The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [17]
CHAPTER XVII
It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there's a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe. Well, that poor Bizcocho, he cracked my skull, but he had broken a leg and Thea shot him. Unconscious, I didn't hear the explosion. She and Jacinto dragged me up on her horse. The boy mounted with me and held me up like a sack of meal. The blood was spilling from my head, and I had lost some teeth too, from the lower jaw. So, sagging in Jacinto's arms with the bandanna Thea had used for signaling so soaked it couldn't absorb more blood, I was carried to the doctor's house. When we were nearly there I gave myself a heave and said, "Where's the eagle?" A hunting accident would never make Thea shed tears, even one as bad as this. She didn't cry at all. As I was deafened from faintness or from blood or hair or soil in my ears, I didn't hear but rather saw how she cursed Caligula. I felt a wave or'divot of my scalp curl or wrinkle on my head. I glimpsed how her hand, which held my leg tight, was streaked with red. Her pallor was very hot. With that depth and hollow narrowness of sight that you have at such moments her face came before me with spots of light on it from the pattern of brass eyelets on her hat, a spatter of heat across the bridge of her nose and on her lips. My hearing cleared; I heard the kids cry, "Es el amo del dguila!" El dguila! Who was doing loops somewhere in the heavens with great pinions, with Turkish feather pants and rending beak. The whole height of space appeared very great to me. I felt I crept along at the bottom of it. Thea said, "You've lost a tooth." I nodded. I knew where the gap was. But sooner or later you're bound to lose some teeth. From the doctor's yard two women came for me with furled stretcher, and they laid me on it. I kept fading in and out, extremely weak. But as we went through the patio I was conscious and admired the day, which was notably beautiful. However, I thought next that it was because of me that Bizcocho was dead, that he had survived wild Zapatista night of guerrilla shooting and slithering and probably been present when men were crucified or their bellies filled with ants, that he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him. The doctor had a flower in his buttonhole when he came forward, and he was smiling. But basically he was gloomy. His room stunk of drugs and ether. I got a dose of ether that made me reek for days after. I kept puking. I was covered with bandages; my face was stiff with the crusts of scratches. I could eat only gruel and turkey soup, and I couldn't stand myself. Inside the turban of bandages I heard a hissing as if I had a faucet or jet there. From the pain and this hiss or trickle I suspected that gloomy smiler of doing a bad job and I worried about my skull because of the careless Mexican approach to slaughter, sickness, and burial; but the doctor turned out later to have done a good job. But then I suffered, I was low, eyes deep circled, cheeks drawn in, gap-toothed. In the bandages I seemed to myself to resemble my mother and at times my brother Georgie. And even after the scratches healed and the headaches dimmed down I was gnawed and didn't know from what cause. Thea also became very restless. Caligula's washout and my being such a chump as to spur poor Bizcocho from the top of a bluff terribly disappointed her. With her eagerness and boldness, that she should be held back g by my incompetence after having undertaken this, planned it out, I mastered the animal, was very hard to take. Thea sent Caligula away to her father's friend in Indiana, for his Trianon zoo. I thought how the old desert rat in Texarkana would enjoy hearing about this. I hobbled out to see the eagle, caged and crated, loaded on the wagon. The white patch of maturity was beginning to show on his head; the eye wasn't a bit less imperial and his beak with its naked purposes of breathing and tearing just as awesome as before. I said, "Good-by, Calig." "Good-by and good riddance, you phony," said Thea. We were near tears, both of us, from the crackup of hopes and ridiculing of expectations. The gauntlets and hood lay for a long time in a corner and took on oblivion. As Thea sat with me and minded and nursed me for a feiv weeks it became more and more clear that if she didn't show any unrest there were other expressions that didn't appear on her face either. When I started to recover I didn't want her to hang around for my sake and company, if she was going to look like this. We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn't want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn't want it to be afte; snakes that she went. But somebody had tipped her off to some green and red vipers, and what didn't show in her looks, patient toward me as I lay deaf and gaunt in my turban, in the sequel of the great flopwhat didn't show was how she sat and dreamed of catching these snakes. I recognized that she was bored and needed action. At first she went after wild pigs and such creatures, to l: eep me