Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  I had turned to ice. Then I was horrified. Even to be a dummy impersonating a murderer was dreadful. But before I could indignantly deny, remove the hat, stop Cantabile’s bluff, the voice of Stronson’s receptionist came, enormously amplified and room-filling, from the slotted box on the desk. “Now?” she said.

  And he answered, “Now!”

  Immediately the porter in the gray jacket entered the office, pushing Thaxter before him. His I.D. card was open in his hand. He said, “Police, Homicide!” and he pushed all three of us against the wall.

  “Wait a minute. Let’s see that card. What do you mean, homicide?” said Cantabile.

  “What do you think, I was just going to let you make threats and hold still? After you said how you’d have me killed I went to the State’s Attorney and swore a warrant,” said Stronson. “Two warrants. One John Doe for the hit man, your friend.”

  “Are you supposed to be Murder Incorporated?” said Thaxter to me. Thaxter seldom laughed aloud. His deepest delight was always more than half-silent, and his delight at this moment was wonderfully deep.

  “Who’s the hit man, me?” I said, trying to smile.

  No one replied.

  “Who has to threaten you, Stronson?” said Cantabile. His brown eyes, challenging, were filled with moisture, while his face turned achingly dry and pale. “You lost more than a million bucks for the guys in the Troika, and you’re finished, kid. You’re dead! Why should anybody else get in the act? You’ve got no more chance than a shit-house rat. Officer, this man is unreal. You want to see the story in tomorrow’s paper. Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation is wiped out. Stronson wants to pull a few people down with him. Charlie, go and get the paper. Show it to the man.”

  “Charlie ain’t going anywhere. Everybody just lean on the wall. I hear you carry a gun, and your name is Cantabile. Bend over, sweetheart—that’s the way.” We all obeyed. His own weapon was under his arm. His harness creaked. He took the pistol from Cantabile’s ornate belt. “No ordinary .38, a Saturday-Night Special. It’s a Magnum. You could kill an elephant with this.”

  “There it is, just as I told you. That’s the gun he shoved under my nose,” said Stronson.

  “It must run in the Cantabile family to be silly with guns. That was your Uncle Moochy, wasn’t it, who wasted those two kids? No effing class at all. Goofy people. Now we’ll see if you’ve got any grass on you. It would also be nice if there was a little parole violation to go with this too. We’ll fix you fine, buddy boy. Goddamn bunch of kid-killers.”

  Thaxter was now being frisked under the cloak. His mouth was wide and his nose strongly distorted and flaming across the bridge with all the mirth, the joy of this marvelous Chicago experience. I was angry with Cantabile. I was furious. The detective ran his hands over my sides, under the arms, up between my legs and said, “You two gentlemen can turn around. You’re quite a pair of dressers. Where did you get those shoes with the canvas sides?” he asked Thaxter. “Italy?”

  “The King’s Road,” said Thaxter pleasantly.

  The detective took off the gray porter’s jacket—under it he wore a red turtlenecked shirt—and emptied Cantabile’s long black ostrich-skin wallet on the desk. “And which one is supposed to be the hit man? Errol Flynn in the cape, or the check coat?”

  “The coat,” said Stronson.

  “I should let you make a fool of yourself and arrest him,” said Cantabile, still facing the wall. “Go ahead. On top of the rest.”

  “Why, is he somebody?” said the policeman. “A big shot?”

  “Fucking-A-right,” said Cantabile. “He’s a well-known distinguished man. Look in tomorrow’s paper and you’ll see his name in Schneiderman’s column—Charles Citrine. He’s an important Chicago personality.”

  “So what, we’re sending important personalities to jail by the dozen. Governor Kerner didn’t even have the brains to get a smart bagman.” The detective was enjoying himself. He had a plain seamed face, now jolly, a thoroughly experienced police face. Under the red shirt his breasts were fat. The dead hair of his wig did not agree with his healthy human color and was lacking in organic symmetry. It took off from his head in the wrong places. You saw such wigs on the playful, gaily-colored seats of the changing booths at the Downtown Club—hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters.

