by Saul Bellow
I asked the clerk, “What’s a good thing to see that I can go out and see in an hour? I have an appointment at noon.”
I knew this was a very American question, but it happened to be the truth.
I won’t conceal what the appointment was about. I was acting for Mintouchian in a piece of business and had to contact a man who was arranging to obtain an Italian import license for us so we could unload Army surplus goods bought cheap in Germany. Vitamin pills especially, and other pharmaceutical goods. Mintouchian knew all about this type of speculation and we were making a lot of dough. There was this Florentine uncle of a Rome bigshot I had to pay off, and he was one of these civilized personalities with about five motives to my one. However, I have got the hang of dealing with them by now, and when in doubt I talk to Mintouchian on the transatlantic phone and he tells me what to do.
The clerk at the Porta Rossa said, “You can see the gold doors of the Baptistery with the sculptures of Ghiberti.”
I recollected that that lunatic Basteshaw had spoken of this Ghiberti and so I followed the man’s directions to the Piazza del Duomo.
Horses were shivering from the cutting wind. Down the cold alleys flames tore from the salamander cans of the people selling chestnuts far in the stone angles of walls and cobblestones.
There were not many people by the Baptistery, due to this cold, only a few huddlers with teary eyes who offered souvenirs for sale and were flapping packs of postcards hinged together. I went and looked into the gold panels telling the entire history of humankind. As I stared and these gold heads of our supposedly common fathers and mothers burned in the sun while they told once and for all what they were, an old lady came up to explain what they represented, and she began to tell me the story of Joseph, of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, about the flight from Egypt and about the Twelve Apostles. She got everything balled up, for they’re not well up on the Bible in Latin countries. And I wanted to be let alone and moved away, but she followed. She carried a stick down which her pocketbook was sliding by the handle and she wore a veil. At last I looked at her face beneath the veil, this aged face of a great lady covered by mange spots and with tarry blemishes on her lips. The fur of her coat was used up and the bald hide broken and crustlike. What she had to say to me was, “Now I’ll tell you about these gates. You’re an American, aren’t you? I’ll help you, because you’ll never understand things like these without help. I knew many Americans during the war.”
“You’re not an Italian, are you?” I said. She had a German sort of accent.
“I’m a Piedmontese,” she answered. “Many people tell me I don’t speak English like an Italian. I’m not a Nazi, if that’s what you’re driving at. I’d tell you my name if you knew something about distinguished names, but you probably don’t, so why should I pronounce it?”
“You’re absolutely right. You shouldn’t have to tell strangers your name.”
I walked on, with my face stung by the Tramontana, and applied myself again to the sculptures of the gate.
She was after me again on her sprawl feet, but quick.
“I don’t want a guide,” I said, and I took some dough out of my pocket and gave her a hundred lire.
“What is this?” she said.
“What do you mean? It’s money.”
“What are you giving me? Do you know I have to stay in a convent in the mountains with the nuns and that they put me in a room with fourteen other women? All sorts of women? I have to sleep with fourteen other people. And I have to walk into the city because the Sisters won’t give us the bus fare.”
“Do they want you to stay up there?”
“The nuns are not very intelligent,” she said. She wasn’t able to stay up there and do dull tasks and escaped into town. She was full of rebellion. But her bones were showing through, her teeth were mixed up, her veil didn’t quite hide the quavery hairs of her chin and mouth, this unfunny joke on former lady smoothness.
I wanted to look at the doors and thought, Why can’t they let you alone in this country?
“This is Isaac going to his own sacrifice,” she said.
I looked, and doubted if that could be right. I said to her, “I don’t want a guide. I understand how it is, but what do you want me to do? People are coming up to me all the time. So why don’t you please take this money and—” I was beginning to be in pain over it.
“People! But I am not other people. You should realize that. I am—” and she was voice-stopped, she was so angry. “This is happening to me!” she said. She seemed to crowd her heart with her elbow and came up close and started it again, that queer begging and demanding.
O destroying laws!
What was the matter, hadn’t this thing taken long enough, wasn’t it gradual enough? I mean, the wrinkles coming, the gray choking out the black, the skin slackening and sinews getting stringy? Did she still have fresh in her mind the villa she had lost, the husband or lovers, the children, the carpets and piano, the servants and money? What was the matter that she still was as if in the first pain of a deep fall?
I gave her another hundred lire.
“Give me five hundred and I’ll show you the cathedral and I’ll take you to Santa Maria Novella. It’s not far, and you won’t know anything if someone doesn’t tell you.”
“As a matter of fact, I have to meet a man right away on business. Thanks just the same.”
