Humboldt's Gift (65 page)

  “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.”