  “Cantabile came to see me this morning with wild propositions,” said Stronson. “I said, no way. Then he threatened he’d murder me, and he showed me the gun. He’s really crazy. Then he said he’d be back with his hit man. He described how the hit would be done. The guy would track me for weeks. Then he’d shoot half my face off like a rotten pineapple. And the smashed bone and the brains and blood running out of my nose. He even told me how the murder weapon, the evidence, would be destroyed, how the killer would saw it up with a power hacksaw and hammer the pieces out and drop them down different manholes in all the suburbs. Every little detail!”

  “You’re dead anyway, fat-ass,” said Cantabile. “They’ll find you in a sewer in a few months and they’ll have to scrape an inch of shit off your face to see who it was.”

  “There’s no permit for a gun. Beautiful!”

  “Now take these guys out of here,” said Stronson.

  “Are you going to charge everybody? You only got two warrants.”

  “I’m going to charge everybody.”

  I said, “Mr. Cantabile himself has just told you that I had nothing to do with this. My friend Thaxter and I were coming out of the Art Institute and Cantabile made us come here to discuss an investment, supposedly. I can sympathize with Mr. Stronson. He’s terrified. Cantabile is out of his mind with some kind of vanity, eaten up with conceit, violent egomania—bluff. This is just one of his original hoaxes. Maybe the officer can tell you, Mr. Stronson, that I’m not the Lepke type of hired killer. I’m sure he’s seen a few.”

  “This man never killed anybody,” said the cop.

  “And I have to leave for Europe and I have lots of things to attend to.”

  This last point was the main one. The worst of this situation was that it interfered with my anxious preoccupations, my complicated subjectivity. It was my inner civil war versus the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois.

  As a fanatical reader, walled in by his many books, accustomed to look down from his high windows on police cars, fire engines, ambulances, an involuted man who worked from thousands of private references and texts, I now found relevance in the explanation T. E. Lawrence had given for enlisting in the RAF—”To plunge crudely among crude men and find for myself …” How did it go, now? “… for these remaining years of my prime life.” Horseplay, roughhouse, barracks obscenity, garbage detail. Yes, many men, Lawrence said, would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand. I saw what he meant. So it was time that someone—and why not someone like me?—did more with this baffling and desperate question than had been done by other admirable men who attempted it. The worst thing about this absurd moment was that my stride was broken. I was expected at seven o’clock for dinner. Renata would be upset. It vexed her to be stood up. She had a temper, her temper always worked in a certain way; and also, if my suspicions were correct, Flonzaley was never far off. Substitutes are forever haunting people’s minds. Even the most stable and balanced individuals have a secretly chosen replacement in reserve somewhere, and Renata was not one of the stablest. As she often fell spontaneously into rhymes, she had surprised me once by coming out with this:

  When the dear

  Disappear

  There are others

  Waiting near.

  I doubt that anyone appreciated Renata’s wit more deeply than I did. It always opened breath-taking perspectives of candor. But Humboldt and I had agreed long ago that I could take anything that was well said. That was true. Renata made me laugh. I was willing to deal later with the terror implicit in her w
ords, the naked perspectives suddenly disclosed. She had for instance also said to me, “Not only are the best things in life free, but you can’t be too free with the best things in life.”

  A lover in the lockup gave Renata a classic floozy opportunity for free behavior. Because of my habit of elevating such mean considerations to the theoretical level it will surprise no one that I started to think about the lawlessness of the unconscious and its independence from the rules of conduct. But it was only antinomian, not free. According to Steiner, true freedom lived in pure consciousness. Each microcosm had been separated from the macrocosm. In the arbitrary division between Subject and Object the world had been lost. The zero self sought diversion. It became an actor. This was the situation of the Consciousness Soul as I interpreted it. But there now passed through me a qualm of dissatisfaction with Rudolf Steiner himself. This went back to an uncomfortable passage in Kafka’s Diaries pointed out to me by my friend Durnwald, who felt that I was still capable of doing serious intellectual work and wanted to save me from anthroposophy. Kafka too had been attracted by Steiner’s visions and found the clairvoyant states he described similar to his own, feeling himself on the outer boundaries of the human. He made an appointment with Steiner at the Victoria Hotel on Jungmannstrasse. It is recorded in the Diaries that Steiner was wearing a dusty and spotted Prince Albert and that he had a terrible head cold. His nose ran and he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nostrils with his fingers while Kafka, observing this with disgust, told Steiner that he was an artist stuck in the insurance business. Health and character, he said, prevented him from following a literary career. If he added theosophy to literature and the insurance business, what would become of him? Steiner’s answer is not recorded.

