Humboldt's Gift (62 page)

  “You always said that the way life happened to you was so different that you weren’t in a position to judge the desires of other people. It’s really true that you don’t know people from inside or understand what they want—like you didn’t understand that I wanted stability—and you never may know. You gave this away when you told me how you tried to feel your way into little Mary’s emotions over the ten-speed bicycle but couldn’t. Well, I’m lending you Roger. Look after him till I can send for him and study his desires. It’s him you need now, not me. Flonzaley and I are going over to North Africa. Sicily hasn’t been as warm as I like it. Let me suggest, as long as you’re going back to fundamentals of feeling, that you give some thought to your friends Szathmar, Swiebel, and Thaxter. Your passion for Von Humboldt Fleisher speeded the deterioration of our relationship.”

  She didn’t say just when she’d be sending for the boy.

  “If you think you’re on earth for such a very special purpose I don’t know why you cling to the idea of happiness with a woman or a happy family life. This is either dumb innocence or else the last word in kinkiness. You’re really far out and you take up with a person who’s far out in her own way, and then you tell yourself that what you really want is a simple affectionate relationship. Well, you had the warmth and charm to make me think you wanted and needed me. Always your affectionate friend.” She had filled up the paper, and the letter ended.

  I couldn’t help crying when I read this. On the night when Renata locked me out George Swiebel had told me how much he respected me for being able to suffer agonies of love at my age. He took off his hat to me for it. But this was the vitalist youth attitude which Ortega, one of the Madrid authors I had been reading, disparaged in
The Modern Theme
. I agreed with him. However, in the back bedroom of this third-rate
pensión
I was just the kind of old fool who carried on like an adolescent. I was balder and more wrinkled than ever and the white hairs had begun to grow long and wild from my eyebrows. Now I was a forsaken codger snuffling disgracefully from a beautiful floozy’s abuse. I was forgetting that I might also be a World Historical Individual (of a sort), that perhaps I was supposed to scatter the intellectual nonsense of an age or must do something to help the human spirit burst from its mental coffin. She didn’t think much of these aspirations, did she, if you took her running off with Flonzaley, who dealt in stiffs, as an expression of opinion. And even as I wept I glanced at the clock and realized that Roger would be back from his walk in fifteen minutes. We were supposed to play dominoes. Suddenly life goes into reverse. You’re in first grade again. Approaching sixty you must start from the beginning and see whether you can understand another’s desires. The woman you love is making mature progress in life, advancing independently in Marrakech, or somewhere. She doesn’t need a primrose path. Wherever she treads the primroses start growing.

  She was right, of course. In taking up with her I had asked for trouble. Why? Maybe the purpose of such trouble was to turn me deeper into realms of peculiar but necessary thought. One of these peculiar thoughts occurred now. It was that the beauty of a woman like Renata was not entirely appropriate. It was out of season. Her physical perfection was of the Classical Greek or High Renaissance type. And why was this sort of beauty historically inappropriate? Well, it went back to a time when the human spirit was just beginning to disengage itself from nature. Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to man to think of himself separately. He hadn’t distinguished his own being from natural being but was a part of it. But as soon as intellect awoke he became separated from nature. As an individual, he looked and saw the beauty of the external world, including human beauty. This was a moment sacred in history—the golden age. Many centuries later, the Renaissance tried to recover this first sense of beauty. But even then it was too late. Intellect and spirit had moved on. A different sort of beauty, more internal, had begun its development. This internal beauty, manifested in romantic art and poetry, was the result of a free union of the human spirit with the spirit of nature. So Renata really was a peculiar phantom. My passion for her was an antiquarian passion. She seemed to be aware of this herself. Look at the way she swaggered and clowned. Attic or Botticellian loveliness doesn’t smoke cigars. It doesn’t stand up and do vulgar things in the bathtub. It doesn’t stop in a picture gallery and say, “There’s a painter with balls.” It doesn’t talk like that. But what a pity! How I missed herl What a darling woman she was, that crook! But she was a holdover from another time. I couldn’t say that
I
had the new sort of internal beauty. I was a dumb old silly. But I had heard of this beauty, I got advance notice of it. What did I propose to do about this new beauty? I didn’t know yet. At the moment I was waiting for Roger. He was eager to play dominoes. I was eager to get a glimpse of his mother in his face as I sat opposite with the dotted bones.

