by Saul Bellow
I was wrought up, choked. The very air that passed over me was as if from the mouth of prophecy. Meantime the pot went on diffusing smoke. He was watching it like an enemy.
“I’m not passing up any chance to be saved. I don’t want to be interned. I’ve just gotten married. So even if I was sure you knew what you were talking about I’d still say no.”
“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?”
I should have been more tactful. He saw that that was exactly what I thought.
“I’m offering you a great course of life,” he said. “Worth taking a risk for.”
“I already have a course of life.”
“Indeed?” he said.
“Yes, and I’m dead against doing things to the entire human race. I don’t want any more done to me, and I don’t want to tamper with anyone else. No one will be a poet or saint because you fool with him. When you come right down to it, I’ve had trouble enough becoming what I already am, by nature. I don’t want to go to the Canaries with you. I need my wife.”
He sat with his big arms crossed and his face devoid of expression while the smudgepot sent silky, oily curls into the sea freshness of morning. The early red was still on the water from the east fringe of the sky. I kept glancing toward the horizon.
“I assure you I don’t think your answer is frivolous,” he said. “I think it is sincere, but it is minor. Life has a much greater scale. I’m sure you will agree with me later on, after we have worked and discussed, in the islands. Which I understand are charming.”
“We may be passing a hundred miles to the north or the south and never see those islands at all,” I said. “You want to put it over on me that you’re such a great scientist you can steer by the power of your brain. Well, go ahead, but I’m getting rescued if I can.”
“It is my conviction that we may see land at any time,” he said. “So why don’t you extinguish that smudge?”
“No, I won’t!” I shouted. “No, and that’s final!” The fellow was really out of his mind. But even then, in anger, I thought, what if he really was a genius too, and I was lacking in faith.
He said quietly, “Okay.”
I turned to give my full attention to the horizon, when suddenly a heavy blow descended on me and knocked me flat. He had clobbered me with the oar. He was getting ready to hit me again, with the loom this time, having hit me with the blade before. That Moses, Savior and Messiah! He raised up on his heavy legs. More of a look of a task to be done than lust was on his face. I tried to roll away from this blow and I yelled, “For Chrissake, don’t kill me!”
Then I made a rush for him, and the minute I got my hands on him I felt I’d kill him if I could, that much rage was in me. I wanted to strangle him. He dropped the oar and gripped me round the ribs. The way he grabbed me I couldn’t use my arms. I butted and kicked while he put on more pressure, till I couldn’t breathe.
He was a maniac.
And a murderer.
Two demented land creatures struggling on the vast water, head to head, putting out all the strength they had. I would certainly have killed him then if I’d been able. But he was the stronger man. He threw his immense weight on me, he was heavy as brass, and I fell over a thwart with my face on the cleats of the bottom.
I made ready for the end.
The powers of the universe should take me back as they had sent me forth.
Death!
But he didn’t mean to murder me. He was tearing my clothes off and binding me with them. He twisted the shirt into bonds for my wrists. My pants he tied my legs with. Then he tore off my skivvies to wipe the blood from my face and the sweat from his. He yanked the painter off and reinforced my bonds.
Then he doused the smudgepot, and he stepped up the oar again with its piece of canvas and sat looking eastward for the shore he was so sure of while I lay naked and gasping, still on my side as he had left me.
Later he picked me up and set me down under the tarpaulin because the sun was burning on me. When he laid hands on me I flinched and heaved. “Anything busted?” he said, doctorlike, and felt my person, my ribs and shoulders. I cursed him till my throat was raw.
When it came time to eat he fed me; and he said, “Better let me know when you have to go to bathroom, otherwise there’ll be a problem.”
I said, “If you untie me, I give my word of honor I won’t send any signals.”
“I can’t take chances with you,” he said. “This is too important.”
Once in a while he’d chafe the arms and legs to help my circulation.
I begged him now. I said, “I’ll get gangrene.”
But no, he told me; I had made my choice. Besides, he said, we’d hit those happy isles soon. Late in the afternoon he declared he could smell the land breeze. He also said, “It’s getting hotter,” and took to shading his eyes. And when evening came on he stretched out. He did it with heaviness, and, while I watched and wished him the worst, stretched out those doughty big legs and that bowl of tireless contemplations from which the instructions had come to lam me and leave me tied for the night, and which might direct him to do worse yet.
