Ever since the horse-faced septuagenarian started celebrating his birthdays through the press, these two had always attended.
Tesla was changing before their eyes.
At first it seemed that he came from the pits of hell, with its traces of darkness all over him.
But for Miss Jones the man from hell soon disappeared and was replaced by a feeble old gentleman, with two youthful springs beneath his eyebrows.
Then that one vanished too and a prim, catlike man appeared, surrounded by an unearthly aura.
Whether reflected in mirrors or captured in photographs, his face was also changing. He himself did not know whom to expect whenever he looked in a mirror.
“Will anyone weep when this ghostly anachronistic futurist fades away?” whispered Mr. Benda.
Miss Jones took in the glowing horizons and gossamers in Tesla’s dreamy eyes.
“He’s cute,” she whispered back. “I feel like hugging him. He seems to be cold. I feel deeply sorry for him.”
The old man’s emaciation fascinated both Mr. Benda and Miss Jones. His legs were crossed. They noticed his long, narrow, high-laced shoes.
Among the many hats with press passes tucked in the bands, there were always two or three bonnets.
“Erect. Supple. Looks ageless,” these ladies wrote in the notebooks resting on their knees. “Thin and compressed lips. Pointed chin.”
“Prominent forehead. Classic Greek profile. Intellectual pursuits etched on his face. If you take the risk and look into his eyes—you’ll disappear into space…” Miss Jones’s pen danced on the paper.
She had to admit to herself that the smile of this interplanetary old man became a bit disconcerting. His charm came from old-fashioned mannerisms that occasionally radiated something irresistible. He changed the tone of his voice several times during the interview.
Tesla was bored by people and felt pity for them, but he knew how to hide it. These journalists resembled many he had met before—untidy, superficial, smart—almost brilliant but without true faith in themselves. (Each individual is as worthy as the things he takes seriously.) They were envious and condescending toward anyone with a real goal.
Miss Jones flashed her tango smile at Tesla.
“Will you tell us something that you haven’t told anyone?” she asked him.
Don Quixote told a little tale from the “mauve” nineties that could be entitled:
Earthquake
Many years ago, in this very city, on South Fifth Street, Sicilian women with cracked faces arranged oysters on wooden boards covered with seaweed. Rotten cabbage heads rolled down the street. Live fish splashed in buckets. It smelled like smoke. In a side alley some boys played baseball under bedspreads hanging from clotheslines. They felt at home in chaos.
“Tonino! I’ll kill you if the ball messes up the laundry!” shouted mothers from the windows.
Artists from Upper Manhattan used to come with their sketchbooks to this exotic part of the Lower East Side to draw street scenes from “Naples” or “Damascus.” That day, on their way to “Damascus,” the artists felt the ground shift under their feet.
The cobbled street started to shake. The glass panes on the Panetteria Italiana rattled. In the bake house, a chair first jumped up, and then, in two or three hops, limped to the side. Pots and pans started to shake. The head of a crystal chandelier swung sharply. Mysterious waves traveled through what Henry James would call “tiny vulgar streets.”
“Earthquake!” announced an enlightened voice from a window.
Verily, verily I say unto thee, even birds in flight were shaken.
A young woman gave a shrill cry like glass being cut. In a maelstrom of shouts, the cursing of carriage drivers merged with the wailing of pedestrians. Carmine Roca hastily collected his wares. A large eggplant fell onto the cobbled street. The buckets tipped over. The fish flopped in the dust.
All of East Manhattan was shaking.
The conductor of the El stopped the train.
The voices went hoarse as they shouted, “Earthquake!”
Two policemen ran left and right, not knowing where to go first.
“Wait a minute!” said a man from Taormina. “This isn’t an earthquake. An earthquake stops after the first shock, but this is getting stronger. It must be that crazy scientist.”
Tesla chuckled at this point in the story.
“He’s going to kill us all!”
“Let’s kill him before he kills us!”
“Go upstairs, quick!” the people shouted.
The helmet fell over the policeman’s eyes. Stumbling, he rushed up my staircase.
