now revealed a different bent, new kinks. The period of pleasant hard-working exuberance and of practical arts and technics strictly in the service of material life was also ending. Why did Julius want to celebrate the new veins grafted to his heart by miraculous medical technology by buying a water painting? Because even he was no longer all business. He now felt metaphysical impulses too. Maybe he had had it with the ever-alert practical American soul. In six decades he had spotted all the rackets, smelled all the rats, and he was tired of being the absolute and sick master and boss of the inner self. What did a seascape devoid of landmarks signify? Didn’t it signify elemental liberty, release from the daily way and the horror of tension? O God, liberty!

  I knew that if I went to the Prado and asked around, I could find a painter to paint me a seascape. If he charged me two thousand dollars, I could get five from Julius. But I rejected the idea of making a buck on a brother with whom I had bonds of such unearthly satin. I looked over all the marine paintings in one corner of Madrid and then went on to the cape shop.

  There I did business with the president of the international society Los Amigos de la Capa. He was swarthy and small, stood somewhat lopsided, like a jammed accordion, had tooth problems and bad breath. On his dark face were white sycamore patches. As Americans do not tolerate such imperfections in themselves, I felt that I was in the Old World. The shop itself had a broken wooden floor. Cloaks hung from the ceiling everywhere. Women with long poles brought down these beautiful garments, velvet-lined, brocaded, and modeled them for me. Thaxter’s carabiniere costume looked sick by comparison. I bought a black cloak lined with red (black and red—Renata’s best colors) and forked over two hundred dollars in American Express checks. Many thanks and courtesies were exchanged. I shook hands with everyone and couldn’t wait to get back to the Ritz with my parcel to show the Señora.

  But the Señora wasn’t there. In my room I found Roger on the settee, his feet resting on his
packed bag. A chambermaid was keeping an eye on him. “Where’s Grandma?” I said. The maid told me that about two hours before the Señora had been called away urgently. I phoned the cashier, who told me that my guest, the lady in Room 482, had checked out and that her charges would appear on my bill. Then I dialed the concierge. Oh yes, he said, a limousine had taken Madam to the airport. No, Madam’s destination was not known. They had not been asked to arrange tickets for her.

  “Charlie, have you got chocolate?” said Roger.

  “Yes, kid, I brought you some.” He needed all the sweet he could get, and I handed him the entire bar. There was someone whose desire I understood. He desired his Mama. We desired the same person. Poor little guy, I thought, as he peeled the foil from the chocolate and filled his mouth. I had a true feeling for this kid. He was in that feverish beautiful state of pale childhood when we are beating all over with pulses—nothing but a craving defenseless greedy heart. I remembered the condition very well. The chambermaid, when she found that I knew a little Spanish, asked whether Rogelio were my grandson. “No!” I said. It was bad enough that he had been dumped on me, must I be a grandfather, too? Renata was on her honeymoon with Flonzaley. Never having been married herself, the Señora was mad to achieve respectability for her daughter. And Renata, for all of her erotic development, was an obedient child. Perhaps the Señora, when she schemed on her daughter’s behalf, felt herself more youthful. To do me in the eye must have made her decades younger. As for me, I now saw the connection between eternal youth and stupidity. If I was not too old to chase Renata, I was young enough to suffer adolescent heartache.