The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [27]
Go thou to Rome at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness.
So works of art aren't eternal. So beauty is perishable. Didn't this saintly German wake up many mornings inspired, with joy in his heart? What more can you ask? He couldn't be both happy and sure of being right for eternity. You have to take your chance that being happy is also being right." I was with him there; I nodded with answering intelligence. I had a better opinion of him. There was something to him, after all. He had some nobility of heart and was a good guy in some mysterious respects. Though what a mixture! Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and wheewhocked on the steep drink. And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had been wrong. And wrong again. And wrong again. And again. And how long would I be right now? But I had great confidence in my love of Stella and her love of me. And then again, perhaps all matters of right and wrong would finish soon, as we might not survive. Points and crosses of diamond dazzled from the slopey blue ever-full waters. Fish and monsters did their business within. Some of our drowned were near, maybe, and passed beneath us. Now he talked of his aunt Etti as an artist and sounded pompous. Here it wasn't so many days ago that he was scarcely able to fiddle his legs, and shrunk down to nothing with fright, and now look at him, astride his mental powers, sweating and round-headed, sitting there so sturdy. "Why does an educated fellow like you ship out as carpenter?" I said, asking the question that had puzzled me for some time. And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biophysicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this scientific training he wasn't going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work. Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians! He started in to tell me of this work of his, beginning with a survey of his life. "You know how there are things every child wants to be. For instance, when I was twelve I was very fast on the ice and could have become a skating champion. But I lost interest. Then I became a stamp expert. I lost interest in that too. Next a socialist, and that didn't last. I took up the bassoon and I quit. So I went through a large number of interests and nothing suited me. Then when I was in college I caught an extreme desire to be--or to have been--a Renaissance cardinal. That was the one thing I'd have loved. A wicked one, smoking with life, neighing and plunging. Yeah, boy! I'd put my mother in a nunnery. I'd keep my father in a gunny sack. I'd commission Michelangelo to go beyond the Farnese and the Strozzi. Spontaneous, I'd have been. Vigorous. Without embarrassment. Happy as a god. Ah, well, what can you do, impose your ideas on life? Everybody wants to be the most desirable kind of man. "And how does it start? Well, go back to when I was a kid in the municipal swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing, kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty squash you in the ribs with their thumbs and call you snot-nose. Shivery little rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balls tight, your little thing shriveled. Skinny you. The shoving multitude bears down, and you're nothing, a meaningless name, and not just obscure in eternity but right now. The fate of the meanest your fate. Death! But no, there must be some distinction. The soul cries out against this namelessness. And then it exaggerates. It tells you, 'You were meant to astonish the world. You, Hymie Basteshaw, Stupor mundi! My boy, brace up. You have been called, and you will be chosen. So start looking the part. The generations of man will venerate you as long as calendars exist!' This is neurotic, I know--excuse the jargon--but to be not neurotic is to adjust to what they call the reality situation. But the reality situation is what I have described. A billion souls boiling with anger at a doom of insignificance. Reality is also these private hopes the imagination invents. Hopes, the indispensable evils of Pandora's Box. Assurance of a fate worth suffering for. In other words, desiring to be cast in the mold of true manhood. But who is cast in this mold? Nobody knows. 'I did my best to be as much of a Renaissance cardinal as one can under modem conditions. "After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically. Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom. "I did a fair amount of research in literature and among modem thinkers. The first conclusions were obvious. Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren't what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you can't change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom is a manifestation of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your availability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you" are justifying yourself by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified? Hideous Sunday, enemy of humanity. Sunday you're on your own-- free. Free for what? Free to discover what's in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter antagonist. Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions, even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished. This lies behind boredom. But you see the endless vistas." Did I! I was stupefied. I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude. "And I wanted to approach it scientifically," he went on. "So my first project was to study the physiology of boredom. I looked into the muscular fatigue experiments of Jacobson and others and that led me into biochemistry. I knocked out my M. A. in record time, I may add, in cell chemistry. Keeping rat tissues alive in vitro, after Harrison and the technique improved by Carrel. This drew me on to von Wettstein, Leo Loeb, and so forth. How come the simple cells wish for immortality whereas the complex organisms get bored? The cells have the will to persist in their essence..." There ensued certain descriptions which I don't command the physical chemistry to repeat, the kinesis of enzymes and so forth. But the upshot of this was, that as he investigated the irritability of protoplasm he discovered some of the secrets of life. "I'm sure you'll find it hard to believe what happened next. Nobody else has believed it." "You didn't create life!" "In all humility, that's exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out for claiming it." "Why, it's crazy! Are you sure that's what you did?" He said stiffly, "I'm a serious person. My whole existence has been intensely serious. I don't intend to jeopardize my own sanity by making wild claims. I get the same results time after time--protoplasm." "You must be a genius." He didn't offer to deny this. He'd better be one. If he wasn't a genius I was in this boat with a maniac. "I stumbled on this," he said. "I am not God." ' "But couldn't they see you had done it?" "I couldn't get them to. And then the first cells I made lacked two essential powers, the regenerative and the reproductive, and were sterile and fragile forms. But in the last two years I've made a special study of biological organizers. I've been in embryology, and I've made some further discoveries." He had to take a swig of water, for he had talked himself onto dry spittle. Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse continued very strong. "But still you haven't explained what a man of your ability was doing as ship's carpenter on the Mac Manus." "Continuing my experiments." "You mean there was some of that protoplasm aboard?" "As a matter of fact, there was." "And it's floating in the ocean now?" "I'm sure it is." k 505 "And what's going to happen?" "I don't know. It's one of my later forms, a great advance over that earlier, perishable form." "What if a new chain of evolution begins?" "Exactly. What if?" "Something terrible maybe. Damn you guys, you don't care how you fiddle with nature!" I said, feeling extremely angry. "Somebody is going to burn up the atmosphere one day or kill us all with a gas." He conceded that it was not impossible. "Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?" I asked him. "I don't think there's much chance of that," he said. And then he wouldn't continue the conversation but fell into fascinated thought. Often Basteshaw seemed to be thinking over my head, and he would be in a strange humor in which you could see him make an observation, both grim and amusing to himself. It made me wonder what he was up to. And for long spells, though he patrolled me still from the side of his eyes and knew my every move, he sometimes sat as heavy as a piece of foundry brass. I became very uneasy. A couple of days went by and not a single remark was spoken. This was a strange thing, first to be overwhelmed with talk and then to be utterly isolated. Speak of boredom! Why, I'began to feel as stiff as the boat itself. But I took some of the blame for this. I said to myself, "You have only this one person, one soul to deal with here--what's the matter, can't you do better? It's enough like yours, this soul, as one lion is pretty nearly all the lions, and there are just the two here, and some of the last things of all could be said. You're not doing so good, if you want to know the truth." I had a very strange dream on the boat's bottom that night, which was this, that a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman panhandled me. I laughed at her. "Why, you old guzzler, I can hear the beer cans clinking in your shopping bag!" "No, them ain't beer cans," she said, "it's my window-washer stuff, my squeegee and Bon Ami and such, and for the love of God, must I wash my forty-fifty windows every day of my life? Give us something, won't you?" "Okay, okay," I said, me the bighearted, grinning. Among other things it made me feel good to see the West Side of Chicago again. I put my hand in my pocket, and I meant to give her only chickenfeed. Being not downright stingy, but a little close on some days, to tell the truth. But to my own surprise, instead of giving her the price of a beer I gave her one coin of each kind--half a buck, a quarter, a dime, a jitney, and a penny. All these were lined up in my palm, ninety-one cents, and I dropped them in her hand. The same instant I was sorry, for it was far too much. But then I began to feel clean proud of myself. And Ugly Face, she thanked me; she