Humboldt's Gift (66 page)

  Yes, and now Humboldt was spread out somewhere, his soul in some other part of the creation, there where souls waited for sustenance that only we, the living, could send from the earth, like grain to Bangla Desh. Alas for us, born by the millions, the billions, like the bubbles of effervescent drink. I had a worldwide dizzy glimpse of the living and the dead, of humanity either laughing its head off as pictures of man-eating comedy unrolled on the screen or vanishing in great waves of death, in flames and battle agonies, in starving continents. And then I had a partial vision of flying blind through darkness and then coming through a break above a metropolis. It glittered on the ground in icy drops, far below. I tried to divine whether we were landing or flying on. We flew on.

  “Are they following your outline? Are they using it?” said Cantabile.

  “Yes. They’re doing it very well. They’ve added lots of their own ideas,” I said.

  “Try not to be so big about it. I want you in a fighting mood tomorrow.”

  I told Cantabile, “The Russians proved their case, according to the Doctor’s statement, not only by pumping the stomach but also by examination of the man’s excrement. The stools of the starving are hard and dry. This man claimed he had eaten nothing. But it was clear that he hadn’t missed many meals, on the ice floe.”

  “They could have put that in. Stalin wouldn’t have hesitated to put a crock of shit on Red Square. And you can do that nowadays in a picture.”

  The scene had changed to Caldofreddo’s little town in Sicily where no one knew his sin, where he was just a jolly old man who peddled ice cream and played in the village band. As I listened to him tootle, I felt that there was something important about the contrast between his little arpeggios and the terrible modern complexity of his position. Lucky the man who has nothing more to say or play than these easy melodies. Are there still such people around? It was disconcerting also to see, as Otway was puffing at the trumpet, a face so much like Humboldt’s. And since Humboldt had gotten into the film, I looked for myself as well. I thought that something in my nature might be seen in Caldofreddo’s daughter, played by Silvia Sottotutti. Her personality expressed a sort of painful willingness or joyful anxiety which I thought that I had, too. I didn’t care for the man in the role of her fiancé, with his short legs and his wide-angled jaw and flat face and lowish brow. It was possible that I identified him with Flonzaley. A man had once followed us at the Furniture Show who must have been Flonzaley. Signals had passed between Renata and him. ... I had figured out, incidentally, that as Mrs. Flonzaley Renata was going to have a very limited social life in Chicago. Undertakers couldn’t be very popular dinner guests, except with other undertakers. To be free from this occupational curse she’d have to travel a lot with him, and even on a Caribbean cruise, at the Captain’s Table, they’d have to hope and pray that no one would turn up from the home town to ask, “You don’t happen to be Flonzaley of Flonzaley Mortuaries, do you?” Thus Renata’s happiness would be impaired, as the splendor of the Sicilian sky was stained for Caldofreddo . by his dark act in the Arctic. Even in his trumpet-playing I detected this. I thought that there was one key of his trumpet which, when pushed down, drove right against the man’s heart.

  Now the Scandinavian journalist came to town, doing research for a book on Amundsen and Nobile. He tracked down poor Caldofreddo and began to molest him. The old fellow said, “You’ve got the wrong party. That was never me.” “No, you’re the man all right,” said the journalist. He was one of those emancipated people from northern Europe who have expelled shame and darkness from the human breast, an excellent piece of casting. The two men had a conversation on a mountainside. Caldofreddo begged him to go away and leave him in peace. When the journalist refused, he fell into a fit similar to the one he had had on the
Krassin
. But this one, forty years later, was an old man’s frenzy. It contained more strength and wickedness of soul than of body. In this seizure of pleading and rage, weakness and demonic despair, Otway was simply extraordinary.

  “Was this the way you had it in your scenario?” said Cantabile.

  “More or less.”

  “Give me that claim check,” he said. He thrust his hand into my pocket. I realized that he was inspired by Caldofreddo’s fit. He was so stirred that he had lost his head. More to defend myself than to keep the disc, I clutched his arm. “Get your hand out of my pocket, Cantabile.”

  “I have to take care of it. You’re not responsible. A man who’s been pussy-whipped. Not in your right mind.”