“Actually,” said Nikola Tesla softly, “that morning I fastened a small oscillator on the bearing wall of my laboratory on South Fifth Street. As new oscillations combined with existing oscillations, they amplified and traveled to the foundations of the building. As the whole of Manhattan started to shake, my room was as quiet as the eye of a hurricane.”
“Bam, bam, bam!”
The situation turned serious.
“Bam, bam, bam!” The policemen were banging on my door.
Tesla smiled slyly.
“I hit the oscillator with a hammer. I closed my eyes and sighed as everything quieted down completely.”
On that day the entire Lower East Side was abuzz about the mysterious earthquake. There was a rumor that two women miscarried, that the El derailed, that construction workers jumped off scaffolding, that robbers fled from a bank, that a panicking woman threw her child out the window, that some man who happened to look up caught it, that a bearded Russian swept the silver coins off his eyes with the back of his hand, got up from his deathbed, and took off down the stairs.
With crossed legs, nearly shouting, Tesla concluded his story and hit the top of the desk with his stiff index finger: “I could produce vibrations so strong that the earth’s crust would heave up for hundreds of meters, toss rivers from their riverbeds, shatter buildings, and practically destroy an entire civilization. I could illuminate the entire globe with a mild aurora borealis effect. I could send messages to any and all places in the world.”
There was a pianissimo touch of madness in his words.
“Man reins in and tames Prometheus’s fierce, destructive spark—the titanic power of a waterfall, wind, and tide,” Tesla yelled. “He curbs Jupiter’s thundering bolt and annihilates both time and space. He even turns the magnificent sun into his obedient, diligent slave.”
“Even though he looked into the abyss of the Great War, Progress still has him inebriated,” Mr. Benda whispered into Miss Jones’s magnetic ear.
The honoree was so obsessed with Progress that even the sentimental Miss Jones wondered, Could Progress be mad?
At that moment, a flash of light momentarily blinded the honoree.
On this photograph he looked like the ghost picture of the Swedish Queen Astrid, taken by white light in Copenhagen, with the medium Einer Nielsen.
The old man’s voice was tense. More than anyone else, he had the right to be called the father of the electric era.
“So why aren’t you?” someone cut in.
“I’m not a crook,” he proudly complained. “Money doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does fame.”
Did Tesla’s words make sense? Hmm… He might as well repeat the words of the self-proclaimed knight Don Quixote, who insisted that all he did “was in accordance with the rules of knighthood.” Tesla did not believe in people anymore, but he still believed in Progress, just as his father believed in God—despite Voltaire.
Tesla was hesitant to take his leave.
The Angel waited for him in his hotel room: “Jacob, let’s wrestle!”
“What was he like as a young man?” the beauty asked the fat, enamored Mr. Benda.
“Self-possessed and gullible about the world and its evils,” answered Benda. “And he was always a step ahead of his time.”
“Isn’t it more fun to dance cheek to cheek with one’s time?” asked M
iss Jones, ever the coquette.
A denizen of the most exclusive hotel in the world, a member of the Four Hundred in New York society, a friend of Astor and Vanderbilt, of Twain and Dvořák, of Vivekananda, and so on, and so on…
Everything that was known about him was contradictory.
Hadn’t that Tesla fellow won the Nobel Prize?
Hadn’t he ripped up a million-dollar check?
Some wrote that his eyes were quite bright while others insisted that they were small and dark; some said he would not shake hands, while others remembered his firm grip.
He orchestrated galaxies of lightbulbs like a conductor.
Abhorred flies and earrings. Liked beggars and birds.
He caused the Tunguska catastrophe. Wanted to control climate on earth and turn it into a lightbulb. Hovered above while they applauded him. He was one of those who disturb the sleep of the world.
He was like the African deity who painted one half of his face blue and the other white, so those from his left side asked, Have you seen the blue god? while those from the right inquired, Have you seen the white god?
Surrounded by cowards, he was the only one who had the courage to let the hurricane blow through his body. He stood on the blue stage under the rain of sparks, as in a dream.
