Cat's Cradle: A Novel

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “The emperor was Tum-bumwa, the only person who ever regarded the island as being worth defending. A maniac, Tum-bumwa caused to be erected the San Lorenzo Cathedral and the fantastic fortifications on the north shore of the island, fortifications within which the private residence of the so-called President of the Republic now stands.

  “The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.”

  Castle Sugar came into San Lorenzo in 1916, during the sugar boom of the First World War. There was no government at all. The company imagined that even the clay and gravel fields of San Lorenzo could be tilled profitably, with the price of sugar so high. No one complained.

  When McCabe and Johnson arrived in 1922 and announced that they were placing themselves in charge, Castle Sugar withdrew flaccidly, as though from a queasy dream.

  58

  TYRANNY WITH A DIFFERENCE

  “THERE WAS AT LEAST ONE quality of the new conquerors of San Lorenzo that was really new,” wrote young Castle. “McCabe and Johnson dreamed of making San Lorenzo a Utopia.

  “To this end, McCabe overhauled the economy and the laws.

  “Johnson designed a new religion.”

  Castle quoted the “Calypsos” again:

  I wanted all things

  To seem to make some sense,

  So we all could be happy, yes,

  Instead of tense.

  And I made up lies

  So that they all fit nice,

  And I made this sad world

  A par-a-dise.

  There was a tug at my coat sleeve as I read. I looked up.

  Little Newt Hoenikker was standing in the aisle next to me. “I thought maybe you’d like to go back to the bar,” he said, “and hoist a few.”

  So we did hoist and topple a few, and Newt’s tongue was loosened enough to tell me some things about Zinka, his Russian midget dancer friend. Their love nest, he told me, had been in his father’s cottage on Cape Cod.

  “I may not ever have a marriage, but at least I’ve had a honeymoon.”

  He told me of idyllic hours he and his Zinka had spent in each other’s arms, cradled in Felix Hoenikker’s old white wicker chair, the chair that faced the sea.

  And Zinka would dance for him. “Imagine a woman dancing just for me.”

  “I can see you have no regrets.”

  “She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.”

  He proposed a gallant toast. “Sweethearts and wives,” he cried.

  59

  FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

  I WAS IN THE BAR with Newt and H. Lowe Crosby and a couple of strangers, when San Lorenzo was sighted. Crosby was talking about pissants. “You know what I mean by a pissant?”

  “I know the term,” I said, “but it obviously doesn’t have the ding-a-ling associations for me that it has for you.”

  Crosby was in his cups and had the drunkard’s illusion that he could speak frankly, provided he spoke affectionately. He spoke frankly and affectionately of Newt’s size, something nobody else in the bar had so far commented on.

  “I don’t mean a little feller like this.” Crosby hung a ham hand on Newt’s shoulder. “It isn’t size that makes a man a pissant. It’s the way he thinks. I’ve seen men four times as big as this little feller here, and they were pissants. And I’ve seen little fellers—well, not this little actually, but pretty damn little, by God—and I’d call them real men.”

  “Thanks,” said Newt pleasantly, not even glancing at the monstrous hand on his shoulder. Never had I seen a human being better adjusted to such a humiliating physical handicap. I shuddered with admiration.

  “You were talking about pissants,” I said to Crosby, hoping to get the weight of his hand off Newt.

  “Damn right I was.” Crosby straightened up.

  “You haven’t told us what a pissant is yet,” I said.

  “A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.”

  “Not a very attractive characteristic,” I suggested.

  “My daughter wanted to marry a pissant once,” said Crosby darkly.

  “Did she?”

  “I squashed him like a bug.” Crosby hammered on the bar, remembering things the pissant had said and done. “Jesus!” he said, “we’ve all been to college!” His gaze lit on Newt again. “You go to college?”

  “Cornell,” said Newt.

  “Cornell!” cried Crosby gladly. “My God, I went to Cornell.”

