by Saul Bellow
And even after the scratches healed and the headaches dimmed down I was gnawed and didn’t know from what cause. Thea also became very restless. Caligula’s washout and my being such a chump as to spur poor Bizcocho from the top of a bluff terribly disappointed her. With her eagerness and boldness, that she should be held back by my incompetence after having undertaken this, planned it out, mastered the animal, was very hard to take. Thea sent Caligula away to her father’s friend in Indiana, for his Trianon zoo. I thought how the old desert rat in Texarkana would enjoy hearing about this. I hobbled out to see the eagle, caged and crated, loaded on the wagon. The white patch of maturity was beginning to show on his head; the eye wasn’t a bit less imperial and his beak with its naked purposes of breathing and tearing just as awesome as before.
I said, “Good-by, Calig.”
“Good-by and good riddance, you phony,” said Thea. We were near tears, both of us, from the crackup of hopes and ridiculing of expectations. The gauntlets and hood lay for a long time in a corner and took on oblivion.
As Thea sat with me and minded and nursed me for a few weeks it became more and more clear that if she didn’t show any unrest there were other expressions that didn’t appear on her face either. When I started to recover I didn’t want her to hang around for my sake and company, if she was going to look like this. We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn’t want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn’t want it to be after snakes that she went. But somebody had tipped her off to some green and red vipers, and what didn’t show in her looks, patient toward me as I lay deaf and gaunt in my turban, in the sequel of the great flop—what didn’t show was how she sat and dreamed of catching these snakes. I recognized that she was bored and needed action.
At first she went after wild pigs and such creatures, to keep me satisfied, but later she brought home snakes from the mountains in a burlap sack. Because of the good it did her I didn’t squawk about it. I could measure her improvement daily with the eye. Only I didn’t want her to go hunting alone, and I urged her to get some of her friends to accompany her, not just Jacinto. There was a hunting set in town, and sometimes the doctor went out with her, sometimes young Talavera.
So I was alone and went around the villa in robe and bandages, into the garden, along the porch with the snakes who writhed in the straw and raced their tongues—I had a cold eye for them. I felt it was less from horror than from antagonism. After all, I had tamed an eagle and got somewhere with wildlife, so I could claim a certain amount of courage. I didn’t have to be clothed in intrepidity all the time or love all creatures. There was a kind of snake smell, like the smell of spoiled mango or rotten hay, the same as where we had hunted the giant iguana.
When I wasn’t too restless I sat in one of the bullhide chairs and read the utopia book. I still had the dysentery bug and in the morning often felt that heavy drape of the guts that made me run to the biffy, Caligula’s old roost. There I kept the door open. It gave me a view of the entire town, which now, late fall, after the deepest heats had passed off, was very beautiful. There weren’t real seasons here, but the shadows of harsher climates varied the months, from the north or from the south. Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. This blue beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it. Otherwise I schlepped around useless and melancholy, feeling like a slob. As my cheeks had fallen, their bones became large and my eyes appeared a little sleepy, from the uneasiness they’d have shown had they opened wider. I grew a kind of Indian mustache of fair hair by the sides of my mouth too.
Thea drank her coffee, told me to be well, put on her sombrero of brass eyelets, and went out to the horses. I would come and watch her mount. With just the slight heaviness of confident body she sat in the saddle. She no longer asked me whether I wanted her to stay with me, only recommended that I take a walk in the afternoon. I said I’d see about it.
Moulton and Iggy came to visit me, and Moulton said, “Boling, you look like hell,” so I felt even more sad over myself and was in the dumps, with omens that moved around in my heart.
Stella too, Oliver’s girl friend, regretted that I didn’t look better when I talked to her from the garden wall. I observed there was a shadow over her also. These days I was drinking up a fair amount of tequila limonada, and I invited her to join me. She refused. Regretfully she said, “I wish I could. One of these days maybe I will. I’d like to talk to you. But you know we’re supposed to move out of the Carlos Quinto.” I didn’t know, and before I could find out why, thin Oliver came lifting his feet over the flowers, his horsy ankles in gartered silk socks, his little red mouth sullen. He took her away from the wall, not even talking to me.
What was wrong with him?
Moulton said he was jealous.
“And she says they’re moving out.”
“Yes, Oliver rented that Jap’s villa. The Jap has to go back to Nagasaki. Oliver says the biddies at the Carlos are giving Stella the treatment. Because they know they aren’t married. If I had a girl like that, a lot I’d care what some old bags were saying!”
“But why is he settling down here? Doesn’t he have that magazine to take care of in New York?”
“He runs it from Mexico,” said Iggy.
Moulton said, “Bushwah! He’s here because he’s in dutch.”
“You think he embezzled money?” said Iggy, astonished.
Moulton looked as though he knew much more than he judged fit to tell. Satchel ass. His portly hard middle hung over with a shirt illustrated with pineapples. He even had a faint shame of the apparition he made in the sunlight. His lids were as dark in stain as his smoker’s fingers, and he had the blinking habit.
