Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [129]
ventricles three and four, which direct the flow of vital energy all over. And this explains what I am so excited about, Henderson-Sungo." For he was highly excited, by now. He was soaring. He was up there with enthusiasm. Trying to keep up with his flight made me dizzy. Also I felt very bitter over some implications of his theory, which I was beginning to understand. For if I was the painter of my own nose and forehead and of such a burly stoop and such arms and fingers, why, it was an out-and-out felony against myself. What had I done! A bungled lump of humanity. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! Would death please wash me away and dissolve this giant collection of errors. "It's the pigs," I suddenly realized, "the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead." "You are pensive, Henderson-Sungo." I came near holding a grudge against the king at that moment. I should have realized that his brilliance was not a secure gift, but like this ramshackle red palace rested on doubtful underpinnings. Now he began to give me a new sort of lecture. He said that nature might be a mentality. I wasn't sure quite what he meant by that. He wondered whether even inanimate objects might have a mental existence. He said that Madame Curie had written something about the beta particles issuing like flocks of birds. "Do you remember?" he said. "The great Kepler believed that the whole planet slept and woke and breathed. Was this talking through his hat? In that case the mind of the human may associate with the All-Intelligent to perform certain work. By imagination." And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created instead. "I have subsumed them under the types I mentioned," he said, "as the appetite, the agony, the fateful-hysterical, the fighting Lazaruses, the immune elephants, the mad laughers, the hollow genital, and so on. Think of what there would be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr. Henderson-Sungo." "Me?" I said, still dazed by my own roaring. My mental horizon was far from clear, although the clouds on it were not low and dark. "So you see," said Dahfu, "you came to me speaking of grun-tu-molani. What could be grun-tu-molani upon a background of cows?" _Swine!__ he might have said to me. It was vain to curse Nicky Goldstein for this. It was not his fault that he was a Jew, that he had announced he was going to raise minks in the Catskills and that I had told him I was going to raise pigs. Fate is much more complex than that. I must have been committed to pigs long before I laid eyes on Goldstein. Two sows, Hester and Valentina, used to follow me about with freckled bellies and sour, red, rust-gleaming bristles, silky in luster, stiff as pins to the touch. "Don't let them loll in the driveway," said Frances. That was when I warned her, "You'd better not hurt them. Those animals have become a part of me." Well, had those creatures become a part of me? I hesitated to come clean with Dahfu and to ask him right out bluntly whether he could see their influence. Secretly investigating myself, I felt my cheekbones. They stuck out like the mushrooms that grow from the trunks of trees, those mushrooms which prove to be as white as lard when you break them open. Under my helmet, my fingers crept toward my eyelashes. Pigs' eyelashes occur only on the upper lid. I had some on the lower, but they were sparse and blunt. When a boy I had practiced to become like Houdini and tried to pick up needles from the floor with my eyelashes while hanging upside down from the foot of my bed. He had done it. I never managed to, but that was not because my eyelashes were too short. Oh, I had changed all right. Everybody changes. Change is ordained. Changes must come. But how? The king would say that they were directed by the master-image. And now I felt my jowls, my snout; I did not dare to look down at what