Chapter XIV



I was hurrying to fulfill the prophecy Thea Fenchel had made on that swing in
St. Joe. And while it was no minor thing to me that I was beat up and chased like
this, I couldn't feel the importance of the cause much, or that it would benefit
anyone for me to fight on in it. If I had felt this as such a matter of conscience
I might have been out in front of Republic Steel at the hour of the Decoration
Day Massacre, as Grammick was. He was clubbed on the head. But I was with
Thea. It wasn't even in my power to be elsewhere, once we had started. No, I
just didn't have the calling to be a union man or in politics, or any notion of my
particle of will coming before the ranks of a mass that was about to march
forward from misery. How would this will of mine have got there to lead the
way? I couldn't just order myself to become one of those people who do go out
before the rest, who stand and intercept the big social ray, or collect and
concentrate it like burning glass, who glow and dazzle and make bursts of fire.
It wasn't what I was meant to be.

As I ran into Thea's apartment house from the cab and rang the bell three
times, fast, I didn't especially observe where I had come. It was a showy, heavily
furnished lobby, no one in it, and as I was trying to find out which of the elegant
doors belonged to the elevator, a square of light appeared in one of them. Thea
had come down for me. The door opened. There was a velvet bench and we sank
down on it, pressing and kissing as the smooth elevator rose. Not noticing the
blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders.
I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head. I was
unaware, nearly blind. If anyone else had been near neither of us would have
known it. I can't for certain say I don't remember a face, maybe that of a maid
when the door opened, and we went on embracing in the corridor and then in the
apartment, by the door, on the carpet.

With Thea it wasn't at all as it had been with other women, those who gave you
their permission, so to speak, to undo one thing at a time and admire it, the
next thing guarded again, and the last thing most guarded of all. She didn't
delay, or seem to hurry either. As if studying deeply from a surrendered mind,
and with the lips, the hands and hair, the rising bosom and legs, without the use
of any force, presently it seemed as if an exchange or transfer had happened of
us both into still another person who hadn't existed before. There was a powerful
feeling of love. And so finally, as if I had been on my bent knees in what's
supposed to be an entirely opposite spirit, praying, with my fingers pressed
together, I think it would have been no different from what I felt come over me
with the fingers not together but touching her on the breasts instead. My burst-
ing face with the swatted eye lay between, and her arms were around my neck.
Now the sun began to heat us by the door, on the rug where we were lying. It
had the same filmy whiteness as it had in the linen room. It had shone dirtier
on the Loop sidewalk where I jumped from the streetcar. Here it glowed white once
more. Presently I wanted to pull the curtain because of the glare on my eye, and
when I stood up she observed for the first time how I looked.

"Who did that to you?" she cried.

I explained the whole business to her, and she kept saying, "Is that why you
didn't come? Is that what you were doing all that time?" The time lost was the
most important thing of all to her. Although it gave her a tremor to look straight
at my bruise, the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she
wasn't very curious about it. Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that
I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was
intended to be, it didn't make much difference where I was. All intervening
things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belonged--out there.
Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister,
that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling's gigolo, all that Thea had herself
done meanwhile, these were entirely "out there." The reality was now, and in
here; she had followed it by instinct since St. Joe. So this was the reason for
the cry of all that time lost and it made me feel what her fear was like of never
succeeding in finding her way from the "out there" but blundering forever.

Of course I didn't grasp this right away. It came out during the next few days,
during which we stayed in the apartment. We slept and woke, and we didn't real-
ly discuss my doings or hers. Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I
didn't ask about them. It was just as well that I didn't go out, for the hood-
lums were looking to make an object lesson of me. Grammick told me when I got
around to phoning him.

Other women I had known--well, I didn't blame them that I loved them less
than Thea. Only it was through her that I began to learn somewhat about the
reasons behind my opinions. There were some people who were too slow in their
life, because of fatigue, unwillingness, hardship, sorrow, mistrust; and some
were too fast out of other trouble or desperation. But as far as I was concerned,
Thea had perfect life. So that any no-account thing, such as her walking to the
kitchen or bending to pick up an object from the floor, when I would see the
shape of her back, her spine, or the soft departure of her breasts, or her brush,
made my soul topple over. I loved her to the degree that anything she chanced to
do was welcome to me. I was very happy. And when she was going about the
room and I lay stretched and occupied so much of her bed with my body, I was
about like a king, as to the pleasure of my face, looking on, watching her.

Her face was paler than I had remembered, but then I hadn't observed it so
well before. Some pains of life were in it too, sure enough, when you looked
close, though just at present her eyes were relatively clear of them. She had
black hair. The roots came a little unevenly from her forehead, upward, beautiful
at that. You had to look well to notice this eccentricity. Her eyes were most
dark. She often applied rouge to her mouth from a little tube on the bed table
as though feeling she had to stay adorned at least that way, with the carnation
color, and a fire smudge came off on the pillows and on me.

Now, when I had called in from South Chicago. Thea had told me she didn't
have much time, she would have to leave soon. And the first few days, as I've
said, she didn't speak of it, but eventually the open suitcases brought up the
subject and she told me that she had been, and legally still was, married, and
she was on her way from Long Island to Mexico to get a divorce. Afraid to hurt
my feelings, all she'd say at the outset was that her husband was considerably
older than either of us and was very rich. But gradually more came out. He flew
a Stinson plane, he had tons of ice dumped in his private lake when it became
lukewarm in July, he went on Canadian hunting trips, he wore cufflinks worth
fifteen hundred dollars, he sent to Oregon for apples and they cost him forty
cents apiece, he cried because he was growing bald so quickly, etcetera. What-
ever she said was chosen to prove she didn't love him. But I wasn't very jea-
lous. I guess because he had lost out there was no cause. Esther also was mar-
ried and to a man rich as all get-out, a lawyer in Washington, D. C. This rung
very foreign to me, as she didn't quite observe--the planes, the hunting, and
the colossal cliffs of dough. Thea too traveled with sports equipment--breeches,
boots, gun cases, cameras; in the can I had by chance turned on an infra-red bulb
that she used for developing films, and in the bathtub were pans with fluid and
unfamiliar pipes and gizmos.

Well, during this talk it was evening beside the window. We were at the table,
having just eaten supper, which was ordered by phone. There was a watermelon
rind, chicken bones, and so on. She was telling me about her husband, but all I
could think of was my luck, at this point and hour as she was leaning her head on
the curtain, and on her own hands behind her just by the open window and its
shadow of blue which cleared the trees and then got paler. The trees grew in the
little yard, which was covered with white gravel. Some big insect flew in and be-
gan walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shin-
ing, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets
thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented. And then beneath us
the dinner dishwater was splashing in an apartment; and over toward Hell's Kitchen,
from a couple of belfries like the twin points of the black leathery sand-shark
egg-cases you find on beaches, the sound of bells went out. This Roman-twilight
firing or mild shelling the targets scarcely even heard for the sloshing of the
tapwater and the conk of china. I was wearing one of her bathrobes and my legs
were stretched under the table from a silk armchair, and on an occasion like this,
as glad as I was, what was I going to do, be envious of her husband whom she had
left?

Since I had come near being Lucy Magnus's husband, I understood why Thea
had married at the same time as her sister and to the same sort of man. Though
she could be ironical about them now, I found out later that she had a weakness
for being successful in social circles like this man Smith's, or at least she
liked to feel she outclassed the women from those Boston or Virginia families.
Which was a department of rivalry I didn't know much about.

She assumed that I'd go to Mexico with her, and I never seriously thought of
refusing. I knew I didn't have what it took, of pride, or of a strong feeling of
duty, to ask her to come back another time when I was ready, or at least in bet-
ter position, honorably quits with the union, or when I could at least pay my
own way. I said I had no money, and she answered seriously, "Take what you
need from the refrigerator." She was in the habit of leaving the dough she got in
change from the delivery men and also checks and so forth in the refrigerator.
The money was mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of
bacon grease, which she didn't like to throw away. Anyway, the fives and ten-
ners were there, and I was to pick up what I needed on the way out, as a man
takes a handkerchief from his drawer on slight thought.

I had a conversation with Grammick to ask him to step into my place at the
Northumberland. He already had done what he could. There was no wildcat
strike. He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to
lay low. When I told him I was quitting and leaving town he was surprised.
However, I explained about Thea, that I absolutely had to go with her, and he
appeared to take it better. He said it was a lousy deal anyway to be stuck in
these dual-union situations, and the organization ought to put on a real drive
in the hotel field or quit.

Thea outfitted me before the trip. In which connection, for some reason, I get
the picture something like the Duke of Wellington stepping out in the dress of
the Salisbury Hunt, blue coat, black cap, and buckskins. Maybe this is because
Thea had such very exact ideas as to what I should put on. We went from shop to
shop in the station wagon to try on clothes. When she thought a thing was right
she kissed me and cried, "Oh, baby, you make me happy!" unmindful of all the
stiffness in the salespeople and the other customers. When I picked something
she didn't like she'd give a laughing start and say, "Oh, you fool! Take it off.
That's like what the old lady in Evanston thought was so smart." The clothes
Simon had given me she disliked too. She wanted me to look like a sportsman,
and she got me a heavy leather jacket at Von Lengerke and Antoine's that
required you to want to kill game or you couldn't wear it. It was a knockout,
with a dozen different kinds of pockets and slits for cartridges and handline,
knife, waterproof matches, compass. You could be thrown in the middle of Lake
Huron in it and hope to live. Then for boots we crossed Wabash Avenue to
Carson's, where I hadn't gone since Jimmy Klein trapped me that bad moment
in the revolving doors.

In these joints it was she who did the talking. Mostly silent, feeling full of
blood, I came up smiling to try on the things and walk inside the triple mirror to
let her turn me by the shoulder and see. I was glad over her least peculiarity--
that she spoke high, that she didn't care that her slip showed a loop from her
brilliant green dress, or that there were hairs on her neck that had escaped the
gathering of the comb, hairs of Japanese blackness. Her dresses were expensive,
but, as I had noticed her hat trembling when she had come up to my room, there
never lacked one piece of disorder caused by excitement, and where arrangement
failed.

Going through this, being kissed in the stores and the purchases and gifts, my
luck didn't make me hangdog, I'll say that for myself. If she had handed me
titles and franchises like Elizabeth to Leicester it wouldn't have caused me
awkwardness; nor would wearing feathers, instead of the deep Stetson that
pleased her. So the checks, plaids, chamois, suedes, or high boots that made me
come out on Wabash Avenue like a tall visitor or tourist were no embarrassment
but made me laugh and even be somewhat vain, putting on like a stranger in my
own home town.

She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and
combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went
into McCrory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles
with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some
things Thea liked to buy cheaply; they maybe gave her the best sense of the
innermost relations of pennies and nickels and expressed the real depth of
money. I don't know. But I didn't think myself too good to be wandering in the
dime store with her. I went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted
because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object
she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a
comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with
great satisfaction, or a green-billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she
kept in the apartment--she would never be anywhere without an animal. This little
striped and spike-tailed tom, like a cat of the sea in the wide darkness of the
floors of those rooms of the suite that Thea never used. She rented a big place
and then settled in a space-economizing style, gathering and piling things around
her. There were plenty of closets and dressers but she was still living out of the
suitcases, boxes, cases, and you had to approach the bed at the center of this
confusion through spaces between. She used sheets as towels and towels as shoe
rags or mats or to wipe the kitten's messes, for it wasn't housebroken. She
gave the maids bribes of perfume and stockings to clean up, wash the dishes,
underclothes, and do other extras; or maybe she did it so that they wouldn't
criticize her disorderliness. She thought she was first-rate with clerks and
servants. I, the ex-organizer, didn't say anything.

It didn't matter. I let a lot of things go past. Those days, whatever touched me
had me entirely, and whatever didn't was like dead, my heart not giving it a
tumble. I was never before so taken up with a single human being. I followed her
sense wherever it went. As I wasn't yet old enough to be tired of confinement to
my own sense, I didn't appreciate this enough.

What I did at times realize was how I was abandoning some mighty old protect-
ions which now stood empty. Hadn't I been warned enough because of my mo-
ther, and on my own account? With terrible warnings? Look out! Oh, you chump
and weak fool, you are one of a humanity that can't be numbered and not
more than the dust of metals scattered in a magnetic field and clinging to the
lines of force, determined by laws, eating, sleeping, employed, conveyed,
obedient, and subject. So why hunt for still more ways to lose liberty? Why go
toward, and not instead run from, the huge drag that threatens to wear out your
ribs, rub away your face, splinter your teeth? No, stay away! Be the wiser person
who crawls, rides, runs, walks to his solitary ends used to solitary effort, who
procures for himself and heeds the fears that are the kings of this world. Ah,
they don't give you much of a break, these kings! Many a dead or dying face lies
or drifts under them.

Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great
circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico,
her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something
better than what people call reality. Oh, well and good. Very good and bravo!
Let's have this better, nobler reality. Still, when such an assertion as this is
backed by one person and maintained for a long time, obstinacy finally gets the
upper hand. The beauty of it is harmed by what it suffers on the way to proof. I
know that.

However, Thea had one superiority in her ideas. She was one of those people who
are so certain of their convictions that they can fight for them in the body. If
the threat to them goes against their very flesh and blood, as with people who
are examined naked by police or with martyrs, you soon know which beliefs have
strength and which do not. So that you don't speak air. For what you don't suffer
in your person is mostly dreaminess, or like shots of light, sky-sprinkling fire-
works and creamy wheels that scatter to a sad earth. Thea was prepared for the
extremest test of her thoughts.

Not that she herself was always on her own highest standard. I had to accept
her version of everything, this being the obstinacy of assertion I spoke of. Also
it was evident that she was used to having what she wanted, including me. Her
behavior was sometimes curious and crude. When certain long-distance calls
came through she'd just about order me out of the room, and then I could hear
her yelling and be startled, astonished that she could have a voice like that. I
couldn't catch the words and could only speculate as to the reasons. Then how
I'd criticize her if I weren't her lover would come to me.

She assumed she understood everything about me, and it was astonishing how
much she did know; the remainder she made up with confidence and trusted to
closed eyes and fast strokes. She therefore said some harsh and jealous things
and her look occasionally was more brilliant than friendly. She was aware of her
weakness in having come after me--in her confident moments she thought of it
instead as strength and was proud of it.

"Did you like that Greek girl?"

"Yes, sure I did."

"Was it just the same with her as with me?"

"No."

"I can tell you're just lying, Augie. Of course it was the same for you."

"Don't you find it different with me? Am I like your husband?"

"Like him? Never!"

"Well, can it be so different for you and not also for me? You think I can put
it on and not love you?"

"Oh, but I came to look for you, not you for me. I had no pride"--she was
forgetting that I scarcely knew her in St. Joe. "You were getting tired of this
little Greek chambermaid, and I happened to show up, and it flattered you so
much you couldn't resist. You like to get bouquets like that." And now, to say
this, made her breathe with labor; she was suffering. "You want people to pour
love on you, and you soak it up and swallow it. You can't get enough. And when
another woman runs after you, you'll go with her. You're so happy when
somebody begs you to oblige. You can't stand up under flattery!"

Maybe so. But what I couldn't stand up under at the moment was this glare,
when she went so hot and white in the face with its strong nerve and meta-
physical reckless assertion. Although she painted her mouth with carnation
lipstick she didn't make it sensual, nor did she have a sensual face, but any
excitement, no matter what it was, took up her person, her entire being. It
was the same whether she was angry or when she was loving and had her
breasts against me, clasping hands, touching feet. So even if this jealousy
made no sense, still it wasn't play-acting jealousy.

"If I'd been wise enough I'd have come for you," I said. "I just didn't have
enough sense, so I'm grateful that you did. And you don't have to be afraid."
No, no, what did I want with the upper hand or pride contests? None of that
stuff. When she heard me speak like this there was a tremor in her features of
the strain passing off; she shrugged and smiled at herself and a more normal
color began to appear.

Not only was she accustomed to independence struggles and to resistance, to
going counter to the open direction of everyone else, which made her judgments
severe, but she was in many ways suspicious. Her experience was, socially,
much wider than mine, and so she suspected many things which at the time were
out of my range. She must have remembered that when we met I seemed an old
woman's hanger-on who sponged on her and maybe worse than that. Of course
she knew better. What she knew of me by now, really knew, was plenty, from
information I gave freely. Because involuntarily. But so was her habitual
shrewdness involuntary, the shrewd suspiciousness of a rich girl. And then,
once you've irrevocably made up your mind, does that mean you don't sweat
and fear you can be wrong? Even Thea with her convictions and confidence
wasn't immune to occasional fits of doubt.

"What makes you say these things about me, Thea?" They bothered me. Certainly
there was some truth in them; I felt it in my lining, somewhere, like an object that
had slipped down out of the pocket.

"Aren't they right? Especially about your being so obliging?"

"Well, partly. I used to be much more so. But not so much now." I tried to tell
her that I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough,
that I had opposed people in what they wanted to make of me, but now that
I was in love with her I understood much better what I myself wanted.

But what she had to answer was this: "What makes me say these things is that
I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much
to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven't got
anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to
put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for
them. It's a sickness. But they don't want you to care for them as they really
are. No. That's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as
they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones
around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie, darling, don't do
it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter
to them. You only matter when someone loves you. You matter to me. Otherwise
you don't matter, you're only dealt with. So you shouldn't care how you seem
to them. But you do, you care too much."

She went on like this. It was bitter sometimes, for usually her wisdom was
against me. As if she foresaw that I'd do her wrong and was warning me. But
then, too, I was eager to hear what she said and I understood it, I understood
only too well.

These conversations we had more often on the road when we set out for Mexico.


She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico besides
obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her
plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or
rented a house in the town of Acatla, and what she described of the country
didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked
of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population. I
wasn't clear for a long time about the hunting. I thought she intended to hunt
eagles, and that seemed peculiar to me, but what I understood wasn't so peculiar
as what she really meant. She wanted to hunt with an eagle trained in falconry,
and as she had owned hawks she was eager to imitate a British captain and an
American couple who had taught or "manned" golden and American eagles, some of
the few since the Middle Ages. She had gotten the idea for this hunt from read-
ing articles by Dan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years
before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas.

Near Texarkana there was a man who had eaglets to sell. He had offered one
to George H. Somebody-or-other, an old friend of Thea's father, who kept a
private zoo. This friend of her father, who by the accounts she gave seemed to
me loony, like the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, had built himself a copy of the
Trianon in Indiana, only with cages inside, and had made Hagenbeck voyages
everywhere to fill them with beasts of his own capture. He was in retirement
now, too old to travel; but he had asked Thea to bring him some giant iguanas--
or challenged her to--these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the
mountains south of Mexico City. As this information came out, which I didn't
know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life--I could not
find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity.

I'm not going to say that she was more than I had bargained for, because it
has to be absolutely understood that I didn't bargain. What I will say is that
she was singular, unforeseen, and contradictory in her flightiness, steadiness,
nervousness, or courage. When she tripped on the stairs in the dark she cried out,
but she traveled with snake-catching equipment and she showed me snapshots of
the outings of a rattler-collectors' club she had belonged to. I saw her holding
a diamondback behind the head and milking the poison from him with a slice of
rubber. She told me how she had crawled into a cave after him. In Renling's
shop I had sold sports equipment, but the only hunting I had ever watched was in
the movies, apart from having seen my brother Simon shooting at the rats in his
yard with his pistol. My special memory was of one large one with humped back
like a small boar but terrible, swift-clawed feet racing for the fence. I was,
however, ready even to become a hunter. Thea took me out into the country
before we left Chicago, and I practiced shooting at crows.

This was while we held over in Chicago a few days longer; she was waiting
for a letter from Smitty's--her husband's--lawyer and used the time to give
me lessons with the guns in the woods off toward the Wisconsin line. When we
came home and she took off her breeches and sat in her out-of-doors shirt with
bare legs, she might take up a piece of costume jewelry to fix the clasp and sit
like a girl of ten, in a rapt way, her neck bent and knees up, her fingers kind
of clumsy. Then we'd ride on the Lincoln Park bridle path, and there was nothing
clumsy about her there. I hadn't forgotten how to manage a horse since my Evan-
ston days. But that was what it was, managing rather than riding. I followed
her speed as fast as I could, red in the face and hitting the saddle hard, using
my weight against the animal. I managed to stay on, but how I did it amused
her.

I was amused, too, when I caught my breath and climbed down from the sad-
dle, but asked myself just how many new adaptations I was going to have to
try to make. Along with the snapshots of the Rattlesnake Club I saw others; she
had a leather case full of them. Some were of that very summer in St. Joe when I
met her, of her uncle and aunt, her sister Esther and sports in white pants with
tennis rackets and paddling canoes. When she showed me Esther's picture it
didn't touch me except through her resemblance to Thea. There were photos also
of her parents. Her mother had been a lover of the Pueblos, so there she was,
sitting in a touring car in a hat and furs, looking at the cliffs. One picture in
particular took my attention. It was of her father in a rikshaw. He wore a white
drill suit and a helmet with a nipple, his eyes also whitish, the influence of
the sun whose spottiness made the wheels seem like tea-soaked lemon. He looked
over the shaved head of the Chinese human horse who stood with thick wide
calves between the shafts.

Then there were more pictures of hunting. Some of Thea with different falcons
on her gloved arm. Several of Smitty, her husband. In riding pants. At play,
wrangling with a dog. Or again with Thea in a night club--she laughed with
eyes closed in the flash of the bulb and he covered his bald head with slen-
der fingers while an entertainer flung arms out over the table. Many of these
things troubled me. For instance, in her laughter at the night club I saw the
bosom, shoulder, chin, with kind of a happy recognition, but the hands of
ridicule and squawk of limelight laughter--no, those were foreign. There was no
place for me, there, by the table. Nor by her father in the rikshaw. Nor by the
mother in the touring car with the fur about her neck. And then the hunting
troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it. Banging at crows,
fine, that was okay. But when she bought me a gauntlet so I could handle the
eagle, and I put it on, a strange sense came over me as if I were a fielder in
a demons' game and would have to gallop here and there and catch burning stone
in the air.

So I was very uncertain. Not as to whether I should go with her, which was no
decision since I had to, but as to what to expect, what I'd have to go through or
put up as my share, where we were headed. To explain it sensibly to anyone was
more than I was capable of. I tried. Mimi, who should have been the one best
able to sympathize, was just the friend with whom I had most awkwardness a-
bout it. She didn't like it a bit and said, "Now what are you trying to tell me?"
unwilling to believe I was, as I said, in love, and the skin of her forehead
thickened and drew along her upshot brows. As I explained in more detail she
laughed in my face. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Ark-
ansas? An eagle? Don't you mean a buzzard?" From loyalty to Thea I didn't
laugh; Mimi couldn't get me to, even if the queerness of the expedition wor-
ried me plenty. "Where did you find a babe like this?"

"Mimi, I love her."

This made her take another, nearer look at me, which showed me to be in
earnest. And Mimi thought so much of the seriousness of love she doubted there
were many who could get it right, and, soberer, she said, "Watch out you don't
get in trouble. And why are you quitting your job? Grammick told me you had a
future as an organizer."

"I don't want any more of that. Arthur can have it."

As if she thought I spoke of Arthur with disrespect she said, "Don't be silly.
He has to finish those translations, and he's working very hard; he's in the
middle of an essay on the poet and death," and she began to tell me how poets
must be allowed to run funerals. Arthur was installed in my room, and he had
discovered the fire-ruined set of Dr. Eliot's classics in the old box under the
bed and asked to be allowed to take care of it for me. Since the books were
stamped "W. Einhorn," it would have been hard to refuse even if I had wanted to.
Meanwhile he was in a cure for his clap, and Mimi watched over him and could
have only side concerns about anybody else.

It was easy to explain my going off to Mama. Of course I didn't have to tell her
much, only that I was engaged to a young lady who had to go to Mexico, and
that I was going too.

Though Mama no longer did kitchen work, the knife marks in her hands had stay-
ed, and there probably always would be those dark lines; so, also, her color
still was gentle, but her eyes increasingly cloudy and her lower lip expressed
continually less sense. I suppose what I said was pretty well indifferent to her,
as long as the tone of it didn't distress her. That was what she listened to. And
why should it distress her, since I was riding high and in the best silks and co-
lors? Say if the main bonds of attachment were death ropes, crazy, in the end, at
least I felt them now as connections of joy, and if that was a deception it would
never appear more substantial or marvelous. But I denied it would be a deception,
unless nothing so vivid can be substantial. No, I wouldn't admit that.

"Is she a rich girl, like Simon's wife?"

I thought perhaps she believed Thea was Lucy Magnus.

"This isn't any of Charlotte's family, Ma."

"Well, then don't let her make you unhappy, Augie," she said. And what lay
behind this, I believe, was that if Simon hadn't helped me to choose, if I had
picked for myself, my mother thought me to be sufficiently like her to get myself
in a bad fix. I said nothing of the hunting to her, but it did occur to me how it
was inevitable for the son of a Hagar to go chase wild animals at one time or
another.

I asked about Simon. The only recent news I had of him was from Clem
Tambow, who had seen him in a fistfight with a Negro on Drexel Boulevard.

"He bought a new Cadillac car," said Mama, "and he came to give me a ride.
Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow."

It didn't hurt me to hear of him in prosperity, and even if he was Duke of
Burgundy, let him go ahead and be it. But I have to admit that I couldn't keep
down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too. I don't want
to pretend that I could.

I looked up Padilla too before I left, and found him in front of his institute.
He was in a blood-spotted lab coat, although he was hired to do calculations,
as far as I knew, not experiments, and he smoked one of his stinking dark-tobacco
cigarettes while in his swift way he debated about two curves with a character
who held open a big looseleaf notebook. Padilla wasn't so terribly pleased that
I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province.
He said that in Mexico City, where he himself had never been, he had a cousin,
whose address I took. "If he'll rob you or help I can't predict, but look him
up if you want somebody to look up," he said. "He was piss-poor fifteen years
ago when he went away. He sent me a postcard last year when I got my M.A. Which
maybe means that he wants me to send for him. Fat chance! Well, enjoy your trip,
if they let you, but don't tell me afterward I didn't warn you to stay home."
Suddenly he smiled in the sunshine and creased his short curved nose and fore-
head which sloped backward into his handsome Mexican hair. "Go easy with that
wild native tail." I couldn't even grin at him to be sociable, it was such in-
appropriate advice to a man in love.

