by Saul Bellow
I couldn’t question her judgment about Caligula—there I went along with her and had confidence by now, based on her proved ability with him. A creature like that, he’d have torn me to strips if I’d ever taken him on myself, assuming that I’d have had the nerve. No, where the eagle was concerned I did as she said, insofar as I backed the undertaking. When I knew more about it I trembled, thinking of the precautions we didn’t take. We ought to have worn wire masks, especially at the time he was being taught to give up the lure for meat on the fist, since bald eagles are most dangerous when they have their quarry under them. She might have been struck in the eyes. But that never happened, and eventually she succeeded in teaching him to respond to our voices and come directly after the stoop for the hand-fed meat. We talked to him and used every gentleness on him. He liked to be stroked with a feather. He became pretty tame, but all the same my heart picked up a few beats when we hooded him or struck the hood.
At the Regina the scared maids were called in to be present when we worked with him. Thea lined them up and said, “Hablen, hablen ustedes!” They had to chatter. For the thing was to accustom Caligula to close human presence and sound. So the Indian women, in smocks, frightened as well as amused by us—they stood in a row and watched Thea take the eagle down from the dresser on her hand. What I had imagined at the first sight of him actually happened to one of these young chicks, that she wet her pants when the hood came off from the unmerciful face and weapon beak with its breathing holes. But it did affect Caligula to be surrounded by these women; he ate and then at one moment he seemed to lean his head toward Thea and act like a cat who wants to wipe and wreathe and ply himself at a woman’s legs.
“Oh, look at him,” Thea cried. “Augie, see what he’s doing, he wants to be petted!”
Then she was impatient with having to wait on in the city. “Now’s the time to follow up. We ought to be in the country with him.”
“Well, let’s drive out away.”
“No, we can’t. I have to see the lawyer. But I can’t bear to lose the time. Now, now, we could be getting home. We could start to enter him to his quarry.”
By this she meant his first introduction to lizards. Not the giant variety with the high frill of which she had shown me pictures, the game we were after, but littler lizards. And furthermore Caligula had to become accustomed to a horse or burro; these giant lizards were in almost inaccessible parts of the mountain, far from roads, and we couldn’t lug Caligula the whole long difficult way.
I felt Thea maybe ought not to hurry the divorce too much. She might not be getting a good deal. I didn’t want to ask about the details, and I figured probably she had been an heiress long enough to look after things for herself. What could I tell her of that? Besides, I didn’t care to find out in its entirety about the trouble between her and Smitty, and had I asked she would have told me. So I laid off the topic, and we used the spare time to take color pictures of Caligula on my arm in front of the cathedral; until mounted officers who appeared to gallop out of the gates of a ministry drove us off the plaza. They were tough with me. I understood them to say the bird was dangerous, and they shouted that they wanted to see my papers. They were more deferential to Thea, but with lady-killer smiles they anyway made us go. Thea still intended to sell illustrated articles about Caligula to the National Geographic or Harper’s. She knew a writer in Acatla who would help us; and she kept notes in a little book which was a very classy affair of red leather with a gold pencil attached. At any time at all she’d take it out on her knees and write with bent neck, a few words to a page, while, as she paused to think or remember, she moved her hand like someone in the process of shading a drawing. I studied her so well I even noted that the creases at the joints of her fingers were much like my own.
“Darling, what town was that in Texas where he wanted to go after a jack rabbit?”
“Around Uvalde, wasn’t it?”
“Honey, no. Could it have been?”
She took my thigh with her hand. Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. We sat under a tree on a wrought-iron chair. As I looked at the clear skin of her breast I felt its heat as actual as the heat of her hand through the thin cloth of my trousers. I assumed we’d get married when the divorce came through.
Chapter 16
And strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.
Antony and Cleopatra
WE FOUND Thea’s house ready. If it was her house. Perhaps it was Smitty’s. I thought I’d find out in due time. There was no rush about it.
The towers and roofs of town appeared and then were hid many times in knots of mountain and back of cliffs of thousands of feet before the descending road became a street and we arrived in the cathedral square, or zócalo. There we parked, and, the way to the villa being narrow, we had to walk. Even normally we’d have been met by a gang of kids, beggars, loafers, hotel-touts, and so forth, but the eagle on my fist brought out a mob from the shops and bars and from the awning-covered market just below the cathedral. A lot of people recognized Thea and sounded off with yells and yelps, whistles, picked-up sombreros, and in this turbulent escort that raised a dust around us we climbed a few hundred yards above the zócalo on the pointy stone terraces, to the gate of the villa. “Casa Descuitada,” I read on a blue tile under the branches of pomegranate trees—Carefree House. We entered, and the cook and houseboy met us. Mother and son, they stood a good distance apart, both with bare feet on the red stone of the porch, she by the kitchen and he by the bedroom door. In her shawl she carried an infant, and at the sight of the bird, even in his hood, started to back into the kitchen. We took the bird away. The toilet became his mews; he perched on the waterbox or cistern where the sound of trickling seemed to please him. The boy, Jacinto, tagged after to see how we handled him. He was thrilled.
