Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

Sexual ideas had distorted the minds of people who were under oath, who were virtually priests. Were you inclined to believe that mania and crime and catastrophe were the destiny of mankind in this vile century? Demmie by her innocence, by beauty and virtue, drew masses of evidence from the environment to support this. A strange demonism revealed itself to her. But she was not intimidated. She told me that she was sexually fearless. “And they’ve tried to pull everything on me,” she said. I believed her.

  Dr. Ellenbogen said that she was a bad marriage-risk. He was not amused by the anecdotes I related about Mother and Daddy Vonghel. The Vonghels had made a bus tour of the Holy Land, obese Mother Vonghel bringing her own peanut-butter jars and Daddy his cans of Elberta cling peaches. Mother squeezed into the tomb of Lazarus but could not get out again. Arabs had to be sent for to free her. But I was delighted, despite Ellenbogen’s warnings, with the oddities of Demmie and her family. When she lay suffering, her deep eye sockets filled with tears and she gripped the middle finger of her left hand convulsively with the other fingers. She was strongly drawn to sickbeds, hospitals, terminal cancers, and funerals. But her goodness was genuine and deep. She bought me postage stamps and commuter tickets, she cooked briskets of beef and pots of paella for me, lined my dresser drawers with tissue paper, put away my scarf in moth-flakes. She couldn’t do elementary arithmetic but she could repair complicated machines. Guided by instinct she went into the colored wires and tubes of the radio and made it play. It seldom stopped broadcasting hillbilly music and religious services from everywhere. She received from home The Upper Room, A Devotional Guide for Family and Individual Use, with its Thought of the Month: “Christ’s Renewing Power.” Or “Read and consider: Habakkuk 2:2-4.” I read this publication myself. The Song of Solomon 8:7: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” I loved her clumsy knuckles, her long head growing gold hair. We sat on Barrow Street playing gin rummy. She gripped and shuffled the deck, growling, “I’m going to clean you out, sucker.” She snapped down the cards and shouted, “Gin! Count ‘em up!” Her knees were apart.

  “It’s the open view of Shangri-La that takes my mind off these cards, Demmie,” I said.

  We also played double solitaire hearts and Chinese checkers. She led me to antique-jewelry shops. She loved old brooches and rings all the more because dead ladies once had worn them, but what she mostly wanted of course was an engagement ring. She made no secret of that. “Buy me this ring, Charlie. Then I can show my family that it’s on the up-and-up.”

  “They won’t like me no matter how big an opal you get,” I said.

  “No, that’s true. They’ll hit the roof. There’s all kinds of sin in you. They wouldn’t be impressed by Broadway. You write things that aren’t so. Only the Bible is true. But Daddy is flying down to South America to spend Christmas at his Mission. The one he’s such a big giver to, down in Colombia, near Venezuela. I’m going with him and tell him that we’re getting married.”

  “Ah, don’t go, Demmie,” I said.

  “Down in that jungle with savages all around you’ll seem a lot more normal to him,” she said.

  “Tell him what I’m making. The money should help do it all,” I said. “But I don’t want you to go. Is your mother coming too?”

  “Not here. I couldn’t take that. No, she’s staying back in Mount Coptic, giving a Christmas party for the kids in the hospital. They’ll be sorry.”

  These meditations were supposed to make you tranquil. To look behind the appearances you had to cultivate an absolute calm. And I didn’t feel very calm now. The heavy shadow of a jet from Midway airport crossed the room, reminding me of the death of Demmie Vonghel. Just before Christmas in the year of my success she and Daddy Vonghel died in a plane crash in South America. Demmie was carrying my Broadway scrapbook. Perhaps she had just begun to show it to him when the crash occurred. No one ever knew quite where this was—somewhere in the vicinity of the Orinoco River. I spent several months in the jungle looking for her.

  It was at this time that Humboldt put through the blood-brother check I had given him. Six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents was a smashing sum. But it wasn’t the money that mattered much. What I felt was that Humboldt should have respected my grief. I thought, What a time he chose to make his move! How could he do that! To hell with the money. But he reads the papers. He knows she’s gone!

  eighteen

  I now lay there grieving. Again! This wasn’t what I was looking for when I lay down. And I was actually grateful when a brassy hammering at the door made me get up. It was Cantabile on the knocker, forcing his way into my sanctuary. I was annoyed with old Roland Stiles. I paid Stiles to keep intruders and pests away while I was meditating but he wasn’t at his post in the receiving room today. Just before Christmas tenants wanted help with trees and such. He was much in demand, I suppose.

