The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  So she asked me whether I didn’t want to stay behind, and then seeing it all over my face how I loved her she took back her question and was silent; the only sound was the strike of the guitar as it was set down.

  Then she said, “If the bird worries you, just forget about it till you see it. I’ll show you what to do. Only don’t think about it beforehand. Or think what a kick there may be in it when you get the animal trained, and how beautiful it is.”

  I tried to take her advice, but all the same my bottom skepticism of West-Side Chicago nagged after me and asked, “Nah, what is this!” And since we were only a short distance from the zoo I took a walk to see their eagle, who perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and sun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers—the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy! In the old-country park green of lawns and verdigris-covered ironwork, ordinary tree shade and garden sunlight, there seemed nothing a bird like this might want. I thought, How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We’d better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big.

  The letter from Smith’s lawyer had arrived. The day we received it we loaded up the wagon and left the city, heading toward St. Louis. As we started late we didn’t quite make it that far. We camped, sleeping on the ground under a shelter-half. I figured we weren’t too far from the Mississippi, which I was eager to see. I was terribly excited.

  We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries’ old trunk still had such small-change of foliage—it was difficult to think this enormous thing should live merely by these tiny leaves. And soon you distinguished the sound of the leaves, moved by the air, from the insects’ sound. First near and loud; then farther and mountainous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark there was this sound of insects, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.

  Chapter 15

  WHAT CLASS we started out in! We were risen up high with pleasure. We had all the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we found in each other, for in some ways Danaë or Flora the Belle Romaine couldn’t have been stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the weight of precious personality and the veteran burden that familiarity is always a part of.

  The way we set out and all that we did or saw, what we ate, under what trees we took off our clothes and what protocol there was about kissing, from the face to the legs and back again up to the breasts, what we agreed and disagreed about, or what animals or people came our way I can always recall when I want to. Some things I have an ability to see without feeling much previous history, almost like birds or dogs that have no human condition but are always living in the same age, the same at Charlemagne’s feet as on a Missouri scow or in a Chicago junkyard. And often that is how the trees, water, roads, grasses may come back in their green, white, blue, steepness, spots, wrinkles, veins, or smell, so that I can fix my memory down to an ant in the folds of bark or fat in a piece of meat or colored thread on the collar of a blouse. Or such discriminations as where, on a bush of roses, you see variations in heats that make your breast and bowel draw at various places from your trying to correspond; when even the rose of rot and wrong makes you attempt to answer and want to stir. Which is to say also that the human heat that circulates and warms, when it’s piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps. So there are burning roses, there are sores, and there are busted circuits. It’s rare to find us without these breaks and interferences.

  Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her. I’d do it by looking, through long old habit, casual and unattached; it was hard for me to change. And on her side, she couldn’t make me any promises. She just wouldn’t. I knew that Smitty wouldn’t have divorced her because of one single naval cadet. I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was not of such importance. When I took it up with her she admitted it. “Of course,” she said, “now and then. Because of Smitty. Well—also because of myself. But we don’t have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to me. So what do I know about far in the future? I’ve never been this way before. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Why,” she said, exactly right, “this makes you jealous! Why, Augie, the others would be jealous of you. They should be. Those just were incidents. You know, this can be one of the most unimportant things in the world. If it’s good, why grudge anybody? And if it’s bad you can only feel sorry. And can you blame me if I tried? And don’t you want me to tell you the truth?”

  “Oh! Yes, I do. No. I’m not sure. Maybe not.”

  “Suppose I hadn’t looked—what would I know? And if I can’t tell you the truth, and you can’t tell me …”

  Yes, yes, I knew the truth had to be appropriate somewhere, but was this the place for it?

  She wanted to say and to know all. Pale as she was, she got paler at the approach of this desire to say and know, and often her seriousness was right on the border of panic. For of course she was jealous too. Yes, she was jealous. It did me good sometimes to realize it. She wanted to be hard about the truth, and when she was she shook and got frightened.

  Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me in the first place. It wasn’t a reassuring thought. But then it’s actually very common that at the outset you desire a thing for the wrong reasons; there’s an even more deep desire which will bring you out of such reasons. Otherwise there’d never be any human motives but miserable, green ones, and only the illusion of better and riper. Rather than as the history of the world shows, that inferior reasons are not the only leading ones. Because why have unhappy people persisted in thinking of the best, and the best only? You take that poor Rousseau, in the picture he leaves of himself, stubble-faced and milky, in a rope wig, while he wept at his own opera performed at court for the monarch, how he was encouraged by the weeping of the heart-touched ladies and fancied he’d like to gobble the tears from their cheeks—this sheer horse’s ass of a Jean-Jacques who couldn’t get on with a single human being, goes away to the woods of Montmorency in order to think and write of the best government or the best system of education. And similarly Marx, with his fierce carbuncles and his poverty and the death of children, whose thought was that the angel of history would try in vain to fly against the wind from the past. And I can mention many others, less great, but however worried, spoiled, or perverse, still wanting to set themselves apart for great ends, and believing in at least one worthiness. That’s what the more deep desire is under the apparent ones.