Sometimes I thought that if to earn money was the reason for this goofy undertaking I should devote myself to the money question and how to make a killing; then I’d set Caligula free or give him away. But I knew that to make money was not Thea’s objective. I didn’t overlook the nobility of her project, how ancient it was, the kind of ambition that was involved or the aspect of game or hazard; I even was aware of a link to earliest times in the great venture of domestication. Yes, for all my opposition and dread of the bird, wishing him a gargoyle of stone or praying he would drop dead, I saw the other side of it, and what was in it for her, that she was full of brilliant energy. But I thought, What was wrong with the enjoyment of love, and what did there have to be an eagle for? So then, if I had dough at least there couldn’t be that pretext. Then I understood, next, how to think idly of money is terribly frivolous. Being unreasonable perhaps about the capture of the lizards, Thea nevertheless had a bird and had made a start, whereas my thought of money was only a flutter of imagination. What was I doing in breeches and campaign hat down here in Central Mexico if I wanted to be serious about it? In short, I saw anew how great a subject money is in itself. Here was vast humankind that meshed or dug, or carried, picked up, held, that served, returning every day to its occupations, and being honest or kidding or weeping or hypocritic or mesmeric, and money, if not the secret, was anyhow beside the secret, as the secret’s relative, or associate or representative before the peoples.
Here we arrived, and lunch was served to us—soup, chicken with black molé sauce, tomato and avocados, coffee and guava jelly. And this strange, mouth-inflaming delicate food, as I was eating, was what brought my mind to this question of the dollar.
The house was handsome and wide, deeper than appeared from outside, because from the garden you descended to the rooms. The walls were reddish and floors darker red or green tile. There were two patios, one with a fountain and barrel-shaped oxhide chairs; the other was by the kitchen, a sort of old stable yard, and here we continued Caligula’s
training. He flew down to us from the tiles of the shed where Jacinto slept.
From the porch where we ate we had the town and the cliffs before us. Nearly immediately below was the zócalo, the dippy bandstand and its vines, the monstrous trees around. The cathedral had two towers and a blue-varied belly of dome, finely crusted and as if baked in a kiln, overheated, and in places with the mutilated spectrum that sometimes you split out of brick. It was settled uneven on the stones of the square, and occasionally in the midst of admiration gave you a heavy, squalid, gut-sick feeling, so much it incorporated all that was in the surroundings. The bells clung like two weak old animals, green and dull, and the doors opened on a big gloom in which stood dead white altars and images slashed and scratched with axes, thorns, raked with black wounds—some of these flashy with female underpants on their hips, nail-cloven and hacked as they were, and bleeding as far as their clothespin white fingers. Then on a hill to one side was the cemetery, white and spiky, and on another side and higher in a star of connecting gullies was a silver mine, and there you could see where the force of great investment had dented. The mountainside was eaten for some distance by machine. I was intrigued and climbed up there one day. It certainly was odd what mechanisms you saw all over Mexico, what old styles there gnawed and crawled, pit or tunnel makers, and machine scarabaeuses, British and Belgian doojiggers, Manchester trolleys or poodle locomotives at the head of sick cars covered with blanketed men and soldiers.
Within the town still, along the road to the mine, the garbage was thrown into a little valley, hummocky with soft old decays; the vultures hung over it all day. At one of the highest points you could see, in a cliff, there was a waterfall. Sometimes it was covered in a cloud, but there usually flew the slight smoke of water, paler than the air, above the treeline. A good deal below were pines, at the widows’ peaks of wrinkled rock; and then more tropical trees and flowers, and the hot stone belt of snakes and wild pigs, the deer, and the giant iguanas we had come to catch. Where they hung out the light was very hot.
In a Paris or a London where the distinction of the sun isn’t so great, in the grays and veilings, it isn’t credited with its fall power, and many southern people have envied those places the virtues it’s possible to think of having in the cool or cold. I believe Mussolini was not kidding about blasting pieces out of his Alps and Apennines to let the cold foggy currents of Germany over the peninsula and make the Perugini and the Romans into fighters. That same Mussolini who was slung up dead by the legs with shirt tails drooped off his naked belly, and the flies, on whom he had also declared war, walked on his empty face relaxed of its wide-jawed grimace, upside down. Ay! And his girl friend with poor breasts bullet-punctured also hung by the feet. But what I want of the contrast of broadcast or exposing versus discreet light is to suggest what the claims are, or the illusions, the discreeter seems to allow. Now I’ve mentioned that Thea carried among other pictures one of her father, taken in the south of China, in a rikshaw. She put it on the dresser, tucked in the mirror frame, and I often found myself studying him, his white shoes of far manufacture off the ground being used by the dish-faced Cantonese. In his white suit. And I thought what there was to such being picked for special distinction. Maybe I looked at him with special regard as lover or future husband of his daughter. But anyway, he was sitting gentlemanly up in the human taxi. Around him spectators from the millions gowping at him, famine-marks, louse-vehicles, the supply of wars, the living fringe of a great number sunk in the ground, dead, and buzzing or jumping over Asia like diatoms of the vast bath of the ocean in the pins of the sun.
