by Saul Bellow
There’s an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God’s City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor’s symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat place.
Well, Padilla in his thieving wasn’t of this earthly-power class, and had no ideas such as involved the whole world. It wasn’t his real calling. But he enjoyed being good at it and liked the whole subject. He had all kinds of information about crooks, about dips, wires, and their various tricks; about Spanish pickpockets who were so clever they got to the priest’s money through the soutane, or about the crook’s school in Rome of such high tuition that the students signed a contract to pay half their take for five years after graduation. He knew a lot about Chicago clipjoints and rackets. It was a hobby with him, as other people go in for batting averages. What fascinated him was the little individual who tries to have a charge counter to the central magnetic one and dance his own dance on the periphery. He knew about B girls and how the hip-chicks operated in the big hotels; a book he read often was the autobiography of Chicago May, who used to throw her escorts’ clothes out of the window to her accomplice in the alley, and was a very remarkable woman.
Padilla himself when he went to have a good time didn’t stint; he spent everything he had. I was his guest at a flat on Lake Park Avenue that a couple of Negro girls kept together. First he shopped at Hill-man’s; he bought ham, chicken, beer, pickles, wine, coffee, and Dutch chocolate; then we went there and spent Saturday evening and Sunday in those two rooms, kitchen and bedroom. The only retiring space was the toilet, so everything was in common. This suited Padilla. Toward morning he started to say that we should make an exchange so no exclusive feelings would develop. The girls were glad and voted that this made sense. They appreciated Padilla and his spirit of the thing, so let themselves into the fun. Nothing was very serious nor much held back but in the very best sympathy. I liked best the girl I had first, as she was willing to be more personal with me and wished our cheeks to touch. The second was taller and less given to it; she seemed to have more of a private life to defend against us. There was more style to her. Also she was an older girl.
Anyway, it was Padilla’s show. If he got out of bed to eat or dance he wanted me to do likewise, and on and off during the night he was sitting up on the pillows, talking of his life.
“I once was married,” said Padilla when the subject came to that. “In Chihuahua when I was fifteen. I had a kid before I was a man myself.”
I didn’t approve of his boasting that he had left a wife and kid behind in Mexico, but then the tall girl said she had a child too, and maybe the other did also and just didn’t say, and so I let the subject pass, since if so many do the same wrong there maybe is something to it that’s not right away apparent.
We were lying in the two beds, all four, with only as much shape as there was light to reveal it proceeding from the curtains in the slow opening of Sunday, originating white in the east but falling gray upon the upright staggers of walls. Such a sight as the old Negro walls in these streets had a peculiar grandness, if dread too, where this external evidence was of a big humanity which you now couldn’t see. It was like the Baths of Caracalla. The vast hidden population slept away into the morning of Sunday. The little girl I liked lay with saddle nose and her sleepy cheeks and big, sensitive, thoughtless mouth, smiling a little at Padilla’s speeches. We lay and warmed ourselves by the girls, like kings, till nearly evening, then we left, kissing and fondling while dressing and then to the door, promising we’d be back.
Broke, Padilla and I had supper at his house, a more empty house than the one we had just left; that at least had old carpets, old soft chairs, and doodad girls’ ingenuities, whereas Padilla lived with some aged female relatives in a big railroad flat off Madison Street. It was almost empty; in one room was a table with a few chairs and in another nothing but mattresses laid on the floor. The old women sat in the kitchen and cooked, fanning a charcoal fire, fat-burdened, slow, stone-inexpressive old creatures to whom he didn’t even speak. We ate soup with ground meat at the bottom of the bowl and tortillas which came wrapped in a napkin. Finishing quickly, Padilla left me at the table, and when I went to see what had become of him found him already in bed, an army blanket drawn up to his face, with sharp nose and hair fallen back.
He said, “I have to get some sleep. I have a quiz first thing in the morning.”
“Are you ready for it, Manny?”
He said, “Either this stuff comes easy or it doesn’t come at all.”
And that stayed with me. Therefore I was thinking on the streetcar. Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. So I decided to try this out and, to begin with, to experiment with book stealing. If it went easily I’d leave the dog club. And if I made as much at it as Padilla did, that would be double what Guillaume paid me, and I could start saving toward the tuition fee at the university. I didn’t mean to settle down to a career of stealing even if it were to come easy, but only to give myself a start at something better.
