The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [215]
a little valley, hummocky with soft old decays; the vultures hung over it all day. At one of the highest points you could see, in a cliff, there was a waterfall. Sometimes it was covered in a cloud, but there usually flew the slight smoke of water, paler than the air, above the treeline. A good deal below were pines, at the widows' peaks of wrinkled rock; and then more tropical trees and flowers, and the hot stone belt of snakes and wild pigs, the deer, and the giant iguanas we had come to catch. Where they hung out the light was very hot. In a Paris or a London where the distinction of the sun isn't so great, in the grays and veilings, it isn't credited with its full power, and many southern people have envied those places the virtues it's possible to think of having in the cool or cold. I believe Mussolini was not kidding about blasting pieces out of his Alps and Apennines to let the cold foggy currents of Germany over the peninsula and make the Perugini and the Romans into fighters. That same Mussolini who was slung up dead by the legs with shirt tails drooped off his naked belly, and the flies, on whom he had also declared war, walked on his empty face relaxed of its wide-jawed grimace, upside down. Ay! And his girl friend with poor breasts bullet-punctured also hung by the feet. But what I want of the contrast of broadcast or exposing versus discreet light is to suggest what the claims are, or the illusions, the discreeter seems to allow. Now I've mentioned that Thea carried among other pictures one of her father, taken in the south of China, in a rikshaw. She put it on the dresser, tucked in the mirror frame, and I often found myself studying him, his white shoes of far manufacture off the ground being used by the dish-faced Cantonese. In his white suit. And I thought what there m 345 was to such being picked for special distinction. Maybe I looked at him with special regard as lover or future husband of his daughter. But anyway, he was sitting gentlemanly up in the human taxi. Around him spectators from the millions gowping at him, famine-marks, lousevehicles, the supply of wars, the living fringe of a great number sunk in the ground, dead, and buzzing or jumping over Asia like diatoms of the vast bath of the ocean in the pins of the sun. Well, in the hot light I saw the wild mountain, the semitropical band of it where the iguanas haunted in the big leaves and gorgeous flowers, the laborers and peasants, and I didn't realize right away how many visitors from the cool and cold were paying their good dough to be here. Very near us was a luxury hotel, the Carios Quinto. Its swimming pool shone in the garden, blue and white like heavenly warmth and weather, and there were large foreign cars in the drive. Acatia was beginning to attract people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo but now wanted to be out of the way of politics. There were already some Spaniards here, from both sides of the disaster, and also some Frenchwomen, and Japanese and Russians, a family of Chinese who ran a bar and manufactured rope-soled alpargatas. The American colony was large, and so the place was boiling and booming. I knew little about that at first. It entertained me to look into the gardens of the Carios Quinto next door, the bar on the terrace, the swimmers in the pool, the riding parties setting out, the small deer kept in a wire pen. The manager was an Italian; he wore diplomatist's pants and a claw-hammer coat that accommodated his wide prat. His hair was smooth and his face confident for others, worried toward himself. I noticed how quick his fingers were, in and out of his vest pockets where many of his functions started. From our wall Thea introduced me to him; he was called da Fiori. There was a private end of the garden for his own family on which our bedroom window looked down. In the morning old da Fiori, his tiny father, came out in a cap and old English type of suit, dark green, fuzzy, with a belt on the jacket and chestnut buttons. He brushed the ends of his whiskers with hairy knuckles, and when he walked, his little feet