Well, in the hot light I saw the wild mountain, the semitropical band of it where the iguanas haunted in the big leaves and gorgeous flowers, the laborers and peasants, and I didn’t realize right away how many visitors from the cool and cold were paying their good dough to be here. Very near us was a luxury hotel, the Carlos Quinto. Its swimming pool shone in the garden, blue and white like heavenly warmth and weather, and there were large foreign cars in the drive. Acatla was beginning to attract people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo but now wanted to be out of the way of politics. There were already some Spaniards here, from both sides of the disaster, and also some Frenchwomen, and Japanese and Russians, a family of Chinese who ran a bar and manufactured rope-soled alpargatas. The American colony was large, and so the place was boiling and booming. I knew little about that at first.
It entertained me to look into the gardens of the Carlos Quinto next door, the bar on the terrace, the swimmers in the pool, the riding parties setting out, the small deer kept in a wire pen. The manager was an Italian; he wore diplomatist’s pants and a claw-hammer coat that accommodated his wide prat. His hair was smooth and his face confident for others, worried toward himself. I noticed how quick his fingers were, in and out of his vest pockets where many of his functions started. From our wall Thea introduced me to him; he was called da Fiori. There was a private end of the garden for his own family on which our bedroom window looked down. In the morning old da Fiori, his tiny father, came out in a cap and old English type of suit, dark green, fuzzy, with a belt on the jacket and chestnut buttons. He brushed the ends of his whiskers with hairy knuckles, and when he walked, his little feet didn’t seem adequate to support him. We loved to sit up in bed, each by the other’s nude waist, and watch him mouse around in the enormous flowers. Then came his son, already combed, pale, bored; his spats in the dew, he bent and kissed his father’s hand. And then came two little daughters, like white birthday cake, and the soft mother. All carried the old geezer’s tiny hand to their mouths. It gave us a lot of pleasure. They would sit down in the arbor and be served.
By now the eagle had learned Thea’s voice and mine, and he’d come off the lure to eat out of our hands when called. It was time to introduce or enter him to lizards. Live ones were a trouble, because they’d run away, and they were so small. Dead ones didn’t suit Thea. She worried about those Jacinto brought in; she suggested doping the larger ones a little with ether, just enough to make them sluggish. I was fond of them. Some soon became tame. You stroked them on the little head with a finger and they got affectionate, up your sleeve or on your shoulder, into your hair. At night, when we were at dinner, I’d stare at the ones that lay near the bug-attracting lights, with swift puff of the throat and their tongues which are supposed to have the power to hear. I wished we could leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and beak. About this Thea was both gay and sharp with me, and when she argued against my sympathy with these gilded Hyperion’s kids made me laugh and also squirm. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about it independently.
She said, “Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with everything, like a savage. Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don’t want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn’t be lizards—they’d be too slow, and pretty soon they’d be extinct. And look, if you were lying dead the little lizard would run down your open mouth to catch beetles, as if you were a log.”
“And Caligula would eat me.”
“Could be.”
“And you’d bury me?”
“Because you’re my lover. Of course. Wouldn’t you me?”
Unlike Lucy Magnus, she never called me husband, or by any domestic term. I sometimes believed her marriage views, except that they weren’t polemical, were similar to Mimi’s.
This conversation about lizards was one of several on the same general topic, and gradually Thea made me see what she was driving at with me. You couldn’t get the admission out of me that a situation couldn’t be helped and was inescapably bad, but I was eternally looking for a way out, and what was up for question was whether I was a man of hope or foolishness. But I suppose I felt the good I had must be connected with a law. While she, I guess, didn’t care for my statue-yard of hopes. It seemed when somebody held me up an evil there had to be a remedy or I pulled my head and glance awa
y, turned them in another direction. She had me dead to rights when she accused me of that; and she tried to teach me her view.
Nevertheless I hated to see the little lizards hit and squirt blood, and their tiny fine innards of painted delicacy come out under Caligula’s talons while he glared and opened his beak.
On a Sunday morning, when the band boomed and spat in the zócalo, where it began at dawn, and the heat was dry in the kitchen patio, after breakfast—we had sunnyside-up eggs—we were working with the bird. It was something to hear the exercise of his wings in the heated space of the air. Jacinto brought us a larger lizard. We tied him with short fishing line to a stake, which gave him no chance to dart away. Then the eagle came beating down with a sharp threat of pinions in the electrical dry air and its hurried dust and went to set his claws in the lizard. But there was enough play in the line for the quick animal to whip around, and it opened its mouth and showed a tissue of rage to the big beast over it, then snapped its jaws and hung from the bird’s thigh, curved with the force of its attack and bite. One of those thighs that made the bird seem to ride like an Attila’s horseman through the air. Caligula made a noise. I don’t believe he had ever in his life been hurt and his astonishment was enormous. He tore off the lizard, and when he had already squeezed and wounded it past recovery he hopped off. I couldn’t show it, but it did my heart good to see Caligula so offended. He sorted among the feathers with his beak to find the hurt place.
