The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  The driver came around. She made sure again that I had written down the name of her theatrical agent who always knew where to find her. She kissed me, and her lips made an unknown sensation on the side of my face, so I asked myself what mistake might I be on the verge of making now. Whilst the cab moved slowly in the market crowd, I walked beside it and we pressed hands through the window. She said, “Thank you. You were a real friend.”

  “Good luck, Stella,” I said. “Better luck …”

  “I wouldn’t let her be too rough on me if I were you,” she told me.

  I wasn’t going to let her be rough, I thought as I went to face and to lie to Thea. I didn’t really feel the sharpness of the lying I was prepared to do. I came back to her thinking I was now more faithful than before, so I believed I was going to maintain something more true than not. And I didn’t expect to feel as bad as I did feel when I saw her in the garden, by a hedge that had turned out to have a red waxy berry. She wore the punctured hat and was ready to start for Chilpanzingo. I too was ready to go immediately, if she’d let me. I wanted her back in the worst way. But then I decided I’d better not go. My idea now was that I’d already given in too much to these strange activities; with the eagle, even, I should have called a halt, not seemed so unsurprised by every bizarre thing as if I had seen it before. But I was moving toward the future much too fast.

  “Well! Here you come,” she said harshly. “I didn’t know whether to expect you. I thought you’d stay away. I think I’d have liked that better.”

  “All right,” I said, “don’t be so spoken in full. Just come to the point.”

  She did speak differently, next, and I was sorry I had asked her to. On a sort of cry, and with mouth trembling, she said, “We’re washed up—washed up! It’s all finished, Augie. We made a mistake. I made a mistake.”

  “Now don’t rush like that. Wait, will you? One thing at a time. If what’s bothering you is that Stella and I—”

  “Spent the night together!”

  “We had to. But because I got on the wrong road, that’s why.”

  “Oh, please, stop that, don’t say that! It just poisons me to hear you sound like that,” she said with uncontrollable wretchedness. Her look was very sick.

  “Why, it’s true,” I insisted. “What do you mean? You shouldn’t be jealous like this. The car got stuck in the mountains.”

  “I could hardly get out of bed this morning. And now it’s worse, it’s worse. Don’t tell me this story. I can’t stand stories.”

  “Well,” I said, looking down at the fresh-washed stones where the sun cooled all over, uneven, the green like velvet, “if you’re bound to have such thoughts and be tortured by them, nobody can help that.”

  She said, “In a way I wish it were just my own trouble.”

  Somehow this made me stiffen toward her. “Well, it is your trouble,” I said to her. “Suppose it was really what you think. It wouldn’t be so hard to tell you after what you’ve told me about yourself, about the Navy man and so forth, while you were married to Smitty. You’re quite a few up on me.” We flushed, both of us, in each other’s sight.

  “I didn’t think what I said to you would come back to me this way,” she said unevenly, and this shiver of voice made me feel a chill, like briny thick ice on the shore in the first freezes, “or that there was a score to keep.”

  She looked very bad, with that more brilliant than friendly glance from her black eyes, her pallor very deep; her nostrils seemed as if they had accepted some of the sickness, smelled the poison she spoke of. And the animals and animal objects, the oxhide chairs, the straw-rustle snakes, the horned and shaggy heads, all that had seemed to have raison d’être got dull, useless, brutal, or to be a jumble, a clutter merely, when something was wrong with her. While she herself looked tired, tendony in the neck, pinched on the shoulders. She didn’t even smell right. And up and down she was gripped by the most frightful jealousy; she wanted, and needed, to do me harm.

  For some reason I thought this would pass presently. But at the same time I trembled too. I said, “You can’t even imagine that nothing happened, can you? And you have to assume that because we were together all night we made love too.”

  “Well, maybe it is irrational,” she said. “But whether it is or not, can you tell me it really didn’t happen? Can you?”

  I was about, slowly, to do that, because it was necessary—and I felt monstrous to be putting up a lying face not having even washed Stella’s odor from me—but Thea stopped me. She said, “No, don’t, you’ll only repeat the same thing. I know. And don’t ask me to imagine anything. I already have imagined everything. Don’t expect me to be superhuman. I won’t try. It’s too painful already, and a lot more than I thought I could stand.” She didn’t have any outburst of tears, but just like a sudden darkness, just that silent, they appeared in her eyes.

  That softened or melted all my hardness, as if by this quick heat. I said, “Let’s quit this, Thea,” and came toward her, but she moved away.

  “You should have stayed with her.”

  “Listen—”

  “I mean it. You can be tender with me now. In ten minutes you could be with her, and fifteen minutes later with some other tramp. There isn’t that much of you to go around. How did you get mixed up with this girl? That’s what I want to know.”

  “How? I met her with Oliver, through Moulton.”

