Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [253]
“You wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t know what ‘that’ is.”
“To take a job in this picture—Memoirs of a Cavalier. Based on Defoe. There are sieges and such.”
“I’d wear a costume?”
“It’s not for you, Charlie.”
“Why not? Listen, Kathleen. If I may speak good English for a moment. . . ,”
“Be my guest.”
“To efface the faults or remedy the defects of five decades I’m prepared to try anything. I am not too good to work in the movies. You little know how much it would please me to be an extra in this historical picture. Could I wear boots and bloomers? A casque, or a hat with plumes? It would do me a world of good.”
“Wouldn’t it be too distracting, mentally? You have . . . things to do.”
“If these things I have to do can’t find their way around those mountains of absurdity there’s no hope for them. It’s not as though my mind were free, you know. I worry about my daughters, and I worry terribly about my friend Thaxter. He was kidnaped by Argentine terrorists.”
“I wondered about him,” said Kathleen. “I read it in the Herald-Tribune. Is that the same Mr. Thaxter I met in the Plaza? He wore a ten-gallon hat and asked me to come back later. Your name was mentioned in the article. He appealed to you for help.”
“I’m upset by this. Poor Thaxter. If the scenarios do earn money I may have to pay it out to ransom him. I don’t care too much. My own romance with wealth is over. What I intend to do now isn’t very expensive. . . .”
“You know, Charles, Humboldt used to say wonderful things. You remind me of that. Tigler was lots of fun. He was an active, engaging person. We were always out hunting and fishing—doing something. But he wasn’t much for conversation and nobody has talked to me like this in a long, long, long time, and I’m out of listening practice. I love it when you sound off. But it isn’t very clear to me.”
“I’m not surprised, Kathleen. It’s my fault. I talk too much to myself. But human beings are far too deep in that false unnecessary comedy of history—in events, in developments, in politics. The common crisis is real enough. Read the papers—all that criminality and filth, murder, perversity, and horror. We can’t get enough of it—we call it the human thing, the human scale.”
“But what else is there?”
“A different scale. I know Walt Whitman compared us unfavorably to the animals. They don’t whine about their condition. I see his point. I used to spend lots of time watching sparrows. I always adored sparrows. I do to this day. I spend hours in the park watching them bob and hop around and take dust baths. But I know they have less mental life than apes do. Orangutans are very charming. An orangutan friend sharing my apartment would make me very happy. But I know that he would understand less than Humboldt did. The question is this: why should we assume that the series ends with us? The fact is, I suspect, that we occupy a point within a great hierarchy that goes far far beyond ourselves. The ruling premises deny this. We feel suffocated and don’t know why. The existence of a soul is beyond proof under the ruling premises, but people go on behaving as though they had souls, nevertheless. They behave as if they came from another place, another life, and they have impulses and desires that nothing in this world, none of our present premises, can account for. On the ruling premises the fate of humankind is a sporting event, most ingenious. Fascinating. When it doesn’t become boring. The specter of boredom is haunting this sporting conception of history.”
Kathleen again said that she had missed conversations of this kind in her married life with Tigler, the horse-wrangler. She certainly hoped I would come to Almería and work as a halberdier. “It’s such an agreeable town.”
“I’m about ready to get out of the pensión, too. People are breathing down my neck. But I’d better stay in Madrid so that I can keep track of everything—Thaxter, Paris. I may even have to go back to France for a while. I now have two attorneys there and that’s double trouble.”
“You haven’t much confidence in lawyers.”
“Well, Abraham Lincoln was a