  Kafka himself of course was crammed to the top with this same despairing fastidious mocking Consciousness Soul. Poor fellow, the way he stated his case didn’t do him much credit. The man of genius trapped in the insurance business? A very banal complaint, not really much better than a head cold. Humboldt would have agreed. We used to talk about Kafka and I knew his views. But now Kafka and Steiner and Humboldt were together in death where, presently, all the folk in Stronson’s office would join them. Reappearing, perhaps, centuries hence in a more sparkling world. It wouldn’t have to sparkle much to sparkle more than this one. Nevertheless, Kafka’s description of Steiner upset me.

  While I was engaged in these reflections, Thaxter had gotten into the act. He came on with malice toward none. He was going to straighten matters out most amiably, not patronizing people too much. “I really don’t think you want to take Mr. Citrine away on this warrant,” he said, gravely smiling.

  “Why not?” said the cop, with Cantabile’s pistol, the fat nickel-plated Magnum, stuck in his belt.

  “You agreed that Mr. Citrine doesn’t resemble a killer.”

  “He’s tired-out and white. He should go to Acapulco for a week.”

  “It’s preposterous, a hoax like this,” said Thaxter. He was showing me the beauty of his common touch, how well he understood and got around his fellow Americans. But it was obvious to me how exotic the cop found Thaxter, his elegance, his Peter Wimsey airs. “Mr. Citrine is internationally known as an historian. He really was decorated by the French government.”

  “Can you prove that?” said the cop. “You wouldn’t have your medal on you by any chance, would you?”

  “People don’t carry medals around,” I said.

  “Well, what kind of proof have you got?”

  “All I have is this bit of ribbon. I have the right to wear it in my buttonhole.”

  “Let’s have a look at that,” he said.

  I drew out the tangled faded insignificant bit of lime green silk.

  “That?” said the cop. “I wouldn’t tie it on a chicken leg.”

  I agreed with the cop completely, and as a Chicagoan I scoffed inwardly with him at these phony foreign honors. I was the Shoveleer, burning with self-ridicule. It served the French right, too. This was not one of their best centuries. They were doing everything badly. What did they mean by handing out these meager bits of kinky green string? Because Renata insisted in Paris that I must wear it in my buttonhole, we had been exposed to the insults of the real chevalier whom Renata and I met at dinner, the man with the red rosette, the “hard scientist,” to use his own term. He gave me the snubbing of my life. “American slang is deficient, nonexistent,” he said. “French has twenty words for ‘boot.’ “ Then he was snooty about the Behavioral Sciences—he took me for a behavioral scientist—and he was very rough on my green ribbon. He said, “I am sure you have written some estimable books but this is the kind of decoration given to people who improve the poubelles.” Nothing but grief had ever come of my being honored by the French. Well, that would have to pass. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

  Cantabile was still facing the wall. The cop, I was glad to note, had it in for him. “You just hold it, there,” he said. It seemed to me that we in this office were under something like a huge transparent wave. This enormous transparent thing stood still above us, flashing like crystal. We were all within it. When it broke and detonated we would be scattered for miles and miles along some far white beach. I almost hoped that Cantabile would have his neck broken. But, no, when it happened I saw each of us cast up safe and separate on a bare white pearly shore.

