by Saul Bellow
She went on like this. It was bitter sometimes, for usually her wisdom was against me. As if she foresaw that I’d do her wrong and was warning me. But then, too, I was eager to hear what she said and I understood it, I understood only too well.
These conversations we had more often on the road when we set out for Mexico.
She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico besides obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn’t tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatla, and what she described of the country didn’t make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population. I wasn’t clear for a long time about the hunting. I thought she intended to hunt eagles, and that seemed peculiar to me, but what I understood wasn’t so peculiar as what she really meant. She wanted to hunt with an eagle trained in falconry, and as she had owned hawks she was eager to imitate a British captain and an American couple who had taught or “manned” golden and American eagles, some of the few since the Middle Ages. She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Dan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas.
Near Texarkana there was a man who had eaglets to sell. He had offered one to George H. Somebody-or-other, an old friend of Thea’s father, who kept a private zoo. This friend of her father, who by the accounts she gave seemed to me loony, like the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, had built himself a copy of the Trianon in Indiana, only with cages inside, and had made Hagenbeck voyages everywhere to fill them with beasts of his own capture. He was in retirement now, too old to travel; but he had asked Thea to bring him some giant iguanas—or challenged her to—these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City. As this information came out, which I didn’t know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life—I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity.
I’m not going to say that she was more than I had bargained for, because it has to be absolutely understood that I didn’t bargain. What I will say is that she was singular, unforeseen, and contradictory in her flightiness, steadiness, nervousness, or courage. When she tripped on the stairs in the dark she cried out, but she traveled with snake-catching equipment and she showed me snapshots of the outings of a rattler-collectors’ club she had belonged to. I saw her holding a diamondback behind the head and milking the poison from him with a slice of rubber. She told me how she had crawled into a cave after him. In Renling’s shop I had sold sports equipment, but the only hunting I had ever watched was in the movies, apart from having seen my brother Simon shooting at the rats in his yard with his pistol. My special memory was of one large one with humped back like a small boar but terrible, swift-clawed feet racing for the fence. I was, however, ready even to become a hunter. Thea took me out into the country before we left Chicago, and I practiced shooting at crows.
This was while we held over in Chicago a few days longer; she was waiting for a letter from Smitty’s—her husband’s—lawyer and used the time to give me lessons with the guns in the woods off toward the Wisconsin line. When we came home and she took off her breeches and sat in her out-of-doors shirt with bare legs, she might take up a piece of costume jewelry to fix the clasp and sit like a girl of ten, in a rapt way, her neck bent and knees up, her fingers kind of clumsy. Then we’d ride on the Lincoln Park bridle path, and there was nothing clumsy about her there. I hadn’t forgotten how to manage a horse since my Evanston days. But that was what it was, managing rather than riding. I followed her speed as fast as I could, red in the face and hitting the saddle hard, using my weight against the animal. I managed to stay on, but how I did it amused her.
I was amused, too, when I caught my breath and climbed down from the saddle, but asked myself just how many new adaptations I was going to have to try to make. Along with the snapshots of the Rattlesnake Club I saw others; she had a leather case full of them. Some were of that very summer in St. Joe when I met her, of her uncle and aunt, her sister Esther and sports in white pants with tennis rackets and paddling canoes. When she showed me Esther’s picture it didn’t touch me except through her resemblance to Thea. There were photos also of her parents. Her mother had been a lover of the Pueblos, so there she was, sitting in a touring car in a hat and furs, looking at the cliffs. One picture in particular took my attention. It was of her father in a rikshaw. He wore a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple, his eyes also whitish, the influence of the sun whose spottiness made the wheels seem like tea-soaked lemon. He looked over the shaved head of the Chinese human horse who stood with thick wide calves between the shafts.
Then there were more pictures of hunting. Some of Thea with different falcons on her gloved arm. Several of Smitty, her husband. In riding pants. At play, wrangling with a dog. Or again with Thea in a night club—she laughed with eyes closed in the flash of the bulb and he covered his bald head with slender fingers while an entertainer flung arms out over the table. Many of these things troubled me. For instance, in her laughter at the night club I saw the bosom, shoulder, chin, with kind of a happy recognition, but the hands of ridicule and squawk of limelight laughter—no, those were foreign. There was no place for me, there, by the table. Nor by her father in the rikshaw. Nor by the mother in the touring car with the fur about her neck. And then the hunting troubled me. I didn’t know how earnestly I was to take it. Banging at crows, fine, that was okay. But when she bought me a gauntlet so I could handle the eagle, and I put it on, a strange sense came over me as if I were a fielder in a demons’ game and would have to gallop here and there and catch burning stone in the air.
