by Saul Bellow
Then I thought that I had loved her so, it was a pleasure to me that the creases at the joints of our fingers were similar; so now with these fingers she would touch Talavera where she had touched me. And when I thought of her doing with another man what she had done with me, that she would forget herself the same, and praise him and kiss him, and kiss in the same places, gone out of her mind with tenderness, eyes wide, hugging his head, opening her legs, it just about annihilated me. I watched in my imagination and suffered horribly.
I had wanted to marry her, but there isn’t any possession. No, no, wives don’t own husbands, nor husbands wives, nor parents children. They go away, or they die. So the only possessing is of the moment. If you’re able. And while any wish lives, it lives in the face of its negative. This is why we make the obstinate sign of possession. Like deeds, certificates, rings, pledges, and other permanent things.
We tore toward Chilpanzingo in the heat. First the brown stormy mountains, then badland rocks and green Florida feathers. As we rolled into the town someone jumped on the side of the bus for a free ride, grabbing my arm and digging his fingers into it hard. I fought and tore it free. In jumping off this joy-rider whacked the palm of my hand as I reached after him. It stung, and I was furious.
Here was the zócalo. White filthy walls sunk toward the ground and rat-gnawed Spanish charm moldered from the balconies, a horrible street like Seville rotting, and falling down to flowering garbage heaps.
I thought if I saw Talavera on the street I’d try to kill him. What with? I had a penknife. It wasn’t dangerous enough. In the square I looked for a shop where I could buy a knife, but I saw none. What I did see was a place that said “Café.” It was a square black opening in a wall, as if dug free in the Syrian desert from thousand-years’ burial. I went in with the object of stealing a knife off the counter. There weren’t any knives there, only tiny spoons with braided necks in the sugar. A piece of white mosquito net hung down torn, like close, fine work done to no useful purpose.
Coming out of the café, I saw the station wagon parked in front of a New Orleans ironwork kind of a place from which there were pieces missing. Without thinking any more of knives, I ran there and went inside. No clerk was at the desk; there was only an old man who cleaned the sand of the path in the decayed patio. He told me Thea’s room number. I had him go up and ask if she would see me. She herself called to me from a gap in the shutter. What did I want? I went up the stairs swiftly, and at the big wooden double doors of her room I said to her, “I have to talk to you.”
She let me in, and when I entered I looked first for signs of him. There was the usual mess of clothes and equipment. I couldn’t tell whether any of it belonged to him. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. I was determined to go beyond any such things. “What do you want, Augie?” she said again. I looked at her. Her eyes were not as keen as usual and she looked ill; above, her brilliant black hair was slipping from its combs. She wore a silk coat or robe. Apparently she had just put it on. In heat like this she preferred to go naked in her room. When I wanted to recall how she was, naked, I found I could do it very well. She saw my eyes on her lower belly and her hand descended to hold the edge of the robe there. Seeing that colorful, round-fingered hand descend I bitterly felt how my privilege had ended and passed to another man. I wanted it back.
I said with my face flaming, “I came to ask if we could be together again.”
“No, I don’t think we can now.”
“I hear Talavera is here with you. Is he?”
“Is it any business of yours?”
I took that for an affirmative and felt in great pain.
I said, “I suppose it isn’t. But why did you have to take up with him right away? As soon as I had someone, you had to have someone. You’re no better than I am. You kept him in reserve.”
“I think the only reason you’re here is that you heard about him,” she said.
“No, I came to ask how about another chance. He doesn’t make so much difference to me.”
“No?” she said with that white warmth of the face she had. She gave a momentary smile of thought.
“I could forget about him if you still wanted me.”
“You’d be bringing him up every other day, whenever we had any trouble.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I know that now you’re dying with worry that he’ll come in and you’ll have a fight. But he’s not here, so you can set your mind at rest.”
“So he was here!”
She didn’t answer. Had she sent him away? Maybe she had. At least that mixed hope and anxiety could end. Of course I had been afraid. But also I hoped I might have killed him. I’d have tried to. I already had thought this over. I pictured that he would have stabbed me.
She said, “You can’t love me, thinking I’m with another man. You must want to murder the both of us. You must want to see him fall off a mountain ten thousand feet, and me in a coffin at my funeral.”
I was silent, and while she stared at me, what a strange view I had of her in this moldery Hispanic room, the tropical sun in the gaps of the shutter—decay in the town, the spiky, twisted patch of grave iron on the slope, bleeding bougainvillaea bubbles, purple and tubercular on the walls, vines shrieky green, and the big lips and forehead of the mountains begging or singing; then the mess of the room itself, the rags and costly things which she used alike as they happened to come to hand, Kleenexes or silk underthings, dresses, cameras, cosmetics. She did things fast, hoping she did them right. Evidently she didn’t believe what I had come to say. She didn’t believe because she didn’t feel, and didn’t feel because of a broken connection.
