by Saul Bellow
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“When I try to guess what you’re thinking I have to try nonsense. Otherwise it would take me a million years to figure out why to you Paris is a ghost town. Would old Chicago aldermen retire to a ghost town to spend their graft-money? Come on Charlie, we’ll eat pressed duck tonight at the Tour d’Argent.”
“No, that kind of food makes me ill.”
“Well then give me the stuff to take back with me—the envelope Humboldt mailed to himself.”
“No, Cantabile, I won’t do that either.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you’re not trustworthy. I’ve got another copy of it, though. You can have that. And I’m willing to write a letter. A notarized letter.”
“That won’t do it.”
“If your friends want to see the original they can come to me in Madrid.”
“You irritate the shit out of me,” said Cantabile. “I’m about to hit the ceiling.” Incensed, he glared at me. Then he made a further effort to be reasonable. “Humboldt has some family yet, doesn’t he? I asked Kathleen. There’s an old uncle in Coney Island.”
I had forgotten Waldemar Wald. Poor old man, he lived in kitchen odors, too, in a back room. He needed rescuing, certainly, from the nursing home. “You’re right, there is an uncle,” I said.
“What about his interest? What, just because you have a mental thing against Paris? You can pay a maid to look after the kid. This is a big deal, Charlie.”
“Well, perhaps I should go,” I said.
“Now you’re talking.”
“I’ll pack a bag.”
thirty-nine
So we flew. That same evening Cantabile and I were on the Champs-Elysées waiting with our tickets to get into the vast movie house near the rue Marbeuf. Even for Paris the weather was bad. It was sleeting. I felt thinly dressed and became aware that my shoe soles had worn through and that my feet were getting wet. The queue was dense, the young people in the crowd were cheerful enough but Cantabile and I were both displeased. Humboldt’s sealed envelope had been locked in the hotel vault and I had the claim check. Rinaldo had quarreled with me about possession of this brass disc. He wanted it in his pocket as a sign that he was my bona-fide representative.
“Give it to me,” he said.
“No. Why should I?”
“Because I’m the natural one to take care of it. That’s my kind of thing.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“You’ll pull out your hankie and lose that check,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re absent-minded.”
“I’ll keep it.”
“You were ornery about the contract, too. You wouldn’t even read it,” he said.
The ice beat on my hat and shoulders. I disliked intensely the smoke of French cigarettes. Above us in the lights were colossal posters of Otway as Caldofreddo and of the Italian actress, Silvia Sottotutti, or something of the sort, who played the role of his daughter. Cantabile was right, in a way, it was a curious experience to be the unrecognized source of this public attraction and to be standing in the sleet—it made one feel like a phantom presence. After two months of what was virtually a retreat in Madrid it felt like backsliding to be here, in the fog and glitter of the Champs-Elysées, under this icy pelting. At the Madrid airport I had picked up a copy of Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals to read on the plane and to insulate me from Cantabile’s frantic conversation. In Baudelaire I had found the following piece of curious advice: Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor write fifty lines upon some extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. What this implied was that the vie quotidienne drove you from the globe, but the deeper implication was that real life flowed between here and there. Real life was a relationship between here and there. Cantabile, one thousand percent here, bore this out. He was acting up. He was feverish with me about the claim-check. He fought with the ouvreuse who took us to our seats. She was enraged by the small tip he gave her. She took his hand and slapped the coin into his palm.
“You bitch!” he yelled at her, and wanted to chase her up the aisle.
I caught him by the arm and said, “Cool it.”
Again I was part of a French audience. Last April Renata and I had come to this very theater. In fact I had lived in Paris in 1955. I quickly learned that this was no place for me. I need a little more fondness from people than a foreigner is likely to get here, and I was then still suffering from Demmie’s death. However, there was no time now to think of such things. The picture was beginning. Cantabile said, “Feel in your pocket, make sure you’ve still got that check. We’re screwed if you’ve lost it.”
“It’s here. Easy, boy,” I said.
“Hand it over. Let me enjoy the picture,” he said. I ignored him.