  “So did he.” Newt nodded at me.

  “Three Cornellians—all in the same plane!” said Crosby, and we had another granfalloon festival on our hands.

  When it subsided some, Crosby asked Newt what he did.

  “I paint.”

  “Houses?”

  “Pictures.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Crosby.

  “Return to your seats and fasten your seat belts, please,” warned the airline hostess. “We’re over Monzano Airport, Bolivar, San Lorenzo.”

  “Christ! Now wait just a Goddamn minute here,” said Crosby, looking down at Newt. “All of a sudden I realize you’ve got a name I’ve heard before.”

  “My father was the father of the atom bomb.” Newt didn’t say Felix Hoenikker was one of the fathers. He said Felix was the father.

  “Is that so?” asked Crosby.

  “That’s so.”

  “I was thinking about something else,” said Crosby. He had to think hard. “Something about a dancer.”

  “I think we’d better get back to our seats,” said Newt, tightening some.

  “Something about a Russian dancer.” Crosby was sufficiently addled by booze to see no harm in thinking out loud. “I remember an editorial about how maybe the dancer was a spy.”

  “Please, gentlemen,” said the stewardess, “you really must get back to your seats and fasten your belts.”

  Newt looked up at H. Lowe Crosby innocently. “You sure the name was Hoenikker?” And, in order to eliminate any chance of mistaken identity, he spelled the name for Crosby.

  “I could be wrong,” said H. Lowe Crosby.

  60

  AN UNDERPRIVILEGED NATION

  THE ISLAND, seen from the air, was an amazingly regular rectangle. Cruel and useless stone needles were thrust up from the sea. They sketched a circle around it.

  At the south end of the island was the port city of Bolivar.

  It was the only city.

  It was the capital.

  It was built on a marshy table. The runways of Monzano Airport were on its water front.

  Mountains arose abruptly to the north of Bolivar, crowding the remainder of the island with their brutal humps. They were called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but they looked like pigs at a trough to me.

  Bolivar had had many names: Caz-ma-caz-ma, Santa Maria, Saint Louis, Saint George, and Port Glory among them. It was given its present name by Johnson and McCabe in 1922, was named in honor of Simón Bolívar, the great Latin-American idealist and hero.

  When Johnson and McCabe came upon the city, it was built of twigs, tin, crates, and mud—rested on the catacombs of a trillion happy scavengers, catacombs in a sour mash of slop, feculence, and slime.

  That was pretty much the way I found it, too, except for the new architectural false face along the water front.

  Johnson and McCabe had failed to raise the people from misery and muck.

  “Papa” Monzano had failed, too.

  Everybody was bound t
o fail, for San Lorenzo was as unproductive as an equal area in the Sahara or the Polar Icecap.

  At the same time, it had as dense a population as could be found anywhere, India and China not excluded. There were four hundred and fifty inhabitants for each uninhabitable square mile.

  “During the idealistic phase of McCabe’s and Johnson’s reorganization of San Lorenzo, it was announced that the country’s total income would be divided among all adult persons in equal shares,” wrote Philip Castle. “The first and only time this was tried, each share came to between six and seven dollars.”

  61

  WHAT A CORPORAL WAS WORTH

  IN THE CUSTOMS SHED at Monzano Airport, we were all required to submit to a luggage inspection, and to convert what money we intended to spend in San Lorenzo into the local currency, into Corporals, which “Papa” Monzano insisted were worth fifty American cents.

  The shed was neat and new, but plenty of signs had already been slapped on the walls, higgledy-piggledy.

  ANYBODY CAUGHT PRACTICING BOKONONISM IN SAN LORENZO, said one, WILL DIE ON THE HOOK!

  Another poster featured a picture of Bokonon, a scrawny old colored man who was smoking a cigar. He looked clever and kind and amused.

  Under the picture were the words: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, 10,000 CORPORALS REWARD!

