by Saul Bellow
Well, it was hard to take this from wild nature, that there should be humanity mixed with it; such as there was in the beasts that embraced Odysseus and his men and wept on them in Circe’s yard.
At home, when we got there sadly, we sent the horses back to Talavera’s with Jacinto. Thea wouldn’t have had the spirit to walk back from the stables, and I didn’t want to leave her now. Entering the patio, we heard cries from the cook, who ran into the kitchen with her baby because Caligula was going back and forth on the shed roof.
I said to Thea, “Here’s the eagle, he’s back. What do you want to do about him?”
She said, “I don’t care. I don’t want to do anything. He just came back for his meat, because he’s too much of a coward to hunt for it.”
“I disagree. He’s back because he doesn’t feel in the wrong. He simply isn’t used to animals that fight when he grabs them.”
“For all I care you can feed him to the cats.”
I took some meat from a basket by the stove and went out to him; he came to my fist, and I hooded him and passed the swivel, then put him on the waterbox, his dark cool place.
About a week passed and I was his sole custodian. Thea interested herself in other things. She set up a darkroom and started to develop the films she had taken en route. The eagle was left to my care; I exercised and handled him alone in the patio, like one man who rows a large lifeboat by himself. And at this time also I had an uneasy gut, an attack of dysentery, and thus saw him more often than I ordinarily would have cared to. The doctor prescribed Carbosome and told me to stay off tequila and town water. I had perhaps been taking a little too much of that smoky tequila, which made you unreliable if you weren’t used to it.
But the slump from nobility of pursuit harmed everybody. The house was dull while Thea was in her laboratory. Dull isn’t perhaps the word when you consider what disappointment and wrath were kept down. And also I couldn’t stay in bed while Caligula was being neglected, if only for the reason that he’d become dangerous through hunger, let alone the humane side of it.
Beneath some paper stored for kindling beside the fireplace I found a big volume, without covers and in fine type. It contained Campanula’s City of the Sun, More’s Utopia, Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels. I don’t recall what ingenious person made this collection, but it certainly was a whopper. Two days it rained, and I was sunk in it while wet wood tried to burn and I tossed in whole bundles of resinous ocote to try to make a blaze. It was too wet to fly Caligula. I stood upon the toilet seat and fed him through the hood, pushed the meat on him in order to get back as quickly as possible to the book. Utterly fascinated I was, and forgot how I sat on my bones, getting up lamed, dazed by all that boldness of assumption and reckoning. I wanted to talk to Thea about this, but she was too preoccupied with other things.
I said, “Whose is this book?”
“Just a book. Somebody’s.”
“Well, this is some splendid stuff.”
She was glad I had found something to interest myself in but didn’t care about the topic. She laid her hand to one side of my face and kissed me on the other; however, that was only to send me on my way. I took a stretch in the rainy garden. From the wall I saw old da Fiori in the arbor as he picked his nose.
Then I went to get my rubber poncho, for I had a great craving for company. Thea had asked me to get some photographic paper, which gave me an errand. As I marched down the wide, terraced stony stages in the slow rain there was a shaggy long-legged pig who lay in the red mud of the ditch, and a chicken stood on him and pecked the lice. And the gramophone was playing at Hilario’s through a loudspeaker,
Tres cosas hay en la vida
Salud dinero y amor
and next something winding and slow by Claudia Muzio or maybe Amelita Galli-Curci from Jewels of the Madonna. Eleanor Klein once had had that record. It made me feel sad, though not in a low state.
In my foul-weather gear I passed before the cathedral where the beggars soaked in their wool colors and showed their lopped puckered limb ends. I left some coins behind; after all, the dough originally was Smitty’s; I thought some of it should pass on.
From Hilario’s second-floor porch of flowers somebody called me and banged on the tin shield of Carta Blanca beer to get my attention. It was Wiley Moulton, who said, “Come on up.” I was glad to.
Besides Iggy there were two other people at the table who at first seemed man and wife to me. He was pushing fifty but behaved younger, a dry, thin, tall person. But I looked first at the girl, introduced to me merely as Stella. I was happy to see her. She ranked everything in the house, man, beast, and plant, as far as beauty went. Her features rose very slightly from the surface of her face, fall of sense; her eyes were, I guess I’d say, amorous. It was natural that I should be happy to see her; I think, the way revolutionists feel the hands of passersby to know whether they’re common people or aristocrats, when you’re in love you also make identifications like that. Stella was this man Oliver’s girl. And although when he looked at me he appeared to be at ease he was suspicious, and that’s the irrationality of people, for he had arranged to make himself envied instead.
Moulton soon made it clear that I wasn’t unattached. “Hah, Bolingbroke,” he said.
“Who’s that, me?”
