Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  Then in the cab to the hotel I was pleased with myself again and thought I had done well to arrive late at night when the roads were empty. There was no delay; the taxi drove furiously fast, I could go to Renata’s room at once and get out of my clothes and into bed with her. Not from lust but from eagerness. I was full of a boundless need to give and take comfort. I can’t tell you how much I agreed with Meister Eckhardt about the eternal youth of the soul. From first to last, he says, it remains the same, it has only one age. The rest of us, however, is not so stable. So overlooking this discrepancy, denying decay, and always starting life over and over doesn’t make much sense. Here, with Renata, I wanted to have another go at it, swearing up and down that I would be more tender and she would be more faithful and humane. It didn’t make sense, of course. But it mustn’t be forgotten that I had been a complete idiot until I was forty and a partial idiot after that. I would always be something of an idiot. Still, I felt that there was hope and raced in the cab toward Renata. I was entering the final zones of mortality, expecting that here in Spain of all places, here in a bedroom, all the right human things would—at last!—happen.

  Dignified flunkies in the circular reception hall of the Ritz took my bag and briefcase and I came through the revolving door looking for Renata. Certainly she would not be waiting for me in one of those stately chairs. A queenly woman couldn’t sit in the lobby with the night staff at 3 a.m. No, she must be lying awake, beautiful, humid, breathing quietly, and waiting for her extraordinary, her one-and-only Citrine. There were other suitable men, handsomer, younger, energetic, but of me Charlie there was only one, and Renata I believed was aware of this.

  For reasons of self-respect she had objected on the telephone to sharing a suite with me. “It doesn’t matter in New York but in Madrid, with different names on our passports, it’s just too whorey. I know it’s going to cost double but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

  I asked the man at the switchboard to ring Mrs. Koffritz.

  “We have no Mrs. Koffritz,” was his answer.

  “A Mrs. Citrine, then?” I said.

  There was no Mrs. Citrine either. That was a wicked disappointment. I walked across the circular carpet under the dome to the concierge. He handed me a wire from Milan. SLIGHT DELAY. BIFERNO DEVELOPING. PHONING TOMORROW. I ADORE YOU.

  I was then shown to my room, but I was in no condition to admire its effects: richly Spanish, with carved chests and thick drapes, with Turkish carpets and fauteuils, a marble bathroom and old-fashioned electrical fixtures in the grand old Wagon-Lit style. The bed stood in a curtained alcove and was covered in watered silk. My heart was behaving badly as I crept in naked and laid my head on the bolster. There was no word from Thax-ter, either, and he should have reached Paris by now. I had to communicate with him. Thaxter would have to inform Stewart in New York that I was accepting his invitation to stay in Madrid for a month as his guest. This was a fairly important matter. I was down to four thousand dollars and couldn’t afford two suites at the Ritz. The dollar was taking a beating, the peseta was unrealistically high, and I didn’t believe that Biferno was developing into anything.

  My heart was dumbly aching. I refused to give it the words it would have uttered. I condemned the state I was in. It was idle, idle, idle. Many thousands of miles from my last bed in Texas I lay stiff and infinitely sad, my body temperature at least three degrees below normal. I had been brought up to detest self-pity. It was part of my American training to be energetic, and positive, and a thriving energy system, and an achiever, and having achieved two Pulitzer prizes and the Zig-Zag medal and a good deal of money (of which I was robbed by a Court of Equity), I had set myself a final and ever higher achievement, namely, an indispensable metaphysical revision, a more correct way of thinking about the question of death! And now I remembered a quotation from Coleridge, cited by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the papers he had left me, about quaint metaphysical opinions. How did it go? Quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, were playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. I got up then to rummage in the briefcase for the exact quotation. But then I stopped. I recognized that to be afraid that Renata was ditching me was far different from being deadly sick. Besides, damn her, why should she give me an hour of anguish and make me stoop and rummage naked, pulling out a dead man’s papers by the light of this Wagon-Lit lamp. I decided that I was only overtired and suffering from jet lag.

