Humboldt's Gift (60 page)

  “I wired Renata yesterday and asked her to marry me,” I said.

  “Did you? How nice. That should have been done long ago,” said the relentless Señora. “You can’t treat proud women like this. But I would be happy to have such a distinguished son-in-law and Roger loves you like his own daddy.”

  “But she hasn’t answered me.”

  “The postal system isn’t working. Haven’t you heard, Italy is breaking down?” she said. “Did you telephone too?”

  “I tried, Señora. I hesitate to call in the middle of the night. Anyway there’s never an answer.”

  “She may have gone with her father for the holiday. Maybe Biferno still owns his house in the Dolomites.”

  “Why don’t you use your influence for me, Señora,” I said. This capitulation was a mistake. To appeal to certain peculiar powers is the worst thing you can do. These vulcanized hearts, they only become more resistant when you ask for mercy. “You know I’m in Spain to work on a new type of Baedeker. After Madrid Renata and I, if we got married, would be going on to Vienna, Rome, and Paris. I’m going to buy a new Mercedes-Benz. We could hire a governess for the boy. There’s a great deal of money in this.” I now dropped names, I bragged of my connections in European capitals, I babbled. She was less and less impressed. Maybe she had had a talk with Szathmar. I don’t know why, but Szathmar loved to give my secrets away. Then I said, “Señora, why don’t we go to the Flamenco Cabaret—the whatch-amacallit that advertises all over the place? I really love strong voices and people hammering with their heels. We can get a sitter for Roger.”

  “Oh, very good,” she said.

  So we spent the evening with gypsies, and I splurged and behaved like a man with plenty of money. I discussed rings and wedding gifts with the crazy old woman at every interval in the guitar music and hand-clapping.

  “What have you seen, going back and forth in Madrid, that might appeal to Renata?” I asked her.

  “Oh, the most elegant leather and suède. Coats and gloves and bags and shoes,” she said. “But I found a street where they sell exquisite cloaks and I talked with the president of the International Cloak Society, Los Amigos de la Capa, and he showed me, with hoods and without hoods, the most stunning velvet dark-green items.”

  “I’ll buy one for her first thing tomorrow,” I said.

  If the Señora had given even the slightest hint of discouragement I might have known where I stood. But she gave me only a dry look. A blink crossed the table. It even seemed to come from the bottom of her eye upward, like a nictitating membrane. My impression was of a forest, and of a clearing from which a serpent departed just as I got to it on a dry and golden autumn afternoon fragrant with leaf mold. I mention this for what it may be worth. Nothing, probably. But I had been going around to the Prado, around the corner from the Ritz, looking at some strange pictures every free moment and especially the burlesque visions of Goya and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. My mind was prepared therefore for visiting images and even hallucinations.

  “I congratulate you on finally making sense,” said the old woman. She didn’t say, mind you, that I had done this in time. She said, “I brought Renata up to make a perfect wife to a serious man.”

  A born patsy, I concluded from this that I was the serious man she meant and that these women had not yet reached an irrevocable decision. I celebrated this possibility by drinking a large amount of Lepanto brandy. As a result I slept soundly and woke rested. In the morning I opened the high windows and enjoyed the traffic wheeling in the sun, the dignified plaza with the white Palace Hotel on the far side. Delicious rolls and coffee were brought with sculptured butter and Hero jam. For ten years I had lived in style, well tailored, with custom-made shirts and cashmere stockings and silk neckties, esthetically satisfying. Now this silly splendor was ending but I, with my experience of the great Depression, knew austerity perfectly well. I had spent most of my life in it. The hardship was not living in a rooming house but becoming just another old guy, no longer capable of inspiring the minds of pretty ladies with May-December calculations or visions of being mistress of a castle like Mrs. Charlie Chaplin, having ten children by an autumnal-to-wintry husband of great stature. Could I bear to live without having this effect on women? And then possibly, just possibly, Renata loved me well enough to accept conditions of austerity. On an income of fifteen thousand dollars, promised by Julius if I were to invest fifty thousand with him, something very nice could be arranged in Segovia. I could even put up with the Señora for the rest of her life. Which I hoped would not be long. No hard feelings, you understand, but it would be nice to lose her soon.

  I tried to reach Thaxter in Paris—the Hotel Pont-Royal was his address there. I also put in a call for Carl Stewart in New York. I wanted to discuss the cultural Baedeker with Thaxter’s publisher myself. I also wanted to make certain that he would pay my bill at the Ritz. Thaxter was not registered at the Pont-Royal. Maybe he was staying with his mother’s friend, the Princesse de Bourbon-Sixte. I was not disturbed. Having discussed the details of my New York call with the switchboard I gave myself ten minutes of tranquillity by the window. I enjoyed the winter freshness and the sun. I tried to experience the sun not as a raging thermonuclear pile of gases and fissions but as a being, an entity with a life and meanings of its own, if you know what I mean.

  Thanks to penicillin, Roger was well enough to go to the Retiro with his grandma, so I had no responsibility for him this morning. I performed thirty push-ups and stood on my head; then I shaved and dressed and strolled out. I left the grand boulevards and found my way into the back streets of the old city. My object was to buy a beautiful cloak for Renata but I remembered Julius’s request for a marine painting and since I had lots of time I went into antique shops and art galleries to have a look. But in all the blue and green, foam and sun, calm and storm, there was always a rock, a sail, a funnel and Julius wasn’t having any of that. Nobody cared to paint the pure element, the inhuman water, the middle of the ocean, the formless deep, the world-enfolding sea. I kept thinking of Shelley among the Euganean Hills:

        Many a green isle needs must be

        In the deep wide sea of Misery ...

  But Julius didn’t see why there needs must be anything in any sea whatever. Like a reverse Noah he sent out his dove brother, beautifully dressed, greatly troubled, anguishing over Renata, to find him water only. Shop assistants, girls, all of them, in black smocks, were bringing up old seascapes from the cellars because I was an American on the loose with traveler’s checks in his pocket. I didn’t feel foreign among Spaniards. They resembled my parents and my immigrant aunts and cousins. We were parted when the Jews were expelled in 1492. Unless you were very stingy with time, that wasn’t really so long ago.

  And I wondered how American my brother Ulick was after all. From the first he had taken the view that America was that materially successful happy land that didn’t need to trouble its mind, and he had dismissed the culture of the genteel and their ideals and aspirations. Now the famous Santayana agreed, in a way, with Ulick. The genteel couldn’t attain their ideals and were very unhappy. Genteel America was handicapped by meagerness of soul, thinness of temper, paucity of talent. The new America of Ulick’s youth only asked for comfort and speed and good cheer, health and spirits, football games, political campaigns, outings, and cheerful funerals. But this new America now revealed a different bent, new kinks. The period of pleasant hard-working exuberance and of practical arts and technics strictly in the service of material life was also ending. Why did Julius want to celebrate the new veins grafted to his heart by miraculous medical technology by buying a water painting? Because even he was no longer all business. He now felt metaphysical impulses too. Maybe he had had it with the ever-alert practical American soul. In six decades he had spotted all the rackets, smelled all the rats, and he was tired of being the absolute and sick master and boss of the inner self. What did a seascape devoid of landmarks signify? Didn’t it signify elemental liberty, release from the daily way and the horror of tension? O God, liberty!

  I knew that if I went to the Prado and asked around, I could find a painter to paint me a seascape. If he charged me two thousand dollars, I could get five from Julius. But I rejected the idea of making a buck on a brother with whom I had bonds of such unearthly satin. I looked over all the marine paintings in one corner of Madrid and then went on to the cape shop.

  There I did business with the president of the international society Los Amigos de la Capa. He was swarthy and small, stood somewhat lopsided, like a jammed accordion, had tooth problems and bad breath. On his dark face were white sycamore patches. As Americans do not tolerate such imperfections in themselves, I felt that I was in the Old World. The shop itself had a broken wooden floor. Cloaks hung from the ceiling everywhere. Women with long poles brought down these beautiful garments, velvet-lined, brocaded, and modeled them for me. Thaxter’s carabiniere costume looked sick by comparison. I bought a black cloak lined with red (black and red—Renata’s best colors) and forked over two hundred dollars in American Express checks. Many thanks and courtesies were exchanged. I shook hands with everyone and couldn’t wait to get back to the Ritz with my parcel to show the Señora.

  But the Señora wasn’t there. In my room I found Roger on the settee, his feet resting on his packed bag. A chambermaid was keeping an eye on him. “Where’s Grandma?” I said. The maid told me that about two hours before the Señora had been called away urgently. I phoned the cashier, who told me that my guest, the lady in Room 482, had checked out and that her charges would appear on my bill. Then I dialed the concierge. Oh yes, he said, a limousine had taken Madam to the airport. No, Madam’s destination was not known. They had not been asked to arrange tickets for her.

  “Charlie, have you got chocolate?” said Roger.

