Edward groaned. A palpable groan. “What else?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Nothing else?”
“When I was on my way to the ladies’ club, the boy I had tried to take a picture of came up and took my arm. I was surprised but I said to myself something like, It’s necessary to have friends here.”
“What else?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What did the ladies’ club remind you of?”
“It was in a cellar.”
“Did it remind you of anything?”
“It was rather like a place at the university. Where we used to dance.”
“What is connected with that place in your mind?”
“Once a boy came through a window to a party.”
“Why did he come through the window?”
“So he didn’t pay.”
“Who was he?”
“Someone.”
“Did you dance with him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“Yes.”
“Very often?”
“Twice.”
Edward and Pia went to Malmö on the flying boat. The hydrofoil leaped into the air. The feeling was that of a plane laboring down an interminable runway.
“I dreamed of a roof,” Pia said. “Where corn was kept. Where it was stored.”
“What does that—” Edward began.
“Also I dreamed of rugs. I was beating a rug,” she went on. “And I dreamed about horses, I was riding.”
“Don’t,” Edward said.
Pia silently rehearsed three additional dreams. Edward regarded the green leaves of Malmö. Edward and Pia moved through the rug department of a department store. Surrounded by exciting rugs: Rya rugs, Polish rugs, rag rugs, straw rugs, area rugs, wall-to-wall rugs, rug remnants. Edward was thinking about one that cost five hundred crowns, in seven shades of red, about the size of an opened-up Herald Tribune, Paris edition.
“It is too good for the floor, clearly,” Pia said. “It is to be hung on the wall.”
Edward had four hundred dollars in his pocket. It was supposed to last him two months. The hideously smiling rug salesman pressed closer. They burst into the street. Just in time. “God knows they’re beautiful, however,” Edward said.
“What did you dream last night?” Edward asked. “What did you dream? What?”
“I can’t remember.”
Edward decided that he worried too much about the dark side of Pia. Pia regarded as a moon. Edward lay in bed trying to remember a dream. He could not remember. It was eight o’clock. Edward climbed out of bed to see if there was mail on the floor, if mail had fallen through the door. No. Pia awoke.
“I dreamed of beans.”
Edward looked at her. Madam Cherokee’s Dream Book flew into his hand.
“To dream of beans is, in all cases, very unfortunate. Eating them means sickness, preparing them means that the married state will be a very difficult one for you. To dream of beets is on the other hand a happy omen.”
Edward and Pia argued about Mrs. Miniver. It was not written by J. B. Priestley, Edward said.
“I remember it very well,” Pia insisted. “Errol Flynn was her husband, he was standing there with his straps, his straps”—Pia made a holding-up-trousers gesture—“hanging, and she said that she loved Walter Pidgeon.”
“Errol Flynn was not even in the picture. You think J. B. Priestley wrote everything, don’t you? Everything in English.”
“I don’t.”
“Errol Flynn was not even in the picture.” Edward was drunk. He was shouting. “Errol Flynn was not even … in’… the goddamn picture!”
Pia was not quite asleep. She was standing on a street corner. Women regarded her out of the corners of their eyes. She was holding a string bag containing strawberries, beer, razor blades, turnips. An old lady rode up on a bicycle and stopped for the traffic light. The old lady straddled her bicycle, seized Pia’s string bag, and threw it into the gutter. Then she pedaled away, with the changing light. People crowded around. Someone picked up the string bag. Pia shook her head. “No,” she said. “She just … I have never seen her before.” Someone asked Pia if she wanted him to call a policeman. “What for?” Pia said. Her father was standing there smiling. Pia thought, These things have no significance really. Pia thought, If this is to be my dream for tonight, then I don’t want it.
The Temptation Of St. Anthony
YES, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable. I think that’s quite understandable—that kind of thing can be extremely irritating, to some people. After all, everything is hard enough without having to deal with something that is not tangible and clear. The higher orders of abstraction are just a nuisance, to some people, although to others, of course, they are quite interesting. I would say that on the whole, people who didn’t like this kind of idea, or who refused to think about it, were in the majority. And some were actually angry at the idea of sainthood—not at the saint himself, whom everyone liked, more or less, except for a few, but about the idea he represented, especially since it was not in a book or somewhere, but actually present, in the community. Of course some people went around saying that he “thought he was better than everybody else,” and you had to take these people aside and tell them that they had misperceived the problem, that it wasn’t a matter of simple conceit, with which we are all familiar, but rather something pure and mystical, from the realm of the extraordinary, as it were; unearthly. But a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind telling you so. “If he’d just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long, if he wanted to”—that was a common theme. There is a sort of hatred going around for people who have lifted their sights above the common run. Probably it has always been this way.
For this reason, in any case, people were always trying to see the inside of the saint’s apartment, to find out if strange practices were being practiced there, or if you could discern, from the arrangement of the furniture and so on, if any had been, lately. They would ring the bell and pretend to be in the wrong apartment, these people, but St. Anthony would let them come in anyhow, even though he knew very well what they were thinking. They would stand around, perhaps a husband-and-wife team, and stare at the rug, which was ordinary beige wall-to-wall carpet from Kaufman’s, and then at the coffee table and so on, they would sort of slide into the kitchen to see what he had been eating, if anything. They were always surprised to see that he ate more or less normal foods, perhaps a little heavy on the fried foods. I guess they expected roots and grasses. And of course there was a big unhealthy interest in the bedroom, the door to which was usually kept closed. People seemed to think he should, in pursuit of whatever higher goals he had in mind, sleep on the floor; when they discovered there was an ordinary bed in there, with a brown bedspread, they were slightly shocked. By now St. Anthony had made a cup of coffee for them, and told them to sit down and take the weight off their feet, and asked them about their work and if they had any children and so forth: they went away thinking, He’s just like anybody else. That was, I think, the way he wanted to present himself, at that time.
Later, after it was all over, he moved back out to the desert.
I didn’t have any particular opinion as to what was the right thing to think about him. Sometimes you have to take the long way round to get to a sound consensus, and of course you have to keep the ordinary motors of life running in the meantime. So, in that long year that saw the emergence of his will as one of its major landmarks, in our city, I did whatever I could to help things along, to direct the stream of life experience at him in ways he could handle. I wasn’t a disciple, that would be putting it far too strongly; I was sort of like a friend. And there
were things I could do. For example, this town is pretty goodsized, more than a hundred thousand, and in any such town—maybe more so than in the really small ones, where everyone is scratching to survive—you run into people with nothing much to do who don’t mind causing a little trouble, if that would be diverting, for someone who is unusual in any way. So the example that Elaine and I set, in more or less just treating him like any one of our other friends, probably helped to normalize things, and very likely protected him, in a sense, from some of the unwelcome attentions he might otherwise have received. As men in society seem to feel that the problem is to get all opinions squared away with all other opinions, or at least in recognizable congruence with the main opinion, as if the world were a jury room that no one could leave until everybody agreed (and keeping in mind the ever-present threat of a mistrial), so the men, and the women too, of the city (which I won’t name to spare possible embarrassment to those of the participants who still live here) tried to think about St. Anthony, and by extension saintliness, in the approved ways of their time and condition.
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: íf 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.
St. Anthony’s major temptation, in terms of his living here, was maybe 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 simple-minded. 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 coffeepots (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 the town 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.
Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) Page 14