  I turned from Humboldt and Coleridge to the theories of George Swiebel. I did what George would have done. I ran myself a hot bath and stood on my head while the tub was filling. I went on to do a wrestler’s bridge, resting all my weight on my heels and on the back of my head. After this I performed some of the exercises recommended by the famous Dr. Jacobsen, the relaxation and sleep expert. I had studied his manual. You were supposed to cast out tension toe by toe and finger by finger. This was not a good idea, for it brought back to me what Renata did with toes and fingers in moments of erotic ingenuity. (I never knew about the toes until Renata taught me.) After all this I simply went back to bed and prayed my upset soul to go out for a while, please, and let the poor body have some rest. I picked up her telegram, fixing my eyes on I ADORE YOU. Studying this hard, I decided to believe that she was telling the truth. As soon as I performed this act of faith I slept. For many hours I was out cold in the curtained alcove.

  Then my telephone rang. In the shuttered curtained blackness I felt for the switch. It was not to be found. I picked up the phone and asked the operator, “What time is it?”

  It was twenty minutes after eleven. “A lady is on her way up to your room,” the switchboard told me.

  A lady! Renata was here. I dragged the drapes aside from the windows and ran to brush my teeth and wash my face. I pulled on a bathrobe, gave a swipe at my hair to cover the bald spot, and was drying myself with one of the heavy luxurious towels when the knocker ticked many times, like a telegraph key, only more delicately, suggestively. I shouted, “Darling!” I swept the door open and found Renata’s old mother before me. She was wearing her dark travel costume, with many of her own arrangements, including the hat and the veil. “Señora!” I said.

  She entered in her medieval garments. Just over the threshold she reached a gloved hand behind her and brought in Renata’s little boy, Roger. “Roger!” I said. “Why is Roger in Madrid? What are you doing here, Señora?”

  “Poor baby. He was sleeping on the plane. I had them carry him off.”

  “But Christmas with the grandparents in Milwaukee—what about that?”

  “His grandfather had a stroke. May die. As for his father, we can’t locate the man. I couldn’t keep Roger with me, my apartment is small.”

  “What about Renata’s apartment?”

  No, the Señora, with her affaires de coeur, couldn’t take care of a small child. I had met some of her gentlemen friends. It was wise not to expose the child to them. As a rule I avoided thinking about her romances.

  “Does Renata know?”

  “Of course she knows we’re coming. We discussed it on the telephone. Please order breakfast for us, Charles. Will you eat some nice Frosted Flakes, Roger darling? For me, hot chocolate and also some croissants and a glass of brandy.”

  The child sat bowed over the arm of the tall Spanish chair.

  “Come on, kid,” I said, “lie on my bed.” I pulled off his small shoes and led him into the alcove. The Señora watched as I covered him and drew the curtains. “So Renata told you to bring him here.”

  “Of course. You may be here for months. It was the only thing to do.”

  “When is Renata arriving?”

  “Tomorrow is Christmas,” said the Señora.

  “Terrific. What does your statement mean? Will she be here for Christmas or is she having Christmas with her father in Milan? Is she getting anywhere? How can she, if you’re suing Mr. Biferno?”

  “We’ve been in the air for ten hours, Charles. I’m not strong enough to answer questions. Please order bre
akfast. I wish you would shave also. I really can’t bear a man’s unshaven face across the table.”

  This made me consider the Señora’s own face. She had wonderful dignity. She sat in her wimple like Edith Sitwell. Her power with her daughter, whom I so badly needed, was very great. There was a serpentine dryness about her eyes. Yes, the Señora was bananas. However, her composure, with its large content of furious irrationality, was unassailable.

  “I’ll shave while you’re waiting for your cocoa, Señora. Why, I wonder, did you choose such a time to sue Signor Biferno?”

  “Isn’t that my own business?”

  “Isn’t it Renata’s business also?”