satisfied, but later she brought home snakes from the mountains in a burlap sack. Because of the good it did her I didn't squawk about it. I could measure her improvement daily with the eye. Only I didn't want her to go hunting alone, and I urged her to get some of her friends to accompany her, not just Jacinto. There was a huntiig set in town, and sometimes the doctor went out with her, sometimes young Talavera. So I was alone and went around the villa in robe and bondages, into the garden, along the porch with the snakes who writhed in the straw and raced their tongues I had a cold eye for them. I felt it was less from horror than from antagonism. After all, I had timed an eagle and got somewhere with wildlife, so I could claim s certain amount of courage. I didn't have to be clothed in intrepidity all the time or love all creatures. There was a kind of snake smell, like the smell of spoiled mango or rotten hay, the same as where we hai hunted the giant iguana. When I wasn't too restless I sat in one of the bullhide chairs and read the Utopia book. I still had the dysentery bug and in the morning often felt that heavy drape of the guts that made me run to fhe biffy, Caligula's old roost. There I kept the door open. It gave m; a view of the entire town, which now, late fall, after the deepest teats had passed off, was very beautiful. There weren't real seasons liere, but the shadows of harsher climates varied the months, from the north or from the south. Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. This blus beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it. Otherwise I schlepped around useless and melancholy, feeling like a slob. As my cheeks had fallen, their bones became large and my eyes appeared a little sleepy, from the uneasiness they'd have shown had they opened wider. I grew a kind of Indian mustache of fair hair by the sides of my mouth too. Thea drank her coffee, told me to be well, put on her sombrero of brass eyelets, and went out to the horses. I would come and watch her mount. With just the slight heaviness of confident body she sat in the saddle. She no longer asked me whether I wanted her to stay with me, only recommended that I take a walk in the afternoon. I said I'd see ' about it., v.' Moulton and Iggy came to visit me, and Moulton said, "Boling, you look like hell," so I felt even more sad over myself and was in the dumps, with omens that moved around in my heart. Stella too, Oliver's girl friend, regretted that I didn't look better when I talked to her from the garden wall. I observed there was a shadow over her also. These days I was drinking up a fair amount of tequila limonada, and I invited her to join me. She refused. Regretfully she said, "I wish I could. One of these days maybe I will. I'd like to talk to you. But you know we're supposed to move out of the Carios Quinto." I didn't know, and before I could find out why, thin Oliver:; ' came lifting his feet over the flowers, his horsy ankles in gartered;;' I silk socks, his little red mouth sullen. He took her away from the wall, not even talking to me. ^: |' What was wrong with him? Moulton said he was jealous. "And she says they're moving out." "Yes, Oliver rented that Jap's villa. The Jap has to go back to Nagasaki. Oliver says the biddies at the Carios are giving Stella the treatment. Because they know they aren't married. If I had a girl like that, a lot I'd care what some old bags were saying!" "But why is he settling down here? Doesn't he have that magazine y to take care of in New York?" 'S "He runs it from Mexico," said Iggy. Moulton said, "Bushwah! He's here because he's in dutch." i I "You think he embezzled money?" said Iggy, astonished, j Moulton looked as though he knew much more than he judged fit 'I to tell. Satchel ass. His portly hard middle hung over with a shirt il- | lustrated with pineapples. He even had a faint shame of the apparition he made in the sunlight. His lids were as dark in stain as his smoker's fingers, and he had the blinking habit. "Jepson says he heard he wants to throw a big party on account of Stella in the villa, to show those old bitches at the Carlos," said ^gy"He's going to show everyone, and knock people down with his success. Whoever thought he was nothing but an international bum, and that's everybody in the world who ever laid eyes on him, now's going to be shown. Boy! People are right where he left them, and he's going to come back and wow them. He has been around the world too, but he didn't know it because he was drunk." As he said this, Oliver appeared to my thought in a shack of Outer Mongolia, where soldiers in quilted coats saw him lying in his vomit in a stupor. Moulton liked to show that ill, miserable things and rubbish supplied the unity of the world. Only amusement supposedly made this tolerable, and so he specialized in amusement. All these people, the whole colony, did that. Well, they visited me at the villa. Then after half an hour Mouiton ran out of talk. They had stamped out a dozen butts, and Moulton began to look terribly bored. He had exhausted this particular corner where we sat and so looked sick that he had to stay. "Bolingbroke," he said, "you don't have to stick around the house because you wear that turban. Come down to the zocalo. We'll meet folks there or play on the fribble machine. Come along, Boling. To horse." "Yes, come on, Boling." "Not you, Iggy. Go home. Eunice raises hell with me because I keep you away from work." "But I thought you were divorced, Iggy?" I said. "He is, but his wife keeps him on a chain. She makes him stay with the kid while she and the new husband go out." Down at Hilario's we sat amid the flowers of the porch, over the square. They were the simpler flowers of cooler weather. Except the red poinsettia, star of Christmas, with velvet thrust-out peaks, the leader in splendor. It said a lot to me th^t these flowers should have no power over their place of appearance, nor over the time, and yet be such a success of beauty and plaster the insignificant wall. I saw also the little kinkajou who roved over his square of cage in every dimension, upside down, backwards. In the depth of accident, you be supple--never sleepy but at sleeping time. And Moulton sat and continued his satire on Iggy. Eunice took the checks from New York and kept Iggy on a budget. But Iggy didn't know how to handle dough. He'd only go to the foco rojo with it, and the girls would take it away. Iggy with his bloodshot green eyes and froggy kindly mouth felt praised, sort of, pictured among the whores of the foco rojo. "Eunice needs the money for the kid. Or I'd lose it to you in poker. That's what gets Wiley, he can't win real jack off me." "Hell, what would I care if I didn't see Jepson lush in here with your money, the money he gets out of Eunice?" "Why, you're nuts! He's got his own. His grandfather had an expedition to Africa. No bunk." To be near his daughter, an overpetted dark little kid, Iggy lived in the same villa as his ex-wife. It was mostly in order to protect her and the kid from Jepson. I think Iggy probably still loved Eunice. I went around with him and with Moulton now. As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn't strong enough to go with Thea but wasn't too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony. I couldn't deny their appeal. I learned their language fast. But also fatigue of them came fast. And the strange thing was, you know, how you woke early in the morning and saw the air, a light gold, thin but strong before daily influences took it away from you. But you felt no reason why, as far as the air itself was concerned, these influences had to be such as they were, low, anxious, or laughable. Under the pomegranate tree, on the wood bench, Iggy asked me to help him with his difficulties. His story was hung up and he had to have a plot angle. There is a busted ensign on the beach who be' comes a rummy. A half-breed proposes to him to run coolies illegally ainto Hawaii. But among the plantation hands he discovers there are Sspies, so the old U. S. officer in him is stirred, and he's going to surrender the whole swatch of them to the authorities. But he has to fight it out with the lascar who now suspects him. Iggy worried out his story, and I went on bare feet for the tequila bottle. Then Moulton came and we left. The cook had fixed lunch, but I didn't like to eat alone. I bought tacos in the market, which made my gut worse, or I got a sandwich at the Chinaman's. So things shouldn't cram on his mind but be orderly. Bacon had music played in the next room when he thought out the New Atlantis. But down in the zdcalo all day the machines played "Salud Dinero" or "Jalisco," and there was furious noise, the rapid dual hammer of the mariachis and the yockering of the lame-tongue blind fiddler and crazy scrapes, plus the bang of bus motors and bells, and this mingling was the bed of my disharmonies. So mostly I felt confusion, and dangers that were as terrible as the sky and mountain sights were gorgeous in their painting. The town whirled and howled as it hit the stride of its season. While Iggy doped out how the American and the half-breed would fight it out over the signals to warn the coast guard we were on the way to Moulton's hotel. He coaxed me to stay while he ground out his installments of men from Mars. He hated his work; the solitude of it above all. I'd sit on the roof outside his room, droop-shouldered hands hung large from my knees, and look toward the knotted mountains and wonder in my sun-dimmed mind where Thea might be. Coming from the cigarette-gray room to think, Moulton paced in shorts that showed his concave knees and thick huge legs; he narrowed the eyes of his great face and looked at the town as though it were all a racket. He poured a drink, he was a chain-smoker; and in the business of mixing, lighting, dragging, flipping, blowing smoke through his satirical nose, there seemed to be contained about all he thought really worth effort. He was mighty bored. And he understood how to make me go through the long characteristic moment of his mood--this ash, ice, butts, lemon peel and sticky glass, panting space of empty time. He saw to it his lot was shared, like everybody else, and