  Cantabile had brought a young woman with him.

  “Your wife, I presume?”

  “Don’t presume. She’s not my wife. This is Polly Palomino. She’s a friend. Of the family, she’s a friend. She was Lucy’s roommate at the Woman’s College in Greensboro. Before Radcliffe.”

  White-skinned, wearing no brassiere, Polly entered the light and began strolling about my parlor. The red of her hair was entirely natural. Stockingless (in December, in Chicago), minimally dressed, she walked on platform shoes of maximum thickness. Men of my generation never have gotten used to the strength, size, and beauty of women’s legs, formerly covered up.

  Cantabile and Polly examined my flat. He touched the furniture, she stooped to feel the carpet, turning over a corner to read the label. Yes, it was a genuine Kirman. She studied the pictures. Cantabile then sat down on the silky plush bolstered sofa, saying, “This is whorehouse luxury.”

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable. I have to go to court.”

  Cantabile said to Polly, “Charlie’s ex-wife goes on suing and suing him.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. You’ve given her a lot already, Charlie?”

  “A lot.”

  “He’s shy. He’s ashamed to say how much,” Cantabile told Polly.

  I said to Polly, “Apparently I told Rinaldo the whole story of my life at a poker game.”

  “Polly knows it. I told her about yesterday. You did most of the talking after the poker game.” He turned toward Polly. “Charlie was too smashed to drive his 280-SL so I took him home and Emil brought the T-bird. You told me plenty, Charlie. Where do you get these fancy goose-quill toothpicks? They’re scattered all over. You seem very neurotic about having crumbs between your teeth.”

  “They’re sent from London.”

  “Like your cashmere socks, and your face soap from Floris?”

  Yes, I must have been eager to talk. I had given Cantabile plenty of information and he had made extensive inquiries besides, obviously intending to develop a relationship with me. “Why do you let your Ex bug you like this? And you have a lousy big-shot lawyer. Forrest Tomchek. You see I asked around. Tomchek is top-drawer in the divorce-establishment. He divorces corporation biggies. But you’re nothing to him. It was your pal Szathmar who put you on to this prick, isn’t that right? Now, who is your wife’s lawyer?”

  “A fellow named Maxie Pinsker.”

  “Yiy! Pinsker, that man-eating kike! She’s picked the worst there is. He’ll chop up your liver with egg and onion. Yuch, Charlie! this side of your life is disgusting. You refuse to be alert about your interests. You let people dump on you. It starts with your pals. I know something about your friend Szathmar. Nobody asks you to dinner, they invite him and he puts on his louse-up Charlie routine. He feeds confidential information about you to gossip columnists. Always kissing Schneiderman’s ass, which is so low to the ground you have to stand in a foxhole to reach it. He’ll get a kickback from Tomchek. Tomchek will sell you to that cannibal Pinsker. Pinsker will throw you to the judge. The judge will give your wife … what’s her
name?”

  “Denise,” I said, habitually helpful.

  “He’ll give Denise your skin and she’ll hang it in the den. —Well, Polly, does Charles look like Charles is supposed to look?”

  Of course Cantabile couldn’t bear his elation. Last night he naturally had to tell someone what he had done. As Humboldt after his triumph with Longstaff ran straight to the Village to get on top of Ginnie so Cantabile had roared off in his Thunder-bird to spend the night with Polly, to celebrate his triumph and my abasement. It made me think what a tremendous force the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA. This is why Americans can’t keep secrets. In WW II we were the despair of the British because we couldn’t shut our mouths. Luckily the Germans couldn’t believe we were so gabby. They figured we were deliberately leaking false information. And it’s all done to prove that we’re not so tedious as we seem but are running over with charm and inside information. So I said to myself, Okay, be elated, you mink-mustached bastard. Brag about what you did to me and the 280-SL. I’ll catch up with you. At the same time I was glad that Renata was taking me away, forcing me to go abroad again. Renata had the right idea. For Cantabile obviously was making plans for our future. I wasn’t at all sure that I could defend myself from his singular attack.

