Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  And this was the way I spent January and February in Madrid, reading helpful texts, sotto voce, to the departed, and trying to draw near to them. You might have thought that this hope of getting next to the dead would weaken my mind, if it didn’t actually originate in mental debility. No. Although I have only my own authority for saying so, my mind appeared to become more stable. For one thing I seemed to be recovering an independent and individual connection with the creation, the whole hierarchy of being. The soul of a civilized and rational person is said to be free but is actually very closely confined. Although he formally believes that he ranges with perfect freedom everywhere and is thus quite a thing, he feels in fact utterly negligible. But to assume, however queerly, the immortality of the soul, to be free from the weight of death that everybody carries upon the heart presents, like the relief from any obsession (the money obsession or the sexual obsession), a terrific opportunity. Suppose that one doesn’t think of death as all sensible people in their higher realism have agreed to think of it? The first result is a surplus, an overflow to be good with. Terror of death ties this energy up but when it is released one can attempt the good without feeling the embarrassment of being unhistorical, illogical, masochistically passive, feebleminded. Good then is nothing like the martyrdom of certain Americans (you will recognize whom I mean), illuminated by poetry in high school, and then testifying to the glory of their (unprovable, unreal) good by committing suicide—in high style, the only style for poets.

  Going broke in a foreign country I felt little or no anxiety. The problem of money was almost nonexistent. It did bother me that I was a phony widower, indebted to the ladies of the pension for their help with Rogelio. Rebecca Volsted, with her face of scalding white, was breathing down my neck. She wanted to sleep with me. But I simply went on with my exercises. Sometimes I thought, Oh, that stupid Renata, didn’t she know the difference between a corpse-man and a would-be seer? I wrapped myself in her cloak, a warmer garment than the vicuna Julius had given me, and I stepped out. As soon as I hit the open air, Madrid was all jewelry and art to me, the smells inspiring, the perspectives lovely, the faces attractive, the winter colors of the park frosty green and filled with vertical strokes of the lightly hibernating trees and the mouth and muzzle vapors of people and animals visible up and down the streets. Renata’s little boy and I walked, holding hands. He was a remarkably composed and handsome little boy. When we wandered in the Retiro together and all the lawns were a dark and chill Atlantic green, this little Roger could very nearly convince me that up to a point the soul was the artist of its own body and I thought I could feel him at work within himself. Now and then you almost sense that you are with a person who was conceived by some wonderful means before he was physically conceived. In early childhood this invisible work of the conceiving spirit may still be going on. Pretty soon little Roger’s master-building would stop and this extraordinary creature would begin to behave in the most ordinary or dull manner or perniciously, like his mother and grandma. Humboldt was forever talking about something he called “the home-world,” Wordsworthian, Platonic, before the shades of the prison house fell. This is very possibly when boredom sets in, the point of advent. Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions. Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery. A terrible breed, the educated nits, mental bores of the heaviest caliber. The world had never seen the likes of them. Poor Humboldtl What a mistake! Well, perhaps he could have another go at it. When? Oh, in a few hundred years his spirit might return. Meantime, I could remember him as a lovely man and generous, a heart of gold. Now and then I shuffled through the papers he had left me. He had believed so greatly in their value. I gave a skeptical sigh and was sad and put them back in his briefcase.

  thirty-seven

  The world checked in with me occasionally, reports arrived from various parts of the globe. Renata’s was the letter I most wanted. I longed to hear that she was sorry, that she was bored with Flonzaley and horrified at what she had done, that he had vile mortician’s habits, and I rehearsed in my head the magnanimous moment when I took her back. When I was less nice I gave the bitch a month with her millionaire embalmer. When I was angrily depressed I thought that after all frigidity and money, as everyone has known since antiquity, made a stable combination. Add death, the strongest fixative in the world, and you had something remarkably durable. I figured by now that they had left Marrakech and were honeymooning in the Indian Ocean. Renata always did say that she wanted to winter in the Seychelles Islands. My secret belief had always been that I could cure Renata of what ailed her. Then I remembered, turning the point of recollection against myself, that Humboldt had always wanted to do the girls good but that they wouldn’t hold still for it, and how he had said about Demmie’s friend, Ginnie, in the village, “Honey from the icebox … Cold sweets won’t spread.” No, Renata didn’t write. She was concentrating on the new relationship and she didn’t have to worry about Roger while I was looking after him. At the Ritz I picked up picture postcards addressed to the kid. I had guessed right. Morocco didn’t detain the couple long. Her cards now bore Ethiopian and Tanzanian postmarks. He received some also from his father, who was skiing in Aspen and Vail. Koffritz knew where his child was.

