Humboldt's Gift (59 page)

  “So we will have Christmas together,” said the Señora.

  “The kid is very pale. Is he sick?”

  “It’s only fatigue,” said the Señora.

  Roger, however, came down with the flu. The hotel sent an excellent Spanish doctor, a graduate of Northwestern who reminisced with me about Chicago and soaked me. I paid him an American fee. I gave the Señora money for Christmas presents and she bought all kinds of objects. On Christmas Day, thinking of my own girls, I felt quite low. I was glad to have Roger there and kept him company, reading him fairy tales and cutting and pasting long chains from the Spanish newspapers. There was a humidifier in the room which heightened the odors of paste and paper. Renata did not telephone.

  I recalled that I had spent the Christmas of 1924 in the TB sanatorium. The nurses gave me a thick-striped peppermint candy cane and a red openwork Christmas stocking filled with chocolate coins wrapped in gilt, but it was depressing joy and I longed for Papa and Mama and for my wicked stout brother, Julius, even. Now I had survived this quaking and heartsickness and was an elderly fugitive, the prey of Equity, sitting in Madrid, cutting and pasting with sighs. The kid was pale with fever, his breath flavored with the chocolate and paste, and he was absorbed in a paper chain that went twice about the room and had to be strung over the chandelier. I tried to be nice and calm but now and then my feelings gave a wash (oh those lousy feelings) like the water in a ferry slip when the broad-beamed boat pushes in and the backing engines churn up the litter and drowned orange rinds. This happened when my controls failed and I imagined what Renata might be doing in Milan, the room she was in, the man who was with her, the positions they took, the other fellow’s toes. I was determined that no, I wouldn’t tolerate being wrung abandoned sea-sick ship-wrecked castaway. I tried quoting Shakespeare to myself—words to the effect that Caesar and Danger were two lions whelped on the same day, and Caesar the elder and more terrible. But that was aiming too high and it didn’t work. In addition the twentieth century is not easily impressed by pains of this nature. It has seen everything. After the holocausts, you can’t blame it for lacking interest in private difficulties of this sort. I myself recited a brief list of the real questions before the world—the oil embargo, the collapse of Britain, famines in India and Ethiopia, the future of democracy, the fate of humankind. This did no more good than Julius Caesar. I remained personally downhearted.

  It wasn’t until I was sitting in a French brocade armchair of the Ritz’s private eighteenth-century barber’s cubicle—I was here not because I needed a haircut but, as so often, only because I longed for a human touch—that I began to have clearer ideas about Renata and thé Señora. How was it, for instance, that as soon as grandfather Koffritz had suffered his stroke and became paralyzed on one side Roger was ready to go? How did that old broad get him a passport so quickly? The answer was that the passport, when I went up and examined it on the quiet, proved to have been issued back in October. The ladies were very thorough planners. Only I failed to think ahead. So now it occurred to me to take the initiative.

  It would be a clever move to marry Renata before she could learn that I was broke. This should not be done merely to hit back. No, in spite of her shenanigans I was mad about her. Loving her, I was willing to overlook certain trifles. She had provoked me by locking me out one night and by the conspicuous display of her birth-control device at the top of her open bag in Heathrow last April when we were parting for three days. But was that, after all, very significant? Did it mean more than that one never knew when one was going to meet an interesting man? The serious question was whether I, with all my thoughts, or because of them, would ever be able to understand what sort of girl Renata was. I wasn’t like Humboldt, given to jealous seizures. I recalled how he had looked in Connecticut, when he quoted me King Leontes in my yard by the sea. “I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances; but not for joy, not joy.” That heart-dancing was classic jealousy. I didn’t suffer from classic jealousy. Renata did gross things, to be sure. But perhaps these were war measures. She was campaigning to get me and would be different when we were settled down as husband and wife. No doubt she was a dangerous person but I would never be greatly interested in any woman incapable of harm, in any woman who didn’t threaten me with loss. Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights. The Spanish setting was right for this. Renata was acting like Carmen, and Flonzaley, for it probably was Flonzaley, was being Escamillo the Toreador, while I, at two and a half times the age for the role, was cast as Don José.

