Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  “Do we have to do this over?” I said. He explained nothing. He stood with his head angrily hooked forward until the Thun-derbird came around. Once more I had to get in.

  Our next stop was in the Hancock Building, somewhere on the sixtieth or seventieth story. It looked like a private apartment, and yet it seemed also to be a place of business. It was furnished in decorator style with plastic, trick art objects hanging on the walls, geometrical forms of the trompe l’oeil type that intrigue business people. They are peculiarly vulnerable to art racketeers. The gentleman who lived here was elderly, in a brown hopsack sports jacket with gold threads and a striped shirt on his undisciplined belly. White hair was slicked back upon his narrow head. The liver stains on his hands were large. Under the eyes and about the nose he did not look altogether well. As he sat on the low sofa which, judging by the way it gave under him, was stuffed with down, his alligator loafers extended far into the ivory shag carpet. The pressure of his belly brought out the shape of his phallus on his thigh. Long nose, gaping lip, and wattles went with all this velvet, the gold-threaded hopsack, brocade, satin, the alligator skin, and the trompe l’oeil objects. From the conversation I gathered that his line was jewelry and that he dealt with the underworld. Perhaps he was also a fence—how would I know? Rinaldo Cantabile and his wife had an anniversary coming and he was shopping for a bracelet. A Japanese houseboy served drinks. I am not a great drinker but today I understandably wanted whisky and I took another double shot of Black Label. From the skyscraper I could contemplate the air of Chicago on this short December afternoon. A ragged western sun spread orange light over the dark shapes of the town, over the branches of the river and the black trusses of bridges. The lake, gilt silver and amethyst, was ready for its winter cover of ice. I happened to be thinking that if Socrates was right, that you could learn nothing from trees, that only the men you met in the street could teach you something about yourself, I must be in a bad way, running off into the scenery instead of listening to my human companions. Evidently I did not have a good stomach for human companions. To get relief from uneasiness or heaviness of heart I was musing about the water. Socrates would have given me a low mark. I seemed rather to be on the Wordsworth end of things —trees, flowers, water. But architecture, engineering, electricity, technology had brought me to this sixty-fourth story. Scandinavia had put this glass in my hand, Scotland had filled it with whisky, and I sat there recalling certain marvelous facts about the sun, namely, that the light of other stars when it entered the sun’s gravitational field, had to bend. The sun wore a shawl made of this universal light. So Einstein, sitting thinking of things, had foretold. And observations made by Arthur Eddington during an eclipse proved it. Finding before seeking.

  Meantime the phone rang continually and not a single call seemed local. It was all Las Vegas, L.A., Miami, and New York. “Send your boy over to Tiffany and find out what they get for an item like that,” our host was saying. I then heard him speak of estate-jewels, and of an Indian prince who was trying to sell a whole lot of stuff in the USA and inviting bids.

  At one interval, while Cantabile was fussing over a tray of diamonds (nasty, that white stuff seemed to me), the old gentleman spoke to me. He said, “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said. “From the whirlpool at the Downtown Health Club, I think.”

  “Oh yeah sure, I met you with that lawyer fellow. He’s a big talker.”

  “Szathmar?”

  “Alec Szathmar.”

  Cantabile said, fingering diamonds and not lifting his face from the dazzle of the velvet tray, “I know that son of a bitch Szathmar. He claims to be an old buddy of yours, Charlie.”

  “True,” I said, “we were all boys at school. Including George Swiebel.”

  “In the old stone age that must have been,” said Cantabile.