Nobody, then, gave the happy bon voyage I'd have liked. Everybody warned
me, in some way, and I even thought of Eleanor Klein and what Jimmy had told
me of her being rooked there in Mexico, and her mishaps. I argued back to
myself that it was just the Rio Grande I had to cross, not the Acheron, but
anyway it oppressed me from somewhere. Really, it was the strangeness of the
state I was in and not so much that of the destination I was aware of. The great
astonishment of this state was that the unit of humanity should maybe be not
one but two. Not even the eagle falconry distressed me as much as that what
happened to her had to happen to me too, necessarily. This was scary.

This trouble of course wasn't clear to me then. I put it all on Mexico and the
hunting. And finally I said to Thea, on an evening while she was playing the
guitar--with a rounded-back thumb on the hind string; she treated the instrument
easily and it supplied its own strength--I said, "Do we have to go to Mexico?"

"Do we have to?" she said and shut off the strings with her hand.

"You can get a quick divorce in Reno and in other places."

"But why shouldn't we go to Mexico? I've been there several times, many times.
What's wrong with it?"

"But what's wrong with other places?"

"There's a house down in Acatla, and we're going there to catch some of those
lizards and other animals. Besides, I've arranged with Smitty's lawyer to be
divorced there. And there's still another reason why it's better for us to be
there."

"What's that?"

"I won't have much money after the divorce."

I shut my eyes and put my palm on my forehead as if trying to help the sudden
astonishment go through. "Well, Thea, excuse me if I don't follow you. I
thought you and Esther had lots of money. What about the stuff in the icebox?"

"Augie, our part of the family never did have very much. It's my uncle, my
father's brother, who's rich, and Esther and I are the only kin, and we always
had allowances and were brought up in the money, but we were supposed to
make good. Esther did; she married a rich man."

"And so did you."

"But it's over, and I may as well tell you there was a scandal about it. It isn't
anything you should mind, it was just foolishness, but I took off from a party
with a naval cadet. He looked just like you. It didn't amount to anything. I was
thinking of you all the time, but you weren't there."

"A substitute!"

"Well, that Greek girl wasn't even that for you."

"I never said I spent all the time since we were in St. Joseph thinking about
you."

"Nor about Esther?"

"No."

"Do you want to argue, or do you want to hear? I'm only trying to explain
what happened. My aunt was visiting us--you remember the old lady--and the
party was at our house, at Smitty's house. And she saw how this kid and I were
petting. Augie, you really don't have to mind that. It was thousands of miles
away and I didn't realize that I was going to come to Chicago to look for you.
But I couldn't take Smitty any more. I had to have somebody else. Even if it was
only just another boy, like that Navy boy. After that my old aunt went home, and
my uncle talked to me long-distance and told me I was on probation with him.
And that's one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money."

"With the eagle?" I cried out. Many kinds of things were disturbing me. "How
do you expect to make anything with an eagle! Even if he catches those blasted
lizards or whatever you mean. Holy smokes!"

"It isn't just the lizards. We're also going to make movies of hunting. I have
to capitalize on the things I know how to do. We can sell articles about it to
the National Geographic."

"How do you know we can? And who can write them?"

"We'll have the material and find somebody to help us. There's always such a
person wherever you go."

"But, darling, you can't count on that. What do you think! It's not so easy."

"It's not so terribly hard, I don't believe. I know lots of people everywhere
who are crazy to do me a favor. I don't suppose it is going to be very easy to
man that bird. But I'm thrilled to try. Besides, we can live cheaper in Mexico."

"But what about the money you're spending now? In this suite?"

"Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final. That doesn't matter to
you, does it?"

"No, but you ought to take it easier, not put out all this gold."

"Why?" she said, and genuinely didn't understand.

Any more than I could understand some of her notions about spending. She would
pay thirty dollars for a pair of French sewing scissors in a silver shop on
Michigan Boulevard--one big dead sizzle of trousseau silver--and those scissors
would never cut a thread or snip a button, but disappear into the flow of art-
icles in the bags and boxes, in the rear of the station wagon, and perhaps never
show up again. Yet she could talk about being thrifty in Mexico.

"You don't mind spending Smitty's money, do you?"

"No," I said, and truthfully I scarcely cared. "But suppose I wasn't going to
Mexico with you--would you have gone on alone? With the bird, and so on?"

"Of course. Don't you want to come with me, though?"

She knew, however, that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could
put out my eyes. Even if it was African vultures, condors, rocs, or phoenixes.
She had the initiative and carried me; if I had had a different, independent idea
I might have tried to take the lead instead. But I had none.

So she asked me whether I didn't want to stay behind, and then seeing it all
over my face how I loved her she took back her question and was silent; the only
sound was the strike of the guitar as it was set down.

Then she said, "If the bird worries you, just forget about it till you see it.
I'll show you what to do. Only don't think about it beforehand. Or think what a
kick there may be in it when you get the animal trained, and how beautiful it
is." I tried to take her advice, but all the same my bottom skepticism of West-
Side Chicago nagged after me and asked, "Nah, what is this!" And since we were
only a short distance from the zoo I took a walk to see their eagle, who perched
on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor
parrot, in its smoke and sun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped
stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers--the pressed-down head, the
killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy! In the old-country park green of
lawns and verdigris-covered ironwork, ordinary tree shade and garden sunlight,
there seemed nothing a bird like this might want. I thought, How could anybody
ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with
this thing before it grows too big.

The letter from Smith's lawyer had arrived. The day we received it we loaded
up the wagon and left the city, heading toward St. Louis. As we started late we
didn't quite make it that far. We camped, sleeping on the ground under a shel-
ter-half. I figured we weren't too far from the Mississippi, which I was eager
to see. I was terribly excited.

We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries' old trunk still had such small-change
of foliage--it was difficult to think this enormous thing should live merely by
these tiny leaves. And soon you distinguished the sound of the leaves, moved by
the air, from the insects' sound. First near and loud; then farther and mountain-
ous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark there was this sound of in-
sects, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous
and dense as stars.




Chapter XV




What class we started out in! We were risen up high with pleasure. We had all
the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we
found in each other, for in some ways Danaë or Flora the Belle Romaine
couldn't have been stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity
out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the
weight of precious personality and the veteran burden that familiarity is always a
part of.

The way we set out and all that we did or saw, what we ate, under what trees
we took off our clothes and what protocol there was about kissing, from the face
to the legs and back again up to the breasts, what we agreed and disagreed about,
or what animals or people came our way I can always recall when I want to.
Some things I have an ability to see without feeling much previous history,
almost like birds or dogs that have no human condition but are always living in
the same age, the same at Charlemagne's feet as on a Missouri scow or in a
Chicago junkyard. And often that is how the trees, water, roads, grasses may
come back in their green, white, blue, steepness, spots, wrinkles, veins, or smell,
so that I can fix my memory down to an ant in the folds of bark or fat in a piece
of meat or colored thread on the collar of a blouse. Or such discriminations as
where, on a bush of roses, you see variations in heats that make your breast and
bowel draw at various places from your trying to correspond; when even the rose
of rot and wrong makes you attempt to answer and want to stir. Which is to say
also that the human heat that circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or
break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of
fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps. So there are
burning roses, there are sores, and there are busted circuits. It's rare to find
us without these breaks and interferences.

Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her. I'd do it by
looking, through long old habit, casual and unattached; it was hard for me to
change. And on her side, she couldn't make me any promises. She just wouldn't.
I knew that Smitty wouldn't have divorced her because of one single naval
cadet. I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was
not of such importance. When I took it up with her she admitted it. "Of course,"
she said, "now and then. Because of Smitty. Well--also because of myself. But
we don't have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to
me. So what do I know about far in the future? I've never been this way before.
Have you?"

"No."

"Why," she said, exactly right, "this makes you jealous! Why, Augie, the
others would be jealous of you. They should be. Those just were incidents. You
know, this can be one of the most unimportant things in the world. If it's good,
why grudge anybody? And if it's bad you can only feel sorry. And can you
blame me if I tried? And don't you want me to tell you the truth?"

"Oh! Yes, I do. No. I'm not sure. Maybe not."

"Suppose I hadn't looked--what would I know? And if I can't tell you the
truth, and you can't tell me…"

Yes, yes, I knew the truth had to be appropriate somewhere, but was this the
place for it?

She wanted to say and to know all. Pale as she was, she got paler at the
approach of this desire to say and know, and often her seriousness was right on
the border of panic. For of course she was jealous too. Yes, she was jealous. It
did me good sometimes to realize it. She wanted to be hard about the truth, and
when she was she shook and got frightened.

Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me
in the first place. It wasn't a reassuring thought. But then it's actually very
common that at the outset you desire a thing for the wrong reasons; there's an
even more deep desire which will bring you out of such reasons. Otherwise
there'd never be any human motives but miserable, green ones, and only the
illusion of better and riper. Rather than as the history of the world shows,
that inferior reasons are not the only leading ones. Because why have unhappy
people persisted in thinking of the best, and the best only? You take that poor
Rousseau, in the picture he leaves of himself, stubble-faced and milky, in a rope
wig, while he wept at his own opera performed at court for the monarch, how he
was encouraged by the weeping of the heart-touched ladies and fancied he'd like
to gobble the tears from their cheeks--this sheer horse's ass of a Jean-Jacques
who couldn't get on with a single human being, goes away to the woods of
Montmorency in order to think and write of the best government or the best
system of education. And similarly Marx, with his fierce carbuncles and his
poverty and the death of children, whose thought was that the angel of history
would try in vain to fly against the wind from the past. And I can mention many
others, less great, but however worried, spoiled, or perverse, still wanting to
set themselves apart for great ends, and believing in at least one worthiness.
That's what the more deep desire is under the apparent ones.

Oh, jealousy, sure. But there were plenty of other defects and inferiorities.
What I sometimes didn't think of myself, in the fine pants and the buckskins,
boots, sheath knife, while I drove the station wagon as if from the court at
Greenwich and along the Thames, just back from a Spanish raid, goofy flowers
in my hat. This was how I'd note myself with satisfaction and glowing; I may
ask a partial excuse, because of the swelling of my heart, that I was such a happy
jerk. But she could be singular too, when she'd swagger or boast or vie against
other women; or fish compliments, or force me to admire her hair or skin, which
I didn't have to be forced to do. Or I would find her stuffing toilet paper into
her brassiere. Toilet paper! What a strange idea of herself--complete failure to
know what she had! What did she want with different breasts? I would look over
into her blouse, where they seemed to me perfect, and perplex myself with this
question.

I could enumerate more difficulties, like pangs, vexations, bellyaches, an-
xious nosebleeds and vomiting, continual alarms about pregnancy. Also she was
snobbish now and then about her extraction and would brag about her musical
ability. Actually, I heard her play the piano only once, in a roadhouse, in the
afternoon. She went up on the bandstand, and the instrument may have been out
of whack from use by jazz musicians; anyway, it began to crash from the energy
she turned loose on the keys, chords overreached and elements spilled. She
abruptly quit and came back silent to the table, drops of sweat on her nose.
She said, "This seems to be an off day." Well, I didn't care whether she could
play or not, but to her it seemed important.

But these shortcomings, both in her and me, could have been corrected or
changed. Whatever wasn't essential I thought might simply be rolled over. Like
camp articles we rolled over that were in our way; we forgot to clear them aside
--I am thinking of one particular day; there were some aluminum cups and lines
and straps that happened to be on the blanket. It was afternoon; we were in the
Ozark foothills, well off the road, in the woods near a pasture. Up from where
we were there was a totter of small pines, and above them bigger trees, and
subsiding land below. Because the water we had was poor we spiked it with rye
for taste. The weather was hot, and the air was glossy, the clouds white and
heavy, rich, dangerous, swagging, silk. The open ground glared and baked, the
wheat looked like the glass of wheat, the cattle had their feet in the water.
First the heat and then the rye made us take off our clothes, shirts, then trou-
sers, finally all. I was startled to see those pinks of her breast, so heavy and
forward, and despite everything I was still, at first, somewhat shy of them. When
I put down my tin plate and began to kiss her, both kneeling, her hand passed o-
ver my belly hairs; it sometimes surprised me where she would put a kiss of gen-
tleness, and I didn't know where the jump of happiness would come from. She gave
me only the side of her face at first, and, when her lips, she would not let my
mouth go for some time, until her arms locked in my head. I felt, when I was roofed
and covered with heat, met all over and to the smallest hair, carried on her body,
easily. She didn't shut her eyes, but they were not open in order to see me or
anything; filled and slow, they made no effort but only received or showed. Very
soon I didn't notice either, but knew I came out of my hidings and confinements,
efforts, ends, observations, and I wanted nothing that was not for her and felt
the same from her. We stayed a length of time as we were, easing and slowly lying
apart on each other's arms, then once more nearer, kissing neck and breastbone
and on the edge of the face and on the hair.

Meanwhile the clouds, birds, cattle in the water, things, stayed at their dis-
tance, and there was no need to herd, account for, hold them in the head, but
it was enough to be among them, released on the ground as they were in their
brook or in their air. I meant something like this when I said occasionally I
could look out like a creature. If I mentioned a Chicago junkyard as well as
Charlemagne's estate, I had my reasons. For should I look into any air, I could
recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El
pillars--such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are--like a
terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshipers
crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel
that I myself was the creation of such places. How is it that human beings will
submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their
original eyes?


We had few such afternoons when we started to train the eagle. After all, love
can be the calling of mythological characters around Mount Olympus or Troy,
like Paris, Helen, or Palamons and Emilies, but we had to start to earn our own
bread. And it couldn't be in any way other than this one that Thea had chosen, to
send out a bird after another animal. And so the gilded and dallying part of the
excursion ended in Texarkana.

Seeing that fierce animal in his cage, I felt darkness, and then a streaming on
my legs as if I had wet myself: it wasn't so, it was only something to do with my
veins. But I really felt dazed in all my nerves when I saw with what we would
have to deal, and dark before the eyes. The bird looked to be close kin to the one
that lit on Prometheus once a day. I had hoped this would be a smaller bird, and,
brought up by us from a baby, he'd learn something about affection. But no--to
my despair--here he was as big as the one in Chicago, with the same Turkish or
paratroop knickers down to his merciless feet.

Thea was terribly excited and keen. "Oh, he's so beautiful! But how old is he?
He's not an eaglet; he looks full grown and must weigh twelve pounds."

"Thirty," I said.

"Oh, honey, no."

Of course she knew more about it than I did.

"But you didn't get him from the nest, did you?" she asked the owner.

This old guy, who kept a roadside zoo of mountain lions and armadillos, a few
rattlers, was an ancient-prospector or desert-rat-looking joker, with the sort of
eyes that request you to believe their crookedness is only the freak of nature
or effect of unfavorable light. But I hadn't served around Einhorn's poolroom
or had Grandma Lausch's upbringing for nothing, and I recognized him for a
crooked old bastard and prick in his heart.

"No, I didn't climb for him. Fellow brought him in when he was real tiny.
They grow so durn fast."

"He looks older to me. My guess is he's in the prime of life."

Thea said, "I have to know if he was ever a haggard--ever hunted wild."

"He's never been outside that cage since practically from hatching. You
know, miss, I've been shipping animals to your uncle for close on twenty
years."

He thought George H. Something-or-other was her uncle.

"Oh, of course we're going to take him," said Thea. "He's so magnificent.
You can open the cage."

I rushed forward because I feared for her eyes. Falconry with those little
peregrine hawks was all right in the tame meadows out East in the company of
ladies and sporting gentlemen; but we were on the edge of Texas, within smell
of deserts and mountains, and she had never touched an eagle before even if she
was experienced with smaller birds and capable of the capture of poisonous
snakes. However, she was very steady when it came to dealing with animals; she
had no fear of them at all. With the gauntlet pulled on, she held a piece of meat
inside the cage. The eagle struck it out of her hand and then took it. She tried
another piece, and he mounted her arm with that almost inaudible whiff of his
spread wings that's so fearful in itself, the raised shoulder with its forward power
and the fan of the pinions with hidden rust and angel-of-death armpit or deepest
hollow inside the wing. His talons held her arm steady while he tore up the meat.
However, when she wanted to take him out he attacked and tore with his beak. I
reached for him next, and he struck me above the gauntlet and cut gashes in my
arm. I expected this, if not worse, and somehow I was relieved that it happened
so quick, making me fear him a little less. As for Thea, fascinated, and whiter
than ever in her cap with green bill, quick, strong, erect in the head with her
purpose to get and tame him, the spurt of blood on my arm was, just now, only
an incident, like the grate of gravel under our boots. In action, she was that way
about accidents--spills and falls from horses and motorcycles, knife cuts or any
hunting injuries.

Finally we got the bird transferred to the back of the station wagon. Thea was
happy. I had things to do, such as bandaging my arm and stowing the boxes anew
to give the bird more space, that allowed me to hide my gloom. While the old man,
as Thea described her scheme, could hardly keep his grin in his whiskers. Like
so many enthusiasts, Thea rarely got the number of anyone who pretended to lis-
ten seriously. Since the old man was getting a fancy price for his eagle, or,
the way I felt about it, had found a place for this harsh client of his, he
was very pleased and malicious. So we drove off, with the thing supervisor of
the back of the wagon. I observed how glad and confident Thea was, and took
note of the shotgun behind the seat.

I can remember a cousin of Grandma Lausch who recited "The Eagle," by Ler-
montov, in Russian; which I didn't dig, but the elocution was wonderful and
romantic. She was dark, she had black eyes, her throat was ardent but her hands
rather powerless. She was much younger than Grandma, and her husband was a
furrier. I'm only trying to gather together what a city-bred man knew of eagles
altogether, and it's curious: the eagle of money, the high-flying eagles of
Bombay, the NRA eagle with its gear and lightnings, the bird of Jupiter and of
nations, of republics as well as of Caesar, of legions and soothsayers, Colonel
Julian the Black Eagle of Harlem; also the ravens of Noah and Elijah, which
may well have been eagles; the lone eagle, animal president. And, as well,
robber and carrion feeder.

Well, given time, we all catch up with legends, more or less.

The bird had looked to me to be in his prime, but the old man was approxi-
mately right, even though he probably lied by as much as eight months. Amer-
ican eagles are generally blackish until maturity; before they get the white
part of their plumage they moult a good many times. Ours didn't yet have his,
the full bad eye of the head when it whitens, and was still only Black Prince,
not King. He was, however, powerfully handsome, with his onward-turned head and
buff and white feathers among the darker, his eyes that were gruesome jewels
and meant nothing in their little lines but cruelty, and that he was here for his
own need; he was entirely a manifesto of that. I hated him beyond measure, at
the start. In the night we had to be up because of him, and it was an interference
with love. If we slept out-of-doors and I woke and missed her, I would find her
by him; or she would shake and send me to check if all was well--the jesses
around his legs, the swivel through the hole of the jesses, the leash through the
swivel. If we had a hotel room he shared it. I'd hear his step; he crackled his
feathers or hissed as if snow was sliding. He was right away her absorption and
idée fixe, almost child, and he made her out of breath. She turned to him
continually in her seat as we rode, or when we ate, and I wondered at other
times whether he was on her mind.

Of course he had to be subdued, so that we didn't have a mighty and savage
animal at our backs, antagonism constantly increasing between captive and
masters. And since I had to, I got along with him. He didn't require that I
should love him; he looked the other way from that. Meat was how you came
to terms with him. Thea really did understand how to tame him, and naturally,
since she had the know-how, she had to think of him more than I did. Soon he
started to come to our fists for his beef. You had to get used to it. Under
the gloves your skin was twisted by his talons, and he did do a whole lot of
damage. I also had to accustom myself to the work he did with his beak when
he ravened. But later when I saw vultures on carcasses I appreciated his
prouder pull of a more noble bird.

So as we ran through Texas, and it was very hot. We stopped several times a
day to work with the bird. By the time we got close to Laredo, where it was
desert, he would come both to my fist and hers from the top of the station
wagon. And this open shadow would shut out your heart with its smell and
power--the Etna feathers and clasped beak opening. Often, then, without the
preparatory move you observe in other animals, he ejected a straight, heavy
squirt of excrement before he wound up to fly again to the top of the wagon.
Thea was mad about him for his progress. I was that about her, and for lots of
reasons, among them admiration, seeing how she succeeded with the bird.

Birds that hunt have to be hooded; Thea had this thing ready, a tufted cover
with drawstrings that you struck or loosened before you released the animal to
rise and wait on its game. But before the eagle would take the hood he had to
be thoroughly mastered, and I carried him on my arm some forty hours without
sleep. He wouldn't drop off, and Thea kept me awake. This was in Nuevo Laredo,
just over the border. We put up in a hotel full of flies, a brown room with
giant coarse cactus almost in the window. And there I paced at first, rested,
at length, in the dark, with my arm on the table, overborne by him. After several
hours a numbness grew over my entire side and into my shoulder as deep as the
bone. The flies nipped me because I had only one hand free and anyhow didn't
want to startle him. Thea had a kid bring up coffee for us, which she took from
him at the door. I could see him stare as he tried to dope us out, for he knew
we had the bird and perhaps even saw his shape on my victimized arm, or his
wakeful eye.

There had been an amazing crowd when we drove up to the hotel and opened the
back door of the station wagon. In a few minutes more than fifty men and chil-
dren had gathered. The eagle came on my hand for his meat and the kids scream-
ed, "Ay! Mira, mira--el águila, el águila!" Some sight, I guess, since I'm fairly
tall and wore that height-increasing hat and whipcord breeches, and, moreover,
obviously followed the lead of Thea's beauty and importance. And anyway the
eagle has ancient respect in Mexico from the old religion and the great class
of knights in those days of obsidian sword slaughter that Diaz del Castillo wit-
nessed. The children, I said, were screaming, while he rocked on my fist, "El
águila, el águila!" And because I heard Spanish for the first time, it was an-
other word I made out, the Roman name of Caligula. I thought in my heart
how suitable it was. Caligula!

"El águila!"

"Si, Caligula," I said. That name was the first satisfaction I had in him.
Now he had my arm pinned to the table with torture, and my mouth and chest
filled with moans I couldn't give out. I had to drag him with me everywhere,
to the toilet too, and sitting or standing I had his eye on me and his comment
to try to read and will to feel. From moody sunkenness, when I rose to go, he
thrashed back, his neck began to swim and his eyes livened; his clutch grew more
positive. I won't attempt to play down my fear when I had to take him into the
toilet for the first time. I held him as far off as I had the strength to do,
while he started to stretch his wings and change the stance of his thick legs.

O observation! We had our struggle on that very thing, it appears to me. The
conversation with Thea about living in the eyes of others, I've reported. When
has such damage been done by the gaze and so much awful despotism belonged
to the eyes? Why, Cain was cursed between them so he would never be unaware
of his look in the view of other men. And police accompany accused and suspects
to the can, and jailers see their convicts at will through bars and peepholes.
Chiefs and tyrants of the public give no relief from self-consciousness. Van-
ity is the same thing in private, and in any kind of oppression you are a sub-
ject and can't forget yourself; you are seen, you have to be aware. In the most
personal acts of your life you carry the presence and power of another; you
extend his being in your thoughts, where he inhabits. Death, with monuments,
makes great men remembered like that. So I had to bear Caligula's gaze. And
I did.

He resisted the hood for a long time. Several times we tried it on him, and I
had my hand slashed badly and cursed him with all my might; but I continued to
carry him. Occasionally Thea would spell me, but he was too much of a weight
for her and after an hour or so I'd lure him back to my unrested arm. During the
last groggy stretch I couldn't any longer stay in and went into the street with
him where the cries about him made him restive. We brazened our way into a movie
and sat in the back row; here the sound got him even worse, and I was afraid
he'd blow his top. I took him back to the room and fed him chunks of meat to
soothe him. Then, in the middle of the night, under the infrared bulb of Thea's
photographic kit, I tried the hood once more, and he submitted to it at last.
We continued to give him meat under it, and he was calm. Covered eyes made him
much more docile. Henceforth he rode either my fist or Thea's and took the
hood without using his beak on us.

When we had this victory and Caligula was standing on the dresser in his hood
with tufts, we kissed and danced or tromped around the room. Thea went to get
ready for bed and I fell asleep in my breeches and was out for ten hours. She
pulled off my boots and let me lie.

Next afternoon, hot and bright, we started out for Monterrey; trees, bushes,
stones, as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them. The
giant bird, when Thea brought him out, seemed to shoulder it with a kind of
rise of sensuality. I felt dizzy from long sleep and the wires of radiant heat
curling up from road and rock. Also the paws and pads, the tongues and jaws of
cactus and their spines, the dust like resin, the squamous crumbly walls, were
a trial to the sight and the skin. But as the wagon climbed and the day cooled
we both revived.

We didn't stop over in Monterrey but only got a few supplies--more raw meat
for Caligula than anything else. The curiosity of evening in this foreign city
would have held me--it was so green, and the buildings red, the humanity so
numerous in the flat open beside the railroad station and its length of low
entrances and windows. But it was Thea's idea to drive on and beat the hot wea-
ther. It wasn't easy going, for the fields weren't fenced and there were cattle
in the way; the road had no night markers and took foolish twists. For some time
there was a mist although the moon was plain enough. The animals rose up in
big shapes from this vague cover, and sometimes we came up with horsemen and
left behind the slap of iron shoes and the loose change and slash of harness.

At a town well past Valles we stopped for what was left of the night, and then
because I insisted. The air was sharp, the stars pricking, the roosters sounding
off, and the never-sleeping element of Mexican towns came to see us take out
the eagle, with the same solemnness about it as at the Sunday promenade of a
holy image, and, as everywhere, said to one another, astonished, "Es un águila!"
I wanted to leave him in the station wagon where by now his excrement and fowl-
ish smell were so thick, but he wouldn't stand for it. Left alone all night, he
was vicious in the morning, and Thea was by now so wrapped up in his career
that for the time very few considerations took precedence. Because she was mak-
ing history. Those gallant young sons of financiers who flew planes in the twen-
ties and took off to break records from New Orleans to Buenos Aires, over the
jungles which sometimes collected both them and machines, their passions must
have been on this order. She kept reminding me how few people since the Middle
Ages had manned eagles. I agreed it was terrific and admired her without limit;
I thanked God I was even her supernumerary or assistant. But I tried to tell her
that the eagle in the room disconcerted me at love, which was awkward; and also
that he was a beast after all, not a child in cradle for whom you had to have
titty or bottle. Thea, however, couldn't see any arguments, only her objective
with the bird, which she never doubted that I shared. She thought I disagreed
as to how to manage him. The motive of power over her, the same as afflicted
practically everyone I had ever known in some fashion, and which in my degree,
though in a different place, I had too, carried and plunged us forward. Of
course, when you had an eagle by the tail, so to speak, how could you quit?
Having started, you had to follow up. But it wasn't being halfway in a course
of difficulties that counted. No, what carried her was the passion for him to
capture those huge lizards.