did something with you to compel you to feel what he felt. Moulton could even put it in words himself. He said, "Boredom is strength, Bolingbroke. The bored man gets his way sooner than the next guy. When you're bored you're respected." With small nose, gross thighs, and those back-bent smoke-dyed fingers, he obliged me with this explanation, and he thought to have more effect on me than he really ever could have. When I didn't argue he v/as satisfied that he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake. A conversation was something he could run well, so he liked the reality of his life to be that of conversations. I was on to this. "Ah well, let's have a break and play blackjack." He carried a deck of cards in his shirt pocket. So he blew the cigarette dust from the table and cut for the deal, and when he saw my glances still going out to the mountains he said, to distract me, not roughly, "Yeah, she's up there. Come on, chum, deal me. Okay. Take yourself. Want a side bet? I bet I get the deal from you in ten minutes." Moulton was a big boy for a game of cards, poker most of all. We played at Hilario's at first, and when Hilario kicked about these long sessions that lasted far into the night we moved over to the filthy BP-" Chinese restaurant. Very soon I began to put all my time into gambling. It seems the ancient Huron tribe thought gambling was a remedy for some illnesses. Maybe I had one of those illnesses. Moulton must have too. He had to be betting continually. I matched pesos with him, cut for high card, played fribble--which was what he called pinball-- and even put-and-take, with a little top. I was lucky and also skillful at poker, which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom. Moulton complained, "Brother, you must have studied with the Capablanca of poker. I can't tell when you're bluffing because you always look so innocent. Nobody can really be as innocent as all that." This was true, though I would have said I actually did intend to be as good as possible. That's how much I myself knew. But Jesus, Lord! Dissembling! Why, the master-dissemblers there are around! And if nature made us live and do as worms and beetles do, to escape the ichneumon fly and swindle other enemies by mimicry, and so forth--well, all right!! But that's not our problem. With Thea too I behaved as though nothing was wrong, and yet I knew we were slipping. If I didn't show what despair this caused it was a lead-pipe cinch to bluff Moulton out with only a jack. Why these snakes? Why did she have to hunt snakes? She came back with heaving sackfuls, which made my intestines go wrong with reaction; and then she gave them such loving treatment that I could see nothing in it but eccentricity. You had to be careful not to provoke them into striking the glass, because it gave them mouth sores hard to cure. And in addition they had parasites that got between the scales,. and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis. Toughest of all was the casting of the skins, which was like labor when they couldn't writhe out of the epidermis and even their eyes were clouded with a dirty milk. Thea sometimes took forceps to help them or covered them with damp rags to soften the skin, or she put the more restless ones in water and in the water set a block of wood afloat so the beast might rest its little head when fatigued with swimming. But then they would gleam out, one day, and their freshness and jewelry would give even me pleasure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the cast skin from which they were regenerated in green or dots of red like pomegranate seeds or varnished gold crust. Meanwhile Thea and I were not satisfied with each other. I was resentful of the snakes and that she tended them. I felt myself between two peculiarities, hers and the peculiarity of the town in full .369 stride of its season. But I didn't tell her. When she asked me how about coming out with her to hunt I said I wasn't well enough yet. So she looked at me, and the thought was very prominent that after all I was lushing and playing cards, so if I stood before her skinny, ill, and with secret thoughts smoldering, what remedy could we ever agree on? "I don't like that gang you're with," she said. "They're harmless," I casually answered, but it was not a harmless kind of answer. "Why don't you come out with me tomorrow? Talavera has a safe horse for you. There are some places I want to show you, wonderful places." "Well, that'll be swell," I said. "When I feel more ready." I had tried to put Caligula over and that was enough of a trial; I had stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. I'd be damned if I could get myself into Thea's excitement about catching snakes. It was too extreme a way of making out, with that vigor that couldn't be satisfied in ordinary pursuits. If she had to go and snatch these dangerous animals by the throat with a noose, and keep them and milk their venom from them, okay. But I knew at last that definitely there was one thing that was not for me. She was gone for two days in the mountains. When she returned I