I took off. I might as well have, since Ghiberti didn’t have much of a spell over me anyhow just then.
This ancient lady was right too, and there always is a me it happens to. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That’s what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?
Yes, Europe is where Stella and I went after I made three other voyages in the war.
I have written out these memoirs of mine since, as a traveling man, traveling by myself, I have lots of time on my hands. For a couple of months last year I had to be in Rome. It was summer, and the place broke out in red flowers, hot and sleepy. All the southern cities are sleep cities in summer, and daytime sleep makes me heavy and tasteless to myself. To wake up in the afternoon I would drink coffee and smoke cigars, and by the time I came to myself after the siesta it was well-nigh evening. You have dinner, and it’s soft nerveless green night with quiet gas mantles in the street going on incandescent and making a long throbbing scratch in the utter night. Time to sleep again, so you go and subside thickly on the bed.
Therefore I got into the habit of going every afternoon to the Café Valadier in the Borghese Gardens on top of the Pincio, with the whole cumulous Rome underneath, where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions. Said not in order to be so highly significant but probably because human beings have the power to say and ought to employ it at the proper time. When finally you’re done speaking you’re dumb forever after, and when you’re through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.
I try most of the time to be in Paris because that’s where Stella works. She’s with a film company that does international movies. We have an apartment on Rue Francois Ier, a pretty fancy section near the Hotel Georges V. It’s the ornamental and luxury quarter, but the joint Stella and I rented was terrible. It belonged to an old Britisher and his French wife. They took off for Mentone to live off the high rent they soaked us, and here all winter the rain and fog never let up. I’d pass days trying to get used to this moldy though fancied-up apartment, somewhat obstinate, seeing that it was now my place. But there was no getting anywhere with the carpets and chairs, the lamps that looked as if grown on Coney Island, cat-house pictures, alabaster owls with electric eyes, books of Ouida and Marie Corelli in leather binding, smelling like spit. The old crook of a Britisher who was the locataire had something he called a study, which was a sort of closet with a nasty piece of carpet, a set of La
rousse’s encyclopedia from way back, and a green table. The drawers of this green felt table were full of pieces of paper covered with figures on conversion of pounds and francs, dollars, pesetas, schillings, marks, escudos, piasters, and even rubles. This old man, Ryehurst, practically dead, sat here in a suit like for burial, purple flannel without lapels or buttons or buttonholes, and he calculated about money and wrote letters to the papers on the Fall of France and how to get the peasants’ gold out of hiding, or which passes to Italy were the best for motorists. In his youth he had broken the speed record from Turin to London. There was a photo of him in his racer. A little Irish terrier sat in the cockpit with him.
The front rooms were bad enough, but the dining room was too much for me. Stella would leave early to be on the lot, and even though there was a bonne à tout faire to fix my breakfast I couldn’t always bring myself to sit down at the yellow red-embroidered Turkestan cloth for my coffee.
So I would go out to a little café for breakfast, and here one day I ran into my old friend Hooker Frazer. At this café, the Roseraie, which was a jazzy kind of place, there were round tables, wicker chairs, palms in brass tubs, candy-striped fiber carpet, red and white awnings, steam of a huge coffee machine of hundreds of gimmicks, cakes in cellophane, and all that kind of stuff. After I set up the coal stoves—this maid, Jacqueline, was very nice but she didn’t know a thing about getting coal to catch; I was an expert from way back—I’d go to breakfast. Thus one morning I was ordering coffee at the Roseraie. Old folks in slippers, as if in their own lace-veined parlors, walked in the street, with horsemeat and strawberries, etcetera, coming from the market on Place de I’Alma. All at once Frazer came by. I hadn’t seen him since my wedding day.
“Frazer, hey!”
“Augie!”
“What brings you to Paris, old pal?”
“How are you? Same healthy color as always, and smiling away! Why, I’m working with the World Educational Fund. I think I’ve seen everyone I ever knew here during this past year. But what a surprise to run across you, Augie, in the City of Man!”
He was feeling very grand, the place inspired him, and he sat down and gave me a sort of talk—pretty amazing!—about Paris and how nothing like it existed, the capital of the hope that Man could be free without the help of gods, clear of mind, civilized, wise, pleasant, and all of that. For a minute I felt rather insulted that he should laugh when he asked me what I was doing here. It might be incongruous, but if it was for Man why shouldn’t it be for me too? If it wasn’t, perhaps that wasn’t one hundred per cent my fault. Which Man was it the City of? Some version again. It’s always some version or other.
