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.

  As I was only in a state of preparation, not an initiate, I couldn’t expect to reach my dead. Still, I thought I would try, as their painful experience of life sometimes does qualify some people to advance more rapidly in spiritual development. So I tried to put myself in a proper state for such contact, concentrating especially on my parents and on Demmie Vonghel and Von Humboldt Fleisher. The texts said that actual communication with an individual who had died was possible though difficult but demanded discipline and vigilance and a keen awareness that the lowest impulses might break out and raise hell with you. A pure intention must police these passions. So far as I knew my intention was pure. The souls of the dead hungered for a completion of their purgatory and for the truth. I, in the Pension La Roca, sent my intensest thoughts toward them with all the warmth I had. And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything. Real questions to the dead have to be imbued with true feeling. By themselves abstractions will not travel. They must pass through the heart to be transmitted. The time to ask the dead something is in the last instant of consciousness before sleeping. As for the dead they reach us most easily just as we awaken. These are successive instants in the time-keeping of the soul, the eight intervening clock hours in bed being only biological. The one occult peculiarity that I couldn’t get used to was that the questions we asked originated not with us but with the dead to whom they were addressed. When the dead answered it was really your own soul speaking. Such a mirror-image reversal was difficult to grasp. I spent a long time pondering that.

  And this was the way I spent January and February in Madrid, reading helpful texts, sotto voce, to the departed, and trying to draw near to them. You might have thought that this hope of getting next to the dead would weaken my mind, if it didn’t actually originate in mental debility. No. Although I have only my own authority for saying so, my mind appeared to become more stable. For one thing I seemed to be recovering an independent and individual connection with the creation, the whole hierarchy of being. The soul of a civilized and rational person is said to be free but is actually very closely confined. Although he formally believes that he ranges with perfect freedom everywhere and is thus quite a thing, he feels in fact utterly negligible. But to assume, however queerly, the immortality of the soul, to be free from the weight of death that everybody carries upon the heart presents, like the relief from any obsession (the money obsession or the sexual obsession), a terrific opportunity. Suppose that one doesn’t think of death as all sensible people in their higher realism have agreed to think of it? The first result is a surplus, an overflow to be good with. Terror of death ties this energy up but when it is released one can attempt the good without feeling the embarrassment of being unhistorical, illogical, masochistically passive, feebleminded. Good then is nothing like the martyrdom of certain Americans (you will recognize whom I mean), illuminated by poetry in high school, and then testifying to the glory of their (unprovable, unreal) good by committing suicide—in high style, the only style for poets.

  Going broke in a foreign country I felt little or no anxiety. The problem of money was almost nonexistent. It did bother me that I was a phony widower, indebted to the ladies of the pension for their help with Rogelio. Rebecca Volsted, with her face of scalding white, was breathing down my neck. She wanted to sleep with me. But I simply went on with my exercises. Sometimes I thought, Oh, that stupid Renata, didn’t she know the difference between a corpse-man and a would-be seer? I wrapped myself in her cloak, a warmer garment than the vicuna Julius had given me, and I stepped out. As soon as I hit the open air, Madrid was all jewelry and art to me, the smells inspiring, the perspectives lovely, the faces attractive, the winter colors of the park frosty green and filled with vertical strokes of the lightly hibernating trees and the mouth and muzzle vapors of people and animals visible up and down the streets. Renata’s little boy and I walked, holding hands. He was a remarkably composed and handsome little boy. When we wandered in the Retiro together and all the lawns were a dark and chill Atlantic green, this little Roger could very nearly convince me that up to a point the soul was the artist of its own body and I thought I could feel him at work within himself. Now and then you almost sense that you are with a person who was conceived by some wonderful means before he was physically conceived. In early childhood this invisible work of the conceiving spirit may still be going on. Pretty soon little Roger’s master-building would stop and this extraordinary creature would begin to behave in the most ordinary or dull manner or perniciously, like his mother and grandma. Humboldt was forever talking about something he called “the home-world,” Wordsworthian, Platonic, before the shades of the prison house fell. This is very possibly when boredom sets in, the point of advent. Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions. Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery. A terrible breed, the educated nits, mental bores of the heaviest caliber. The world had never seen the likes of them. Poor Humboldtl What a mistake! Well, perhaps he could have another go at it. When? Oh, in a few hundred years his spirit might return. Meantime, I could remember him as a lovely man and generous, a heart of gold. Now and then I shuffled through the papers he had left me. He had believed so greatly in their value. I gave a skeptical sigh and was sad and put them back in his briefcase.

  thirty-seven

  The world checked in with me occasionally, reports arrived from various parts of the globe. Renata’s was the letter I most wanted. I longed to hear that she was sorry, that she was bored with Flonzaley and horrified at what she had done, that he had vile mortician’s habits, and I rehearsed in my head the magnanimous moment when I took her back. When I was less nice I gave the bitch a month with her millionaire embalmer. When I was angrily depressed I thought that after all frigidity and money, as everyone has known since antiquity, made a stable combination. Add death, the strongest fixative in the world, and you had something remarkably durable. I figured by now that they had left Marrakech and were honeymooning in the Indian Ocean. Renata always did say that she wanted to winter in the Seychelles Islands. My secret belief had always been that I could cure Renata of what ailed her. Then I remembered, turning the point of recollection against myself, that Humboldt had always wanted to do the girls good but that they wouldn’t hold still for it, and how he had said about Demmie’s friend, Ginnie, in the village, “Honey from the icebox . . . Cold sweets won’t spread.” No, Renata didn’t write. She was concentrating on the new relationship and she didn’t have to worry about Roger while I was looking after him. At the Ritz I picked up picture postcards addressed to the kid. I had guessed right. Morocco didn’t detain the couple long. Her cards now bore Ethiopian and Tanzanian postmarks. He received some also from his father, who was skiing in Aspen and Vail. Koffritz knew where his child was.

  Kathleen wrote from Belgrade to say how glad it made her to hear from me. Everything was going extremely well. Seeing me in New York had been unforgettably marvelous. She longed to talk to me again and she expected soon to pass through Madrid on her way to Almería to work on a film. She hoped to have very pleasant things to tell me. There was no check enclosed with her letter. Evidently she didn’t suspect that I badly needed money. I had been prosperous for so many years that no such thought occurred to anyone. Toward the middle of February a letter arrived from George Swiebel, and George, who knew a good deal about my financial condition, made no mention of money either. This was understandable because his letter came from Nairobi, so he couldn’t have received my appeals for help and my questions about the sale of the Oriental rugs. He had been in Kenya for a month hunting for a beryllium mine in the bush. Or was it a lode? I preferred to think of a mine. Had George found such a mine, I as a full partner would be free forever from money anxieties. Unless, of course, the court found a way to take that too away from me. Judge Urbanovich had for some reason chosen to become my mortal enemy. He was out to strip me naked. I don’t know why this was, but it was so.

  George wrote as follows: “Our buddy from the Field Museum was unable to make this trip with me. Ben simply couldn’t swing it. The suburbs wouldn’t give him a release. He invited me for Sunday dinner so I could see for myself what a hell his life was. It didn’t look too terrible to me. His wife is fat but she looks good-natured and there’s a nice kid and a sort of standard mother-in-law and an English bulldog and a parrot. He says his mother-in-law lives on nothing but almond rings and cocoa. She must eat in the night because he’s never yet seen her taking a bite, not in fifteen years. Well, I thought, a lot he’s got to holler. His twelve-year-old boy is a Civil War buff and he and Daddy and the parrot and the bulldog have a kind of club. Besides, he has a nice profession looking after his fossils, and every summer he and the kid take a trip in the camper and fetch home more rocks. So what is he beefing? For old times’ sake I let him into our deal, but he was not the one I took to East Africa with me.

  “To tell the truth I didn’t want to make that long trip alone. Then Naomi Lutz invited me to dinner to meet her son, the one who wrote those articles for the Southtown paper about how he kicked the drug habit. I read them and developed a real interest in this young fellow. Naomi said why not let him come with you? And I actually began to think he would be good company.”

  I interrupt to observe that George Swiebel conceived himself to be especially gifted with young people. They never saw him as a funny old fellow. He took pride in his readiness to understand. He had many special and privileged relationships. He was accepted by youth, by the blacks, by gypsies and bricklayers, by Arabs in the desert, and by tribesmen in every remote place he had ever visited. With exotics he was a hit, making instantaneous human contact, invited to their tents and their cellars and their most intimate private circles. As Walt Whitman did with the draymen, clam diggers, and roughs, as Hemingway did with the Italian infantry and Spanish bullfighters, so George always did in Southeast Asia or in the Sahara or in Latin America, or wherever he went. He made his trips of this sort as often as he could manage, and the natives were always his brothers and were mad about him.