  Kathleen wrote from Belgrade to say how glad it made her to hear from me. Everything was going extremely well. Seeing me in New York had been unforgettably marvelous. She longed to talk to me again and she expected soon to pass through Madrid on her way to Almería to work on a film. She hoped to have very pleasant things to tell me. There was no check enclosed with her letter. Evidently she didn’t suspect that I badly needed money. I had been prosperous for so many years that no such thought occurred to anyone. Toward the middle of February a letter arrived from George Swiebel, and George, who knew a good deal about my financial condition, made no mention of money either. This was understandable because his letter came from Nairobi, so he couldn’t have received my appeals for help and my questions about the sale of the Oriental rugs. He had been in Kenya for a month hunting for a beryllium mine in the bush. Or was it a lode? I preferred to think of a mine. Had George found such a mine, I as a full partner would be free forever from money anxieties. Unless, of course, the court found a way to take that too away from me. Judge Urbanovich had for some reason chosen to become my mortal enemy. He was out to strip me naked. I don’t know why this was, but it was so.

  George wrote as follows: “Our buddy from the Field Museum was unable to make this trip with me. Ben simply couldn’t swing it. The suburbs wouldn’t give him a release. He invited me for Sunday dinner so I could see for myself what a hell his life was. It didn’t look too terrible to me. His wife is fat but she looks good-natured and there’s a nice kid and a sort of standard mother-in-law and an English bulldog and a parrot. He says his mother-in-law lives on nothing but almond rings and cocoa. She must eat in the night because he’s never yet seen her taking a bite, not in fifteen years. Well, I thought, a lot he’s got to holler. His twelve-year-old boy is a Civil War buff and he and Daddy and the parrot and the bulldog have a kind of club. Besides, he has a nice profession looking after his fossils, and every summer he and the kid take a trip in the camper and fetch home more rocks. So what is he beefing? For old times’ sake I let him into our deal, but he was not the one I took to East Africa with me.

  “To tell the truth I didn’t want to make that long trip alone. Then Naomi Lutz invited me to dinner to meet her son, the one who wrote those articles for the Southtown paper about how he kicked the drug habit. I read them and developed a real interest in this young fellow. Naomi said why not let him come with you? And I actually began to think he would be good company.”

  I interrupt to observe that George Swiebel conceived himself to be especially gifted with young people. They never saw him as a funny old fellow. He took pride in his readiness to understand. He had many special and priv
ileged relationships. He was accepted by youth, by the blacks, by gypsies and bricklayers, by Arabs in the desert, and by tribesmen in every remote place he had ever visited. With exotics he was a hit, making instantaneous human contact, invited to their tents and their cellars and their most intimate private circles. As Walt Whitman did with the draymen, clam diggers, and roughs, as Hemingway did with the Italian infantry and Spanish bullfighters, so George always did in Southeast Asia or in the Sahara or in Latin America, or wherever he went. He made his trips of this sort as often as he could manage, and the natives were always his brothers and were mad about him.

