Humboldt's Gift (58 page)

  Anyway, we were lofted to an altitude of six miles in a great 747, an illuminated cavern, a theater, a cafeteria, the Atlantic in pale daylight raging below. According to the pilot, ships were taking hard punishment in the storm. But from this altitude the corrugations of the seas looked no higher to the eye than the ridges of your palate feel to the tongue. The stewardess served whisky and Hawaiian macadamia nuts. We plunged across the longitudinal lines of the planet, this deep place that I was learning to think of as the great school of souls, the material seat of the spirit. More than ever I believed that the soul with its occasional glimmers of the Good couldn’t expect to get anywhere in a single lifetime. Plato’s theory of immortality was not, as some scholars tried to make it, a metaphor. He literally meant it. A single span could only make virtue desperate. Only a fool would try to reconcile the Good with one-shot mortality. Or as Renata, that dear girl, might put it, “Better none than only one.”

  In a word, I allowed myself to think what I pleased and let my mind go in every direction. But I felt that the plane and I were headed the right way. Madrid was a smart choice. In Spain I could begin to set myself straight. Renata and I would enjoy a quiet month. I put it to myself—thinking of the carpenter’s level—that maybe our respective bubbles could be coaxed back to the center. Then the things that really satisfied, naturally satisfied, all hearts and minds might be attempted. If people felt like fakers when they spoke of the True and the Good this was because their bubble was astray, because they believed they were following the rules of scientific thought, which they didn’t understand one single bit. But I had no business to be toying with fire either, or playing footsie with the only revolutionary ideas left. Actuarially speaking, I had only a decade left to make up for a life-span largely misspent. There was no time to waste even on remorse and penitence. I felt also that Humboldt, out there in death, stood in need of my help. The dead and the living still formed one community. This planet was still the base of operations. There was Humboldt’s bungled life, and my bungled life, and it was up to me to do something, to give a last favorable turn to the wheel, to transmit moral understanding from the earth where you can get it to the next existence where you needed it. Of course I had my other dead. It wasn’t Humboldt alone. I also had a substantial suspicion of lunacy. But why should my receptivity fall under such suspicion? On the contrary, etcetera. I concluded, We’ll see what we shall see. We flew through unshadowed heights, and in the pure upper light I saw that the beautiful brown booze in my glass contained many crystalline corpuscles and thermal lines of heat-generating cold fluid. This was how I entertained myself and passed the time. We were held up in Lisbon for quite a while and reached Madrid hours off schedule.

  The 747, with its whale’s anterior hump, opened, and passengers poured out, eager Charlie Citrine among them. Tourists in this year, I had read in the airline magazine, outnumbered the Spanish population by about ten million. Still, what American could believe that his arrival in the Old World was not a special event? Behavior under these skies meant more than in Chicago. It had to. There was significant space here. I couldn’t help feeling this. And Renata, also surrounded by significant space, was waiting at the Ritz. Meantime, my charter-flight countrymen, a party of old folks from Wichita Falls, shuffled fatigued down the long corridors and resembled ambulatory patients in a hospital. I passed them like a streak. I was first at the passport window, first at the baggage conveyor. And then—my bag was the last bag of all. The Wichita Falls party was gone and I was beginning to think my bag with its elegant wardrobe, its Hermès neckties, its old chaser’s monkey-jackets, and so forth was lost when I saw it wobbling, solitary, on the long, long trail of rollers. It came toward me like an uncorseted woman sauntering over cobblestones.

  Then in the cab to the hotel I was pleased with myself again and thought I had done well to arrive late at night when the roads were empty. There was no delay; the taxi drove furiously fast, I could go to Renata’s room at once and get out of my clothes and into bed with her. Not from lust but from eagerness. I was full of a boundless need to give and take comfort. I can’t tell you how much I agreed with Meister Eckhardt about the eternal youth of the soul. From first to last, he says, it remains the same, it has only one age. The rest of us, however, is not so stable. So overlooking this discrepancy, denying decay, and always starting life over and over doesn’t make much sense. Here, with Renata, I wanted to have another go at it, swearing up and down that I would be more tender and she would be more faithful and humane. It didn’t make sense, of course. But it mustn’t be forgotten that I had been a complete idiot until I was forty and a partial idiot after that. I would always be something of an idiot. Still, I felt that there was hope and raced in the cab toward Renata. I was entering the final zones of mortality, expecting that here in Spain of all places, here in a bedroom, all the right human things would—at last!—happen.