  His letter went on: “Naomi really wanted the boy to be with you. Remember we were going to meet in Rome? But when I was ready to leave, Szathmar still hadn’t heard from you. My contact in Nairobi was waiting and when Naomi begged me to take her son, Louie—he needed adult masculine influences and her own boy friend, with whom she drinks beer and goes to the hockey game, was not the type to help and, in fact, was part of the kid’s problem—I was sympathetic. I thought I would like to learn about the dope scene anyway, and the boy must have some character, you know, if he got the monkey off his back (as they used to say in our time) without outside help. Naomi sets a good table, there was lots to eat and drink, I got pretty mellow, and I said to this Louie with the beard, ‘Okay, kid, meet me at O’Hare, TWA flight so and so, Thursday, half past five.’ I told Naomi I’d drop him off with you on the return trip. She’s a good old broad. I think you should have married her thirty years ago. She’s our kind of people. She gave me a thank-you hug and cried quite a bit. So Thursday at flight time this skinny young character with the beard is hanging around near the gate in his sneakers and shirt sleeves. I say to him, ‘Where’s your coat?’ and he says, ‘What do I need a coat for in Africa?’ And, ‘Where’s your luggage?’ I said. He told me he liked to travel light. Naomi provided his ticket but nothing else. I outfitted him from my own duffel bag. He needed a windbreaker in London. I took him to a sauna to warm him up and gave him a Jewish dinner in the East End. So far the boy was good company and told me a whole lot about the drug scene. Damn interesting. We went on to Rome and from Rome to Khartoum and from Khartoum to Nairobi where my friend Ezekiel was supposed to meet me. But Ezekiel didn’t show. He was in the bush, collecting beryllium. Instead, we were met by his cousin Theo, this marvelous tall black man, built like a whippet, and black, black, shining deep black. Louie said, ‘I dig this Theo. I’m gonna learn Swahili and rap with him.’ Okay, fine. The next day we rented a Volks Minibus from the German Tourist Agency lady Ezekiel had worked for. She organized the trip I took with him four years ago. Then I bought clothing for the bush and even a pair of suède desert boots for Louie and railroad caps and smoked glasses and lots of other stuff, and we took off into the bush. Where we were bound for I didn’t know, but I developed a relationship with Theo very quickly. To tell the truth, I was happy. You know I always had the feeling that Africa was the place where the human species got its start. That was the feeling that came to me when I visited the Olduvai Gorge and met Professor Leakey on my last trip. He absolutely convinced me that this was where man came from. I knew from my own intuition, like a sense of homecoming, that Africa was my place. And even if it wasn’t, it was better than South Chicago anytime and I’d rather meet up with lions than use public transportation. For the weekend before I left Chicago, twenty-five murders were reported. I hate to think what the real figure must be. Last time I took a ride on the Jackson Park El, two cats were slicing off a guy’s pants pocket with razor blades while he pretended to be asleep. I was one of twenty people watching. Couldn’t do a thing.

  “Before leaving Nairobi we visited the game park and saw a lioness jumping on wild pigs. The whole thing was really glorious. Then we drove off and before long we were wallowing in the deep red dust of the back roads and driving under the shade of marvelous big trees, like with roots in the air, and all the black people looked to be sleepwalking because of their nightgown- and pajama-type of costume. We’d enter some village where a whole lot of natives would be working on old foot-pedal Singer sewing machines under the open sky, and out again among the giant anthills like nipples all over the landscape. You know how I love sociable, affectionate situations and I was having the time of my life with this marvelous black man Theo. It wasn’t long before we really became very close. The trouble was with Louie. In the city he was bearable but as soon as we got into the bush, he was something else again. I don’t know what’s with these kids. Are they feeble, sick, or what? The generation of the Sixties, now about twenty-eight years old, already are invalids and basket cases. He’d lie there all day long, acting dazed. Dog-tired we’d arrive in some village in the Minibus and the young fellow who had been pissing and moaning for two hours would begin to cry for his milk. Yes, that’s right. Bottled, homogenized American milk. He’d never been without it and it made him frantic. It was easier to kick the heroin habit than the milk. It sounded innocent enough, and even amusing, why shouldn’t a kid from Cook County, Illinois, have his lousy milk? But I tell you, Charlie, the thing got desperate two days out of Nairobi. He learned the Swahili word for milk from Théo, and when we drove into any little cluster of huts, he leaned out of the window and began to shout for it. ‘Mizuah! Mizuah! Mizuah! Mizuah!’ as we bumped over the ruts. You would have thought he was in agony for his fix. What did the natives know about this damn mizuah of his? They kept a few little cans for the Britishers’ tea and couldn’t understand what he meant, had never even seen a glass of milk. They did their best with a trickle of evaporated stuff, while I felt—to tell the truth, I was humiliated. This was no way to travel in the wilds. After a few days this skinny character with his hair and beard and sharp nose and completely unreasonable eyes—there was just no rapport. My health went into reverse. I began to have a bad stitch in the side of my belly so that I couldn’t sit comfortably or even lie down. The whole middle of me became inflamed, sensitive—horrible! I was trying to relate to the natural surroundings and the primitive life, the animals, etc. This should have been bliss for me. I could almost see the bliss ahead of me like heat waves in the road and couldn’t catch up with it. I had fucked myself out of it by being such a do-gooder. And it only got worse. Ezekiel had left messages along the way and Theo said we should be catching up with him in a few days. I hadn’t seen any beryllium yet. Ezekiel was supposedly making a tour of all the beryllium locations. We couldn’t reach these in our Minibus. You had to have a Land Rover or a Jeep. Ezekiel had a Jeep. So we went along like this and every once in a while we hit a tourist hotel where Louie demanded mizuah and grabbed off the best food. If there were sandwiches, he seized the meat and left me nothing but cheese and Spam. If there was a little hot water, he bathed first and left nothing but dirt for me. The sight of his skinny ass as he toweled himself filled me with one complete hot passion, either to hit him on the butt with a two by four or give him a terrific boot.

  “The payoff was when he got after Theo to teach him Swahili words and the first thing he asked for, naturally, was ‘motherfucker.’ Charlie, there is absolutely no such thing in Swahili. But Louie couldn’t accept the fact that in the very heart of Africa this expression should not exist. He said to me, ‘Man, after all, this is Africa. This Theo has got to be kidding. Is it a secret they won’t tell the white man?’ He swore he wasn’t coming back to America without being able to say it. The truth was that Theo couldn’t even grasp the concept. He had no difficulty with part one, the sex act. And of course he understood part two, the mother. But bringing them together was beyond him. Several long days Louie worked to get it out of him. Then one evening Theo at last understood. He put these two things together. When the idea became clear, he jumped up, he grabbed the jack handle out of the Minibus and swung at Louie’s head. He landed a pretty bad hit on the shoulder and lamed him. This gave me a certain amount of satisfaction but I had to break it up. I had to pull Theo to the ground and get my knees on his arm and hold his head while I reasoned with him. I said it was a misunderstanding. However, Theo was all shook up and never talked to Louie again after this mother-blasphemy had struck home. As for Louie, he griped and bitched about his shoulder so long that I couldn’t continue to follow Ezekiel. I decided that we would go back to town and wait for him. Actually we had been making an enormous circle and were now only fifty or sixty miles from Nairobi. It didn’t look to me like any beryllium mine. I concluded that Ezekiel had been collecting or perhaps even stealing beryllium here and there. In Nairobi we X-rayed the young fellow. Nothing was broken but the Dr. did tie his arm in a sling. Before I took him to the airport we sat at an outdoor café while he drank several bottles of milk. He had had it with Africa. The place had become phony under civilized influence and denied its heritage. He said, ‘I’m all shook up. I’m going straight home.’ I took from him the outfit I had bought for his use in the bush and gave it to Theo. Then Louie said he had to bring African souvenirs home for Naomi. We went to tourist shops where he bought his mother a deadly ugly Masai spear. He was due to reach Chicago at 3 a.m. I knew he had no money in his pocket. ‘How are you getting home from O’Hare?’ I said. ‘Why of course I’ll phone Mother.’ ‘Don’t wake Mother. Take a taxi. You can’t hitchhike on Mannheim Road with that fucking spear.’ I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and drove him to the airport. Happy for the first time in a month, I watched him in shirt sleeves and sling climbing up the stairs and carrying the Assegai for Mother into the plane. Then at about a thousand miles an hour ground speed, he took off for Chicago.