“Of course you. You can’t look like a personage and not expect to receive an illustrious name. Something clicked when I saw you, and I said there’s a man who ought to be Bolingbroke if he isn’t already. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Could anyone mind being Bolingbroke?”
Each, according to his tendency, had a look of pleasantry, with malice or with sympathy.
“This is Mr. March. Bolingbroke, what’s your first name?”
“Augie.”
“How is Thea?”
“Fine.”
“We haven’t seen you two much. Must be that eagle that keeps you busy.”
“He does, we are busy.”
“I admired you like anything when you arrived in the station wagon and I saw you take out that bird. I was sitting up here and watching the whole thing. But I understand he’s flunked.”
“Who said so?”
“Oh, the word went around that he was a flop.”
That little bastard Jacinto!
“Is it true, Bolingbroke—is that mighty bird funky? Is he yellow?”
“Why,” I said, “that’s a lot of nonsense! How’s one eagle different from another? They’re all more or less the same. An eagle is an eagle, a wolf a wolf, a bat a bat.”
“You’re right, Boling. I’d say in our species, even, we’re pretty much alike. Just the same, the differences are interesting. So what about your eagle?”
“He’s not ripe yet for this kind of hunting. But he will be soon. Thea’s a great trainer.”
“I wouldn’t deny it. But if he’s timid he must have been a lot easier to train than a real triple-threat, piss-and-vinegar eagle like the one that actually caught those lizards a while back.”
“Caligula is a bald American, the strongest and most savage kind.”
I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater effort falls on its face. On behalf of the writers I had been reading I felt a grievance too.
“Oliver is editor of a magazine,” said Iggy. “Maybe he wants the story on your eagle.”
“Which magazine is that?”
“Wilmot’s Weekly.”
“Yes, we drove down for a holiday,” said this Oliver.
He looked rather silly, frail in the head, with thready lips, small mustache, and knobby cheekbones. Obviously he was a lush, and a very vain man. It was only recent, his coming up in the world. Moulton and Iggy had known him back in New York, and one of the first things Moulton told me about him was that only a couple of years before if you let this Oliver
into your house you ran the risk that he would steal some of your clothes and hock them for whisky; and when last heard from he was in the booby-hatch for the insulin cure, with the screaming meemies. Yet here he was, dressed to kill, with a new convertible and this beauty who was supposed to be an actress. And he was really the editor of Wilmot’s Weekly. Of which he now said, “We’re interested mainly in political articles.”
“Well, Christ, Johnny, don’t try to tell me it’s all so serious in your mag—all think-pieces. It never used to be.”
“Under the new owners everything is different. You know,” he said, and changed the subject in a way that soon became predictable. “I wrote my autobiography last week. Just before we started out. It took a week. Childhood one day, boyhood next, and the rest in five days flat. Ten thousand words a day. It’s coming out next month.” When he talked about himself it was with such satisfaction that for the moment he looked healthy and well, glossy. Then he had a relapse when the topic got away from him, and seemed very meager.
Stella said, “We’re staying at the Carlos Quinto. Come and have a drink with us.”
“Yes, why don’t we,” said Oliver. “We ought to take advantage of it; it’s costing plenty. We can sit in the garden at least.”
I went away, for I was really worked up about the eagle after Moulton’s ribbing. I’d have thought, myself, that Caligula’s flop would give me a sort of pleasure, but, curiously, that wasn’t how it worked out. Before, he had interfered with love; but now that he had flopped he did even more harm. Suddenly Thea and I appeared to have lost the place, and I was bewildered. What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn’t be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?
I went home determined that we would not back down but fly Caligula and catch those giant iguanas, just like that other American couple.
First I wanted to collar Jacinto for blabbing, but I couldn’t find him. Nor was Thea in the house. The cook told me, “Están cazando.”
“Que?”
“Culebras,” said she, in that voice that was like a haywisp of antiquity, it was always so thin and distant.
I looked the word up in the dictionary. They had gone to hunt snakes. Caligula was in his closet.
At night they returned. A band of town kids tagged after them, some of Jacinto’s gang, and yelled to one another by the fiery gate light of Casa Descuitada. In a box Jacinto carried two snakes.
“Where have you been, Thea?”
“We caught these pit vipers—fine ones.”
“Who? All these kids weren’t with you, were they?”
“Oh no. We picked them up on the way back when Jacinto told them what we had.”
“Thea, you’re marvelous to go out and catch them. It’s great! But why didn’t you wait for me? They’re dangerous, aren’t they, these things?”
“I didn’t know when you were coming back. A charcoal burner showed up and told me he had seen vipers, so I went right out after them.”
She put them in one of the cases we had made ready for the iguanas, and that was the start of her collection. In time the porch became a snake gallery, so that the cook wanted to quit, fearing for her kid.
