Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [232]
“You don’t when he’s at school. Or maybe you rehearse the big bad wolf. ...”
thirty-six
What was this muttering? I couldn’t tell Miss Rebecca Volsted of the Danish Embassy in Madrid that I was making esoteric experiments, that I was reading to the dead. I already seemed odd enough. Supposedly a widower from the Midwest and father of a small boy, I turned out, according to Who’s Who, to be a prize-winning biographer and playwright and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The chevalier widower rented the worst room in the pensión (across the air shaft from the kitchen). His brown eyes were red from weeping, he dressed with high elegance although the kitchen smells made his clothing noticeably rancid, he tried with persistent vanity to comb his thin and graying hair over the bald middle of his head and was always disheartened when he realized that in the lamplight his scalp was glistening. He had a straight nose like John Barrymore, but the resemblance went no further. He was a man whose bodily case was fraying. He was beginning to wrinkle under the chin, beside the ears, and below the sad, warm-hearted eyes that gazed intelligently in the wrong direction. I had always counted hygienically on regular intercourse with Renata. I apparently agreed with George Swiebel that you were headed for trouble if you neglected to have normal sexual relations. In all civilized countries this is the basic creed. There was, of course, a text to the contrary—I always had a text to the contrary. This text was from Nietzsche and took the interesting view that the mind was greatly strengthened by abstinence because the spermatazoa were reabsorbed into the system. Nothing was better for the intellect. Be that as it might, I became aware that I was developing tics. I missed my paddle ball games at the Downtown Club—the conversation of my fellow members I must say that I didn’t miss at all. To them I could never say what I was really thinking. They didn’t speak their thoughts to me either but those thoughts were at least speakable. Mine were incomprehensible and becoming more so all the time.
I was going to move out of here when Kathleen sent that check, but meantime I had to live on a tight budget. The IRS, Szathmar informed me, had reopened my 1970 return. I wrote to say that this was now Urbanovich’s problem.
Every morning powerful coffee odors woke me. Afterward came ammoniac smells of frying fish and also of cabbage garlic saffron, and of pea soup boiled with a ham bone. Pension La Roca used a heavy grade of olive oil which took some getting used to. At first it went through me quickly. The water closet in the hall was lofty and very cold with a long chain pull of green brass. When I went there I carried the cape I had bought for Renata over my arm and put it over my shoulders when I was seated. To sit down on the freezing board was a sort of Saint Sebastian experience. Returning to my room I did fifty push-ups and stood on my head. When Roger was at nursery school I walked in the back streets or went to the Prado or sat in cafes. I devoted long hours to Steiner meditation and did my best to draw close to the dead. I had very strong feelings about this and could no longer neglect the possibility of communication with them. Ordinary spiritualism I dismissed. My postulate was that there was a core of the eternal in every human being. Had this been a mental or logical problem I would have dealt logically with it. However, it was no such thing. What I had to deal with was a lifelong intimation. This intimation must be either a tenacious illusion or else the truth deeply buried. The mental respectability of good members of educated society was something I had come to despise with all my heart. I admit that I was sustained by contempt whenever the esoteric texts made me uneasy. For there were passages in Steiner that set my teeth on edge. I said to myself, this is lunacy. Then I said, this is poetry, a great vision. But I went on with it, laying out all that he told us of the life of the soul after death. Besides, did it matter