  Dignified flunkies in the circular reception hall of the Ritz took my bag and briefcase and I came through the revolving door looking for Renata. Certainly she would not be waiting for me in one of those stately chairs. A queenly woman couldn’t sit in the lobby with the night staff at 3 a.m. No, she must be lying awake, beautiful, humid, breathing quietly, and waiting for her extraordinary, her one-and-only Citrine. There were other suitable men, handsomer, younger, energetic, but of me Charlie there was only one, and Renata I believed was aware of this.

  For reasons of self-respect she had objected on the telephone to sharing a suite with me. “It doesn’t matter in New York but in Madrid, with different names on our passports, it’s just too whorey. I know it’s going to cost double but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

  I asked the man at the switchboard to ring Mrs. Koffritz.

  “We have no Mrs. Koffritz,” was his answer.

  “A Mrs. Citrine, then?” I said.

  There was no Mrs. Citrine either. That was a wicked disappointment. I walked across the circular carpet under the dome to the concierge. He handed me a wire from Milan. SLIGHT DELAY. BIFERNO DEVELOPING. PHONING TOMORROW. I ADORE YOU.

  I was then shown to my room, but I was in no condition to admire its effects: richly Spanish, with carved chests and thick drapes, with Turkish carpets and
fauteuils
, a marble bathroom and old-fashioned electrical fixtures in the grand old
Wagon-Lit
style. The bed stood in a curtained alcove and was covered in watered silk. My heart was behaving badly as I crept in naked and laid my head on the bolster. There was no word from Thax-ter, either, and he should have reached Paris by now. I had to communicate with him. Thaxter would have to inform Stewart in New York that I was accepting his invitation to stay in Madrid for a month as his guest. This was a fairly important matter. I was down to four thousand dollars and couldn’t afford two suites at the Ritz. The dollar was taking a beating, the peseta was unrealistically high, and I didn’t believe that Biferno was developing into anything.

  My heart was dumbly aching. I refused to give it the words it would have uttered. I condemned the state I was in. It was idle, idle, idle. Many thousands of miles from my last bed in Texas I lay stiff and infinitely sad, my body temperature at least three degrees below normal. I had been brought up to detest self-pity. It was part of my American training to be energetic, and positive, and a thriving energy system, and an achiever, and having achieved two Pulitzer prizes and the Zig-Zag medal and a good deal of money (of which I was robbed by a Court of Equity), I had set myself a final and ever higher achievement, namely, an indispensable metaphysical revision, a more correct way of thinking about the question of death! And now I remembered a quotation from Coleridge, cited by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the papers he had left me, about quaint metaphysical opinions. How did it go? Quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, were playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. I got up then to rummage in the briefcase for the exact quotation. But then I stopped. I recognized that to be afraid that Renata was ditching me was far different from being deadly sick. Besides, damn her, why should she give me an hour of anguish and make me stoop and rummage naked, pulling out a dead man’s papers by the light of this
Wagon-Lit
lamp. I decided that I was only overtired and suffering from jet lag.

  I turned from Humboldt and Coleridge to the theories of George Swiebel. I did what George would have done. I ran myself a hot bath and stood on my head while the tub was filling. I went on to do a wrestler’s bridge, resting all my weight on my heels and on the back of my head. After this I performed some of the exercises recommended by the famous Dr. Jacobsen, the relaxation and sleep expert. I had studied his manual. You were supposed to cast out tension toe by toe and finger by finger. This was not a good idea, for it brought back to me what Renata did with toes and fingers in moments of erotic ingenuity. (I never knew about the toes until Renata taught me.) After all this I simply went back to bed and prayed my upset soul to go out for a while, please, and let the poor body have some rest. I picked up her telegram, fixing my eyes on I ADORE YOU. Studying this hard, I decided to believe that she was telling the truth. As soon as I performed this act of faith I slept. For many hours I was out cold in the curtained alcove.

  Then my telephone rang. In the shuttered curtained blackness I felt for the switch. It was not to be found. I picked up the phone and asked the operator, “What time is it?”

  It was twenty minutes after eleven. “A lady is on her way up to your room,” the switchboard told me.