was almost like a dwarf, with a wide behind. "Well, there's a few windows free," I said. "I haven't got one I can call my own." "Come," said she warmly, "and let me treat you to a beer." "No, thanks, mother, I've got to go. Thanks all the same." I felt kindness in the depth of my breast. In kindness, I touched her on the crown of her old head and a great thrill passed through me from it. "Why, old woman," I said, "you've got the hair of an angel!" "Why shouldn't I have," she said gently, "like other daughters of men?" My bosom was full of stormy surprises and dark bursts of happiness. "God send you truth," said the window-washer dwarf. She went toward the shadow and the cool of the beer cavern. I gave a long sigh and unwillingly woke. The stars were restless and fevery. Basteshaw was asleep in a sitting position, transversely. I regretted he wasn't awake so I could immediately start to talk to him. But instead of bosom fraternity, what took place next day was a battle. Basteshaw claimed we must be close to land; he said he had seen land birds and also seaweed and floating branches. I didn't believe him. Also, the color of the water was changing, he said, and was a yellower green. It didn't seem so to me. He pulled his scientific authority on me. 'Because, he said, after all, he was a scientist; he had seen the charts and studied the currents and made the calculations and watched all the signs, so there couldn't be any two ways about it. But the reason I resisted believing him was that I was afraid to encourage my joy and increase the heaviness of the opposite if he should be wrong. However, the trouble didn't start until I thought I saw a ship on the west horizon. I began to shout and leap and wave my shirt. I was frantic. And then I rushed to put a smudgepot into the water. I had taken good care of the signaling equipment and had read the instructions for using it fifty times if I'd read them once. So now with sweaty hands and anxiety-crippled fingers I started to get the pot ready. Then Basteshaw, with that calm of voice that was his specialty and made me doubt I heard right, said, "What do you want to make signals for?" Damn! The guy didn't want to be saved! He wanted to pass up a chance of rescue! I turned my back on him and lowered the pot on the water. The black E smoke began to rise against the pure color of the air. I went on flagging my shirt. I could almost feel Stella's arms slip round my waist and her face touch my shoulder. And meantime my heart filled with black murder at this lunatic Basteshaw, who sat in the stem with crossed arms. It was maddening to see him. But now there wasn't anything on the horizon, and I had to think my imagination had pulled a stunt on me. I was deeply graveled and felt my fatigue and weakness for the first tune; with just that clong of hope departing that I had been afraid of, and sunken darkness. "I'm sorry to tell you you were hallucinated," he said, while I was covered with weak sweat., "Why, you blind bastard, there is a ship out there, just over the horizon!" "My vision is corrected to twenty-twenty," he said. It was just that kind of pedantry that made me hate him wildly. "You damn four-eyed fool, what makes you want to croak out here? Do you think you have a built-in compass? Maybe you believe you can navigate, but don't expect me to have the same sublime confidence. I'm not passing up any chances." "Now take it easy. Nobody's going to croak. I had a careful look at the course a few hours before we went down and I know we're close to land. We must be, we've been going due east. We're going to land on Spanish territory and be interned. Don't you be a damn fool. Haven't you had enough war yet? But for dumb luck you'd have been burned alive or become shark food. Now," he said, getting severe, "listen attentively. I don't like to chew my cabbage twice. I've been figuring this, and I believe luck is on our side. I'm going to land in the Canaries and be interned. For the rest of the war I'll just stay there and do my research. Which they wouldn't exempt me for at home though I went to Washington with an appeal. Now. I have plenty of money in the States; my old man left me close to a hundred grand and we can work here. I'll teach you. You're a pretty smart fellow, though you have all kinds of cockeyed ideas about yourself. In a year you'll know more than a Ph. D. in biochemistry. Think of the opportunity you've fallen into. To understand the birth of life and be in on the profoundest secrets. Wiser than the Sphinx. You'll gaze on the riddle of the universe with comprehension!" He went on with his oratory. I was frightened and awed. Not just by the storming of his mind, great as that was, but by the appearance once more of the sign of the recruit under which I had been born. "I say to you this is a great chance for you, not simply to rise to eminence, not just to give your intellectual powers the very highest development, but to assist in making a historic contribution to the happiness of mankind. These experiments with cells, March, will give the clue to the origin of boredom in the higher organisms. To what used to be called the sin of acedia. The old fellows were right, for it is a sin. Blindness to life, secession, unreceptivity, a