By the door of the posada two dirty lumps of kerosene light were burning, like
persimmons streaked with black. The stones of the street were slippery, but
neither from dew nor from rain, and the smells which I didn't yet know how to
sort rose thickly mixed--smells of straw, clay, charcoal and ocote smoke,
cookery, stone, shit and corn meal, boiled chicken, pepper, dog, pig, donkey.
Nothing was as before; all was strange. In the barnyard, which gave a heave
most likely of terror as Caligula in his hood was brought through; and in the
bedroom where the perfumed air of the branchy mountainside washed over the
white wall and on the stinks of community, as the long impulse from well out in
ocean bobs the rotten oranges and other trash at the wharfside; and the Indian
woman who turned down the counterpane of the iron bedstead which was in a
form of fantasy, a white spider monkey.

It was not a long night's rest, for early in the morning washerwomen at their
tank started slapping their clothes; corn was pounding; the animals were live-
ly, especially the burros, penetrated with necessity; and the church clanged.
However, Thea woke happy, and she was busy right away giving Caligula his
pacifier of morning meat, while I set out through the damp rooms to find bread
and coffee.

Because of the bird we traveled rather slowly. Now Thea wanted to teach him
to fly after a lure. This was a horseshoe with chicken or turkey wings and heads
tied to it; it was slung by a rawhide line, and when it was thrown he gave a great
lurch of preparation and soared after it. Some of his problems were like those of
an airline pilot, as to judging distances and the air currents. It wasn't, with
him, the simple mechanics of any little bird that went and landed as impulse tick-
led him, but a task of massive administration. When he was high enough he could
look as light as a bee, and later on I saw him at such altitudes that he appeared
to tumble or turn somersaults like a mere pigeon--it must have been that he played
the various air pockets of hot and cold. Anyway, it was glorious how he would
mount away high and seem to sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere,
as if he was governing from up there. If his motive was rapaciousness and every-
thing based on the act of murder, he also had a nature that felt the triumph
of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and bone could rise. And
doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores
and parachute seeds who weren't there as individuals but messengers of species.

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of
Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the
flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or
silk membrane, showed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly
high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dan-
gerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the
cones--gliding like a Satan--well, it was here the old priests, before the
Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them
whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their
astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a
human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods
in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided
as they spun by the ropes--feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores,
or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be
remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or
pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are
corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented
graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins
looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, black,
white, gray, and in all sizes, with their heavy death fringes daubed in Sapolio
silver on the black. Beggars in dog voices on the church steps enact the last
feebleness for you with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of
stump and their sores. The burden carriers with the long lines, bemp lines they
wind over their foreheads to hold the loads on their backs, lie in the garbage
at siesta and give themselves the same exhibited neglect the dead are shown.
Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere, in the
beauty of the place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly
handled--the proudest--pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown down; for death
throws even worse in men's faces and makes it horrible and absurd that one
never touched should be roughly dumped under, dumped upon.

When Caligula soared under this sky I sometimes wondered what connection he
made with this element of nearly too great strength that was dammed back of
the old spouts of craters.

But he wasn't soaring yet. He was still cumbersomely flying after the lure and
its slimy giblets spoiled by the sun. Again and again it was flung out, downslope,
for that was the only way to get him going. Whenever Thea miscalculated the dis-
tance he made me stagger, since we were tied by a rope that passed under my arms.
She ran to watch him devour the chicken and signaled when I was to pull at the
leash. So gradually he learned to come back to the fist from the lure. No matter
how isolated a mountain place we stopped in to practice, there was an audience
soon of herdsmen and peasants in their sleeping-suit white costumes and sandals
soled with pieces of rubber tire, little kids and the mountaineers with the
creased impassivity that showed how gravely they took it.

As for Thea, sometimes she looked more barbarous than they did in spite of
the civilized lipstick and conventional shape of the jodhpurs she wore. Her arm
was held out to the eagle when he descended, braked with his wings and feet
together, the stirred air showing on his breast. Her cap fluttered. I took a
great pride in her. I thought it was the most splendid human act I would ever
see. It went around my soul like fine ribbon. She'd call out to me too, when
I poised myself forward to bring the bird in, admiring how gallant it looked.
I was pleased, of course, though not groggy with glory.

After ten days we reached Mexico City. Thea had to see the representative of
Smitty's lawyer and we therefore stayed awhile. Against her desire, which was
to go on immediately to Acatla. We put up very cheaply in a hotel called La
Regina, for only three pesos a day. They didn't appear to mind the eagle, and the
place was quiet and modest-looking, unusually clean, with a skylight over the
center and galleries onto which you came from rooms, showers, or toilets. The
lobby was also very fine, and empty. From above it had a diagrammatic look.
The chairs and writing tables were arranged with geometry, but no one was there
to use them. And soon we found that the queen for whom the place was named
was the licentious old Cyprian one. The closets were full of douche pans, the
beds were heavily prepared with rubber under the sheets, which was an annoy-
ance. During the day we were alone in the hotel with the maids, whom we amuse-
d. They thought it was fun that we lived in a house of assignation and they
waited on us, did laundry and pressed pants, fetched coffee and fruit, because
we were the only guests. Thea's Spanish entertained them--I had only begun to
pick up a few words--as did her requests, that she summoned them when we
were in bed and ordered mangos for us and meat for the bird. Encouraged to be
free around the place, we covered with only a towel when we went to take a
shower, and when I wanted to be without the eagle nobody minded if we went
into one of the other rooms. It was only at night that there were drawbacks to
the Regina; though the clients were probably respectable people they had no
ideas whatever about quiet, and very few of the doors had glass in the transom.
However, we were out to all hours ourselves, seeing the city, and we did a lot
of daytime sleeping. I rested my arm, of which the gashes were healing. Thea
took me to the palaces and night clubs, zoo and churches. The rideresses in
Chapultepec, those patrician ladies in hard hats and immense skirts and foot-
conforming little black leather shoes, sitting sidesaddle, they impressed me.
I thought the world was really much greater than I had ever fancied. I said to
Thea, "I don't actually know much, I begin to see."

She laughed and answered, "You're welcome to all the side of things I can
give information about. But how much are you obliged to know?"

"No, there actually is a lot," I said, for I was amazed and struck, it was so
splendid. I wanted to stay, but there was our business with the bird, and Thea
didn't like the city very much.

I couldn't question her judgment about Caligula--there I went along with her
and had confidence by now, based on her proved ability with him. A creature
like that, he'd have torn me to strips if I'd ever taken him on myself, assuming
that I'd have had the nerve. No, where the eagle was concerned I did as she
said, insofar as I backed the undertaking. When I knew more about it I trembled,
thinking of the precautions we didn't take. We ought to have worn wire masks,
especially at the time he was being taught to give up the lure for meat on the
fist, since bald eagles are most dangerous when they have their quarry under them.
She might have been struck in the eyes. But that never happened, and eventually
she succeeded in teaching him to respond to our voices and come directly after
the stoop for the hand-fed meat. We talked to him and used every gentleness on
him. He liked to be stroked with a feather. He became pretty tame, but all the
same my heart picked up a few beats when we hooded him or struck the hood.

At the Regina the scared maids were called in to be present when we worked
with him. Thea lined them up and said, "Hablen, hablen ustedes!" They had to
chatter. For the thing was to accustom Caligula to close human presence and
sound. So the Indian women, in smocks, frightened as well as amused by us--
they stood in a row and watched Thea take the eagle down from the dresser on
her hand. What I had imagined at the first sight of him actually happened to
one of these young chicks, that she wet her pants when the hood came off from
the unmerciful face and weapon beak with its breathing holes. But it did af-
fect Caligula to be surrounded by these women; he ate and then at one moment
he seemed to lean his head toward Thea and act like a cat who wants to wipe
and wreathe and ply himself at a woman's legs.

"Oh, look at him," Thea cried. "Augie, see what he's doing, he wants to be
petted!"

Then she was impatient with having to wait on in the city. "Now's the time to
follow up. We ought to be in the country with him."

"Well, let's drive out away."

"No, we can't. I have to see the lawyer. But I can't bear to lose the time. Now,
now, we could be getting home. We could start to enter him to his quarry."
By this she meant his first introduction to lizards. Not the giant variety with
the high frill of which she had shown me pictures, the game we were after, but
littler lizards. And furthermore Caligula had to become accustomed to a horse or
burro; these giant lizards were in almost inaccessible parts of the mountain, far
from roads, and we couldn't lug Caligula the whole long difficult way.

I felt Thea maybe ought not to hurry the divorce too much. She might not be
getting a good deal. I didn't want to ask about the details, and I figured probably
she had been an heiress long enough to look after things for herself. What could
I tell her of that? Besides, I didn't care to find out in its entirety about the
trouble between her and Smitty, and had I asked she would have told me. So I laid
off the topic, and we used the spare time to take color pictures of Caligula on my
arm in front of the cathedral; until mounted officers who appeared to gallop out
of the gates of a ministry drove us off the plaza. They were tough with me. I
understood them to say the bird was dangerous, and they shouted that they wanted
to see my papers. They were more deferential to Thea, but with lady-killer smiles
they anyway made us go. Thea still intended to sell illustrated articles about
Caligula to the National Geographic or Harper's. She knew a writer in Acatla who
would help us; and she kept notes in a little book which was a very classy af-
fair of red leather with a gold pencil attached. At any time at all she'd take
it out on her knees and write with bent neck, a few words to a page, while, as
she paused to think or remember, she moved her hand like someone in the process
of shading a drawing. I studied her so well I even noted that the creases at the
joints of her fingers were much like my own.

"Darling, what town was that in Texas where he wanted to go after a jack
rabbit?"

"Around Uvalde, wasn't it?"

"Honey, no. Could it have been?"

She took my thigh with her hand. Here in the city she had gilded her nails.
They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was
heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. We sat under a tree on a
wrought-iron chair. As I looked at the clear skin of her breast I felt its heat as
actual as the heat of her hand through the thin cloth of my trousers. I assumed
we'd get married when the divorce came through.



Chapter XVI



And strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.
　　　　　　　　　Antony and Cleopatra


We found Thea's house ready. If it was her house. Perhaps it was Smitty's. I
thought I'd find out in due time. There was no rush about it.

The towers and roofs of town appeared and then were hid many times in knots
of mountain and back of cliffs of thousands of feet before the descending road
became a street and we arrived in the cathedral square, or zócalo. There we
parked, and, the way to the villa being narrow, we had to walk. Even normally
we'd have been met by a gang of kids, beggars, loafers, hotel-touts, and so
forth, but the eagle on my fist brought out a mob from the shops and bars and
from the awning-covered market just below the cathedral. A lot of people recog-
nized Thea and sounded off with yells and yelps, whistles, picked-up sombreros,
and in this turbulent escort that raised a dust around us we climbed a few hundred
yards above the zócalo on the pointy stone terraces, to the gate of the villa.
"Casa Descuitada," I read on a blue tile under the branches of pomegranate trees
--Carefree House. We entered, and the cook and houseboy met us. Mother and son,
they stood a good distance apart, both with bare feet on the red stone of the
porch, she by the kitchen and he by the bedroom door. In her shawl she carried
an infant, and at the sight of the bird, even in his hood, started to back into the
kitchen. We took the bird away. The toilet became his mews; he perched on the
waterbox or cistern where the sound of trickling seemed to please him. The boy,
Jacinto, tagged after to see how we handled him. He was thrilled.

Sometimes I thought that if to earn money was the reason for this goofy
undertaking I should devote myself to the money question and how to make a
killing; then I'd set Caligula free or give him away. But I knew that to make
money was not Thea's objective. I didn't overlook the nobility of her project,
how ancient it was, the kind of ambition that was involved or the aspect of game
or hazard; I even was aware of a link to earliest times in the great venture of
domestication. Yes, for all my opposition and dread of the bird, wishing him a
gargoyle of stone or praying he would drop dead, I saw the other side of it, and
what was in it for her, that she was full of brilliant energy. But I thought, What
was wrong with the enjoyment of love, and what did there have to be an eagle
for? So then, if I had dough at least there couldn't be that pretext. Then I
understood, next, how to think idly of money is terribly frivolous. Being un-
reasonable perhaps about the capture of the lizards, Thea nevertheless had a
bird and had made a start, whereas my thought of money was only a flutter of
imagination. What was I doing in breeches and campaign hat down here in Cen-
tral Mexico if I wanted to be serious about it? In short, I saw anew how great
a subject money is in itself. Here was vast humankind that meshed or dug, or
carried, picked up, held, that served, returning every day to its occupations,
and being honest or kidding or weeping or hypocritic or mesmeric, and money,
if not the secret, was anyhow beside the secret, as the secret's relative, or
associate or representative before the peoples.

Here we arrived, and lunch was served to us--soup, chicken with black molé
sauce, tomato and avocados, coffee and guava jelly. And this strange, mouth-
inflaming delicate food, as I was eating, was what brought my mind to this
question of the dollar.

The house was handsome and wide, deeper than appeared from outside, because
from the garden you descended to the rooms. The walls were reddish and floors
darker red or green tile. There were two patios, one with a fountain and barrel-
shaped oxhide chairs; the other was by the kitchen, a sort of old stable yard,
and here we continued Caligula's training. He flew down to us from the tiles
of the shed where Jacinto slept.

From the porch where we ate we had the town and the cliffs before us. Nearly
immediately below was the zócalo, the dippy bandstand and its vines, the mon-
strous trees around. The cathedral had two towers and a blue-varied belly of
dome, finely crusted and as if baked in a kiln, overheated, and in places with
the mutilated spectrum that sometimes you split out of brick. It was settled
uneven on the stones of the square, and occasionally in the midst of admiration
gave you a heavy, squalid, gut-sick feeling, so much it incorporated all that
was in the surroundings. The bells clung like two weak old animals, green and
dull, and the doors opened on a big gloom in which stood dead white altars and
images slashed and scratched with axes, thorns, raked with black wounds--some of
these flashy with female underpants on their hips, nail-cloven and hacked as they
were, and bleeding as far as their clothespin white fingers. Then on a hill to one
side was the cemetery, white and spiky, and on another side and higher in a star
of connecting gullies was a silver mine, and there you could see where the force
of great investment had dented. The mountainside was eaten for some distance
by machine. I was intrigued and climbed up there one day. It certainly was odd
what mechanisms you saw all over Mexico, what old styles there gnawed and
crawled, pit or tunnel makers, and machine scarabaeuses, British and Belgian
doojiggers, Manchester trolleys or poodle locomotives at the head of sick cars
covered with blanketed men and soldiers.

Within the town still, along the road to the mine, the garbage was thrown into
a little valley, hummocky with soft old decays; the vultures hung over it all day.
At one of the highest points you could see, in a cliff, there was a waterfall.
Sometimes it was covered in a cloud, but there usually flew the slight smoke of
water, paler than the air, above the treeline. A good deal below were pines, at
the widows' peaks of wrinkled rock; and then more tropical trees and flowers, and
the hot stone belt of snakes and wild pigs, the deer, and the giant iguanas we had
come to catch. Where they hung out the light was very hot.

In a Paris or a London where the distinction of the sun isn't so great, in the
grays and veilings, it isn't credited with its full power, and many southern people
have envied those places the virtues it's possible to think of having in the cool
or cold. I believe Mussolini was not kidding about blasting pieces out of his Alps
and Apennines to let the cold foggy currents of Germany over the peninsula and
make the Perugini and the Romans into fighters. That same Mussolini who was
slung up dead by the legs with shirt tails drooped off his naked belly, and the
flies, on whom he had also declared war, walked on his empty face relaxed of its
wide-jawed grimace, upside down. Ay! And his girl friend with poor breasts bullet-
punctured also hung by the feet. But what I want of the contrast of broadcast
or exposing versus discreet light is to suggest what the claims are, or the il-
lusions, the discreeter seems to allow. Now I've mentioned that Thea carried
among other pictures one of her father, taken in the south of China, in a rik-
shaw. She put it on the dresser, tucked in the mirror frame, and I often found
myself studying him, his white shoes of far manufacture off the ground being
used by the dish-faced Cantonese. In his white suit. And I thought what there
was to such being picked for special distinction. Maybe I looked at him with
special regard as lover or future husband of his daughter. But anyway, he was
sitting gentlemanly up in the human taxi. Around him spectators from the mil-
lions gowping at him, famine-marks, louse-vehicles, the supply of wars, the
living fringe of a great number sunk in the ground, dead, and buzzing or jump-
ing over Asia like diatoms of the vast bath of the ocean in the pins of the sun.

Well, in the hot light I saw the wild mountain, the semitropical band of it
where the iguanas haunted in the big leaves and gorgeous flowers, the laborers
and peasants, and I didn't realize right away how many visitors from the cool
and cold were paying their good dough to be here. Very near us was a luxury
hotel, the Carlos Quinto. Its swimming pool shone in the garden, blue and white
like heavenly warmth and weather, and there were large foreign cars in the drive.
Acatla was beginning to attract people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo
but now wanted to be out of the way of politics. There were already some Span-
iards here, from both sides of the disaster, and also some Frenchwomen, and
Japanese and Russians, a family of Chinese who ran a bar and manufactured
rope-soled alpargatas. The American colony was large, and so the place was
boiling and booming. I knew little about that at first.

It entertained me to look into the gardens of the Carlos Quinto next door, the
bar on the terrace, the swimmers in the pool, the riding parties setting out,
the small deer kept in a wire pen. The manager was an Italian; he wore diplo-
matist's pants and a claw-hammer coat that accommodated his wide prat. His hair
was smooth and his face confident for others, worried toward himself. I noticed
how quick his fingers were, in and out of his vest pockets where many of his
functions started. From our wall Thea introduced me to him; he was called da
Fiori. There was a private end of the garden for his own family on which our
bedroom window looked down. In the morning old da Fiori, his tiny father, came
out in a cap and old English type of suit, dark green, fuzzy, with a belt on
the jacket and chestnut buttons. He brushed the ends of his whiskers with hairy
knuckles, and when he walked, his little feet didn't seem adequate to support
him. We loved to sit up in bed, each by the other's nude waist, and watch him
mouse around in the enormous flowers. Then came his son, already combed, pale,
bored; his spats in the dew, he bent and kissed his father's hand. And then
came two little daughters, like white birthday cake, and the soft mother. All
carried the old geezer's tiny hand to their mouths. It gave us a lot of plea-
sure. They would sit down in the arbor and be served.

By now the eagle had learned Thea's voice and mine, and he'd come off the
lure to eat out of our hands when called. It was time to introduce or enter him
to lizards. Live ones were a trouble, because they'd run away, and they were so
small. Dead ones didn't suit Thea. She worried about those Jacinto brought in;
she suggested doping the larger ones a little with ether, just enough to make
them sluggish. I was fond of them. Some soon became tame. You stroked them
on the little head with a finger and they got affectionate, up your sleeve or on
your shoulder, into your hair. At night, when we were at dinner, I'd stare at the
ones that lay near the bug-attracting lights, with swift puff of the throat and
their tongues which are supposed to have the power to hear. I wished we could
leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the
toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and beak. About this Thea was both gay
and sharp with me, and when she argued against my sympathy with these gilded
Hyperion's kids made me laugh and also squirm. It wasn't as if she hadn't
thought about it independently.

She said, "Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with every-
thing, like a savage. Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don't
want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn't be lizards--they'd
be too slow, and pretty soon they'd be extinct. And look, if you were lying
dead the little lizard would run down your open mouth to catch beetles, as
if you were a log."

"And Caligula would eat me."

"Could be."

"And you'd bury me?"

"Because you're my lover. Of course. Wouldn't you me?"

Unlike Lucy Magnus, she never called me husband, or by any domestic term.
I sometimes believed her marriage views, except that they weren't polemical,
were similar to Mimi's.

This conversation about lizards was one of several on the same general topic,
and gradually Thea made me see what she was driving at with me. You couldn't
get the admission out of me that a situation couldn't be helped and was ines-
capably bad, but I was eternally looking for a way out, and what was up for
question was whether I was a man of hope or foolishness. But I suppose I felt
the good I had must be connected with a law. While she, I guess, didn't care
for my statue-yard of hopes. It seemed when somebody held me up an evil there
had to be a remedy or I pulled my head and glance away, turned them in another
direction. She had me dead to rights when she accused me of that; and she tried
to teach me her view.

Nevertheless I hated to see the little lizards hit and squirt blood, and their tiny
fine innards of painted delicacy come out under Caligula's talons while he glared
and opened his beak.

On a Sunday morning, when the band boomed and spat in the zócalo, where it
began at dawn, and the heat was dry in the kitchen patio, after breakfast--we
had sunnyside-up eggs--we were working with the bird. It was something to hear
the exercise of his wings in the heated space of the air. Jacinto brought us a
larger lizard. We tied him with short fishing line to a stake, which gave him no
chance to dart away. Then the eagle came beating down with a sharp threat of
pinions in the electrical dry air and its hurried dust and went to set his claws in
the lizard. But there was enough play in the line for the quick animal to whip
around, and it opened its mouth and showed a tissue of rage to the big beast over
it, then snapped its jaws and hung from the bird's thigh, curved with the force of
its attack and bite. One of those thighs that made the bird seem to ride like an
Attila's horseman through the air. Caligula made a noise. I don't believe he had
ever in his life been hurt and his astonishment was enormous. He tore off the
lizard, and when he had already squeezed and wounded it past recovery he
hopped off. I couldn't show it, but it did my heart good to see Caligula so
offended. He sorted among the feathers with his beak to find the hurt place.
Thea was furious at him, her face red. She shouted, "Get him! Go finish him!"
But when he heard her voice he rose up and flew to her for his usual meat. Since
he came to her she had to let him land and extended her arm. But she was very
angry. "Oh, the dirty bastard! We can't let him run away from a little bit of an
animal like that. What'll we do? Augie, don't you grin about it!"

"I'm not, Thea, it's the sun making me squint."

"What should we try now?"

"I'll pick up the lizard and call Caligula back. The poor thing is almost dead."

"Jacinto, kill the lagarto," Thea said.

With pleasure the boy ran from the shed on bare feet and hit the creature on
the head with a stone. I laid it, dead, on my gauntlet, and Caligula didn't
refuse to come but he wouldn't eat. He shook the lizard with fury and let it
drop to the ground. When I offered it a second time, now a dusty dead thing,
he did the same.

"Oh, that damned crow! Get him out of my sight!"

"Now, Thea, wait a minute," I said. "This has never happened to him before."

"Wait? He only came out of an egg once. How many times did he have to do
that? He's supposed to have instincts. I'll wring his neck. How is he going
to fight the big ones if a little nip does this to him?"

"Why, if you're hurt, what do you expect?"

But that was my humanizing again, and she shook her head. She believed
fierce nature shouldn't be like that.

I put the eagle on his waterbox, and gradually Thea let me pacify her. I said,
"You've done wonders with this bird already. You can't miss. We'll make it,
sure. After all, he doesn't have to be as terrible as he looks. He's still a
young bird."

At last, in the afternoon, she got over her anger and proposed for the first time
that we go to Hilario's bar in the zócalo for a drink. While she was unpleasantly
stirred against Caligula I felt a little condemned with him.

Though Thea was specially loving when we went into the room to change for Sun-
day p.m. in the zócalo. She took off her clothes. The outer were rugged, the inner
silky. And when she was naked, smoking a cigarette, she looked at me differently
as I sat shirtless and pulled off my boots in the heated shade and the radiated
color of the tiles. I went and put my head on her breast. But I knew that, both
in love, we were not quite the same in our purpose. She had the idea of an
action for which love makes you ready and sets you free. This happened to be
connected with Caligula. He meant that to her. But as she suspected now that he
preferred brought meat to prey, perhaps she thought also, about me, whether I
could make the move from love to the next necessary thing.

We rose from bed and dressed. In the lace blouse she wore, how soft she looked.
Her hair fell long on her back. She took my arm, not because she needed its sup-
port on the sharp cobbles, but to keep close, and in the shade of the fruit
trees she looked very much as she had in St. Joe on the swing, a young girl.

Since the Fenchels had owned the Acatla house for many years Thea was a-
cquainted in the town. But at Hilario's bar we sat at a small table; she didn't want
company. Nevertheless, people came over to greet her, to ask after hern sister,
her aunt and uncle, and Smitty, and of course to give me the once-over. Many
of these remained. Thea continued to hold my arm.

To my Chicago eyes these others mostly looked far and odd. Now and then
Thea explained who or what they were, and I didn't always understand her. So
then this bald old German had been a dancer, and on this side was a jeweler,
and the blonde, his wife, came from Kansas City; here was a woman of fifty who
was a painter, and the man with her was a sort of cowhand, or Reno-cowhand;
and coming up now was a rich fairy, once a queen. Here was a woman who
opened a mouth of intelligence on you; she seemed to look at me severely; I
thought, at first, because I had taken Smitty's place. Her name was Nettie
Kilgore, and she turned out to be not bad at all, only sometimes impatient in
look, and something of a lush. She didn't care a hang about Smitty. Well, I'd
known plenty of grotesque people before, but none who had made it their life's
specialty. The foreign colony of this town represented Greenwich Village, or
Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There was a Polish
exile, there was an Austrian with a beard, there was Nettie Kilgore; there were
a pair of writers from New York, one named Wiley Moulton, the other, his friend,
simply called Iggy; there also was a young Mexican, Talavera, whose father
owned the taxi service and rented out horses. A man who sat near Iggy turned
out to be the second husband of Iggy's first wife. His name was Jepson and he
was the grandson of an African explorer. Well, all this was new to me, and so it
went. While Thea and I, fresh from bed, sat side by side. It was curious
amusement and didn't much touch me. I was nearly as much entertained by the
kinkajou Hilario had in a cage and I fed it potato chips. This large-eyed little
animal.

