Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [41]
So we drove again through what had become a tropical West Indies slum, resembling the parts of San Juan that stand beside lagoons which bubble and smell like stewing tripe. There was the same crushed plaster, smashed glass, garbage in the streets, the same rude amateur blue chalk lettering on the shops.
But the Russian Bath where I was supposed to meet Rinaldo Cantabile stood more or less unchanged. It was also a proletarian hotel or lodging house. On the second floor there had always lived aged workingstiffs, lone Ukrainian grandfathers, retired car-line employees, a pastry cook famous for his icings who had to quit because his hands became arthritic. I knew the place from boyhood. My father, like old Mr. Swiebel, had believed it was healthful, good for the blood to be scrubbed with oak leaves lathered in old pickle buckets. Such retrograde people still exist, resisting modernity, dragging their feet. As Menasha the boarder, an amateur physicist (but mostly he wanted to be a dramatic tenor and took voice lessons: he had worked at Brunswick Phonograph Co. as a punch-press operator), once explained to me, human beings could affect the rotation of the earth. How? Well, if the whole race at an agreed moment were to scuff its feet the revolution of the planet would actually slow down. This might also have an effect on the moon and on the tides. Of course Menasha’s real topic was not physics but concord, or unity. I think that some through stupidity and others through perversity would scuff the wrong way. However, the old guys at the Bath do seem to be unconsciously engaged in a collective attempt to buck history.
These Division Street steam-bathers don’t look like the trim proud people downtown. Even old Feldstein pumping his Exercycle in the Downtown Club at the age of eighty would be out of place on Division Street. Forty years ago Feldstein was a swinger, a high roller, a good-time Charlie on Rush Street. In spite of his age he is a man of today, whereas the patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded. Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices