Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [47]
Deliberately, at the next corner, Rinaldo ran a red light. He rode the bumper of the car ahead and he made other motorists chicken out. He was elegant, flashy. The seats of the T-bird were specially upholstered in soft leather—so soft, so crimson! He wore the sort of gloves sold to horsemen at Abercrombie & Fitch. At the expressway he swept right and gunned up the slope, running into merging traffic. Cars braked behind us. His radio played rock music. And I recognized Cantabile’s scent. It was Canoe. I had once gotten a bottle of it for Christmas from a blind woman named Muriel.
In the squalid closet at the Bath when his pants were down and I was thinking about Zuckerman’s apes at the London Zoo it had been clear that what was involved here were the plastic and histrionic talents of the human creature. In other words I was involved in a dramatization. It wouldn’t have done much for the image of the Cantabiles, however, if he had actually shot off the gun that he held between his knees. It would make him too much like the crazy uncle who disgraced the family. That, I thought, was the whole point.
nine
Was I afraid of Cantabile? Not really. I don’t know what he thought, but what I thought was perfectly clear to me. Absorbed in determining what a human being is, I went along with him. Cantabile may have believed that he was abusing a passive man. Not at all. I was a man active elsewhere. At the poker game, I received a visionary glimpse of this Cantabile. Of course, I was very high that night, if not downright drunk, but I saw the edge of his spirit rising from him, behind him. So when Cantabile yelled and threatened I didn’t make a stand on grounds of proper pride—”Nobody treats Charlie Citrine like this, I’m going to the police,” and so forth. No, the police had no such things to show me. Cantabile had made a very peculiar and strong impression on me.
What a human being is—I always had my own odd sense of this. For I did not have to live in the land of the horses, like Dr. Gulliver, my sense of mankind was strange enough without travel. In fact I traveled not to seek foreign oddities but to get away from them. I was drawn also to philosophical idealists because I was perfectly sure that this could not be it. Plato in the Myth of Er confirmed my sense that this was not my first time around. We had all been here before and would presently be here again. There was another place. Maybe a man like me was imperfectly reborn. The soul is supposed to be sealed by oblivion before its return to earthly life. Was it possible that my oblivion might be slightly defective? I never was a thorough Platonist. I never could believe that you could be reincarnated a bird or a fish. No soul once human was locked into a spider. In my case (which I suspect is not so rare as all that) there may have been an incomplete forgetting of the pure soul-life, so that the mineral condition of re-embodiment seemed abnormal, so that from an early age I was taken aback to see eyes move in faces, noses breathe, skins sweat, hairs grow, and the like, finding it comical. This was sometimes offensive to people born with full oblivion of their immortality.
This leads me to recall and reveal a day of marvelous spring and a noontime full of the most heavy silent white clouds, clouds like bulls, behemoths, and dragons. The place is Appleton, Wisconsin, and I am a grown man standing on a crate trying to see into the bedroom where I was born in the year 1918. I was probably conceived there, too, and directed by divine wisdom to appear in life as so-and-so, such-and-such (C. Citrine, Pulitzer Prize, Legion of Honor, father of Lish and Mary, husband of A, lover of B, a serious person, and a card). And