“Jepson says he heard he wants to throw a big party on account of Stella in the villa, to show those old bitches at the Carlos,” said Iggy.
“He’s going to show everyone, and knock people down with his success. Whoever thought he was nothing but an international bum, and that’s everybody in the world who ever laid eyes on him, now’s going to be shown. Boy! People are right where he left them, and he’s going to come back and wow them. He has been around the world too, but he didn’t know it because he was drunk.” As he said this, Oliver appeared to my thought in a shack of Outer Mongolia, where soldiers in quilted coats saw him lying in his vomit in a stupor. Moulton liked to show that ill, miserable things and rubbish supplied the unity of the world. Only amusement supposedly made this tolerable, and so he specialized in amusement. All these people, the whole colony, did that.
Well, they visited me at the villa. Then after half an hour Moulton ran out of talk. They had stamped out a dozen butts, and Moulton began to look terribly bored. He had exhausted this particular corner where we sat and so looked sick that he had to stay.
“Bolingbroke,” he said, “you don’t have to stick around the house because you wear that turban. Come down to the zócalo. We’ll meet folks there or play on the fribble machine. Come along, Boling. To horse.”
“Yes, come on, Boling.”
“Not you, Iggy. Go home. Eunice raises hell with me because I keep you away from work.”
“But I thought you were divorced, Iggy?” I said.
“He is, but his wife keeps him on a chain. She makes him stay with the kid while she and the new husband go out.”
Down at Hilario’s we sat amid the flowers of the porch, over the square. They were the simpler flowers of cooler weather. Except the red poinsettia, star of Christmas, with velvet thrust-out peaks, the leader in splendor. It said a lot to me that these flowers should have no power over their place of appearance, nor over the time, and yet be such a success of beauty and plaster the insignificant wall. I saw also the little kinkajou who roved over his square of cage in every dimension, upside down, backwards. In the depth of accident, you be supple—never sleepy but at sleeping time.
And Moulton sat and continued his satire on Iggy
. Eunice took the checks from New York and kept Iggy on a budget. But Iggy didn’t know how to handle dough. He’d only go to the foco rojo with it, and the girls would take it away. Iggy with his bloodshot green eyes and froggy kindly mouth felt praised, sort of, pictured among the whores of the foco rojo.
“Eunice needs the money for the kid. Or I’d lose it to you in poker. That’s what gets Wiley, he can’t win real jack off me.”
“Hell, what would I care if I didn’t see Jepson lush in here with your money, the money he gets out of Eunice?”
“Why, you’re nuts! He’s got his own. His grandfather had an expedition to Africa. No bunk.”
To be near his daughter, an overpetted dark little kid, Iggy lived in the same villa as his ex-wife. It was mostly in order to protect her and the kid from Jepson. I think Iggy probably still loved Eunice.
I went around with him and with Moulton now. As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn’t strong enough to go with Thea but wasn’t too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony. I couldn’t deny their appeal. I learned their language fast. But also fatigue of them came fast.
And the strange thing was, you know, how you woke early in the morning and saw the air, a light gold, thin but strong before daily influences took it away from you. But you felt no reason why, as far as the air itself was concerned, these influences had to be such as they were, low, anxious, or laughable.
Under the pomegranate tree, on the wood bench, Iggy asked me to help him with his difficulties. His story was hung up and he had to have a plot angle. There is a busted ensign on the beach who becomes a rummy. A half-breed proposes to him to run coolies illegally into Hawaii. But among the plantation hands he discovers there are spies, so the old U.S. officer in him is stirred, and he’s going to surrender the whole swatch of them to the authorities. But he has to fight it out with the lascar who now suspects him. Iggy worried out his story, and I went on bare feet for the tequila bottle.
Then Moulton came and we left. The cook had fixed lunch, but I didn’t like to eat alone. I bought tacos in the market, which made my gut worse, or I got a sandwich at the Chinaman’s.
So things shouldn’t cram on his mind but be orderly, Bacon had music played in the next room when he thought out the New Atlantis. But down in the zócalo all day the machines played “Salud Dinero” or “Jalisco,” and there was furious noise, the rapid dual hammer of the mariachis and the yockering of the lame-tongue blind fiddler and crazy scrapes, plus the bang of bus motors and bells, and this mingling was the bed of my disharmonies. So mostly I felt confusion, and dangers that were as terrible as the sky and mountain sights were gorgeous in their painting. The town whirled and howled as it hit the stride of its season.
While Iggy doped out how the American and the half-breed would fight it out over the signals to warn the coast guard we were on the way to Moulton’s hotel. He coaxed me to stay while he ground out his installments of men from Mars. He hated his work; the solitude of it above all. I’d sit on the roof outside his room, droop-shouldered, hands hung large from my knees, and look toward the knotted mountains and wonder in my sun-dimmed mind where Thea might be.