  A lady! Renata was here. I dragged the drapes aside from the windows and ran to brush my teeth and wash my face. I pulled on a bathrobe, gave a swipe at my hair to cover the bald spot, and was drying myself with one of the heavy luxurious towels when the knocker ticked many times, like a telegraph key, only more delicately, suggestively. I shouted, “Darling!” I swept the door open and found Renata’s old mother before me. She was wearing her dark travel costume, with many of her own arrangements, including the hat and the veil. “Señora!” I said.

  She entered in her medieval garments. Just over the threshold she reached a gloved hand behind her and brought in Renata’s little boy, Roger. “Roger!” I said. “Why is Roger in Madrid? What are you doing here, Señora?”

  “Poor baby. He was sleeping on the plane. I had them carry him off.”

  “But Christmas with the grandparents in Milwaukee—what about that?”

  “His grandfather had a stroke. May die. As for his father, we can’t locate the man. I couldn’t keep Roger with me, my apartment is small.”

  “What about Renata’s apartment?”

  No, the Señora, with her
affaires de coeur
, couldn’t take care of a small child. I had met some of her gentlemen friends. It was wise not to expose the child to them. As a rule I avoided thinking about her romances.

  “Does Renata know?”

  “Of course she knows we’re coming. We discussed it on the telephone. Please order breakfast for us, Charles. Will you eat some nice Frosted Flakes, Roger darling? For me, hot chocolate and also some
croissants
and a glass of brandy.”

  The child sat bowed over the arm of the tall Spanish chair.

  “Come on, kid,” I said, “lie on my bed.” I pulled off his small shoes and led him into the alcove. The Señora watched as I covered him and drew the curtains. “So Renata told you to bring him here.”

  “Of course. You may be here for months. It was the only thing to do.”

  “When is Renata arriving?”

  “Tomorrow is Christmas,” said the Señora.

  “Terrific. What does your statement mean? Will she be here for Christmas or is she having Christmas with her father in Milan? Is she getting anywhere? How can she, if you’re suing Mr. Biferno?”

  “We’ve been in the air for ten hours, Charles. I’m not strong enough to answer questions. Please order breakfast. I wish you would shave also. I really can’t bear a man’s unshaven face across the table.”

  This made me consider the Señora’s own face. She had wonderful dignity. She sat in her wimple like Edith Sitwell. Her power with her daughter, whom I so badly needed, was very great. There was a serpentine dryness about her eyes. Yes, the Señora was bananas. However, her composure, with its large content of furious irrationality, was unassailable.

  “I’ll shave while you’re waiting for your cocoa, Señora. Why, I wonder, did you choose such a time to sue Signor Biferno?”

  “Isn’t that my own business?”

  “Isn’t it Renata’s business also?”

  “You speak like Renata’s husband,” she said. “Renata went to Milan to give that man a chance to acknowledge his daughter. But there is a mother in the case too. Who brought the girl up and made such an extraordinary woman of her? Who taught her class and all the important lessons of a woman? The whole injustice should be dealt with. The man has three plain ugly daughters. If he wants this marvelous child he had by me, let him settle his bill. Don’t try to teach a Latin woman about such things, Charles.”

  I sat in my not entirely clean beige silk robe. The sash was too long and the tassels had dragged on the floor for many years. The waiter came, the tray was uncovered with a flourish, and we breakfasted. As the Señora snuffed up her cognac I observed the grain of her skin, the touch of whisker on her lip, the arched nose with its operatic nostrils and the peculiar chicken luster of her eyeballs. “I got the TWA tickets from your travel agent, that Portuguese lady who wears a paisley turban, Mrs. Da Cintra. Renata told me to charge them. I didn’t have a cent.” The Señora was like Thaxter in this regard—people who could tell you with pride, even with delight, how broke they were. “And I’ve taken a room here for Roger and me. My institute is closed this week. I will have a holiday.”

  At the mention of institute, I thought of a loony bin, but no, she was speaking of the secretarial school where she taught commercial Spanish. I had always suspected that she was actually a Magyar. Be that as it might, the students appreciated her. No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending. But she would have to retire soon, and who would push the Señora’s wheelchair? Was it possible that she now saw me in that capacity? But perhaps the old woman, like Humboldt, dreamed that she could make her fortune in a lawsuit. And why not? Perhaps there was a judge in Milan like my Urbanovich.