Humboldt's Gift (61 page)

  I had to account somehow for this child. If I described myself as his uncle it would raise suspicions. If I called myself his grandfather, I would have to behave like a grandfather. To be a widower was best. Rogelio called me Charlie, but in American children this was normal. Besides, the boy
was
in a sense an orphan, and I was without exaggeration bereaved. I went out and bought myself mourner’s handkerchiefs and some very fine black silk neckties and a little black suit for Rogelio. I gave the American Embassy an extremely plausible account of a lost passport. It luckily happened that the young man who took care of such matters knew my books on Woodrow Wilson and on Harry Hopkins. A history major from Cornell, he had heard me once when I gave a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association. I told him my wife had died of leukemia and that my wallet had been stolen on a bus here in Madrid. The young fellow told me that this town had always been notorious for its pickpockets. “Priests’ pockets are picked under the soutane. They really are slick here. Many Spaniards boast that Madrid is a world center for this picking of pockets. To change the subject— maybe you’d lecture for the USIA.”

  “I’m too depressed,” I said. “Besides, I’m here to do research. I’m preparing a book on the Spanish-American War.”

  “We’ve had leukemia cases in my family,” he said. “These lingering deaths leave you wrung out.”

  At the Pensión La Roca I told the landlady that Roger’s mother had been killed by a truck when she stepped off a curb in Barcelona.

  “Oh, what a horrible thing.”

  “Yes,” I said. I had prepared myself fully, consulting the Spanish dictionary. I added with great fluency, “My poor wife— her chest was crushed, her face was destroyed, her lungs were punctured. She died in agony.”

  Leukemia, I felt, was much too good for Renata.

  thirty-four

  In the
pensión
were any number of sociable people. Some spoke English, some French, and communication was possible. An Army captain and his wife lived there, and also some ladies from the Danish Embassy. One of these, the most outstanding, was a gimpy blond of about fifty. Occasionally, a sharp face and protruding teeth can be pleasant, and she was a rather agreeable-looking person, although the skin of her temples had gone a little silky (the veins), and she was even slightly hunchbacked. But hers was one of those commanding personalities that takes over a dining room or a drawing room not because they say much but because they know the secret of proclaiming their pre-eminence. As for the staff, the chambermaids who doubled as waitresses, they were extremely kind. Black means much less in the Protestant north. In Spain mourning still carries a lot of weight. Rogelio’s little black suit was even more effective than my bordered handkerchief and my armband. When I fed him his lunch we brought the house down. It was not unusual for me to cut up the kid’s meat. I did this normally in Chicago. But somehow, in the small, windowless dining room of the
pensión
, it was an eye opener—this unexpected disclosure of the mothering habits of American men got to people. My fussing over Roger must have been unbearably sad. Women began to help me. I put the
empleadas del hogar
on my payroll. In a few days’ time he was speaking Spanish. Mornings, he attended a nursery school. Late every afternoon, one of the maids took him to the park. I was free to walk about Madrid or to lie on my bed and meditate. My life was quieter. Full quietude was something I couldn’t expect, under the circumstances.

  This was not the life I had pictured in the little plush seat of the 747, rushing over the deep Atlantic stream. Then, as I had put it to myself, the little bubble in the carpenter’s level might be coaxed back into the center. Now I wasn’t sure that I had a bubble at all. Then there was Europe, too. For knowledgeable Americans, Europe was not much good these days. It led the world in nothing. You had to be a backward sort of person (a vulgar broad, a Renata—not to beat about the bush) to come here with serious cultural expectations. The sort of thing propagated by ladies’ fashion magazines. I am obligated to confess, however, that I too had come this time with pious ideals, or the remnants of such ideals. People had once done great things here, inspired by the spirit. There were still relics of holiness and of art here. You wouldn’t find Saint Ignatius, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, El Greco, the Escorial on Twenty-sixth and California or at the Playboy Club in Chicago. But then there was no little Citrine family group in Segovia with the Daddy trying to achieve the separation of consciousness from its biological foundation, while the sexual, rousing Mommy busied herself with the antiques trade. No, Renata had given me my lumps and she had done it in such a way that my personal dignity was badly damaged. The mourning I wore helped me to recover, somewhat. Black garments put me on polite and courteous terms with the Spanish. A suffering widower and a pale foreign orphan touched the shop assistants, especially the women. At the
pensión
, the secretary from the Danish Embassy took a particular interest in us. She was very pale, and her pallor had origins very different from Roger’s. She had a dry, hectic look and she was so white that the lipstick raged on her mouth. She applied it after dinner with a violent effect. Yet her intentions weren’t bad. She took me for a walk one Sunday afternoon, when I was not at my best. She put on a cloche or bucket hat and we walked slowly, for she had a hip ailment. As we followed the paths with the holiday crowds, she gave me a talking-to about sorrow.

  “Was your wife beautiful?”

  “Oh, she was very beautiful.”

  “You Americans are so self-indulgent about grief. How long has she been dead?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Last week you said three.”

  “You can see for yourself, I’ve lost all sense of time.”

  “Well now, you’ve got to get back on your feet. There are times when you have to cut—cut your losses. What’s the expression? Spin the thing off. I’ve got some good brandy in my room. Come have a drink when the boy is asleep. You have to share a double bed with him, don’t you?”

  “They’re trying to find us two singles.”

  “Isn’t he restless? Children kick a lot.”

  “He’s a quiet sleeper. I can’t sleep anyway. I lie there reading.”

  “We can find you something better than that to do at night,” she said. “What’s the use of brooding. She’s gone.”

  She was certainly gone. That was fully confirmed now. She had written me from Sicily. On Saturday, only yesterday, when I stopped at the Ritz to ask for mail, I was given her letter. This was why I was not at my best on Sunday; I’d been up all night studying Renata’s words. If I couldn’t attend very closely to Miss Rebecca Volsted, this furiously white limping woman, it was because I was suffering. I might almost have wished that Roger weren’t such a good child. He did not even kick in his sleep. He gave me no headaches. He was a dear little boy.

  Renata and Flonzaley had gotten married in Milan and they were honeymooning in Sicily. I suppose they went to Taormina. She didn’t specify. She wrote, “You are the best person to leave Roger with. You’ve proved often that you love him for his own sake and never used him to get at me. Mother is too busy to look after him. You don’t think so now, but you’ll get over this and remain a good friend. You’ll be sore and bitter and call me a scheming dirty cunt—that’s how you talk when you’re burned up. But you’ve got justice in your heart, Charles. You owe me something and you know it. You had your chance to do right by me. You missed it! Oh, you missed it! I couldn’t get you started doing right!” Renata burst into mourning. I had spoiled it. “The role you got me into was the palooka role. I was your marvelous sex-clown. You had me cooking dinner in a top hat, and my behind bare.” Not so, not so, that was her own idea. “I was a good sport and let you have your fun. I enjoyed myself, too. I didn’t deny you anything. You denied me plenty, though. You wouldn’t remember that I was the mother of a boy. You showed me off in London as your spectacular lay from Chicago, that Toddling town. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gave me a private feel. He did, the bastard. I let it pass because of the former greatness of Britain. But he wouldn’t have done it if I had been your wife. You put me in the whore position. I don’t think you have to be a professor of anatomy to connect the ass with the heart. If you had acted as though I had a heart in my breast just like your distinguished highness the Chevalier Citrine, we might have made it. Ah Charlie, I’ll never forget how you smuggled Cuban cigars for me from Montreal. You put
Cyrus the Great
bands on them. You were kind and funny. I believed you when you said that a peculiar foot needed a peculiar shoe and that we were shoe and foot, foot and shoe together. Why, if you had only thought the obvious thing, ‘This is a kid who grew up in hotel lobbies, and her mother never was married,’ you would have married me in every city hall and church in America and given me some protection, finally. This Rudolf Steiner you’ve been driving me crazy with says, I think, that if you’re a man this time, you’ll be reincarnated as a woman, and that the ether body (not that I’m sure what an ether body is; it’s the vital part that makes the body live, isn’t it?) is always of the other sex. But if you’re going to be a woman in your next life, you’ve got a lot to learn in between. I’ll tell you something anyway. Many a woman would admit, if she was honest, that what she’d really adore is a man made up of many men, a composite lover or husband. She loves this in X and that in Y and something else again in Z. Now you are charming, delightful, touching, usually a pleasure to be with. You could have been my X and partly my Y, but you were a complete dud in the Z department.

