Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [206]
He drove his Cadillac under the glittering sun. Shadows that might have been cast by all the peoples of the earth flickered over it. He was an American builder and millionaire. The souls of billions fluttered like spooks over the polish of the great black hood. In distant Ethiopia people with dysentery as they squatted over ditches, faint and perishing, opened copies of Business Week, abandoned by tourists, and saw his face or faces like his. But it seemed to me that there were few faces like his, with the ferocious profile that brought to mind the Latin word rapax or one of Rouault’s crazed death-dealing arbitrary kings. We passed his enterprises, the Peony Condominiums, the Trumbull Arms. We reviewed his many building projects. “Peony almost did me in. The architect talked me into putting the swimming pool on the roof. The concrete estimate was short by tons and tons, to say nothing of the fact that we overran the lot by a whole foot. Nobody ever found out, and I got rid of the damn thing. I had to take lots of paper.” He meant a large second mortgage. “Now listen, Chuck, I know you need income. That crazy broad won’t be satisfied until she’s got your liver in her deepfreeze. I’m astonished, really astonished, that you didn’t put away some dough. You must be bananas. People must be into you for some pretty good sums. You ve invested plenty with this fellow Zitterbloom in New York who promised to shelter you, protect your income from Uncle Sam. He screwed you good. You’ll never get a penny out of him. But others must owe you thousands. Make them offers. Take half, but in cash. I’ll show you how to launder your money and we’ll make it disappear. Then you go to Europe and stay there. What the hell do you want to be in Chicago for? Haven’t you had enough of that boring place? For me it wasn’t boring, because I went out and saw action. But you? You get up, look out, it’s gray, you pull the curtain, and pick up a book. The town is roaring, but you don’t hear it. If it hasn’t killed your fucking heart you must be a man of iron, living like that. Listen, I have an idea. We’ll buy a house on the Mediterranean together. My kids ought to learn a foreign language, have a little culture. You can tutor them. Listen, Chuck, if you can scrape together fifty thousand bucks I’ll guarantee you a twenty-five-percent return, and you can live abroad on that.”
So he talked to me, and I kept thinking about his fate. His fate! And I couldn’t tell him my thoughts. They were not transmissible. Then what good were they? Their oddity and idiosyncrasy was a betrayal. Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meaning, and a man should believe what he said. This was Hamlet’s complaint to Polonius when he said, “Words, words, words.” The words are not my words, the thoughts not my thoughts. It’s wonderful to have thoughts. They can be about the starry heavens and the moral law, the majesty of the one, the grandeur of the other. Ulick was not the only one that took lots of paper. We were all taking paper, plenty of it. And I wasn’t about to pass any paper off on Ulick at a time like this. My new ideas, yes. They were more to the point. But I wasn’t ready to mention them to him. I should have been ready. In the past, thoughts were too real to be kept like a cultural portfolio of stocks and bonds. But now we have mental assets. As many world views as you like. Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They’re all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or has true strength or speaks straight to the soul. It was this paper-taking, this passing of highbrow currency that had finally put