Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  The first thing to do, then, was to prove that he was a fake. Strange as it may sound in retrospect, that was the original general opinion, because who could believe that the reverse was the case? Because it wasn’t easy, in the midst of all the other things you had to think about, to imagine the marvelous. I don’t mean that he went around doing tricks or anything like that. It was just a certain—ineffable is the only word I can think of, and I have never understood exactly what it means, but you get a kind of feeling from it, and that’s what you got, too, from the saint, on good days. (He had his ups and downs.) Anyhow, it was pretty savage, in the beginning, the way the local people went around trying to get something on him. I don’t mean to impugn the honesty of these doubters; doubt is real enough in most circumstances. Especially so, perhaps, in cases where what is at issue is some principle of action: if you believe something, then you logically have to act accordingly. If you decided that St. Anthony actually was a saint, then you would have to act a certain way toward him, pay attention to him, be reverent and attentive, pay homage, perhaps change your life a bit. So doubt is maybe a reaction to a strong claim on your attention, one that has implications for your life-style, for change. And you absolutely, in many cases, don’t want to do this. A number of great plays have demonstrated this dilemma, on the stage.

  St. Anthony’s major temptation, in terms of his living here, was perhaps this: ordinary life.

  Not that he proclaimed himself a saint in so many words. But his actions, as the proverb says, spoke louder. There was the ineffableness I’ve already mentioned, and there were certain things that he did. He was mugged, for example. That doesn’t happen too often here, but it happened to him. It was at night, somebody jumped on him from behind, grabbed him around the neck and began going through his pockets. The man only got a few dollars, and then he threw St. Anthony down on the sidewalk (he put one leg in front of the saint’s legs and shoved him) and then began to run away. St. Anthony called after him, held up his hand, and said, “Don’t you want the watch?” It was a good watch, a Bulova. The man was thunderstruck. He actually came back and took the watch off St. Anthony’s wrist. He didn’t know what to think. He hesitated for a minute and then asked St. Anthony if he had bus fare home. The saint said it didn’t matter, it wasn’t far, he could walk. Then the mugger ran away again. I know somebody who saw it (and of course did nothing to help, as is common in such cases). Opinion was divided as to whether St. Anthony was saintly, or simpleminded. I myself thought it was kind of dumb of him. But St. Anthony explained to me that somebody had given him the watch in the first place, and he only wore it so as not to hurt that person’s feelings. He never looked at it, he said. He didn’t care what time it was.

  Parenthetically. In the desert, where he is now, it’s very cold at night. He won’t light a fire. People leave things for him, outside the hut. We took out some blankets but I don’t know if he uses them. People bring him the strangest things, electric coffee pots (even though there’s no electricity out there), comic books, even bottles of whiskey. St. Anthony gives everything away as fast as he can. I have seen him, however, looking curiously at a transistor radio. He told me that in his youth, in Memphis (that’s not Memphis, Tennessee, but the Memphis in Egypt, the ruined city) he was very fond of music. Elaine and I talked about giving him a flute or a clarinet. We thought that might be all right, because performing music, for the greater honor and glory of God, is an old tradition, some of our best music came about that way. The whole body of sacred music. We asked him about it. He said no, it was very kind of us but it would be a distraction from contemplation and so forth. But sometimes, when we drive out to see him, maybe with some other people, we all sing hymns. He appears to enjoy that. That appears to be acceptable.

  A funny thing was that, toward the end, the only thing he’d say, the only word was . . . “Or.” I couldn’t understand what he was thinking of. That was when he was still living in town.

  The famous temptations, that so much has been written about, didn’t occur all that often while he was living amongst us, in our city. Once or twice. I wasn’t ever actually present during a temptation but I heard about it. Mrs. Eaton, who lived upstairs from him, had actually drilled a hole in the floor, so that she could watch him! I thought that was fairly despicable, and I told her so. Well, she said, there wasn’t much excitement in her life. She’s fifty-eight and both her boys are in the Navy. Also some of the wood shavings and whatnot must have dropped on the saint’s floor when she drilled the hole. She bought a brace-and-bit specially at the hardware store, she told me. “I’m shameless,” she said. God knows that’s true. But the saint must have known she was up there with her fifty-eight-year-old eye glued to the hole. Anyhow, she claims to have seen a temptation. I asked her what form it took. Well, it wasn’t very interesting, she said. Something about advertising. There was this man in a business suit talking to the saint. He said he’d “throw the account your way” if the saint would something something. The only other thing she heard was a mention of “annual billings in the range of five to six mil.” The saint said no, very politely, and the man left, with cordialities on both sides. I asked her what she’d been expecting and she looked at me with a gleam in her eye and said: “Guess.” I suppose she meant women. I myself was curious, I admit it, about the fabulous naked beauties he is supposed to have been tempted with, and all of that. It’s hard not to let your imagination become salacious, in this context. It’s funny that we never seem to get enough of sexual things, even though Elaine and I have been very happily married for nine years and have a very good relationship, in bed and out of it. There never seems to be enough sex in a person’s life, unless you’re exhausted and worn out, I suppose—that is a curiosity, that God made us that way, that I have never understood. Not that I don’t enjoy it, in the abstract.