  “As for the beryllium, Ezekiel showed up with a barrel of it. We went to an English lawyer whose name I had from Alec Szathmar and tried to set up a deal. Ezekiel needed about five thousand dollars worth of equipment, a Land Rover, a truck, etc. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’ve got ourselves a partnership and I’m leaving this check in escrow and he’ll pay it over as soon as you give him a title to the mine.’ There was no title forthcoming, nor any way to prove these semiprecious stones were legally come by. I’m going down to the coast now to visit the old slave towns and try to recover something from this double-disaster of Naomi’s kid and our sour beryllium deal. I’m sorry to say that some kind of African con was going on. I don’t think Ezekiel and Theo were on the level. Szathmar sent me your address, in care of his colleague in Nairobi. Nairobi is fancier than ever. Downtown it looks more like Scandinavia than East Africa. I’m getting on the night train to Mombasa. Coming home via Addis Ababa and maybe even Madrid. Yours with love.”

  thirty-eight

  While I was absorbed in boning a slice of merluza for Roger, Pilar came into the dining room and whispered as she leaned over me with her high-aproned bosom, that an American gentleman was asking for me. I was delighted. Stirred, anyway. No one had called on me before, not in ten weeks. Could this be Géorgie? Or Koffritz, come to fetch Roger? Also Pilar, with cool apron, warm white face, large brown eyes leaning toward me with her powder fragrance, was being extremely discreet. Had she never swallowed the widower story? Did she nevertheless know that I had a deep legitimate sorrow and good reason to dress in black? “Shall I ask the señor to come to the comedor to take coffee?” said Pilar, and moved her eyes from me to the kid and back to me. I said that I would talk with my visitor in the salon if she would sit with the orphan for me and make him eat his fish.

  Then I went to the salon, a room seldom used and crowded with old plushy dusty objects. It was kept dark, like a chapel, and I had never seen the sun in it before. Light now poured in, revealing many religious pictures and treasures of bric-a-brac on the wainscoting. Underfoot were rubbishy ensnaring scatter rugs. It all gave the effect of a period vanishing together with the emotions one had had for this period and the individuals who had felt such emotions. My caller stood by the window, aware that I was catching the dust-filled sunlight straight in the eyes and couldn’t see his face. The dust swirled everywhere. I was as dense in these motes as an aquarium fish in bubbles. My caller was still pulling at the drapes to let in more sun and he sent down the dust of a whole century.

  “You?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “That’s who. You thought I was in jail.”

  “Thought, and wished. And hoped. How did you track me here, and what do you want?”

  “You’re sore at me. Okay, I admit that was a bad scene. But I’m here to make up for it.”

  “Was that your purpose in coming here? What you can do for me is go away. I’d like that best.”

  “Honestly I came to do you good. You know,” he said, “when I was a little kid my grandmother on Taylor Street was laid out in a parlor like this with a ton of flowers. Wow, I never thought I’d see another roomful of such old-time crap. But leave it to Charlie Citrine. Look at these branches from Palm Sunday fifty years back. It stinks on the staircase and you’re a fastidious guy. But it must agree with you here. You look okay—better, in fact. You haven’t got those brown circles you had under your eyes in Chicago. You know what my guess is? That paddle ball game put too much strain on you. You here alone?”

  “No, I’ve got Renata’s little boy.”

  “The boy? And where is she?” I didn’t answer. “She blew you off. I see. You’re broke, and she’s not the type for a tacky boarding-house like this. She took up with somebody else and left you to be the sitter. You’re what limeys call the nanny. That’s a riot. And what’s the black armband for?”

  “Here I’m a widower.”

  “You’re an impostor,” said Cantabile. “Now that I like.”

  “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

  “I won’t give you away. I think it’s terrific. I can’t figure how you get yourself into these situations. You’re a superintelligent high-grade person, the friend of poets, a kind of poet yourself. But being a widower in a dump like this is a two-day gag at most and you’ve been here two months, that’s what I don’t uiiderstand. You’re a lively type of guy. When you and me were tiptoeing on the catwalk of that skyscraper in a high wind sixty stories up, hey, wasn’t that something? Honestly, I wasn’t sure you had the guts.”

  “I was intimidated.”

  “You entered into the spirit of the thing. But I want to tell you something a little more serious—you and that poet Fleisher, you really were a quality team.”

  “When did you get out of jail?”

  “Are you kidding? When was I in jail? You don’t know your own town at all. Any little Polish girl on confirmation day knows more than you, with all your books and prizes.”

  “You had a smart lawyer.”

  “Punishment is on the way out. The courts don’t believe in it. Judges understand that no realistic sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

  Well here he was. He arrived in a sort of torrent as if the tail wind that drove his jet had gotten into him somehow. He was high, exuberant, showing off, and he transmitted the usual sense of boundlessness, of cranky dangers—chanciness I called it. “I just now blew in from Paris,” he said, pale, dark-haired, happy. His chancy eyes glittered under the dagger-hilt brows, his nose was full at the bottom and white. “You know neckties. What’s your opinion of this one I bought on the rue de Rivoli?” He was dressed with brilliant elegance in a double-knit sort of whipcord pattern and black lizard shoes. He was laughing, nerves were beating in his cheeks and temples. He had only two moods, this and the threatening one.

  “Did you trace me through Szathmar?”

  “If Szathmar could get you into a pushcart he’d sell you by the slice on Maxwell Street.”

  “Szathmar is a good fellow in his own way. From time to time I speak harshly of Szathmar, but I really love him, you know. You invented all that stuff about the kleptomaniac girl.”

  “Yes, but what of it? It could have been true. No, I didn’t get your address from him. Lucy got it from Humboldt’s widow. She phoned her in Belgrade to check out some facts. She’s almost done with the thesis.”

  “She’s very tenacious.”

  “You should read her dissertation.”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Why not?” He was offended. “She’s smart. You might even learn something.”

  “I might.”

  “But you don’t want to hear any more about your pal, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why, because he blew it—he goofed? This big jolly character with so many talents caved in, just a fucking failure, crazy and a deadbeat, so enough of him?”

  I wouldn’t reply. I saw no point in discussing such a thing with Cantabile.

  “What would you say if I told you that your friend Humboldt scored a success from the grave. I talked to that woman Kathleen myself. There were some points I had to discuss with her and I thought she might have some answers. Incidentally, she’s real keen on you. You’ve got a friend there.”

  “What is this about a success from the grave? What did you talk to her about?”

  “A certain movie scenario. The one you described to Polly and me just before Christmas in your apartment.”

  “The North Pole? Amundsen, Nobile, and Caldofreddo?”

  “Caldofreddo is what I mean. Caldofreddo. You wrote that? Or Humboldt? Or both?”

  “We did it together. It was horseplay. A vein of humor we used to have. Kid stuff.”

  “Charlie, listen, you and I need to reach a preliminary agreement, have an understanding between us. I’ve already taken a certain amount of responsibility, put out money and effort, made arrangements. I’m entitled to ten percent, minimum.”

  “In a minute I’ll ask what the devil you’re talking about. But tell me first about Stronson. What happened to him?”

  “Never mind Stronson now. Forget Stronson.” Cantabile then shouted, “Fuck Stronson!” This must have been heard all over the pensión. After that his head shook a few times as if with vibration or recoil. But he collected himself, fetched his shirt-cuffs from under the coat sleeves, and said in quite a different tone, “Oh, Stronson. Well, there was a riot in his office by people who got screwed. But he wasn’t even there. His big worry should be obvious to you. He lost a lot of Mafia money. They owned him. He had to do anything they said. So about a month ago they called the obligation in. Did you read about the Fraxo burglary in Chicago? No? Well, it was a sensational heist. And who should be flying afterward to Costa Rica with a bag, a big valise full of dollars to stash away?”

  “Stronson was caught?”

  “The Costa Rican officials put him in jail. He’s in jail now. Charlie, can you actually prove that you and Von Humboldt Fleisher actually wrote this thing about Caldofreddo? That’s what I asked Kathleen. Have you got any proof?”

  “I think so.”

  “But you want to know why. The why is kind of strange, Charlie, and you’ll hardly believe it. However, you and I have to have an understanding before I explain things. It’s complicated. I’ve taken a hand in this. I’ve laid out a plan. I’ve got people standing by. And I’ve really done it mostly out of friendship. Now take a look at this. I’ve prepared a paper that I want you to sign.” He laid a document before me. “Take your time,” he said.

  “This is a regular contract. I can’t bear to read these things. What do you want, Cantabile? I’ve never read a contract through in all my life.”

  “But you’ve signed them, haven’t you? By the hundreds, I bet. So sign this one too.”

  “Oh God! Cantabile, you’re back again to hassle me. I was beginning to feel so well here in Madrid. And calmer. And stronger. Suddenly you’re here.”

  “When you get into a tizzy, Charlie, you’re hopeless. Try to check yourself. I’m here to do you a major favor, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Von Humboldt Fleisher once asked me that and I said, ‘Do I trust the Gulf Stream or the South Magnetic Pole or the orbit of the moon?’ “

  “Charles” (to calm me he addressed me formally) “what’s to get so excited? To begin with this is a one-shot deal. For me it provides like a regular agent’s fee—ten percent of your gross up to fifty thousand dollars, fifteen percent of the next twenty-five, and twenty percent on the balance, with a ceiling of one hundred and fifty thousand. So I can’t get more than twenty grand out of this any way you look at it. Is that a colossal fortune? And I’m doing it more for you, and for a few kicks, you poor dimwit. A lot you got to lose. You’re a fucking baby-sitter in a Spanish boardinghouse.”

