Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [216]
I asked the man at the switchboard to ring Mrs. Koffritz.
“We have no Mrs. Koffritz,” was his answer.
“A Mrs. Citrine, then?” I said.
There was no Mrs. Citrine either. That was a wicked disappointment. I walked across the circular carpet under the dome to the concierge. He handed me a wire from Milan. SLIGHT DELAY. BIFERNO DEVELOPING. PHONING TOMORROW. I ADORE YOU.
I was then shown to my room, but I was in no condition to admire its effects: richly Spanish, with carved chests and thick drapes, with Turkish carpets and fauteuils, a marble bathroom and old-fashioned electrical fixtures in the grand old Wagon-Lit style. The bed stood in a curtained alcove and was covered in watered silk. My heart was behaving badly as I crept in naked and laid my head on the bolster. There was no word from Thax-ter, either, and he should have reached Paris by now. I had to communicate with him. Thaxter would have to inform Stewart in New York that I was accepting his invitation to stay in Madrid for a month as his guest. This was a fairly important matter. I was down to four thousand dollars and couldn’t afford two suites at the Ritz. The dollar was taking a beating, the peseta was unrealistically high, and I didn’t believe that Biferno was developing into anything.
My heart was dumbly aching. I refused to give it the words it would have uttered. I condemned the state I was in. It was idle, idle, idle. Many thousands of miles from my last bed in Texas I lay stiff and infinitely sad, my body temperature at least three degrees below normal. I had been brought up to detest self-pity. It was part of my American training to be energetic, and positive, and a thriving energy system, and an achiever, and having achieved two Pulitzer prizes and the Zig-Zag medal and a good deal of money (of which I was robbed by a Court of Equity), I had set myself a final and ever higher achievement, namely, an indispensable metaphysical revision, a more correct way of thinking about the question of death! And now I remembered a quotation from Coleridge, cited by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the papers he had left me, about quaint metaphysical opinions. How did it go? Quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, were playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. I got up then to rummage in the briefcase for the exact quotation. But then I stopped. I recognized that to be afraid that Renata was ditching me was far different from being deadly sick. Besides, damn her, why should she give me an hour of anguish and make me stoop and rummage naked, pulling out a dead man’s papers by the light of this Wagon-Lit lamp. I decided that I was only overtired and suffering from jet lag.
I turned from Humboldt and Coleridge to the theories of George Swiebel. I did what George would have done. I ran myself a hot bath and stood on my head while the tub was filling. I went on to do a wrestler’s bridge, resting all my weight on my heels and on the back of my head. After this I performed some of the exercises recommended by the famous Dr. Jacobsen, the relaxation and sleep expert. I had studied his manual. You were supposed to cast out tension toe by toe and finger by finger. This was not a good idea, for it brought back to me what Renata did with toes and fingers in moments of erotic ingenuity. (I never knew about the toes until Renata taught me.) After all this I simply went back to bed and prayed my upset soul to go out for a while, please, and let the poor body have some rest. I picked up her telegram, fixing my eyes on I ADORE YOU. Studying this hard, I decided to believe that she was telling the truth. As soon as I performed this act of faith I slept. For many hours I was out cold in the curtained alcove.
Then my telephone rang. In the shuttered curtained blackness I felt for the switch. It was not to be found. I picked up the phone and asked the