  Quickly I sketched the immediate future. Civil marriages probably didn’t exist in this Catholic country. The knot could be tied at the American Embassy by the military attaché, perhaps, or even a notary public for all I knew. I would go to the antique shops (I loved the Madrid antique shops) to look for two wedding bands and I could throw a champagne supper at the Ritz, no questions asked about Milan. After we had sent the Señora back to Chicago, the three of us might move to Segovia, a town I knew. After Demmie’s death I traveled widely, so I had been to Segovia before. I was beguiled by the Roman aqueduct, I recalled that I had really gone for those tall knobby stone arches—stones whose nature was to fall or sink were sitting there lightly in the air. That was an achievement that had gone home—an example to me. For purposes of meditation Segovia couldn’t be beat. We could live there
en famille
in one of the old back streets, and while I tried to see if I could really move from mental consciousness to the purer consciousness of spirit, it might amuse Renata to comb the town for antiques she could sell to decorators in Chicago. Perhaps she would even make a buck. Roger could attend nursery school and eventually my little girls might join us, because when Denise won her case and collected her money she’d want to get rid of them immediately. I had just enough cash left to settle in Segovia and give Renata a commercial start. Perhaps I would even write the essay on contemporary Spanish culture suggested by Thaxter, if that could be done without too much faking. And how would Renata take my deception? She would take it as good comedy, which she valued more highly than anything in the world. And when I told her after the marriage that we were down to our last few thousand dollars she would laugh brilliantly, larger than life, and say, “Well,
there’s
a twist.” I evoked Renata laughing brilliantly because I was in reality undergoing a major attack of my lifelong trouble—the longing, the swelling heart, the tearing eagerness of the deserted, the painful keenness or infinitizing of an unidentified need. This condition was apparently stretching from earliest childhood to the border of senescence. I thought, Hell, let’s settle this once and for all. Then, not wanting the nosy Ritz staff to talk, I went to the central post office of Madrid, with its sonorous halls and batty-looking steeples (Spanish bureaucratic Gothic) and sent a cable to Milan. MARVELOUS IDEA, RENATA DARLING. MARRY ME TOMORROW. YOUR TRULY LOVING FAITHFUL CHARLIE.

  After this I lay awake all night because I had used the word faithful. This might queer the whole deal, with its implied accusation and the hint or shadow of forgiveness. But I had really meant no harm. I was betwixt and between. I mean, if I were a true hypocrite I wouldn’t forever be putting my foot in my mouth. On the other hand, if I were a real innocent, pure in heart, I wouldn’t have to fret the night out over Renata’s conduct in Milan or her misinterpretation of my wire. But I lost a night’s sleep for nothing. The wording of the message didn’t matter. She didn’t reply at all.

  So that night, in the romantic dining room of the Ritz where every bite cost a fortune, I said to the Señora, “You’ll never guess who’s been on my mind today.” Without waiting for an answer I then uttered the name “Flonzaley!” as a surprise assault on her defenses. But the Señora was made of terribly hard material. She seemed hardly to notice. I repeated the name. “Flonzaley! Flonzaley! Flonzaley!”

  “What is this loudness, what is the matter, Charles?”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s the matter. Where is Mr. Flonzaley?”

  “Why should his whereabouts be my problem? Would you mind asking the
camarero
to pour the wine?” It was not only because she was the lady and I the gentleman that the Señora wished me to speak to waiters. She was fluent in Spanish all right, but her accent was pure Hungarian. Of this there was no doubt now. I learned a thing or two from the Señora. For instance, did I think that people concluding their lives would all be in a fever to come to terms with their souls? I went through agonies of preparation before I blurted out Flonzaley’s name and then she asked for more wine. And yet it must have been she that masterminded the plan to bring Roger to Madrid. It was she who made certain that I was pinned down here and prevented me from rushing to Milan to burst in on Renata. For Flonzaley was there with her, all right. He was mad for her and I didn’t blame him. A man who met more people on the mortuary slab than he met socially could not be blamed for losing his head that way. A body like Renata’s was not often seen in the living flesh. As for Renata, she complained of the morbid element in his adoration, but could I be altogether sure that it was not one of his attractions? I was certain of nothing. I sat trying to make myself drunk on a bottle of acid wine, but I made no headway against my bitter sobriety. No I didn’t understand.