  I took a closer look at that poster and found reproduced at the bottom of it some sort of police identification form Bokonon had had to fill out way back in 1929. It was reproduced, apparently, to show Bokonon hunters what his fingerprints and handwriting were like.

  But what interested me were some of the words Bokonon had chosen to put into the blanks in 1929. Wherever possible, he had taken the cosmic view, had taken into consideration, for instance, such things as the shortness of life and the longness of eternity.

  He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.”

  He reported his principal occupation as: “Being dead.”

  THIS IS A CHRISTIAN NATION! ALL FOOT PLAY WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE HOOK, said another sign. The sign was meaningless to me, since I had not yet learned that Bokononists mingled their souls by pressing the bottoms of their feet together.

  And the greatest mystery of all, since I had not read all of Philip Castle’s book, was how Bokonon, bosom friend of Corporal McCabe, had come to be an outlaw.

  62

  WHY HAZEL WASN’T SCARED

  THERE WERE SEVEN OF US who got off at San Lorenzo: Newt and Angela, Ambassador Minton and his wife, H. Lowe Crosby and his wife, and I. When we had cleared customs, we were herded outdoors and onto a reviewing stand.

  There, we faced a very quiet crowd.

  Five thousand or more San Lorenzans stared at us. The islanders were oatmeal colored. The people were thin. There wasn’t a fat person to be seen. Every person had teeth missing. Many legs were bowed or swollen.

  Not one pair of eyes was clear.

  The women’s breasts were bare and paltry. The men wore loose loincloths that did little to conceal penes like pendulums on grandfather clocks.

  There were many dogs, but not one barked. There were many infants, but not one cried. Here and there someone coughed—and that was all.

  A military band stood at attention before the crowd. It did not play.

  There was a color guard before the band. It carried two banners, the Stars and Stripes and the flag of San Lorenzo. The flag of San Lorenzo consisted of a Marine Corporal’s chevrons on a royal blue field. The banners hung lank in the windless day.

  I imagined that somewhere far away I heard the Hamming of a sledge on a brazen drum. There was no such sound. My soul was simply resonating the beat of the brassy, clanging heat of the San Lorenzan clime.

  “I’m sure glad it’s a Christian country,” Hazel Crosby whispered to her husband, “or I’d be a little scared.”

  Behind us was a xylophone.

  There was a glittering sign on the xylophone. The sign was made of garnets and rhinestones.

  The sign said, MONA.

  63

  REVERENT AND FREE

  TO THE LEFT SIDE of our reviewing stand were six propeller-driven fighter planes in a row, military assistance from the United States to San Lorenzo. On the fuselage of each plane was painted, with childish blood-lust, a boa constrictor which was crushing a devil to death. Blood came from the devil’s ears, nose, and mouth. A pitchfork was slipping from satanic red fingers.

  Before each plane stood an oatmeal-colored pilot; silent, too.

  Then, above that tumid silence, there came a nagging song like the song of a gnat. It was a siren approaching. The siren was on “Papa’s” glossy black Cadillac limousine.

  The limousine came to a stop before us, tires smoking.

  Out climbed “Papa” Monzano, his adopted daughter, Mona Aamons Monzano, and Franklin Hoenikker.

  At a limp, imperious signal from “Papa,” the crowd sang the San Lorenzan National Anthem. Its melody was “Home on the Range.” The words had been written in 1922 by Lionel Boyd Johnson, by Bokonon. The words were these:

  Oh, ours is a land

  Where the living is grand,

  And the men are as fearless as sharks;

  The women are pure,

  And we always are sure

  That our children will all toe their marks.

  San, San Lo-ren-zo!

  What a rich, lucky island are we!

  Our enemies quail,

  For they know they will fail

  Against people so reverent and free.

  64

  PEACE AND PLENTY

  AND THEN THE CROWD was deathly still again.

  “Papa” and Mona and Frank joined us on the reviewing stand. One snare drum played as they did so. The drumming stopped when “Papa” pointed a finger at the drummer.

