by Saul Bellow
We went to a Mexican restaurant where he devoured an order of chicken breasts with molé sauce—a bitter spicy chocolate gravy. I could not finish mine. He took my plate. He ordered pecan pie à la mode, and then a cup of Mexican chocolate.
When we got home I said I would go to my motel and lie down; I was very tired. We stood together in his garden for a while.
“Do you even begin to get the picture of this peninsula?” he said. “With this land I could do the most brilliant piece of business in my life. These smart-ass Cubans will have to go along. I’ll sweep those bastards with me. I’ll develop a plan—while I’m convalescing I’ll get a survey done, and a map, and when I make my pitch to those lazy Spanish jet-set bastards, I’ll be prepared with architect’s models and all my financing ready. I mean if, you know. Do you want to try some of these loquats?” He reached gloomily into one of his trees and picked handfuls of fruit.
“I’m bilious now,” I said, “from all I’ve eaten.”
He stood plucking and eating, spitting out stones and skins, his gaze fixed beyond me. He wiped at his Acheson mustache from time to time. Arrogant, haggard, he was filled with incommunicable thoughts. These were written dense and small on every inch of his inner surface. “I won’t see you in Houston before the operation, Charlie,” he said. “Hortense is against it. She says you’ll make me too emotional, and she’s a woman who knows what she’s talking about. Now this is what I want to say to you, Charlie. If I die, you marry Hortense. She’s a better woman than you’ll ever find by yourself. She’s straight as they come. I trust her one hundred percent, and you know what that means. She acts a little rough but she’s made me a wonderful life. You’ll never have another financial problem, I can tell you that.”
“Have you discussed this with Hortense?”
“No, I’ve written it in a letter. She probably guesses that I want her to marry a Citrine, if I die on the table.” He stared hard at me and said, “She’ll do what I tell her. So will you.”
Late noon stood like a wall of gold. And a mass of love was between us, and neither Ulick nor I knew what to do with it. “Well, all right, good-by.” He turned his back on me. I got into the rented car and took off.
thirty-two
Hortense, on the telephone, said, “Well, he made it. They took veins from his leg and attached them to his heart. He’s going to be stronger than ever now.”
“Thank God for that. He’s out of danger?”
“Oh, sure, and you can see him tomorrow.”
During the operation Hortense hadn’t wanted my company. I attributed this to wife/brother rivalry, but later I changed my mind. I recognized a kind of boundlessness or hysteria in my affection which, in her place, I would have avoided, too. But on the phone there was a tone in her voice I had never heard before. Hortense raised exotic flowers and hollered at dogs and men—that was her style. This time, however, I felt that I shared what as a rule she reserved for the flowers and my attitude toward her changed entirely. Humboldt used to tell me, and he was a harsh judge of character himself, that far from being mild I was actually too tough. My reform (if it was one) would have pleased him. In this critical age, following science (fantasy-science is really what it is) people think they are being “illusion-less” about one another. The law of parsimony makes detraction more realistic. Therefore I had had my reservations about Hortense. Now I thought she was a good broad. I had been lying on the king-sized motel bed reading some of Humboldt’s papers and books by Rudolf Steiner and his disciples, and I was in a state.
I don’t know what I expected to see when I entered Ulick’s room—bloodstains, perhaps, or bone-dust from the power saw; they had pried open the man’s rib cage and taken out his heart; they had shut it off like a small motor and laid it aside and started it up again when they were ready. I couldn’t get over this. But I came into a room filled with flowers and sunlight. Over Ulick’s head was a small brass plate engraved with the names of Papa and Mama. His color was green and yellow, the bone of his nose stuck out, his white mustache grew harshly under it. His look, however, was happy. And his fierceness was still there, I was glad to see. He was weak, of course, but he was all business again. If I had told him that I thought he looked a shade other-worldly he would have listened with contempt. Here was the polished window, here were the grand roses and dahlias, and here was Mrs. Julius Citrine in a knitted trouser-suit, her legs plump, low to the ground, an attractive short strong woman. Life went on. What life? This life. And what was this life? But now was not a time to be metaphysical. I was very eager, Very happy. I kept things under my peculiar hat, however.