heard of it but didn't go up to the house; I was in a game at Louie Fu's and couldn't leave. Next morning I saw her in the garden, in riding breeches and the heavy boots she wore for snaking, thick and sturdy so that fangs couldn't pierce. Her white skin showed she was unwell, sullen; she hadn't rested and she craved and smarted, she wanted to punish me. Under the eyes there was a thickening of trouble. From her head the black hair gave back the heat of the sun, and along those particular hairs of irregular departure from her forehead there burned the red thread that was part of the secret of the black. She said fiercely, "Where were you!" "I got in very late." She was hot, shaky, and hasty, and heavy clear tears gave her eyes that crazy largeness of grievance that sometimes they would get. I thought she would sob, but she only shook. "I kind of expected you, the night before last," I said, and she didn't answer me. We were both sore but not prepared really to fight. What she shook with was breaking and not increasing anger. "What do you see in those people down there?" she demanded. "I think they must make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula. They make fun of me." "You think I'd let them do that?" "I know them better than you do. That Moulton stinks." She lit into Wiley Moulton and other residents. I listened, and in this way we ignored our real differences. We couldn't yet stand a fight. Sometimes I almost convinced myself that I was ready to bat around the mountains with the snake nooses and cameras and guns. I could have used some action, because I was nervous and overcharged and because I longed that she and I should be back as we had been in Chicago. But I never could quite bring myself to go. It seemed to me that I had to continue playing poker. I was ahead and couldn't quit. Moulton kept yelling how I had drawn blood on everybody; I had to give people their chance for revenge. So I had a deck of cards between my fingers as their most familiar object, and actually I became a very dexterous and fancy dealer. Soon people were looking for me who didn't even know me, and I seemed to be running a game at the Chinese restaurant. Louie Fu in his coat sweater was of that opinion even. I was Bolingbroke or the Eagle Man to tourist strangers who sat in the game, world-tour burns, Moulton called them. My pockets were full of different foreign currencies. I didn't know exactly what I had. But I did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's. There was no longer any refrigerator with bills in the greens and dishes; Thea never seemed to think to offer me an allowance. If I hadn't been sick I'd have felt well-off, prosperous, with my pounds, dollars, pesos, and Swiss francs. But it was only my superficial luck that was good; I was rattled, I was bandaged in an unclean bandage, gaunt, the town seemed to want to blow its silly self to pieces, Thea was collecting coral snakes and rattlers, I had to win a fight of patience with my anxious backside to sit at Louie's, or in somebody's hotel room, or even at the foco rojo where the game sometimes moved. There the whores were in the rear; in front there was a little bar which was a soldiers' hangout, before the tourists took over. The soldiers read comic books, ate beans, and drank pulque. Rats walked on the beams. The girls cooked, swept, or read too, or washed their hair in the yard. One half-naked kid with a garrison cap clonked on the marimba; the little black rubber balls on his sticks struck fast. I felt I had to do something well, so it shouldn't all be a total loss, and so I watched the cards. I didn't convince Thea when I said that I'd go along with her just as soon as I felt up to it, nor did she convince me by her gestures toward me. She consented to keep me company in town some evenings, and it was good to see her legs in skirts, not covered by trousers. But it burned me up on the day her divorce papers came and I said, as I had figured to do, "Let's get married," and she simply shook her head. Then I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let escape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father. Where at first it had disappointed me, and later graveled me more, this now gave me a harsh sting. For sure enough I had a glimmer of things from her standpoint, of how it is one thing to have a young man for your happy friend in the rosy days of love, and quite different the faulty creature to face in practical weather. I knew how I'd seem to her uncle, the powerful millionaire with his squash white-haired nose and his tailor-made Havanas. It was true that Thea defied him and aimed to become financially independent; but as she couldn't count on me she wouldn't cut herself off from her family for my sake. Had I been as enthusiastic on birds, snakes, horses, guns, and photography as she we might have made the grade. But I wouldn't have read a light meter for gold, I didn't want to capture snakes, and I felt ornery about it all. I hoped Thea would tire of it; while she, I suppose, waited for me to get tired of Moulton and Co. It was one fiesta after another