  “Yes, kid, I brought you some.” He needed all the sweet he could get, and I handed him the entire bar.
There
was someone whose desire I understood. He desired his Mama. We desired the same person. Poor little guy, I thought, as he peeled the foil from the chocolate and filled his mouth. I had a true feeling for this kid. He was in that feverish beautiful state of pale childhood when we are beating all over with pulses—nothing but a craving defenseless greedy heart. I remembered the condition very well. The chambermaid, when she found that I knew a little Spanish, asked whether Rogelio were my grandson. “No!” I said. It was bad enough that he had been dumped on me, must I be a grandfather, too? Renata was on her honeymoon with Flonzaley. Never having been married herself, the Señora was mad to achieve respectability for her daughter. And Renata, for all of her erotic development, was an obedient child. Perhaps the Señora, when she schemed on her daughter’s behalf, felt herself more youthful. To do me in the eye must have made her decades younger. As for me, I now saw the connection between eternal youth and stupidity. If I was not too old to chase Renata, I was young enough to suffer adolescent heartache.

  So I told the maid that Rogelio and I were not related although I was certainly old enough to be his
abuelo
, and I gave her a hundred pesetas to mind him for another hour. Even though I was going broke I still had money enough for certain refined needs. I could afford to suffer like a gentleman. Just now I couldn’t cope with the kid. I had an urge to go to the Retiro, where I could abandon myself and beat my breast or stamp my feet or curse or weep. As I was leaving my room the phone rang and I snatched it up, hoping to hear Renata’s voice. It was, however, New York calling.

  “Mr. Citrine? This is Stewart in New York. We’ve never met. I know of you, of course.”

  “Yes, I wanted to ask you. You are publishing a book by Pierre Thaxter on dictators?”

  “We have great hopes for it,” he said.

  “Where is Thaxter now, in Paris?”

  “At the last moment he changed his plans and flew to South America. So far as I know he’s in Buenos Aires interviewing Perón’s widow. Very exciting. The country’s being torn apart.”

  “You know, I suppose,” I said, “that I’m in Madrid to explore the possibility of doing a cultural guide to Europe.”

  “Is that so?” he said.

  “Didn’t Thaxter tell you that? I thought we had your blessing.”

  “I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “You’re sure now? You have no recollection?”

  “What’s this all about, Mr. Citrine?”

  “To be brief,” I said. “Only this question: Am I in Madrid as your guest?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “
Ay, que lío
!”

  “Sir?”

  In the curtained alcove, suddenly cold, I crawled into bed with the telephone. I said, “It’s a Spanish expression like
malentendu
or
snafu
or screwed again. Excuse the emphasis. I am under stress.”

  “Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain this in a letter,” said Mr. Stewart. “Are you at work on a book? We’d be interested, you know.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “But if you should get started ...”

  “I’ll write you a letter,” I said.

  I was paying for this call.

  Now very stormy, I asked the operator to try Renata again. I’ll tell that bitch a thing or two, I thought. But when I got through, Milan said that she had gone and left no address. By the time I got to the Retiro, intending to express myself, there was nothing to express. I took a meditative walk. I reached the same conclusions I had reached in Judge Urbanovich’s chambers. What good would it do me to tell Renata off? Fierce and exquisite speeches, perfect in logic, mature in judgment, deep in wise rage, heavenly in poetry, were all right for Shakespeare but they wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for me. The desire for emission still existed but reception was lacking for my passionate speech. Renata didn’t want to hear it, she had other things on her mind. Well, at least she trusted me with Rogelio and in her own good time she’d send for him. By brushing me off like this she had probably done me a service. At least she would see it in that way. I should have married her long ago. I was a man of little faith, my hesitancy was insulting, and it was quite right that I should be left to mind her kid. Furthermore, I suppose the ladies figured that Rogelio would tie me down and prevent pursuit. Not that I had any intention of pursuing. By now I couldn’t even afford it. For one thing, the bill at the Ritz was enormous. The Señora had made many telephone calls to Chicago to keep in touch with a certain young man whose business was to repair television sets, her present
affaire de coeur
. Moreover, Christmas in Madrid, counting Roger’s illness and his presents, gourmet dining, and Renata’s cloak, had reduced my assets by nearly a third. For many years, since the success of
Von Trench
, or about the time of Demmie Vonghel’s death, I had spent freely, lived it up, but now I must go back to the old rooming-house standard. To stay at the Ritz I would have to hire a governess. It was impossible anyway. I was going broke. My best alternative was to move into a
pensión
.