  As all parties continued—Stronson, stung by Cantabile’s evocation of his corpse fished from the sewer, crying in a kind of pig’s soprano voice, “I’ll see that you get it, anyway!” while Thaxter was coming in underneath, trying to be persuasive—I tuned out and gave my mind to one of my theories. Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves. Take the case of Stron-son, a man who entered into desperate schemes to swindle gangsters. Or take myself, a lover of beauty who insisted on living in Chicago. Or Von Humboldt Fleisher, a man of powerful social instincts burying himself in the dreary countryside.

  Stronson didn’t have the strength to carry through. Seeing how self-deformed he was, fat but elegant; short of leg and ham, on platform shoes; given to squealing, but sending his voice deep, I was sorry, oh! deeply sorry for him. It seemed to me that his true nature was quickly reclaiming him. Had he forgotten to shave that morning or did terror make his beard suddenly rush out? And long awful bristles were coming up from his collar. A woodchuck look was coming over him. The pageboy wave went lank with sweat. “I want all these guys handcuffed,” he said to the plainclotliesman.

  “What, with one pair of cuffs?”

  “Well, put ‘em on Cantabile. Go, put ‘em on.”

  I completely agreed with him, in silence. Yes, manacle the son of a bitch, twist his arms behind him, and cut into the flesh. But having said these savage things to myself, I didn’t necessarily wish to see them happen.

  Thaxter drew the cop aside and said a few words in an undertone. I wondered later whether he hadn’t passed him a secret CIA code word. You couldn’t be sure with Thaxter. To this day I have never been able to decide whether or not he had ever been a secret agent. Years ago he invited me to be his guest in Yucatan. Three times I changed planes to get there, and then I was met at a dirt landing strip by a peon in sandals who drove me in a new Cadillac to Thaxter’s villa, fully staffed with Indian servants. There were cars and jeeps, and a wife and little children, and Thaxter had already mastered the local dialect and ordered people around. A linguistic genius, he quickly learned new languages. But he was having trouble with a bank in Mérida, and there was, of all things, a country club in his neighborhood where he had run up a tab.
I arrived just as he was completing the invariable pattern. He said on the second day that we were leaving this damn place. We packed his steamer trunks with fur coats and tennis equipment, with temple treasures and electrical appliances. As we drove away I was holding one of his babies on my lap.

  The cop took us out of Stronson’s office. Stronson called after us, “You bastards are going to get it. I promise you. No matter what happens to me. Especially you, Cantabile.”

  Tomorrow he himself would get it.

  As we waited for the elevator, Thaxter and I had time to confer. “No, I’m not being booked,” said Thaxter. “I’m almost sorry about that. I’d love to go along, really.”

  “I expect you to get busy,” I said. “I felt that Cantabile was going to pull something like this. And Renata’s going to be very upset, that’s the worst of it. Don’t go off and forget me now, Thaxter.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Charles. I’ll get the lawyers right on this. Give me some names and numbers.”

  “First thing is to call up Renata. Take Szathmar’s number. Also Tomchek and Srole.”

  Thaxter wrote the information on an American Express receipt form. Could it be that he was still a cardholder?

  “You’ll lose that flimsy bit of paper,” I said.

  Thaxter spoke to me rather seriously about this. “Watch it, Charlie,” he said. “You’re being a nervous Nellie. This is a trying moment, sure. Exactly why you have to watch it all the more. A plus forte raison.”

  You knew that Thaxter was in earnest when he spoke French. And whereas George Swiebel always shouted at me not to abuse my body, Thaxter forever warned me about my anxiety level. Now there was a man whose nerves were strong enough for his chosen way of life. And notwithstanding his weakness for French expressions, Thaxter was a real American in that, like Walt Whitman, he offered himself as an archetype—”What I assume you will assume.” At the moment, that didn’t particularly help. I was under arrest. My feelings toward Thaxter were those of a man with many bundles trying to find the doorkey and hampered by the house cat. But the truth was that the people from whom I looked for help were by no means my favorites. Nothing was to be expected from Thaxter. I even suspected that his efforts to help might be downright dangerous. If I cried out that I was drowning, he would come running and throw me a life preserver of solid cement. If odd feet call for odd shoes, odd souls have odd requirements and affection comes to them in odd modes. A man who longed for help was fond of someone incapable of giving any.