Humboldt's Gift (57 page)

  We went to a Mexican restaurant where he devoured an order of chicken breasts with
molé
sauce—a bitter spicy chocolate gravy. I could not finish mine. He took my plate. He ordered pecan pie à la mode, and then a cup of Mexican chocolate.

  When we got home I said I would go to my motel and lie down; I was very tired. We stood together in his garden for a while.

  “Do you even begin to get the picture of this peninsula?” he said. “With this land I could do the most brilliant piece of business in my life. These smart-ass Cubans will have to go along. I’ll sweep those bastards with me. I’ll develop a plan—while I’m convalescing I’ll get a survey done, and a map, and when I make my pitch to those lazy Spanish jet-set bastards, I’ll be prepared with architect’s models and all my financing ready. I mean
if
, you know. Do you want to try some of these loquats?” He reached gloomily into one of his trees and picked handfuls of fruit.

  “I’m bilious now,” I said, “from all I’ve eaten.”

  He stood plucking and eating, spitting out stones and skins, his gaze fixed beyond me. He wiped at his Acheson mustache from time to time. Arrogant, haggard, he was filled with incommunicable thoughts. These were written dense and small on every inch of his inner surface. “I won’t see you in Houston before the operation, Charlie,” he said. “Hortense is against it. She says you’ll make me too emotional, and she’s a woman who knows what she’s talking about. Now this is what I want to say to you, Charlie. If I die, you marry Hortense. She’s a better woman than you’ll ever find by yourself. She’s straight as they come. I trust her one hundred percent, and you know what that means. She acts a little rough but she’s made me a wonderful life. You’ll never have another financial problem, I can tell you that.”

  “Have you discussed this with Hortense?”

  “No, I’ve written it in a letter. She probably guesses that I want her to marry a Citrine, if I die on the table.” He stared hard at me and said, “She’ll do what I tell her. So will you.”

  Late noon stood like a wall of gold. And a mass of love was between us, and neither Ulick nor I knew what to do with it. “Well, all right, good-by.” He turned his back on me. I got into the rented car and took off.

  thirty-two

  Hortense, on the telephone, said, “Well, he made it. They took veins from his leg and attached them to his heart. He’s going to be stronger than ever now.”

  “Thank God for that. He’s out of danger?”

  “Oh, sure, and you can see him tomorrow.”

  During the operation Hortense hadn’t wanted my company. I attributed this to wife/brother rivalry, but later I changed my mind. I recognized a kind of boundlessness or hysteria in my affection which, in her place, I would have avoided, too. But on the phone there was a tone in her voice I had never heard before. Hortense raised exotic flowers and hollered at dogs and men—that was her style. This time, however, I felt that I shared what as a rule she reserved for the flowers and my attitude toward her changed entirely. Humboldt used to tell me, and he was a harsh judge of character himself, that far from being mild I was actually too tough. My reform (if it was one) would have pleased him. In this critical age, following science (fantasy-science is really what it is) people think they are being “illusion-less” about one another. The law of parsimony makes detraction more realistic. Therefore I had had my reservations about Hortense. Now I thought she was a good broad. I had been lying on the king-sized motel bed reading some of Humboldt’s papers and books by Rudolf Steiner and his disciples, and I was in a state.

  I don’t know what I expected to see when I entered Ulick’s room—bloodstains, perhaps, or bone-dust from the power saw; they had pried open the man’s rib cage and taken out his heart; they had shut it off like a small motor and laid it aside and started it up again when they were ready. I couldn’t get over this. But I came into a room filled with flowers and sunlight. Over Ulick’s head was a small brass plate engraved with the names of Papa and Mama. His color was green and yellow, the bone of his nose stuck out, his white mustache grew harshly under it. His look, however, was happy. And his fierceness was still there, I was glad to see. He was weak, of course, but he was all business again. If I had told him that I thought he looked a shade other-worldly he would have listened with contempt. Here was the polished window, here were the grand roses and dahlias, and here was Mrs. Julius Citrine in a knitted trouser-suit, her legs plump, low to the ground, an attractive short strong woman. Life went on. What life? This life. And what was this life? But now was not a time to be metaphysical. I was very eager, Very happy. I kept things under my peculiar hat, however.

  “Well, kid,” he said, his voice still thin. “You’re glad, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, Ulick.”

  “A heart can be fixed like a shoe. Resoled. Even new uppers. Like Novinson on Augusta Street .’. .”

