Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [218]
At the mention of institute, I thought of a loony bin, but no, she was speaking of the secretarial school where she taught commercial Spanish. I had always suspected that she was actually a Magyar. Be that as it might, the students appreciated her. No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending. But she would have to retire soon, and who would push the Señora’s wheelchair? Was it possible that she now saw me in that capacity? But perhaps the old woman, like Humboldt, dreamed that she could make her fortune in a lawsuit. And why not? Perhaps there was a judge in Milan like my Urbanovich.
“So we will have Christmas together,” said the Señora.
“The kid is very pale. Is he sick?”
“It’s only fatigue,” said the Señora.
Roger, however, came down with the flu. The hotel sent an excellent Spanish doctor, a graduate of Northwestern who reminisced with me about Chicago and soaked me. I paid him an American fee. I gave the Señora money for Christmas presents and she bought all kinds of objects. On Christmas Day, thinking of my own girls, I felt quite low. I was glad to have Roger there and kept him company, reading him fairy tales and cutting and pasting long chains from the Spanish newspapers. There was a humidifier in the room which heightened the odors of paste and paper. Renata did not telephone.
I recalled that I had spent the Christmas of 1924 in the TB sanatorium. The nurses gave me a thick-striped peppermint candy cane and a red openwork Christmas stocking filled with chocolate coins wrapped in gilt, but it was depressing joy and I longed for Papa and Mama and for my wicked stout brother, Julius, even. Now I had survived this quaking and heartsickness and was an elderly fugitive, the prey of Equity, sitting in Madrid, cutting and pasting with sighs. The kid was pale with fever, his breath flavored with the chocolate and paste, and he was absorbed in a paper chain that went twice about the room and had to be strung over the chandelier. I tried to be nice and calm but now and then my feelings gave a wash (oh those lousy feelings) like the water in a ferry slip when the broad-beamed boat pushes in and the backing engines churn up the litter and drowned orange rinds. This happened when my controls failed and I imagined what Renata might be doing in Milan, the room she was in, the man who was with her, the positions they took, the other fellow’s toes. I was determined that no, I wouldn’t tolerate being wrung abandoned sea-sick ship-wrecked castaway. I tried quoting Shakespeare to myself—words to the effect that Caesar and Danger were two lions whelped on the same day, and Caesar the elder and more terrible. But that was aiming too high and it didn’t work. In addition the twentieth century is not easily impressed by pains of this nature. It has seen everything. After the holocausts, you can’t blame it for lacking interest in private difficulties of this sort. I myself recited a brief list of the real questions before the world—the oil embargo, the collapse of Britain, famines in India and Ethiopia, the future of democracy, the fate of humankind. This did no more good than Julius Caesar. I remained personally downhearted.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in a French brocade armchair of the Ritz’s private eighteenth-century barber’s cubicle—I was here not because I needed a haircut but, as so often, only because I longed for a human touch—that I began to have clearer ideas about Renata and thé Señora. How was it, for instance, that as soon as grandfather Koffritz had suffered his stroke and became paralyzed on one side Roger was ready to go? How did that old broad get him a passport so quickly? The answer was that the passport, when I went up and examined it on the quiet, proved to have been issued back in October. The ladies were very thorough planners. Only I failed to