meantime. The band plunged in the zocalo, clashed, drummed, and brayed; the fireworks bristled and ran off in strings, the processions swayed around with images. A woman died of a heart attack at a five-day drunk: party, and there were scandals. Two young men, lovers, had an argument about a dog and one of them took an overdose of sleeping pills. Jepson forgot his jacket in the foco rojo; the madame herself, Negra, brought it to the house. Iggy's ex-wife locked Jepson out, so he begged to sleep on Moulton's porch. Moulton wouldn't let him stay because he tried to borrow money, he drank his whisky. Now Jepson was living in the street, but as the town was foaming his sorrow wasn't particularly noticeable in it. Wolves or wild swine or the giant iguanas themselves or stags wouldn't have been either if they had slipped in from the mountains. A bright dust blew around and whitened the nights. The hotels and shops wanted there should be a hullabaloo and paid money for the music and shots and tolling, but to keep up these long fiestas cash wouldn't have been enough, and the energy for them must have come from the olden-time worship of those fire snakes and smoke mirrors and gruesome monster gods. Even the dogs ran and mumbled as if fresh back from their errand in the land of death, Mictlan. The old belief of the Indians was that dogs carried the souls of the dead there. There was an intestinal-amoeba epidemic which was hushed up, but funerals tangled with the other processions. There were big enter372 tainments. A Cossack chorus sang in the cathedral; the priest had never had such a crowd inside, and it made him frantic; he scolded and clapped his hands at everyone, crying we were in la casa de Dios. It didn't do a bit of good with that crowd. I can't say those Russians looked out of place in the zocalo in their tunics, boots, and tucked-in pants, musing around at night, burning their long cigarettes. A Brazilian-Italian opera company did La Forza del Destiiw. They sang and throbbed powerfully, but as though they didn't believe any of it themselves. Therefore I was skeptical too. Thea didn't come back for the second act. Then there was an Indian circus that gave a grim performance. The equipment of the acrobats was as if ripped out of an old foundry; the horses were shabby; the performers were solemn Michoacan Indians, and they stunted without nets or any safety devices. The savage little girls who came out in their soiled trousers to juggle and walk the wires and perform other tasks never smiled or bowed. Thus in this town I didn't see anything familiar, except in reminiscence--as when those Russians made me remember Grandma Lausch. Until one day when it was fairly quiet and I was sitting on a bench in the zocalo petting a kitten that tried to get into my armpit, and several large cars drove up to the cathedral. They were old cars but powerful, with something cast-iron about them, the long hoods, the low sling of expensive European automobiles. Immediately I knew there was a personage in the middle car, for bodyguards emerged from the two others, and I wondered who it was that could. be so important and yet so run-down. Among the rest were two Mexican policemen, grouchy and proud of their tunics, which they smoothed straight right away; but the guards were Europeans or Americans, in leather jackets and leggings. Their hands were on their holsters and they were jittery; it seemed to me they didn't know the first thing about their job. So I judged, having now and again, in Chicago, seen the real thing. It was a cool day. I wore the thick jacket with many pockets that Thea had bought for me on Wabash Avenue, the one that could save you in the wilderness. But it was zipped open, as I sat in the sun. The kitty was nuzzling and kneading under my arm with her paws--I felt her little spine with satisfied amusement and I watched to see who would come out of the center limousine now that the arrangements were complete. An aide gave the nod and a guard started to work the handle of the door, who obviously didn't have the hang of it, and all stood helpless during this embarrassment till the opposite door impatiently was thrown back with iron bump from the extreme wads of old upholstery, and heads of a foreign comb, specs, beards bent for ward within the beautifully polished glass. Here and there was a briefcase; I thought I recognized something political about these briefcases. One person was saying something, smiling and chatty, into the chauffeur's phone. And then the principal figure came out with a spring; he was very gingery and energetic, debonair, sharp, acute in the beard. He addressed himself without waste of attention to the study of the front of the cathedral. He wore a short coat with fur collar, large glasses, his cheek was somewhat soft but that didn't take away from an ascetic impression he gave. As I looked at him I decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the great Russian exile, and my eyes grew big. I always knew my entire life would not go by without my having seen a great man; and strangely enough my thought was of Einhorn, condemned