But who could complain of this pert, pretty Paris when it revolved like a merry-go-round—the gold bridge-horses, the Greek Tuileries heroes and stone beauties, the overloaded Opera, the racy show windows and dapper colors, the maypole obelisk, the all-colors ice-cream, the gaudy package of the world.
I don’t suppose Frazer meant to hurt my feelings; he was merely surprised to see me here.
“I’ve been over since the end of the war,” I said.
“Is that so? What doing?”
“I’m connected in business with that Armenian lawyer you met at my wedding. Remember?”
“Oh, of course, you’re married. Is your wife here with you?”
“Naturally. She works in pictures. Maybe you’ve seen her in Les Orphelines. It’s about displaced persons.”
“No, as a matter of fact I don’t see many movies. But I’m not surprised to hear she’s an actress. She’s very beautiful, you know. How are things working out?”
“I love her,” I said.
As if that was an answer! But how can you blame me if I was unwilling to say more to Frazer? Suppose I started to explain that she loved me too, but loved me in the same way that Paris is the City of Man, or with what she brought to it, given her preoccupations—love being the victory of love over preoccupations, or what Mintouchian called dominant ideas that afternoon in the Turkish bath. I wasn’t going to go into all this with Frazer. When I took it up with Stella, and once in a while I did, or tried to, I seemed to sound like a fanatic, and maybe sounded to her as other people had to me, sounding off about their idea that they were trying to sell or to recruit you for. This made her a mirror, like, where I could see my own obstinacy of yore and how it must have looked when I balked. She was right when we took cover in the garden of the Japanese villa in Acatla and she observed that we were very similar. So we are.
However, even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don’t want to lie more than is average. Stella does. Of course you can call it lying or you can call it protection of your vision. I think I prefer the second description. Stella looks happy and firm and wants me to look the same. She sits down by the bird-breasted stove in the salon, on the chair the old English gent Ryehurst warned me—having damages in mind—was a genuine Chippendale, and she’s calm, intelligent, forceful, vital, tremendously handsome, and this is how she wants to put herself across. It’s the vision. Naturally it often takes me a while to know where we’re really at. She talks about happenings at the studio and laughs with her clear, bosomy voice about the jokes of the day. And what have I been doing? Well, perhaps I had a meeting with a person who used to be in Dachau and did some business with him in dental supplies from Germany. That took an hour or two. After which I may have gone to the cold halls of the Louvre and visited in the Dutch School, or noticed how the Seine smelled like medicine, or went into a café and wrote a letter, and so passed the day.
She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me—for the time being, anyway—the most important things I ask of her.
It’s really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You’d never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, “Darling, please bring me a towel.” I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marché department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman’s smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
Lying in the bath, Stella was performing labor. It was obvious to me. And generally I was doing hard work too. And what for?
Everybody gives me a line about Paris being a place of ease and mentions calme, ordre, luxe, et volupté, and yet there is this toil being done. Every precious personality framed dramatically and doing the indispensable work. If Stella weren’t bound to do her hardest work we wouldn’t be in this city of cal
m and luxury, so called. The clothes, the night clubs and entertainment, the supposed play of the studio and the friendship of the artists—who strike me as being characters of pretty high stomach, like our buddy Alain du Niveau—there’s nothing easy in it. I’ll tell you about this du Niveau. He’s what the Parisians call a noceur, meaning that it’s always the wedding night for him or that he plays musical beds. That’s just about the least of it.
Anyway, I would have preferred to stay in the States and have children. Instead I’m in the bondage of strangeness for a time still. It’s only temporary. We’ll get out of it.
I said that Stella lied more than average, unfortunately. She told me a number of things that weren’t so; she forgot to tell me others that were so. For instance, she said she was getting money from her dad in Jamaica. There was no such party in Jamaica. She had never gone to college either. And she had never cared anything about Oliver. He wasn’t the important man. The important one was a big operator whose name was Cumberland. It wasn’t she who first told me about him. I found out from someone else that there was such a man. And then she told me that this Cumberland was a crook. Of morals, that is; in business he was not only respectable but great. In fact he was one of these powerful characters whose pictures don’t even get into the papers because they’re too strong to be named. And gradually this man, with whom she had taken up while still a high-school girl, built up to be about like Jupiter-Ammon, with an eye like that new telescope out at the Mount Palomar observatory, about as wicked as Tiberius, a czar and mastermind. To tell the truth, I’m good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists. After Basteshaw clobbered me I took an oath of unsusceptibility. But this oath is probably a mice-and-man matter, for here the specter of one of this breed was over me. Brother! You never are through, you just think you are!