The moment was right to mention the eagle, when Thea was freshened by her success. She listened and was reasonably ready to be swayed, agreeing that Caligula should have another try. I never thought I’d be pleading for him with her. Jacinto went to Talavera’s for the horses next morning. At the gate of the villa I got the traps ready, the cages and the pole, and when Jacinto returned we were there with Caligula, who, as usual, looked great, dangerous. I frowned at Thea’s occasional skeptical glance toward him. We set out. Now and then I talked to him and stroked him with a feather. I said, “Old man, this time you’d better do your stuff.”
We came to the same place, the iguanas’ haunt, and I took a higher position than the last time, to give Caligula a better view of that stony slope. We stood then. His grip was very sharp; I tried to transfer some of his weight to the thigh, not hold him continually on my raised arm. Bizcocho twitched off the ferocious flies of this place who pinned themselves sparkling on his gray ribs.
Thea rode below, and I saw her through a floor of ferns. I caught glimpses also of Jacinto climbing on the turrety white rocks and began to hear some of the giants scuttle and crash when they leaped and fled, and see the voluptuary flowers tremble heavily.
Suddenly I got the idea of what it was to hunt, not with a weapon but with a creature, a living creature you had known how to teach because you’d inferred that all intelligences from the weakest blink to the first-magnitude stars were essentially the same. I touched him and stroked him. As if to check up on me Bizcocho turned his head. And just then Thea whipped the bandanna from her hair, the prearranged signal. I found the cord of the hood and gave the galloping fall on the saddle, feeling called upon not to spare myself. Bizcocho started off very fast. I must have picked too abrupt a downcourse, for the old horse went faster than he ever had. I gripped with my thighs and I pulled the hood and swivel. I was shouting, “Go to it!” when I too suddenly began to go, over the head of the horse as he struck with his hoofs for balance on the sliding stone. He was falling and so was I. I felt the push of Caligula’s spring as he left my arm, and then I saw the color of my own blood on the slope of stones. I struck and slid. I heard Bizcocho’s crazy neigh and Jacinto’s cry.
“Roll, go on rolling!” shouted Thea. “Augie, darling, roll! He’s kicking! He’s hurt!”
But one of Bizcocho’s hoofs caught me square in the head, and I was out.
Chapter 17
IT TAKES SOME OF US a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there’s a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.
Well, that poor Bizcocho, he cracked my skull, but he had broken a leg and Thea shot him. Unconscious, I didn’t hear the explosion. She and Jacinto dragged me up on her horse. The boy mounted with me and held me up like a sack of meal. The blood was spilling from my head, and I had lost some teeth too, from the lower jaw. So, sagging in Jacinto’s arms with the bandanna Thea had used for signaling so soaked it couldn’t absorb more blood, I was carried to the doctor’s house. When we were nearly there I gave myself a heave and said, “Where’s the eagle?”
A hunting accident would never make Thea shed tears, even one as bad as this. She didn’t cry at all. As I was deafened from faintness or from blood or hair or soil in my ears, I didn’t hear but rather saw how she cursed Caligula. I felt a wave or divot of my scalp curl or wrinkle on my head. I glimpsed how her hand, which held my leg tight, was streaked with red. Her pallor was very hot. With that depth and hollow narrowness of sight that you have at such moments her face came before me with spots of light on it from the pattern of brass eyelets on her hat, a spatter of heat across the bridge of her nose and on her lips.
My hearing cleared; I heard the kids cry, “Es el amo del águila!” El águila! Who was doing loops somewhere in the heavens with great pinions, with Turkish feather pants and rending beak. The whole height of space appeared very great to me. I felt I crept along at the bottom of it. Thea said, “You’ve lost a tooth.” I nodded. I knew where the gap was. But sooner or later you’re bound to lose some teeth.
From the doctor’s yard two women came for me with furled stretcher, and they laid me on it. I kept fading in and out, extremely weak. But as we went through the patio I was conscious and admired the day, which was notably beautiful. However, I thought next that it was because of me that Bizcocho was dead, that he had survived wi
ld Zapatista night of guerrilla shooting and slithering and probably been present when men were crucified or their bellies filled with ants, that he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him.
The doctor had a flower in his buttonhole when he came forward, and he was smiling. But basically he was gloomy. His room stunk of drugs and ether. I got a dose of ether that made me reek for days after. I kept puking. I was covered with bandages; my face was stiff with the crusts of scratches. I could eat only gruel and turkey soup, and I couldn’t stand myself. Inside the turban of bandages I heard a hissing as if I had a faucet or jet there. From the pain and this hiss or trickle I suspected that gloomy smiler of doing a bad job and I worried about my skull because of the careless Mexican approach to slaughter, sickness, and burial; but the doctor turned out later to have done a good job. But then I suffered, I was low, eyes deep circled, cheeks drawn in, gap-toothed. In the bandages I seemed to myself to resemble my mother and at times my brother Georgie.
