Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [251]
“I’ll take dollars. I have a brother in Texas who can invest them in a good thing for me.”
“You’re lucky to have a kind brother. Are you feeling antsy down there in spic-land?”
“Not a bit. I’m very much at home. I read anthroposophy and I meditate. I’m doing the Prado inch by inch. What about the second scenario?”
“I’m not in on that, so why ask me?”
I said, “No, you’re not.”
“Then I don’t see why I should tell you a damn thing. But I’ll tell you anyway, out of courtesy. They are interested. They’re damn interested. They’ve offered Barbash three thousand dollars for a three-week option. They say they need time to show it to Otway.”
“Otway and Humboldt look very much alike. Maybe the resemblance means something. Some invisible link. I’m convinced that Otway will be attracted by Humboldt’s story.”
Next afternoon Kathleen Tigler arrived in Madrid. She was on her way to Almería to begin work on a new film. “I’m sorry to tell you,” she said, “that the people to whom I sold the option on Humboldt’s scenario have decided not to take it up.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember the outline that Humboldt bequeathed to both of us?”
“Of course.”
“I should have sent you your share of the three thousand. Part of my purpose in coming to Madrid was to talk to you about it and draw a contract, settle with you. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.”
“No, I hadn’t forgotten,” I said. “But it just occurred to me that I’ve been trying on my own to sell the same property to another group.”
“I see,” she said. “Selling the same thing to two parties. It would have been very awkward.”
All this while, you see, business was going on. Business, with the peculiar autonomy of business, went its own way. Like it or not, we thought its thoughts, spoke its language. What did it matter to business that I suffered a defeat in love, or that I resisted Rebecca Volsted with her urgently blazing face, that I investigated the doctrines of anthroposophy? Business, sure of its own transcendent powers, got us all to interpret life through its practices. Even now, when Kathleen and I had so many private matters to consider, matters of the greatest human importance, we were discussing contracts options producers and sums ‘ of money.
“Of course,” she said, “you couldn’t be bound legally by an agreement I entered into.”
“When we met in New York we spoke about a film outline Humboldt and I concocted in Princeton—”
“The one Lucy Cantabile asked me about? Her husband also phoned me in Belgrade and pestered me with mysterious questions.”
“—to divert ourselves while Humboldt was scheming to get the chair in poetry.”
“You told me it was all nonsense, and I thought no more about it.”
“It was lost for twenty years or so, and then someone got around to stealing our original story and turned it into the picture called Caldofreddo.”
“No! Is that where Caldofreddo comes froml You and Humboldt?”
“Have you seen it?”
“Of course I have. Otway’s big, big hit was created by the two of you? It’s not to be believed.”
“Yes, indeed. I’ve just come from a meeting in Paris at which I proved our authorship to the producers.”
“Will they settle