“Well, kid,” he said, his voice still thin. “You’re glad, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, Ulick.”
“A heart can be fixed like a shoe. Resoled. Even new uppers. Like Novinson on Augusta Street .’. .”
I suppose that I was Ulick’s nostalgia-man. What he couldn’t himself remember, he loved to hear from me. Tribal chieftains in Africa had had official remembrancers about them; I was Ulick’s remembrancer. “Novinson in his window had trench souvenirs from 1917,” I said. “He had brass shell casings and a helmet with holes in it. Over his bench was a colored cartoon made by his son Izzie of a customer squirted in the face and leaping into the air yelling, ‘Hilp!’ The message was, Don’t Get Soaked for Shoe Repairs.”
Ulick said to Hortense, “All you have to do is turn him on.”
She smiled from her upholstered chair, her legs crossed. The color of her knitted suit was old rose, or young brick. She was as white-faced as a powdered Kabuki dancer, for despite her light eyes her face was Japanese—the cheekbones and the chub lips, painted crimson, did that.
“Well, Ulick, I’ll be going, now that you’re out of the woods.”
“Listen, Chuck, there’s something I’ve always wanted that you can buy for me in Europe. A beautiful seascape. I’ve always loved paintings of the sea. Nothing but the sea. I don’t want to see a rock, or a boat, or any human beings. Only mid-ocean on a terrific day. Water water everywhere: Get me that, Chuckie, and I’ll pay five grand, eight grand. Phone me if you come across the right thing and I’ll wire the money.”
It was implied that I was entitled to a commission—unofficial, of course. It would be unnatural for me not to chisel a little. This was the form his generosity sometimes took. I was touched.
“I’ll go to the galleries,” I said.
“Good. Now what about the fifty thousand—have you thought about my offer?”
“Oh, I’d certainly like to take you up on that. I need the income badly. I’ve already cabled a friend of mine—Thaxter. He’s on his way to Europe on the France. I told him that I was willing to go to Madrid to try my hand at a project he dreamed up. A cultural Baedeker … So I’m going to Madrid now.”
“Fine. You need projects. Get back to work. I know you. When you stop work you’re in trouble. That broad in Chicago has brought your work to a standstill, with her lawyers. She knows what the stoppage does to you—Hortense, we have to look after Charlie a little, now.”
“I agree we should,” said Hortense. From moment to moment I more and more admired and loved Hortense. What a wonderful and sensitive woman she was, really, and what emotional versatility the Kabuki mask concealed. Her gruffness had put me off. But behind the gruffness, what goodness, what a rose garden. “Why not make more of an effort to settle with Denise?” she said.
“She doesn’t want to settle,” said Ulick. “She wants his gizzard in a glass on her mantelpiece. When he offers her more dough she raises the ante again. It’s no use. The guy is pissing against the wind in Chicago. He needs broads, but he picks women who cripple him. So get back to business, Chuck, and start turning the stuff out. If you don’t keep your name before the public people will assume you’re gone and they missed your obituary. How much can you get out of this culture-guide deal? Fifty? Hold out for a hundred. Don’t forget the taxes. Did you get caught in the stock market too? Of course you did. Y
ou’re an America expert. You have to experience what the whole country experiences. You know what I’d do? I’d buy old railroad bonds. Some of them are selling for forty cents on the dollar. Only railroads can move the coal, and the energy crisis is bringing coal back strongly. We ought to acquire some coal-lands, too. Under Indiana and Illinois, the whole Midwest is a solid mass of coal. It can be crushed, mixed with water, and pumped through pipelines, but that’s not economical. Even water is getting to be a scarce commodity,” said Ulick, off on one of his capitalistic fugues. On this subject of coal he was a romantic poet, a Novalis speaking of earth-mysteries. “You get together some dough. Send it and I’ll invest for you.”
“Thank you, Ulick,” I said.
“Right. Bug off. Stay in Europe, what the hell do you want to come back for? Get me a seascape.”