  The activities of higher consciousness didn’t inevitably improve the understanding. The hope of such understanding was raised by my manual—
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment
. This gave specific instructions. One suggested exercise was to try to enter into the intense desire of another person on a given occasion. To do this one had to remove all personal opinions, all interfering judgments; one should be neither for nor against this desire. In this way one might come gradually to feel what another soul was feeling, I had made this experiment with my own child Mary. For her last birthday she desired a bicycle, the ten-speed type. I wasn’t convinced that she was old enough to have one. When we went to the shop it was by no means certain that I would buy it. Now what was her desire, and what did she experience? I wanted to know this, and tried to desire in the way that she desired. This was my kid, whom I loved, and it should have been elementary to find out what a soul in its fresh state craved with such intensity. But I couldn’t do this. I tried until I broke into a sweat, humiliated, disgraced by my failure. If I couldn’t know this kid’s desire could I know any human being? I tried it on a large number of people. And then, defeated, I asked where was I anyway? And what did I really know of anyone? The only desires I knew were my own and those of nonexistent people like Macbeth or Pros-pero. These I knew because the insight and language of genius made them clear. I bought Mary the bike and then shouted at her, “For Christ’s sake, don’t ride over the curbs, you’ll bust hell out of the wheel.” But this was an explosion of despair over my failure to know the kid’s heart. And yet I was prepared to know. I was all set up to know in the richest colors, with the deepest feelings, and in the purest light. I was a brute, packed with exquisite capacities which I was unable to use. There’s no need to go into this yet once again and tickle each mandolin note ten times as that dear friend of mine accused me of doing. The job, once and for all, was to burst from the fatal self-sufficiency of consciousness and put my remaining strength over into the Imaginative Soul. As Humboldt too should have done.

  I don’t know who the other gentlemen in the Ritz may have been dining with, the human scene was too pregnant and dense in complications for me at this moment, and all I can say was that I was glad the aims of the pimping old bitch across the table were merely conventional aims. If she had gone after my soul, what was left of it, I would have been sunk. But all she wanted was to market her daughter at her finest hour. And was I through? And was it over? For a few years I had had it good with Renata—the champagne cocktails, the table set with orchids, and this warm beauty serving dinner in feathers and G string while I ate and drank and laughed till I coughed at her erotic teasing, the burlesque of the amorous greatness of heroes and kings. Good-by, good-by to those wonderful sensations. Mine at least had been the real thing. And if hers were not, she had at least been a true and understanding pal. In her percale bed. In her heaven of piled pillows. All that was probably over.

  And what could you be at the Ritz but a well-conducted diner? You were attended by servitors and chefs and
maîtres
and grooms, waiters, and the little
botónes
who was dressed like an American bellhop and was filling the glasses with crystalline ice water and scraping crumbs from the linen with a broad silver blade. Him I liked best of all. There was nothing I could do under the circumstances about my desire to give a sob. It was my heartbreak hour. For I didn’t have the dough and the old woman knew it. This tunicate withered bag the Señora had my financial number. Flonzaley with his corpses would never run out of money. The course of nature itself was behind him. Cancers and aneurysms, coronaries and hemorrhages stood behind his wealth and guaranteed him bliss. All these dead, like the glorious court of Jerusalem, chanting, “Live forever, Solomon Flonzaley!” And so Flonzaley was getting Renata while I yielded a moment to bitter self-pity and saw myself very old and standing dazed in the toilet of some tenement. Perhaps like old Doc Lutz I would put two socks on one foot and pee in the bathtub. That, as Naomi said, was the end. It was just as well that the title to those graves in Waldheim had turned up in Julius’s desk. I might just need them, untimely. Tomorrow, heavy of heart, I was going to the Prado to look for the Velasquez, or was it the Murillo that resembled Renata—the one mentioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Downing Street. So I sat in this scene of silver service and brandy flames and the superb flash of chafing dishes.