  After he had returned to the desert, we dropped by one day to see if he was home. The door of his hut was covered with an old piece of sheepskin. A lot of ants and vermin were crawling over the surface of the sheepskin. When you go through the door of the hut you have to move very fast. It’s one of the most unpleasant things about going to see St. Anthony. We knocked on the sheepskin, which is stiff as a board. Nobody answered. We could hear some scuffling around inside the hut. Whispering. It seemed to me that there was more than one voice. We knocked on the sheepskin again; again nobody answered. We got back into the Pontiac and drove back to town.

  Of course he’s more mature now. Taking things a little easier, probably.

  I don’t care if he put his hand on her leg or did not put his hand on her leg.

  Everyone felt we had done something wrong, really wrong, but by that time it was too late to make up for it.

  Somebody got the bright idea of trying out Camilla on him. There are some crude people in this town. Camilla is well known. She’s very aristocratic, in a way, if “aristocratic” means that you don’t give a damn what kind of damn foolishness, or even evil, you lend yourself to. Her folks had too much money, that was part of it, and she was too beautiful—she was beautiful, it’s the only word—that was the other part. Some of her friends put her up to it. She went over to his place wearing those very short pants they wore for a while, and all of that. She has beautiful breasts. She’s very intelligent, went to the Sorbonne and studied some kind of philosophy called “structure” with somebody named Levy who is supposed to be very famous. When she came back there was nobody she could talk about it to. She smokes a lot of dope, it’s well known. But in a way, she is not uncompassionate. She was interested in the saint for his own personality, as well as his being an anomaly, in our local context. The long and short of it is that she claimed he tried to make advances to her, put his hand on her leg and all that. I don’t know if she was lying or not. She could have been. She could have been telling the truth. It’s hard to say. Anyhow a great hue was raised about it and her father said he was going to press charges, although in the event, he did not
. She stopped talking about it, the next day. Probably something happened but I don’t necessarily think it was what she said it was. She became a VISTA volunteer later and went to work in the inner city of Detroit.

  Anyhow, a lot of people talked about it. Well, what if he had put his hand on her leg, some people said—what was so wrong about that? They were both unmarried adult human beings, after all. Sexuality is as important as saintliness, and maybe as beautiful, in the sight of God, or else why was it part of the Divine plan? You always have these conflicts of ideas between people who think one thing and people who think another. I don’t give a damn if he put his hand on her leg or did not put his hand on her leg. (I would prefer, of course, that he had not.) I thought it was kind of a cheap incident and not really worth talking about, especially in the larger context of the ineffable. There really was something to that. In the world of mundanity in which he found himself, he shone. It was unmistakable, even to children.

  Of course they were going to run him out of town, by subtle pressures, after a while. There is a lot of anticlericalism around, still. We visit him, in the desert, anyhow, once or twice a month. We missed our visits last month because we were in Florida.

  He told me that, in his old age, he regarded the temptations as “entertainment.”

  Daumier

  WE HAVE ALL

  MISUNDERSTOOD

  BILLY THE KID

  I was speaking to Amelia.

  “Not self-slaughter in the crude sense. Rather the construction of surrogates. Think of it as a transplant.”

  “Daumier,” she said, “you are not making me happy.”

  “The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self, which is a dirty great villain, as can be testified and sworn to by anyone who has ever been awake.”

  “The self also dances,” she said, “sometimes.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have noticed that, but one pays dear for the occasional schottische. Now, here is the point about the self: It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full. I need only adduce the names of Alexander, Richelieu, Messalina, and Billy the Kid.”

  “You have misunderstood Billy the Kid,” she murmured.

  “Whereas the surrogate, the construct, is in principle satiable. We design for satiability.”

  “Have you taken action?” she asked. “Or is all this just the usual?”

  “I have one out now,” I said, “a Daumier, on the plains and pampas of consciousness, and he is doing very well, I can tell you that. He has an important post in a large organization. I get regular reports.”

  “What type of fellow is he?”

  “A good true fellow,” I said, “and knows his limits. He doesn’t overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum. Just enough left to make him go. Loved and respected by all.”

  “Tosh,” she said. “Tosh and bosh.”

  “You will want one,” I said, “when you see what they are like.”

  “We have all misunderstood Billy the Kid,” she said in parting.

  A LONG SENTENCE

  IN WHICH THE

  MIRACLE OF SURROGATION

  IS PERFORMED

  BEFORE YOUR EYES

  Now in his mind’s eye which was open for business at all times even during the hours of sleep and dream and which was the blue of bedcovers and which twinkled and which was traced with blood a trifle at all times and which was covered at all times with a monocle of good quality, the same being attached by long thin black streamy ribands to his mind’s neck, now in this useful eye Daumier saw a situation.