  These last weeks I had been far from the world, beholding it from a considerable altitude and rather strangely. This white-nosed, ultranervous, overreaching, gale-force Cantabile had brought me back, one hundred percent. I said, “For just an instant I was almost glad to see you, Rinaldo. I always like people who seem to know what they want and behave boldly. But I am very happy to tell you now that I will not sign any paper.”

  “You won’t even read it?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “If I were really a bad guy I’d go away and let you miss out on a fortune of money, you creep. Well, let’s have a verbal agreement. I put you on to one hundred thousand dollars. I manage the whole deal and you promise me ten percent.”

  “But of what?”

  “You never read Time or Newsweek, I suppose, unless you’re waiting to have a tooth drilled. But there is a sensational movie out, the biggest hit of the year. On Third Avenue the ticket line is about three blocks long and in London and Paris the same. Do you know the name of this hit? It’s called Caldofreddo, and it’s based on the scenario you and Humboldt wrote. It’s got to be grossing millions.”

  “And is it the same? Are you certain?”

  “Polly and I went to see it in New York and we both remembered what you described to us in Chicago. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can see it yourself.”

  “Is it showing in Madrid?”

  “No, you’ll have to fly back to Paris with me.”

  “Well, Caldofreddo is the name we gave our protagonist all right. He’s one of the survivors of the crash of Umberto Nobile’s dirigible in the Arctic?”

  “Eats human flesh! Exposed by the Russians as a cannibal! Goes back to his Sicilian village! An ice-cream vendor! All the kids in town love him.”

  “You mean someone made something of such a farrago?”

  Cantabile cried, “They’re crooks, crooks, crooks! Those fuckers have stolen you blind! They’ve made a film out of your idea. How did they ever get it?”

  “Well,” I said, “all I know is that Humboldt gave the outline to a man named Otto Klinsky in the RCA building. He had an idea that he could reach Sir Laurence Olivier’s hairdresser through a relative of some scrubwoman who was the mother of a friend of Mrs. Klinsky. Did they actually reach Olivier? Does he play the role?”

  “No, it’s some other Englishman, like the Charles Laughton or Ustinov type. Charlie, this is a hell of a good picture. Now, Charlie, if we can prove your authorship, we’ve really got those guys. I told them, you know, I’m ready to slaughter them. I’m in a position to throw their balls into the Osterizer.”

  “You can’t have many equals when it comes to threatening,” I said.

  “Well, I had to put heat on them if I didn’t want a long business in court. We’re looking for a fast settle. What kind of proof have you got?”

  “What Humboldt did,” I explained, “was to send himself a copy of the scenario by registered mail. This has never been opened.”

  “You’ve got it?”

  “Yes, I found it among the papers he left me with a note that tells all.”

  “Why didn’t he copyright the idea?”

  “There is no other way in these cases. But the method is perfectly legal Humboldt would have known. He always had more lawyers than the White House.”

  “Those movie bastards didn’t have the time of day for me. Now we’ll see. Our next move is this,” he said. “We fly to Paris. . . .”

  “We?”

  “I am advancing expense money.”

  “But I don’t want to go. I shouldn’t even be here now. After lunch I generally sit in my room.”

  “What for? You just sit?”

  “I sit and withdraw into myself.”

  “A hell of an egotistical thing to do,” he said.

  “On the contrary, I try to see and hear the outer world with no static whatever from within, an empty vessel, and completely silent.”

  “What is that supposed to do for you?”

  “Well, according to my manual, if you sit quiet enough, everything in the outer world, every flower, every animal, every action, will eventually unveil secrets undreamed of—I’m quoting.”

  He stared at me with venturesome eyes and dagger brows. He said, “Damn it, you’re not going to turn into one of those transcendental-type weirdos. You don’t enjoy that, do you, just sitting quiet?”

  “I enjoy it deeply.”

  “Come to Paris with me.”

  “Rinaldo, I don’t want to come to Paris.”

  “You put your back up in the wrong place and you’re passive in the wrong place. You’ve got everything arsy-versy. You come along to Paris and look at that picture. It’ll only take a day or two. You can stay at the George V or the Meurice. It’ll add strength to our case. I hired two good lawyers, one French and one American. We’ll have to open that sealed envelope before witnesses under oath. Maybe we should get it done in the US Embassy and have the commercial attaché and the military attaché. So come on, pack your bag, Charlie. There’s a plane in two hours.”

  “No I don’t think I will. It’s true I’ve got no money left, but I’ve been doing better without money than I ever did with it. And I don’t want to leave the kid.”

  “Don’t act like a granny about that kid.”

  “Anyway, I don’t like Paris.”

  “You don’t like Paris? What have you got against Paris?”

  “A prejudice. For me Paris is a ghost town.”

  “You’re out of your head. You should see the lines on the Champs-Elysées waiting to get into Caldofreddo. And it’s your achievement. That should give you a feeling of secret power—a kick. I know you’re sore because the French made a phony knight of you and you took it like an insult. Or maybe you hate them because of Israel. Or their record in the last war.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “When I try to guess what you’re thinking I have to try nonsense. Otherwise it would take me a million years to figure out why to you Paris is a ghost town. Would old Chicago aldermen retire to a ghost town to spend their graft-money? Come on Charlie, we’ll eat pressed duck tonight at the Tour d’Argent.”

  “No, that kind of food makes me ill.”

  “Well then give me the stuff to take back with me—the envelope Humboldt mailed to himself.”

  “No, Cantabile, I won’t do that either.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you’re not trustworthy. I’ve got another copy of it, though. You can have that. And I’m willing to write a letter. A notarized letter.”

  “That won’t do it.”

  “If your friends want to see the original they can come to me in Madrid.”

  “You irritate the shit out of me,” said Cantabile. “I’m about to hit the ceiling.” Incensed, he glared at me. Then he made a further effort to be reasonable. “Humboldt has some family yet, doesn’t he? I asked Kathleen. There’s an old uncle in Coney Island.”

  I had forgotten Waldemar Wald. Poor old man, he lived in kitchen odors, too, in a back room. He needed rescuing, certainly, from the nursing home. “You’re right, there is an uncle,” I said.

  “What about his interest? What, just because you have a mental thing against Paris? You can pay a maid to look after the kid. This is a big deal, Charlie.”

  “Well, perhaps I should go,” I said.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “I’ll pack a bag.”

  thirty-nine

  So we flew. That same evening Cantabile and I were on the Champs-Elysées waiting with our tickets to get into the vast movie house near the rue Marbeuf. Even for Paris the weather was bad. It was sleeting. I felt thinly dressed and became aware that my shoe soles had worn through and that my feet were getting wet. The queue was dense, the young people in the crowd were cheerful enough but Cantabile and I were both displeased. Humboldt’s sealed envelope had been locked in the hotel vault and I had the claim check. Rinaldo had quarreled with me about possession of this brass disc. He wanted it in his pocket as a sign that he was my bona-fide representative.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Because I’m the natural one to take care of it. That’s my kind of thing.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’ll pull out your hankie and lose that check,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re absent-minded.”

  “I’ll keep it.”

  “You were ornery about the contract, too. You wouldn’t even read it,” he said.

  The ice beat on my hat and shoulders. I disliked intensely the smoke of French cigarettes. Above us in the lights were colossal posters of Otway as Caldofreddo and of the Italian actress, Silvia Sottotutti, or something of the sort, who played the role of his daughter. Cantabile was right, in a way, it was a curious experience to be the unrecognized source of this public attraction and to be standing in the sleet—it made one feel like a phantom presence. After two months of what was virtually a retreat in Madrid it felt like backsliding to be here, in the fog and glitter of the Champs-Elysées, under this icy pelting. At the Madrid airport I had picked up a copy of Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals to read on the plane and to insulate me from Cantabile’s frantic conversation. In Baudelaire I had found the following piece of curious advice: Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor write fifty lines upon some extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. What this implied was that the vie quotidienne drove you from the globe, but the deeper implication was that real life flowed between here and there. Real life was a relationship between here and there. Cantabile, one thousand percent here, bore this out. He was acting up. He was feverish with me about the claim-check. He fought with the ouvreuse who took us to our seats. She was enraged by the small tip he gave her. She took his hand and slapped the coin into his palm.

  “You bitch!” he yelled at her, and wanted to chase her up the aisle.

  I caught him by the arm and said, “Cool it.”

  Again I was part of a French audience. Last April Renata and I had come to this very theater. In fact I had lived in Paris in 1955. I quickly learned that this was no place for me. I need a little more fondness from people than a foreigner is likely to get here, and I was then still suffering from Demmie’s death. However, there was no time now to think of such things. The picture was beginning. Cantabile said, “Feel in your pocket, make sure you’ve still got that check. We’re screwed if you’ve lost it.”

  “It’s here. Easy, boy,” I said.

  “Hand it over. Let me enjoy the picture,” he said. I ignored him.