Then with great crashes of music the film began to roll. It opened with shots from the Twenties in the old newsreel manner—the first conquest of the North Pole by Amundsen and Umberto Nobile who flew in a dirigible from Scandinavia to Alaska. This was played by excellent comedians, highly stylized. I was enormously pleased. They were delicious. We saw the Pope blessing the expedition and Mussolini haranguing from his balcony. The competition between Amundsen and Nobile increased in hostility. When a little girl presented Amundsen with a bouquet, Nobile snatched it away; Amundsen gave orders, Nobile countermanded them. The Norwegians bickered with the Italians on the airship. Gradually we recognized, behind the Time Marches On style of these events, the presence of old Mr. Caldofreddo now in his ancient Sicilian village. These flashes of recollection were superimposed upon the daily existence of this amiable old gent, the ice-cream vendor who is loved by the kiddies, the affectionate father of Silvia Sottotutti. In his youth Caldofreddo had served with Nobile on two transpolar flights. The third, under Nobile’s sole command, ended in a disaster. The dirigible went down in the Arctic seas. The crew was scattered over the ice floes. Receiving radio signals from the survivors, the Russian icebreaker Krassin came to the rescue. Amundsen was handed a cable telling of the disaster while he was drinking deeply at a banquet—according to Humboldt, who had private information about everything, the man had been drinking like a fish. Immediately he announced that he was organizing an expedition to save Nobile. It was all as we had laid it out in Princeton years and years ago. Amundsen chartered a plane. He quarreled violently with his French pilot, who warned him that the aircraft was dangerously overloaded. He commanded him to take off, anyhow. They crashed into the sea. I was shocked to see how effective the comic interpretation of this disaster was. I remembered now that Humboldt and I had disagreed on this. He had insisted that it would be extremely funny. And so it was. The plane sank. Thousands of people were laughing. I wondered how he would have liked that.
The next portion of the film was all mine. It was I who did the research and wrote the scenes in which the rescued Caldofreddo ran wild aboard the Krassin. The sin of eating human flesh was too much for him to bear. To the astonishment of the Russian crew, he ran amuck, shouting gibberish. He hacked at a table with a large knife, he tried to drink scalding water, he hurled his body against the bulkheads. The sailors wrestled him to the ground. The suspicious ship’s doctor emptied his stomach with a pump and found human tissue under the microscope. I was responsible also for the big scene in which Stalin directs the contents of Caldofreddo’s stomach to be exhibited in a jar on Red Square under great banners denouncing cannibalistic capitalism. I added also the rage of Mussolini at this news, the calm of Calvin Coolidge in the White House as he prepared to get into bed for his daily siesta. All this I watched in a state of elation. Mine! All this had originated in my head in Princeton, New Jersey, twenty years ago. It was not a big achievement. It didn’t ring bells in the far universe. It did nothing about brutality, inhumanity, it didn’t clarify much or prevent anything. Nevertheless there was something in it. It was pleasing hundreds of thousands, millions of spectators. Of course, it was ingeniously directed and George Otway as Cald
ofreddo gave a wonderful performance. This Otway, an Englishman in his thirties, strongly resembled Humboldt. At the moment when he threw himself at the cabin walls, as I have seen maddened apes do in the monkey house, battering the partitions with heart-rending recklessness, I was stabbed with the thought of how Humboldt had fought the police when they took him away to Bellevue. Ah, poor character, poor fighting furious weeping hollering Humboldt. His flowers were aborted in the bulb. The colors never came into the light, they rotted in his chest. And the resemblance between Otway in the cabin and Humboldt was so uncanny that I began to cry. As the whole theater rocked with delight, shouting with laughter, I sobbed aloud. Cantabile said in my ear, “What a picture, hey? What did I tell you? Even you’re laughing your head off.”
Yes, and now Humboldt was spread out somewhere, his soul in some other part of the creation, there where souls waited for sustenance that only we, the living, could send from the earth, like grain to Bangla Desh. Alas for us, born by the millions, the billions, like the bubbles of effervescent drink. I had a worldwide dizzy glimpse of the living and the dead, of humanity either laughing its head off as pictures of man-eating comedy unrolled on the screen or vanishing in great waves of death, in flames and battle agonies, in starving continents. And then I had a partial vision of flying blind through darkness and then coming through a break above a metropolis. It glittered on the ground in icy drops, far below. I tried to divine whether we were landing or flying on. We flew on.