  Yes, I had met this old gentleman in the hot chemical bath at the club, the circular bubbling whirlpool where people sat sweating, gossiping about sports, taxes, television programs, best sellers, or chatting about Acapulco and numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I didn’t know but what this old fence had one of those infamous cabanas near the swimming pool to which young chicks were invited for the siesta. There had been some scandal and protest over this. What was done behind drawn drapes in the cabanas was no one’s business, of course, but some of the old guys, demonstrative and exhibitionistic, had been seen fondling their little dolls on the sun-terrace. One had removed his false teeth in public to give a girl soul kisses. I had read an interesting letter in the Tribune about this. A retired history teacher living high up in the club building had written a letter saying that Tiberius—the old girl was showing off—Tiberius in the grottoes of Capri had had nothing on these grotesque lechers. But what did these old characters, in the rackets or in First Ward politics, care about indignant school-mams and classical allusions. If they had gone to see Fellini’s Satyricon at the Woods Theater it was only to get more sex ideas not because they were studying Imperial Rome. I myself had seen some of these spider-bellied old codgers on the sundeck taking the breasts of teen-age hookers into their hands. It occurred to me that the Japanese houseboy was also a judo or karate expert as in 007 movies, there were so many valuables in the apartment. When Rinaldo said he’d like to see more Accutron watches, the fellow brought out a few dozen, flat as wafers. These may or may not have been stolen. My heated imagination couldn’t be relied upon for guidance here. I was excited, I admit, by these currents of criminality. I could feel the need to laugh rising, mounting, always a sign that my weakness for the sensational, my American, Chicagoan (as well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and extremes, was aroused. I knew that fancy thieving was a big thing in Chicago. It was said that if you knew one of these high-rise superrich Fagin-types you could obtain luxury goods at half the retail price. The actual shoplifting was done by addicts. They were compensated in heroin. As for the police, they were said to be paid off. They kept the merchants from making too much noise. Anyway there was insurance. There was also the well-known “shrinkage” or annual loss reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one’s Chicago view of society. Naïveté was something you couldn’t afford.

  Item by item, I tried to assess what Cantabile wore as I sat there in soft upholstery with my scotch on the rocks, his hat coat suit boots (the boots may have been unborn calf) his equestrian gloves, and I made an effort to imagine how he had obtained these articles through criminal channels, from Field’s, from Saks Fifth Avenue, from Abercrombie & Fitch. He was not, so far as I could judge, taken absolutely seriously by the old fence.

  Rinaldo was intrigued with one of the watches and slipped it on. His old watch he tossed to the Japanese who caught it. I thought the moment had come to recite my piece and I said, “Oh, by the way, Ronald, I owe you some dough from the other night.”

  “Where from?” said Cantabile.

  “From the poker game at George Swiebel’s. I guess it slipped your mind.”

  “Oh I know that guy Swiebel with all the muscles,” said the old gentleman. “He’s terrific company. And you know he cooks a great bouillabaisse, I’ll give him that.”

  “I inveigled Ronald and his cousin Emil into this game,” I said. “It really was my fault. Anyhow, Ronald cleaned up on us. Ronald is one of the poker greats. I ended up about six hundred dollars in the hole and he had to take my IOU—I’ve got the dough on me, Ronald, and I better give it to you while we both remember.”

  “Okay.” Again Cantabile, without looking, crumpled the notes into his jacket pocket. His performance was better than mine, though I was doing my very best. But then he had the honor side of the deal, the affront. To be angry was his right and that was no small advantage.

  When we were out of the building again I said, “Wasn’t that okay?”

  “Okay—yes! Okay!�
�� he said loud and bitter. Clearly he wasn’t ready to let me off. Not yet.

  “I figure that old pelican will pass the word around that I paid you. Wasn’t that the object?”

  I added, almost to myself, “I wonder who makes pants like the pants the old boy was wearing. The fly alone must have been three feet long.”

  But Cantabile was still stoking his anger. “Christ!” he said. I didn’t like the way he was staring at me under those straight bodkin brows.

  “Well, then, that does it,” I said. “I can get a cab.”

  Cantabile caught me by the sleeve. “You wait,” he said. I didn’t really know what to do. After all, he carried a gun. I had for a long time thought about having a gun too, Chicago being what it is. But they’d never give me a license. Cantabile, without a license, packed a pistol. There was one index of the difference between us. Only God knew what consequences such differences might bring. “Aren’t you enjoying our afternoon?” said Cantabile, and grinned.