  His letter went on: “Naomi really wanted the boy to be with you. Remember we were going to meet in Rome? But when I was ready to leave, Szathmar still hadn’t heard from you. My contact in Nairobi was waiting and when Naomi begged me to take her son, Louie—he needed adult masculine influences and her own boy friend, with whom she drinks beer and goes to the hockey game, was not the type to help and, in fact, was part of the kid’s problem—I was sympathetic. I thought I would like to learn about the dope scene anyway, and the boy must have some character, you know, if he got the monkey off his back (as they used to say in our time) without outside help. Naomi sets a good table, there was lots to eat and drink, I got pretty mellow, and I said to this Louie with the beard, ‘Okay, kid, meet me at O’Hare, TWA flight so and so, Thursday, half past five.’ I told Naomi I’d drop him off with you on the return trip. She’s a good old broad. I think you should have married her thirty years ago. She’s our kind of people. She gave me a thank-you hug and cried quite a bit. So Thursday at flight time this skinny young character with the beard is hanging around near the gate in his sneakers and shirt sleeves. I say to him, ‘Where’s your coat?’ and he says, ‘What do I need a coat for in Africa?’ And, ‘Where’s your luggage?’ I said. He told me he liked to travel light. Naomi provided his ticket but nothing else. I outfitted him from my own duffel bag. He needed a windbreaker in London. I took him to a sauna to warm him up and gave him a Jewish dinner in the East End. So far the boy was good company and told me a whole lot about the drug scene. Damn interesting. We went on to Rome and from Rome to Khartoum and from Khartoum to Nairobi where my friend Ezekiel was supposed to meet me. But Ezekiel didn’t show. He was in the bush, collecting beryllium. Instead, we were met by his cousin Theo, this marvelous tall black man, built like a whippet, and black, black, shining deep black. Louie said, ‘I dig this Theo. I’m gonna learn Swahili and rap with him.’ Okay, fine. The next day we rented a Volks Minibus from the German Tourist Agency lady Ezekiel had worked for. She organized the trip I took with him four years ago. Then I bought clothing for the bush and even a pair of suède desert boots for Louie and railroad caps and smoked glasses and lots of other stuff, and we took off into the bush. Where we were bound for I didn’t know, but I developed a relationship with Theo very quickly. To tell the truth, I was happy. You know I always had the feeling that Africa was the place where the human species got its start. That was the feeling that came to me when I visited the Olduvai Gorge and met Professor Leakey on my last trip. He absolutely convinced me that this was where man came from. I knew from my own intuition, like a sense of homecoming, that Africa was my place. And even if it wasn’t, it was better than South Chicago anytime and I’d rather meet up with lions than use public transportation. For the weekend before I left Chicago, twenty-five murders were reported. I hate to think what the real figure must be. Last time I took a ride on the Jackson Park El, two cats were slicing off a guy’s pants pocket with razor blades while he pretended to be asleep. I was one of twenty people watching. Couldn’t do a thing.

  “Before leaving Nairobi we visited the game park and saw a lioness jumping on wild pigs. The whole thing was really glorious. Then we drove off and before long we were wallowing in the deep red dust of the back roads and driving under the shade of marvelous big trees, like with roots in the air, and all the black people looked to be sleepwalking because of their nightgown- and pajama-type of costume. We’d enter some village where a whole lot of natives would be working on old foot-pedal Singer sewing machines under the open sky, and out again among the giant anthills like nipples all over the landscape. You know how I love sociable, affectionate situations and I was having the time of my life with this marvelous black man Theo. It wasn’t long before we really became very close. The trouble was with Louie. In the city he was bearable but as soon as we got into the bush, he was something else again. I don’t know what’s with these kids. Are they feeble, sick, or what? The generation of the Sixties, now about twenty-eight years old, already are invalids and basket cases. He’d lie there all day long, acting dazed. Dog-tired we’d arrive in some village in the Minibus and the young fellow who had been pissing and moaning for two hours would begin to cry for his milk. Yes, that’s right. Bottled, homogenized American milk. He’d never been without it and it made him frantic. It was easier to kick the heroin habit than the milk. It sounded innocent enough, and even amusing, why shouldn’t a kid from Cook County, Illinois, have his lousy milk? But I tell you, Charlie, the thing got desperate two days out of Nairobi. He learned the Swahili word for milk from Théo, and when we drove into any little cluster of huts, he leaned out of the window and began to shout for it. ‘Mizuah! Mizuah! Mizuah! Mizuah!’ as we bumped over the ruts. You would have thought he was in agony for his fix. What did the natives know about this damn mizuah of his? They kept a few little cans for the Britishers’ tea and couldn’t understand what he meant, had never even seen a glass of milk. They did their best with a trickle of evaporated stuff, while I felt—to tell the truth, I was humiliated. This was no way to travel in the wilds. After a few days this skinny character with his hair and beard and sharp nose and completely unreasonable eyes—there was just no rapport. My health went into reverse. I began to have a bad stitch in the side of my belly so that I couldn’t sit comfortably or even lie down. The whole middle of me became inflamed, sensitive—horrible! I was trying to relate to the natural surroundings and the primitive life, the animals, etc. This should have been bliss for me. I could almost see the bliss ahead of me like heat waves in the road and couldn’t catch up with it. I had fucked myself out of it by being such a do-gooder. And it only got worse. Ezekiel had left messages along the way and Theo said we should be catching up with him in a few days. I hadn’t seen any beryllium yet. Ezekiel was supposedly making a tour of all the beryllium locations. We couldn’t reach these in our Minibus. You had to have a Land Rover or a Jeep. Ezekiel had a Jeep. So we went along like this and every once in a while we hit a tourist hotel where Louie demanded mizuah and grabbed off the best food. If there were sandwiches, he seized the meat and left me nothing but cheese and Spam. If there was a little hot water, he bathed first and left nothing but dirt for me. The sight of his skinny ass as he toweled himself filled me with one complete hot passion, either to hit him on the butt with a two by four or give him a terrific boot.