“Are they following your outline? Are they using it?” said Cantabile.
“Yes. They’re doing it very well. They’ve added lots of their own ideas,” I said.
“Try not to be so big about it. I want you in a fighting mood tomorrow.”
I told Cantabile, “The Russians proved their case, according to the Doctor’s statement, not only by pumping the stomach but also by examination of the man’s excrement. The stools of the starving are hard and dry. This man claimed he had eaten nothing. But it was clear that he hadn’t missed many meals, on the ice floe.”
“They could have put that in. Stalin wouldn’t have hesitated to put a crock of shit on Red Square. And you can do that nowadays in a picture.”
The scene had changed to Caldofreddo’s little town in Sicily where no one knew his sin, where he was just a jolly old man who peddled ice cream and played in the village band. As I listened to him tootle, I felt that there was something important about the contrast between his little arpeggios and the terrible modern complexity of his position. Lucky the man who has nothing more to say or play than these easy melodies. Are there still such people around? It was disconcerting also to see, as Otway was puffing at the trumpet, a face so much like Humboldt’s. And since Humboldt had gotten into the film, I looked for myself as well. I thought that something in my nature might be seen in Caldofreddo’s daughter, played by Silvia Sottotutti. Her personality expressed a sort of painful willingness or joyful anxiety which I thought that I had, too. I didn’t care for the man in the role of her fiancé, with his short legs and his wide-angled jaw and flat face and lowish brow. It was possible that I identified him with Flonzaley. A man had once followed us at the Furniture Show who must have been Flonzaley. Signals had passed between Renata and him. … I had figured out, incidentally, that as Mrs. Flonzaley Renata was going to have a very limited social life in Chicago. Undertakers couldn’t be very popular dinner guests, except with other undertakers. To be free from this occupational curse she’d have to travel a lot with him, and even on a Caribbean cruise, at the Captain’s Table, they’d have to hope and pray that no one would turn up from the home town to ask, “You don’t happen to be Flonzaley of Flonzaley Mortuaries, do you?” Thus Renata’s happiness would be impaired, as the splendor of the Sicilian sky was stained for Caldofreddo . by his dark act in the Arctic. Even in his trumpet-playing I detected this. I thought that there was one key of his trumpet which, when pushed down, drove right against the man’s heart.
Now the Scandinavian journalist came to town, doing research for a book on Amundsen and Nobile. He tracked down poor Caldofreddo and began to molest him. The old fellow said, “You’ve got the wrong party. That was never me.” “No, you’re the man all right,” said the journalist. He was one of those emancipated people from northern Europe who have expelled shame and darkness from the human breast, an excellent piece of casting. The two men had a conversation on a mountainside. Caldofreddo begged him to go away and leave him in peace. When the journalist refused, he fell into a fit similar to the one he had had on the Krassin. But this one, forty years later, was an old man’s frenzy. It contained more strength and wickedness of soul than of body. In this seizure of pleading and rage, weakness and demonic despair, Otway was simply extraordinary.
“Was this the way you had it in your scenario?” said Cantabile.
“More or less.”
“Give me that claim check,” he said. He thrust his hand into my pocket. I realized that he was inspired by Caldofreddo’s fit. He was so stirred that he had lost his head. More to defend myself than to keep the disc, I clutched his arm. “Get your hand out of my pocket, Cantabile.”
“I have to take care of it. You’re not responsible. A man who’s been pussy-whipped. Not in your right mind.”
