The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [209]
eyes of others, I've reported. When has such damage been done by the gaze and so much awful despotism belonged to the eyes? Why, Cain was cursed between them so he would never be unaware of his look in the view of other men. And police accompany accused and suspects to the can, and jailers see their convicts at will through bars and peepholes. Chiefs and tyrants of the public give no relief from self-consciousness. Vanity is the same thing in private, and in any kind of oppression you are a subject and can't forget yourself; you are seen, you have to be aware. In the most personal acts of your life you carry the presence and power of another; you extend his being in your thoughts, where he inhabits. Death, with monuments, makes great men remembered like that. So I had to bear Caligula's gaze. And I did. He resisted the hood for a long time. Several times we tried it on him, and I had my hand slashed badly and cursed him with all my might; but I continued to carry him. Occasionally Thea would spell me, but he was too much of a weight for her and after an hour or so I'd lure him back to my unrested arm. During the last groggy stretch I couldn't any longer stay in and went into the street with him where the cries about him made him restive. We brazened our way into a movie and sat in the back row; here the sound got him even worse, and I was afraid he'd blow his top. I took him back to the room and fed him chunks of meat to soothe him. Then, in the middle of the night, under the infrared bulb of Thea's photographic kit, I tried the hood once more, and he submitted to it at last. We continued to give him meat under it, and he was calm. Covered eyes made him much more docile. Henceforth he rode either my fist or Thea's and took the hood without using his beak on us. When we had this victory and Caligula was standing on the dresser 'n his hood with tufts, we kissed and danced or tromped around the room. Thea went to get ready for bed and I fell asleep in my breeches and was out for ten hours. She pulled off my boots and let me lie. Next afternoon, hot and bright, we started out for Monterrey; trees, bushes, stones, as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them. The giant bird, when Thea brought him out, seemed to shoulder it with a kind of rise of sensuality. I felt dizzy from long sleep and the wires of radiant heat curling up from road and rock. Also the paws and pads, the tongues and jaws of cactus and their spines, the dust like resin, the squamous crumbly walls, were a trial to the sight and the skin. But as the wagon climbed and the day cooled we both revived. We didn't stop over in Monterrey but only got a few supplies--more raw meat for Caligula than anything else. The curiosity of evening in this foreign city would have held me--it was so green, and the buildings red, the humanity so numerous in the flat open beside the railroad station and its length of low entrances and windows. But it was Thea's idea to drive on and beat the hot weather. It wasn't easy going, for the fields weren't fenced and there were cattle in the way; the road had no night markers and took foolish twists. For some time there was a mist although the moon was plain enough. The animals rose up in big shapes from this vague cover, and sometimes we came up with horsemen and left behind the slap of iron shoes and the loose change and slash of harness. At a town well past Valles we stopped for what was left of the night, and then because I insisted. The air was sharp, the stars pricking, the roosters sounding off, and the never-sleeping element of Mexican towns came to see us take out the eagle, with the same solemnness about it as at the Sunday promenade of a holy image, and, as everywhere, said to one another, astonished, "Es un dguila!" I wanted to leave him in the station wagon where by now his excrement and fowlish smell were so thick, but he wouldn't stand for it. Left alone all night, he was vicious in the morning, and Thea was by now so wrapped up in his career that for the time very few considerations took precedence. Because