Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [239]
“As for the beryllium, Ezekiel showed up with a barrel of it. We went to an English lawyer whose name I had from Alec Szathmar and tried to set up a deal. Ezekiel needed about five thousand dollars worth of equipment, a Land Rover, a truck, etc. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’ve got ourselves a partnership and I’m leaving this check in escrow and he’ll pay it over as soon as you give him a title to the mine.’ There was no title forthcoming, nor any way to prove these semiprecious stones were legally come by. I’m going down to the coast now to visit the old slave towns and try to recover something from this double-disaster of Naomi’s kid and our sour beryllium deal. I’m sorry to say that some kind of African con was going on. I don’t think Ezekiel and Theo were on the level. Szathmar sent me your address, in care of his colleague in Nairobi. Nairobi is fancier than ever. Downtown it looks more like Scandinavia than East Africa. I’m getting on the night train to Mombasa. Coming home via Addis Ababa and maybe even Madrid. Yours with love.”
thirty-eight
While I was absorbed in boning a slice of merluza for Roger, Pilar came into the dining room and whispered as she leaned over me with her high-aproned bosom, that an American gentleman was asking for me. I was delighted. Stirred, anyway. No one had called on me before, not in ten weeks. Could this be Géorgie? Or Koffritz, come to fetch Roger? Also Pilar, with cool apron, warm white face, large brown eyes leaning toward me with her powder fragrance, was being extremely discreet. Had she never swallowed the widower story? Did she nevertheless know that I had a deep legitimate sorrow and good reason to dress in black? “Shall I ask the señor to come to the comedor to take coffee?” said Pilar, and moved her eyes from me to the kid and back to me. I said that I would talk with my visitor in the salon if she would sit with the orphan for me and make him eat his fish.
Then I went to the salon, a room seldom used and crowded with old plushy dusty objects. It was kept dark, like a chapel, and I had never seen the sun in it before. Light now poured in, revealing many religious pictures and treasures of bric-a-brac on the wainscoting. Underfoot were rubbishy ensnaring scatter rugs. It all gave the effect of a period vanishing together with the emotions one had had for this period and the individuals who had felt such emotions. My caller stood by the window, aware that I was catching the dust-filled sunlight straight in the eyes and couldn’t see his face. The dust swirled everywhere. I was as dense in these motes as an aquarium fish in bubbles. My caller was still pulling at the drapes to let in more sun and he sent down the dust of a whole century.
“You?” I said.
“Yes,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “That’s who. You thought I was in jail.”
“Thought, and wished. And hoped. How did you track me here, and what do you want?”
“You’re sore at me. Okay, I admit that was a bad scene. But I’m here to make up for it.”
“Was that your purpose in coming here? What you can do for me is go away. I’d like that best.”
“Honestly I came to do you good. You know,” he said, “when I was a little kid my grandmother on Taylor Street was laid out in a parlor like this with a ton of flowers. Wow, I never thought I’d see another roomful of such old-time crap. But leave it to Charlie Citrine. Look at these branches from Palm Sunday fifty years back. It stinks on the staircase and you’re a fastidious guy. But it must agree with you here. You look okay—better, in fact. You haven’t got those brown circles you had under your eyes in Chicago. You know what