Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [159]
Naomi sighed as she listened to me and then said, “Ah, Charlie, I’ll never understand how or why you reach your conclusions. When you used to lecture me, I never could follow you at all. ‘But at the time your play opened on Broadway, you were in love with a girl, they tell me. What happened to her?”
“Demmie Vonghel. Yes. She was the real thing, too. She was killed in South America with her father. He was a millionaire from Delaware. They took off from Caracas in a DC-3 and crashed in the jungle.”
“Oh how sad and terrible.”
“I went down to Venezuela to look for her.”
“I’m glad you did that. I was going to ask.”
“I took the same flight out of Caracas. They were old planes and patched up. Indians flying around with their chickens and goats. The pilot invited me to sit in the cockpit. There was a big crack in the windshield and the wind rushed in. Flying over the mountains I was afraid we wouldn’t make it either, and I thought, O Lord, let it happen to me the way it happened to Demmie. Looking at those mountains I frankly didn’t care much for the way the world was made, Naomi.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh I don’t know, but you get disaffected from nature and all its miracles and stupendous achievements, from subatomic to galactic. Things play too rough with human beings. They chafe too hard. They stick you in the veins. As we came over the mountains and I saw the Pacific throwing a fit of epilepsy against the shore I thought, To hell with you, then. You can’t always like the way in which the world was molded. Sometimes I think, Who wants to be an eternal spirit and have more existences! Screw all that! But I was telling you about the flight. Up and down about ten times. We landed on bare earth. Strips of red dirt on coffee plantations. Waving at us under the trees were little naked kids with their brown bellies and bent dinguses hanging.”
“You never found anything? Didn’t you search in the jungle?”
“Sure I searched. We even found a plane, but not the missing DC-3. This was a Cessna that went down with some Japanese mining engineers. Vines and flowers were growing all over their bones, and God knows what spiders and other animals were making themselves at home in their skulls. I didn’t want to discover Demmie in that condition.”
“You didn’t like the jungle much.”
“No. I drank lots of gin. I developed a taste for straight gin, like my friend Von Humboldt Fleisher.”
“The poet! What happened to him?”
“He’s dead, too, Naomi.”
“Isn’t all this dying something, Charlie!”
“The whole thing is disintegrating and reintegrating all the time, and you have to guess whether it’s always the same cast of characters or a lot of different characters.”
“I suppose you finally got to the mission,” said Naomi.
“Yes, and there were lots of Demmies there, about twenty Vonghels. They were all cousins. All with the same long heads golden hair knock-knees and upturned noses, and the same mumbling style of speech. When I said that I was Demmie’s fiancé from New York they thought I was some sort of nut. I had to attend services and sing hymns, because the Indians wouldn’t understand a white visitor who was not a Christian.”
“So you sang hymns while your heart was breaking.”
“I was glad to sing the hymns. And Dr. Tim Vonghel gave me a bucket of gentian violet to sit in. He told me I had a bad case of tinia crura. So I stayed among these cannibals, hoping that Demmie would show up.”
“Were they cannibals?”
“They had eaten the first group of missionaries that came there. As you sang in the chapel and saw the filed teeth of somebody who had probably eaten your brother—Dr. Timothy’s brother was eaten, and he knew the fellows who had done it— well, Naomi, there’s lots of peculiar merit in people. I wouldn’t be surprised if my experiences in the jungle put me in a forgiving frame of mind.”
“Who was there to forgive?” said Naomi.
“This friend of mine, Von Humboldt Fleisher. He drew a check on my account while I was knocking myself out