He and Hortense went back to their development plans for the Cubans’ peninsula. He fiercely applied his genius to maps and blueprints while Hortense dialed bankers for him on the telephone. I kissed my brother and his wife and drove my Avis to the airport.
thirty-three
Although I was full of joy, I knew that things were not going well in Milan. Renata troubled my mind. I didn’t know what she was up to. From the motel last night I had talked with her on the telephone. I asked her what was happening. She said, “I’m not going into this on a transatlantic call, Charlie, it’s too expensive.” But then she wept for two solid minutes. Even Renata’s intercontinental sobs were fresher than other women’s close at hand. After this, still tearful, she laughed at herself and said, “Well, that was two-bits a tear, at least. Yes, I’ll meet you in Madrid, you bet I will.”
“Is Signor Biferno your father?” I said.
“You sound as if the suspense is killing you. Imagine what it’s doing to me. Yes, I think Biferno is my dad. I feel he is.”
“What does he feel? He must be a glorious-looking man. No punk could beget a woman like you, Renata.”
“He’s old and caved in. He looks like somebody they forgot to take off from Alcatraz. And he hasn’t talked to me. He won’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Before I left, Mother didn’t tell me that she was all set to sue him. Her papers were served on him the day before I arrived. It’s a paternity suit. Child support. Damages.”
“Child support? You’re almost thirty. And the Señora didn’t tell you that she was plotting this?” I said.
“When you sound incredulous, when you take that I-can’t-believe-it tone I know you’re really in a furious rage. You’re sore about the money this trip is costing.”
“Renata, why did the Señora have to sock Biferno with summonses just as you’re about to solve the riddle of your birth?— to which she should have the answer, by the way. You go on this errand for the sake of your heart, or your identity—you’ve spent weeks fretting about your identity crisis—and then your own mother pulls this. You can’t blame me for being baffled. It’s wild. What a plan for conquest the old girl has hatched. All this —fire-bombing, victory, unconditional surrender.”
“You can’t bear to hear of women suing men. You don’t know what I owe my mother. Bringing up a girl like me was a pretty rough project. As for what she pulled on me, remember what people pull on you. This Cantabile, may he rot in hell, or Szathmar or Thaxter. Watch out for Thaxter. Take the month at the Ritz but don’t sign any contract or anything. Thaxter will take his money and stick you with all the work.”
“No, Renata, he’s peculiar, but he is basically trustworthy.”
“Good-by, darling,” she said. “I’ve missed you like mad. Remember what you once said to me about the British lion standing up with his paw on the globe? You said that when you set your paw on my globe it was better than an empire. The sun never sets on Renata! I’ll be waiting in Madrid.”
“You seem to be washed up in Milan,” I said.
She answered by telling me, like Ulick, that I must begin to work again. “Only for God’s sake don’t write that pedantic stuff you’re unloading on me lately,” she said.
But now the whole Atlantic must have surged between us; or perhaps the communications satellite was peppered with glittering particles in the upper air. Anyway, the conversation crumpled and ended.
But when the plane took off I felt unusually free and light— trundled out on the bowed eagle legs of the 747, lifted into flight on the great wings, the machine passing from level to level into brighter and brighter atmospheres while I gripped my briefcase between my feet like a rider and my head lay on the bosom of the seat. On balance I believed that the Señora’s wicked and goofy lawsuit improved my position. She discredited herself. My kindliness, my patience, my sanity, my superiority would gain on Renata. All I had to do was to keep my mouth shut and to sit tight. Thoughts about her came thick and fast—all kinds of things connecting what-beautiful-girls-contributed-to-the-unfold-ing-destiny-of-capitalist-Democracy to, far beyond this, deeper questions. Let me see if I can clarify any of it. Renata was very nearly aware, as many people now are, of “leading a life in history.” Now Renata was, as a biologically noble beauty, in a false category—Goya’s Maja smoking a cigar, or Wallace Stevens’ Fretful Concubine who whispered “Pfui!” That is she wished to defy and outsmart the category to which she was assigned by common opinion. But with this she also collaborated. And if there is one historical assignment for us it is to break with false categories. Vacate the personae. I once suggested to her, “A woman like you can be called a dumb broad only if Being and Knowledge are entirely separate. But if Being is also a form of Knowledge, one’s own Being is one’s own accomplishment in some degree… .”
