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By Root 6095 0

Mine! All this had originated in my head in Princeton, New Jersey, twenty years ago. It was not a big achievement. It didn’t ring bells in the far universe. It did nothing about brutality, inhumanity, it didn’t clarify much or prevent anything. Nevertheless there was something in it. It was pleasing hundreds of thousands, millions of spectators. Of course, it was ingeniously directed and George Otway as Caldofreddo gave a wonderful performance. This Otway, an Englishman in his thirties, strongly resembled Humboldt. At the moment when he threw himself at the cabin walls, as I have seen maddened apes do in the monkey house, battering the partitions with heart-rending recklessness, I was stabbed with the thought of how Humboldt had fought the police when they took him away to Bellevue. Ah, poor character, poor fighting furious weeping hollering Humboldt. His flowers were aborted in the bulb. The colors never came into the light, they rotted in his chest. And the resemblance between Otway in the cabin and Humboldt was so uncanny that I began to cry. As the whole theater rocked with delight, shouting with laughter, I sobbed aloud. Cantabile said in my ear, “What a picture, hey? What did I tell you? Even you’re laughing your head off.”

Yes, and now Humboldt was spread out somewhere, his soul in some other part of the creation, there where souls waited for sustenance that only we, the living, could send from the earth, like grain to Bangla Desh. Alas for us, born by the millions, the billions, like the bubbles of effervescent drink. I had a worldwide dizzy glimpse of the living and the dead, of humanity either laughing its head off as pictures of man-eating comedy unrolled on the screen or vanishing in great waves of death, in flames and battle agonies, in starving continents. And then I had a partial vision of flying blind through darkness and then coming through a break above a metropolis. It glittered on the ground in icy drops, far below. I tried to divine whether we were landing or flying on. We flew on.

“Are they following your outline? Are they using it?” said Cantabile.

“Yes. They’re doing it very well. They’ve added lots of their own ideas,” I said.

“Try not to be so big about it. I want you in a fighting mood tomorrow.”

I told Cantabile, “The Russians proved their case, according to the Doctor’s statement, not only by pumping the stomach but also by examination of the man’s excrement. The stools of the starving are hard and dry. This man claimed he had eaten nothing. But it was clear that he hadn’t missed many meals, on the ice floe.”

“They could have put that in. Stalin wouldn’t have hesitated to put a crock of shit on Red Square. And you can do that nowadays in a picture.”

The scene had changed to Caldofreddo’s little town in Sicily where no one knew his sin, where he was just a jolly old man who peddled ice cream and played in the village band. As I listened to him tootle, I felt that there was something important about the contrast between his little arpeggios and the terrible modern complexity of his position. Lucky the man who has nothing more to say or play than these easy melodies. Are there still such people around? It was disconcerting also to see, as Otway was puffing at the trumpet, a face so much like Humboldt’s. And since Humboldt had gotten into the film, I looked for myself as well. I thought that something in my nature might be seen in Caldofreddo’s daughter, played by Silvia Sottotutti. Her personality expressed a sort of painful willingness or joyful anxiety which I thought that I had, too. I didn’t care for the man in the role of her fiancé, with his short legs and his wide-angled jaw and flat face and lowish brow. It was possible that I identified him with Flonzaley. A man had once followed us at the Furniture Show who must have been Flonzaley. Signals had passed between Renata and him. ... I had figured out, incidentally, that as Mrs. Flonzaley Renata was going to have a very limited social life in Chicago. Undertakers couldn’t be very popular dinner guests, except with other undertakers.