  “You speak like Renata’s husband,” she said. “Renata went to Milan to give that man a chance to acknowledge his daughter. But there is a mother in the case too. Who brought the girl up and made such an extraordinary woman of her? Who taught her class and all the important lessons of a woman? The whole injustice should be dealt with. The man has three plain ugly daughters. If he wants this marvelous child he had by me, let him settle his bill. Don’t try to teach a Latin woman about such things, Charles.”

  I sat in my not entirely clean beige silk robe. The sash was too long and the tassels had dragged on the floor for many years. The waiter came, the tray was uncovered with a flourish, and we breakfasted. As the Señora snuffed up her cognac I observed the grain of her skin, the touch of whisker on her lip, the arched nose with its operatic nostrils and the peculiar chicken luster of her eyeballs. “I got the TWA tickets from your travel agent, that Portuguese lady who wears a paisley turban, Mrs. Da Cintra. Renata told me to charge them. I didn’t have a cent.” The Señora was like Thaxter in this regard—people who could tell you with pride, even with delight, how broke they were. “And I’ve taken a room here for Roger and me. My institute is closed this week. I will have a holiday.”

  At the mention of institute, I thought of a loony bin, but no, she was speaking of the secretarial school where she taught commercial Spanish. I had always suspected that she was actually a Magyar. Be that as it might, the students appreciated her. No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending. But she would have to retire soon, and who would push the Señora’s wheelchair? Was it possible that she now saw me in that capacity? But perhaps the old woman, like Humboldt, dreamed that she could make her fortune in a lawsuit. And why not? Perhaps there was a judge in Milan like my Urbanovich.

  “So we will have Christmas together,” said the Señora.

  “The kid is very pale. Is he sick?”

  “It’s only fatigue,” said the Señora.

  Roger, however, came down with the flu. The hotel sent an excellent Spanish doctor, a graduate of Northwestern who reminisced with me about Chicago and soaked me. I paid him an American fee. I gave the Señora money for Christmas presents and she bought all kinds of objects. On Christmas Day, thinking of my own girls, I felt quite low. I was glad to have Roger there and kept him company, reading him fairy tales and cutting and pasting long chains from the Spanish newspapers. There was a humidifier in the room which heightened the odors of paste and paper. Renata did not telephone.

  I recalled that I had spent the Christmas of 1924 in the TB sanatorium. The nurses gave me a thick-striped peppermint candy cane and a red openwork Christmas stocking filled with chocolate coins wrapped in gilt, but it was depressing joy and I longed for Papa and Mama and for my wicked stout brother, Julius, even. Now I had survived this quaking and heartsickness and was an elderly fugitive, the prey of Equity, sitting in Madrid, cutting and pasting with sighs. The kid was pale with fever, his breath flavored with the chocolate and paste, and he was absorbed in a paper chain that went twice about the room and had to be strung over the chandelier. I tried to be nice and calm but now and then my feelings gave a wash (oh those lousy feelings) like the water in a ferry slip when the broad-beamed boat pushes in and the backing engines churn up the litter and drowned orange rinds. This happened when my controls failed and I imagined what Renata might be doing in Milan, the room she was in, the man who was with her, the positions they took, the other fellow’s toes. I was determined that no, I wouldn’t tolerate being wrung abandoned sea-sick ship-wrecked castaway. I tried quoting Shakespeare to myself—words to the effect that Caesar and Danger were two lions whelped on the same day, and Caesar the elder and more terrible. But that was aiming too high and it didn’t work. In addition the twentieth century is not easily impressed by pains of this nature. It has seen everything. After the holocausts, you can’t blame it for lacking interest in private difficulties of this sort. I myself recited a brief list of the real questions before the world—the oil embargo, the collapse of Britain, famines in India and Ethiopia, the future of democracy, the fate of humankind. This did no more good than Julius Caesar. I remained personally downhearted.

