The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [199]
got anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It's a sickness. But they don't want you to care for them as they really are. No. That's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie, darling, don't do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter to them. You only matter when someone loves you. You matter to me. Otherwise you don't matter, you're only dealt with. So you shouldn't care how you seem to them. But you do, you care too much." She went on like this. It was bitter sometimes, for usually her wisdom was against me. As if she foresaw that I'd do her wrong and was warning me. But then, too, I was eager to hear what she said and I understood it, I understood only too well. These conversations we had more often on the road when we set out for Mexico. She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico besides obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatia, and what she described of the country didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population. I wasn't clear for a long time about the hunting. I thought she intended to hunt eagles, and that seemed peculiar to me, but what I understood wasn't so peculiar as what she really meant. She wanted to hunt with an eagle trained in falconry, and as she had owned hawks she was eager to imitate a British captain' and an American couple who had taught or "manned" golden and American eagles, some of the few since the Middle Ages. She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Clan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas. Near Texarkana there was a man who had eaglets to sell. He had offered one to George H. Somebody-or-other, an old friend of Thea's father, who kept a private zoo. This friend of her father, who by the accounts she gave seemed to me loony, like the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, had built himself a copy of the Trianon in Indiana, only with cages inside, and had made Hagenbeck voyages everywhere to fill them with beasts of his own capture. He was in retirement now, too old to travel; but he had asked Thea to bring him some giant iguanas--or challenged her to--these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City. As this information came out, which I didn't know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life--I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity. I'm not going to say that she was more than I had bargained for, because it has to be absolutely understood that I didn't bargain. What::^. ' ' 319 I will say is that she was singular, unforeseen, and contradictory in her flightiness, steadiness, nervousness, or courage. When she tripped on the stairs in the dark she cried out, but she traveled with snake-catching equipment and she showed me snapshots of the outings of a rattlercollectors' club she had belonged to. I saw her holding a diamondback behind the head and milking the poison from him with a slice of rubber. She told me how she had crawled into a cave after him. In Renling's shop I had sold sports equipment, but the only hunting I had ever watched was in the movies, apart from having seen my brother Simon shooting at the rats in his yard with his pistol. My special memory was of one large one with humped back like a small boar but terrible, swiftclawed feet racing for the fence. I was, however, ready even to become a hunter. Thea took me out into the country before we left Chicago, and I practiced shooting at crows. This was