  “I miss you this minute, and what’s more Flonzaley knows it. But one advantage of his business is that it’s made him very basic. You once said to me that Flonzaley’s point of view must be Plutonian—whatever that meant. I put it that his trade is gloomy but his character is roomy. He doesn’t insist that I shouldn’t love you. Don’t forget that I didn’t run away with a stranger. I went back to him. When we parted at Idlewild, I didn’t know I was going to do it. But I got out of patience with you. There are too many zigzags in your temperament. Both of us need more serious arrangements.”

  Wait a minute. She said this and she said that, but was she giving me up because I was about to go broke? That would never be a problem with Flonzaley. Probably Renata knew that I was beginning to think about a more austere sort of life. I hadn’t renounced my money out of principle. Urbanovich was taking it from me, and that was just as well. But I was beginning to see the American dollar-drive for what it was. It had assumed the proportions of a cosmic force. It stood between us and the real forces. But no sooner had I thought this than I understood one of Renata’s reasons for giving me up—she gave me up because I thought such thoughts as this. In her own way, she was telling me so.

  “Now you can write your big essay on boredom, and maybe the human race will be grateful. It’s suffering, and you want to help. It’s a wonderful thing to knock yourself out over these deep problems, but personally I don’t care to be around when you’re doing it. I admit you’re smart. That’s all right with me.
You
should be as tolerant toward undertakers as
I
am toward intellectuals. When it comes to men, my judgments are completely female-human, regardless of race, creed, or previous condition of servitude, as Lincoln said. Congratulations, your intelligence is terrific. Still I agree with your old sweetie Naomi Lutz. I don’t want to get involved in all this spiritual, intellectual, universal stuff. As a beautiful woman and still young, I prefer to take things as billions of people have done throughout history. You work, you get bread, you lose a leg, kiss some fellows, have a baby, you live to be eighty and bug hell out of everybody, or you get hung or drowned. But you don’t spend years trying to dope your way out of the human condition. To me that’s boring.” Yes, when she said this, I saw thinkers of genius throwing skeins of belief and purpose over the heads of the multitude. I saw them molesting the race with their fancies, programs, and world-perspectives. Not that the race itself was guiltless. But it had incredible abilities to work, to feel, to believe, which it was asked to bestow here, bestow there by those who were convinced that they knew best and abused mankind with projects. “And you never asked me,” she went on, “but I have my own beliefs. I believe I live in nature. I think that when you’re dead you’re dead, and that’s that. And this is what Flonzaley stands for. Dead is dead, and the man’s trade is with stiffs, and I’m his wife now. Flonzaley performs a practical service for society. Like the plumber, the sewage department, or the garbage collector, he says. But you do people good and then they turn around and have a prejudice against you. In a way it’s like my own personal situation. Flonzaley accepts the occupational stigma but there’s a slight charge for that, and he adds it to the bill. Some of your ideas are spookier than his business. He keeps things in their compartments. The color of one frame doesn’t leak into the next.”

  Here she wasn’t being straight. This glowing person Renata, wonderful to me because she was in the Biblical sense unclean, had made my life richer with the thrills of deviation and broken laws. If Flonzaley, because of pollution by the dead, was comparably wonderful to her, why didn’t she just say so—I took it that in the Z department, and Renata never told me what this was, he was all that I was not. This hurt me very deeply, it made my heart ache. In the old expression, she hit me where I lived. But she might have spared me Flonzaley’s rationalizations for soaking the bereaved. I knew Chicago’s business thinkers, I had heard many a rich Chicagoan philosophizing. I knew all of that would-be Shavian wit you could hear at dinner tables on Lake Shore Drive: they wanted to make an untouchable and a chandala of Flonzaley, a scavenger, but he would take their gold into the gloom with him, and he would be a Prince there—that sort of stuff I could do without. Still, Renata was wonderful. Naturally she wanted to say grand things to me and show how well she had done. I had lost a wonderful woman. I was suffering over Renata. She marched off in boots and plumes, as it were, and left me figuring, in pain, what was what, and how, and what to do. And trying to guess what Z was.