  Oh, jealousy, sure. But there were plenty of other defects and inferiorities. What I sometimes didn’t think of myself, in the fine pants and the buckskins, boots, sheath knife, while I drove the station wagon as if from the court at Greenwich and along the Thames, just back from a Spanish raid, goofy flowers in my hat. This was how I’d note myself with satisfaction and glowing; I may ask a partial excuse, because of the swelling of my heart, that I was such a happy jerk. But she could be singular too, when she’d swagger or boast or vie against other women; or fish compliments, or force me to admire her hair or skin, which I didn’t have to be forced to do. Or I would find her stuffing toilet paper into her brassiere. Toilet paper! What a strange idea of herself—complete failure to know what she had! What did she want with different breasts? I would look over into her blouse, where they seemed to me perfect, and perplex myself with this question.

  I could enumerate more difficulties, like pangs, vexations, bellyaches, anxious nosebleeds and vomiting, continual alarms about pregnancy. Also she was snobbish now and then about her extraction and would brag about her musical ability. Actual
ly, I heard her play the piano only once, in a roadhouse, in the afternoon. She went up on the bandstand, and the instrument may have been out of whack from use by jazz musicians; anyway, it began to crash from the energy she turned loose on the keys, chords overreached and elements spilled. She abruptly quit and came back silent to the table, drops of sweat on her nose. She said, “This seems to be an off day.” Well, I didn’t care whether she could play or not, but to her it seemed important.

  But these shortcomings, both in her and me, could have been corrected or changed. Whatever wasn’t essential I thought might simply be rolled over. Like camp articles we rolled over that were in our way; we forgot to clear them aside—I am thinking of one particular day; there were some aluminum cups and lines and straps that happened to be on the blanket. It was afternoon; we were in the Ozark foothills, well off the road, in the woods near a pasture. Up from where we were there was a totter of small pines, and above them bigger trees, and subsiding land below. Because the water we had was poor we spiked it with rye for taste. The weather was hot, and the air was glossy, the clouds white and heavy, rich, dangerous, swagging, silk. The open ground glared and baked, the wheat looked like the glass of wheat, the cattle had their feet in the water. First the heat and then the rye made us take off our clothes, shirts, then trousers, finally all. I was startled to see those pinks of her breast, so heavy and forward, and despite everything I was still, at first, somewhat shy of them. When I put down my tin plate and began to kiss her, both kneeling, her hand passed over my belly hairs; it sometimes surprised me where she would put a kiss of gentleness, and I didn’t know where the jump of happiness would come from. She gave me only the side of her face at first, and, when her lips, she would not let my mouth go for some time, until her arms locked in my head. I felt, when I was roofed and covered with heat, met all over and to the smallest hair, carried on her body, easily. She didn’t shut her eyes, but they were not open in order to see me or anything; filled and slow, they made no effort but only received or showed. Very soon I didn’t notice either, but knew I came out of my hidings and confinements, efforts, ends, observations, and I wanted nothing that was not for her and felt the same from her. We stayed a length of time as we were, easing and slowly lying apart on each other’s arms, then once more nearer, kissing neck and breastbone and on the edge of the face and on the hair.

  Meanwhile the clouds, birds, cattle in the water, things, stayed at their distance, and there was no need to herd, account for, hold them in the head, but it was enough to be among them, released on the ground as they were in their brook or in their air. I meant something like this when I said occasionally I could look out like a creature. If I mentioned a Chicago junkyard as well as Charlemagne’s estate, I had my reasons. For should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars—such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are—like a terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshipers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was the creation of such places. How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?

  We had few such afternoons when we started to train the eagle. After all, love can be the calling of mythological characters around Mount Olympus or Troy, like Paris, Helen, or Palamons and Emilies, but we had to start to earn our own bread. And it couldn’t be in any way other than this one that Thea had chosen, to send out a bird after another animal. And so the gilded and dallying part of the excursion ended in Texarkana.

  Seeing that fierce animal in his cage, I felt darkness, and then a streaming on my legs as if I had wet myself: it wasn’t so, it was only something to do with my veins. But I really felt dazed in all my nerves when I saw with what we would have to deal, and dark before the eyes. The bird looked to be close kin to the one that lit on Prometheus once a day. I had hoped this would be a smaller bird, and, brought up by us from a baby, he’d learn something about affection. But no—to my despair—here he was as big as the one in Chicago, with the same Turkish or paratroop knickers down to his merciless feet.

  Thea was terribly excited and keen. “Oh, he’s so beautiful! But how old is he? He’s not an eaglet; he looks full grown and must weigh twelve pounds.”

  “Thirty,” I said.