  thirty-five

  The haggard Danish lady, Rebecca Volsted, came and walked with me in the Retiro. I walked slowly and she limped alongside. Her cloche hat was pulled low on her face. Her face with its bitter flashes was lightning-pale. She questioned me very closely. She asked why I spent so much time in my room. She felt snubbed by me. Not socially. Socially I was very friendly. I only snubbed her—well, essentially. She seemed to be saying that if I wrestled passionately with her in bed she could, bad hip or no bad hip, cure me of what ailed me. On the contrary, experience had finally taught me that if I followed her suggestion I would only acquire one more (and possibly demented) dependent.

  “What do you do all day long in your room?”

  “I have to catch up on my correspondence.”

  “I suppose you have to notify people of your wife’s death. How did she die, anyway?”

  “She died of tetanus.”

  “You know, Mr. Citrine, I’ve taken the trouble of looking you up in
Who’s Who in the United States
.”

  “Why ever did you do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “A hunch. For one thing, though you have an American passport, you don’t behave like a real American. I felt there must be something to you.”

  “So you found out that I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. Just like Harry Houdini, the great Jewish escape artist—I wonder why he and I chose Appleton to be born in.”

  “Is there an element of choice?” said Rebecca. In her cloche hat, fire-pale, and limping beside me in the Spanish park she spoke up for rationality. I slowed my pace for her as we talked.

  I said, “Of course, science is on your side. Still, it’s rather strange, you know. People who have been on earth for only ten years or so are suddenly beginning to compose fugues and prove subtle theorems in mathematics. It may be that we may bring a great many powers here with us, Miss Volsted. The chronicles say that before Napoleon was born his mother enjoyed visiting battlefields. But isn’t it possible that the little hoodlum, years before his birth, was already looking for a carnage-loving mother? So with the Bach family and the Mozart family and the Bernoulli family. Such family groups may have attracted musical or mathematical souls. As I explained in an article I wrote about Houdini, Rabbi Weiss, the magician’s father, was a perfectly orthodox Jew from Hungary. But he had to leave the old country because he fought a duel with sabers and he certainly was an oddball. Besides, how is it that Houdini and I, both from Appleton, Wisconsin, struggle so hard with the problem of death.”

  “Did Houdini do that?”

  “Yes, this Houdini defied all forms of restraint and confinement, including the grave. He broke out of everything. They buried him and he escaped. They sank him in boxes and he escaped. They put him in a strait jacket and manacles and hung him upside-down by one ankle from the flagpole of the Flatiron Building in New York. Sarah Bernhardt came to watch this and sat in her limousine on Fifth Avenue looking on while he freed himself and climbed to safety. A friend of mine, a poet, wrote a ballad about this called ‘Harlequin Harry.’ Bernhardt was already very old and her leg had been amputated. She sobbed and hung on Houdini’s neck as they were driven away in the car and begged him to give back her leg. He could do anything! In czarist Russia the Okhrana stripped him naked and locked him in the steel van it used for Siberian deportations. He freed himself from that too. He escaped from the most secure prisons in the world. And whenever he came home from a triumphal tour he went straight to the cemetery. He lay down on his mother’s grave and on his belly through the grass he told her in whispers about his trips, where he had been, and what he had done. Later he spent years debunking spiritualists. He exposed all the tricks of the medium-racket. In an article I once speculated whether he hadn’t had an intimation of the holocaust and was working out ways to escape from the death camps. Ah! If only European Jewry had learned what he knew. But then Houdini was punched experimentally in the belly by a medical student and died of peritonitis. So you see, nobody can overcome the final fact of the material world. Dazzling rationality, blazing of consciousness, the most ingenious skill—nothing can be done about death. Houdini worked out one line of inquiry completely. Have you looked into an open grave lately, Miss Volsted?”