He was a Neoplatonist, inspired by a desire to enter the mind of God. Like Isaac Luria, he released “holy sparks” that were held captive in the physical world.
No! He’s a madman and a crook! A homosexual Balkan mythomaniac! A friendless monomaniac.
No! He’s a man with the mark of Cain.
He’s the incomprehensible. The very attempt to define what he represents is offensive. If we deprived the modern world of his inventions…
“What would human solitude feed on without narcissism?” whispered Miss Jones to Mr. Benda of the New York Sun.
For years, Tesla lived in bliss. He was a flaring, impersonal force. He created earthquakes. He was the first human god of thunder on earth. He avoided women and germs. Satan caressed him with high voltage currents. But never a woman.
“Shush…”
“Hasn’t he ever?”
CHAPTER 117
Forgotten
On one Monday…
In 1828…
They found a strange boy in the town square of Nuremberg.
He was sixteen years old and had a note in his hand: “I want to be a cavalry man like my father.”
He bore a striking resemblance to the Grand Dukes of Baden. Because he had spent his entire life in a dungeon, he could not speak. He only knew the jailer who gave him food. When they led him out, light struck him like a rock, and he fainted. He loved twilight. In the dark, he was able to read and to see colors. A wildcat that would attack everyone else grew calm next to him.
People educated him and wounded him.
People taught him his name: Kaspar Hauser.
Throughout Europe, he turned into a symbol of bottomless solitude.
How can one describe a rainy day in New York in the thirties?
The lapels of the coats were turned up. Hats pushed against hats on the streets. Prohibition was finally over. “No more thirst!” the winners celebrated. Inside quiet bars, martinis and cocktails glowed like yellow and red lamps. Ashtrays brimmed with rouged cigarette butts. Someone played the piano in a sly manner. The sounds dripped… Men and women finished their dinner and sighed, “Oh, God!” Sappy movies started to idealize the tenements. In the shadowy apartments in the former tenement buildings fingers turned knobs. The green eye came on. Roosevelt’s aristocratic voice vibrated: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
In his room, the gray-haired somnambulist read an old newspaper:
The Crowd Packed Times Square to See the Arrival of 1910. Theaters and Hotels Full! Woman Set on Fire in the Café Martin at the Stroke of Midnight! Revelers Panick. Morgan Pays a Visit to President Taft. Francolsa Mutarsolo and Emil Arthur Springer Issued a Wedding License. She Is Fifty-Seven Years Old, the Green Bridegroom Is Twenty-Three! Professor Percival Lowell Explains That They Build New Canals on Mars, Causing Disturbance of Dust on the Planet.
Tesla placed the newspaper back with the other yellowing papers and went out to take a walk.
The whole world was lit up like the World Exposition in Chicago once was.
Sometimes he had Hobson clearing his throat by his side, the Spanish-American War hero whose cheeks women flocked to kiss during the gay nineties. Sometimes it was the pug-nosed and persistent Kenneth Swezey. Sometimes the biographer John O’Neill took a walk with Tesla, and sometimes visitors from Yugoslavia. Dwarfed by Manhattan, they were happy to talk with one of their own. His countrymen threw furtive glances at him and compared his features with the drawings on cigarette papers from their childhood, under which it read, “Here’s the feature of his face, whose works we all embrace.”
On the radio, Rudy Vallee sang, “Brother, can you spare a dime?,” the sad song of the Depression.
Workers ate their breakfast sitting on girders fifty stories above the city.
With its ever rising towers, New York rushed into the sky.
The Manhattan Company Building was the tallest building in the world.
William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building overtook it.
For a few months, it wore a crown.
Then the Empire State Building outgrew it.
Tesla watched them on his walk through the city.
What’s the point of obsession with the biggest? he wondered. The earth isn’t the largest planet, or the planet closest to the sun, but life exists only on it.
He held Dane by his hand and carefully—as if he considered death to be some sort of disability—led him across the street.