So I was very uncertain. Not as to whether I should go with her, which was no decision since I had to, but as to what to expect, what I’d have to go through or put up as my share, where we were headed. To explain it sensibly to anyone was more than I was capable of. I tried. Mimi, who should have been the one best able to sympathize, was just the friend with whom I had most awkwardness about it. She didn’t like it a bit and said, “Now what are you trying to tell me?” unwilling to believe I was, as I said, in love, and the skin of her forehead thickened and drew along her upshot brows. As I explained in more detail she laughed in my face. “What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? An eagle? Don’t you mean a buzzard?” From loyalty to Thea I didn’t laugh; Mimi couldn’t get me to, even if the queerness of the expedition worried me plenty. “Where did you find a babe like this?”
“Mimi, I love her.”
This made her take another, nearer look at me, which showed me to be in earnest. And Mimi thought so much of the seriousness of love she doubted there were many who could get it right, and, soberer, she said, “Watch out you don’t get in trouble. And why are you quitting your job? Grammick told me you had a future as an organizer.”
“I don’t want any more of that. Arthur can have it.”
As if she thought I spoke of Arthur with disrespect she said, “Don’t be silly. He has to finish those translations, and he’s working very hard; he’s in the middle of an essay on the poet and death,” and she began to tell me how poets must be allowed to run funerals. Arthur was installed in my room, and he had discovered the fire-ruined set of Dr. Eliot’s classics in the old box under the bed and asked to be allowed to take care of it for me. Since the books were stamped “W. Einhorn,” it would have been hard to refuse even if I had wanted to. Meanwhile he was in a cure for his clap, and Mimi watched over him and could have only side concerns about anybody else.
It was easy to explain my going off to Mama. Of course I didn’t have to tell her much, only that I was engaged to a young lady who had to go to Mexico, and that I was going too.
Though Mama no longer did kitchen work, the knife marks in her hands had stayed, and there probably always would be those dar
k lines; so, also, her color still was gentle, but her eyes increasingly cloudy and her lower lip expressed continually less sense. I suppose what I said was pretty well indifferent to her, as long as the tone of it didn’t distress her. That was what she listened to. And why should it distress her, since I was riding high and in the best silks and colors? Say if the main bonds of attachment were death ropes, crazy, in the end, at least I felt them now as connections of joy, and if that was a deception it would never appear more substantial or marvelous. But I denied it would be a deception, unless nothing so vivid can be substantial. No, I wouldn’t admit that.
“Is she a rich girl, like Simon’s wife?”
I thought perhaps she believed Thea was Lucy Magnus.
“This isn’t any of Charlotte’s family, Ma.”
“Well, then don’t let her make you unhappy, Augie,” she said. And what lay behind this, I believe, was that if Simon hadn’t helped me to choose, if I had picked for myself, my mother thought me to be sufficiently like her to get myself in a bad fix. I said nothing of the hunting to her, but it did occur to me how it was inevitable for the son of a Hagar to go chase wild animals at one time or another.
I asked about Simon. The only recent news I had of him was from Clem Tambow, who had seen him in a fistfight with a Negro on Drexel Boulevard.
“He bought a new Cadillac car,” said Mama, “and he came to give me a ride. Oh, it’s wonderful! He’s going to be a very rich fellow.”
It didn’t hurt me to hear of him in prosperity, and even if he was Duke of Burgundy, let him go ahead and be it. But I have to admit that I couldn’t keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too. I don’t want to pretend that I could.
I looked up Padilla too before I left, and found him in front of his institute. He was in a blood-spotted lab coat, although he was hired to do calculations, as far as I knew, not experiments, and he smoked one of his stinking dark-tobacco cigarettes while in his swift way he debated about two curves with a character who held open a big looseleaf notebook. Padilla wasn’t so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province. He said that in Mexico City, where he himself had never been, he had a cousin, whose address I took. “If he’ll rob you or help I can’t predict, but look him up if you want somebody to look up,” he said. “He was piss-poor fifteen years ago when he went away. He sent me a postcard last year when I got my M.A. Which maybe means that he wants me to send for him. Fat chance! Well, enjoy your trip, if they let you, but don’t tell me afterward I didn’t warn you to stay home.” Suddenly he smiled in the sunshine and creased his short curved nose and forehead which sloped backward into his handsome Mexican hair. “Go easy with that wild native tail.” I couldn’t even grin at him to be sociable, it was such inappropriate advice to a man in love.