  Attempting to laugh this off I failed. The globus hystericus interfered. My throat felt sticky.

  “Get in, Charlie.”

  Again I sat in the crimson bucket seat (the supple fragrant leather kept reminding me of blood, pulmonary blood) and fumbled for the seat belt—you never can find those cursed buckles.

  “Don’t fuck with the belt, we’re not going that far.”

  Out of this information I drew what relief I could. We were on Michigan Boulevard, heading south. We drew up beside a skyscraper under construction, a headless trunk swooping up, swarming with lights. Below the early darkness now closing with December speed over the glistening west, the sun like a bristling fox jumped beneath the horizon. Nothing but a scarlet afterglow remained. I saw it between the El pillars. As the tremendous trusses of the unfinished skyscraper turned black, the hollow interior filled with thousands of electric points resembling champagne bubbles. The completed building would never be so beautiful as this. We got out, slamming the car doors, and I followed Cantabile over some plank-bedding laid down for the trucks. He seemed to know his way around. Maybe he had clients among the hard-hats. If he was in the juice racket. Then again if he was a usurer he wouldn’t come here after dark and risk getting pushed from a beam by one of these tough guys. They must be reckless. They drink and spend recklessly enough. I like the way these steeplejacks paint the names of their girlfriends on inaccessible girders. From below you often see DONNA or SUE. I suppose they bring the ladies on Sunday to point to their love-offerings eight hundred feet up. They fall to death now and then. Anyway Cantabile had brought his own hard hats. We put them on. Everything was prearranged. He said he was related by blood to some of the supervisory personnel. He also mentioned that he did lots of business hereabouts. He said he had connections with the contractor and the architect. He told me things much faster than I could discount them. However, we rose in one of the big open elevators, up, up.

  How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, appreciation, glee—yes I appreciated his ingenuity. It seemed to me, however, that we were rising too high, too far. Where were we? Which button had he pressed? By daylight I had often admired the mantis-like groups of cranes, tipped with orange paint. The tiny bulbs, which seemed so dense from below, were sparsely strung through. I don’t know how far we actually went, but it was far enough. We had as much light about us as the time of day had left to give, steely and freezing, keen, with the wind ringing in the empty squares of wound-colored rust and beating against the hanging canvases. On the east, violently rigid was the water, icy, scratched, like a plateau of solid stone, and the other way was a tremendous effusion of low-lying color, the last glow, the contribution of industrial poisons to the beauty of the Chicago evening. We got out. About ten hard-hats who had been waiting pushed into the elevator at once. I wanted to call to them “Wait!” They went down in a group, leaving us nowhere. Cantabile seemed to know where he was going, but I had no faith in him. He was capable of faking anything. “Come on,” he said. I followed, but I was going slowly. He waited for me. There were a few windbreaks up here on the fiftieth or sixtieth floor, and those, the wind was storming. My eyes ran. I held on to a pillar and he said, “Come on Granny, come on check-stopper.”

  I said, “I have leather heels. They skid.”

  “You better not chicken out.”

  “No, this is it,” I said. I put my arms around the pillar. I wouldn’t move.

  Actually we had come far enough to suit him. “Now,” he said, “I want to show you just how much your dough means to me. You see this?” He held up a fifty-dollar bill. He rested his back on a steel upright and stripping off his fancy equestrian gloves began to fold the money. It was incomprehensible at first. Then I understood. He was making a child’s paper glider of it. Hitching back his raglan sleeve, he sent the glider off with two fingers. I watched it speeding through the strung lights with the wind behind it out into the steely atmosphere, darker and darker below. On Michigan Boulevard they had already put up the Christmas ornaments, winding tiny bubbles of glass from tree to tree. They streamed down there like cells under a microscope.

