The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [216]
didn't seem adequate to support him. We loved to sit up in bed, each by the other's nude waist, and watch him mouse around in the enormous flowers. Then came his son, already combed, pale, bored; his spats in the dew, he bent and kissed his father's hand. And then came two little daughters, like white birthday cake, and the soft mother. All carried the old geezer's tiny hand to their mouths. It gave us a lot of pleasure. They would sit down in the arbor and be served. By now the eagle had learned Thea's voice and mine, and he'd come off the lure to eat out of our hands when called. It was time to introduce or enter him to lizards. Live ones were a trouble, because they'd run away, and they were so small. Dead ones didn't suit Thea. She worried about those Jacinto brought in; she suggested doping the larger ones a little with ether, just enough to make them sluggish. I was fond of them. Some soon became tame. You stroked them on the little head with a finger and they got affectionate, up your sleeve or on your shoulder, into your hair. At night, when we were at dinner, I'd stare at the ones that lay near the bug-attracting lights, with swift puff of the throat and their tongues which are supposed to have the power to hear. I wished we could leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and beak. About this Thea was both gay and sharp with me, and when she argued against my sympathy with these gilded Hyperion's kids made me laugh and also squirm. It wasn't as if she hadn't thought about it independently. She said, "Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with everything, like a savage. Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don't want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn't be lizards--they'd be too slow, and pretty soon they'd be extinct. And look, if you were lying dead the little lizard would run down your open mouth to catch beetles, as if you were a log." "And Caligula would eat me." "Could be." "And you'd bury me?" "Because you're my lover. Of course. Wouldn't you me?" Unlike Lucy Magnus, she never called me husband, or by any domestic term. I sometimes believed her marriage views, except that they weren't polemical, were similar to Mimi's. This conversation about lizards was one of several on the same general topic, and gradually Thea made me see what she was driving at with me. You couldn't get the admission out of me that a situation couldn't be helped and was inescapably bad, but I was eternally looking for a way out, and what was up for question was whether I was a man of hope or foolishness. But I suppose I felt the good I had must be connected with a law. While she, I guess, didn't care for my statue-yard of hopes. It seemed when somebody held me up an evil there had to be a remedy or I pulled my head and glance away, turned them in another direction. She had me dead to rights when she accused me of that; and she tried to teach me her view. Nevertheless I hated to see the little lizards hit and squirt blood, and their tiny fine innards of painted delicacy come out under Caligula's talons while he glared and opened his beak. On a Sunday morning, when the band boomed and spat in the zocafo where it began at dawn, and the heat was dry in the kitchen patio, after breakfast--we had sunnyside-up eggs--we were working with the bird. It was something to hear the exercise of his wings in the heated space of the air. Jacinto brought us a larger lizard. We tied him with short fishing line to a stake, which gave him no chance to dart away. Then the eagle came beating down with a sharp threat of pinions in the electrical dry air and its hurried dust and went to set his claws in the lizard. But there was enough play in the line for the quick animal to whip around, and it opened its mouth and showed a tissue of; rage to the big beast over it, then snapped its jaws and hung from the bird's thigh, curved with the force of its attack and bite. One of those thighs that made the bird seem to ride like an Attila's horseman through