“You don’t have to decide now, Thea.”
“No, well—I suppose not. I may feel differently about you later, but I don’t think I will. Right now I have no use for you. Especially when I think how you behave with other people. I wish you all the harm I can think of. I wish you were dead.”
“And I still love you,” I said. And it must have been evident, for I wasn’t lying. I stood and was shaking. But she gave no answer.
“Don’t you want to have it again the way it was?” I said. “I think I could do it right this time.”
“How do you know you could?”
“Most people are probably in the same condition I’m in. But there must be a way to learn to do better.”
“Must there?” she said. “I guess you would think so.”
“Of course. How would the hope be there at all otherwise? How would I know what to want? How did you know?”
“What do you want to prove by me and what I know?” She said in a low voice, “I’ve been wrong a good many times—more than I want to discuss with you.” She changed the subject. “Jacinto sent me a message about the snakes,” she said. “If you had been around I’d have hit you with something.”
But I sensed that this was one offense of mine that didn’t displease her. I had an impression of a smile of halfway appreciation of it. But I couldn’t take much hope from that, because smiling and abstraction, obstinacy, intention to hurt, alternated fast in her cloudy white nervousness, and I saw she was unable to gather together her feelings toward me. I couldn’t expect an answer. Never. There wasn’t any more connection.
In a waterless fishbowl covered with a straw petate I now saw a creature puffed up in scales, warty as a pickle, gray, with skinny gray wattles and tickle claws, breathing on its belly.
“You’ve started a new collection,” I said.
“I caught this one yesterday. He’s about the most interesting so far. But I’m not staying here. I’m going to Acapulco and then taking a plane for Vera Cruz, and then I’m going to Yucatan. I’m supposed to see where some rare flamingos have migrated from Florida.”
“Let me come with you.”
“No.”
That was how it was. Nothing as I had foreseen it.
Chapter 20
BACK IN ACATLA I lay around. I hoped all the same to hear from Th
ea, and though it was useless I kept calling at the post office. Notified of nothing, I generally went, then, and drank tequila with beer chasers. I no longer played poker at Louie’s and saw none of that gang. Jepson was picked up for vagrancy and sent back to the States, thus Iggy’s wife wanted him back. The little kid knew what it was all about, and when I saw them out walking sensed how sharp she was already, at her age, and pitied her.
So on some of the golden afternoons by the dive where I sat on a bench in neglected pants and dirty shirt and with three days of bristles, I had the inclination to start out and say, “O you creatures still above the ground, what are you up to! Even happiness and beauty is like a movie.” Many times I felt tears. Or again I’d be angry and want to holler. But while no other creature is reprimanded for its noise, for yelling, roaring, screaming, cawing, or braying, there is supposed to be more delicate relief for the human species. However, I’d go up one of the mountain roads where only an occasional Indian heard and wouldn’t say what he thought of it, and there I’d speak my feelings aloud or I’d yell, and it made me feel better temporarily.
There was one companion I had for a few days, a Russian who had been dropped by the Cossack chorus after a fight. He still wore his serge tunic with white piping and all the spaces for bullets. He was very proud and nervous, he bit his nails. His scalp was bare and gave like a soft light on the handsome solemnity of his face, clean shaven at all times. His nose was straight, his mouth was held in with tender rancor, and he had black, continuous, illustrious brows. Damn, if he didn’t look like a picture of the poet D’Annunzio that I once saw.
He drank and he was broke, and pretty soon he’d be picked up too, like Jepson. I had very little money left but I bought a bottle of tequila now and then, so he was attached to me.
Well, I felt about my relations with him somewhat as I did about Iggy’s little girl, pitying her for what she had to understand. At first I was sorry he was my companion. But then I liked him better. And as I wanted to tell someone about Thea, I confessed all to him. I told the whole story. I thought he’d sympathize with me. Those many deep hash marks of enlistment with grief that he had on his forehead were what made me think so.
“So you see how rough it’s been,” I said. “I’m not having it easy. I suffer a great deal. Part of the time I’m half dead.”
“Wait,” he told me, “you haven’t seen anything yet.”
This made me furious with him. All in a rush I said to him, “Why, you lousy egotist!” I wanted to knock him down; I was drunk enough then to do it. “What do you mean, you runt! You cheesecloth Cossack you! After I’ve told you how I feel—”
But he wanted to carry the emphasis over to how he felt. He with his naked head and reddened nose and rancor of the mouth. But he wasn’t such a bad wretch at that. It was actually only natural. Why, he too had a life. He sat there hopeless. He smelled like a bygone brand of footpowder there had once been in the house. But all the same he was simpatico.