Nobody, then, gave the happy bon voyage I’d have liked. Everybody warned me, in some way, and I even thought of Eleanor Klein and what Jimmy had told me of her being rooked there in Mexico, and her mishaps. I argued back to myself that it was just the Rio Grande I had to cross, not the Acheron, but anyway it oppressed me from somewhere. Really, it was the strangeness of the state I was in and not so much that of the destination I was aware of. The great astonishment of this state was that the unit of humanity should maybe be not one but two. Not even the eagle falconry distressed me as much as that what happened to her had to happen to me too, necessarily. This was scary.
This trouble of course wasn’t clear to me then. I put it all on Mexico and the hunting. And finally I said to Thea, on an evening while she was playing the guitar—with a rounded-back thumb on the hind string; she treated the instrument easily and it supplied its own strength—I said, “Do we have to go to Mexico?”
“Do we have to?” she said and shut off the strings with her hand.
“You can get a quick divorce in Reno and in other places.”
“But why shouldn’t we go to Mexico? I’ve been there several times, many times. What’s wrong with it?”
“But what’s wrong with other places?”
“There’s a house down in Acatla, and we’re going there to catch some of those lizards and other animals. Besides, I’ve arranged with Smitty’s lawyer to be divorced there. And there’s still another reason why it’s better for us to be there.”
“What’s that?”
“I won’t have much money after the divorce.”
I shut my eyes and put my palm on my forehead as if trying to help the sudden astonishment go through. “Well, Thea, excuse me if I don’t follow you. I thought you and Esther had lots of money. What about the stuff in the icebox?”
“Augie, our part of the family never did have very much. It’s my uncle, my father’s brother, who’s rich, and Esther and I are the only kin, and we always had allowances and were brought up in the money, but we were supposed to make good. Esther did; she married a rich man.”
“And so did you.”
“But it’s over, and I may as well tell you there was a scandal about it. It isn’t anything you should mind, it was just foolishness, but I took off from a party with a naval cadet. He looked just like you. It didn’t amount to anything. I was thinking of you all the time, but you weren’t there.”
“A substitute!”
“Well, that Greek girl wasn’t even that for you.”
“I never said I spent all the time since we were in St. Joseph thinking about you.”
“Nor about Esther?”
“No.”
“Do you want to argue, or do you want to hear? I’m only trying to explain what happened. My aunt was visiting us—you remember the old lady—and the party was at our house, at Smitty’s house. And she saw how this kid and I were petting. Augie, you really don’t have to mind that. It was thousands of miles away and I didn’t realize that I was going to come to Chicago to look for you. But I couldn’t take Smitty any more. I had to have somebody else. Even if it was only just another boy, like that Navy boy. After that my old aunt went home, and my uncle talked to me long-distance and told me I was on probation with him. And that’s one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money.”
“With the eagle?” I cried out. Many kinds of things were disturbing me. “How do you expect to make anything with an eagle! Even if he catches those blasted lizards or whatever you mean. Holy smokes!”
“It isn’t just the lizards. We’re also going to make movies of hunting. I have to capitalize on the things I know how to do. We can sell articles about it to the National Geographic.”
“How do you know we can? And who can write them?”
“We’ll have the material and find somebody to help us. There’s always such a person wherever you go.”
“But, darling, you can’t count on that. What do you think! It’s not so easy.”
“It’s not so terribly hard, I don’t believe. I know lots of people everywhere who are crazy to do me a favor. I don’t suppose it is going to be very easy to man that bird. But I’m thrilled to try. Besides, we can live cheaper in Mexico.”
“But what about the money you’re spending now? In this suite?”
“Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final. That doesn’t matter to you, does it?”
“No, but you ought to take it easier, not put out all this gold.”
“Why?” she said, and genuinely didn’t understand.
Any more than I could understand some of her notions about spending. She would pay thirty dollars for a pair of French sewing scissors in a silver shop on Michigan Boulevard—one big dead sizzle of trousseau silver—and those scissors would never cut a thread or snip a button, but disappear into the flow of articles in the bags and boxes, in the rear of the station wagon, and perhaps never show up again. Yet she could talk about being thrifty in Mexico.
“You don’t mind spending Smitty’s money, do you?”
“No,” I said, and truthfully I scarcely cared. “But suppose I wasn’t going to Mexico wi
th you—would you have gone on alone? With the bird, and so on?”
“Of course. Don’t you want to come with me, though?”
She knew, however, that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes. Even if it was African vultures, condors, rocs, or phoenixes. She had the initiative and carried me; if I had had a different, independent idea I might have tried to take the lead instead. But I had none.