  Then with great crashes of music the film began to roll. It opened with shots from the Twenties in the old newsreel manner—the first conquest of the North Pole by Amundsen and Umberto Nobile who flew in a dirigible from Scandinavia to Alaska. This was played by excellent comedians, highly stylized. I was enormously pleased. They were delicious. We saw the Pope blessing the expedition and Mussolini haranguing from his balcony. The competition between Amundsen and Nobile increased in hostility. When a little girl presented Amundsen with a bouquet, Nobile snatched it away; Amundsen gave orders, Nobile countermanded them. The Norwegians bickered with the Italians on the airship. Gradually we recognized, behind the Time Marches On style of these events, the presence of old Mr. Caldofreddo now in his ancient Sicilian village. These flashes of recollection were superimposed upon the daily existence of this amiable old gent, the ice-cream vendor who is loved by the kiddies, the affectionate father of Silvia Sottotutti. In his youth Caldofreddo had served with Nobile on two transpolar flights. The third, under Nobile’s sole command, ended in a disaster. The dirigible went down in the Arctic seas. The crew was scattered over the ice floes. Receiving radio signals from the survivors, the Russian icebreaker Krassin came to the rescue. Amundsen was handed a cable telling of the disaster while he was drinking deeply at a banquet—according to Humboldt, who had private information about everything, the man had been drinking like a fish. Immediately he announced that he was organizing an expedition to save Nobile. It was all as we had laid it out in Princeton years and years ago. Amundsen chartered a plane. He quarreled violently with his French pilot, who warned him that the aircraft was dangerously overloaded. He commanded him to take off, anyhow. They crashed into the sea. I was shocked to see how effective the comic interpretation of this disaster was. I remembered now that Humboldt and I had disagreed on this. He had insisted that it would be extremely funny. And so it was. The plane sank. Thousands of people were laughing. I wondered how he would have liked that.

  The next portion of the film was all mine. It was I who did the research and wrote the scenes in which the rescued Caldofreddo ran wild aboard the Krassin. The sin of eating human flesh was too much for him to bear. To the astonishment of the Russian crew, he ran amuck, shouting gibberish. He hacked at a table with a large knife, he tried to drink scalding water, he hurled his body against the bulkheads. The sailors wrestled him to the ground. The suspicious ship’s doctor emptied his stomach with a pump and found human tissue under the microscope. I was responsible also for the big scene in which Stalin directs the contents of Caldofreddo’s stomach to be exhibited in a jar on Red Square under great banners denouncing cannibalistic capitalism. I added also the rage of Mussolini at this news, the calm of Calvin Coolidge in the White House as he prepared to get into bed for his daily siesta. All this I watched in a state of elation. Mine! All this had originated in my head in Princeton, New Jersey, twenty years ago. It was not a big achievement. It didn’t ring bells in the far universe. It did nothing about brutality, inhumanity, it didn’t clarify much or prevent anything. Nevertheless there was something in it. It was pleasing hundreds of thousands, millions of spectators. Of course, it was ingeniously directed and George Otway as Caldofreddo gave a wonderful performance. This Otway, an Englishman in his thirties, strongly resembled Humboldt. At the moment when he threw himself at the cabin walls, as I have seen maddened apes do in the monkey house, battering the partitions with heart-rending recklessness, I was stabbed with the thought of how Humboldt had fought the police when they took him away to Bellevue. Ah, poor character, poor fighting furious weeping hollering Humboldt. His flowers were aborted in the bulb. The colors never came into the light, they rotted in his chest. And the resemblance between Otway in the cabin and Humboldt was so uncanny that I began to cry. As the whole theater rocked with delight, shouting with laughter, I sobbed aloud. Cantabile said in my ear, “What a picture, hey? What did I tell you? Even you’re laughing your head off.”

  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.”

  “That is what we want,” said Cantabile.

  But he was ignored. And I felt very much in command. So this was business. Julius, as I’ve mentioned before, was forever urging me to recognize what he liked to call the Romance of Business. And was this the famous Romance of Business? Why it was nothing but pushiness, rapidity, effrontery. The sense it gave of getting your way was shallow. Compared with the satisfaction of contemplating flowers or of something really serious—trying to get in touch with the dead, for instance—it was nothing, nothing at all.

  Paris was not at its most attractive as Cantabile and I walked by the Seine. The bankside was now a superhighway. The water looked like old medicine.

  “Well, I got ‘em for you, didn’t I? I promised I’d make you money. What’s your Mercedes now? Peanuts. I want twenty percent.”

  “We agreed on ten.”

  “Ten if you cut me into that other script. Thought you’d hold out on me, didn’t you?”

  “I’m going to write to Barbash to say that I want you to be paid ten percent. For Caldofreddo.”

  He said, “You’re ungrateful. You never read the paper, you schmuck, and the whole thing would have passed you by without me. Just like the Thaxter business.”

  “What Thaxter business?”

  “You see? You don’t know anything. I didn’t want to rattle you by telling you about Thaxter till the negotiations got started. You don’t know what happened to Thaxter? He was kidnaped in Argentina.”

  “He wasn’t! By whom, terrorists? But why? Why Thaxter? Have they hurt him?”

  “America should thank God for its gangsters. The Mafia at least makes sense. These political guys don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re snatching and murdering all over South America without rhyme and reason. How should I know why they picked on him. He must have acted like a big shot. They let him send out one letter and he mentioned your name in it. And you didn’t even know you were all over the world press.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He appealed to the internationally famous historian and playwright Charles Citrine for help. He said you’d vouch for him.”

  “Those fellows don’t know what they’re doing. I hope they won’t harm Thaxter.”

  “They’ll be sore as hell when they find out he’s a phony.”

  “I don’t understand. What was he pretending? Whom did they take him to be?”

  “They’re very confused in all those countries,” said Cantabile.

  “Ah, my old friend Professor Durnwald is probably right when he says how nice it would be to hack off the Western Hemisphere at the isthmus and let the southern part drift away. Only there are so many parts of the earth of which that holds true now.”

  “Charles, the more commission you pay me, the less you’ll have left for those terrorists.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Oh, it’ll be you all right,” said Cantabile.

  forty

  Thaxter’s captivity by terrorists oppressed me. It made me grieve at heart to imagine him locked in a black cellar with rats and terrified of torture. He was, after all, an innocent sort of person. True, he was not perfectly upright but much of his wrongdoing was simply delirium. Restless, seeking a piece of the action, he had now been cast among even more violently hallucinated parties who cut off ears and planted bombs in mailboxes or hijacked jet planes and slaughtered passengers. The last time I troubled to read a newspaper I noted that an oil company, after paying a ransom of ten million dollars, was still unable to obtain the release of one of its executives from his Argentine kidnapers.

  That afternoon from the hotel I wrote to Carl Stewart, Thaxter’s publisher. I said, “I understand Pierre has been abducted and that in his appeal for help he has named me. Well, of course, I will give everything I’ve got to save his life. In a way all his own, he is a wonderful man and I do love him; I have been his faithful friend for more than twenty years. I assume you have been in touch with the State Department and also with the US Embassy in Buenos Aires. Despite the fact that I have written on political matters I am not a political person. Let me put it this way, that for forty years during the worst crises of civilization I read the papers faithfully and this faithful reading did no one any good. Nothing was prevented thereby. I gradually stopped reading the news. It now appears to me, however, and I say this as a dispassionate observer, that between gunboat diplomacy at one extreme and submission to acts of piracy at the other, there ought to be some middle ground for a great power. In this regard, the flabbiness of the United States is disheartening. Are we only now catching up with the lessons of World War I? We learned from Sarajevo not to let acts of terrorism precipitate wars and from Woodrow Wilson that small nations have rights that great ones must respect. But that’s it and we have gotten stuck some six decades back and set the world a miserable example by allowing ourselves to be bullied.

  “To come back to Thaxter, however, I am wildly anxious about him. As recently as three months ago I would have been able to offer a ransom of $250,000. But that has been swept away by an unfortunate litigation. There is now more money on the horizon. I may soon be able to come up with ten or even twenty thousand and I am prepared to put up that much. I don’t see how I can go beyond twenty-five. You would have to advance it. I would give you my note. Perhaps some way could be found to repay me out of Pierre’s royalties. If these South American bandits let him go he’ll write a whopping account of his experiences. That’s the twist things have taken. Formerly life’s bitterest misfortunes enriched only the hearts of wretches or were of spiritual value exclusively. But now any frightful event may be a gold mine. I’m sure that if and when poor Thaxter makes it, if they release him, he will strike it rich by writing a book. Hundreds of thousands of people who at this moment don’t give a single damn about him will suffer with him intensely. Their souls will be wrung and they will gasp and cry. This is actually very important. I mean that the powers of compassion are now being weakened by an impossible volume of demands. We don’t need to go into that, however. I’d be very grateful to you for information, and you may regard this letter as binding on me to come up with dollars for Thaxter. He must have swaggered and put on the dog in his Stetson and Western boots till he impressed those Latin Maoists or Trotskyists. Well, I suppose it’s one of those World Historical things, peculiar to our times.”