Coming from the cigarette-gray room to think, Moulton paced in shorts that showed his concave knees and thick huge legs; he narrowed the eyes of his great face and looked at the town as though it were all a racket. He poured a drink, he was a chain-smoker; and in the business of mixing, lighting, dragging, flipping, blowing smoke through his satirical nose, there seemed to be contained about all he thought really worth effort. He was mighty bored. And he understood how to make me go through the long characteristic moment of his mood—this ash, ice, butts, lemon peel and sticky glass, panting space of empty time. He saw to it his lot was shared, like everybody else, and did something with you to compel you to feel what he felt. Moulton could even put it in words himself. He said, “Boredom is strength, Boling-broke. The bored man gets his way sooner than the next guy. When you’re bored you’re respected.” With small nose, gross thighs, and those back-bent smoke-dyed fingers, he obliged me with this explanation, and he thought to have more effect on me than he really ever could have. When I didn’t argue he was satisfied that he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake. A conversation was something he could run well, so he liked the reality of his life to be that of conversations. I was on to this.
“Ah well, let’s have a break and play blackjack.” He carried a deck of cards in his shirt pocket. So he blew the cigarette dust from the table and cut for the deal, and when he saw my glances still going out to the mountains he said, to distract me, not roughly, “Yeah, she’s up there. Come on, chum, deal me. Okay. Take yourself. Want a side bet? I bet I get the deal from you in ten minutes.”
Moulton was a big boy for a game of cards, poker most of all. We played at Hilario’s at first, and when Hilario kicked about these long sessions that lasted far into the night we moved over to the filthy Chinese restaurant. Very soon I began to put all my time into gambling. It seems the ancient Huron tribe thought gambling was a remedy for some illnesses. Maybe I had one of those illnesses. Moulton must have too. He had to be betting continually. I matched pesos with him, cut for high card, played fribble—which was what he called pin-ball—and even put-and-take, with a little top. I was lucky and also skillful at poker, which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn’s poolroom. Moulton complained, “Brother, you must have studied with the Capablanca of poker. I can’t tell when you’re bluffing because you always look so innocent. Nobody can really be as innocent as all that.” This was true, though I would have said I actually did intend to be as good as possible. That’s how much I myself knew. But Jesus, Lord! Dissembling! Why, the master-dissemblers there are around! And if nature made us live and do as worms and beetles do, to escape the ichneumon fly and swindle other enemies by mimicry, and so forth—well, all right!! But that’s not our problem.
With Thea too I behaved as though nothing was wrong, and yet I knew we were slipping. If I didn’t show what despair this caused it was a lead-pipe cinch to bluff Moulton out with only a jack.
Why these snakes? Why did she have to hunt snakes? She came back with heaving sackfuls, which made my intestines go wrong with reaction; and then she gave them such loving treatment that I could see nothing in it but eccentricity. You had to be careful not to provoke them into striking the glass, because it gave them mouth sores hard to cure. And in addition they had parasites that got between the scales, and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis. Toughest of all was the casting of the skins, which was like labor when they couldn’t writhe out of the epidermis and even their eyes were clouded with a dirty milk. Thea sometimes took forceps to help them or covered them with damp rags to soften the skin, or she put the more restless ones in water and in the water set a block of wood afloat so the beast might rest its little head when fatigued with swimming. But then they would gleam out, one day, and their freshness and jewelry would give even me pleasure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the cast skin from which they were regenerated in green or dots of red like pomegranate seeds or varnished gold crust.
Meanwhile Thea and I were not satisfied with each other. I was resentful of the snakes and that she tended them. I felt myself between two peculiarities, hers and the peculiarity of the town in full stride of its season. But I didn’t tell her. When she asked me how about coming out with her to hunt I said I wasn’t well enough yet. So she looked at me, and the thought was very prominent that after all I was lushing and playing cards, so if I stood before her skinny, ill, and with secret thoughts smoldering, what remedy could we ever agree on?
“I don’t like that gang you’re with,” she said.
“They’re ha
rmless,” I casually answered, but it was not a harmless kind of answer.
“Why don’t you come out with me tomorrow? Talavera has a safe horse for you. There are some places I want to show you, wonderful places.”
“Well, that’ll be swell,” I said. “When I feel more ready.”
I had tried to put Caligula over and that was enough of a trial; I had stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. I’d be damned if I could get myself into Thea’s excitement about catching snakes. It was too extreme a way of making out, with that vigor that couldn’t be satisfied in ordinary pursuits. If she had to go and snatch these dangerous animals by the throat with a noose, and keep them and milk their venom from them, okay. But I knew at last that definitely there was one thing that was not for me.
She was gone for two days in the mountains. When she returned I heard of it but didn’t go up to the house; I was in a game at Louie Fu’s and couldn’t leave. Next morning I saw her in the garden, in riding breeches and the heavy boots she wore for snaking, thick and sturdy so that fangs couldn’t pierce. Her white skin showed she was unwell, sullen; she hadn’t rested and she craved and smarted, she wanted to punish me. Under the eyes there was a thickening of trouble. From her head the black hair gave back the heat of the sun, and along those particular hairs of irregular departure from her forehead there burned the red thread that was part of the secret of the black.