  “Why didn’t she ask your friend Moulton then? Why you? Because you flirted with her.”

  “No, because she picked me for someone sympathetic. She knew how I was with you, and she must have thought I’d understand a woman’s situation faster than somebody else would.”

  “That’s just the kind of easy lie you often tell. She picked you because you look so damn obliging and she figured she could do what she wanted with you.”

  “Oh no,” I said, “you’re wrong. She was just in a bad spot and I felt for her.” But I remembered, of course, in the orange grove, that sensation of something that drew on me in a vital place and where I couldn’t stop it. Apparently Thea knew something about this too, which amazed me. Back in Chicago she had predicted that I’d go for another woman who ran after me. If only she hadn’t described me to myself so mercilessly hard though. There, however, in Chicago, I thought how pleased I was I didn’t have to have secrets from her; now there was a dusky sort of fluctuation back from this, as if it were fatal to be without hidden things. “I really and truly wanted to help her,” I said.

  She cried, “What are you talking about—help! The man was picked up by the police just about as you were leaving.”

  “Who, Oliver?” It stunned me. “Arrested? I guess I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he’d drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent, and I thought he’d force her—”

  “That foolish, weak, poor drunk moron—force her? That girl? What did he force before? She didn’t lie in bed at the point of a gun, did she? She’s a whore! But it didn’t take her very long to see what you were like, that you’d be afraid to fall beneath her expectations, not be the man she wanted you to be, that you’d play her game. You play everyone’s.”

  “You’re mad because I don’t always play yours. Yes, I reckon she did understand me. She didn’t tell me to do this. She asked me. She must have seen I was fed up with being told—”

  This made her look with intensified sickness at me, as if a new gust of it had hit her; she held her lip an instant with her teeth. Then she said, “It wasn’t a game. I see you took it that way. Well, it wasn’t, it was genuine. As far as I could make it, it was. It may have looked like a game to you. I guess it would. Maybe you wouldn’t have anything else.”

  “We’re not talking about the same thing. Not the love. It’s the other things you’re so fantastic about.”

  “Me—so fantastic?” she said with dry mouth and laid her hand over her breast.

  “Well, how can you think you’re not—
the eagle, the other things, the snakes, hunting every day?”

  It gave her another hurt.

  “What, were you just being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn’t mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?”

  I felt what a terrible thing I had done to her by this, and so I tried to mitigate it. “Don’t those things ever strike you as queer, even for a minute?” I said.

  This made her throat tighten, and the tears, before, were nothing to this tightness. She said, “A lot of things look queer to me too. Some of them maybe much more than what I do seems to you. Loving you, that wasn’t queer at all to me. But now you start to seem queer, like many other things. Maybe I am peculiar, that I only know these strange ways of doing something. Instead of sticking to the ordinary way and doing something false. So”—and I was silent, recognizing the right on her side in this—“you made allowances for me.” I could scarcely bear how she suffered. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether she could add the next word, her throat kept so many other sounds back, in abeyance. “I didn’t ask you to—ever. Why didn’t you say how you felt? You could have told me. I didn’t want to seem fantastic to you.”

  “You yourself, you never were. No, you weren’t.”

  “You don’t tell anybody, I suppose. But to me you didn’t have to behave as you do with anyone else. You could have done as you couldn’t with anyone else. Isn’t there one person in the whole world to whom you could? Do you tell anybody? Yes, I guess love would come in a queer form. You think the queerness is your excuse. But perhaps love would be strange and foreign to you no matter which way it happened, and maybe you just don’t want it. In that case I made a mistake, because I thought you did. And you don’t, do you?”

  “What do you want to do to me, burn me down to the ground? It’s just because you’re so jealous and sore—”

  “Yes, I am jealous. I feel very sick and disappointed, otherwise I probably wouldn’t do this. I know you can’t take it. But I’m disappointed. I’m not just jealous. When I came up to your room in Chicago you had a girl, and when you came to see me I didn’t ask you first whether you loved her or not. I knew it couldn’t amount to much. But even if it had been important I thought I had to try! I felt mostly alone, as if the world were full of things but empty of people. I know,” she admitted, dismaying me deeper than ever, “I must be a little crazy.” She said it in a husky and quiet tone. “I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn’t tire me, and so I wouldn’t be afraid of them. Because my feeling can’t be people’s fault, so much. They don’t make it. Well, I believed it must be you who could do this for me. And you could. I was so happy to find you. I thought you knew all about what you could do and you were so lucky and so special. That’s why it’s not just jealousy. I didn’t want you to come back. I’m sorry you’re here now. You’re not special. You’re like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don’t want to see you any more.”