  I got this letter off to New York and then flew back to Spain. Cantabile took me to Orly in a cab, now arguing for fifteen percent and beginning to make threats.

  As soon as I reached Pension La Roca I was handed a note on Ritz stationery. It was from the Señora. She wrote, “Kindly deliver Roger to me at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow in the lobby. We are going back to Chicago.” I understood why she stipulated the lobby. I wouldn’t lay violent hands on her in a public place. In her room I might go for her throat or try to drown her in the toilet bowl. So, in the morning, with the kid, I met the old woman, that extraordinary condensation of wild prejudices. In the great circle of the Ritz lobby under the dome, I handed the kid to her. I said, “Good-by, Roger darling, you’re going home.”

  The kid began to cry. The Señora couldn’t calm him and accused me of corrupting him, attaching him to myself with chocolates. “You’ve bribed the boy with sweets.”

  “I hope Renata is happy in her new state,” I said.

  “She certainly is. Flonzaley is a high type of man. His IQ is out of this world. Writing books is no proof that you’re smart.”

  “Oh how true that is,” I said. “And after all burial was a great step forward. Vico said there was a time when corpses were allowed to rot on the ground and dogs and rats and vultures ate your near and dear. You can’t have ; he dead all over the place. Although Stanton, a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, kept his dead wife for nearly a year.”

  “You look worn out. You have too much on your mind,” she said.

  Intensity does that to me. I know it’s true, but I hate to hear it said. Despair rises up. “Adiós, Roger. You’re a fine boy and I love you. I’ll see you in Chicago soon. Have a good flight with Grandma. Don’t cry, kid,” I said. I was threatened by tears myself. I left the lobby and walked toward the park. The danger of being struck by speeding cars, masses of them battering from all directions, prevented me from shedding more tears.

  At the pensión I said that I had sent Roger home to his grandparents until I could readjust myself. The Danish lady from the embassy, Miss Volsted, was still standing by to do the humane thing for my sake. Depressed by Roger’s leaving I was almost demoralized enough to take her up on it.

  Cantabile telephoned every day from Paris. It was of the greatest importance for him to figure in these deals. I should have thought that Paris, with the many opportunities it offered a man like Cantabile, would distract him from business. Not a bit. He was all business. He kept after Maître Furet and Barbash. He irritated Barbash greatly by going over his head and trying to negotiate independently. Barbash complained to me from Paris. The producers, Cantabile told me, were now offering twenty thousand dollars in settlement. “They should be ashamed of themselves. And what kind of impression did Barbash make on them to get such a puny, insulting offer! He’s no good. Our figure is two hundred thousand.” Next day he reported, “They’re up to thirty now. I’ve changed my mind again. This Barbash is real tough. I think he’s sore at me and taking it out on them. What’s two hundred to them, with such a box office? A pimple on the ass. One thing—we have to think about the taxes, and whether we should take payment in foreign currency. I know we can get more in lire. Caldofreddo is doing a tremendous business in Milan and Rome. The suckers are standing ten deep. I wonder why the cannibalism gets the Italians, raised on pasta. Anyhow, if you’ll take lire you can get a lot more money. Of course, Italy is falling apart.”

  “I’ll take dollars. I have a brother in Texas who can invest them in a good thing for me.”

  “You’re lucky to have a kind brother. Are you feeling antsy down there in spic-land?”

  “Not a bit. I’m very much at home. I read anthroposophy and I meditate. I’m doing the Prado inch by inch. What about the second scenario?”

  “I’m not in on that, so why ask me?”

  I said, “No, you’re not.”

  “Then I don’t see why I should tell you a damn thing. But I’ll tell you anyway, out of courtesy. They are interested. They’re damn interested. They’ve offered Barbash three thousand dollars for a three-week option. They say they need time to show it to Otway.”

  “Otway and Humboldt look very much alike. Maybe the resemblance means something. Some invisible link. I’m convinced that Otway will be attracted by Humboldt’s story.”

  Next afternoon Kathleen Tigler arrived in Madrid. She was on her way to Almería to begin work on a new film. “I’m sorry to tell you,” she said, “that the people to whom I sold the option on Humboldt’s scenario have decided not to take it up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You remember the outline that Humboldt bequeathed to both of us?”

  “Of course.”

  “I should have sent you your share of the three thousand. Part of my purpose in coming to Madrid was to talk to you about it and draw a contract, settle with you. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.”

  “No, I hadn’t forgotten,” I said. “But it just occurred to me that I’ve been trying on my own to sell the same property to another group.”

  “I see,” she said. “Selling the same thing to two parties. It would have been very awkward.”

  All this while, you see, business was going on. Business, with the peculiar autonomy of business, went its own way. Like it or not, we thought its thoughts, spoke its language. What did it matter to business that I suffered a defeat in love, or that I resisted Rebecca Volsted with her urgently blazing face, that I investigated the doctrines of anthroposophy? Business, sure of its own transcendent powers, got us all to interpret life through its practices. Even now, when Kathleen and I had so many private matters to consider, matters of the greatest human importance, we were discussing contracts options producers and sums ‘ of money.

  “Of course,” she said, “you couldn’t be bound legally by an agreement I entered into.”

  “When we met in New York we spoke about a film outline Humboldt and I concocted in Princeton—”

  “The one Lucy Cantabile asked me about? Her husband also phoned me in Belgrade and pestered me with mysterious questions.”

  “—to divert ourselves while Humboldt was scheming to get the chair in poetry.”

  “You told me it was all nonsense, and I thought no more about it.”

  “It was lost for twenty years or so, and then someone got around to stealing our original story and turned it into the picture called Caldofreddo.”

  “No! Is that where Caldofreddo comes froml You and Humboldt?”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Of course I have. Otway’s big, big hit was created by the two of you? It’s not to be believed.”

  “Yes, indeed. I’ve just come from a meeting in Paris at which I proved our authorship to the producers.”

  “Will they settle with you? They should. You’ve got a real case against them, haven’t you?”

  “I die when I think of a lawsuit. Ten more years in the courts? That would be worth fees of four or five hundred thousand to my lawyers. But for me, a man approaching sixty and heading for seventy, there wouldn’t be a penny left. I’ll take my forty or fifty thousand now.”

  “Like a mere nuisance claim?” said Kathleen, indignant.

  “No, like a man lucky enough to have his higher activities subsidized for a few years. I’ll divide the money with Uncle Waldemar, of course. Kathleen, when I heard of Humboldt’s will I thought it was just his posthumous way of carrying on more of the same touching tomfoolery. But the legal steps he took were all sound and he was right, damn it, about the value of his papers. He always had a wild hope of hitting the big time. And what do you know? He did! And it wasn’t his serious work that the world found a use for. Just these capers.”

  “Also your capers,” said Kathleen. When she smiled quietly she showed a great many small lines in her skin. I was sorry to see these signs of age in a woman whose beauty I remembered so well. But you could live with such things if you took the right view of them. After all, these wrinkles were the result of many many many years of amiability. They were the mortal toll taken by a good thing. I was beginning to understand how one might be reconciled to such alterations. “But to be taken seriously, what do you suppose Humboldt should have done?”

  “How can I say that, Kathleen? He did what he could, and lived and died more honorably than most. Being crazy was the conclusion of the joke Humboldt tried to make out of his great disappointment. He was so intensely disappointed. All a man of that sort really asks for is a chance to work his heart out at some high work. People like Humboldt—they express a sense of life, they declare the feelings of their times or they discover meanings or find out the truths of nature, using the opportunities their time offers. When those opportunities are great, then there’s love and friendship between all who are in the same enterprise. As you can see in Haydn’s praise for Mozart. When the opportunities are smaller, there’s spite and rage, insanity. I’ve been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years. It’s been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry—the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry. You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That—it’s perfectly plain, now—can’t be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us.”

  “And that’s what you call the higher activity—and this is what the money you get from Caldofreddo will subsidize. ... I see,” said Kathleen.

  “On the assumption commonly made the commonest events of life can only be absurd. Faith was called absurd. But now faith will perhaps move these mountains of commonsense absurdity.”

  “I was going to suggest that you leave Madrid and come down to Almería.”

  “I see. You’re worried about me. I look bad.”

  “Not exactly. But I can tell you’ve been under a huge strain. It’ll be pleasant weather on the Mediterranean now.”

  “The Mediterranean, yes. How I’d love a month of blessed peace. But I haven’t got much money to maneuver with.”

  “You’re broke? I thought you were loaded.”

  “I’ve been unloaded.”

  “It was bad of me then not to send the fifteen hundred dollars. I assumed it would be a trifle.”

  “Well, until a few months ago it was a trifle. Can you find something for me to do in Almería?”

  “You wouldn’t want that.”

  “I don’t know what ‘that’ is.”