  We were openly fighting. I couldn’t see what the maniac on the screen was doing because this other maniac was all over me. As one of my authorities said, the difference between the words “command” and “convince” is the difference between democracy and dictatorship. Here was a man who was crazy because he never had to persuade himself of anything! Suddenly it gave me as much despair to have thought this as to fight Cantabile off. This thinking would make a nitwit of me. As when Cantabile threatened me with baseball bats and I thought of Loren/’s wolves or of sticklebacks, or when he forced me into a toilet stall, I thought . . . All occasions were translated into thoughts and then the thoughts informed against me. I would die of these intellectual quirks. People began to cry out behind us, “
Dispute! Bagarre! Emmerdeurs
!” They roared, “
Dehors . .
.!” or “
Flanquez les à la porte
!”

  “They’re calling for the bouncer, you fool!” I said. Cantabile took his hand out of my pocket and we turned our attention to the screen again in time to see a boulder pried loose by Caldo-freddo hurtling down the mountainside toward the journalist in his Volvo while the old man, appalled at himself, cried warnings and then fell on his knees and thanked the Virgin when the Scandinavian was spared. After this attempted murder Caldo-freddo made a public confession in the village square. Finally he was given a hearing by a jury of townspeople in the ruins of the Greek theater on a Sicilian hillside. This ended with a choric scene of forgiveness and reconciliation—just as Humboldt, with
Oedipus at Colonus
in mind, would have wanted it.

  When the lights came on and Cantabile turned toward the near aisle I made my exit by the far one. He caught up with me on the Champs-Elysées, saying, “Don’t be sore, Charlie. That’s just the breed of dog I am, to protect things like that claim check. What if you’re mugged and rolled? Then who even knows what box the envelope is in? And five people are coming tomorrow morning to inspect the evidence. All right, I’m a high-strung fellow. I just want everything to go right. And you’ve been so hurt by that broad you’re a hundred times more out of it than you ever were in Chicago. That’s what I meant by pussy-whipped. Now why don’t we pick up a couple of French hookers. I’ll treat. Rebuild your ego a little.”

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  “I’m just trying to make up. I know it’s hard for somebody like you having to share the earth with nuts like me. Well, let’s go and have a drink. You’re all ruffled and upset.”

  But I wasn’t upset at all, really. A hard full day, even full of nonsense, acquits me of nonfeasance, satisfies my conscience. After four glasses of Calvados in the hotel bar I went to bed and slept soundly.

  In the morning we met with Maître Furet and the American lawyer, a terribly aggressive man named Barbash, just the sort of representative that Cantabile would choose. Cantabile was deeply pleased. He had promised to deliver me and the evidence —I could see now why he had had such a fit about the check— and here we were, as prearranged, all beautifully coordinated. The producers of
Caldofreddo
knew that one Charles Citrine, author of a Broadway play,
Von Trench
, later made into a successful film, claimed to be the source of the original story on which their worldwide hit was based. They sent a couple of Harvard Business School types to meet with us. Poor Stronson now in jail in Miami hadn’t come within miles of the image. These two clean, well-spoken, knowledgeable, moderate, completely bald, extremely firm young men were waiting in Barbash’s office.

  “Are you two gentlemen fully authorized to deal?” Barbash said to them.

  “The last word will have to come from our principals.”

  “Then bring the principals, the guys with the clout. Why are you wasting our time!” said Cantabile.

  “Easy, easy does it,” Barbash said.

  “Citrine is more important than your fucking principals, any day,” Cantabile shouted at them. “He’s a leader in his field, a Pulitzer winner, a
chevalier
of the Legion of Honor, a friend of the late President Kennedy and the late Senator Kennedy, and the late Von Humboldt Fleisher the poet was his buddy and collaborator. Don’t give us any shit here! He’s busy with important research in Madrid. If he can spare the time to come up here so can your crummy principals. He won’t throw his weight around. I’m here to throw it for him. Do this right or you’ll see us in court.”

  To utter his threat relieved him wonderfully of something. His lips (not often silent) were lengthened by a silent smile when one of the young men said, “We’ve all heard of Mr. Citrine before.”