  Now she bent her head. She was crying. The hat dropped from her head and held by the cord. Gripped hard in my chest like a sick squirrel trapped in a chimney, in the silky shudder of smoke, was a terrible stuck feeling. I tried to come near again, and she straightened, looked me in the face, and cried, “I don’t want you to do that! I don’t want it; I can’t allow you to. I know you think this, that, or the other can always be overlooked, but I don’t.”

  She walked past me to the door, where she stopped. “I’m going to Chilpanzingo,” she said. She had stopped crying.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t. There won’t be any more games. I’m going there alone.”

  “And what am I supposed to do?”

  “Don’t ask me. You figure that out yourself.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  I was in the room collecting my stuff, burning, with tears and cries that couldn’t find an outlet from suffocation, and stones of pity heaped up in me, when I saw her descending to the zócalo with a rifle, and Jacinto with baggage behind her. She was leaving immediately. I wanted to yell to her, “Don’t go!” as she had called to me last night in the zócalo, and tell her what a mistake she was making. But what I called her mistake was, in my own emotion, that she was abandoning me. That was what made me tremble when I tried to call to her. She couldn’t leave me. I ran through the house to holler from the kitchen garden wall.

  Something about me scared the cook; she grabbed up her kid and beat it when she saw me. And suddenly I was as full of rage as of grief, so that they choked me. I tore open the garden door and ran pounding down toward the zócalo, but the station wagon was no longer there. I turned back and kicked open the gate of the house, looking for what to attack and smash. Swooping and bursting, I tore up rocks in the garden and hurled them at the wall, knocking down the stucco. I went into the living room and wrecked the oxhide chairs, the glassware, tore off curtains and pictures. Next, finding myself on the porch, I kicked to pieces the snake cases, overturned them, and stood and watched the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover. Every last box I booted over.

  Then I grabbed my valise and got out. I pounded down into the zócalo, sobbing in my chest.

  On Hilario’s porch, there was Moulton. I saw only his face above the Carta Blanca shield. He looked down. Him, the pope of rubble.

  “Hey, Bolingbroke, where’s the girl? Oliver is in the jug. Come on up here, I want to talk to you.”

  “Why don’t you go to hell!”

  He didn’t hear.

  “Why are you carrying a valise?” he said.

  I went away and roamed the town some more. In the market place I met Iggy and his little daughter.

  “Hey, where did you come from? Oliver was arrested last night.”

  “Oh, fuck Oliver!”

  “Please, Bolingbroke, don’t talk that way in front of the kid.”

  “Don’t call me Bolingbroke any more.”

  I went around with him though, as he led the kid by the hand. We looked at the stalls and finally he bought the kid a cornhusk dolly.

  He talked about his troubles. Now she was through with Jepson, should he remarry his wife? I had nothing to say, but felt my eyes burn as I looked at him.

  “So you helped Stella get away, huh?” he said. “I guess you did right. Why should she get it in the neck because of him? Wiley says in jail last night he was screaming about her running out on him.”

  Then he saw my valise for the first time and said, “Oh-oh, I’m sorry, man! Busted up, huh?”

  I flinched, my face twisted, I made a dumb sign and then burst into tears.

  Chapter 19

  THE SNAKES ESCAPED—I presume to the mountains. I didn’t go back to Casa Descuitada to find out. Iggy took me to a room in the villa where he stayed. For a time I didn’t do anything, only lay in the small warm stone cell at the top of the house. You climbed the stairs till they gave out and then continued the rest of the way up a ladder. There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he’d do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt.

  Iggy came and kept me company. There was a low chair on which he sat for hours without saying a word, his chin drawn inward so that his neck was creased and swollen, and his trousers tied at the bottom with the strings of the alpargatas like those of a bicycle rider who doesn’t want his cuffs to tangle in the chain. So he sat, his head sunk and his green eyes with inflamed lids. Now and then the church bell would sound, lurching back and forth as if someone were carrying water that was clear, all right, but in a squalid bucket, and stumbling and slipping on the stones. Iggy knew I was in a crisis and didn’t want me to be alone. But if I tried to say anything he turned the edge of it back against me and accepted nothing of what I told him even after he had encouraged me to talk. Of course I told him every
thing, to the end of my breath, and then I felt as if he had covered my face with his hand and wouldn’t let me say any more. So after this stifling had happened a few times I quit talking. I thought he came to be merciful and stayed to be sure I choked. He got some obscure revenge out of me at the same time that he pitied me.

  Anyway, he sat by the dry handsome wall on which the sun fell in over the ledge where the pigeons landed with their red feet and fanned down dust and straw. Sometimes he would actually lay his cheek to the plaster.

  I knew I had done wrong. And as I lay and thought of it I felt my eyes roll as if in search of an out. Something happened to my forgetting power, it was impaired. My mistakes and faults came from all sides and gnawed at me. They gnawed away, and I broke out in a sweat, and turned, or felt the vanity of turning.