So I began; at first with more excitement than I could tolerate. I had nausea after, on the street, and sweated. It was a big Jowett’s Plato that I took. But I was severe with myself to finish the experiment. I checked the book in a dime locker of the Illinois Central station as Padilla had told me to do and immediately went after another, and then I made good progress and became quite cool about it. The difficult moment wasn’t that of walking out of the store; it came when I picked the books up and put them under my arm. But then I felt more casual, confident that if stopped I’d be able to explain myself, laugh it off as an error of thoughtlessness and charm my way out. In the store, Padilla told me, the dicks would never arrest you; it was when you stepped into the street that they nabbed you. However, in a department store, without glancing back, I’d drift into another section—men’s shoes at Carson Pirie’s, candy or rugs at Marshall Field’s. It never entered my mind to branch out and steal other stuff as well.
Sooner than I had planned I quit the dog club, and it wasn’t only confidence in my crook’s competence that made me do it, but I was struck by the reading fever. I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man. Sometimes I couldn’t give a book up to a customer who had ordered it, and for a long time this was all that I could care about. The sense I had was of some live weight driven into tangles or nets of hungry feeling; I wanted to haul it in. Padilla was sore and fired up when he came to my room and saw stacks of books I should have gotten rid of long ago; it was dangerous to keep them. If he had restricted me to books on mathematics, thermodynamics, mechanics, things probably would have been different, for I didn’t carry the germ of a Clerk Maxwell or Max Planck in me. But as he had turned over to me his orders for books on theology, literature, history, and philosophy, and I copped Ranke’s History of the Popes and Sarpi’s Council of Trent for the seminary students, or Burckhardt or Merz’s European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, I sat reading. Padilla raised hob with me about the Merz because it took so long to finish and a man in the History department was after him for it. “You can use my card and get it out of the library,” he said. But somehow that wasn’t the same. As eating your own meal, I suppose, is different from a handout, even if calory for calory it’s the same value; maybe the body even uses it differently.
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sp; Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn’t created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn’t budge from the corner, you wouldn’t stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else—that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and all the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there’s a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.
This was when I heard from Simon again. He said on the phone he was coming to repay the five bucks I had sent him. It meant that he felt ready to face me—otherwise he’d have mailed the money. Thus when he entered I sensed how he carried a load of lordly brass and effrontery; that’s how he was ready; he was prepared to put me down, should I begin to holler and blame. But when he saw me surrounded by books, barefoot in an old gown, and noted, probably, the air puffs and yellow blisters of wallpaper and the poverty of light, he was more confident and easy. For he very likely felt that I was the same as before, that my wheels turned too freely, that I was hasty, too enthusiastic, or, in few words, something of a schlemiel. Suppose he touched on Grandma’s death, I’d easy be led to cry, and then he’d have me. The question for him was always whether I was this way by character or choice. If by choice I could maybe be changed.
Me, on my side, I was glad he had come and eager to see him. I could never in the world have taken Einhorn’s advice to be hard with him and keep him down. It’s true he ought to have sent me that money when I wired from Buffalo, but he’d been in dutch and I could forgive him that. Then the loan from Einhorn wasn’t too grievous either, since Einhorn himself had let lots of people down for far larger amounts; and he, Einhorn, was big enough and gentleman enough not to scream and moan about it. So far so good. But what about Mama and the flat? I confess that had gone down hard, and that if I had seen Simon when I was rushing downstairs to Kreindl’s to look for Mama I’d have broken his head for him. But later when I had thought it through I conceded to myself that we couldn’t have kept the old home going much longer and set up a gentle kind of retirement there for Mama, neither of us having that filial tabby dormancy that natural bachelors have. Something in us both consented to the busting up of the house. All Simon had to do was speak of this; if he didn’t it was because he felt his blame too much to have a clear head.
I expected to see him haggard; instead he was fatter. However, it wasn’t comfortable-looking fat but as if it came from not eating right. It took me a minute to get over my uneasiness about his creasing smile and the yellow and gold bristles on his chin—it wasn’t like him not to shave; but then he was all right and sat down, big fingers knit on his chest.
