The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [211]
membrane, showed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones--gliding like a Satan--well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes-- feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, black, white, gray, and in all sizes, with their heavy death fringes daubed in Sapolio silver on the black. Beggars in dog voices on the church steps enact the last feebleness for you with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of stump and their sores. The burden carriers with the long lines, hemp lines they wind over their foreheads to hold the loads on their backs, lie in the garbage at siesta and give themselves the same exhibited neglect the dead are shown. Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere, in the beauty of the place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly handled--the proudest--pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown down; for death throws even worse in men's faces and makes it horrible and absurd that one never touched should be roughly dumped under, dumped upon. When Caligula soared under this sky I sometimes wondered what connection he made with this element of nearly too great strength that was dammed back of the old spouts of craters. But he wasn't soaring yet. He was still cumbersomely flying after the lure and its slimy giblets spoiled by the sun. Again and again it was flung out, downslope, for that was the only way to get him going. Whenever Thea miscalculated the distance he made me stagger, since we were tied by a rope that passed under my arms. She ran to watch him devour the chicken and signaled when I was to pull at the leash. So gradually he learned to come back to the fist from the lure. No matter how isolated a mountain place we stopped in to practice, there was an audience soon of herdsmen and peasants in their sleeping-suit white costumes and sandals soled with pieces of rubber tire, little kids and the mountaineers with the creased impassivity that showed how gravely they took it. Hi' As for Thea,' sometimes she looked more barbarous than they did in spite of the civilized lipstick and conventional shape of the jodhpurs she wore. Her arm was held out to the eagle when he descended, braked with his wings and feet together, the stirred air showing on his breast. Her cap fluttered. I took a great pride in her. I thought it was the most splendid human act I would ever see. It went around my soul like fine ribbon. She'd call out to me too, when I poised myself forward to bring the bird in, admiring how gallant it looked. I was pleased, of course, though not groggy with glory. After ten days we reached Mexico City. Thea had to see the representative of Smitty's lawyer and we therefore stayed awhile. Against her desire, which was to go on immediately to Acatla. We put up very cheaply in a hotel called La Regina, for only three pesos a day. They didn't appear to mind the eagle, and the place was quiet and modestlooking, unusually clean, with a skylight over the center and galleries onto which you came from rooms,