• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6098 0

hibernating trees and the mouth and muzzle vapors of people and animals visible up and down the streets. Renata’s little boy and I walked, holding hands. He was a remarkably composed and handsome little boy. When we wandered in the Retiro together and all the lawns were a dark and chill Atlantic green, this little Roger could very nearly convince me that up to a point the soul was the artist of its own body and I thought I could feel him at work within himself. Now and then you almost sense that you are with a person who was conceived by some wonderful means before he was physically conceived. In early childhood this invisible work of the conceiving spirit may still be going on. Pretty soon little Roger’s master-building would stop and this extraordinary creature would begin to behave in the most ordinary or dull manner or perniciously, like his mother and grandma. Humboldt was forever talking about something he called “the home-world,” Wordsworthian, Platonic, before the shades of the prison house fell. This is very possibly when boredom sets in, the point of advent. Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions. Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery. A terrible breed, the educated nits, mental bores of the heaviest caliber. The world had never seen the likes of them. Poor Humboldtl What a mistake! Well, perhaps he could have another go at it. When? Oh, in a few hundred years his spirit might return. Meantime, I could remember him as a lovely man and generous, a heart of gold. Now and then I shuffled through the papers he had left me. He had believed so greatly in their value. I gave a skeptical sigh and was sad and put them back in his briefcase.

thirty-seven

The world checked in with me occasionally, reports arrived from various parts of the globe. Renata’s was the letter I most wanted. I longed to hear that she was sorry, that she was bored with Flonzaley and horrified at what she had done, that he had vile mortician’s habits, and I rehearsed in my head the magnanimous moment when I took her back. When I was less nice I gave the bitch a month with her millionaire embalmer. When I was angrily depressed I thought that after all frigidity and money, as everyone has known since antiquity, made a stable combination. Add death, the strongest fixative in the world, and you had something remarkably durable. I figured by now that they had left Marrakech and were honeymooning in the Indian Ocean. Renata always did say that she wanted to winter in the Seychelles Islands. My secret belief had always been that I could cure Renata of what ailed her. Then I remembered, turning the point of recollection against myself, that Humboldt had always wanted to do the girls good but that they wouldn’t hold still for it, and how he had said about Demmie’s friend, Ginnie, in the village, “Honey from the icebox . . . Cold sweets won’t spread.” No, Renata didn’t write. She was concentrating on the new relationship and she didn’t have to worry about Roger while I was looking after him. At the Ritz I picked up picture postcards addressed to the kid. I had guessed right. Morocco didn’t detain the couple long. Her cards now bore Ethiopian and Tanzanian postmarks. He received some also from his father, who was skiing in Aspen and Vail. Koffritz knew where his child was.

Kathleen wrote from Belgrade to say how glad it made her to hear from me. Everything was going extremely well. Seeing me in New York had been unforgettably marvelous. She longed to talk to me again and she expected soon to pass through Madrid on her way to Almería to work on a film. She hoped to have very pleasant things to tell me. There was no check enclosed with her letter. Evidently she didn’t suspect that I badly needed money. I had been prosperous for so many years that no such thought occurred to anyone. Toward the middle of February a letter arrived from George Swiebel, and George, who knew a good deal about my financial condition,