The moon shone, a damp fell, and the boat crept; it scarcely budged on the water. I wore out my wrists trying to pull free, and then I thought that if I could crawl that far I might find a corner of the metal locker on which I could saw myself free. I turned on my back and began to work toward it, using my heels. Basteshaw didn’t wake. He lay like that great painted mummy case, his feet cocked out and his head like stone.
He had made a big welt on my back, and this I scraped as I crawled, and I had to stop and take it out on my lip with my teeth. It didn’t seem any use. Terrible deep sorrow came on me, and I wept to myself. So as not to wake him.
It took me half the night to reach the locker and work my hands loose. But finally the shirt tore off and I flaked away at the painter, soaking it to make it expand. At last it came off. I crouched there and licked my raw wrists. My back was flaming from the beating it had taken, but there was one cool place in my body, which was where I kept murder in my heart toward Basteshaw. I crept over to him; I didn’t stand up because he might wake and see me standing in the moonlight. I had my choice now of pushing him in the water, of strangling him, of beating him with the oar as he had done me, of breaking his bones and seeing his blood.
I decided as the first step to tie him and take off his goggles. Then we’d see.
Well, as I stood poised over him on my toes, fall of revenge, holding the painter, I felt heat rising off him. I lightly touched his cheek. The guy was burning up with fever. I listened to his heart. Some kind of gunnery seemed to be going on there, hollow and terrible.
I was gypped of revenge. For as a matter of course I took care of him. I cut a hole in a piece of canvas to make myself a poncho, my other clothes being ripped to tatters, and I sat up with him all night.
Like Henry Ware of the Kentucky border and the great chief of the Ohio, Timmendiquas. He might have stabbed Timmendiquas but he let him go.
I felt sorrow and pity for him too. I realized how much he was barren of, or trying to be barren of in order to become the man of his ideas. Didn’t he, even if mainly from his head rather than from his heart, want to bring about redemption and rescue the whole brotherhood of man from suffering?
He was off his rocker all the next day. It would have been the end of him if I hadn’t sighted and signaled a British tanker late that day. It would have been the end of me too, for it turned out that we were way past the Canaries and somewhere off the Rio de Oro. This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo! Why, we’d both have rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted, and there would have been nothing but death and mad ideas to the last. Or he’d have murdered and eaten me, still calm and utterly reasonable, and gone on steering to his goal.
Anyway, they dragged us aboard, both in a bad way. Naples was the first port this Limey ship made. There the authorities stuck us in a hospital. And it was a few we
eks before I was afoot again, and I met Basteshaw in the corridor in a bathrobe, coming along slowly. He seemed himself again, confident and proud-headed. But he was decidedly cool to me. I could see he was blaming me for frustrating his great plan. Now he’d have to ship again. No Canaries. His research, so essential to human survival itself—that was no small thing to postpone.
“Do you realize,” I said, driving it home, still indignant at what might have happened, “that you missed, you great navigator? I might never have seen my wife again if I had listened to you.”
He heard me out and meanwhile took my measure. He said, “The power of an individual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now than ever.”
“Go ahead! Save mankind!” I said, “But don’t forget if you had your way you’d be dead now.”
He wouldn’t talk to me after that, and I didn’t care. We snubbed each other in the corridor. All I thought about was Stella anyhow.
It was six months before I saw New York again, for they found one reason after another to detain me at the hospital.
So it was a night in September when the taxi let me off at Stella’s door, which now also was mine, and she came running down the stairs to me.
Chapter 26
IF I COULD HAVE COME back and started to lead a happy, peaceful life I think very few people would have the right to complain that I wasn’t ready yet or hadn’t paid the admission price that’s set by whoever sets prices. Guys like the broken-down Cossack of the Mexican mountains and other spokesmen would at least have to agree that I had a breather coming. Nevertheless I have had almost none. It probably is too much to ask.
I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character was his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character. And since I never have had any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still, and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still so that the axial lines can be found. When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift—bounty, harmony, love, and so forth. Maybe I can’t take these very things I want.
Once I said to Mintouchian when we were discussing this, “Wherever I stay it has always been on somebody’s hospitality. First on old Grandma—it was really her house. Then those people in Evanston, the Renlings, then this Casa Descuitada in Mexico, and with Mr. Paslavitch the Yugoslavian.”