  I suppose that I was Ulick’s nostalgia-man. What he couldn’t himself remember, he loved to hear from me. Tribal chieftains in Africa had had official remembrancers about them; I was Ulick’s remembrancer. “Novinson in his window had trench souvenirs from 1917,” I said. “He had brass shell casings and a helmet with holes in it. Over his bench was a colored cartoon made by his son Izzie of a customer squirted in the face and leaping into the air yelling, ‘
Hilp
!’ The message was,
Don’t Get Soaked for Shoe Repairs
.”

  Ulick said to Hortense, “All you have to do is turn him on.”

  She smiled from her upholstered chair, her legs crossed. The color of her knitted suit was old rose, or young brick. She was as white-faced as a powdered Kabuki dancer, for despite her light eyes her face was Japanese—the cheekbones and the chub lips, painted crimson, did that.

  “Well, Ulick, I’ll be going, now that you’re out of the woods.”

  “Listen, Chuck, there’s something I’ve always wanted that you can buy for me in Europe. A beautiful seascape. I’ve always loved paintings of the sea. Nothing but the sea. I don’t want to see a rock, or a boat, or any human beings. Only mid-ocean on a terrific day. Water water everywhere: Get me that, Chuckie, and I’ll pay five grand, eight grand. Phone me if you come across the right thing and I’ll wire the money.”

  It was implied that I was entitled to a commission—unofficial, of course. It would be unnatural for me not to chisel a little. This was the form his generosity sometimes took. I was touched.

  “I’ll go to the galleries,” I said.

  “Good. Now what about the fifty thousand—have you thought about my offer?”

  “Oh, I’d certainly like to take you up on that. I need the income badly. I’ve already cabled a friend of mine—Thaxter. He’s on his way to Europe on the
France
. I told him that I was willing to go to Madrid to try my hand at a project he dreamed up. A cultural Baedeker ... So I’m going to Madrid now.”

  “Fine. You need projects. Get back to work. I know you. When you stop work you’re in trouble. That broad in Chicago has brought your work to a standstill, with her lawyers. She knows what the stoppage does to you—Hortense, we have to look after Charlie a little, now.”

  “I agree we should,” said Hortense. From moment to moment I more and more admired and loved Hortense. What a wonderful and sensitive woman she was, really, and what emotional versatility the Kabuki mask concealed. Her gruffness had put me off. But behind the gruffness, what goodness, what a rose garden. “Why not make more of an effort to settle with Denise?” she said.

  “She doesn’t want to settle,” said Ulick. “She wants his gizzard in a glass on her mantelpiece. When he offers her more dough she raises the ante again. It’s no use. The guy is pissing against the wind in Chicago. He needs broads, but he picks women who cripple him. So get back to business, Chuck, and start turning the stuff out. If you don’t keep your name before the public people will assume you’re gone and they missed your obituary. How much can you get out of this culture-guide deal? Fifty? Hold out for a hundred. Don’t forget the taxes. Did you get caught in the stock market too? Of course you did. You’re an America expert. You have to experience what the whole country experiences. You know what I’d do? I’d buy old railroad bonds. Some of them are selling for forty cents on the dollar. Only railroads can move the coal, and the energy crisis is bringing coal back strongly. We ought to acquire some coal-lands, too. Under Indiana and Illinois, the whole Midwest is a solid mass of coal. It can be crushed, mixed with water, and pumped through pipelines, but that’s not economical. Even water is getting to be a scarce commodity,” said Ulick, off on one of his capitalistic fugues. On this subject of coal he was a romantic poet, a Novalis speaking of earth-mysteries. “You get together some dough. Send it and I’ll invest for you.”

  “Thank you, Ulick,” I said.

  “Right. Bug off. Stay in Europe, what the hell do you want to come back for? Get me a seascape.”

  He and Hortense went back to their development plans for the Cubans’ peninsula. He fiercely applied his genius to maps and blueprints while Hortense dialed bankers for him on the telephone. I kissed my brother and his wife and drove my Avis to the airport.

  thirty-three

  Although I was full of joy, I knew that things were not going well in Milan. Renata troubled my mind. I didn’t know what she was up to. From the motel last night I had talked with her on the telephone. I asked her what was happening. She said, “I’m not going into this on a transatlantic call, Charlie, it’s too expensive.” But then she wept for two solid minutes. Even Renata’s intercontinental sobs were fresher than other women’s close at hand. After this, still tearful, she laughed at herself and said, “Well, that was two-bits a tear, at least. Yes, I’ll meet you in Madrid, you bet I will.”