I felt flattered when people assumed I was the eagle's master. Of course I said,
"Oh, Thea is his real boss," but people seemed to feel that only a man could cope
with a bird of that size. All except the handsome brown strong young chap, Tal-
avera, who said he knew how good Thea was with animals. I didn't altogether care
for his contribution to the conversation, though I have to admit he looked to be
in a different class from the rest of this gang. I couldn't get over their queer-
ness. The person who sat next to him seemed to have a kind of bony crest to the
middle of his head, and the back of his hand was like the instep of another man's
foot--white, thick, and dead-appearing. Then Nettie Kilgore. Then Iggy, red-eyed.
Then a man I secretly named Ethelred the Unready--like Grandma Lausch or Commis-
sioner Einhorn, I would sometimes do that, give a name. Then Wiley Moulton, the
weird-story writer. He was big-bellied and long-haired; his face was sort of
subtle, with brown lids; his teeth were small and tobacco dyed; his fingers
seemed all back-bent at the last joint.

There was hard work in some of these people, that they made the most partial
little good climb around in tremendous mountain ranges of opposition to prove
itself.

"So you're going to catch these monsters with your bird?" said Moulton.

"Yes, we are," said Thea quite calmly. It was a great thing about her that she
could not be swayed to make small changes of plan or views in order to get on
with people. "I don't like monkey games," she always said.

"It has been done," I observed.

And now again the public band in the zócalo, just below, began to pound and
smite, so the air quivered with the ragged march. It was nearly twilight. Young
people promenaded, but in rapid time, so you felt flirtation and desperate flying,
both. Firecrackers jumped in the air. A blind fiddler played and howled, with
dance-of-death scrapes, serenading the tourists. Then the cathedral started to ring
the bells, the deepest voice of that big, crusted sadness. So with this noise the
conversational people were silenced for a time; they drank their beer or knocked
off their shots of tequila with tastes of salt licked from the thumb in the styl-
ish Mexican way and bites of lime.

Thea wanted Moulton's help with the articles; when you could hear your own
voice again she asked him about that.

"I'm not in that line now," he said. "I make more by sticking to Nicolaides."
Nicolaides was the editor of the pulp magazine Moulton contributed to. "I had a
bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I'd rather
write for Nicolaides. Besides it takes all the strength I've got to turn out the
installments."

I felt that Moulton had in store all kinds of words and in fact would say
anything. Anything! He only waited for the conversation to give him the chance.

"But you did write magazine articles at one time," said Thea, "and you can
show us how to do it."

"I take it Mr. March is not a writer."

"No." I answered for myself.

What he was fishing for was my calling. I suppose he knew that I didn't have
one I could announce even to these worldly people--for I imagined they were of
the great world, and they just about were. Moulton smiled at me, and not without
kindness. With the deep creases of his eyes, he took on a powerful resemblance
to a fat lady of the old neighborhood.

"Well, in a pinch maybe Iggy can help if I can't."

Moulton and Iggy were friends, but this recommendation everybody knew
was a joke, because Iggy specialized in blood-curdlers for Doc Savage and
Jungle Thrillers. He couldn't write anything else.

I liked this Iggy Blaikie. His real handle was Gurevitch, but that didn't have
the dash that went with the proud Anglo-Saxon names of his heroes. So as
Gurevitch was abandoned and Blaikie had never been real in the first place he
became entirely Iggy. He had a real poolroom look. The boy with the bucket in
Nagel's corner, a little weavy and punchy himself. He wore an apache jersey and
a pair of the rope-soled sandals from the Chinese shop; he was lean but his face
was flushed and gross, with bloodshot green eyes and mouth of froggy width,
the skin of his throat creased, dirty, half shaved; his voice was choky and his
conversation only part coherent. Except by someone experienced in sizing up
such people, who would have known he was innocent, he might have been tak-
en for a dope peddler, a junk-pusher, or minor hoodlum. His was a case of a
strongly misleading appearance.

As to young Talavera, I didn't know just what to make of him. It was obvious
that he looked me over measuringly, and he made me conscious, from the
outside, of how I seemed, with tanned face and freestyle hair. I felt foolish
somewhat, but I had to grant after all that I had studied him too. I wasn't
experienced enough to be suspicious of the young man and native of the place
who attaches himself to the foreign visitors, especially to women. Such are the
broke characters to whom ancient names belong, in Florence in front of Gilli's
Café, or the young men in tight pants who wait around at the top of the funicular
in Capri for Dutch or Danish girls to pick up. And if I had been that experienced
I might not have been quite right about Talavera. He was a mixed type. Very
handsome, he looked like Ramon Navarro of the movies, both soft and haughty,
and was said to be a mining engineer by profession; that was never proved but
he had no need of work, his father was rich, and Talavera was a sportsman.

I said to Thea, "I don't think that young fellow likes me much."

"Well, what about it?" she answered carelessly. "We're only renting horses
from his father."

For Caligula we first tried a burro, but though he stood hooded on the saddle
and was well secured, the burro was bowed with terror and its head bristled. We
then tried horses, and they were shy of him. I couldn't keep my seat when Thea
handed Caligula up to me. And she herself wasn't more successful. Finally
Talavera Senior brought out an old horse who had been through the Zapatista
rebellion and wounded in guerrilla battles. To be ridden by a picador was all this
gray animal appeared fit for, and be gored in the ring. But he was first-rate with
the eagle. I would have said myself there was more sorrow than anything else in
his accepting the bird on his back. Old Bizcocho, that was what this horse was
called; it was hard to make him go at more than a fast amble, though he still
had a few bursts of speed in him.

We took him out of town to a flat place, first, to practice. Out beyond the
cemetery and its bones that lay accidental on the ground, the reek of flowers
along the white tomb walls: first I on the gray animal who clopped slow, the
eagle braced on my arm; then Thea on another horse; and Jacinto in his white
sleeping-suit garb and dark feet carried just above the ground riding a donkey.
We would pass a funeral, often of a child, and the father himself with the casket
on his head would step out of the road--so would the whole cortege, musicians
included--and with his eyes, like the milk of blackness, a few Mongolian mus-
tache hairs fine and long on the savage bulges of his mouth, even afflicted,
and while inimical, would follow the eagle as he passed. There would be the
same whisper, "Mira, mira, mira--el águila, el águila!" So we'd pass by the
white stones and walls that scaled in the heat, the iron prickles, the bones of
death, the sleepers' clothes flappy and humiliated at the back; and also the
little fever-slain child that rode inside.

We got up to the plateau, from which the town lay half covered in a picturesque
hole, and there practiced with Caligula to get him used to a take-off while in
motion. When he learned that, Thea's confidence in him entirely came back. In
fact we did it well. He sat on my arm, I stirred old Bizcocho to move faster,
and the eagle took hold strongly with his feet and wrung me through the demon's
glove. I struck the hood and then slipped the swivel--I had to drop the reins
to do this and grip with my knees--and Caligula put forward his breast with a
clap of the huge wings and started to take the air.

In a few days Bizcocho was ready, and in tremendous excitement, one morning,
we went out for the giant lizards. Jacinto came with us to flush them out of
the rocks, and we climbed down the mountainside to their tropical place. There
the heat was thick; it collected stagnant in the rocks, which were soft and
eaten by rain acids into grottos and Cambodian shapes. The lizards were really
huge, with great frills or sails--those ancient membranes. The odor here was
snaky, and we seemed in the age of snakes among the hot poisons of green and
the livid gardenias. We waited, and the cautious kid went to poke under leaves
with a long pole, for the iguanas were savage. Then on a ledge above us I saw
one who looked on, but as I pointed him out we saw the Elizabethan top of him
scoot away. These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen,
and they would jump anywhere and from any height, with a pure writhe of their
sides, like fish. They had great muscles, like fish, and their flying was
monstrously beautiful. I was astonished that they didn't dash themselves into
pellets, like slugs of quicksilver, but when they smashed down they continued
without any pause to run. They were faster than the wild pigs.

I was anxious for Thea. I knew what a state she was in. The place was steep,
there was no room to maneuver, and she wheeled and plunged her horse. I had
the burden of the eagle, and the old Zapatista gray couldn't turn fast though he
was game enough and understood taking chances. So I heard more than I saw
most of the time.

"Thea," I shouted, "for Chrissake, don't do that!"

But she was crying something to Jacinto and at the same time waved to me to
get into position. She wanted to get the lizards driven down a slope of stones
where they had no cover. Sometimes silver, sometimes dusty, gray, statue-green
they looked as they flew. Finally she signaled me to strike the eagle's hood and
slip his leash. I took a lurch, Bizcocho started downslope on the loose rocks,
Caligula gripped me; I slipped the drawstring and took off the hood, drew the
swivel, and he went up, forward in the deep air of the mountainside, once again
up toward the high vibrations of blue. Coming and going in stages, he went to a
great height to wait on.

Thea sprang to the ground to seize the pole from the boy. He was just sweep-
ing it through the thick growth and tore off magnificent flowers as red as
meat that tumbled down in the wave of ferns, and he cried, "Ya viene!" An
iguana fled down the rocks. Caligula saw him and made his pitch. Feathered and
armored he looked in his black colors, and such menace falling swift from
heaven. Down the iguana made his pure leap too, crashed, ran, doubled at Cal-
igula's stoop, slithered from the snatch of the talons, rolled, fought over his
belly from the shadow that haunted him so fast, flew again. I saw the two sharp
fierce faces, and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular
mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried,
and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get
free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks. Thea yelled,
"After him! Get him! There he goes!" But the eagle didn't pursue down the slope;
he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn't
be heard any more he folded them. He didn't fly to me.

Thea shrieked at him, "You stinking coward! You crow!" She picked up a stone
and flung it at him. Her aim was wide; Caligula only raised his head when
it struck above him.

"Stop that, Thea! For the love of God, stop! He'll tear out your eyes!"

"Let him try to come at me, I'll kill him with my hands. Let him just come
near!" She left her mind with fury, and there was no sense in her eyes. I felt my
arms weak, seeing her like this. I tried to keep her from throwing another stone,
and when I couldn't I ran to unstrap the shotgun for use, and also to keep it from
her. Again she missed, but this time came close, and Caligula took off. As he
rose I thought, Good-by bird! There he goes to Canada or to Brazil. She pulled at
the breast of my shirt and with great pain and tears she cried, "We wasted our
time with him, Augie. Oh, Augie. He's no good. He's chicken!"

"Maybe the thing hurt him."

"No, he was the same with the little one. He's scared."

"Well, he's gone. He beat it."

"Where?" She tried to look, but I reckon couldn't see well for the tears. And I
wasn't any longer sure, either, which of various spots in the sky he was. "I
hope he flies to hell!" she said with a shiver of anger. Her face burned. At
his fraud, that he should look such a cruel machine, so piercing, such a chief,
and have another spirit under it all. "Is he hurt if he flies like that?"

"But you threw rocks at him," I said. And once again I felt implicated,
because he had been tamed on my arm.

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 Campanella'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 ingen-
ious 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 Moul-
ton, 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,
full 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 scream-
ing 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 change-
d 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, boy-
hood next, and the rest in five days flat. Ten thousand words a day. It's com-
ing 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 ap-
peared 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 XVII



It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in na-
ture, 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 beau-
tiful. However, I thought next that it was because of me that Bizcocho was
dead, that he had survived wild 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.

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. Ca-
ligula'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, plan-
ned 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 hunt-
ing 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 antagon-
ism. 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 intre-
pidity 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 u-
topia 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 con-
siderably, 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. Ol-
iver 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. Who-
ever 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 amuse-
ment. 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 sea-
son.

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, Bolingbroke. 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 Hil-
ario'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 heav-
ing 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 mercuro-
chrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ail-
ments, 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 plea-
sure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the east 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 harmless," I casually answered, but it was not a harmless kind of an-
swer.

"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 ir-
regular departure from her forehead there burned the red thread that was part of
the secret of the black.

She said fiercely, "Where were you!"

"I got in very late."

She was hot, shaky, and hasty, and heavy clear tears gave her eyes that crazy
largeness of grievance that sometimes they would get. I thought she would sob,
but she only shook.

"I kind of expected you, the night before last," I said, and she didn't answer
me. We were both sore but not prepared really to fight. What she shook with was
breaking and not increasing anger.

"What do you see in those people down there?" she demanded. "I think they must
make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula. They make fun of me."

"You think I'd let them do that?"

"I know them better than you do. That Moulton stinks."

She lit into Wiley Moulton and other residents. I listened, and in this way we
ignored our real differences. We couldn't yet stand a fight.

Sometimes I almost convinced myself that I was ready to bat around the
mountains with the snake nooses and cameras and guns. I could have used some
action, because I was nervous and overcharged and because I longed that she and
I should be back as we had been in Chicago. But I never could quite bring
myself to go.

It seemed to me that I had to continue playing poker. I was ahead and couldn't
quit. Moulton kept yelling how I had drawn blood on everybody; I had to give
people their chance for revenge. So I had a deck of cards between my fingers as
their most familiar object, and actually I became a very dexterous and fancy
dealer. Soon people were looking for me who didn't even know me, and I seemed
to be running a game at the Chinese restaurant. Louie Fu in his coat sweater
was of that opinion even. I was Bolingbroke or the Eagle Man to tourist strang-
ers who sat in the game, world-tour bums, Moulton called them. My pockets were
full of different foreign currencies. I didn't know exactly what I had. But I
did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's. There was no longer any refrigerator
with bills in the greens and dishes; Thea never seemed to think to offer me an
allowance. If I hadn't been sick I'd have felt well-off, prosperous, with my
pounds, dollars, pesos, and Swiss francs. But it was only my superficial luck
that was good; I was rattled, I was bandaged in an unclean bandage, gaunt, the
town seemed to want to blow its silly self to pieces, Thea was collecting coral
snakes and rattlers, I had to win a fight of patience with my anxious backside
to sit at Louie's, or in somebody's hotel room, or even at the foco rojo where
the game sometimes moved. There the whores were in the rear; in front there was
a little bar which was a soldiers' hangout, before the tourists took over. The
soldiers read comic books, ate beans, and drank pulque. Rats walked on the beams.
The girls cooked, swept, or read too, or washed their hair in the yard. One half-
naked kid with a garrison cap clonked on the marimba; the little black rubber
balls on his sticks struck fast. I felt I had to do something well, so it shouldn't
all be a total loss, and so I watched the cards.

I didn't convince Thea when I said that I'd go along with her just as soon as I
felt up to it, nor did she convince me by her gestures toward me. She consented
to keep me company in town some evenings, and it was good to see her legs in
skirts, not covered by trousers. But it burned me up on the day her divorce pap-
ers came and I said, as I had figured to do, "Let's get married," and she simply
shook her head. Then I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let es-
cape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father. Where at first
it had disappointed me, and later graveled me more, this now gave me a harsh
sting. For sure enough I had a glimmer of things from her standpoint, of how it
is one thing to have a young man for your happy friend in the rosy days of love,
and quite different the faulty creature to face in practical weather. I knew
how I'd seem to her uncle, the powerful millionaire with his squash white-haired
nose and his tailor-made Havanas. It was true that Thea defied him and aimed to
become financially independent; but as she couldn't count on me she wouldn't
cut herself off from her family for my sake. Had I been as enthusiastic on birds,
snakes, horses, guns, and photography as she we might have made the grade. But
I wouldn't have read a light meter for gold, I didn't want to capture snakes,
and I felt ornery about it all. I hoped Thea would tire of it; while she, I sup-
pose, waited for me to get tired of Moulton and Co.

It was one fiesta after another meantime. The band plunged in the zócalo, clash-
ed, drummed, and brayed; the fireworks bristled and ran off in strings, the pro-
cessions swayed around with images. A woman died of a heart attack at a five-
day drunk party, and there were scandals. Two young men, lovers, had an argument
about a dog and one of them took an overdose of sleeping pills. Jepson forgot
his jacket in the foco rojo; the madame herself, Negra, brought it to the house.
Iggy's ex-wife locked Jepson out, so he begged to sleep on Moulton's porch. Mou-
lton wouldn't let him stay because he tried to borrow money, he drank his whisky.
Now Jepson was living in the street, but as the town was foaming his sorrow wasn't
particularly noticeable in it. Wolves or wild swine or the giant iguanas themselves
or stags wouldn't have been either if they had slipped in from the mountains.

A bright dust blew around and whitened the nights. The hotels and shops wanted
there should be a hullabaloo and paid money for the music and shots and tolling,
but to keep up these long fiestas cash wouldn't have been enough, and the energy
for them must have come from the olden-time worship of those fire snakes and
smoke mirrors and gruesome monster gods. Even the dogs ran and mumbled as if
fresh back from their errand in the land of death, Mictlan. The old belief of
the Indians was that dogs carried the souls of the dead there. There was an
intestinal-amoeba epidemic which was hushed up, but funerals tangled with the
other processions. There were big entertainments. A Cossack chorus sang in
the cathedral; the priest had never had such a crowd inside, and it made him
frantic; he scolded and clapped his hands at everyone, crying we were in la casa
de Dios. It didn't do a bit of good with that crowd. I can't say those Russians
looked out of place in the zócalo in their tunics, boots, and tucked-in pants,
musing around at night, burning their long cigarettes. A Brazilian-Italian opera
company did La Forza del Destino. They sang and throbbed powerfully, but as
though they didn't believe any of it themselves. Therefore I was skeptical too.
Thea didn't come back for the second act. Then there was an Indian circus that
gave a grim performance. The equipment of the acrobats was as if ripped out of
an old foundry; the horses were shabby; the performers were solemn Michoacán
Indians, and they stunted without nets or any safety devices. The savage little
girls who came out in their soiled trousers to juggle and walk the wires and
perform other tasks never smiled or bowed.

Thus in this town I didn't see anything familiar, except in reminiscence--as
when those Russians made me remember Grandma Lausch.

Until one day when it was fairly quiet and I was sitting on a bench in the
zócalo petting a kitten that tried to get into my armpit, and several large
cars drove up to the cathedral. They were old cars but powerful, with some-
thing cast-iron about them, the long hoods, the low sling of expensive Euro-
pean automobiles. Immediately I knew there was a personage in the middle car,
for bodyguards emerged from the two others, and I wondered who it was that
could be so important and yet so run-down. Among the rest were two Mexican
policemen, grouchy and proud of their tunics, which they smoothed straight
right away; but the guards were Europeans or Americans, in leather jackets
and leggings. Their hands were on their holsters and they were jittery; it
seemed to me they didn't know the first thing about their job. So I judged,
having now and again, in Chicago, seen the real thing.

It was a cool day. I wore the thick jacket with many pockets that Thea had
bought for me on Wabash Avenue, the one that could save you in the wilderness.
But it was zipped open, as I sat in the sun. The kitty was nuzzling and knead-
ing under my arm with her paws--I felt her little spine with satisfied amuse-
ment and I watched to see who would come out of the center limousine now that
the arrangements were complete. An aide gave the nod and a guard started to work
the handle of the door, who obviously didn't have the hang of it, and all stood
helpless during this embarrassment till the opposite door impatiently was thrown
back with iron bump from the extreme wads of old upholstery, and heads of a
foreign comb, specs, beards bent forward within the beautifully polished glass.
Here and there was a briefcase; I thought I recognized something political about
these briefcases. One person was saying something, smiling and chatty, into the
chauffeur's phone. And then the principal figure came out with a spring; he was
very gingery and energetic, debonair, sharp, acute in the beard. He addressed
himself without waste of attention to the study of the front of the cathedral. He
wore a short coat with fur collar, large glasses, his cheek was somewhat soft but
that didn't take away from an ascetic impression he gave. As I looked at him I
decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the
great Russian exile, and my eyes grew big. I always knew my entire life would
not go by without my having seen a great man; and strangely enough my thought
was of Einhorn, condemned to sit in a chair and study faces in the papers and
limited to seeing only the people who chanced to come by. I was very enthusi-
astic and right away stood up. The beggars and loafers were already collect-
ing in their Middle Ages style, the touts and schnorrers and the others
uncovering their damages and stock-in-trade woes from bandages and rags.
Head thrown back, Trotsky regarded and estimated the vast church, and with
a jump in which hardly anything elderly appeared he went up the stairs and
hastened in. There was a surge after him; the people with the briefcases--
members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had brief
cases like those--and also a huge man with hair like a woman's, and some
of those queer bodyguards, and quite a few crutch-hoppers and singsong
limosnita beggars who true enough were near dead, as they claimed, went
through the dark gap of the church door.

I too wanted to go in; I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what
it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no mat-
ter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navi-
gation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak
the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to
a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only
sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stir-
ring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established,
an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the
highest things. So I was wild with enthusiasm; it bumped up inside my skull like
the handle of a broom and made me recall that my head still was bandaged and I
should go easy. I stood watching till he came out again.

But the reason for telling you all this is that one of the bodyguards turned
out to be my old friend Sylvester, the onetime owner of the Star Theater, the
engineering student from Armour Tech, the exhusband of Mimi Villars' sister,
the former subway employee. I recognized him in his Western-style rig. Ye
gods! How severe, melancholy, duty-charged, and baffled he looked! Same as
the others, he packed a pistol; the spread of his pants was wide at the back
and his belly hung over the belt. I hollered at him, "Sylvester! You, Sylves-
ter!" He looked sharply at me, as if I took a dangerous liberty; yet he was
curious. I was full of glee, and my head was pounding. My face got very red
with laughter and excitement, because I was so extremely happy to see him.
"You damned fool, Sylvester, don't you know who it is? It's Augie March. You
mean to stand there and not recognize me? I haven't changed that much, have
I?"

"Augie?" he asked and smiled a little with dark bitter lips, incredulous. His
question made an uncertain creak in his throat.

"Of course! It's me, you dope! Jesus, how did you get here? What are you
doing with that hardware?"

"How did you land down here? Gosh, we sure get around. What's wrong with your
head?"

"I fell off a horse," I said, and in spite of my joy at seeing him I quickly
ran through in my mind a variety of reasonable, and not especially true, ac-
counts. But he didn't ask, which astonished me. It now astonishes me less,
for I know more about how people get preoccupied.

"Gee, it's swell to see you, Sylvester. How come you're doing this?"

"I got assigned to it--what do you mean? They wanted somebody with a
technological background."

Technological background! As I was laughing still from pleasure at meeting
him I could get away with a laugh over this too. Poor Sylvester, with this story
about being a technician. Well, well, whatever we got out of this meeting it sure
wasn't going to be the truth. I had prepared a story myself, should he ask me
what I was up to. That's how it is. One day's ordinary falsehood if you could
convert it into silt would choke the Amazon back a hundred miles over the banks.
However, it never appears in this form but is distributed all over like the
nitrogen in potatoes.

"So?" I said. "You're with Trotsky all the time, you know him well, I guess?
It must be marvelous. I wish I could know him!"

"You?"

"Gosh, I suppose I wouldn't fit in. What's he like? Do you think I could at
least meet him, Sylvester? You could introduce me."

"Yeah? Just like that?" said Sylvester, amused, with his heavy eyes. "It
couldn't be more complicated than you think, could it? You're a funny guy. But
look, I have to go. When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you;
we'll have a beer. You remember Frazer from Chicago? He's one of the old
man's secretaries. Don't forget now." Another guard was calling him, and he
trotted away to the cars.


Oliver cursed the Japanese for the delay about the villa, but finally the
Japanese sailed for Japan and Oliver moved in and prepared to throw a huge
party and have the best society in town. That would poison his enemies at the
Carlos Quinto. Moulton helped him make up a guest list and invitations were
sent out to the old residents. Mostly a lot of riffraff turned up, however, in
observance of his troubles, which were by then public and had been for some
time. A Treasury agent came to town, and he didn't hide his identity but told
everyone, with swell humor, what he was. He sat spread on one of Hilario's
wire-harp chairs and drank beer as if on a holiday, or fed peanuts to the
kinkajou. Oliver managed to look indifferent when he went through the square,
he and Stella as usual dressed up to the eyes. The more he looked self-posses-
sed, the more it was a disaster, and I was sorry for him. Stella was scared.
She sometimes tried to make me understand that she'd like to talk to me about
this. I never thought it unnatural that I should be the one she wanted to dis-
cuss her troubles with. However, there was no chance to do it. Oliver watched
her very closely.

I said to Moulton, "What do they want Oliver for? It must be serious or they
wouldn't have sent a man from Washington."

"The guy says income-tax evasion, but it must be worse than that. Oliver's a
vain, silly type, but he wouldn't be so dumb as to get in that sort of trouble.
It's worse."

"Poor Oliver!"

"He's a jerk."

"Maybe so. But fundamentally--I mean, as a man."

"Oh, fundamentally," he said thoughtfully. But then he seemed to shake him-
self out of it and said, "Maybe fundamentally too he's a jerk."

Meanwhile it was in a terrible way instructive to see how Oliver behaved, how
unruffled he tried to appear. But he was always in small ways losing control.
One afternoon he got into a fight with old Louie Fu. Louie, he was queer e-
nough, with his Spanish-Chinese cackles, and in addition he was also a terrib-
ly economizing old man, and I suppose in famine China he may have known what
it was to pick grains out of manure; so it was nothing much to him now to pour
the drinks people didn't finish into a single pop bottle. With his unassertive
chest covered with gray knots of a loopy sweater, at the zinc counter, he poured
together what was left of orange pop one day and put it in the icebox; Oliver
caught him and punched him in the face. This was terrible. Louie screamed. His
family was infuriated and started to yell. All we foreigners started up from the
card game. The police appeared and closed in from the front door. I took Stella
by the hand through the curtain of beads into the other half of the shop, where
they sold drygoods, and as we came into the street we saw a gang swirl out and
follow the arrestees to city hall and the magistrate's court. Louie's eye was
already covered by a large stain and his throat was full of cords as he shouted.
Oliver got one of the Mexican guitar-playing fancy-boys to interpret for him.
And the defense he made was that what Louie had done was very dangerous because
of the amoeba. Oliver couldn't have done worse than to claim he was protecting
public health. The magistrate slapped his hand down en seguida on this irre-
sponsible rumor of dysentery. He was large and squat, a man who raised bulls
for the ring, and he wore his hat in the court like a businessman-prince, this
dark powerful person. He named a whopping fine which Oliver paid on the spot,
looking sporting, if grim, and also entertained. Money was one thing he didn't
seem to lack. And how did Stella take this--in her sleeveless lace dress and
wearing a hat? She appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for
myself what she was up against. With so much going on in the town I hadn't
given it the consideration it called for. Why, even, did she need to wear such
an elegant dress to Louie Fu's afternoon poker game? It must have been that she
had no dresses except elegant ones, and no places to visit except those Oliver
took her to. It was very odd. She said, "I have to talk to you one of these
days. Soon."