  Mr. Barbash now got control of the conversation. His problem, of course, was to subdue Cantabile. “Here are the facts. Mr. Citrine and his friend Mr. Fleisher wrote the outline for this film back in 1952. We are prepared to prove this. Mr. Fleisher mailed a copy of the scenario to himself in January 1960. We have this piece of evidence right here in a sealed envelope, postmarked and receipted.”

  “Let’s go to the US Embassy and open it before witnesses,” said Cantabile. “And let the principals get their asses down to the Place de la Concorde, too.”

  “Have you seen the film
Caldofreddo
?” said Barbash to me.

  “I saw it last night. Beautiful performance by Mr. Otway.”

  “And does it resemble the original story by you and Mr. Fleisher?”

  I now saw that a stenotypist sat in the corner at her tripod making a record of this conversation. Shades of Urbanovich’s court! I became Citrine the witness. “It couldn’t have had any other source,” I said.

  “Then how did these guys get it? They stole it,” said Cantabile. “They might have to face a plagiarism rap.”

  As the envelope was handed around to be examined, a pang passed through my lower bowel. What if distracted, mad Humboldt had stuffed an envelope with letters, with old bills, with fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject?

  “You are satisfied,” said Maître Furet, “that this is the unopened, original object? It will be so deposed.”

  The Harvard business types agreed that it was on the up and up. Then the envelope was slit open—it contained a manuscript headed, “An original movie treatment. —Co-authors, Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleisher.” As the pages passed from hand to hand I breathed again. The case was proven. There was no doubt about the authenticity of this manuscript. Scene by scene, shot by shot, the picture followed our outline. Barbash made an elaborate and detailed statement for the record. He had obtained a copy of the shooting script. There were almost no departures from our plot.

  Humboldt, bless him, had done things right this time.

  “This is thoroughly legitimate,” said Barbash. “Authentic beyond dispute. I take it you people are insured against such claims?”

  “What do we care about that!” said Cantabile.

  There was, of course, an insurance policy.

  “I don’t think our writers ever said anything, one way or another, about an original story,” one of the young men remarked.

  Only Cantabile carried on. His idea was that everybody should be in a fever. But to business people it was just one of those things. I hadn’t expected such coolness and decorum. Messrs. Furet, Barbash, and the Harvard Business graduates agreed that long costly lawsuits ought to be avoided.

  “And what of Mr. Citrine’s co-author?”

  So that was all that the name Von Humboldt Fleisher meant to these MBAs from one of our great universities!

  “Dead!” I said. This word reverberated with feeling only for me.

  “Any heirs?”

  “One, that I know of.”

  “We’ll take this matter to our principals. What sort of figure have you gentlemen in mind?”

  “A big one,” said Cantabile. “A percentage of your gross.”

  “I think we’re in a position to ask for a statement of earnings,” Barbash argued.

  “Let’s be more realistic. This will be viewed mainly as a minor nuisance claim.”

  “What do you mean minor nuisance? It’s the whole picture,” Cantabile shouted. “We can kill your group!”

  “A little calmer, Mr. Cantabile, please. We have a serious claim here,” said Barbash. “We’d like to hear what you say after serious consideration.”

  “Would there be any interest,” I said, “in another idea for a screenplay from the same source?”

  “Is there one?” said one of the Harvard businessmen. He answered me smoothly, unsurprised. I couldn’t help admiring his admirable schooling. You couldn’t catch a man like this out.

  “
Is
there? You just heard it. We’re telling you so,” said Cantabile.

  “I have here a second sealed envelope,” I said. “It contains another original proposal for a picture. Mr. Cantabile, by the way, has nothing to do with this. He’s never even heard of the existence of this. His participation is limited to
Caldofreddo
only.”

  “Let’s hope you know what you’re doing,” said Ronald, angry.

  This time I knew perfectly well. “I’m going to ask Mr. Barbash and Maître Furet to represent me also in this matter.”

  “Us!” Cantabile said.

  “Me,” I repeated.

  “You, of course,” Barbash quickly said.

  I hadn’t lost tons of money for nothing. I had mastered the commercial lingo at least. And as Julius had observed I was a Citrine by birth. “This sealed envelope contains a plot from the same brain that conceived
Caldofreddo
. Why don’t you gentlemen ask the people you represent whether they’d like to have a look at it. My price for looking—for looking only, mind you—is five thousand dollars.”