to sit in a chair and study faces in the papers and limited to seeing only the people who chanced to come by. I was very enthusiastic and right away stood up. The beggars and loafers were already collecting in their Middle Ages style, the touts and schnorrers and the others uncovering their damages and stock-in-trade woes from bandages and rags. Head thrown back, Trotsky regarded and estimated the vast church, and with a jump in which hardly anything elderly appeared he went up the stairs and hastened in. There was a surge after him; the people with the briefcases--members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had briefcases like those--and also a huge man with hair like a woman's, and some of those queer bodyguards, and quite a few crutchhoppers and singsong limosnita beggars who true enough were near dead, as they claimed, went through the dark gap of the church door. I too wanted to go in; I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things. So I was wild with enthusiasm; it bumped up inside my skull like the handle of a broom and made me recall that my head still was bandaged and I should go easy. I stood watching till he came out again. But the reason for telling you all this is that one of the bodyguards turned out to be my old friend Sylvester, the onetime owner of the Star Thpater, the engineering student from Armour Tech, the exhusband of Mimi Villars' sister, the former subway employee. I recognized him in his Western-style rig. Ye gods! How severe, melancholy, duty-charged, and baffled he looked! Same as the others, he packed a pistol; the spread of his pants was wide at the back and his belly hung over the belt. I hollered at him, "Sylvester! You, Sylvester!" He looked sharply at me, as if I took a dangerous liberty; yet he was curious. I | was full of glee, and my head was pounding. My face got very red with Ji laughter and excitement, because I was so extremely happy to see him. "You damned fool, Sylvester, don't you know who it is? It's Augie March. You mean to stand there and not recognize me? I haven't changed that much, have I?" "Augie?" he asked and smiled a little with dark bitter lips, incredulous. His question made an uncertain creak in his throat. "Of course! It's me, you dope! Jesus, how did you get here? What are you doing with that hardware?" "How did you land down here? Gosh, we sure get around. What's wrong with your head?" "I fell off a horse," I said, and in spite of my joy at seeing him I quickly ran through in my mind a variety of reasonable, and not especially true, accounts. But he didn't ask, which astonished me. It now astonishes me less, for I know more about how people get preoccupied. "Gee, it's swell tosee you, Sylvester. How come you're doing this?" "I got assigned to it--what do you mean? They wanted somebody with a technological background." Technological background! As I was laughing still from pleasure at meeting him I could get away with a laugh over this too. Poor Sylvester, with this story about being a technician. Well, well, whatever we got out of this meeting it sure wasn't going to be the truth. I had prepared a story myself, should he ask me what I was up to. That's how it is. One day's ordinary falsehood if you could convert it into ":; silt would choke the Amazon back a hundred miles over the banks. ' However, it never appears in this form but is distributed all over like the nitrogen in potatoes. "So?" I said. "You're with Trotsky all the time, you know him well, I guess? It must be marvelous. I wish I could know him!" "You?" "Gosh, I suppose I wouldn't fit in. What's he like? Do you think I could at least meet him, Sylvester? You could introduce me." "Yeah? Just like that?" said Sylvester, amused, with his heavy eyes. "It couldn't be more complicated than you think, could it? You're a funny guy. But look, I have to go. When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you; we'll have a beer. You remember Frazer from Chicago? He's one of the old man's secretaries. Don't for"et now." Another guard was calling him, and he trotted away to the cars. Oliver cursed the Japanese for the delay about the villa, but finally the Japanese sailed for Japan and Oliver moved in and prepared to throw a huge party and have the best society in town. That would poison his enemies at the Carlos Quinto. Moulton helped him make up a guest list and invitations were sent out to the old residents. Mostly a lot of riffraff turned up, however, in observance of his troubles, which were by then public and had been for some time. A Treasury agent came to town, and he didn't hide his identity but told everyone, with swell humor, what he was. He sat spread on one of Hilario's wireharp chairs and drank beer as if on a holiday, or fed peanuts to the kinkajou. Oliver managed to look indifferent when he went through the square, he and Stella as usual dressed up to the eyes. The more he looked self-possessed, the more it was a, disaster, and I was sorry for him. Stella was scared. She sometimes tried to make me understand that she'd like to talk to me about this. I never thought it unnatural that I should