He read Magnetic Fields by Philippe Soupault, ate his pathetic “factor actus,” and praised his own subconscious plan for self-annihilation.
The angelic fragrance of a Chinese laundry wafted by him as he passed. A wooden Indian stared at him with its white eyes. The sound of guitars and irregular terza intervals came from a Cuban bar. (Jesus would have loved to have had a drink in such a place right after they took him down from his cross.) In an Italian café, a gigantic espresso machine with an eagle hissed like an airplane coming in for a landing.
Beneath the elevated train on Second and Third Avenues, Don Quixote stalked through an interplay of shadows that made him dizzy. He strolled by stone churches in the canyons between the buildings. Fire escapes and water tanks on the roofs rose above him. Time and again, he wondered at the trees planted on the terraces of the ziggurats. He looked up at the sky that was squeezed between the cliffs and his head spun. From Pennsylvania Station, trains rattled, fired out into the world.
Dreams, movies, and neon signs were mixed up with everyday life.
Tesla watched the movies Vermeer from Delft directed. Blonds stared at him through a veil of smoke. Shady characters dressed in tweed chased femme fatales down wet streets. Shadows were as deep as chasms. Fans turned slowly in bars. On the screen, the train wheels rattled in the smoke. Sheets of illuminated rain whipped the window-panes while the hero and his fiancée left the station. Then Bela Lugosi focused his crazed and anguished eyes on Tesla from the screen.
“I love to go to the movies,” our hero would say. “I look through the pictures like through glass. It’s relaxing, and yet I can think.”
Deaf from solitude, Tesla left the movie theater.
He blinked and fed on the city noise. All around him, the dangerous and enchanting New York screeched, growled, hummed, and screamed. The only city on the planet made of villages. He listened to the barking of the elevated train as it curved.
It grew dark. Automobile headlights in the streets became something sacred. Seen from above, the liquid jewelry slowly crawled along the streets.
The view of New York was a drug.
Neon oracles on the roofs…
Pulse! Pulse!
… repeated the same things.
“Part of
my laboratory has always been out in the streets,” the hermit smiled.
The tireless stroller pushed through the throng of people in front of Broadway theaters. In front of the entrance, a lightly dressed girl hugged herself and shivered.
A newsboy with a flat cap practiced Tarzan’s scream with a breaking voice.
“I need to apologize?” a scrawny man shouted at a woman. “I’m too skinny to apologize!”
Once again, like before, couples sniffed each other all around him. They rubbed against each other and squeezed each other—the couples. They were barely able to tear apart their honey-sweet lips in the movie theaters, the entrances, the alleys—the couples. In the hotel rooms—the couples.
Undulating roundness. Tightness. Possessing. Recoiling and submitting, dissolving in affluence and sensuality. The couples.
Each woman was a boundless promise.
Each young man wanted to be a bull, and a swan, and a shower of gold.
Lights hovered, and the city burned around our Kaspar Hauser. Around the wrestling ring in Harlem, the spectators howled. Faust and Job tossed each other on the mat. King Kong roared from the Empire State Building. In Caribbean restaurants, cooks softly prayed to Yemanja, the African goddess of the sea. In a bar in Greenwich Village, the Grand Inquisitor accused Jesus of giving people too much freedom.
Nikola Tesla entered the lobby of his hotel and nodded at the porter in livery.
An unread daily paper waited on the table.
In the paper, Roosevelt shook hands with a forgotten man.
“You remembered me,” the Forgotten told him.
CHAPTER 118
The Bride of Frankenstein
Three rows of neon signs rose above the movie theater. Tesla entered the Palace of Illusions on his own two feet, and left it on someone else’s. Whenever he stepped into the lobby, freshness enveloped him.
The lobby was plastered with mysterious semi-profiles and sensuous smiles of movie stars.
The sweetshop offered candy and cigars. The lobby appeared to be a cross between a mosque, the Kremlin, and a Chinese restaurant. Ornamental wriggling lines created an illusion of movement. On the boxes, even ornaments were ornamented.
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