  Polly was considering how to answer Cantabile’s question and he himself, pale and handsome, was studying me almost with affection. Still buttoned in the raglan coat and wearing the pinch hat, his beautiful boots on my Chinese lacquer coffee table, he was dark-bristled and wore a look of fatigue and satisfaction. He was not fresh now, he was smelly, but he was flying high.

  “I think Mr. Citrine is still a good-looking man,” Polly said.

  “Thank you, dear girl.”

  “He must have been. Slim but solid, with big Oriental eyes and probably a thick dick. Now he’s a faded beauty,” said Cantabile. “I know it’s killing him. He’s losing the clean jawline. Notice the dewlaps and the neck wrinkles. His nostrils are getting big and hungry-like, and they have white hair. It’s a sign with beagles and horses too, turning white around the muzzle. Oh, he’s unusual all right. A rare animal. Like the last of the orange flamingos. He should be protected as a national resource. And a sexy little bastard. He’s slept with everything under the sun. Awfully vain, too. Charlie and his pal George jog and train like a couple of adolescent jocks. They stand on their heads, take vitamin E, and play racquet ball. Though they tell me you’re a dog on the courts, Charlie.”

  “It’s a bit late for the Olympics.”

  “He has a sedentary trade and needs the exercise,” said Polly. She had a slightly bent nose as well as the fresh, shining red hair. I was growing fond of her—disinterestedly, for her human qualities.

  “The main reason for all the fitness is that he has a young broad, and young broads, unless they have a terrific sense of humor, don’t like being squeezed by a potbelly.”

  I explained to Polly, “I exercise because I suffer from an arthritic neck. Or did. As I grew older my head seemed to become heavier, my neck weaker.”

  The strain was largely at the top. In the crow’s-nest from which the modern autonomous person keeps watch. But of course Cantabile was right. I was vain, and I hadn’t reached the age of renunciation. Whatever that is. It wasn’t entirely vanity, though. Lack of exercise made me feel ill. I used to hope that there would be less energy available to my neuroses as I grew older. Tolstoi thought that people got into trouble because they ate steak and drank vodka and coffee and smoked cigars. Overcharged with calories and stimulants and doing no useful labor they fell into carnality and other sins. At this point I always remembered that Hitler had been a vegetarian, so it wasn’t necessarily the meat that was to blame. Heart-energy, more likely, or a wicked soul, maybe even karma—paying for the evil of a past life in this one. According to Steiner, whom I was now reading heavily, the spirit learns from resistance—the material body resists and opposes it. In the process the body wears out. But I had not gotten good value for my deterioration. Seeing me with my young daughters, silly people sometimes asked if these were my grandchildren. Me! Was it possible! And I saw that I was getting that look of a badly stuffed trophy or mounted specimen that I always associated with age, and was horrified. Also I recognized from photographs that I wasn’t the man I had been. I should have been able to say, “Yes, maybe I do seem about to cave in but you should see my spiritual balance sheet.” But as yet I was in no position to say that, either. I look better than the dead, of course, but at times only just.

  I said, “Well, thanks for dropping in, Mrs. Palomino. You’ll have to excuse me, though. I’m being called for and I haven’t shaved or eaten lunch.”

  “How do you shave, electric or steel?”

  “Remington.”

  “The electric Abercrombie & Fitch is the only machine. I think I’ll shave, too. And what’s for lunch?”

  “I’m having yoghurt. But I can’t offer you any.”

  “We’ve just eaten. Plain yoghurt? Do you put anything in it? What about a hard-boiled egg? Polly will boil you an egg. Polly, go in the kitchen and boil Charlie an egg. How did you say you were getting downtown?”

  “I’m being called for.”

  “Don’t be upset about the Mercedes. I’ll get you three 280-SLs. You’re too big a man to hold a mere car against me. Things are going to be different. Look, why don’t we meet after court and have a drink? You’ll need it. Besides, you should talk more. You listen too much. It’s not good for you.”

  He relaxed even more conspicuously, supporting both arms on the round back of the sofa as if to show that he was not a man I could shoo out. He wished also to transmit a sense of luxurious intimacy with pretty and fully gratified Polly. I had my doubts about that. “This kind of life is very bad for you,” he said. “I’ve seen guys come out of solitary confinement and I know the signs. Why do you live South, surrounded by the slums? Is it because you have egghead friends on the Midway? You spoke about this Professor Richard What’s-His-Face.”

