Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [93]
“Well, don’t get ahead of yourself, Cantabile,” I said.
I was perfectly aware that in business Chicago it was a true sign of love when people wanted to take you into money-making schemes. But I couldn’t lay hold of Cantabile in this present mood or get a navigational fix or reading of his spirit, which was streaming all over the place. He was a highly excited and, in that Goethean hospital, a sick citizen. I wasn’t perhaps in such great shape myself. It occurred to me that yesterday Cantabile had taken me up to a high place, not exactly to tempt me, but to sail away my fifty-dollar bills. Wasn’t he facing a challenge of the imagination now—I mean, how was he going to follow such an act? However, he seemed to feel that yesterday’s events had united us in a near-mystical bond. There were Greek words for this—philia, agape, and so on (I had heard a famous theologian, Tillich the Toiler, expound their various meanings, so that now I was permanently confused about them). What I mean was that the philia, at this particular moment in the career of mankind, expressed itself in American promotional ideas and commercial deals. To this, along the edges, I added my own peculiar embroidery. I elaborated people’s motives all too profusely.
I looked at the clock. Renata wouldn’t be here for forty minutes yet. She would arrive fragrant painted fresh and even majestic in one of her large soft hats. I didn’t want Cantabile to meet her. For that matter I didn’t know that it was such a good idea for her to meet Cantabile. When she looked at a man who interested her she had a slow way of detaching her gaze from him. It didn’t mean much. It was only her upbringing. She was schooled in charm by her mama, the Señora. Though I suppose that if you are born with such handsome eyes you work out your own methods. In Renata’s method of womanly communication piety and fervor were important. The main point, however, was that Cantabile would see an old guy with a young chick and that he might try, as they say, to get leverage out of this.
I want it to be clear, however, that I speak as a person who had lately received or experienced light. I don’t mean “The light.” I mean a kind of light-in-the-being, a thing difficult to be precise about, especially in an account like this, where so many cantankerous erroneous silly and delusive objects actions and phenomena are in the foreground. And this light, however it is to be described, was now a real element in me, like the breath of life itself. I had experienced it briefly, but it had lasted long enough to be convincing and also to cause an altogether unreasonable kind of joy. Furthermore, the hysterical, the grotesque about me, the abusive, the unjust, that madness in which I had often been a willing and active participant, the grieving, now had found a contrast. I say “now” but I knew long ago what this light was. Only I seemed to have forgotten that in the first decade of life I knew this light and even knew how to breathe it in. But this early talent or gift or inspiration, given up for the sake of maturity or realism (practicality, self-preservation, the fight for survival), was now edging back. Perhaps the vain nature of ordinary self-preservation had finally become too plain for denial. Preservation for what?
For the moment Cantabile and Polly were not paying a great deal of attention to me. He was explaining to her how a convenient little corporation might be set up to protect my income. He spoke of “estate-planning,” with a one-sided grimace. In Spain working-class women give themselves a three-fingered prod in the cheek and twist their faces to denote the highest irony. Cantabile grimaced in the same way. It was a question of keeping assets from the enemy, Denise, and her lawyer, Cannibal Pinsker, and maybe even Judge Urbanovich himself.
“My sources tell me the judge is in the lady’s corner. How do we know