  “At this point in your life, such a morbid obsession is understandable,” she said. She looked up, her face burning white. “There’s only one thing to do. It’s obvious.”

  “Obvious?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” she said. “You know the answer. You and I could do very well together. With me you’d stay free—no strings attached. Come and go as you like. We are not in America. But what
do
you do in your room?
Who’s Who
says you’ve won prizes in biography and history.”

  “I’m preparing to write about the Spanish-American War,” I said. “And I’m catching up on my correspondence. Actually, I have this letter to post. . . .”

  I had written to Kathleen in Belgrade. I didn’t mention money but I hoped she wasn’t going to forget my share of the option payment on Humboldt’s scenario. The sum she had mentioned was fifteen hundred dollars and I was going to need it soon. I was being dunned in Chicago—Szathmar was forwarding my mail. It turned out that the Señora had flown to Madrid First Class. The travel bureau was asking me to remit, promptly I had written to George Swiebel to ask whether the money for my Kirman rugs had been paid yet, but George was not a prompt correspondent. I knew that Tomchek and Srole would send in a staggering bill for losing my case and that Judge Urbanovich would let Cannibal Pinsker help himself from the impounded funds.

  “You seem to be muttering to yourself in your room,” said Rebecca Volsted.

  “I’m sure you haven’t been listening at the door,” I said.

  She flushed—that is, she turned even paler—and answered, “Pilar tells me that you’re talking to yourself in there.”

  “I read fairy tales to Roger.”

  “You don’t when he’s at school. Or maybe you rehearse the big bad wolf. ...”

  thirty-six

  What was this muttering? I couldn’t tell Miss Rebecca Volsted of the Danish Embassy in Madrid that I was making esoteric experiments, that I was reading to the dead. I already seemed odd enough. Supposedly a widower from the Midwest and father of a small boy, I turned out, according to
Who’s Who
, to be a prize-winning biographer and playwright and a
chevalier
of the Legion of Honor. The
chevalier
widower rented the worst room in the
pensión
(across the air shaft from the kitchen). His brown eyes were red from weeping, he dressed with high elegance although the kitchen smells made his clothing noticeably rancid, he tried with persistent vanity to comb his thin and graying hair over the bald middle of his head and was always disheartened when he realized that in the lamplight his scalp was glistening. He had a straight nose like John Barrymore, but the resemblance went no further. He was a man whose bodily case was fraying. He was beginning to wrinkle under the chin, beside the ears, and below the sad, warm-hearted eyes that gazed intelligently in the wrong direction. I had always counted hygienically on regular intercourse with Renata. I apparently agreed with George Swiebel that you were headed for trouble if you neglected to have normal sexual relations. In all civilized countries this is the basic creed. There was, of course, a text to the contrary—I always had a text to the contrary. This text was from Nietzsche and took the interesting view that the mind was greatly strengthened by abstinence because the spermatazoa were reabsorbed into the system. Nothing was better for the intellect. Be that as it might, I became aware that I was developing tics. I missed my paddle ball games at the Downtown Club—the conversation of my fellow members I must say that I didn’t miss at all. To them I could never say what I was really thinking. They didn’t speak their thoughts to me either but those thoughts were at least speakable. Mine were incomprehensible and becoming more so all the time.

  I was going to move out of here when Kathleen sent that check, but meantime I had to live on a tight budget. The IRS, Szathmar informed me, had reopened my 1970 return. I wrote to say that this was now Urbanovich’s problem.