  “Oh, honey, no.”

  Of course she knew more about it than I did.

  “But you didn’t get him from the nest, did you?” she asked the owner.

  This old guy, who kept a roadside zoo of mountain lions and armadillos, a few rattlers, was an ancient-prospector or desert-rat-looking joker, with the sort of eyes that request you to believe their crookedness is only the freak of nature or effect of unfavorable light. But I hadn’t served around Einhorn’s poolroom or had Grandma Lausch’s upbringing for nothing, and I recognized him for a crooked old bastard and prick in his heart.

  “No, I didn’t climb for him. Fellow brought him in when he was real tiny. They grow so durn fast.”

  “He looks older to me. My guess is he’s in the prime of life.”

  Thea said, “I have to know if he was ever a haggard—ever hunted wild.”

  “He’s never been outside that cage since practically from hatching. You know, miss, I’ve been shipping animals to your uncle for close on twenty years.” He thought George H. Something-or-other was her uncle.

  “Oh, of course we’re going to take him,” said Thea. “He’s so magnificent. You can open the cage.”

  I rushed forward because I feared for her eyes. Falconry with those little peregrine hawks was all right in the tame meadows out East in the company of ladies and sporting gentlemen; but we were on the edge of Texas, within smell of deserts and mountains, and she had never touched an eagle before even if she was experienced with smaller birds and capable of the capture of poisonous snakes. However, she was very steady when it came to dealing with animals; she had no fear of them at all. With the gauntlet pulled on, she held a piece of meat inside the cage. The eagle struck it out of her hand and then took it. She tried another piece, and he mounted her arm with that almost inaudible whiff of his spread wings that’s so fearful in itself, the raised shoulder with its forward power and the fan of the pinions with hidden rust and angel-of-death armpit or deepest hollow inside the wing. His talons held her arm steady while he tore up the meat. However, when she wanted to take him out he attacked and tore with his beak. I reached for him next, and he struck me above the gauntlet and cut gashes in my arm. I expected this, if not worse, and somehow I was relieved that it happened so quick, making me fear him a little less. As for Thea, fascinated, and whiter than ever in her cap with green bill, quick, strong, erect in the head with her purpose to get and tame him, the spurt of blood on my arm was, just now, only an incident, like the grate of gravel under our boots. In action, she was that way about accidents—spills and falls from horses and motorcycles, knife cuts or any hunting injuries.

  Finally we got the bird transferred to the back of the station wagon. Thea was happy. I had things to do, such as bandaging my arm and stowing the boxes anew to give the bird more space, that allowed me to hide my gloom. While the old man, as Thea described her scheme, could hardly keep his grin in his whiskers. Like so many enthusiasts, Thea rarely got the number of anyone who pretended to listen seriously. Since the old man was getting a fancy price for his eagle, or, the way I felt about it, had found a place for this harsh client of his, he was very pleased and malicious. So we drove off, with the thing supervisor of the back of the wagon. I observed how glad and confident Thea was, and took note of the shotgun behind the seat.

  I can remember a cousin of Grandma Lausch who recited “The Eagle,” by Lermontov, in Russian; which I didn’t dig, but the elocution was wonderful and romantic. She was dark, she had black eyes, her throat was ardent but her hands rather powerless. She was much younger than Grandma, and her husband was a furrier. I’m only
trying to gather together what a city-bred man knew of eagles altogether, and it’s curious: the eagle of money, the high-flying eagles of Bombay, the NRA eagle with its gear and lightnings, the bird of Jupiter and of nations, of republics as well as of Caesar, of legions and soothsayers, Colonel Julian the Black Eagle of Harlem; also the ravens of Noah and Elijah, which may well have been eagles; the lone eagle, animal president. And, as well, robber and carrion feeder.

  Well, given time, we all catch up with legends, more or less.

  The bird had looked to me to be in his prime, but the old man was approximately right, even though he probably lied by as much as eight months. American eagles are generally blackish until maturity; before they get the white part of their plumage they moult a good many times. Ours didn’t yet have his, the full bad eye of the head when it whitens, and was still only Black Prince, not King. He was, however, powerfully handsome, with his onward-turned head and buff and white feathers among the darker, his eyes that were gruesome jewels and meant nothing in their little lines but cruelty, and that he was here for his own need; he was entirely a manifesto of that. I hated him beyond measure, at the start. In the night we had to be up because of him, and it was an interference with love. If we slept out-of-doors and I woke and missed her, I would find her by him; or she would shake and send me to check if all was well—the jesses around his legs, the swivel through the hole of the jesses, the leash through the swivel. If we had a hotel room he shared it. I’d hear his step; he crackled his feathers or hissed as if snow was sliding. He was right away her absorption and idée fixe, almost child, and he made her out of breath. She turned to him continually in her seat as we rode, or when we ate, and I wondered at other times whether he was on her mind.