be the one she wanted to discuss her troubles with. However, there was no chance to do it. Oliver watched her very closely. I said to Moulton, "What do they want Oliver for? It must be serious or they wouldn't have sent a man from Washington." "The guy says income-tax evasion, but it must be worse than that. Oliver's a vain, silly type, but he wouldn't be so dumb as to get in that sort of trouble. It's worse." "Poor Oliver!" "He's a jerk." "Maybe so. But fundamentally--I mean, as a man." "Oh, fundamentally," he said thoughtfully. But then he seemed to shake himself out of it and said, "Maybe fundamentally too he's a jerk." Meanwhile it was in a terrible way instructive to see how Oliver behaved, how unruffled he tried to appear. But he was always in small ways losing control. One afternoon he got into a fight with old Louie Fu. Louie, he was queer enough, with his Spanish-Chinese cackles, and in addition he was also a terribly economizing old man, and I suppose in famine China he may have known what it was to pick grains out of manure; so it was nothing much to him now to pour the drinks people didn't finish into a single pop bottle. With his unassertive chest covered with gray knots of a loopy sweater, at the zinc counter, he poured together what was left of orange pop one day and put it in the icebox; Oliver caught him and punched him in the face. This was terrible. Louie screamed. His family was infuriated and started to yell. All we foreigners started up from the card game. The police appeared and closed in from the front door. I took Stella by the hand through the curtain of beads into the other half of the shop, where they sold drygoods, and as we came into the street we saw a gang swirl out and follow the arrestees to city hall and the magistrate's court. Louie's eye was already covered by a large stain and his throat was full of cords as he shouted. Oliver got one of the Mexican guitar-playing fancy-boys to interpret for him. And the defense he made was that what Louie had done was very dangerous because of the amoeba. Oliver couldn't have done worse than to claim he was protecting public health. The magistrate slapped his hand down en seguida on this irresponsible rumor of dysentery. He was large and squat, a man who raised bulls for the ring, and he wore his hat in the court like a businessman-prince, this dark powerful person. He named a whopping fine which Oliver paid on the spot, looking sporting, if grim, and also entertained. Money was one thing he didn't seem to lack. And how did Stella take this--in her sleeveless lace dress and wearing a hat? She appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for myself whatshe was up against. With so much going on in the town I hadn't given it the consideration it called for. Why, even, did she need to wear such an elegant dress to Louie Fu's afternoon poker game? It must have been that she had no dresses except elegant ones, and no places to visit except those Oliver took her to. It was very odd. She said, "I have to talk to you one of these days. Soon." But this was not the time. Oliver was now with us and said to Moulton and Iggy various peculiar things, such as, "I've been to courts the world over." And, "Now they can't go on pretending about the trots, that there isn't any amoeba," And, "That yellow old c---sucker, at least I taught him a lesson." Listening, I felt quite queer myself, in my bandages, cards and currencies in my pockets, my heart tight in my breast and toes free in the huaraches. I felt like someone who might come into the vision of a theosophist, that kind of figure. At dinner Thea said, "I hear there was a riot in town. Were you in it, too?" I didn't care for that. Why must she put it like that? I told her the story, or rather gave her a version of what happened. Anyway, she frowned. As I spoke of Stella I realized that I wanted to represent her as in love with Oliver. Thea didn't believe me. "Augie," she said, "why don't we get away from here? At least while the season lasts. Let's get away from these people." "Where do you want to go?" "I thought we'd drive to Chilpanzingo." Chilpanzingo was down in the hot country. But I was willing to go. I would go. But what would I do there? "There are some interesting animals down there," she said. So I answered evasively, "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon." "You look run-down," she said, "but how can you expect to look anything else when you lead such a life? You never touched a drop before you got down here." "I never had much reason to. I don't get stinking drunk either." "No," she said, bitter, "just enough to carry you through your mistakes." "Our mistakes," I corrected her. So we sat at the dinner table, full of trouble and under the shadow of disappointment and anger. Then, after long thought, I said to her, "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world." She looked at me more warmly than she had in a long time. I wondered if there was something we might do in Chilpanzingo instead of hunting snakes. But she didn't say there was. Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.