dull wall of anxious, overprotected flesh, ignorant of the subtlety of God or Nature and unfeeling toward its beauty. March, when liberated from this boredom, every man will be a poet and every woman a saint. Love will fill the world. Injustice will go, and slavery, bloodshed, cruelty. They will belong to the past, and, seeing all these horrors of past times, all mankind will sit down and weep at the memory of them, the memory of blood and the horrible life of monads, at misunderstanding and murderous rages and carnage of innocents. The breasts and bowels will melt at this vision of the past. And then a new brotherhood of man will begin. The prisons and madhouses will be museums. Like the pyramids and the ruins of Maya, they will commemorate an erroneous development of human genius. Real freedom will manifest itself, not based on politics and revolutions, which never gave it anyhow, because it's not a gift but a possession of the man who is not bored. March, this is what my experiments are leading toward. I am going to create a serum --a serum like a new River Jordan. With respect to which I will be a Moses. And you Joshua. To lead an Israel consisting of the entire human race across it. And this is why I don't want to go back to the States." I was wrought up, choked. The very air that passed over me was as if from the mouth of prophecy. Meantime the pot went on diffusing smoke. He was watching it like an enemy. "I'm not passing up any chance to be saved. I don't want to be interned. I've just gotten married. So even if I was sure you knew what you were talking about I'd still say no." "You think I don't know what I'm talking about?" I should have been more tactful. He saw that that was exactly what I thought. "I'm offering you a great course of life," he said. "Worth taking a risk for." "I already have a course of life." "Indeed?" he said. "Yes, and I'm dead against doing things to the entire human race. I don't want any more done to me, and I don't want to tamper with anyone else. No one will be a poet or saint because you fool with him. When you come right down to it, I've had trouble enough becoming what I already am, by nature. I don't want to go to the Canaries with you. I need my wife." He sat with his big arms crossed and his face devoid of expression while the smudgepot sent silky, oily curls into the sea freshness of morning. The early red was still on the water from the east fringe of the sky .1 kept glancing toward the horizon. "I assure you I don't think your answer is frivolous," he said. "I think it is sincere, but it is minor. Life has a much greater scale. I'm sure you will agree with me later on, after we have worked and discussed, in the islands. Which I understand are charming." "We may be passing a hundred miles to the north or the south and never see those islands at all," I said. "You want to put it over on me that you're such a great scientist you can steer by the power of your brain. Well, go ahead, but I'm getting rescued if I can." "It is my conviction that we may see land at any time," he said. "So why don't you extinguish that smudge?" "No, I won't!" I shouted. "No, and that's final!" The fellow was really out of his mind. But even then, in anger, I thought, what if he really was a genius too, and I was lacking in faith. He said quietly, "Okay." I turned to give my full attention to the horizon, when suddenly a heavy blow descended on me and knocked me flat. He had clobbered me with the oar. He was getting ready to hit me again, with the loom this time, having hit me with the blade before. That Moses, Savior and Messiah! He raised up on his heavy legs. More of a look of a task to be done than lust was on his face. I tried to roll away from this blow and I yelled, "For Chrissake, don't kill me!" Then I made a rush for him, and the minute I got my hands on him I felt I'd kill him if I could, that much rage was in me. I wanted to strangle him. He dropped the oar and gripped me round the ribs. The way he grabbed me I couldn't use my arms. I butted and kicked while he put on more pressure, till I couldn't breathe. He was a maniac. And a murderer. Two demented land creatures struggling on the vast water, head to head, putting out all the strength they had. I would certainly have killed him then if I'd been able. But he was the stronger man. He threw his immense weight on me, he was heavy as brass, and I fell over a thwart with my face on the cleats of the bottom. I made ready for the end. The powers of the universe should take me back as they had sent me forth. Death! But he didn't mean to murder me. He was tearing my clothes off and binding me with them. He twisted the shirt into bonds for my wrists. My pants he tied my legs with. Then he tore off my skivvies to wipe the blood from my face and the sweat from his. He yanked the painter off and reinforced my bonds. Then he doused the smudgepot, and he stepped up the oar again with its piece of canvas and sat looking eastward for the shore he was so sure of while I lay naked and gasping, still on my side as he had left me. Later he picked me up and set me down under the tarpaulin because the sun was burning on me. When he laid hands on me I flinched and heaved. "Anything busted?" he