The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [208]
increasing between captive and masters. And since I had to, I got along with him. He didn't require that I should love him; he looked the other way from that. Meat was how you came to terms with him. Thea really did understand how to tame him, and naturally, since she had the knowhow, she had to think of him more than I did. Soon he started to come to our fists for his beef. You had to get used to it. Under the gloves your skin was twisted by his talons, and he did do a whole lot of damage. I also had to accustom myself to the work he did with his beak when he ravened. But later when I saw vultures on carcasses I appreciated his prouder pull of a more noble bird. So as we ran through Texas, and it was very hot. We stopped several times a day to work with the bird. By the time we got close to Laredo, where it was desert, he would come both to my fist and hers from the top of the station wagon. And this open shadow would shut- out your heart with its smell and power--the Etna feathers and clasped beak opening. Often, then, without the preparatory move you observe in other animals, he ejected a straight, heavy squirt of excrement before he wound up to fly again to the top of the wagon. Thea was mad about him for his progress. I was that about her, and for lots of reasons, among them admiration, seeing how she succeeded with the bird. Birds that hunt have to be hooded; Thea had this thing ready, a tufted cover with drawstrings that you struck or loosened before you released the animal to rise and wait on its game. But before the eagle would take the hood he had to be thoroughly mastered, and I carried him on my arm some forty hours without sleep. He wouldn't drop off, and Thea kept me awake. This was in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border. We put up in a hotel full of flies, a brown room with giant coarse cactus almost in the window. And there I paced at first, rested, at length, in the dark, with my arm on the table, overborne by him. After several hours a numbness grew over my entire side and into my shoulder as deep as the bone. The flies nipped me because I had only one hand free and anyhow didn't want to startle him. Thea had a kid bring up coffee for us, which she took from him at the door. I could see him stare as he tried to dope us out, for he knew we had the bird and perhaps even saw his shape on my victimized arm, or his wakeful eye. There had been an amazing crowd when we drove up to the hotel and opened the back door of the station wagon. In a few minutes more than fifty men and children had gathered. The eagle came on my hand for his meat and the kids screamed, "Ay! Mira, mira--el dguila, el dguila!" Some sight, I guess, since I'm fairly tall and wore that heightincreasing hat and whipcord breeches, and, moreover, obviously followed the lead of Thea's beauty and importance. And anyway the eagle has ancient respect in Mexico from the old religion and the great class of knights in those days of obsidian sword slaughter that Diaz del Castillo witnessed. The children, I said, were screaming, while he rocked on my fist, "El dguila, el dguila!" And because I heard Spanish for the first time, it was another word I made out, the Roman name of Caligula. I thought in my heart how suitable it was, Caligula! "El �ila!" "Si, Caligula," I said. That name was the first satisfaction I had in him. Now he had my arm pinned to the table with torture, and my mouth and chest filled with moans I couldn't give out. I had to drag him with me everywhere, to the toilet too, and sitting or standing I had his eye on me and his comment to try to read and will to feel. From moody sunkenness, when I rose to go, he thrashed back, his neck began to swim and his eyes livened; his clutch grew more positive. I won't attempt to play down my fear when I had to take him into the toilet for the first time. I held him as far off as I had the strength to do, while he started to stretch his wings and change the stance of his thick legs. 0 observation! We had our struggle on that very thing, it appears to me. The conversation with Thea about living in the