“All right pal,” I said. “That’s true, you have had a bad time. You may never see Harbin again, or wherever you’re from.”
“Not Harbin, Paris,” he said.
“Okay, you poor jerk, Paris. Let it be Paris then.”
“I had an uncle in Moscow,” he said, “who dressed himself like a woman and went to the church. And he scared everybody because he had a beard and looked very fierce. A policeman said to him, ‘You look to me, sir, like a man and not a woman.’ So he said, ‘Do you know, you look to me like a woman and not a man.’ And he went away. Everybody was scared of him.”
“This is very fine, but how does it mean I haven’t seen anything yet?”
“I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don’t you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible. Don’t you think my uncle must have been desperate to go in that dark church and frighten everybody? He had to use his powers. He felt he had only a few years more to live.”
Well, I pretended not to understand because it suited me to make him out as ridiculous, but I knew very well what he was trying to get across. Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential. This is a fact.
Finally I had to stop going around with him. He took to pimping for Negra who was the madame of the foco rojo, and I decided to make a move. I sold my fancy equipment, like the riding boots and the life-saving Lake Huron jacket, to Louie Fu, and with the pesos I went to Mexico City. I gave up on waiting for Thea to forgive me. It was sad putting up at the Regina without her. The management and the chambermaids remembered her and the bird and saw I had come down in life; no station wagon, no bags, no wild beast, no happy joy and eating mangos in bed, etcetera. The assignation couples made noise at night, when this was no place for me. But it was cheap and so I closed my ears.
There was no dough from Stella at Wells Fargo. However, I had Sylvester’s number at Coyoacán and could call him when flat broke. First I thought I’d try Manny Padilla’s cousin. He was nothing like Manny, but scrawny, red-skinned, glittering his teeth and hungry, a fast man with a buck. He wanted to be my guide to the city, but Thea had already shown me it; he wanted to introduce me to Spanish literature and finally he put the touch on me for some dough. He said he was going to buy me a blanket with it, but he never showed up again.
I ached in my body for Thea though I knew she was by now unobtainable and absolutely removed from me by the difficulty of her mind and the peculiarity of my own character. So I knocked around the city thinking things over. I’d watch the mariachis and death-song fiddler-cripples or the flower-sellers and the bees feeding off the candystands. Whichever way you turned there was the snow of one of the volcanoes and the whole mountain floating in. If I could help it I wouldn’t look in a mirror those days, being haggard and ill. At one time I felt that if Death came up and tapped me on the shoulder, saying, “Ready?” I’d think it over a minute and then say, “Okay.” So in a way I died somewhat, and if there was anything I knew by now it was how impossible it is to live without something infinitely mighty and great. However, the city was beautiful—even the unsightliness, misery, and scrawls were rich—it was warm, and this kept me going. My heart would complain and I felt sick, but not continually in the utmost despair.
At last I got in touch with Sylvester. He came to see me and lent me some dough. He wasn’t saying much at first. I understood that he couldn’t talk about political and confidential things.
“You look starved and raggedy,” he said. “If I didn’t know you I’d say you were one of these Pan-American bums. You’ve got to clean yourself up.”
I felt as if I were an object Caligula had dropped about a thousand feet to the earth. The air screamed. The colors were about like the colors of Jerusalem. However, getting up stunned, I wanted to be steadfast. Go and be steadfast though! Just like that! It’s not a small order. Sylvester realized that I wanted to get myself reconstructed and not go to wrack. He gave me his grin with little dark lines, always amused at me.
“My luck has been very bad, Sylvester,” I said.
“I see. I see. Well, do you want to stick around here until it changes or do you want to go back to Chicago?”
“What do you think? I don’t know what I should do.”
“Stick around. There’s a sympathizer who’ll put you up for a while if Frazer asks him.”
“I’d be glad. I’d be very grateful, Sylvester. Who is this sympathizer?”
“He’s a friend of the Old Man from away back. He’d put you up. I don’t like to see you go around the way you are.”
“Gee thanks, Sylvester. Thanks.”
So then Frazer came around and took me over to be introduced to the sympathizer, whose name was Paslavitch. He was a friendly Yugoslavian who lived in a little villa out in Coyoacán. Beside his mouth were deep folds and inside them grew little shining bristles, as the geode or marvel of the
rock world is full of tiny crystals. He was a very original kind of person. His head was onion-shaped and clipped close. In the garden where he was when we met the heat was trembling off the top of his dome.
He said, “You are very welcome. I am glad to have company. Maybe you will give me English lessons?”
“Sure he will,” said Frazer. Frazer’s looks had changed too. I never understood better why Mimi had called him “Preacher.” With the pucker of thought between his eyes he did look like a minister. And also like an officer of the Confederate Army. He appeared to have grave weights on his mind and to be preoccupied with superior things.
