The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [119]
didn't approve of his boasting that he had left a wife and kid behind in Mexico, but then the tall girl said she had a child too, and maybe the other did also and just didn't say, and so 1 let the subject pass, since if so many do the same wrong there maybe is something to it that's not right away apparent. We were lying in the two beds, all four, with only as much shape as there was light to reveal it proceeding from the curtains in the slow opening of Sunday, originating white in the east but falling gray upon the upright staggers of walls. Such a sight as the old Negro walls in these streets had a peculiar grandness, if dread too, where this external evidence was of a big humanity which you now couldn't see. It was like the Baths of Caracalla. The vast hidden population slept away into the morning of Sunday. The little girl I liked lay with saddle nose and her sleepy cheeks and big, sensitive, thoughtless mouth, smiling a little at Padilla's speeches. We lay and warmed ourselves by the girls, like kings, till nearly evening, then we left, kissing and fondling while dressing and then to the door, promising we'd be back. Broke, Padilla and I had supper at his house, a more empty house than the one we had just left; that at least had old carpets, old soft chairs, and doodad girls' ingenuities, whereas Padilla lived with some aged female relatives in a big railroad flat off Madison Street. It was almost empty; in one room was a table with a few chairs and in another nothing but mattresses laid on the floor. The old women sat in the kitchen and cooked, fanning a charcoal fire, fat-burdened, slow, stoneinexpressive old creatures to whom he didn't even speak. We ate soup with ground meat at the bottom of the bowl and tortillas which came wrapped in a napkin. Finishing quickly, Padilla left me at the table, and when I went to see what had become of him found him already in bed, an army blanket drawn up to his face, with sharp nose and hair fallen back. He said, "I have to get some sleep. I have a quiz first thing in the morning." "Are you ready for it, Manny?" He said, "Either this stuff comes easy or it doesn't come at all." And that stayed with me. Therefore I was thinking on the streetcar. Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. So I decided to try this out and, to begin with, to experiment with book stealing. If it went easily I'd leave the dog club. And if I made as much at it as Padilla did, that would be double what Guillaume paid me, and I could start saving toward the tuition fee at the university. I didn't mean to settle down to a career of stealing even if it were to come easy, but only to give myself a start at something better. So I began; at first with more excitement than I could tolerate. I had nausea after, on the street, and sweated. It was a big Jowett's Plato that I took. But I was severe with myself to finish the experiment. I checked the book in a dime locker of the Illinois Central station as Padilla had told me to do and immediately went after another, and then I made good progress and became quite cool about it. The difficult moment wasn't that of walking out of the store; it came when I picked the books up and put them under my arm. But then I felt more casual, confident that if stopped I'd be able to explain myself, laugh it off as an error of thoughtlessness and charm my way out. In the store, Padilla told me, the dicks would never arrest you; it was when you stepped into the street that they nabbed you. However, in a department store, without glancing back, I'd drift into another sectionmen's shoes at Carson Pirie's, candy or rugs at Marshall Field's. It never entered my mind to branch out and steal other stuff as well. Sooner than I had planned I quit the dog club, and it wasn't only confidence in my crook's competence that made me do it, but I was struck by the reading fever. I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man. Sometimes I couldn't give a