  “To take a job in this picture—Memoirs of a Cavalier. Based on Defoe. There are sieges and such.”

  “I’d wear a costume?”

  “It’s not for you, Charlie.”

  “Why not? Listen, Kathleen. If I may speak good English for a moment. . . ,”

  “Be my guest.”

  “To efface the faults or remedy the defects of five decades I’m prepared to try anything. I am not too good to work in the movies. You little know how much it would please me to be an extra in this historical picture. Could I wear boots and bloomers? A casque, or a hat with plumes? It would do me a world of good.”

  “Wouldn’t it be too distracting, mentally? You have . . . things to do.”

  “If these things I have to do can’t find their way around those mountains of absurdity there’s no hope for them. It’s not as though my mind were free, you know. I worry about my daughters, and I worry terribly about my friend Thaxter. He was kidnaped by Argentine terrorists.”

  “I wondered about him,” said Kathleen. “I read it in the Herald-Tribune. Is that the same Mr. Thaxter I met in the Plaza? He wore a ten-gallon hat and asked me to come back later. Your name was mentioned in the article. He appealed to you for help.”

  “I’m upset by this. Poor Thaxter. If the scenarios do earn money I may have to pay it out to ransom him. I don’t care too much. My own romance with wealth is over. What I intend to do now isn’t very expensive. . . .”

  “You know, Charles, Humboldt used to say wonderful things. You remind me of that. Tigler was lots of fun. He was an active, engaging person. We were always out hunting and fishing—doing something. But he wasn’t much for conversation and nobody has talked to me like this in a long, long, long time, and I’m out of listening practice. I love it when you sound off. But it isn’t very clear to me.”

  “I’m not surprised, Kathleen. It’s my fault. I talk too much to myself. But human beings are far too deep in that false unnecessary comedy of history—in events, in developments, in politics. The common crisis is real enough. Read the papers—all that criminality and filth, murder, perversity, and horror. We can’t get enough of it—we call it the human thing, the human scale.”

  “But what else is there?”

  “A different scale. I know Walt Whitman compared us unfavorably to the animals. They don’t whine about their condition. I see his point. I used to spend lots of time watching sparrows. I always adored sparrows. I do to this day. I spend hours in the park watching them bob and hop around and take dust baths. But I know they have less mental life than apes do. Orangutans are very charming. An orangutan friend sharing my apartment would make me very happy. But I know that he would understand less than Humboldt did. The question is this: why should we assume that the series ends with us? The fact is, I suspect, that we occupy a point within a great hierarchy that goes far far beyond ourselves. The ruling premises deny this. We feel suffocated and don’t know why. The existence of a soul is beyond proof under the ruling premises, but people go on behaving as though they had souls, nevertheless. They behave as if they came from another place, another life, and they have impulses and desires that nothing in this world, none of our present premises, can account for. On the ruling premises the fate of humankind is a sporting event, most ingenious. Fascinating. When it doesn’t become boring. The specter of boredom is haunting this sporting conception of history.”

  Kathleen again said that she had missed conversations of this kind in her married life with Tigler, the horse-wrangler. She certainly hoped I would come to Almería and work as a halberdier. “It’s such an agreeable town.”

  “I’m about ready to get out of the pensión, too. People are breathing down my neck. But I’d better stay in Madrid so that I can keep track of everything—Thaxter, Paris. I may even have to go back to France for a while. I now have two attorneys there and that’s double trouble.”

  “You haven’t much confidence in lawyers.”

  “Well, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and I always venerated him. But he’s nothing now but a name they put on license plates in the state of Illinois.”

  There was, however, no need to go to Paris. A letter came from Stewart, the publisher.

  He wrote: “I see you haven’t followed the papers for some time. It’s true that Pierre Thaxter was abducted in Argentina. How or why or whether he’s still in their hands I’m in no position to say. But I tell you in confidence, since you’re his old pal, that it all puzzles me and sometimes I wonder if it’s really on the level. Mind you, I don’t care to suggest that it’s a phony kidnap, out-and-out. I’m ready to believe that the people who grabbed Thaxter off the sidewalk were convinced of his importance. Nor is there any indication of a prearranged snatching as may possibly have been the case with Miss Hearst and the Sym-bionese. But I enclose an article from the Op Ed page of The New York Times by our friend Thaxter. It’s supposed to have been sent from the secret place or dungeon where they keep him. How come, I ask you, was he able to write and send to the Times this little essay on being kidnaped? Perhaps you will note, as I did, that he even makes a pitch for ransom funds. I am told that sympathetic readers have already sent checks to the US Embassy in Argentina to reunite him with his nine children. Far from being harmed, he is even crashing the big time and, if I’m not mistaken, the experience has also sharpened his literary style. This is publicity beyond price. Your guess that he may have fallen into a gold mine is probably correct. If his neck isn’t broken, he’ll be rich and famous.”

  Thaxter wrote, in part, “Three men held pistols to my head as I was leaving a restaurant in a busy street in Buenos Aires. In these three muzzles I saw the vanity of all the mental strategies for outwitting violence that I had ever entertained. Until that moment I had never realized how very often a modern man anticipates this critical moment. My head, now perhaps about to be blown open, had been full of schemes for saving myself. As I got into the waiting car I thought, I’m done for. I was not subjected to physical abuse. It soon became apparent that I was in the hands of sophisticated individuals advanced in their political thinking and utterly devoted to the principles of liberty and justice as they understood them. My captors believe that they have a case to present to civilized opinion and have chosen me to state it for them, having ascertained that I was sufficiently well known as an essayist and journalist to command attention.” (Even now he gave himself a plug.) “As guerrillas and terrorists they would like it known that they are not heartless and irresponsible fanatics but that they have a high tradition of their own. They invoke Lenin and Trotsky as founders and builders who discovered that force was their indispensable instrument. They know the classics of this tradition, from nineteenth-century Russia to twentieth-century France. I have been brought up from the cellar to attend seminars on Sorel and Jean-Paul Sartre. These people are, in their own fashion, most high principled and serious. They have, furthermore, the quality to which Garcia Lorca applied the term Duende, an inner power which burns the blood like powdered glass, a spiritual intensity that does not suggest, but commands.”

  I met Kathleen at a café and showed her the clippings. There was more in the same vein. I said, “Thaxter has a terrible weakness for making major statements. I think I might just ask for the three guns to be applied to the back of my head and the triggers pulled rather than sit through those seminars.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him. The man is saving his life,” she said. “Also it’s a fascinating thing, really. Where does he make the ransom pitch?”

  “Here. ‘... a price of fifty thousand dollars which I am allowed to take this occasion to request my friends and members of my family to contribute. In the hope of seeing my young children again,’ and so forth. The Times treats its readers to plenty of thrills. That’s a really pampered public that gets the Op Ed page.”

  “I don’t suppose that the terrorists would get him to write an apology to world opinion and then bump him off,” she said.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be a hundred percent consistent. Who knows what those fellows will do. But I am a bit relieved. I think he’s going to be all right.”

  Kathleen had questioned me closely, asking what I would like to do if Thaxter were out of the woods, if life became calmer and more settled. I answered her that I would probably spend a month at Dornach, near Basel, at the Swiss Steiner Center, the Goetheanum. Perhaps I could rent a house there where Mary and Lish could spend the summer with me.

  “You should get quite a lot of money from the Caldofreddo people,” she said. “And it seems that Thaxter is wiggling out of it, if he ever was really in it. For all you know he’s free now.”

  “That’s right. I still intend to split with Uncle Waldemar and give him Humboldt’s full share.”

  “And how much would you estimate the settlement to be?”

  “Oh, thirty thousand dollars,” I said, “forty at the most.”

  But this guess was far too conservative. Barbash ended by bidding the producers up to eighty thousand dollars. They paid five thousand also to read Humboldt’s scenario and eventually took an option on that as well. “They couldn’t afford to pass it by,” said Barbash, on the telephone. Cantabile was at that moment in the lawyer’s office, talking loudly and urgently. “Yes, he’s with me,” said Barbash. “He’s the most difficult bastard I ever had to deal with. He went over my head, he’s been noisy, and lately he’s begun to make threats. He’s a real pain in the ass and if he weren’t your authorized representative, Mr. Citrine, I’d have thrown him out long ago. Let me pay his ten percent and get him off my back.”

  “Mr. Barbash, you have my permission to disburse his eight thousand dollars immediately,” I said. “What sort of terms are being offered for the second scenario?”

  “They started at fifty thousand. But I argued that it was obvious the late Mr. Fleisher really had something. Contemporary, you know what I mean? Just the stuff the public was hungry for right now. You may have it yourself, Mr. Citrine. If you don’t mind my saying so, I believe you shouldn’t quit now. If you want to write the screenplay for the new vehicle I can make you one hell of a deal. Would you do it for two thousand a week?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not interested, Mr. Barbash. I have other plans.”