“Then I’m not a dumb broad after all. I can’t be, if I’m so beautiful. That’s super! You’ve always been kind to me, Charlie.”
“Because I really love you, kid.”
Then she wept a little because, sexually, she was not all that she was cracked up to be. She had her hang-ups. Sometimes she accused herself wildly, crying, “The truth! I’m a phony! I like it better under the table.” I told her not to exaggerate. I explained to her that the Ego had emancipated itself from the Sun and it must undergo the pain of this emancipation (Steiner). The modern sexual ideology could never counteract this. Programs of uninhibited natural joy could never free us from the universal tyranny of selfhood. Flesh and blood never could live up to such billing. And so on.
Anyway, we were lofted to an altitude of six miles in a great 747, an illuminated cavern, a theater, a cafeteria, the Atlantic in pale daylight raging below. According to the pilot, ships were taking hard punishment in the storm. But from this altitude the corrugations of the seas looked no higher to the eye than the ridges of your palate feel to the tongue. The stewardess served whisky and Hawaiian macadamia nuts. We plunged across the longitudinal lines of the planet, this deep place that I was learning to think of as the great school of souls, the material seat of the spirit. More than ever I believed that the soul with its occasional glimmers of the Good couldn’t expect to get anywhere in a single lifetime. Plato’s theory of immortality was not, as some scholars tried to make it, a metaphor. He literally meant it. A single span could only make virtue desperate. Only a fool would try to reconcile the Good with one-shot mortality. Or as Renata, that dear girl, might put it, “Better none than only one.”
In a word, I allowed myself to think what I pleased and let my mind go in every direction. But I felt that the plane and I were headed the right way. Madrid was a smart choice. In Spain I could begin to set myself straight. Renata and I would enjoy a quiet month. I put it to myself—thinking of the carpenter’s level—that maybe our respective bubbles could be coaxed back to the center. Then the things that really satisfied, naturally satisfied, all hearts and minds might be attempted. If people felt like fakers when they spoke of the True and the Good this was because their bubble was astray, because they believed they were following the rules of scientific thought, which they didn’t understand one single bit. But I had no business
to be toying with fire either, or playing footsie with the only revolutionary ideas left. Actuarially speaking, I had only a decade left to make up for a life-span largely misspent. There was no time to waste even on remorse and penitence. I felt also that Humboldt, out there in death, stood in need of my help. The dead and the living still formed one community. This planet was still the base of operations. There was Humboldt’s bungled life, and my bungled life, and it was up to me to do something, to give a last favorable turn to the wheel, to transmit moral understanding from the earth where you can get it to the next existence where you needed it. Of course I had my other dead. It wasn’t Humboldt alone. I also had a substantial suspicion of lunacy. But why should my receptivity fall under such suspicion? On the contrary, etcetera. I concluded, We’ll see what we shall see. We flew through unshadowed heights, and in the pure upper light I saw that the beautiful brown booze in my glass contained many crystalline corpuscles and thermal lines of heat-generating cold fluid. This was how I entertained myself and passed the time. We were held up in Lisbon for quite a while and reached Madrid hours off schedule.
The 747, with its whale’s anterior hump, opened, and passengers poured out, eager Charlie Citrine among them. Tourists in this year, I had read in the airline magazine, outnumbered the Spanish population by about ten million. Still, what American could believe that his arrival in the Old World was not a special event? Behavior under these skies meant more than in Chicago. It had to. There was significant space here. I couldn’t help feeling this. And Renata, also surrounded by significant space, was waiting at the Ritz. Meantime, my charter-flight countrymen, a party of old folks from Wichita Falls, shuffled fatigued down the long corridors and resembled ambulatory patients in a hospital. I passed them like a streak. I was first at the passport window, first at the baggage conveyor. And then—my bag was the last bag of all. The Wichita Falls party was gone and I was beginning to think my bag with its elegant wardrobe, its Hermès neckties, its old chaser’s monkey-jackets, and so forth was lost when I saw it wobbling, solitary, on the long, long trail of rollers. It came toward me like an uncorseted woman sauntering over cobblestones.