  My chief worry now was how to get down. Though the papers underplay it people are always falling off. But however scared and harassed, my sensation-loving soul also was gratified. I knew that it took too much to gratify me. The gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high. I must bring it down again. It was excessive. I must, I knew, change everything.

  He sailed off more of the fifties. Tiny paper planes. Origami (my knowledgeable mind, keeping up its indefatigable pedantry —my lexical busybody mind!), the Japanese paper-folder’s art. An international congress of paper-aircraft freaks had been held, I think, last year. It seemed last year. The hobbyists were mathematicians and engineers.

  Cantabile’s green bills went off like finches, like swallows and butterflies, all bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant. They brought crepuscular fortune to people down in the streets.

  “The last two I’m going to keep,” said Cantabile. “To blow them on drinks and dinner for us.”

  “If I ever get down alive.”

  “You did fine. Go on, lead the way, start back.”

  “These leather heels are awfully tricky. I hit an ordinary piece of wax paper in the street the other day and went down. Maybe I should take my shoes off.”

  “Don’t be crazy. Go on your toes.”

  If you didn’t think of falling, the walkways were more than adequate. I crept along, fighting paralysis of the calves and the thighs. My face was sweating faster than the wind could dry it as I took hold of the final pillar. I thought that Cantabile had been treading much too close behind. More hard-hats waiting for the elevator probably took us for union guys or architect’s men. It was night now and the hemisphere was frozen all the way to the Gulf. Gladly I fell into the seat of the Thunderbird when we got down. He removed his hard hat and mine. He cocked the wheel and started the motor. He should really let me go now. I had given him enough satisfaction.

  But he was off again, driving fast. He sped away toward the next light. My head hung back over the top of the seat in the position you take to stop a nosebleed. I didn’t know exactly where we were. “Look, Rinaldo,” I said. “You’ve made your point. You bashed my car, you’ve run me all day long, and you’ve just given me the scare of my life. Okay, I see it wasn’t the money that upset you. Let’s stuff the rest of it down a sewer so I can go home.”

  “You’ve had it with me?”

  “It’s been a whole day of atonement.”

  “You’ve seen enough of the whatchamacallems?—I learned some new words at the poker game from you.”

  “Which words?”

  “Proles,” he said, “Lumps. Lumpenproletartat. You gave us a little talk about Karl Marx.”

  “My lord, I did carry on, didn’t I. Completely unbuttoned. What got into me!”

  “You wanted to mix with riffraff and the criminal element. You went slumming, Charlie, and you had a great time playing
cards with us dumbheads and social rejects.”

  “I see. I was insulting.”

  “Kind of. But you were interesting, here and there, about the social order and how obsessed the middle class was with the Lumpenproletariat. The other fellows didn’t know what in hell you were talking about.” For the first time, Cantabile spoke more mildly to me. I sat up and saw the river flashing night-lights on the right, and the Merchandise Mart decorated for Christmas. We were going to Gene and Georgetti’s old steak house, just off the spur of the Elevated train. Parking among other sinister luxury cars we went into the drab old building where—hurrah for opulent intimacy!—a crash of jukebox music fell on us like Pacific surf. The high-executive bar was crowded with executive drinkers and lovely companions. The gorgeous mirror was peopled with bottles and resembled a group photograph of celestial graduates.

  “Giulio,” Rinaldo told the waiter. “A quiet table, and we don’t want to sit by the rest rooms.”

  “Upstairs, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “Why not?” I said. I was shaky and didn’t want to wait at the bar for seating. It would lengthen the evening, besides.

  Cantabile stared as if to say, Who asked you! But he then consented. “Okay, upstairs. And two bottles of Piper Heidsieck.”

  “Right away, Mr. Cantabile.”

  In the Capone days hoodlums fought mock battles with champagne at banquets. They jigged the bottles up and down and shot each other with corks and foaming wine, all in black tie, and like a fun-massacre.

  “Now I want to tell you something,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “and it’s a different subject altogether. I’m married, you know.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “To a marvelous beautiful intelligent woman.”