  MR. BELLOWS,

  MR. HAWKINS,

  THE TRAFFIC,

  CHILIDOGS

  Two men in horse-riding clothes stood upon a plain, their attitudes indicating close acquaintance or colleagueship. The plain presented in its foreground a heavy yellow oblong salt lick rendered sculptural by the attentions over a period of time of sheep or other salt-loving animals. Two horses in the situation’s upper left-hand corner watched the men with nervous horse-gaze.

  Mr. Bellows spoke to his horse.

  “Stand still, horse.”

  Mr. Hawkins sat down atop the salt lick and filled a short brass pipe Oriental in character.

  “Are they quiet now?”

  “Quiet as the grave,” Mr. Bellows said. “Although I don’t know what we’ll be doin’ for quiet when the grass gives out.”

  “That’ll be a while yet.”

  “And Daumier?”

  “Scoutin’ the trail ahead,” said Mr. Hawkins.

  “He has his problems you must admit.”

  “Self-created in my opinion.”

  Mr. Hawkins took a deep draw upon his pipelet.

  “The herd,” he said.

  “And the queen.”

  “And the necklace.”

  “And the cardinal.”

  “It’s the old story,” Mr. Hawkins stated. “One word from the queen and he’s off tearing about the countryside and let business go hang.”

  “There’s such a thing as tending to business, all right,” said Mr. Bellows. “Some people never learned it.”

  “And him the third generation in the Traffic,” Mr. Hawkins added. Then, after a moment: “Lovely blue flowers there a while back. I don’t suppose you noticed.”

  “I noticed,” said Mr. Bellows. “I picked a bunch.”

  “Did you, now. Where are they at?”

  “I give um to someone,” Mr. Bellows said.

  “Someone. What someone?”

  There was a silence.

  “You are acquainted with the Rules, I believe,” Mr. Hawkins said.

  “Nothing in the Rules about bestowal of bluebonnets, I believe,” Mr. Bellows replied.

  “Bluebonnets, were they? Now, that’s nice. That’s very nice.”

  “Bluebonnets or indeed flowers of any kind are not mentioned in the Rules.”

  “We are promised to get this here shipment—”

  “I have not interfered with the shipment.”

  “We are promised to get this here herd of au-pair girls to the railhead intact in both mind and body,” Mr. Hawkins stated. “And I say that bestowal of bluebonnets is interferin’ with a girl’s mind and there’s no two ways about it.”

  “She was looking very down-in-the-mouth.”

  “Not your affair. Not your affair.”

  Mr. Bellows moved to change the subject. “Is Daumier likely to be back for chow do you think?”

  “What is for chow?”

  “Chilidogs.”

  “He’ll be back. Daumier does love his chilidog.”

  RÉSUMÉ OF THE PLOT

  OR ARGUMENT

  Ignatius Loyola XVIII, with a band of hard-riding fanatical Jesuits under his command, has sworn to capture the herd and release the girls from the toils so-called of the Traffic, in which Daumier, Mr. Hawkins, and Mr. Bellows are prominent executives of long standing. Daumier meanwhile has been distracted from his proper business by a threat to the queen, the matter of the necklace (see Dumas, The Queen’s Necklace, pp. 76–105).

  DESCRIPTION OF

  THREE O’CLOCK

  IN THE AFTERNOON

  I left Amelia’s place and entered the October afternoon. The afternoon was dying giving way to the dark night, yet some amount of sunglow still warmed the cunning-wrought cobbles of the street. Many citizens both male and female were hurrying hither and thither on errands of importance, each agitato step compromising slightly the sheen of the gray fine-troweled sidewalk. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniq
ues transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle. Some number of these were engaged in ludic agon with basketballs, the same being hurled against passing vehicles producing an unpredictable rebound. Dispersed amidst the hurly and burly of the children were their tenders, shouting. Inmixed with this broil were ordinary denizens of the quarter—shopmen, ren­tiers, churls, sellers of vicious drugs, stum-drinkers, aunties, girls whose jeans had been improved with appliqué rose blossoms in the cleft of the buttocks, practicers of the priest hustle, and the like. Two officers of the Shore Patrol were hitting an imbecile Sea Scout with long shapely well-modeled nightsticks under the impression that they had jurisdiction. A man was swearing fine-sounding swearwords at a small yellow motorcar of Italian extraction, the same having joined its bumper to another bumper, the two bumpers intertangling like shameless lovers in the act of love. A man in the organic-vegetable hustle stood in the back of a truck praising tomatoes, the same being abulge with tomato-muscle and ablaze with minimum daily requirements. Several members of the madman profession made the air sweet with their imprecating and their moans and the subtle music of the tearing of their hair.