  “Durnwald.”

  “That’s the man. But you also told how some pork-chop chased you down the middle of the street. You should rent near-North in a high-security building with an underground garage. Or are you here because of these professors’ wives? The Hyde Park ladies are easy to knock over.” Then he said, “Do you own a gun at least?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Christ, here’s another example of what I mean. All you people are soft about the realities. This is a Fort Dearborn situation, don’t you know that? And only the redskins have the guns and tomahawks. Did you read about the cabbie’s face last week, blown off with a shotgun? It’ll take a year for plastic surgery to rebuild. Don’t you want revenge when you hear about that? Or have you really become so flattened out? If you have, then I don’t see how your sex life can be any good either! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be thrilled to waste the buffalo that chased you—just turning around and shooting him through the fucking head. If I give you a gun, will you carry it? No? You liberal Jesuses are disgusting. You’ll go downtown today and it’ll be more of the same with this Forrest Tomchek and this Cannibal Pinsker. They’ll eat your ass. But you tell yourself they’re gross, while you have class. You want a gun?” He thrust his quick hand under the raglan. “Here’s a gun.”

  I had a weakness for characters like Cantabile. It was no accident that the Baron Von Trenck of my Broadway hit, the source of the movie-sale money—the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago who were now waiting for me downtown—had also been demonstrative exuberant impulsive destructive and wrong-headed. This type, the impulsive-wrong-headed, was now making it with the middle class. Rinaldo was ticking me off for my decadence. Damaged instincts. I wouldn’t defend myself. His ideas probably went back to Sorel (acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve). Although he didn’t know who Sorel was, these theories do get around and find people to exemplify them— highjackers, k
idnapers, political terrorists who murder hostages or fire into crowds, the Arafats one reads of in the papers and sees on television. Cantabile was manifesting these tendencies in Chicago, wildly exalting some human principle—he knew not what. In my own fashion I myself knew not what. Why was it that I enjoyed no relations with anyone of my own mental level? I was attracted instead by these noisy bumptious types. They did something for me. Maybe this was in part a phenomenon of modern capitalist society with its commitment to personal freedom for all, ready to sympathize with and even to subsidize the mortal enemies of the leading class, as Schumpeter says, actively sympathetic with real or faked suffering, ready to accept peculiar character-distortions and burdens. It was true that people felt it gave them moral distinction to be patient with criminals and psychopaths. To understand! We love to understand, to have compassion! And there I was. As for the broad masses, millions of people born poor now had houses and power tools and other appliances and conveniences and they endured the social turbulence, lying low, hanging on to their worldly goods. Their hearts were angry but they put up with the disorders and formed no mobs in the streets. They took all the abuse, doggedly waiting it out. No rocking the boat. Apparently I shared in their condition. But I couldn’t see what good it would do me to fire a gun. As if I could shoot my way out of my perplexities—the chief perplexity being my characterl

  Cantabile had invested much boldness and ingenuity in me and now he seemed to feel that we must never part. Also he wanted me to draw him upward, to lead him to higher things. He had reached the stage reached by bums, con men, freeloaders, and criminals in France in the eighteenth century, the stage of the intellectual creative man and theorist. Maybe he thought he was Rameau’s nephew or even Jean Genet. I didn’t see this as the wave of the future. I wanted no part of it. In creating Von Trenck of course I had contributed my share to this. On the Late Late Show Von Trenck was still often seen fighting duels, escaping from prison, seducing women, lying and bragging, trying to set fire to his brother-in-law’s villa. Yes, I had done my bit. Possibly, too, I continually gave hints of a new interest in higher things, of a desire to advance in the spirit, so that it was only fair that Cantabile should ask me to tell him something of this, to share with him, to give him a hint at least. He was here to do me good, he told me. He was eager to help me. “I can put you into a good thing,” he said. He began to describe some of his enterprises to me. He had money in this and money in that. He was president of a charter-flight company, perhaps one of those that had stranded thousands of people in Europe last summer. He had also a little abortion-referral racket and advertised in college newspapers all over the country as a disinterested friend. “Call us if this misfortune occurs. We will advise and help free of charge.” This was quite accurate, said Cantabile. There was no charge but the doctors kicked back a percentage of the fee. It was normal business.