  “The payoff was when he got after Theo to teach him Swahili words and the first thing he asked for, naturally, was ‘motherfucker.’ Charlie, there is absolutely no such thing in Swahili. But Louie couldn’t accept the fact that in the very heart of Africa this expression should not exist. He said to me, ‘Man, after all, this is Africa. This Theo has got to be kidding. Is it a secret they won’t tell the white man?’ He swore he wasn’t coming back to America without being able to say it. The truth was that Theo couldn’t even grasp the concept. He had no difficulty with part one, the sex act. And of course he understood part two, the mother. But bringing them together was beyond him. Several long days Louie worked to get it out of him. Then one evening Theo at last understood. He put these two things together. When the idea became clear, he jumped up, he grabbed the jack handle out of the Minibus and swung at Louie’s head. He landed a pretty bad hit on the shoulder and lamed him. This gave me a certain amount of satisfaction but I had to break it up. I had to pull Theo to the ground and get my knees on his arm and hold his head while I reaso
ned with him. I said it was a misunderstanding. However, Theo was all shook up and never talked to Louie again after this mother-blasphemy had struck home. As for Louie, he griped and bitched about his shoulder so long that I couldn’t continue to follow Ezekiel. I decided that we would go back to town and wait for him. Actually we had been making an enormous circle and were now only fifty or sixty miles from Nairobi. It didn’t look to me like any beryllium mine. I concluded that Ezekiel had been collecting or perhaps even stealing beryllium here and there. In Nairobi we X-rayed the young fellow. Nothing was broken but the Dr. did tie his arm in a sling. Before I took him to the airport we sat at an outdoor café while he drank several bottles of milk. He had had it with Africa. The place had become phony under civilized influence and denied its heritage. He said, ‘I’m all shook up. I’m going straight home.’ I took from him the outfit I had bought for his use in the bush and gave it to Theo. Then Louie said he had to bring African souvenirs home for Naomi. We went to tourist shops where he bought his mother a deadly ugly Masai spear. He was due to reach Chicago at 3 a.m. I knew he had no money in his pocket. ‘How are you getting home from O’Hare?’ I said. ‘Why of course I’ll phone Mother.’ ‘Don’t wake Mother. Take a taxi. You can’t hitchhike on Mannheim Road with that fucking spear.’ I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and drove him to the airport. Happy for the first time in a month, I watched him in shirt sleeves and sling climbing up the stairs and carrying the Assegai for Mother into the plane. Then at about a thousand miles an hour ground speed, he took off for Chicago.