Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [7]
I knew what her father had done. Drunk as I was, I could hardly bear the cruelty myself. The old man had shot himself after a family quarrel. He was a charming man, weak, heartbroken, affectionate, and sentimental. He came home full of whiskey and would sing old-time songs for Lily and the cook; he told jokes and tap-danced and did corny vaudeville routines in the kitchen, joking with a catch in his throat--a dirty thing to do to your child. Lily told me all about it until her father became so actual to me that I loved and detested the old bastard myself. "Here, you old clog-dancer, you old heart-breaker, you pitiful joker--you cornball!" I said to his ghost. "What do you mean by doing this to your daughter and then leaving her on my hands?" And when I threatened suicide in Chartres cathedral, in the very face of this holy beauty, Lily caught her breath. The light in her face turned fine as pearl. She silently forgave me. "It's all the same to me whether you forgive me or not," I told her. We broke up at V�lay. From the start our visit there was a strange one. The d�potable Deux Cent Deux had a flat when we came down in the morning. It being fine June weather, I had refused to put the car in a garage and in my opinion the management had let out the air. I accused the hotel and stood shouting until the office closed its iron shutter. I changed the tire quickly, using no jack but in my anger heaving up the little car and pushing a rock under the axle. After fighting with the hotel manager (both of us saying, "Pneu, pneu"), my mood was better, and we walked around the cathedral, bought a kilo of strawberries in a paper funnel, and went out on the ramparts to lie in the sun. Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs. Lily took off her blouse to get the sun on her shoulders. Presently she took off her slip, too, and after a time her brassi�, and she lay in my lap. Annoyed, I said to her, "How do you know what I want?" And then more gently, because of the roses on all the tree trunks, piercing and twining and flaming, I said, "Can't you just enjoy this beautiful churchyard?" "It isn't a churchyard, it's an orchard," she said. I said, "Your period just began yesterday. So what are you after?" She said I had never objected before, and that was true. "But I do object now," I said, and we began to quarrel and the quarrel got so fierce I told her she was going back to Paris alone on the next train. She was silent. I had her, I thought. But no, it only seemed to prove how much I loved her. Her crazy face darkened with the intensity of love and joy. "You'll never kill me, I'm too rugged!" I cried at her. And then I began to weep from all the unbearable complications in my heart. I cried and sobbed. "Get in there, you mad bitch," I said, weeping. And I rolled back the roof of the d�potable. It has rods which come out, and then you reef back the canvas. Under her breath, pale with terror but consumed also with her damned exalted glory, she mumbled as I was sobbing at the wheel about pride and strength and soul and love, and all of that. I told her, "Curse you, you're nuts!" "Without you, maybe it's true. Maybe I'm not all there and I don't understand," she said. "But when we're together, I _know."__ "Hell you know. How come I don't know anything! Stay the hell away from me. You tear me to pieces." I dumped her foolish suitcase with the unwashed clothes in it on the platform. Still sobbing, I turned around in the station, which was twenty kilometers or so from V�lay, and I headed for the south of France. I drove to a place on the Vermilion Coast called Banyules. They keep a marine station there, and I had a strange experience in the aquarium. It was twilight. I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular--blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head