But this was not the time. Oliver was now with us and said to Moulton and
Iggy various peculiar things, such as, "I've been to courts the world over."
And, "Now they can't go on pretending about the trots, that there isn't any
amoeba." And, "That yellow old c----sucker, at least I taught him a lesson."

Listening, I felt quite queer myself, in my bandages, cards and currencies in
my pockets, my heart tight in my breast and toes free in the huaraches. I felt
like someone who might come into the vision of a theosophist, that kind of fig-
ure.

At dinner Thea said, "I hear there was a riot in town. Were you in it, too?"

I didn't care for that. Why must she put it like that? I told her the story, or
rather gave her a version of what happened. Anyway, she frowned. As I spoke of
Stella I realized that I wanted to represent her as in love with Oliver. Thea
didn't believe me.

"Augie," she said, "why don't we get away from here? At least while the season
lasts. Let's get away from these people."

"Where do you want to go?"

"I thought we'd drive to Chilpanzingo."

Chilpanzingo was down in the hot country. But I was willing to go. I would go.
But what would I do there?

"There are some interesting animals down there," she said.

So I answered evasively, "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon."

"You look run-down," she said, "but how can you expect to look anything else
when you lead such a life? You never touched a drop before you got down here."

"I never had much reason to. I don't get stinking drunk either."

"No," she said, bitter, "just enough to carry you through your mistakes."

"Our mistakes," I corrected her.

So we sat at the dinner table, full of trouble and under the shadow of disap-
pointment and anger. Then, after long thought, I said to her, "I will go to
Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world."
She looked at me more warmly than she had in a long time. I wondered if there
was something we might do in Chilpanzingo instead of hunting snakes. But she
didn't say there was.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often
can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't
correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something
better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed
what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a
happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we
invent.




Chapter XVIII




So I agreed to go down to Chilpanzingo with Thea; there was an interval, ex-
tremely short, when we both showed gratitude. I appreciated it that she let up
her severity, and she was happy that she was still my preference. So on the night
of Oliver's house-warming party she said, "Let's go and see what it's like," and
I understood that she wanted to do something for me, because I wanted to go. Did
I! I was wild to go, having been in the house for two days straight in support
of my good intentions. I looked carefully at her and saw how she sustained her
smile to back up her suggestion, but I thought, Hell, let's!

I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most
people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her
eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity
altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions.
Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she
wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to
me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People
with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy,
just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her.
As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destruct-
ions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go
out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering. So of course I knew
she didn't want to go; but I did, badly, and my thought was, If I can stand her
snakes, she can take this for one evening.

I changed into good clothes, therefore. I took off my turban and wore only a
patch of bandage over the shaved place. Thea put on an evening dress with black
silk rebozo. But there was nobody to take note how we arrived. I've never seen
such a goons' rodeo as that party. When we got to the villa we found ourselves
in the overflow of a mob that covered the street. I saw the most amazing male
and female bums, master-molds of some of the leading turpitudes, fags, apes,
goofs, and terminal and fringe types, lapping, lushing, gabbing, and celebrating
notoriety. Because it was no secret that Oliver was wanted by the government
and that this was a big last fling. Probably Thea was the only person in town
who didn't know what was happening.

Some of the guests were lying in the garden with bottles, about to pass out or
already looped in full; the Japanese flowers were trod down and tequila empties
floated in the fish pond. Things had been taken out of the hands of the servants,
and people poured for themselves, broke off chunks of ice with candlesticks,
grabbed glasses from one another. In the patio the hired orchestra fiddled weakly
and the soberer company danced. Thea wanted to leave immediately, but as she
began to say so I saw Stella by an orange tree. She made me a small sign, and I
had to go and talk to her; I was very eager. Annoyed that Thea tried to pull me
away as soon as we had arrived, I didn't look at her. And when Moulton in a din-
ner jacket but still in short pants asked her for a dance I handed her over. I
thought her dislike for him was exaggerated and it wouldn't do her any harm at
all to go around the floor with him once or twice.

Since Oliver's trial when Stella said she had to talk to me I had been all
worked up, I realized now. I didn't know what had got into me that I was so
excited. But I was sure this was something I was bound to figure in; the play
would go to me. So I got away from Thea on the dancing patio, aware how she
appealed to me not to leave her, and how angry, also, she was. But it wouldn't
really hurt her and I'd find out about this other thing. I could see another case
much more clearly than my own, and because of that vagueness and incapac-
ity that I felt about going to Chilpanzingo, or throwing myself more blind and
deeper down into Chilpanzingo, I perhaps needed an opportunity to be definite
and active and to believe that definiteness and action still existed. But in fact
I also felt assailed by weakness when I saw Stella beckon. Not that I intended
anything toward her. I thought merely I'd feel swayed, but nothing would happen.
I'd be confidential with a beautiful woman. This was terribly pleasing to me,
inasmuch as it followed, with self-appreciation, that such a woman would natural-
ly turn for help to a man in her own class. I forgot that I had fallen from
the horse on my face, and looked it. That's the kind of thing you're apt to forget.
But it did occur to me that the last time I had been called aside like this for a
discussion apart was with Sophie Geratis, when we had fallen into each other's
arms. And what did I think of that? But some involutional, busy, dippy horsefly
in me made such a mad fuss of love over this treasure of crystal-sugar esteem I
didn't think much of that at all. Of course at the same time I was very serious; I
knew she was in trouble. But that she chose me to consult with and to ask for
help--for what else could she do but ask help?--was like a kindness she did me
and I was under obligation to her before she spoke even a word.

She said, "Mr. March, I count on you to help me."

Immediately I was overwhelmed. I said, "Oh, sure, certainly. I'll do all I can."
Down me went a shiver of willingness. My thought was fuzzy, yet my blood
excited. "What can I do though?"

"I'd better tell you what the situation is. Just let's get out of this crowd
first."

"Yes," I agreed, looking around. She assumed that I was watching out for Oliv-
er and said. "He's not here. I don't expect him for half an hour yet." It was
Thea, however, of whom the thought burdened me, just as much. But when Stella
took my hand and led me deeper into the trees I felt her touch leap through
my arm and further, and as I went along with her my sense of consequences was
never weaker, not even when I committed robbery. I was full of curiosity to hear
the truth about Oliver, yet I knew he was as light a being as I had ever weighed
in my judgment.

"You must know about the government man who's here to get Oliver," she said.
"Everybody knows. But do you know why he's here?"

"No, why?"

"Wilmot's Weekly was bought by money that came from the Italian government.
There was a fellow in New York who did it. His name is Malfitano. He bought
the magazine and made Oliver editor. All the important things that were print-
ed were planned in Rome. Now this Malfitano was arrested a couple of months
ago; that's why we didn't go back. I don't know what he was arrested for. Now
they've sent this government man for Oliver."

"Why?"

"I don't know why. I know about the entertainment world. Ask me why
something is in Variety and I can maybe explain it."

"They probably want him to give evidence against this Italian. I believe the
smartest thing would be for him to go back. Oliver is just one of those old-time
journalists who don't see any difference between one government and the next."

She misunderstood me. "He's not so terribly old."

"He should make a deal and go back to testify."

"That's not what he aims to do," she said.

"No? Don't tell me he's going to try to run away? Where to?"

"I can't tell. It wouldn't be fair."

"To South America? He's wacky if he thinks he can. And that will make the
thing serious, if they have to chase him. Why, he's small fry."

"No, he thinks it was a very serious thing."

"And what do you think?"

"I think I've had about enough," she said. She looked with her wide
swimming eye-surfaces in which the lanterns from the garden were changed
entirely into the lights of her meaning. "He wants me to come with him."

"No! Down to Guatemala, Venezuela. Where--?"

"That's one thing I don't want to say, even though I trust you."

"But on what? Does he have money socked away? No, he wouldn't have. You'd
be on the beach with him somewhere. He probably hopes you love him that
much. Do you?"

"Oh--not that much, no," she said as if it was something she hoped to find the
degree of. I suppose she had to say she loved him somewhat, to give herself
character. Why, that poor, bony, dopey skull and romantic jumping-jack of an
Oliver! I saw his imaginary luck of money and car and love collapsing, and was
bitter for him in a kind of fleeting way. I caught a glimpse of her ingratitude
too, but I couldn't for long see anything to her discredit. Before her, hid in
the trees from the crackling party, I felt something happen to me that drew u-
pon my character in the most vital part, where I couldn't prevent.

"The party is supposed to be just a cover-up," she said. "He went out to take
the car down the road and hide it, and then he's coming back for me. He says the
cops are ready to arrest us."

"Oh, he is loony," I said with fresh conviction. "How far does he expect to get
in that red convertible?"

"In the morning he's going to ditch it. He's really serious. He's carrying a
gun. And he has gone a little crazy. He was pointing it at me this afternoon. He
says I want to two-time him."

"That poor fool! He thinks he's a big-league fugitive. You'll have to get away
from him. How did you ever get into a fix like this?"

I knew this was a foolish question to put to her. She couldn't tell me. About
some paths of life either you guess or you never know, because you can't be
told. Yes, it was very foolish; but then I was aware of many wrong things said
and done which I nevertheless couldn't stop.

"Well, I've known him for quite a while. He was likable, and he had lots of
money."

"Oh, all right, you don't have to tell me."

She said, "Didn't you come to Mexico in something like the way I did?" So that
was what she thought we had in common. "I came because I was in love."

"Well, she is so lovely that of course that's a difference. But all the same,"
she said with a sudden shrewdness and frankness--and I might have known it was
there--"it's her house, isn't it, and all the things are hers? What have you got
of your own?"

"What have I got?"

"You don't have anything, do you?"

Of course I wasn't going to be such a hypocrite as to argue with her and put
on a face, as though I had never in all the world given a momentary thought, not
even a one, to the matter of money. For what was that stuff in my pockets, that
assorted dough, my winnings, the rainbow foreign currencies I had raked in at
the Chinaman's? Even czarist rubles had been thrown in the pot, for which I
blamed those Cossack singers. Don't worry, I had been mindful of money, all
right, so I knew what she was talking about.

"I do have something," I said. "I can lend you enough to get away on. Don't
you have any money at all?" At this moment of our conversation we were very
close together in understanding.

"I have a bank account in New York. But what good does that do me now? I
can give you a check for the pesos you lend me. There's no money I can lay my
hands on right away. I'd have to go to Mexico City and wire from Wells Fargo
to the bank."

"No, I don't want a check."

"It won't bounce--you don't have to worry about that!"

"No, no. I'll just take your word for it. I meant that you don't have to give me
any check at all."

"What I thought of asking was whether you'd take me to Mexico City," she said.

This I had been expecting, though I don't think I ever intended to do anything
about it. Now, when it came, it did something to me. I shivered, as if my fate
had brushed me. Admitted that I always tried to elicit what I hoped for; how
did people, however, seldom fail to supply it so mysteriously?

"Why--why, where does that suddenly fit?" I said, treating it not merely as a
plan for her safety but as a proposal involving me. The holleration and screech-
es of the party were loud and the narrow grove of oranges where we were seemed
like the last strip of field the harvesters are cutting. Any minute I awaited some
drunk interrupter or a blazing couple crashing in. I knew I had to get out and
start looking for Thea. But first this had to be attended to. "You don't have to
put it to me that way," I said. "I'll help you anyway."

"You're getting ahead of yourself. I don't blame you, but you are. Maybe I'd
even feel bad if you didn't, but … I can't be as vain as to think I deserve the
very best way of escaping from my trouble. You don't even know me. And all I
should think about now is getting away from this poor guy who's lost his mind."

"I'm very sorry. I apologize. I talked out of turn."

"Oh, you don't have to apologize. We know what the score is here, pretty
much. I admit I was often looking, and I have thought of you. But one of the
things I thought is that you and I are the kind of people other people are always
trying to fit into their schemes. So suppose we didn't play along, then what? But
we don't have the time to go into it now."

To these words that she spoke I responded tremendously, I melted toward her.
I was grateful for her plain way of naming a truth that had been hanging around
me anonymously for many long years. I did fit into people's schemes. It was an
emotion of truth that I had, hearing this. Mainly of truth. For I will admit that
among other things I considered that here was a woman who wouldn't put me on
trial for my shortcomings or judge me. Because I was tired of being socked on
the head and banged by judgments. But that was all.

However, we had no time to go into this further. Oliver would be coming back
right away. He had packed her things and taken them away, all but a few articles
she had hidden from him.

"Listen," said I, "I can't take you to Mexico, but what I can do is take you a
good way out of town, where you'll be safe. Meet me by the station wagon in the
zócalo. Which way was he going? You can trust me. I don't especially want to
see him get caught. I have no reason to."

"He was going toward Acapulco."

"Okay, that's fine. We'll go the other way."

So he wanted to catch a ship at Acapulco, did he, the poor jerk! Or was he
plotting to escape through the jungle into Guatemala, as brain-softened as that?
Why, if the Indians didn't murder him for his black and white sport shoes he'd
die of exhaustion.

I hurried to find Thea. She had gone, Iggy told me, leaving Moulton in the
middle of the floor. "She was quite in a mood," said Iggy. "We looked for you.
Then she said for me to tell you she was pulling out for Chilpanzingo first thing
in the morning. She was all nervous and shaking, Bolingbroke. Where did you
disappear?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

I ran down to the zócalo and opened the station wagon. Soon Stella arrived
and slipped in. I threw off the brake and twisted the ignition key. From disuse
the battery was low; and the starter chattered but the motor failed to turn. Not
to run the battery any lower I nervously took to the crank. As I began to turn it
I right away had a crowd to watch me, that unfailing bunch of a Mexican square
that comes to maintain its secret view of life. Sweating with the crank, I was in
a furious rage, and I said to a few of them, "Beat it! Scat, goddam you!" But this
fetched only jeers and scorn, and I heard my old title, el gringo del águila. My
heart was full of murder toward them, as toward the motor-man that day on the
State Street line when the slugger was in pursuit of me. But I put my breast
against the radiator and heaved. Stella hadn't had the sense to duck down--I
suppose she had to see what was happening and be ready for flight. Now she had
been recognized by the bystanders, and it was too late.

"Augie, what are you doing?"

I had prayed that Thea had gone straight back to Casa Descuitada to pack for
Chilpanzingo, but she was here, and the crowd around me at the station wagon
had brought her over. She stared at Stella through the windshield.

"Where are you going with her? Isn't she the hostess? Why did you dump me
at that horrible party?"

"Oh, I didn't dump you."

"With that terrible Moulton. No? Well, I couldn't find you."

I couldn't pretend that it was an extremely serious thing to have left her alone
at that party. "It was just for a few minutes," I said.

"And now where are you going?"

"Listen, Thea, this girl is in a lot of trouble."

"Is she?"

"I'm telling you she is."

Stella didn't come out, or change her position behind the spotted dust of the
glass.

"And are you getting her out of trouble?" said Thea, angry, ironic, and sad.

"You can think what you want about me," I said, "but it's because you don't
understand how urgent it is, and that she's in danger."

I was full of the frantic hurry of escape, and in true fact I already felt caught.

As for Thea, enfolded in the rebozo, she stared at me--hard, begging, firm
and infirm, all together. There was something about Thea of a nervousness, and
she was a kind of universalist, believing that where she stood the principal laws
were underfoot. And this made her tremble, but also she was daring. So at a time
like this I didn't know what to expect from her.

One thing more: she was, like Mimi, a theoretician about love. She was differ-
ent from Mimi in that Mimi really intended to do everything for herself if
others failed her. And maybe Mimi didn't even need others except as witnesses
or accessories. Thea knew better than that. I had heard from various men, and
especially from Einhorn, about women's fanaticism in love, how for them all life
was knotted around this one thing whereas men found several other vital places
of attachment and therefore were more like to avoid monomania. You could always
get part of the truth from Einhorn.

"It's a fact," I said. "Oliver went crazy and tried to kill her today."

"What are you trying to give me! Whom could that poor idiot hurt? Besides, why
do you have to be the one to protect her? How do you get into this?"

"Because," I said, impatient over logic, "she asked me to take her out of town.
She's trying to get to Mexico City, and she can't get on the bus here. The police
might try to pick her up too."

"Even so, where do you come in?"

"But don't you see? She asked me!"

"Did she just? Or did she ask because you wanted her to?"

"Now how would I do that?" I said.

"As if you didn't know what I was talking about! I've seen you with women. I
know what you look like when a handsome woman or even not such a handsome
woman passes by."

I said, "Well--" about to assert how normal that was. Then I wanted to say
instead, "What about the men out East, that Navy officer and the others?" But I
held this back even though it crawled into my throat with a bitter taste. Minutes
counted now; I remembered, however, seeing the Mexican faces that listened to
this wrangle as if it were the New Testament. "Why do you have to do this?" I
said. "Can't you take my word for it she's in danger? Let me do something for a
change. We can take up these other things later, in private."

"Do you have to rush like this because of Oliver? Can't you protect her from
him here?"

"I told you he was dangerous. Look!" I was out of my mind, nearly, with im-
patience. "He's going to try to get away and he wants to drag her with him."

"Oh, she's going to ditch him and you're helping her."

"No!" I almost yelled, then dropped my voice low. "Don't you understand any
part of what I'm trying to tell you? Why are you being so stubborn?"

"For God's sake, go then, if you have to go. What are you arguing with me
for! Are you waiting for my permission? Because you won't get it. You're
telling me something ridiculous. She doesn't have to go with him if she
doesn't want to."

"Right, she doesn't, and I'm helping her to get away."

"You? You'll be glad if Oliver doesn't have her."

I threw myself on the crank, ramming it in the shaft.

"Augie, don't go! Listen, we're supposed to go to Chilpanzingo in the morn-
ing. Why don't we take her up to the house? He won't dare bother us up there."

"No, this is something I've decided to do. I promised."

"Why, you're ashamed to change your mind and do the right thing!"

"Maybe so," I said. "You may understand this better, but that won't stop me."

"Don't go! Don't!"

"Well," I said, turning to her, "suppose you come along. I'll drive her up to
Cuernavaca and we'll be back in a few hours."

"No, I won't come along."

"Then I'll see you later."

"By a little flattery anyone can get what he wants from you, Augie. I've told
you that before. Where does that put me? I came after you. I flattered you. But I
can't outflatter everyone in the world."

She stabbed me hard with this, and suffered as she did so. I knew I'd bleed a
long time from it. I grabbed and gave an inhuman twist to the crank. The kick of
the motor tore at my arms, and I jumped to the wheel. In the headlights I saw
Thea's dress; she was standing still and probably she was waiting to see what I
would do. My real desire was to get out. But already the car had gone a way over
the cobbles and it seemed to me that having just got it under way I couldn't
check it. That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it
carries the decision.

I took the turn for Cuernavaca, a climbing, steep road, black, badly marked.
We rose above the town, which sat like embers in its circle; and I put on as much
speed as I dared, for enough people had seen us in the square so that Oliver
would quickly know. I thought if Stella could hire a taxi in Cuernavaca it would
be better than the bus, for the bus made all the one-horse stops and Oliver could
easily catch up with it.

At a terrible rate for that dark road we climbed toward Cuernavaca, even
while, in the black air and orangy fragrance which we burned through in our
speed, the danger we were escaping appeared smaller and slighter every minute;
flying up the mountain in the machine from that pipsqueak Oliver began to seem
what Thea had thought it was--foolish. This silent Stella in the seat, who lit
cigarettes with the dash-board lighter in such apparent calm of mind, it was hard
to think how she could have taken seriously the ability of a man like Oliver to do
harm. Even if he had threatened her with his gun it must have been in a kind of
dither, and more than likely she was escaping from his trouble not his threats.

"I see some lights in the road," she said.

They were flares; it was a detour. I went very slow over the ruts of an old cart
track until I came to a big arrow nailed pointing upward. There were wheel marks
in both directions. Having detoured to the right, I bore left, and that was a
mistake. We went up a narrowing, long way, I heard brush and grass underneath
but was scared to try to back down and went on looking for a widening of the
road where I could maneuver a turn. I came to one I reckoned I could try, and I
twisted hard and raced the motor, for I dreaded to stall. The clumsy wagon just
failed to make the circle. Cautious, I eased out the clutch, the gear in reverse,
but the transmission was poor; the clutch grabbed and the lurch killed the engine.
Which was just as well, there being an unusual softness under the rear right
wheel. When I went out I saw that it rested on a tuft of grass right on the edge
of a deep drop. I couldn't measure the distance below, but we had been climbing a
good while, and it wouldn't have been any mere fifty feet. I was all over sweat,
and I lightly opened the other door and said to Stella, low, "Quick!" which she
understood, and she slipped out. Reaching through the window, I turned the
wheels and drew the gearshift back to neutral position. The car rolled a few feet
and stopped against the mountain wall. But the battery was dead now, and the
crank wouldn't work.

She said, "Are we going to be stuck here all night?"

"It could have been even more permanent than that. And I told Thea I'd be
back in a few hours," I said. Of course she had heard the whole conversation
between Thea and me. This fact made an enormous difference. It was just as
if, after that talk in the orange grove, Thea had given Stella and me a new in-
troduction to each other. Was I so vain and nonsensical, and was Stella so un-
scrupulous? We didn't speak about it. Stella could, and did, act as though it was
no use answering the accusations of an overwrought woman. As for me, I thought
that if what Thea said of me was true, then the truth must be sticking out all
over me, and if it was so plain there was nothing much to say. And after all
the rush and anxious sweat and urgency, to be here on the mountain like the
millipede with one bank of legs suddenly out of commission while the other
tried to continue with haste, gave me an unpleasant sort of feeling inside.

"If there were a couple of men to pick up the front end and straighten us out
we could get a start by rolling."

"What," she said, "roll with those lights?" The lights were just a feeble
yellow. "Anyhow, where are you going to find two men to help you?"

Nevertheless I went to look for help and descended as far as the giant arrow
pointing nowhere. Over the grass distances I couldn't be sure whether what I
saw was stars or human lights, but I knew I better not try to find out now which
they were. There'd be many a fall on terrain like this before I reached what
possibly was a village. Or I might be trying to reach the southern heaven. And
even to say "southern heaven" is to try to familiarize terrific convulsions of
fire in the million light-year distances (and why, from space to space, does the
occupancy have to be by fire?). There were falls, though, and also thorns and
cactuses, from huge maguey to vicious leg-tearing pads; and animals too. No car
came along the detour, and then it occurred to me that the next car that passed
might be Oliver's. Was I waiting there for him to come and shoot at me with his
pistol? I gave up and went back to the station wagon. There were some blankets
and a shelter-half in the back. As I hunted them with the flashlight I thought how
much dislike I bore to this machine and the false positions it had put me in. I
spread the canvas shelter-half on the wet grass, and when I crouched and was
nearly still great speed and motion continued to go through me. I worried about
Thea; I knew she was bound to let me have it. She'd never excuse me for this.
And now Stella was lying close to me, for it was cold. Her smell was tender,
from her hair and face powder--I suppose the mountain coldness made a differ-
ence in the odor. I felt her weight full, both soft and heavy, from her hips
and breasts. And if before I vaguely thought how I'd be swayed, there wasn't
much vagueness now.

I suppose if you pass the night with a woman in a deserted mountain place
there's only one appropriate thing, according to the secret urging of the world.
Or not so secret. And the woman, who has done so much to be dangerous in this
same scheme, the more she comes of the world the less she knows how to vary
from it. I thought that in the crisis that seems to have to occur when a man and
a woman are thrown together nothing, nothing easy, can happen until first one
difficulty is cleared and it is shown how the man is a man and the woman a
woman; as if a life's trial had to be made, and the pretensions of the man and the
woman satisfied. I say I thought, and so I did. A considerable number of things.
But I was terribly hot for this woman. As, suddenly, with a breathless impulse
toward me, she was for me too. Her tongue was in my mouth, my hands were
drawing up her clothes. It made no difference what other thought beat on me, it
beat from outside. As her things came off, as in the cold of night her shoulders,
her breasts, and her humid heat I fell on maddened me, my voice came out of me
strangely. She talked rapidly in my ear, she heaved her body, pressed my face,
gathered up her breasts, and she gave herself like a prize. She did many things
like a woman who had studied from men what it was that pleased them. This was
in part innocent in her. It seemed an instant after blowing that, happily, she
began to talk, every now and then kissing. It made her laugh that back at the
party she had told me that I mistook her, and that I had apologized. I had known
then that it had no more weight than a matchstick, that. The inevitability that
brought us together on this mountain of wet grass was greater than the total of all
other considerations. We had all known that, all three of us. After much making
with sense, it's senselessness that you submit to. Thea foresaw that I'd do this.
It annoyed me all the more with her, as though if she hadn't made the prediction
it wouldn't have happened. And I thought savagely that if she hadn't put herself
in the way and told me what to do there wouldn't have been this struggle with my
pride. It was my unreasonable idea that she had tried to spoil everything for me.
But I could bring forth a lot more reasons without reaching as high as the foot
of the inevitability.

Between Stella and me only one true subject was possible now, whether there
was anything permanent between us. But I was thinking mostly of Thea. And as
this couldn't be said, neither could any other genuine thing. Therefore we didn't
talk of genuine things. She mentioned Thea once, saying that her standards were
awfully high, it seemed. At last we were both silent, and then we slept, and that
was more intimate than talk.

A similar night for me was, years after this, on a crowded ship from Palma de
Mallorca to Barcelona. The cabins were full, and I slept on deck where there was
a throng of what they call there the humble people, laborers in denim jumpers,
whole families, babes at breast, young girls of delicate stomach vomiting in the
sea, singers who pumped on the concertina, old people on the deck cargo--like
dead, or musing, with awkward released feet and large bellies. A sad night,
damp, with floating carbon flakes from the cheap fuel. The puny officers in
white, stepping over the bodies on the boards. A young Texas girl shared my
coat; she was frank to say she had sought out another American in the foreign
crowd. So all night she lay close to me, and in the shrimp chill of dawn when the
pink light of the rocking sea fell on us she reminded me powerfully of Stella.
That rising was in the Spanish commotion of the wet deck, and this other in
the smoky white dawn sun and a freight-yard hush of mountains, like the silence
after the crash of cars, here and there a skinny, armored cricket still trying out
a trill. The gray-green cold came down from the rocks, the smoke from a village
mixed with it. Such a smell of charcoal, the very smell of familiarity and wel-
come day to some, was the last tinge of foreignness to me. Stella stood rolled
in the blanket and tried to look to the bottom of the cliff; the sight of that
depth shriveled my stomach.

Some Indians, for a peso apiece, set the car straight. When we started to roll
the engine caught, and we went on to Cuernavaca, where I hired a car to take her
to Mexico, giving her all the dollars I had. She said she'd pay me through Wells
Fargo, and there was all that talk about settling up indebtedness that's so hard to
give a definite character. I didn't believe her, but money was the only subject we
now could talk of. Gratitude wasn't all she felt, that's certain, but since she did
have some gratitude to express, she stuck to that and let the rest go. She did say,
however, "Someday, will you come see me?"

"Sure I will."

Waiting in the sun for the taxi, we were at the side of the market, by the
flowers, and stood where the stones were slippery from the cast-off blooms, just
the light greasiness of flowers underfoot. Facing us were the butchers' stalls, and
on the hooks the tripes and lights and the carcasses were slung, on which the
flies gave out nearly a roar and bounded like the first drops of cloudburst on a
red wall. Under a chopping block squatted a naked kid and he slowly made a
strange color of defecation. We went slowly around the broad steel gallery, the
glass roof rising over the packed tinware, peppers, beef, bananas, pork, orchids,
baskets, and this flash, rage, the chitin, electric loud tissue-sound of fond love,
the wild loving hum of the bluebottles and green. As if a huge spool were
revolving that caught up all threads from the sunlight.

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' 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 jeal-
ousy; 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 super-human. 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 pre-
dicted 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 with-
out 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 miti-
gate 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 pecu-
liar, that I only know these strange ways of doing something. Instead of stick-
ing to the ordinary way and doing something false. So"--and I was silent, rec-
ognizing 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 queer-
ness 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 Chilpan-
zingo," 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 re-
marry 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 XIX



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 continu-
ed 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 re-
joice 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 everything,
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 hap-
pened a few times I quit talking. I thought he came to be merciful and stay-
ed 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.

I'd try again and say, "Iggy, what can I do to prove I love her?"

"I don't know what. Maybe you couldn't prove it because you don't."

"No, Iggy, how can you say that! Can't you see how it is?"

"Why did you go away with that broad then?"

"That was kind of a revolt or something. How should I know why! I didn't
invent human beings, Iggy."

"You don't know the score yet, Boling. I'm sorry for you," he said from his
wall, "honest I am. But this has got to happen to you before you get any-
wheres. You always had it too good. You got to get knocked over and crushed
like this. If you don't you'll never understand how much you hurt her. You've
got to find out about this and not be so larky."

"She's too angry. If she loved me she wouldn't be so angry. She needs some
reason to be so angry."

"Well, you gave her it."

It was no use trying to argue with Iggy, so I lay silent and argued and plead-
ed in my mind with Thea instead, but I only kept losing more and more. Why had
I done it? I had wounded her badly, I knew it. I could see it as clearly as I
could see her saying, white, with a strained throat, "I am disappointed!" "Well,
honey, listen," I wanted to tell her, "of course everybody is disappointed some-
time or another. Why, you know that. Everybody gets damaged, and everybody does
some damage. Especially in love. And I've done you this damage. But I love
you, and you should forgive me so we can continue."

I ought to have taken my chances with the snakes in the hot mountains, creep-
ing after them with nooses on the brown soil up there, instead of hanging
around the dizzy town where things were even more dangerous.

It had hit her hard when I revealed what I thought of her hunting. But hadn't
she also tried to carry me to the ground and crush me with the attack she made
on me, saying how vain I was, how unreliable, how I was always looking at
other women and had no conscience? And was it true, as she said, that love
would appear strange to me no matter what form it took, even if there were no
eagles and snakes?

I thought about it and was astonished at how much truth there actually was in
this. Why, it was so! And I had always believed that where love was concerned I
was on my mother's side, against the Grandma Lausches, the Mrs. Renlings, and
the Lucy Magnuses.

If I didn't have money or profession or duties, wasn't it so that I could be
free, and a sincere follower of love?

Me, love's servant? I wasn't at all! And suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was
sick of myself. I thought that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I
wasn't a bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that Mexico from
beyond the walls would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the
bone dust and twisted, spiky crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and lizards.

Now I had started, and this terrible investigation had to go on. If this was how
I was, it was certainly not how I appeared but must be my secret. So if I wanted
to please, it was in order to mislead or show everyone, wasn't it, now? And this
must be because I had an idea everyone was my better and had something I
didn't have. But what did people seem to me anyhow, something fantastic? I
didn't want to be what they made of me but wanted to please them. Kindly
explain! An independent fate, and love too--what confusion!

I must be a monster to make such confusion.

But no, I couldn't be a monster and suffer both. That would be too unjust. I
didn't believe it.

It wasn't right to think everyone else had more power of being. Why, look
now, it was clear as anything that it wasn't so but merely imagination,
exaggerating how you're regarded, misunderstanding how you're liked for what
you're not, disliked for what you're not, both from error and laziness. The
way must be not to care, but in that case you must know how really to care
and understand what's pleasing or displeasing in yourself. But do you think
every newcomer is concerned and is watching? No. And do you care that anyone
should care in return? Not by a long shot. Because nobody anyhow can show
what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can't care while pre-
occupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad!
And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies
on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time
nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what's real. And that's
disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind--mere humanity.

But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong
handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly crea-
ture, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out
differently. External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible,
the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce
a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the
terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice,
but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these
inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to
recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe.
The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their
power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can
impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice
enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is
the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world
--with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and
movies--becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others
to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones
become the moss and the flowers of a version.

I certainly looked like an ideal recruit. But the invented things never became
real for me no matter how I urged myself to think they were.

My real fault was that I couldn't stay with my purest feelings. This was what
tore the greatest hole in me. Maybe Thea couldn't stand many happy days in a
row either, that did occur to me as a reason for her cooling off. Perhaps she
had this trouble too, with her chosen thing. The year before, when Mimi was
in trouble, Kayo Obermark had said to me that this happened to everyone.
Everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing. It might be in the end that the
chosen thing in itself is bitterness, because to arrive at the chosen thing needs
courage, because it's intense, and intensity is what the feeble humanity of us
can't take for long. And also the chosen thing can't be one that we already have,
since what we already have there isn't much use or respect for. Oh, this made me
feel terrible contempt, the way I felt, riled and savage. The fucking slaves! I
thought. The lousy cowards!

As for me personally, not much better than some of the worst, my invention and
special thing was simplicity. I wanted simplicity and denied complexity, and in
this I was guileful and suppressed many patents in my secret heart, and was as
devising as anybody else. Or why would I long for simplicity?

Personality is unsafe in the first place. It's the types that are safe. So almost
all make deformations on themselves so that the great terror will let them be. It
isn't new. The timid tribespeople, they flatten down heads or pierce lips or noses,
or hack off thumbs, or make themselves masks as terrible as the terror itself, or
paint or tattoo. It's all to anticipate the terror which does not welcome your
being.

Tell me, how many Jacobs are there who sleep on the stone and force it to be their
pillow, or go to the mat with angels and wrestle the great fear to win a right to
exist? These brave are so few that they are made the fathers of a whole people.

While as for me, whoever would give me cover from this mighty free-running ter-
ror and wild cold of chaos I went to, and therefore to temporary embraces. It
wasn't very courageous. That I was like many others in this was no consolation.
If there were so many they must all suffer the same way I did.

Well, now that I knew of this I wanted another chance. I thought I must try to
be brave again. So I decided I'd go and plead with her in Chilpanzingo, and say
that though I was a weak man I could little by little alter if she'd bear with
me.

As soon as I had decided this I felt much better. I went to the peluquería and
had myself shaved. Then I ate lunch at Louie Fu's and one of his daughters
pressed my pants for me. I was overwrought but primed with hopes too. I
already saw how she'd whiten in the face as she denounced me, and her eyes
darken and flash out at me. But also she'd throw her arms around me. Because
she also needed me. And all her eccentric force, which came from doubt as to
whether her desire could ever trust someone again, would stop and rest on me.

Imagining how this would be, I melted, my chest got hot, soft, sore, and
yearning. I saw it already happening. It's always been like that with me, that
fantasy went ahead of me and prepared the way. Or else, as it seems, the big
heavy personal van, dark and cumbersome, can't start into strange terrain. But
this imagination of mine, like the Roman army out in Spain or Gaul, makes
streets and walls even if it's only camping, for the night.

While I sat in my shorts and waited for my pants, Louie's dog came out. List-
less and fat, she smelled like old Winnie. She stood square before me and
gazed. Not wanting to be stroked, she backed away with clicking claws when I
reached out, and she showed little old teeth. Not that she was sore, but wanted
to go back to her isolation. So she did, under the curtain with an extreme sigh.
She was very old.

The bus, an old rural schoolbus from the States, arrived like the buckboard of
olden times. I was already inside, holding my ticket, when Moulton came up and
said through the window, "Come out, I want to talk to you."

"No, I won't."

"Come," he said earnestly. "It's important. You'd better."

Iggy said, "Whyn't you mind your own business, Wiley?"

Moulton's big brow and squash nose were covered with a white sweat. "Will
it be better if he walks into something and gets knocked over?" he said.

I got out. "What do you mean, knocked over?" I asked.

Before Iggy could interfere, if he was about to try, Moulton clasped my hand
next to his hard belly, drew my arm taut under his, and with burly haste he
made me walk a few fast steps on the stones and rosy garbage, on my turned-
over heels.

"Get onto yourself," he said. "Talavera was Thea's friend, old man. He's there
with her in Chilpanzingo."

I tore loose. I was going to get my fingers into his neck and choke him to
death.

"Ig," he yelled, "you better hold on to him!"

Iggy who was just behind us took hold of me.

"Let go!"

"Wait, you're not going to kill him right here with cops and everybody around.
You better beat it, Wiley. He's pulling like a bull."

I wanted to smash Iggy to the ground too as he held my arm.

"Now wait, Boling. Find out first if it's true. Chrissake, use your head!"

Moulton was going backwards while I dragged Iggy on my arm.

"Don't be a foolish bastard, Boling," said Moulton. "It's true all right. You
think I want trouble with you? I only did it to help, so you wouldn't get hurt.
It's dangerous down there. Talavera will kill you."

"Look what a favor you done him!" said Iggy. "Look at his face!"

"Is it true he went down there with her, Iggy?" I said, stopping. I was so
clawed and bit inside I could hardly get out this question.

"He was her boy friend here before," Iggy said. "A guy told me yesterday that
Talavera took off for Chilpanzingo right after Thea."

"When was he--?"

"A few years ago. Why, he was living at Casa Descuitada, just about," said
Moulton.

I couldn't any longer stay on my feet and slumped down against the bandstand.
I covered my head with my hands and shivered, my face on my knees.

Moulton was severe toward me. "I'm surprised the way you take it, March,"
he said.

"How do you want him to take it? Stop layin' it on him," said Iggy.

"He acts like a kid and you encourage him," Moulton said. "This has happen-
ed to me, it's happened to you. It happened to Talavera when she showed
up with Smitty and then with him."

"No, it didn't. Talavera knew she was married."

"What's the difference? Even if Talavera is a chorus-boy horse-rider he has
his feelings. Well, shouldn't a man find out when this happens to him? Shouldn't
I have found out? Shouldn't you have found out? This is one of those damn facts
that have got to be known."

"But the guy still loves her. You got mad when somebody put the blocks to
your wife, but not because you loved her."

"Well, does she love him?" said Moulton. "Then what was she doing in the
mountains with Talavera after March got knocked on the dome and was laid
up?"

"She was doing nothing in the mountains with him," I cried out, raging again.
"If he's in Chilpanzingo now, he's just in Chilpanzingo and not with Thea."

He stared at me, acting full of curiosity. He said, "Brother, I bet you see
exactly what everybody else sees, but you just stick by your opinions. Why
didn't she tell you he was her old boy friend? And what were they doing, just
having a debate of yes or no, and she didn't get off her horse for him?"

"Nothing went on. Nothing! If you don't stop talking I'll ram one of these
stones down your throat!"

But he was terribly roused too and bound to go on; he wasn't just trifling
but intended something. His eyes were open large and fixed on me.

"Too bad, friend, but women have no judgment. They aren't just for happy
young fellows like you. What do you want to bet her britches came down for
him, and she didn't save all her sweet little things for you?"

I jumped at him. Iggy held me from the back, and I picked him off the ground
and tried to get rid of him by dashing him against the bandstand, but he clung,
and when I threw my weight backwards and crushed him so he'd let go, he gasped,
"Christ, you lost your mind? I'm keepin' you outa trouble."

Moulton had already gotten away, down the busy street that led to the market. I
yelled after him, "Okay, you filthy slob sonofabitch. You wait. I'll kill you!"

"Quit that, Boling, there's a cop with his eye on you."

An Indian policeman sat on the running board of a nearby car. He probably
was used to drunken gringos wrangling and scrapping.

Iggy had forced me down on my knee; he still clutched my arms. "Can I let
you loose now? You won't run after him?" I uttered a kind of sob and shook my
head. He helped me to stand up. "Look at you, covered with muck. You'll have
to change your clothes."

"No, I haven't got time."

"Come on to my room. I'll get this stuff off you at least with a brush."

"I'm not going to miss that bus."

"You mean to say you're going down there anyway? You must be cracked."

But I had decided I'd go. I washed my face at Louie's and got into the bus;
my place was taken there, and all the early birds who had watched me by the
bandstand appeared to have understood what it was about, that I was a poor
cabrón who had lost his woman.

Iggy entered the bus with me. He said, "Never mind him. He tried to make her
himself and propositioned her a dozen times. He was dying to get her. That's
why he was interested in you and would come up to the villa. At Oliver's party
he tried to make her again. It was why she left so fast."

It didn't matter so much; it was about like a burning match next to a four-
alarm fire.

"Don't go getting into a fight there. You'd be nuts. Talavera will kill you.

Maybe I should come and keep you out of trouble. You want me to?"

"Thanks. Just let me alone."

He didn't really want to come with me.

The old bus made a sudden noise, as of sewing machines in a loft. Through
the fumes the cathedral seemed as if reflected in a river.

"Shoving off," said Iggy. "Remember," he warned me again as he got to the
ground, "you're foolish to go. You're just asking for it."

As the bus rolled down from the town a peasant woman kindly shared her edge of
the seat with me. When I sat down I felt it start to burst through me again. Oh,
fire, fire! Spasms or cramps of jealous sickness, violent and burning. I held
my face and felt that I might croak.

What did she do it for? Why did she take up with Talavera? To punish me?
That was a way to punish somebody!

Why, she was guilty herself of what she accused me! Was I looking over her
shoulder at Stella? Well, she was looking over mine at Talavera and had revenge
ready right away.

Where was that little cat we used to have in Chicago? All at once I wondered.
Because one time when we had been away in Wisconsin for two days and came
back at night this little thing was crying from hunger. Then Thea started to weep
over it and put it inside her dress while we drove to Fulton Street market to feed
it a whole fish. And where was this cat now? Left behind somewhere, nowhere
special, and that was how permanent Thea's attachments were.

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 rot-
ting, 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 Or-
leans 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 differ-
ence 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 Yucatán. 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 XX



Back in Acatla I lay around. I hoped all the same to hear from Thea, 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 ne-
glected pants and dirty shirt and with three days of bristles, I had the inclin-
ation 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 rep-
rimanded 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 sol-
emnity 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 every-
body? 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 ut-
most 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 sympa-
thizer, 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 under-
stood 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.

He left me with this Paslavitch, then, and for some reason I felt I was put in
deposit or reserve, but I was tired and didn't much care what he had in mind.
Paslavitch showed me the rooms and the garden. I gazed at the birds, caged and
free, the hummingbirds in the flowers and the spiny applauding of the cactuses.
Lying in the grass or standing along the path were Mexican gods who gripped
and clutched on themselves and cooled their hot teeth and tongues in the blue
air.

Paslavitch was a kind, worried, meek, stubborn man who covered Mexico for
the Yugoslav press. He considered himself a Bolshevik and old revolutionary but
he was a lacrimae rerum type if I ever saw one; everything was forever touching
him, and he had tears the way a pine has gum to give. He played Chopin on the
piano, and when he executed a particular march he'd say to me, "Frederic
Chopin wrote this during a storm when he was in Mallorca with George Sand.
She was sailing on the Mediterranean. When she arrived he said, 'I thought you
were drowned!' Pressing on the pedals in his Mexican shoes, he made you think
of Nero acting in a tragedy. Most of all this Paslavitch was in love with French
culture and had a keen wish to teach me. In fact he had an obsession about teach-
ing and was always saying, "Teach me about Chicago," "Teach me about General U-
lysses S. Grant. I will teach you. I will tell you about Fontenelle's ham omelette.
We will exchange."

He was very eager. "Fontenelle wanted to eat a ham omelette on a Friday but
a terrible storm started, with thunder. So finally he threw the omelette out of
the window and said to God, 'Seigneur! Tant de bruit pour une omelette.'" It
could be illuminating. He'd sway, with closed eyes and tight pronunciation.
Or else he'd tell me, "Louis Thirteenth loved to play barber and would shave
his gentlemen whether they wanted it or not. Also he enjoyed to imitate dying
agonies, so he would make faces, and furthermore he would spend the wedding
night in the same bed with young couples and was the last expression of feudal
degeneracy."

Maybe he was, but Paslavitch loved him because he was French. He'd keep
me after supper and repeat these conversations of Voltaire and Frederick the
Great, de la Rochefoucauld and the Duchesse de Longueville, Diderot and a
young actress, Chamfort and somebody else. I liked Paslavitch but sometimes it
was heavy going, being his guest. I also had to go and play billiards with him
at a club on the Calle de Uruguay. And to drink with him, when he felt like
drinking. I did not want to do it in the afternoon because it reminded me too
much of the tequila drinking I did in Acatla. But we'd sit and kill a few bottles
of wine. Thousand soft moose-lashes of the copper forest sun passed through the
trees; the garden was green while the woman's form of the volcano slept in the
snow. I was a guest and guests have to go along with hosts. I paid my way by
teaching him about the major leagues, etcetera.

Meanwhile I was building up my health somewhat, and then Frazer came
around and sprung what he had been saving me for.

"You know that the GPU wants the Old Man's life," said Frazer.

I knew it. I had read in the papers about the machine-gun attack on his villa
and Paslavitch had told me many other details.

"Well," said Frazer, "a man named Mink who is the chief of the Russian
police has arrived in Mexico to take over the campaign against the Old Man."

"What a terrible thing! What can you do to protect him?"

"Well, the villa is being fortified, and we have a bodyguard. But the fort-
ification isn't ready yet. The cops aren't enough to do the job. Stalin is
out to get him because he's the conscience of the revolutionary world."

"Why are you telling me this, Frazer?"

"Here's the thing. There's a scheme being discussed. Maybe the Old Man will
shake the GPU by traveling incognito around the country."

"What do you mean, incognito?"

"This is confidential, March. I mean that he should take off his beard and
mustache, cut his hair, and pass as a tourist."

Well, I thought this mighty queer. As if Gandhi should go dressed in a Prince
Albert. That this formerly so mighty and commanding man should have to alter
and humble himself. Somehow, though I had seen and known lots of trouble, this
struck me very hard.

I said, "Whose idea is this?"

"Why it's been discussed," said Frazer in his professional revolutionary way,
meaning it wasn't any of my business. "I trust you, March, or I wouldn't have
suggested you for a part in this."

"Why, where do I come in?" I said.

He said, "If the Old Man is going to travel incognito as a visitor to Mexico
he's going to need a nephew from the States."

"Me, you mean?"

"You and a girl comrade as husband and wife. Would you do it?"

I saw myself driving around Mexico with this great person, tracked by secret
agents. I felt too worn out to take it on.

"There wouldn't be any hanky-panky with the girl," said Frazer.

"I don't even understand what you mean. I'm trying to recover from the injury
of a love affair."

Please God! I thought, keep me from being sucked into another one of those
great currents where I can't be myself. Naturally I wanted to be of help, and
rescue and peril attracted me. But I wasn't up to it at all, going up and down the
mountains of Mexico through the bazaar of red nature and dizzy with deaths and
noises.

"I'm telling you this because the Old Man is very moral."

Frazer spoke as though he too were very moral. Tell it to the marines! I
thought.

"He won't do it anyhow," I said. "It's a loony idea."

"That's for the people who're protecting him to decide."

But to me it seemed his appearance was his trademark. His head was. Sooner
than touch it he'd maybe let it be taken off him and kept just as it was for
martyrdom. Kind of like St. John and Herod. And I had to stop and ask myself
about martyrdom. Out in Russia was his enemy who didn't mind obliging him.
He'd kill him. Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the
dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the
earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right. That's what
passed through my mind.

"You'd have to pack a gun. Does that scare you?"

"Me? Of course not," I said. "Not that part of it."

I reflected in my private mind that I must have holes in my head like a
colander not to refuse. Was I so flattered by the chance to be with this giant
historical personality, speeding around the mountains? The car would rush like
mad. The wild beasts would flee. The terrible earth would turn around. And he
would be silent to me on his thoughts of nations and destiny. The lost world
would call after us with secret voice, and behind us there would be a team of
international killers pursuing and waiting for their chance.

"Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth
shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves."

"That's not a good point of view," said Frazer.

"No? Maybe. It's just a thought."

"Will you do it?"

"You feel I'm the right sort of guy for it?"

"We need somebody who looks very American."

"I guess I could spare some time," I said, "if it doesn't take too long."

"A few weeks, just to shake off Mink and his men."

He went away, and I was sitting in the garden where the lizards were tickling
in the grass and there was a choke of gorgeous color by the birds along the hot
walls. The gods stood or lay and persisted in their gray volcano illustrations of
what the forces of life are. Paslavitch was playing Chopin upstairs. My next i-
dea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his
persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the
same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just
to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn't have the strong-
est alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.

Paslavitch came out on his balcony in his blue bathrobe and asked meekly if I
wanted a drink.

"Okay," I said. I was very worried about this whole scheme.

But it fell through, and when it did I was very glad. I had been in a clutch
about it and lost sleep dreaming how we would chase from town to town all the
way through Jalisco or out into the deserts. But the Old Man vetoed this. I
wanted to send him a letter telling him how smart I thought he was, but then I
thought it wouldn't be right for me to discuss secrets of his political activi-
ty. He must certainly have given a scream when they propositioned him on it.

Anyhow, I felt now that there was something about the effect of Mexico on
me, that I couldn't hold my own against it any more and had better get back
to the States. Paslavitch lent me two hundred pesos and I bought my ticket to
Chicago. He was affected a lot by my going and told me many times in French
that he would miss me. Likewise, I'm sure. He was a very decent guy. You don't
meet so many such.



Chapter XXI



On the way back from Mexico to Chicago I took a side trip or pilgrimage out of
East St. Louis and went toward Pinckneyville to see my brother George after
many years. He was already a grown man, a large hulk insecure in his steps.
Darkenings of brown in his fair skin under the eyes showed how after his own
fashion he too made the struggle that we make if we consent to live. Just as
though, the time for it coming round, we left what company we were in and went
privately to take a few falls with our own select antagonist in his secret room,
like inside a mountain or down in a huge root-cellar. This was how it was with
George too.

Nevertheless he was a man of fine appearance, as he had been a beautiful
child. Now as then his shirt still bagged out in that senseless style over his back,
and his hair grew like chestnut burr the same as formerly, brown and gold, close
bristles. I was kind of proud of him that he took his fate with dignity. They had
made a shoemaker of him. He couldn't run one of those machines you see
thumping under their fender in a repair shop with the screaming disks and
circular brushes, and he wasn't equal to making shoes by hand, but he was good
at heeling and soling. Down in the basement, under the veranda, was where he
worked. It was a wide veranda, for the place was far enough downstate to be
reckoned Southern, and the buildings were big, white, of wood. Vines gave
green color to his dusty half-window below. I saw him bent over the last, taking
nails out of his mouth and sending them through the leather.

"George!" I said, looking at the man he had grown to be. He knew me right
away, and he stood up, happy, and exactly as in the old days said, "Hi, Aug! Hi,
Aug!" in his nasal voice. This repetition of two words if it went on long enough
led usually to howling. So I went up to him, as he didn't move toward me.
"Well, how is it, old man?" I said to him. I pulled him to me with one arm and
put my head on his shoulder. He wore a blue work shirt; he was big, white, and
clean, except his hands. Eyes, nose, and small mouth of his undeveloped face
were as they had always been, simple. I was moved that he couldn't know how
much of a complaint he had against me for neglect, and no sooner saw me than
was happy.

He hadn't had a visitor in three or four years, so they let me see him by spe-
cial permission for the whole day.

"What do you remember, Georgie?" I asked him. "Grandma, and Mama, Simon,
Winnie?" With his small smile he said these names after me, as in the song he
used to sing when he trotted with the dog along the curl-wired fence, sing-
ing how everybody loved Mama. Within his moist mouth his teeth were white
and good, though his eye-teeth were very sharp. I took him by the hand,
which now was bigger than mine, and we went walking in the grounds.

It was the beginning of May and the oak leaves were shot out full, dark and
healthy; worked through just as richly were the big dandelion blades and warm
bottom-land-smelling air surrounded us. We walked along the wall, which at
first was simply a wall to me. But then suddenly I was disturbed to think that he
was a prisoner and never got outside, poor George. So without asking permission
I took him off the grounds. He looked at his feet in the unfamiliar road to watch
where they were going, for he was frightened. In a crossroads store I bought him
a package of chocolate marshmallow cookies. He took them but wouldn't eat them,
putting the package in his pocket. His eyes were now turning very uneasily,
and I said, "Okay, George, we're going back right away." That calmed him.

When he heard the dinner bell go--which was like the clink of the church bell
of mouse-town in a children's zoo--trained to answer right away, he went to the
rambly green cafeteria. He left me here. I had to follow him. He picked up his
tray, and with those disconnected others who scraped their tinware and fed,
wagging their weak noggins, without talk or observation, we sat down and ate.

It must be as simple as the blue and white of pillow-ticking to lay plans to take
care of creatures so, clothe them, feed them, put them in their dormitory. There
is probably just nothing to it.

The rest of the trip I kept thinking that something should be done for Georgie,
not to let him spend his entire life like that; also I thought how quick we were
to latch on to the excuse to deal practically with any element, like jailbirds,
orphans, cripples, the weak-brained or the old. And I decided that after I had
visited Mama I'd go and talk to Simon about Georgie. I didn't have anything
specific to propose. But I said to myself that Simon had money, therefore he
ought to know what money could do. And anyway, as I was coming back to Chi-
cago I thought of Simon. I wanted to see him.

I went from the one institution straight to the other in Chicago. But the two
places were very different. Mama wasn't any longer right off the kitchen but
established in almost an apartment with a Gulistan on the floor and drapes on the
window. I had phoned that I was coming, and she waited for me down in front
and rested on her white cane. While still at a distance I spoke to her, so she
wouldn't be startled. She weaved her head to locate me and with her crying-out
voice of painful joy called my name. From the top rims of her goggles, which
were dull dark, the brows of her pink long face lifted as if she were trying to
use her eyes too. She then kissed me and whispered to me. She felt my face and
said, "You're skinny. Augie, why you're so skinny?" And then, a long figure her-
self, nearly as tall as I, she led me up to her room by the back entrance. An
odor of boiling fish spouted up the stairs; that passed into my home-coming
mood and made me feel the kitchen heat of old days, sitting with my mother.

On the dresser all my postcards from Mexico were set out, and there were
photos of Simon and Charlotte also. To show the seeing people who came. But
besides the supervisor and his wife, who hated Simon, who did come? Only once
in a while Anna Coblin. Or Simon himself. He'd come in, see how fixed up she
was in her bourgeois parlor, and be satisfied. She too realized that she was
being treated in a satisfactory way. On her wrist was a silver bracelet, she
wore high heels, she had a radio with a big chromium zigzag across the speaker.
In fact when Grandma Lausch had put on her black Odessa best in the Nelson Home
she was laying claim feebly to the style Mama here was living in. That was how
the Lausch brothers had let the old lady down, failing to appreciate, legitimacy
and without any sense of standards. Yet it wasn't a light duty for Mama that she
had to live up to what Simon and Charlotte were doing for her. Simon was if
anything even more difficult than Charlotte, I gathered. He was very fussy. He
opened her closet and inspected all her clothes to see if they were cleaned or
if any were missing from the rack. I knew how Simon could be when he was doing
something for your good and welfare; he could make things hot.

But maybe that spicy, sumptuous fish-gravy odor that belonged to the past
made me too much of a critic of the present moment, exaggerating Mama's diffi-
culties and imagining that the Gulistan and the drapes were the softenings of
a cage. A blind woman, growing elderly, she had to live in a room, some room,
and therefore why not a comfortable room? Moreover, it was perhaps my fault
that I saw both Georgie and Mama as prisoners, and was unhappy that I was
tooting freely around while they were confined.

"Augie, go see him," she said. "Don't be mad on Simon. I told him he
shouldn't be."

"I will, Ma, as soon as I find a room and begin to settle down."

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"Oh--something. I hope something interesting."

"What? Do you make a living, Augie?"

"Well, here I am. What do you mean, Ma? I am living."

"Why are you so skinny? But the clothes are good--I felt the material."

They ought to have been good. Thea had paid a fancy price for them.

"Augie, don't wait too long to call Simon. He wants you to. He told me I
should tell you. He talks about you all the time."

Simon did want to see me. As soon as he heard my voice over the phone he
said, "Augie! Where are you? Stay put. I'll come and pick you up right away."

I was calling from a booth near my new place, which wasn't far from the old,
on the South Side. He lived in the vicinity and was there within a few minutes
in his black Cadillac, this beautiful enamel shell coming so softly to the curb,
inside like jewelry. He beckoned and I got in. "I have to go right back," he said.
"I left without a shirt; I just put on this coat and hat. Well, let's look at you."

He said this, but actually didn't much look, despite his rush to get down. Of
course he was driving, but just the touch of manicured hands on the valuable
stones on the wheel--something like jade--did the trick. The thing pretty well
ran itself. I thought he was sorry about the fight we had had over Lucy and
Mimi. I wasn't angry any more but was looking ahead. Simon was heftier than
before. The light raglan with its chestnut buttons came open on his hard bare
belly. Also his face was larger, and rude, autocratic. The fat of it was not
clear, as it is in some faces. Mrs. Klein, Jimmy's mother, had had a fat face,
almost oriental, but there the fat illuminated something. However, I found out
that I couldn't be critical of Simon when I saw him after a long interval. No
matter what he had done or what he was up to now, the instant I saw him I loved
him again. I couldn't help it. It came over me. I wanted to be brothers again.
And why did he come running for me if he didn't want the same?

Well, now he wanted to know how rugged things had been for me, and I didn't
have any intention of telling him. What was I up to in Mexico?

"I was in love with a girl."

"You were, uh? And what else?"

I didn't say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons. Maybe I
should have. He criticized me anyway in his mind for my randomness and
sentiment. So what did I stand to lose by telling him the facts? However,
something haughty kept me. That was how brief the first warmth of love turned
out to be. So he was judging me--what of it? Let him. Wasn't I busted down,
creased, head-damaged, missing teeth, disappointed, and so forth? And couldn't
I have said, "Well, all right, Simon, here I am." No, what I told him was that
I had gone down to Mexico to work out something important.

Then he started to talk about himself. He had built up his business and sold it
at a whopping profit. Since he didn't want to have to do with the Magnuses he
had gone into other kinds of business and he was very lucky. He said, "I
certainly do have the gold touch. After all, I did start in the Depression when
everything was supposed to be over and done with." Then he described how he
had bought an old hospital building at auction and turned it into a tenement.
Inside of six months he had cleared fifty thousand bucks on this, and then had
organized a management company and run the place for the new owners. He had
a large interest in a Spanish cobalt mine now. They sold the stuff in Turkey, or
some place in the Middle East. He also had a potato-chip concession in several
railroad stations. In fact, Einhorn himself couldn't have dreamed up such deals,
much less have made them pay off.

"How much do you think I'm worth now?"

"A hundred grand?"

He smiled. "Let yourself go a little," he said. "If I'm not a millionaire soon
there's a hitch in my arithmetic."

It impressed me; who wouldn't be impressed? He couldn't help seeing this.
Nevertheless, with his autocratic blue eyes darkening, he looked at me and
asked, "Augie, you don't think you're superior to me because you have no
money, do you?"

The question made me laugh, and maybe I laughed more than I should have. I
said, "That's a strange thing to be asking. How can I? And if I can, why should
you care?" Then I said, "I guess it's true that people fix it to come out better
than those near to them. Why, sure I'd like to have money too."

I didn't say that I had to have a fate good enough, and that this came first.
My answer satisfied him. "You're wasting a lot of time," he said.

"I know it."

"You ought to quit stalling. You're not a boy. Even George is something, he's
a shoemaker."

You know, I did admire Georgie for the way he took his fate. I wished I had
one that was more evident, and that I could quit this pilgrimage of mine. I didn't
feel I was better than Simon, not at all. If there had been real ease in me, he
might have envied me. As it was, what was there to envy?

Bodily overbearing, his fashionable pointed shoe on the rubber pad of the ac-
celerator, he drove over the streets. This proud car, it had heraldry, it was
royal, and wasn't my brother like a prince of Detroit, full of force and dark-
ness? Why, what was the matter with that, to be a power of the world of machin-
ery? Wasn't it good enough? And to what should you go rather? I wasn't proud of
myself, believe me, and my stubbornness about a "higher," independent fate. I
was no wizard, for sure, nor gazetted as anything illustrious, nor billed to
stand up to Apollyon with his horrible scales and bear's feet, nor slated to
find the answer to all my shames like Jean-Jacques on the way to Vincennes sinking
down with emotion of the conception that evil society is to blame for all that
happened to warm, impulsive, loving me. There was no such first-rate thing that
I could boast, and who was I, not to make up my mind and be so obstinate? The
one thing I could say was that though I wanted this independent fate it wasn't
merely for my own sake I wanted it.

Oh, but why get too earnest? Seriousness is only for a few, a gift or grace,
and though all have it rough only the favorites can speak of it plain and sober.
"So when are you going to start what you're going to do?"

"I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can't rush."

"Well, people don't trust you if they don't know what you do, and you can't
blame them."

He pulled up before his apartment, and he left the Cadillac triple-parked in
the street for the doorman to worry about. Rising up swift and soundless in the
elevator, we came to the ivory white door of his flat. As he opened it he was
already yelling for the maid to cook some ham and eggs right away. He took on
like a king, a Francis back from the hunt; he swelled, hollered, turned things
round, not so much showing me the great rooms as dominating them typically.
Well, there were vast rugs and table lamps as tall as life-sized dolls or female
idols, walls that were all mahogany, drawers full of underwear and shirts, sliding
doors that opened on racks of shoes, on rows of coats, cases of gloves, of socks,
bottles of eau de cologne, little caskets, lights lining the corners, water hiss-
ing criss-cross in the showerstall. He took a shower. I went alone into the par-
lor; a huge China vase was there, and in secret I got up on a chair to lift the
lid and look down, where I saw the reverse white bulge of the dragons and birds.
The candy dishes were full of candy--I had some coconut balls and apricot
marshmallows walking around while Simon took his shower. Then we went to
eat, on a handsome marble-topped round table. The chairs were red leather. The
metal circle that held up the marble was worked all around with peacocks and
children's faces. The maid came from the blazing white of the kitchen with the
ham and eggs and coffee. Simon's hand with its rings went out to test the heat
of the cup. He behaved like some Italian Lord Moltocurante, jealous over the
quality and exacting all he had coming.

I knew we had gone way up in the elevator but hadn't noticed to what floor.
Now, after breakfast, when I strayed into one of the enormous carpeted rooms,
dark as a Pullman when it sits with drawn blinds in the station, I drew a drape
aside and saw we were on the twentieth story at least. I hadn't had a look at
Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this
window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous
industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its
stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different
powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness
covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word.

Simon came looking for me. He cried, "Hey, what the hell are you doing in
a dark room, for Chrissake? Come on, you're going around with me today."

He wanted me to know what his life was like. And maybe he thought I'd run
into something that would appeal to me, for my future's sake. "Wait a minute
though," he said. "What kind of clown's suit are you wearing there? You can't
go among people dressed like that."

"Listen, a friend of mine picked this out for me. Anyway, just feel the
material. There's nothing wrong with this suit."

But his face was impatient, and he pulled the jacket from me and said, "Strip!"
He dressed me in a double-breasted flannel, very elegant soft gray. It certainly
was my fortune to be poor in style. From the skin out he reclothed me in swell
linen and silk socks, new shoes, and called the maid to have my old suit cleaned
and sent to me--it was sort of shiny on the elbows. The other stuff he ordered
her to throw down the incinerator. So it plunged down into the fire. I wiped my
face with the monogrammed handkerchief, now mine, and felt around with my
toes in the narrow shoes, trying to accustom myself to them. To top it off he
gave me fifty bucks. I made efforts to refuse this, but my tongue got in its own
way. "Go! Stop mumbling," he said. "You have to have a little something in
your pocket to live up to this outfit." He had a big gold money-clip and all the
bills were new. "Now let's go. I have things to do at my office and Charlotte
wants to be picked up at five. She's at the accountant's, going over some of the
books." He called down for the Cadillac, and we drove away, stopping for
scarcely anything in this lustrous hard shell with radio playing.

In his office Simon wore his hat like a Member of Parliament, and while he
phoned his alligator-skin shoes knocked things off the desk. He was in on a deal
to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in
some mining machinery from Sudbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese
company. The nephew of a Cabinet member came in with a proposition about water-
proof material. And after him some sharp character interested Simon in distress-
ed yard-goods from Muncie, Indiana. He bought it. Then he sold it as lining to
a manufacturer of leather jackets. All this while he carried on over the phone
and cursed and bullied, but that was just style, not anger, for he laughed
often.

Then we drove to his club for lunch, arriving late. There was no service in the
dining room. Simon went into the kitchen to bawl out the headwaiter. Seeing
some pot roast on a platter he broke off a piece of bread and sopped the gravy,
covering the meat with crumbs. The waiter hollered and Simon yelled back,
furiously laughing in his face too, "Why don't you wait on people then, you
jerk!"

Finally they fed us, and then Simon seemed to find the afternoon dragging.

We went into the cardroom where he forced his way into a poker game. I could
tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him. He said to some bald-head-
ed guy, "Push over, Curly!" and sat in. "This is my brother," he said as if
bidding them to look at me in the opulent gray flannel and button-down collar.
I lounged just behind him in a leather chair.

Then he would turn and describe various people to me, pretending to lower his
voice. "You see that guy in the blue, the one with the cigar, Augie? He's a
lawyer but doesn't practice, only he keeps an office so he can say he's at the
bar. He makes a living at cards. If nobody played with him he'd be on relief next
week. Same with his wife. She plays in all the fancy hotels. And this other one,
over there, that's Goonie. His father owns a sausage factory and he's a Harvard
man. If I had a son like that I'd just as soon pour champagne on my dick as send
him to college. The sonofabitch. I'd make him stuff wurst. He's a bachelor. He'll
never have sons of his own, but he likes little boys, and last year he tried to
pick up a sailor at the State and Lake and the kid gave him a shiner. Over there
is Ruby Ruskin--he's a good fellow. He visits his old dad down in Joliet Peniten-
tiary at least once a month. The old man took the rap for them both in an arson
case."

Those players who weren't glaring or grinning appeared to be holding their
breath, and I thought sure Simon would end by being clouted. Then he said,
"Listen, you cruds, I want you to take a good look at my brother. He's a radical
and he just got back from Mexico. Augie, tell them how soon the revolution's
coming when they'll get sash weights tied on their necks and be thrown in the
drainage canal."

He took a big pot--he must have won because the rest were too rattled to play
their cards--and left the table with a swagger.

"They could drown you in a teaspoonful of water," I said. "Why do you want
to make them hate you so?"

"Because I hate them. I want them to know it. What do I care if those jag-offs
hate me? Why, they're all lice! I despise them!"

"Then why do you belong to their club?"

"Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club."

He played the Twenty-Six girl at a bar for smokes at the green baize board,
socking down the leather dice cup, and won again. Putting some Havanas in my
breast pocket, he said, "Let's visit a barbershop. You need it and I like it.
God, I love barbershops!" We stopped at the Palmer House where they had those
grand episcopal chairs. By the time we were finished with all the cutting, shav-
ing, toweling, steaming, polishing, it was five o'clock, and on the run we got
into the car and sped through illegal alley shortcuts out of the Loop. Charlotte
was waiting in the street in her fur-trimmed suit, grimly handsome and immense.
She was terribly put out at having had to wait, and right away she started,
"Simon, where have you been? Do you know how late you are?"

"Shut up!" he said. "Here's my kid brother. You haven't seen him for two
years and can't even say hello but have to start yacking first."

"How are you, Augie?" she said, more vigorous than friendly, turning her
head upon her furs toward the back seat. "How did you like Mexico?"

"Oh, very much."

She looked to be at the peak of fashion, and with the straight rulings of brow
and mouth would have seemed attractive if it wasn't so evident how tried in
flesh and patience she was. Her devices for hiding impatience were in bad repair.
Of course she observed that I was already dressed in a suit of Simon's. Not that
she'd object to a thing like that, only she didn't miss it. When she talked to
you she had a nagging, bidding way and was tough, a hard judge, and you a def-
endant. You had to watch what you said. But she anyhow arrived at the opinion
that she wanted. In her fur-trimmed suit, large and handsome, she was like an
officer of the court all right, even though her lips were painted and eyes mas-
caraed. And me, I was like some foxy pirate, larron de mer, only I wasn't really
such a bold answerer.

One thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly
at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy. Free of charge and
trouble. It wasn't true, of course, but only another one of those appearances.
However, she was particularly concerned that I didn't at least look more anxious.

At dinner I wanted to talk about Georgie with Simon, but he said, "Don't make
any new problems. Don't make any new problems. He's fine. What do you want?"

"Why worry about your brother George when you haven't decided what to do
with your own life?" said Charlotte. "It's very easy to turn into a bum."

Simon said, "Be quiet! Better a bum than your cousin Lucy's husband and
your uncle's son-in-law. Let Augie alone. A bum is just what he doesn't want
to be. What if it takes him a little longer to settle down?"

"You lost a tooth or two, didn't you?" said Charlotte. "How did it happen?
You look like hell--" She might have gone on but the bell rang and somebody
who was admitted by the maid went down the passage into the living room.
Charlotte became silent. Later I glanced in, and I saw a giant feminine figure
sitting in the dark. I went to see who this Brobdingnag woman could be. Why, it
was Charlotte's mother, Mrs. Magnus, sitting beside the China jug which didn't
make her seem smaller, giant as it was. Even in the dark Mrs. Magnus's color,
beautiful and healthful, and her braided hair and calm saddle nose and her size,
touched my feeling.

"Why do you sit in the dark, Mrs. Magnus?" I said.

"I have to," she told me simply.

"But why do you have to?"

"Because my son-in-law doesn't want to see me."

"But what's the matter?" I asked Charlotte and Simon.

Charlotte said, "Simon bawled her out about the cheap clothes she wears."

"Because," said Simon, angry, "she comes here wearing nineteen-fifty
dresses. A woman with half a million dollars! She looks like the ragman's
horse."

Owing to me, Charlotte brought her mother in to sit at the table. We were
eating cherries and drinking coffee. Charlotte laid off me, but Simon worked
himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress. He tried to read the paper
and cut her--he hadn't said a word when she came in--but finally he said, and I
could see the devil in him now, "Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy
your clothes off the janitor's wife."

"Let her alone," said Charlotte sharply.

But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and
overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law's dress at the collar,
thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There
were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment
it was, all of a sudden to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with
her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How
she loved Simon! He knew it too.

"Hide, hide!" he said, laughing.

"You crazy fool," cried Charlotte. She ran away on her high heels to bring her
mother a coat and came back laughing also. They were downright proud, I guess.
Simon wrote out a check and gave it to Mrs. Magnus. "Here," he said, "buy
yourself something and don't come here looking like the scrubwoman." He went
and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back
two for one and with tremendous humor.


I went to see Einhorn, who was kind of white and peaky. Things were not too
good with him. He had gone to the hospital and had a prostate operation while I
was away. All the same he still had a fine presence, much as in the insurance
literature and in the clippings and photos all over the place. In the midst of
all these hung the portrait of the Commissioner--there was a man! What a fine,
great head--with the famous obituary under it! Tillie was away on a holiday
with the grandchild, and Mildred who was more than ever Einhorn's friend was
in charge. In her stout orthopedic shoes she stood up at the office barrier,
which was cut down from the old office across the way. She had a way about the
eyes of making you go to war with her. Not me, thanks. Her hair was beginning
to be gray. Einhorn's was snowy, which made his eyes blacker. He saw the dou-
ble-breasted suit Simon had given me and said, "You certainly are doing fine,
Augie." The house stunk. The books were falling off the shelves. The busts of
great men were lost up near the ceiling. The black leather chairs on casters
were aging well, but aging.

Einhorn made a powerful complaint against Mimi Villars, who was ruining
his son.

Mimi was even more unkind when she spoke of him and what he had done to Ar-
thur. "I'll tell you about that old man," she said. "He's a damned impresario
for himself. Every time he goes to the toilet he wants to publish an article a-
bout it. I know everybody is vain, and that that's what makes the world go round.
Maybe it isn't even vanity. Maybe it's like, with a bullet in your brain, you go
on thinking of your nice hat. You go on thinking about the party you were invit-
ed to on Saturday, and so forth. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. If you
can't help it, at least you should know that it isn't a good thing. All that old
man wants is that Arthur should be a credit to him and bring him glory, but as for
helping him worth a damn, no, he won't come across with a nickel. And parents who
have money and won't give any to their children ought to have it all taken away.
They ought to go and beg. I'd take and put the old man on the corner of State
and Lake with a tin cup, that's what I'd do. And you know the grandfather left it
all to Arthur. He knew better than to trust his son. Arthur has been trying to
finish a book, which is a great book. I believe in it. You know he can't be
expected to work while doing that."

Einhorn did have some money though she exaggerated his wealth. However, I
didn't argue with her. I was down on Einhorn myself. Since the time when I
came back from Buffalo and found the family wiped out, when he urged me to
be hard on Simon, I didn't feel the old friendliness toward him. And, if you
want to know, because he and Tillie had warned me in the old days not to expect
anything, repeating how Arthur would come into all, I couldn't help feeling no
one had been good enough for them and now they were not good enough for one
another. Now maybe was my chance to pass them by.

"Of course," Mimi said with some of her old-time bitterness, "I have a pretty
good job now, but last winter I was down with the flu and couldn't work. Not
only that but Owens kicked us out because I couldn't pay the rent and a friend of
ours on Dorchester took us in. But all Arthur and I had to sleep on was the sofa.
Both of us on the sofa, and I had the flu. By morning he was so tired that when
my friend went to work he got into her bed. So," she said with her universal-
comedy laugh, "finally I said he should try to get a job. He said he'd try, and
he got up one morning at eight and was back at ten. He said he had a job in the
toy department at Wieboldt's and he was going to learn the details the next day.
He left at nine that morning and was back at eleven. They had showed him, but
before he started he wanted to clean up an important chapter about Kierkegaard
--what do I know about it?

"So then he went away next day at half-past eight and was back at noon, fired,
because the floorwalker told him to pick up a piece of paper and he said, 'Pick
it up yourself, you dog. Your back isn't broken.'

"Then Arthur came down with the flu and I had to get up and give him the sofa.
But," she said, "I love him. It's never dull with him. The worse our life gets,
the more good I feel in love. And you?" she said, looking closely at me, how
I had been browned by Mexico, aged by hard going and experience, finally thrown
on those rocks by Bizcocho and eating cinders and ashes over Thea. Why, the way
I came back I must have had something in common with a survivor of Crassus's
army in the eastern desert, barely making it back from the massacre in tatter-
ed armor scales.

Well, people had warned me in the first place. Padilla, for instance, said,
"Holy Christ, March, what did you have to go there for, with a broad like that
and this bird! A girl who catches snakes, and God knows what else! What do
you expect? No wonder you look like this. I hate like hell to be rubbing it in, but
it seems to me you had it coming."

"Manny, what was I supposed to do? I fell in love with her."

"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself
out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?"

"That's right, but I didn't love her as I ought to have. You see, I missed out.
I should have been more pure, and stayed with it. There was something wrong
with me."

"Old pal, let me tell you something," said Padilla. "You take too much blame
on yourself, and the real reason is not such a good one. It's because you're too
ambitious. You want too much, and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself
too hard. But this is all a dream. The big investigation today is into how bad a
guy can be, not how good he can be. You don't keep up with the times. You're
going against history. Or at least you should admit how bad things are, which
you don't do either. You should cut out this junketing around and go back to the
university."

"I think I might do that. Only I'm still collecting my thoughts."

"Collect them meanwhile, in the evening. Can't you do two things at a time?"

And then Clem Tambow told me practically the same thing. He was getting
his degree soon, and he looked very mature now with his heavy mustache and
the cigar. He dressed like a poor man's press agent and his clothes smelled of
cleaning fluid and the masculine odor. "Well, big boy, I see you're the same as
when you left," he said. Now Clem and I liked each other very much, a splendid
and goodhearted fellow, salt of the earth, ready with sympathy and appreciative
of the general human plight. But I went on a toot with a rich woman, as he saw
it, and if I was roughed up I had it coming to me. That was what he meant, for
I wasn't at all the same as when I left.

"How is your campaign after a worth-while fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he
knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying
to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in my progress, a
mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after good things, servant of
love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie!
Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side
was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life. A hell of
a cause of sympathetic tears but also, as Clem saw, of haw-haws, as great jokes
often are. So I looked desolated, and Clem laughed like anything. I couldn't
feel sore at him.

You know why I struck people funny? I think it was because of the division of
labor. Specialization was leaving the likes of me behind. I didn't know spot-
welding, I didn't know traffic management, I couldn't remove an appendix, or
anything like that. I discussed it with Clem, who was of like opinion. Clem was
no slouch. He now said he was pushing ahead in the field of psychology and a
lot was clear to him that was a mystery before. Oh, he still knocked himself.
He said, "I bought all my fine notions at a fire sale," but he was growing more
confident of his point of view. He made a big thing of my coming back, declar-
ing that we were among the few true friends around. That was no lie. I had
the warmest feelings toward him. Well, then, he came around and said we must
go to the Oriental Theatre and have supper. Till his last penny, Clem had to
treat, and then he didn't mind if you stood him to something. He liked to look
well, though his face was often raging, wrinkled, or his laugh was enormous
while his teeth were snaggly, his head huge, and the suit he wore was prosper-
ous, solid, middle-aged, a banker's suit, but his shanks were long, his shoes
were wrecked, his socks old Argyles, he wore a turtleneck sweater and stunk
of cigars.

So we went to the Oriental. The stars crept in the blue heavens there, like
Arabian nights. We heard Milton Berle singing "River, Stay Away from My Door,"
then floppy dancers, as couch-dolls in velvet, followed by an act of little
dogs zipping across the stage in automobiles, and then a troupe of girls play-
ing bagpipes. First they performed "Annie Laurie" and then went into classical
numbers. They did the "Liebestod" and "Valse Triste," and then came the
feature, which was so lousy we walked out and went to a restaurant.

Dignified again after his windy haw-haws in the wild gallery, Clem ordered a
big Chinese dinner--sweet and sour pork, bamboo shoots, chicken chow mein
with pineapple, egg foo yung, and tea, rice, sherbet, almond cakes. We cleaned
up on this and meanwhile had a conversation.

"Now just suppose," he said, "we were on our way up the Nile to the first
cataract, sailing in a dahabiyeh. The green fields and boys shying rocks at the
heavy birds, and the splashing flowers, while we eat dates with aphrodisiacs in
them and beautiful Coptic girls come rowing up to the music of the lateen sails
and so on. Going to Karnak to copy inscriptions. How would that be?"

"Well, I just came back from one exotic place."