  “
Is
Signor Biferno your father?” I said.

  “You sound as if the suspense is killing you. Imagine what it’s doing to me. Yes, I think Biferno is my dad. I
feel
he is.”

  “What does he feel? He must be a glorious-looking man. No punk could beget a woman like you, Renata.”

  “He’s old and caved in. He looks like somebody they forgot to take off from Alcatraz. And he hasn’t talked to me. He won’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Before I left, Mother didn’t tell me that she was all set to sue him. Her papers were served on him the day before I arrived. It’s a paternity suit. Child support. Damages.”

  “Child support? You’re almost thirty. And the Señora didn’t tell you that she was plotting this?” I said.

  “When you sound incredulous, when you take that I-can’t-believe-it tone I know you’re really in a furious rage. You’re sore about the money this trip is costing.”

  “Renata, why did the Señora have to sock Biferno with summonses just as you’re about to solve the riddle of your birth?— to which she should have the answer, by the way. You go on this errand for the sake of your heart, or your identity—you’ve spent weeks fretting about your identity crisis—and then your own mother pulls this. You can’t blame me for being baffled. It’s wild. What a plan for conquest the old girl has hatched. All this —fire-bombing, victory, unconditional surrender.”

  “You can’t bear to hear of women suing men. You don’t know what I owe my mother. Bringing up a girl like me was a pretty rough project. As for what she pulled on me, remember what people pull on you. This Cantabile, may he rot in hell, or Szathmar or Thaxter. Watch out for Thaxter. Take the month at the Ritz but don’t sign any contract or anything. Thaxter will take his money and stick you with all the work.”

  “No, Renata, he’s peculiar, but he is basically trustworthy.”

  “Good-by, darling,” she said. “I’ve missed you like mad. Remember what you once said to me about the British lion standing up with his paw on the globe? You said that when you set your paw on my globe it was better than an empire. The sun never sets on Renata! I’ll be waiting in Madrid.”

  “You seem to be washed up in Milan,” I said.

  She answered by telling me, like Ulick, that I must begin to work again. “Only for God’s sake don’t write that pedantic stuff you’re unloading on me lately,” she said.

  But now the whole Atlantic must have surged between us; or perhaps the communications satellite was peppered with glittering particles in the upper air. Anyway, the conversation crumpled and ended.

  But when the plane took off I felt unusually free and light— trundled out on the bowed eagle legs of the 747, lifted into flight on the great wings, the machine passing from level to level into brighter and brighter atmospheres while I gripped my briefcase between my feet like a rider and my head lay on the bosom of the seat. On balance I believed that the Señora’s wicked and goofy lawsuit improved my position. She discredited herself. My kindliness, my patience, my sanity, my superiority would gain on Renata. All I had to do was to keep my mouth shut and to sit tight. Thoughts about her came thick and fast—all kinds of things connecting what-beautiful-girls-contributed-to-the-unfold-ing-destiny-of-capitalist-Democracy to, far beyond this, deeper questions. Let me see if I can clarify any of it. Renata was very nearly aware, as many people now are, of “leading a life in history.” Now Renata was, as a biologically noble beauty, in a false category—Goya’s
Maja
smoking a cigar, or Wallace Stevens’ Fretful Concubine who whispered “Pfui!” That is she wished to defy and outsmart the category to which she was assigned by common opinion. But with this she also collaborated. And if there is one historical assignment for us it is to break with false categories. Vacate the personae. I once suggested to her, “A woman like you can be called a dumb broad only if Being and Knowledge are entirely separate. But if Being is also a form of Knowledge, one’s own Being is one’s own accomplishment in some degree. . . .”

  “Then I’m not a dumb broad after all. I can’t be, if I’m so beautiful. That’s super! You’ve always been kind to me, Charlie.”

  “Because I really love you, kid.”

  Then she wept a little because, sexually, she was not all that she was cracked up to be. She had her hang-ups. Sometimes she accused herself wildly, crying, “The truth! I’m a phony! I like it better under the table.” I told her not to exaggerate. I explained to her that the Ego had emancipated itself from the Sun and it must undergo the pain of this emancipation (Steiner). The modern sexual ideology could never counteract this. Programs of uninhibited natural joy could never free us from the universal tyranny of selfhood. Flesh and blood never could live up to such billing. And so on.