It was summer, a late afternoon, and though I was on the top floor of this old frame house the shade tree was so huge it passed the roof, so all around it was green, as if in the woods, glossy; and underneath on the lawn this bird was, like a hammer tapping a waterpipe in the grass. It could have helped us to feel peaceful, but it didn’t.
I believe people never knew how to observe one another so damagingly as they do now. Kin too, of course. I tried to avoid it with Simon, but we couldn’t. So on each side, for a moment, the worst was thought. Then he said, “What are you doing out on the South Side with all these books, becoming a student?”
“I wish I could afford to.”
“So you must be in the book business. It can’t be much of a business though, because I see you read them too. Leave it to you to find a business like this!” He said it scornfully, or meant to, but there was a dead place where the scorn should have rung; and he said reasonably, “But I suppose you could ask where my mastermind got me.”
“I don’t have to ask. I know. I can see.”
“Are you sore, Augie?”
“No,” I said, husky, and with one glance he could see how far from anger my feeling was. One glance was all he wanted, and he dropped his eyes. “I was sore when I found out. It came all together, including the news about Grandma.”
“Yes, she’s dead, isn’t she? I guess she must have been very old. Did you ever find out how old? I guess we’d never …” And so he passed over it with irony, sadness, even awe. We’d always smile and attribute extraordinary things to her.
Then Simon put off the brass he had come in, and he said, “I was a damn fool to get mixed up with that mob. They took away the dough and beat me up. I knew they were dangerous, but I thought I could hold my own with them. I didn’t think, I mean, because I was in love. Love! She let me go only so far. On the sun porch at night. I thought I’d bust out of my skin. I was dying for her, just to get a touch of it, and that’s about all I got.” He said it with coarse anger, despisingly. It gave me a shiver. “When I heard they were married I had dreams about them jazzing, like a woman with an ape. She wouldn’t care. And you know what he’s like. But it makes no difference, he can raise hell up there same as any other man. Besides he has dough. That’s what she thinks is dough! All he owns is a few buildings. It’s chickenfeed. It’ll look like a lot to her until she gets to know better.” Now his face was red, and with an emotion different from that despising anger. He said, “You know I hate to be like this and have such thoughts. I’m ashamed of it, I tell you honestly. Because she wasn’t all that glorious and he’s not all that bad. He wasn’t bad to us when we were kids. You haven’t forgotten that, have you? I don’t want her to make me act like a damn Eskimo dog with his scruff up about a piece of fish. I used to have my sights set kind of high, as a kid. But after a while you find out what you’ve really got or haven’t, and you wise up to the fact that first comes all the selfish and jealous stuff, that you don’t care what happens to anybody else as long as you get yours; you start to think such things as how pleasant it would be if somebody close to you would die and leave you free. Then I thought it would be all the same to the somebodies if I died.”
“What do you mean, died?”
“By suicide. I came close to it in jail, there on North Avenue.”
This reference to suicide was only factual. Simon didn’t work me for pity; he never seemed to require it of me.
“I don’t have much feeling against death, do you, Augie?” he said. In the change of leaves about him he was calmer, heavy in his seated position, with the crown of his felt hat taking the side against variants, played by the green shadow and yellow of the leaves. “Well, say, do you?”
“I’m not so hot about dying.”
This, after two or three thoughts had come in succession to his face, made him easier and more relaxed, softer with me. He laughed at last. He said, “You’ll die like everybody else. But I have to admit that’s not what you make people think of when they look at you. You’re a pretty gay numero, I’ll say that for you. But you’re not much good at taking c
are of yourself. Any other brother but you would have sweated the money out of me. If you had pulled what I pulled I’d have made things rough for you. Or anyway I’d be glad to see you land on your ass the way I’ve done. I’d say, ‘It serves you right. Good for you!’ Well, since you won’t look out for your interests I see I’m going to have to do it for you.”
“My interests?”
“Sure,” he said, a little angered by the question. “Don’t you believe I ever think about you? We’ve both been running too much with the losers, and I’m tired of it.”