The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [210]
she was making history. Those gallant young sons of financiers who flew planes in the twenties and took off to break records from New Orleans to Buenos Aires, over the jungles which sometimes collected both them and machines, their passions must have been on this order. She kept reminding me how few people since the Middle Ages had manned eagles. I agreed it was terrific and admired her without limit; I thanked God I was even her supernumerary or assistant. But I tried to tell her that the eagle in the room disconcerted me at love, which was awkward; and also that he was a beast after all, not a child in cradle for whom you had to have titty or bottle. Thea, however, couldn't see any arguments, only her objective with the bird, which she never doubted that I shared. She thought I disagreed as to how to manage him. The motive of power over her, the same as afflicted practically everyone I had ever known in some fashion, and which in my degree, though in a different place, I had too, carried and plunged us forward. Of course, when you had an eagle by the tail, so to speak, how could you quit? Having started, you had to follow up. But it wasn't being halfway in a course of difficulties that counted. No, what carried her was the passion for him to capture those huge lizards. By the door of the posada two dirty lumps of kerosene light were burning, like persimmons streaked with black. The stones of the street were slippery, but neither from dew nor from rain, and the smells which I didn't yet know how to sort rose thickly mixed--smells of straw, clay, charcoal and ocote smoke, cookery, stone, shit and corn meal, boiled chicken, pepper, dog, pig, donkey. Nothing was as before; all was strange. In the barnyard, which gave a heave most likely of terror as Caligula in his hood was brought through; and in the bedroom where the perfumed air of the branchy mountainside washed over the white wall and on the stinks of community, as the long impulse from well out in ocean bobs the rotten oranges and other trash at the wharfside; and the Indian woman who turned down the counterpane of the iron bedstead which was in a form of fantasy, a white spider monkey. It was not a long night's rest, for early in the morning washerwomen at their tank started slapping their clothes; corn was pounding; the animals were lively, especially the burros, penetrated with necessity; and the church clanged. However, Thea woke happy, and she was busy right away giving Caligula his pacifier of morning meat, while I set out through the damp rooms to find bread and coffee. Because of the bird we traveled rather slowly. Now Thea wanted to teach him to fly after a lure. This was a horseshoe with chicken or turkey wings and heads tied to it; it was slung by a rawhide line, and when it was thrown he gave a great lurch of preparation and soared after it. Some of his problems were like those of an airline pilot, as to judging distances and the air currents. It wasn't, with him, the simple mechanics of any little bird that went and landed as impulse tickled him, but a task of massive administration. When he was high enough he could look as light as a bee, and later on I saw him at such altitudes that he appeared to tumble or turn somersaults like a mere pigeon-- it must have been that he played the various air pockets of hot and cold. Anyway, it was glorious how he would mount away high and seem to sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere, as if he was governing from up there. If his motive was rapaciousness and everything based on the act of murder, he also had a nature that felt the triumph of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and bone could rise. And doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores and parachute seeds who weren't there as individuals but messengers of species. The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood o S this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk