Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [9]
least of the difficulties is that it happened as in a dream. Well, then, it must have been about eight years after the war ended. I was divorced from Frances and married to Lily, and I felt that something had to be done. I went to Africa with a friend of mine, Charlie Albert. He, too, is a millionaire. I have always had a soldierly rather than a civilian temperament. When I was in the Army and caught the crabs, I went to get some powder. But when I reported what I had, four medics grabbed me, right at the crossroads, in the open they stripped me naked and they soaped and lathered me and shaved every hair from my body, back and front, armpits, pubic hair, mustache, eyebrows, and all. This was right near the waterfront at Salerno. Trucks filled with troops were passing, and fishermen and paisanos and kids and girls and women were looking on. The GIs were cheering and laughing and the paisans laughed, the whole coast laughed, and even I was laughing as I tried to kill all four. They ran away and left me bald and shivering, ugly, naked, prickling between the legs and under the arms, raging, laughing, and swearing revenge. These are things a man never forgets and afterward truly values. That beautiful sky, and the mad itch and the razors; and the Mediterranean, which is the cradle of mankind; the towering softness of the air; the sinking softness of the water, where Ulysses got lost, where he, too, was naked as the sirens sang. In passing--the crabs found refuge in a crevice; I had dealings afterward with these cunning animals. The war meant much to me. I was wounded when I stepped on that land mine and got the Purple Heart, and I was in the hospital in Naples quite a while. Believe me, I was grateful that my life was spared. The whole experience gave my heart a large and real emotion. Which I continually require. Beside my cellar door last winter I was chopping wood for the fire--the tree surgeon had left some pine limbs for me--and a chunk of wood flew up from the block and hit me in the nose. Owing to the extreme cold I didn't realize what had happened until I saw the blood on my mackinaw. Lily cried out, "You broke your nose." No, it wasn't broken. I have a lot of protective flesh over it but I carried a bruise there for some time. However as I felt the blow my only thought was _truth__. Does truth come in blows? That's a military idea if there ever was one. I tried to say something about it to Lily; she, too, had felt the force of truth when her second husband, Hazard, punched her in the eye. Well, I've always been like this, strong and healthy, rude and aggressive and something of a bully in boyhood; at college I wore gold earrings to provoke fights, and while I got an M.A. to please my father I always behaved like an ignorant man and a bum. When engaged to Frances I went to Coney Island and had her name tattooed on my ribs in purple letters. Not that this cut any ice with her. Already forty-six or forty-seven when I got back from Europe after V-E Day (Thursday, May 8) I went in for pigs, and then I confided to Frances that I was drawn to medicine; and she laughed at me; she remembered how enthusiastic I had been at eighteen over Sir Wilfred Grenfell and afterward over Albert Schweitzer. What do you do with yourself if you have a temperament like mine? A student of the mind once explained to me that if you inflict your anger on inanimate things, you not only spare the living, as a civilized man ought to do, but you get rid of the bad stuff in you. This seemed to make good sense, and I tried it out. I tried with all my heart, chopping wood, lifting, plowing, laying cement blocks, pouring concrete, and cooking mash for the pigs. On my own place, stripped to the waist like a convict, I broke stones with a sledgehammer. It helped, but not enough. Rude begets rude, and blows, blows; at least in my case; it not only begot but it increased. Wrath increased with wrath. So what do you do with yourself? More than three million bucks. After taxes, after alimony and all expenses I still have one hundred and ten thousand dollars in