  “What a pity. Won’t you reconsider? They’ve asked many times.”

  “No thanks. No, I’m engaged in a very different kind of activity,” I said.

  “What about consultation?” said Mr. Barbash. “These people have got nothing but money and they’d be glad to pay twenty thousand bucks just because you understood the mind of Von Humboldt Fleisher. Caldofreddo is sweeping the world.”

  “Don’t say no to everything.” This was Cantabile who had taken the phone. “And listen, Charlie, I should get a cut on the other thing because if it wasn’t for me none of this would have started. Besides, you owe me for planes, taxis, hotels, and meals.”

  “Mr. Barbash will settle your bill,” I said. “Now go away, Cantabile, our relationship has drawn to a close. Let’s become strangers again.”

  “Oh, you ungrateful, intellectual, ass-hole bastard,” he said.

  Barbash recovered the phone. “Where shall we be in touch? Are you staying in Madrid for a while?”

  “I may fly down to Almería for a week or so, and then return to the USA,” I said. “I’ve got a houseful of things in Chicago to dispose of. Children to see, and I’ve got to talk to Mr. Fleisher’s uncle. When I’ve taken care of these necessary items and tied up a few loose ends I’m coming back to Europe. To take up a different kind of life,” I added.

  Inquire a little and I’ll tell you all. I was still explaining myself in full to people who couldn’t have cared less.

  forty-one

  So this this was how, in warm April, it happened that Waldemar Wald and I, together with Menasha Klinger, reburied Humboldt and his mother side by side in new graves at the Valhalla Cemetery. I took a very sad pleasure in doing this handsomely, in real style. Humboldt had been buried not in potter’s field but far out in Deathsville, New Jersey, one of those vast, necropolitan developments described by Koffritz, Renata’s first husband, to old Myron Swiebel in the steam room of the Division Street Bath. “They cheat,” he had said about those places, “they skimp, they don’t give the statutory number of feet. You lie there with your legs up, short-sheeted. Aren’t you entitled to a full stretch for eternity?”

  Investigating, I found that Humboldt’s funeral had been arranged by someone at the Belisha Foundation. Some sensitive person there, subordinate to Longstaff, recalling that Humboldt had once been an employee, had gotten him out of the morgue and had given him a send-off from the Riverside Chapel.

  So Humboldt was exhumed and brought in a new casket over the George Washington Bridge. I had stopped for the old boys at their recently rented flat on the Upper West Side. A woman came to cook and clean for them and they were properly fixed up. Turning over a large sum to Uncle Waldemar made me uneasy and I told him so. He answered, “Charlie, my boy, listen —all the horses I ever knew became spooks years ago. And I wouldn’t even know how to contact a bookie. It’s all Puerto Rican up there in the old neighborhood now. Anyway, Menasha is keeping an eye on me. I want to tell you, kid, not many younger fellows would have given me the full split the way you did. If anything is left over at the end, you’ll get it back.”

  We waited in the hired limousine at the New York end of the cabled bridge, the Hudson before us, till the hearse crossed over and we followed it to the cemetery. A blustery day might have been easier to tolerate than this heavy watered-silk blue close day. In the cemetery we wound about among dark trees. These should have been giving shade already but they stood brittle and schematic among the graves. For Humboldt’s mother a new coffin also was provided, and this was already in position, ready to be lowered. Two attendants were opening the hearse as we came around to the back, moving slowly. Waldemar was wearing all the mourning he could find in his gambler’s wardrobe. Hat, trousers, and shoes were black, but his sport coat had large red houndstooth checks and in the sunshine of a delayed overwarm spring the fuzz was shining. Menasha, sad, smiling in thick glasses, felt his way over grass and gravel, his feet all the more cautious because he was looking up into the trees. He couldn’t have been seeing much, a few sycamores and elms and birds and the squirrels coming and going in their fits-and-starts fashion. It was a low moment. There was a massive check threatened, as if a general strike against nature might occur. What if blood should not circulate, if food should not digest, breath fail to breathe, if the sap should not overcome the heaviness of the trees? And death, death, death, death, like so many stabs, like murder—the belly, the back, the breast and heart. This was a moment I could scarcely bear. Humboldt’s coffin was ready to move. “Pallbearers?” said one of the funeral directors. He looked the three of us over. Not much manpower here. Two old fuddyduddies and a distracted creature not far behind them in age. We took honorific positions along the casket. I held a handle—my first contact with Humboldt. There was very little weight within. Of course I no longer believed that any human fate could be associated with such remains and superfluities. The bones were very possibly the signature of spiritual powers, the projection of the cosmos in certain calcium formations. But perhaps even such elegant white shapes, thigh bones, ribs, knuckles, skull, were gone. Exhuming, the grave diggers might have shoveled together certain tatters and sooty lumps of human origin, not much of the charm, the verve and feverish invention, the calamity-making craziness of Humboldt. Humboldt, our pal, our nephew and brother, who loved the Good and the Beautiful, and one of whose slighter inventions was entertaining the public on Third Avenue and the Champs-Elysées and earning, at this moment, piles of dollars for everyone.

  The laborers took over from us, setting Humboldt’s coffin on the canvas bands of the electrical lowering device. The dead were now side by side in their bulky boxes.

  “Did you know Bess?” said Waldemar.

  “Once I saw her, on West End Avenue,” I said.

  He may have been thinking of money taken from her purse and lost in horse races long ago, of quarrels and scandalous scenes and curses.

  In the long years since I had last attended a burial, many mechanical improvements had been made. There stood a low yellow compact machine which apparently did the digging and bull-dozed back the earth. It was also equipped as a crane. Seeing this, I started off on the sort of reflection Humboldt himself had trained me in. The machine in every square inch of metal was a result of collaboration of engineers and other artificers. A system built upon the discoveries of many great minds was always of more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which of itself can do little. So spoke old Dr. Samuel Johnson, and added in the same speech, that the French writers were superficial because they were not scholars and had proceeded upon the mere power of their own minds. Well, Humboldt had admired these same French writers and he too had proceeded for some time upon the mere power of his own mind. Then he began to look, himself, toward the collective phenomena. As his own self, he had opened his mouth and uttered some delightful verses. But then his heart failed him. Ah, Humboldt, how sorry I am. Humboldt, Humboldt—and this is what becomes of us.

  The funeral director said, “Does anybody have a prayer to say?”

  Nobody seemed to have or to know a prayer. But Menasha said he would like to sing something. He then did so. His style had not changed.

  He announced, “I’m going to sing a selection from Aida, ‘In questa tomba oscura.’ “ Aged Menasha now prepared himself. He turned up his face. The Adam’s apple thus revealed was not what it had been when he was a young man operating a punch press in a Chicago factory, but it was there still. So was the old excitement. He clasped his hands, rising on his toes, and as emotionally as in our kitchen on Rice Street, weaker in voice, missing the tune still, and crowing but moved, terribly moved, he sang his aria. But this was only the warm-up. When he was done, he declared that he was going to perform “Coin’ Home,” an old American spiritual—used by DvoMk in the New World Symphony, he added as a program note. Then, oh Lord! I remembered that he had been homesick for Ypsilanti, and that he had pined for his sweetheart, back in the Twenties, longing for his girl, singing “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a’goin’ home,” until my mother said, “For heaven’s sake, go then.” And when he came back with his obese, gentle, weeping bride, this girl who sat in the tub, her arms too fat and defeating her efforts to bring the water as high as her head, Mama came into the bathroom and washed her hair for her, and toweled it.

  They were all gone but ourselves.

  And looking into open graves was no pleasanter than it had ever been. Brown clay and lumps and pebbles—why must it all be so heavy. It was too much weight, oh, far too much to bear. I observed, however, another innovation in burials. Within the grave was an open concrete case. The coffins went down and then the yellow machine moved forward and the little crane, making a throaty whir, picked up a concrete slab and laid it atop the concrete case. So the coffin was enclosed and the soil did not come directly upon it. But then, how did one get out? One didn’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed! There was a dry light grating as of crockery when contact was made, a sort of sugar-bowl sound. Thus, the condensation of collective intelligences and combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt with the individual poet. The same was done to the poet’s mother. A gray lid was set upon her too and then Waldemar took the spade and weakly dug out clods and threw one into each grave. The old gambler wept and we turned aside to spare him. He stood beside the graves while the bulldozer began its work.

  Menasha and I went toward the limousine. The side of his foot brushed away some of last autumn’s leaves and he said, looking through his goggles, “What’s this, Charlie, a spring flower?”

  “It is. I guess it’s going to happen after all. On a warm day like this everything looks ten times deader.”

  “So it’s a little flower,” Menasha said. “They used to tell one about a kid asking his grumpy old man when they were walking in the park, ‘What’s the name of this flower, Papa?’ and the old guy is peevish and he yells, ‘How should I know? Am I in the millinery business?’ Here’s another, but what do you suppose they’re called, Charlie?”

  “Search me,” I said. “I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.”

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