  Every morning powerful coffee odors woke me. Afterward came ammoniac smells of frying fish and also of cabbage garlic saffron, and of pea soup boiled with a ham bone. Pension La Roca used a heavy grade of olive oil which took some getting used to. At first it went through me quickly. The water closet in the hall was lofty and very cold with a long chain pull of green brass. When I went there I carried the cape I had bought for Renata over my arm and put it over my shoulders when I was seated. To sit down on the freezing board was a sort of Saint Sebastian experience. Returning to my room I did fifty push-ups and stood on my head. When Roger was at nursery school I walked in the back streets or went to the Prado or sat in cafes. I devoted long hours to Steiner meditation and did my best to draw close to the dead. I had very strong feelings about this and could no longer neglect the possibility of communication with them. Ordinary spiritualism I dismissed. My postulate was that there was a core of the eternal in every human being. Had this been a mental or logical problem I would have dealt logically with it. However, it was no such thing. What I had to deal with was a lifelong intimation. This intimation must be either a tenacious illusion or else the truth deeply buried. The mental respectability of good members of educated society was something I had come to despise with all my heart. I admit that I was sustained by contempt whenever the esoteric texts made me uneasy. For there were passages in Steiner that set my teeth on edge. I said to myself, this is lunacy. Then I said, this is poetry, a great vision. But I went on with it, laying out all that he told us of the life of the soul after death. Besides, did it matter what I did with myself? Elderly, heart-injured, meditating in kitchen odors, wearing Renata’s cloak in the biffy—should it concern anyone what such a person did with himself? The strangeness of life, the more you resisted it, the harder it bore down on you. The more the mind opposed the sense of strangeness, the more distortions it produced. What if, for once, one were to yield to it? Moreover I was convinced that there was nothing in the material world to account for the more delicate desires and perceptions of human beings. I concurred with the dying Bergotte in Proust’s novel. There was no basis in common experience for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And I was too queerly haughty to take stock in the respectable empiricism in which I had been educated. Too many fools subscribed to it. Besides, people were not really surprised when you spoke to them about the soul and the spirit. How odd! No one was surprised. Sophisticated people were the only ones who expressed surprise. Perhaps the fact that I had learned to stand apart from my own frailties and the absurdities of my character might mean that I was a little dead myself. This detachment was a sobering kind of experience. I thought sometimes how much it must sober the dead to pass through the bitter gates. No more eating, bleeding, breathing. Without the pride of physical existence the shocked soul would surely become more sensible.

  It was my understanding that the untutored dead blundered and suffered in their ignorance. In the first stages especially, the soul, passionately attached to its body, stained with earth, suddenly severed, felt cravings much as amputees feel their missing legs. The newly dead saw from end to end all that had happened to them, the whole of lamentable life. They burned with pain. The children, the dead children especially, could not leave their living but stayed invisibly close to those they loved and wept. For these children we needed rituals—something for the kids, for God’s sake! The elder dead were better prepared and came and went more wisely. The departed worked in the uncon-scious part of each living soul and some of our highest de-signs were very possibly instilled by them. The Old Testament commanded us to have no business with the dead at all and this was, the teachings said, because in its first phase, the soul entered a sphere of passionate feeling after death, of something resem-bling a state of blood and nerves. Base impulses might be mobilized by contact with the dead in this first sphere. As soon as I began to think of Demmie Vonghel, for instance, I received violent impressions. I always saw her handsome and naked as she had been and looking as she had looked during her climaxes. They had always been convulsive, a series of them, and she used to go violently red in the face. There always was a trace of crime in the way that Demmie did the thing and there had always been a trace of the accessory in me, wickedly collaborating. Now I was flooded with sexual associations. Take Renata, there was never any violence with Renata, she always smiled and behaved like a courtesan. Take Miss Doris Scheldt, she was a small girl, almost a blond child, although her profile hinted that there was a Savonarola embedded in her and that she would turn into a masterful little woman. The most charming thing about Miss Scheldt was her lighthearted bursting into laughter during the conclusion of the sexual act. The least charming was her dark fear of pregnancy. She worried when you hugged her naked in the night lest a stray spermatozoon ruin her life. It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people. This was why I looked for-ward to acquaintance with the souls of the dead. They
should
be a little more stable.