“Some people, if they didn’t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep,” said Mintouchian. “Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God.”
“I had this idea of an academy foster-home or something like that.”
“It could never work. Excuse me, but it’s a ridiculous idea. Of course some ridiculous ideas do work, but yours wouldn’t, having so many children to take care of. You’re not the type, and Stella even less.”
“Oh, I know it was a goofy idea that I should educate children. Who am I to educate anybody? It wasn’t so much education as love. That was the idea. What I wanted was to have somebody living with me for a change, instead of the other way around.”
I always denied that I was the only creature of my kind. But how seldom two imaginations coincide! That’s because they are ambitious imaginations, both. If they meant to be satisfied, then they would coincide.
I saw one thing and Stella another when we thought about matters like this academy and foster-home. What I had in my mind was this private green place like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed. However, we are meant to be carried away by the complex and hear the simple like the far horn of Roland when he and Oliver are being wiped out by the Saracens. I told Stella I was keen about beekeeping. Hell, I thought, I had got along with an eagle, why not get along with different winged creatures and there be honey instead? So she bought me a book on beekeeping and I took it out with me on my second voyage. But I already knew what she thought the academy would look like: a beaten-up frame house of dead-drunk jerry-builders under dusty laborious trees, laundry boiling in the yard, pinched chickens of misfortune, rioting kids, my blind mother wearing my old shoes and George cobblering, me with a crate of bees in the woods.
At first Stella said it was a lovely idea, but what else was she going to say in the emotions of reunion when I told her how the ship went down, and the rest. She cried, holding on to me, and her tears fell on my chest, almost spurted. “Oh, Augie,” she said, “the things that happen to you! Poor Augie!” We were in bed. I saw her round smooth back by the Italian mirror, a big circular one that hung over the mantel. “Well, to hell with this war and falling in the water and all of that,” I said. “I want to get this place where we can have a settled life.”
“Oh yes,” she said. But at that time what else could she say?
However, I didn’t have the least idea of how to go about it. And of course it was only one of those bubble-headed dreams of people who haven’t yet realized what they’re like nor what they’re intended for.
Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was I who loved her most. What it was that she wanted wasn’t clear for a time. You see, there was all the immenso giubbilo of homecoming and being saved from the sea and this Basteshaw, a romantic survivor and escapee; it was appropriate there should be cries of Thanksgiving as if written down by Franz Joseph Haydn and sung by the Schola Cantorum, and so on. And after all Stella did love me, and we had a honeymoon still to catch up on. So if sometimes I saw she was preoccupied I considered that probably her preoccupations were with me. That was the intelligent thing to consider. Yet it wasn’t really I who absorbed her most. What do you think it is, to drag people from their preoccupations, where they do their habitual toil! At first you wouldn’t think anything in such a connection with a woman who looks as she does, with those endowments, not light but solid, her body rising toward a delicate head with feathery dark bangs. Around some people the space is their space, and when you want to approach them it has to be across their territory so that how you are to behave to them is mainly under their control, and then it is always astonishing to learn that they suffer, and perhaps worse than others, from their predominant ideas. Now my foster-home and academy dream was not a preoccupation but one of those featherhead millenarian notions or summer butterflies. You should never try to cook such butterflies in lard. So to speak. Other preoccupations are my fate, or what fills life and thought. Among them, preoccupation with Stella, so that what happens to her happens, by necessity, to me too.
Guys may very likely think, Why hell! What’s this talk about fates? and will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think, Let’s see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there’s even an attitude of mind which finds it almost disgusting to be a person and not a function. Nevertheless I stand by my idea of a fate. For which a function is a substitution of a deeper despair.
Not long ago I was in Florence, Italy. Stella and I are in Europe now and have been since the end of the war. She wanted to come for professional reasons, and I’m in a kind of business I’ll soon tell about. Anyway, I was in Florence; I travel all over; a few days before I had been in Sicily where it was warm. Here it was freezing when I arrived; when I came out of the station the mountain stars were barking. The wind called the Tramontana was pouring in. In the morning when I woke, in the Hotel Porta Rossa, just behind the Arno, I felt cold. The maid brought coffee, which warmed me some. Some light shell of old metal in a church tower rung in the swift glossy rush of the free-sight mountain air
. I washed with hot water, splashing the wooden floor. It was a comfort on an icy day to go out in a rubbed body, wrapped in a warm coat.