We were openly fighting. I couldn’t see what the maniac on the screen was doing because this other maniac was all over me. As one of my authorities said, the difference between the words “command” and “convince” is the difference between democracy and dictatorship. Here was a man who was crazy because he never had to persuade himself of anything! Suddenly it gave me as much despair to have thought this as to fight Cantabile off. This thinking would make a nitwit of me. As when Cantabile threatened me with baseball bats and I thought of Loren/’s wolves or of sticklebacks, or when he forced me into a toilet stall, I thought … All occasions were translated into thoughts and then the thoughts informed against me. I would die of these intellectual quirks. People began to cry out behind us, “Dispute! Bagarre! Emmerdeurs!” They roared, “Dehors . . .!” or “Flanquez les à la porte!”
“They’re calling for the bouncer, you fool!” I said. Cantabile took his hand out of my pocket and we turned our attention to the screen again in time to see a boulder pried loose by Caldo-freddo hurtling down the mountainside toward the journalist in his Volvo while the old man, appalled at himself, cried warnings and then fell on his knees and thanked the Virgin when the Scandinavian was spared. After this attempted murder Caldo-freddo made a public confession in the village square. Finally he was given a hearing by a jury of townspeople in the ruins of the Greek theater on a Sicilian hillside. This ended with a choric scene of forgiveness and reconciliation—just as Humboldt, with Oedipus at Colonus in mind, would have wanted it.
When the lights came on and Cantabile turned toward the near aisle I made my exit by the far one. He caught up with me on the Champs-Elysées, saying, “Don’t be sore, Charlie. That’s just the breed of dog I am, to protect things like that claim check. What if you’re mugged and rolled? Then who even knows what box the envelope is in? And five people are coming tomorrow morning to inspect the evidence. All right, I’m a high-strung fellow. I just want everything to go right. And you’ve been so hurt by that broad you’re a hundred times more out of it than you ever were in Chicago. That’s what I meant by pussy-whipped. Now why don’t we pick up a couple of French hookers. I’ll treat. Rebuild your ego a little.”
“I’m going to sleep.”
“I’m just trying to make up. I know it’s hard for somebody like you having to share the earth with nuts like me. Well, let’s go and have a drink. You’re all ruffled and upset.”
But I wasn’t upset at all, really. A hard full day, even full of nonsense, acquits me of nonfeasance, satisfies my conscience. After four glasses of Calvados in the hotel bar I went to bed and slept soundly.
In the morning we met with Maître Furet and the American lawyer, a terribly aggressive man named Barbash, just the sort of repre
sentative that Cantabile would choose. Cantabile was deeply pleased. He had promised to deliver me and the evidence —I could see now why he had had such a fit about the check— and here we were, as prearranged, all beautifully coordinated. The producers of Caldofreddo knew that one Charles Citrine, author of a Broadway play, Von Trench, later made into a successful film, claimed to be the source of the original story on which their worldwide hit was based. They sent a couple of Harvard Business School types to meet with us. Poor Stronson now in jail in Miami hadn’t come within miles of the image. These two clean, well-spoken, knowledgeable, moderate, completely bald, extremely firm young men were waiting in Barbash’s office.
“Are you two gentlemen fully authorized to deal?” Barbash said to them.
“The last word will have to come from our principals.”
“Then bring the principals, the guys with the clout. Why are you wasting our time!” said Cantabile.
“Easy, easy does it,” Barbash said.
“Citrine is more important than your fucking principals, any day,” Cantabile shouted at them. “He’s a leader in his field, a Pulitzer winner, a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a friend of the late President Kennedy and the late Senator Kennedy, and the late Von Humboldt Fleisher the poet was his buddy and collaborator. Don’t give us any shit here! He’s busy with important research in Madrid. If he can spare the time to come up here so can your crummy principals. He won’t throw his weight around. I’m here to throw it for him. Do this right or you’ll see us in court.”
To utter his threat relieved him wonderfully of something. His lips (not often silent) were lengthened by a silent smile when one of the young men said, “We’ve all heard of Mr. Citrine before.”
Mr. Barbash now got control of the conversation. His problem, of course, was to subdue Cantabile. “Here are the facts. Mr. Citrine and his friend Mr. Fleisher wrote the outline for this film back in 1952. We are prepared to prove this. Mr. Fleisher mailed a copy of the scenario to himself in January 1960. We have this piece of evidence right here in a sealed envelope, postmarked and receipted.”