said, doctorlike, and felt my person, my ribs and shoulders. I cursed him till my throat was raw. When it came time to eat he fed me; and he said, "Better let me know when you have to go to bathroom, otherwise there'll be a problem." I said, "If you untie me, I give my word of honor I won't send any signals." "I can't take chances with you," he said. "This is too important." Once in a while he'd chafe the arms and legs to help my circulation. I begged him now. I said, "I'll get gangrene." But no, he told me; I had made my choice. Besides, he said, we'd hit those happy isles soon. Late in the afternoon he declared he could smell the land breeze. He also said, "It's getting hotter," and took to shading his eyes. And when evening came on he stretched out. He did it with heaviness, and, while I watched and wished him the worst, stretched out those doughty big legs and that bowl of tireless contemplations from which the instructions had come to lam me and leave me tied for the night, and which might direct him to do worse yet. The moon shone, a damp fell, and the boat crept; it scarcely budged on the water. I wore out my wrists trying to pull free, and then I thought that if I could crawl that far I might find a corner of the metal locker on which I could saw myself free. I turned on my back and began to work toward it, using my heels. Basteshaw didn't wake. He lay like that great painted mummy case, his feet cocked out and his head like stone. He had made a big welt on my back, and this I scraped as I crawled, and I had to stop and take it out on my lip with my teeth. It didn't seem any use. Terrible deep sorrow came on me, and I wept to myself. So as not to wake him. It took me half the night to reach the locker and work my hands loose. But finally the shirt tore off and I flaked away at the painter, soaking it to make it expand. At last it came off. I crouched there and licked my raw wrists. My back was flaming from the beating it had taken, but there was one cool place in my body, which was where I kept murder in my heart toward Basteshaw. I crept over to him; I didn't stand up because he might wake and see me standing in the moonlight. I had my choice now of pushing him in the water, of strangling him, of beating him with the oar as he had done me, of breaking his bones and seeing his blood. I decided as the first step to tie him and take off his goggles. Then we'd see. Well, as I stood poised over him on my toes, full of revenge, holding the painter, I felt heat rising off him. I lightly touched his cheek. The guy was burning up with fever. I listened to his heart. Some kind of gunnery seemed to be going on there, hollow and terrible. I was gypped of revenge. For as a matter of course I took care of him. I cut a hole in a piece of canvas to make myself a poncho, my other clothes being ripped to tatters, and I sat up with him all night. Like Henry Ware of the Kentucky border and the great chief of the Ohio, Timmendiquas. He might have stabbed Timmendiquas but he let him go. I felt sorrow and pity for him too. I realized how much he was barren of, or trying to be barren of in order to become the man of his ideas. Didn't he, even if mainly from his head rather than from his heart, want to bring about redemption and rescue the whole brotherhood of man from suffering? He was off his rocker all the next day. It would have been the end of him if I hadn't sighted and signaled a British tanker late that day. It would have been the end of me too, for it turned out that we were way past the Canaries and somewhere off the Rio de Oro. This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo! Why, we'd both have rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted, and there would have been nothing but death and mad ideas to the last. Or he'd have murdered and eaten me, still calm and utterly reasonable, and gone on steering to his goal. Anyway, they dragged us aboard, both in a bad way. Naples was the first port this Limey ship made. There the authorities stuck us in a hospital. And it was a few weeks before I was afoot again, and I met Basteshaw in the corridor in a bathrobe, coming along slowly. He seemed himself again, confident and proud-headed. But he was de512 cidedly cool to me. I could see he was blaming me for frustrating his great plan. Now he'd have to ship again. No Canaries. His research, so essential to human survival itself--that was no small thing to postpone. "Do you realize," I said, driving it home, still indignant at what might have happened, "that you missed, you great navigator? I might never have seen my wife again if I had listened to you." He heard me out and meanwhile took my measure. He said, "The power of an individual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now than ever." "Go ahead! Save mankind!" I said. "But don't forget if you had your way you'd be dead now." He wouldn't talk to me after that, and I didn't care. We snubbed each other in the corridor. All I thought about was Stella anyhow. It was six months before I saw New York again, for they found ona reason after another to detain me at the hospital. So it was a night in September when the taxi let me off at Stella's door, which now also was mine, and she came running down the stairs to me.