  He wore a shoulder holster on the outside of his blouse. The weapon in it was a chromium-plated .45. He was an old, old man, as so many members of my karass were. He was in poor shape. His steps were small and bounceless. He was still a fat man, but his lard was melting fast, for his simple uniform was loose. The balls of his hoptoad eyes were yellow. His hands trembled.

  His personal bodyguard was Major General Franklin Hoenikker, whose uniform was white. Frank—thin-wristed, narrow-shouldered—looked like a child kept up long after his customary bedtime. On his breast was a medal.

  I observed the two, “Papa” and Frank, with some difficulty—not because my view was blocked, but because I could not take my eyes off Mona. I was thrilled, heartbroken, hilarious, insane. Every greedy, unreasonable dream I’d ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. There, God love her warm and creamy soul, was peace and plenty forever.

  That girl—and she was only eighteen—was rapturously serene. She seemed to understand all, and to be all there was to understand. In The Books of Bokonon she is mentioned by name. One thing Bokonon says of her is this: “Mona has the simplicity of the all.”

  Her dress was white and Greek.

  She wore flat sandals on her small brown feet.

  Her pale gold hair was lank and long.

  Her hips were a lyre.

  Oh God.

  Peace and plenty forever.

  She was the one beautiful girl in San Lorenzo. She was the national treasure. “Papa” had adopted her, according to Philip Castle, in order to mingle divinity with the harshness of his rule.

  The xylophone was rolled to the front of the stand. And Mona played it. She played “When Day Is Done.” It was all tremolo—swelling, fading, swelling again.

  The crowd was intoxicated by beauty.

  And then it was time for “Papa” to greet us.

  65

  A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO

  “PAPA” WAS A SELF-EDUCATED MAN, who had been major-domo to Corporal McCabe. He had never been off the island. He spoke American English passably well.

  Everything that any one of us said on the reviewing stand was bellowed out at the crowd through doomsday horns.

 
Whatever went out through those horns gabbled down a wide, short boulevard at the back of the crowd, ricocheted off the three glass-faced new buildings at the end of the boulevard, and came cackling back.

  “Welcome,” said “Papa.” “You are coming to the best friend America ever had. America is misunderstood many places, but not here, Mr. Ambassador.” He bowed to H. Lowe Crosby, the bicycle manufacturer, mistaking him for the new Ambassador.

  “I know you’ve got a good country here, Mr. President,” said Crosby. “Everything I ever heard about it sounds great to me. There’s just one thing …”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m not the Ambassador,” said Crosby. “I wish I was, but I’m just a plain, ordinary businessman.” It hurt him to say who the real Ambassador was. “This man over here is the big cheese.”

  “Ah!” “Papa” smiled at his mistake. The smile went away suddenly. Some pain inside of him made him wince, then made him hunch over, close his eyes—made him concentrate on surviving the pain.

  Frank Hoenikker went to his support, feebly, incompetently. “Are you all right?”

  “Excuse me,” “Papa” whispered at last, straightening up some. There were tears in his eyes. He brushed them away, straightening up all the way. “I beg your pardon.”

  He seemed to be in doubt for a moment as to where he was, as to what was expected of him. And then he remembered. He shook Horlick Minton’s hand. “Here, you are among friends.”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Minton gently.

  “Christian,” said “Papa.”

  “Good.”

  “Anti-Communists,” said “Papa.”

  “Good.”

  “No Communists here,” said “Papa.” “They fear the hook too much.”

  “I should think they would,” said Minton.

  “You have picked a very good time to come to us,” said “Papa.” “Tomorrow will be one of the happiest days in the history of our country. Tomorrow is our greatest national holiday, The Day of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy. It will also be the day of the engagement of Major General Hoenikker to Mona Aamons Monzano, to the most precious person in my life and in the life of San Lorenzo.”