  It wasn’t until I was sitting in a French brocade armchair of the Ritz’s private eighteenth-century barber’s cubicle—I was here not because I needed a haircut but, as so often, only because I longed for a human touch—that I began to have clearer ideas about Renata and thé Señora. How was it, for instance, that as soon as grandfather Koffritz had suffered his stroke and became paralyzed on one side Roger was ready to go? How did that old broad get him a passport so quickly? The answer was that the passport, when I went up and examined it on the quiet, proved to have been issued back in October. The ladies were very thorough planners. Only I failed to think ahead. So now it occurred to me to take the initiative.

  It would be a clever move to marry Renata before she could learn that I was broke. This should not be done merely to hit back. No, in spite of her shenanigans I was mad about her. Loving her, I was willing to overlook certain trifles. She had provoked me by locking me out one night and by the conspicuous display of her birth-control device at the top of her open bag in Heathrow last April when we were parting for three days. But was that, after all, very significant? Did it mean more than that one never knew when one was going to meet an interesting man? The serious question was whether I, with all my thoughts, or because of them, would ever be able to understand what sort of girl Renata was. I wasn’t like Humboldt, given to jealous seizures. I recalled how he had looked in Connecticut, when he quoted me King Leontes in my yard by the sea. “I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances; but not for joy, not joy.” That heart-dancing was classic jealousy. I didn’t suffer from classic jealousy. Renata did gross things, to be sure. But perhaps these were war measures. She was campaigning to get me and would be different when we were settled down as husband and wife. No doubt she was a dangerous person but I would never be greatly interested in any woman incapable of harm, in any woman who didn’t threaten me with loss. Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights. The Spanish setting was right for this. Renata was acting like Carmen, and Flonzaley, for it probably was Flonzaley, was being Escamillo the Toreador, while I, at two and a half times the age for the role, was cast as Don José.

  Quickly I sketched the immediate future. Civil marriages probably didn’t exist in this Catholic country. The knot could be tied at the American Embassy by the military attaché, perhaps, or even a notary public for all I knew. I would go to the antique shops (I loved the Madrid antique shops) to look for two wedding bands and I could throw a champagne supper at the Ritz, no questions asked about Milan. After we had sent the Señora back to Chicago, the three of us might move to Segovia, a town I knew. After Demmie’s death I traveled widely, so I had been to Segovia before. I was beguiled by the Roman aqueduct, I recalled that I had really gone for those tall knobby stone arches—stones whose nature was to fall or sink were sitting there lightly in the air. That was an achievement that had gone home—an example to me. For purposes of meditation Segovia couldn’t be beat. We could live there en famille in one of the old back streets, and while I tried to see if I could really move from mental consciousness to the purer consciousness of spirit, it might amus
e Renata to comb the town for antiques she could sell to decorators in Chicago. Perhaps she would even make a buck. Roger could attend nursery school and eventually my little girls might join us, because when Denise won her case and collected her money she’d want to get rid of them immediately. I had just enough cash left to settle in Segovia and give Renata a commercial start. Perhaps I would even write the essay on contemporary Spanish culture suggested by Thaxter, if that could be done without too much faking. And how would Renata take my deception? She would take it as good comedy, which she valued more highly than anything in the world. And when I told her after the marriage that we were down to our last few thousand dollars she would laugh brilliantly, larger than life, and say, “Well, there’s a twist.” I evoked Renata laughing brilliantly because I was in reality undergoing a major attack of my lifelong trouble—the longing, the swelling heart, the tearing eagerness of the deserted, the painful keenness or infinitizing of an unidentified need. This condition was apparently stretching from earliest childhood to the border of senescence. I thought, Hell, let’s settle this once and for all. Then, not wanting the nosy Ritz staff to talk, I went to the central post office of Madrid, with its sonorous halls and batty-looking steeples (Spanish bureaucratic Gothic) and sent a cable to Milan. MARVELOUS IDEA, RENATA DARLING. MARRY ME TOMORROW. YOUR TRULY LOVING FAITHFUL CHARLIE.