"Yes, but you jumped the gun. You weren't ready to go yet. You won't take
things step by step. That's why your trip wasn't a success. Now if you were an
Egyptologist you could go on this trip up the Nile."

"Good, then I'll become one. All I need is about ten years' preparation."

"Look at you, you look so bright and happy after supper and your face is so
pleasant, why, you might be the owner of this building. Haw, haw! Oh, brother,
you're swell!"

"The only thing is," said I, flattered and smiling, "why the Nile?"

"For you? Something exceptional," said Clem. "When I think of you I have to
think in terms of something exceptional. On the level of achievement." He had
picked up this vocabulary at the university. One of his favorite words was
"reinforced," which meant to give food to a rat who has solved a problem, to
encourage him. Meantime, with big red lips, scowling laughter, and territorial
face, the great nose with its passages, he looked like a king. "Are you like one
of the lousy crowd cheering the Coptics who row out to the boat? You are not.
You are a distinguished personality. You are a man of feeling. Among us poor
drips at the human masquerade you come like an angel."

I tried to tut-tut him, but he said, "Oh, keep your shirt on, I'm not finished yet.
You may not like it so much before I finish."

"Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down."

"We aren't in the same universe of discourse. This is not yet what St. Thomas
calls my level of first intention. I didn't say I thought you were an angel; on-
ly us common-clay, step-by-step, unfortunate ordinary personnel see you arrive
as for a ball, smiling and beaming. You have ambitions. But you're ambitious in
general. You're not concrete enough. You have to be concrete. Now Napoleon
was. Goethe was. You take this Professor Sayce who actually had this Nile deal.
He knew everything along the banks for a thousand miles. Specific! Names and
addresses. Dates. The whole mystery of life is in the specific data."

"What makes you so keen about Egypt suddenly?" I said. "And besides I
know there's plenty that's wrong with me. Don't you worry."

"Why, of course, even though you're beaming you're full of anxiety. Don't I
know it! I can see you pissing against the wind. What you need is some of Dr.
Freud's medicine. It could do you a whole lot of good."

"As a matter of fact," I said, now somewhat disturbed, "I've been having
plenty of peculiar dreams lately. Just listen. Last night I dreamed that I
was in my own house, somewhere--it was enough of a surprise to have a house
of my own, much less dream what I dreamed. I was standing in my beautiful front
room, entertaining a guest. And what do you think? I had two pianos. There
were two grand pianos, as if ready for a concert. Then my guest, who had
wonderful manners--and me too, regular society--he said, 'Isn't it unusual for
somebody to own three grand pianos?' Three! I turned around, and God! if there
wasn't another piano. And I had been trying to figure out how come I had two in
my house, as I can't play any more than a bull can sew cushions. This seemed
downright sinister. But even though I was thrown by it I didn't let on or show
anything. I told this guy, 'Sure, of course there are three of them'; as if who
could do with less? So I felt like a terrible faker."

"Oh, what a case! You'd be a regular conservatory for a scientific mind.
You'd be the greatest collection of unknowns ever to lie on a couch. What I
guess about you is that you have a nobility syndrome. You can't adjust to the
reality situation. I can see it all over you. You want there should be Man, with
capital M, with great stature. As we've been pals since boyhood, I know you and
what you think. Remember how you used to come to the house every day? But I
know what you want. O paidea! O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! O chivalry,
O Abbot Suger! O Strozzi Palace, O Weimar! O Don Giovanni, O lineaments of
gratified desire! O godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm or not?"

"You are, yes you are," said I. We were in this woodwork bower, you see, of
the Chinese restaurant, and all seemed right, good-tempered, friendly. When
important thought doesn't have to be soliloquy, I know how valuable an occa-
sion that is. Because to whom can you speak your full mind as to yourself?

"Go on, Clem, go on," I told him.

"I went to the Mottley School in the fourth grade. Mrs. Minsick was the teach-
er. She'd call you up to the front of the class and hand you a piece of chalk.
'Now, Dorabella, what flower are you going to smell?' Haw, haw! It was a riot.
This little Dorabella Feingold would smell up until her pants showed and turn
her eyes with ecstasy. She'd say, 'Sweetpea.' It was a regular drill. Inhale and
exhale. Stephanie Kriezcki, she'd say, 'Violet, rose, nasturtium.'" He held the
cigar by the stem and smelled with his inflated nose. "Just catch the picture of
this lousy classroom, and all these poor punks full of sauerkraut and bread with
pig's-feet, with immigrant blood and washday smells and kielbasa and home-brew
beer. Where did they get off with this flora elegance? Why, hell! And then
old lady Minsick would give a gold star to reinforce the good ones. She, with
that kisser of hers with sharp teeth and tits that hung down to her belly, she'd
hawk into the waste-paper basket. Well, the wild kids would say, 'Skunk cabbage,
teach,' or, 'Wild schmooflowers,' or 'Dreck.' For this she'd grab you by the
neck and rush you down to the principal. But these tough kids were right.
Whoever saw any sweetpeas? Why, I'd fish through the sewer lid with a diaper
pin because my wiseguy brother told me I'd catch goldfish."

"This is a sad story. But don't you see both kinds of kids were right? Some
stood up for what they knew and some longed for what they didn't. What do you
mean, that there are some kids or people for whom there can't be flowers? That
couldn't be true."

"I knew you'd go for this chalk-smelling. You have a strong superego. You
want to accept. But how do you know what you're accepting? You have to be
nuts to take it come one come all. Nobody is going to thank you for trying. And
you know you're going to ruin yourself ignoring the reality principle and trying
to cheer up the dirty scene. You should accept the data of experience. Why don't
you read some psychology? It did me a lot of good."

"Well, I'll borrow some of your books, since you think it's so important. Only
you've got the whole thing wrong already. I'll put it to you as I see it. It can
never be right to offer to die, and if that's what the data of experience tell you,
then you must get along without them. I also understand what you're driving at
about my not being concrete. It's as follows: In the world of today your
individual man has to be willing to illustrate a more and more narrow and
restricted point of existence. And I am not a specialist."

"Well, you tell me you can train birds."

Yes, so far that had been my only field of specialization.

And it's perfectly true, you have to be one of these spirits that get as if jumped
into and driven far and powerfully by a social purpose. If somebody is needed to
go and lie under the street, you be it. Or in a mine. Or work out joyrides in the
carnival. Or invent names of new candy. Or electroplate babies' shoes. Or go
around and put cardboard pictures of bims in barbershops or saloons. Or go die
in one subdivided role or another, with one or two thoughts, these narrow,
persistent ideas of your function.

I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to
be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you'd be
dealing with other experts. You wouldn't care for amateurs, for experts are like
that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what's
there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla's slogan of "Easy or not at all."


Mimi got a big laugh out of my Mexican experiences. "What a ball you've
been having," she said. She made me feel unpleasant about Thea; and about
Stella she said, "Guys like you make life easy for some women."

There hadn't been anything easy for anyone, but you couldn't tell Mimi that.
Having gotten the story as she wanted it, she didn't listen to more, but with her
push-faced vigor, her broad red mouth stretching and giving out with her helicon
or hunting-horn voice, she let me have it almost the same as Clem. I'd better be
cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I
didn't want to; because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was
not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture
--the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-
dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing
and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let
alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their
last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about
themselves was true. Maybe she exaggerated her rake-the-heavens wrath and
went beyond how she truly felt. However, there were blue marks of worry
beneath her eyes these days.

When Arthur came around she talked about money and jobs. Four times out of
five she changed the subject to that as soon as he showed up.

There was a certain job she kept after him to take. But he said, "Why, it's a
farce!" And gently began to laugh in his dark way, crow-footed.

"The money's no farce."

"Oh, please, Mimi. Don't be absurd."

"There'd be practically no work connected with it."

However, he made it seem absolutely impossible. I began to think it was a job
I might put in for myself, if qualified.

I met Arthur out walking and I asked him why he didn't want it.

It was a cool afternoon, and he was wearing cap and coat. He had lost much
weight and was very bony, his shoulders up sharp, so that I was impressed with
his resemblance to his uncle Dingbat and how he had subdued the same inheritance
by a different life. He was of that same sharp skinny-chested build, with long
face and a quick walk of inward-pointed toes. His shoes were tapered, as elegant
as chivalry in the stirrups or the end of a lizard entering a crevice. But Ar-
thur's health was poorer than Dingbat's and he had a swarthier color; his breath
was strong with coffee and tobacco. He owned up to inferior teeth with his smile.
Nevertheless he had all the charm of the Einhorns when he wanted to turn it on.

There was great style in his thinking. Sometimes I believed he was ready to
say or consider anything. My personal preference was for useful thoughts. I
mean thoughts that answered questions that moved you. Arthur said this was
wrong; truth was truer when it had less to do with your needs. What personal
need, for instance, is there in the investigation of the creep of light from the
outermost stars which even at that unimaginable speed decays and breaks down
because it grows so ancient in its travel? It fascinated me, this question.
However, about the job: there was a millionaire engaged in writing a book and
he was looking for a research assistant.

"Do you think I'd fill the bill?"

"Of course you would, Augie. Are you interested?"

"Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."

"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free
time?"

"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need
his time free and I be questioned?

"I'm just curious. Some people always appear to know what they're going to
do, and others never. Of course I'm a poet, and relatively lucky. I've often
thought, If I weren't a poet, what would I be? A politician? But just see how
Lenin's life work turned out. A professor? That's much too tame. A painter? But
nobody knows what painting's about any more. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I
can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets
themselves."

Well, this is how it was in Chicago when I came back. I stayed on the South
Side. I got my case of books back from Arthur and I read in my room. The heat
of June grew until the shady yards gave up the smell of the damp soil, of
underground, and the city-Pluto kingdom of sewers and drains, and the mortar
and roaring tar pots of roofers, the geraniums, lilies-of-the-valley, climbing
roses, and sometimes the fiery devastation of the stockyards stink when the wind
was strong. I read my books and almost each day wrote to Thea in care of Wells
Fargo, but no answer came. One letter was forwarded from Mexico, and that one
was from Stella. She was in New York. I never expected her to write such a
good letter; I decided that I had underrated her. She said she couldn't pay me
yet; she had to square herself with her union. But as soon as she landed a job
she'd settle her debt.

Simon had given me some money so that I could take summer courses at the uni-
versity. Now I thought I might like to be a school-teacher and I was registered
in several Education courses. I found it hard to sit in classes and read the
textbooks. Simon was always ready to stand by me if I wanted to, though he
himself didn't have much use for universities.

I was still after the job Arthur refused to take with the millionaire who wanted
to write a book. This millionaire's name was Robey. He had studied with Frazer
when Frazer was an instructor, and that was why Mimi knew him. He was tall
and bent, he had a bad stammer, he wore a beard, he had been married four or
five times--Mimi told me these facts. Arthur said the book was to be a survey or
history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich. I wasn't so sure that
I wanted to do this but I didn't want Simon to keep on supporting me. I tried to
fish a loan from Einhorn but he held it against me that I was an old friend of
Mimi. He said, "I can't lend you anything. You realize that I have to support my
grandchild. The extra burden is tough. And what if Arthur decides to bless my
last years with another?" He was p.o.

So reluctantly I went to Arthur to ask him to phone Robey for me.

"This is a very strange fellow, Augie, he ought to amuse you."

"Oh hell, I don't want him to amuse me. I just want a job."

"Well, you'll have to try to understand him. He's very peculiar. He partly gets
it from his mother. She thought she was the queen of Rockford, Illinois. She
wore a crown. She had a throne. She expected everyone in town to bow to her."

"Does he live in Rockford now?"

"No, he has a mansion here on the South Side. When he was a student a chauf-
feur used to drive him to campus. For a long time he was mad on Great Books
and he used to buy space in the want ads and put in quotations from Plato
or Locke. Like, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' He has a sister
who's wacky too--Caroline. She think she's a Spaniard. But you have a gift
of getting along with these temperaments. You were a jewel with my dad."

"I was kind of in love with him."

"Maybe you'll love Robey too."

"He sounds to me like another crank. I can't always be connected with
ridiculous people. It's wrong."

But not long afterward, on a drizzly afternoon, I found myself face to face
with this man Robey in his house on the lakefront. And what a face it was--what
an appearance! Big, inflamed, reticent eyes, a reddish beard, red sullen lips, and
across his nose a blotch; the night before, when he was drunk or sleepy, he had
walked into the door of a taxi. His stutter was bad; when it really caught him he
made a great effort, fixed his soul, and twisted his head while his eyes took on
this discipline and almost hatred. At first I was astonished, and I was sorry for
his sake when his teeth clicked or a snarl escaped. But I soon found out how
fluent he could be in spite of it.

With those reticent, blood-flickered eyes of his he looked at me like someone
who had to explain he was born to difficulty and hard luck, and he opened his
lips before starting to speak, as if to separate the upper and lower hairs of the
beard.

He said, "What about l-l-lunch?"

We had a rotten lunch--thin clam chowder, a smoked ham which he sliced him-
self, boiled potatoes, wax beans, and twice-heated coffee. It made me kind of
sore that a millionaire should invite you to lunch and put on such a lousy feed.
He did the talking. Background first, he said. As his collaborator I'd have
to have some personal knowledge of him. He started to tell me of his five
marriages, taking his share of the blame for each divorce. But the marriages
formed part of his education; therefore he had to evaluate them. I was disgusted.
I took a sip of the coffee and let it flow back into the cup through my teeth, and
made a face. But he didn't notice. He was on his third wife, terribly boring. The
fourth gave him real insight into his character. I think he still carried the torch
for her. As he was vibrating his neck over a troublesome word I interrupted. I
was about to say, "What about some fresh coffee at least?" but I didn't have the
heart. Instead I asked, "But can you give me an idea as to what my work will
be?"

He became more tongue-free then. "I need advice," he said. "Help. I need to
clear up some of my concepts, m-my thinking, n-n-need cl-clarity. This is
s-something, this book."

"But what's it about?"

"It's not j-just a book--it's a guide, a p-p-program. I originated the idea
b-but now it's too much for me. I need help." As he spoke of help he sounded
frightened. "I discovered much too m-much. It was just an accident that it
happened to be me, and now I'm stu-stuck with the responsibility."

We went into the salon to continue the conversation. His walk was belly-heavy,
dragging, as if he had to remind himself not to step on his own dong.

It kept on drizzling; the lake looked like milk. Indoors, moony lamps glowed
on the plush and Far East crimson and mahogany. There were Persian screens
and Invalides horsehair helmets, busts of Pericles and Cicero and Athena, and
who-else-not. And there was a portrait of his mother. Sure enough, she looked
demented and wore a crown, a scepter in one hand and a rose in the other. The
fog-cradled ore-boats from Duluth to Gary were moaning. Robey sat under a
light, which showed the acne-exploded follicles under his beard.

He mightn't be very bright, Robey humbly started, but what could he do? he
couldn't escape ideas. None of us could escape ideas, and everybody was up
against the same thing, namely, that there were hundreds of things to think
about and to know. He had a duty to do his best at it. This was how he cover-
ed up his zeal, which I felt, however, powerfully trembling in the back.

This book, he went on, he wanted to call The Needle's Eye. Because there
never had been a spiritual life for the rich if they didn't give up everything.
But it wasn't any longer merely the rich who were headed for trouble. In the
near future technology was going to create abundance and everyone would have
enough of everything. There'd be inequality but not starvation or great need.
People would eat. Well, when they ate, what then? The Eden of liberty, plenty,
and love, the dream of the French Revolution coming to pass. But the French
had been too optimistic and thought that when the decrepit old civilizations were
busted nothing could stop us from entering the earthly paradise.But it wasn't
so simple. We were facing the greatest crisis in history. And he didn't mean the
war, then coming on. No, we'd find out if there was going to be this earthly
paradise or not.

"B-bread's almost free now in America. What'll hap-happen when the struggle
for bread is o-o. … Will goods free man or enslave him?"

You almost forgot to think about his goofy looks and about the lavish collect-
ion of screens, antiques, irons, Russian sleighs, hanks and tails of helmets,
and mother-of-pearl boxes. All the same, even when he was in the top spheres he
looked miserable, ready to weep tears. In the meantime the moldy ham taste kept
coming up on me.

"M-machinery'll make an ocean of commodities. Dictators can't stop it. Man
will accept death. Live without God. That's a b-brave project. End of an illu-
sion. But with what values instead?"

"That's quite a deal," I said.

"But," he said, "that's toward the end of the b-book. I think we should start
with Aristotle discussing how much of worldly goods you need before you can
practice virtue."

"I haven't read much Aristotle."

"Well, that's one of the th-things you have to do. You'll be paid for it, never
you worry. But I want this to be a solid piece of work and real scholarly. We're
going to cover the Greeks and Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance Italy, and I'm
p-planning a chart, the Min-Minoans way high, Calvin down low, Sir Walter
Raleigh, up; Carlyle, stinks; modern science, stand-still. Not even interested."

In the next half-hour he made sense only now and then; he seemed to tire, and
he rambled, he blinked his fire-streaked eyes and coughed in his fist.

"N-now-now you tell me about yourself," he said. I didn't know where to
begin and I damned him for asking me. But he wasn't listening. By the way he
looked at his wristwatch. I could tell he was wondering how soon he could be by
himself again.

So I asked to be shown the can, and he pointed it out. When I came back he
appeared to have recovered his interest in the book and wanted to discuss it some
more. He said he was sure I was the man to help him. And he started to outline
the whole thing for me. Part one, general statement. Part two, pagans. Three,
Christians and so forth. Four, practical examples of the highest happiness. His
excitement again rose. He took off a house slipper and laid it on a book or album
that was on the coffee table and every now and then he put it on again. He was
saying that Christianity originally was aimed at the lowly and slaves, and that
was why crucifixion and nailing and all such punitive grandeur of martyrdom
were necessary. But at the pole opposite, the happy pole, there ought to be an
equal thickness. Joy without sin, love without darkness, gay prosperity. Not to be
always spoiling things. O great age of generous love and time of a new man! Not
the poor, dark, disfigured creature cramped by his falsehood, a liar from the
cradle, flogged by poverty, smelling bad from cowardice, deeper than a latrine in
jealousy, dead as a cabbage to feeling, a maggot to beauty, a shrimp to duty,
spinning the same thread of cocoon preoccupation from his mouth. Without tears
to weep or enough expendable breath to laugh; cruel, frigging, parasitic,
sneaking, grousing, anxious, and sluggardly. Drilled like a Prussian by the
coarse hollering of sergeant fears. Robey poured it on me; he let it come down.

I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have
they sent me to? All the same my heart responded to this and these things went
home. My bottommost thought was, God have mercy on us poor human saps!
And this bottommost thought budded out with another: Even if God did have
mercy, this was what He'd have mercy on.

Then Robey switched on me. He was a quick changer of mood.

The damn bourgeoisie, he said, should have been leaders and offered practical
examples of happiness. But they were a historic failure. They fumbled it. A weak
dominant class, because all they had known how to do was to imitate the flow of
money around the world, fill in all the opportunities for profit, like water seek-
ing its own level, and to imitate the machine. Robey didn't sound like himself now,
not, that is, as earnest as before, but bookish. He scratched his foot and went on
like a lecturer, and with his beard, which looked straw-stuck, he was just one
more oddity of this room.

But I was still enough of an Einhorn worshiper to be taken with him. And I set
aside some of my criticisms and said, "You were talking about the salary before.
Could you be more definite?"

This made an unpleasant impression. "How m-much do you expect? Till I tell
how you pan out, I c-can start you at a reasonable figure."

"What's reasonable?"

"Fifteen a week?"

"You must be making a mistake in your figure. Fifteen? I can get that much
on relief and never lift a finger." It made me indignant.

"Eighteen then," he followed up fast.

"You try to get a plumber to fix your washbasin for less than half a buck an
hour. Are you trying to hoax me or something? I don't think you're being
serious."

"You ought to th-think of the ed-ed-ucation you'll be getting. And it isn't just
a job but a cau-cau-cause." He was very disturbed. "Well, twenty bu-bucks and
you can live upstairs rent free."

So he could lay hold of me and chew my ear whenever he felt like it, night
and day? Not on his life. "No," I said, "thirty a week for thirty hours."

It hurt him to put out dough. I could see what a labor it was for his soul just to
think about it.

Finally he said, "Okay, when you work out. Twenty-five to start."

"No, thirty, I told you."

He cried, "Why do you put me through this t-terrible haggle? It's really
t-terrible. What the devil! It defeats the whole purpose." His look was
positively full of hatred. But he hired me anyway.

From day to day he changed his plan. First he wanted to do the historical
section and assigned me to read Max Weber, Tawney, and Marx. Next I had to
drop all this to start research on a pamphlet on philanthropy. He hated all
philanthropist millionaires and wanted to hit all the puritanical rich who
looked so bad and felt so unhappy. He named some of his cousins among them,
so I could see it was all a family affair. Even the big brazen Wall Street
louse with his suckers full of blood did more good in the form of a devil
than these rich men who were worried, he said, like everybody else. Simply
worried. And he'd rave against them by the hour.

I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's
hangar. Like Einhorn's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days. And I really
understood that Robey wanted from me what Einhorn had wanted, the very same
thing, namely, a listener. He was on the telephone continually or sending the
car for me or hunting for me in the library or waiting outside classrooms for
me all the time.

The first few months he heaped readings on me. I never could have gotten
through all those Greeks and Fathers and histories of Rome and the Eastern
Empire and whatnot in years. I don't even know that anybody should want to
wade through so much stuff. But it suited me fine to sit in the library amid
a heap of books.

Twice a week we had official conferences. I'd come with my notebooks ready to
answer his questions with quotations and paraphrases. It was all right when he
was businesslike, but he had peculiar moods, when his voice straggled, he was
in woe, his hair in spikes and his color bloodshot, tears or anger in his voice,
and much too vexed and bothered to talk to me about Aristotle and theories of
happiness and so forth. He sometimes gave me some real jolts and astonishments.
As when, looking for him through the mansion one day, I found him standing on
a kitchen chair, wrapped in his bathrobe, pumping Flit into a cupboard while hun-
dreds of roaches rushed out practically clutching their heads and falling from
the walls. What a moment that was! He wildly raised hell as he worked the spray
gun, full of lust, and breathed as loudly as the spray itself while the animals land-
ed as thick as beans or beat it, crazy, like an Oklahoma land rush, in every direction.

Caught by me like this, Robey tried to swallow down his emotions and to act
as though he didn't hate the cockroaches or kill them with thrilling satisfaction.
It was kind of too bad he couldn't admit it. Moreover, I knew I had barged in at
the wrong moment and that he'd hold it against me. He wouldn't be able to help
it.

He gave a bad twitch, as if I had touched him in the small of the back, and
came down from the chair. "It's just too much. They're r-r-running away with
the hou-hou--the house. I put a slice of bread in the toaster and a roach
po-popped up toasted with the bread, so I couldn't t-take it any more."

All his rage, like an ember eating a hole through straw, suddenly was out, and
he led me to the salon where in the sunlight was seen much busted-out stuffing
and tears in buttonless royal green velvet and dust. He wiped the oily killer juice
off on his gown, saying, "Did you work up that Italian Renaissance stuff for me
about the p-princes and the h-humanists? How they suffered without God!" he
said, looking off. "But they were godlike themse-selves. What courage! And
terrible, t-t-too. But it had to happen, that m-man would dare."

In the autumn he lost his grip on himself. He went on giving me assignments
and I collected my thirty bucks with a free conscience, but he didn't do any
work.

I had often wondered what sort of women he went around with when unmarried,
whether spiffy whores or ladies of his own set, or Back-of-the-Yards pickups,
or nice little university girls, or what. I was surprised. He went for ordinary
strippers from the Near North Side, from Clark Street, Broadway, Rush, and
those parts, who were rough on him in their dealings. And as if it were a just
punishment he took it from them and even smiled. He tried to sell me on these
girls, but I had taken up once more with Sophie Geratis. He mostly seemed to
want me to come with him. Which I did a few times to North Side joints. One
stripper insulted him about the beard; he bowed to this. Only his red eyes,
which he didn't take off her--she was dressed now, wearing a gray tailored
suit--were something scandalous. But he merely said pedantically, "In the old
days of Elizabeth the barbers had lutes and guitars in the shop so the gentle-
men waiting could sing and play. It was because the beards and the lovelocks
took so long to fix."

On the same evening as he made this mild observation he went on a rampage
and tore the meter off in a taxi. I was supposed to get out at Fifty-fifth
Street but I worried lest the driver sock him for this and so took him home
first.

But he gave me a rough time just the same. He was very sensitive and wanted
my good opinion; however, he was extremely variable, humble one minute and
making sure of his money's worth the next, and yelling or being sullen, stick-
ing out his big red mouth in unhappiness or anger. I remember one day in parti-
cular. There were snow and sunshine all around, and it was fresh and beautiful,
but he was in a nasty mood, prodding his hands knuckle to knuckle in the pig-
skin gloves. He bitched at me and kept on and on. So I said, "You don't want
me to work for you. You want somebody who'll take this lousy nervousness from
you." And I wrapped my old coat around me, which was a camel's hair going
bald in places, and set off across the yard. He came after me to take it all back.
In the thick powder of snow I had on overshoes, but he came on in his fine tan
shoes which were slipper-like, saying, "Augie, let's not have a fight. For the
love of God. Listen, I'm sorry." But I went on, good and mad. And that evening
he phoned me and asked me to come and get him downtown. I could hear that
things weren't right. He said he'd be at the Pump Room, than which few places
were considered niftier in the city. When I got there and asked for him, two
knickered footmen brought him out. He was drunk, mute, numb, and could
scarcely budge a feature of his face or work his tongue.

Little by little he had come to depend on me. Somewhat like Einhorn in the
old days, he had found I wouldn't take advantage of him and that I was dep-
endable. And with his peculiarity and confusion, downright Guiana jungle mani-
festations or freaks that the power of life will squeeze into sometimes, there
nevertheless was something in him that drew me. Just that power, no doubt,
tormenting his humanity and tormented in return. And while he was a bachelor
and shared that mansion with his sister Caroline--well, she didn't do him much
good. She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a
shine to me, believing herself Spanish. She wrote me notes, such as, "Eres muy
Guapo." And now and then a telegram arrived, like, "Amigo, que te vaya con
toda suerte, Carolina." She was terribly scrambled, poor woman.

After all, I had taken care of my brother George. That ability or quality was
with me yet, and sometimes people sensed it.

Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.