The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [321]
you were going around'idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast. Lying in the bath, Stella was performing labor. It was obvious to me. And generally I was doing hard work too. And what for? Everybody gives me a line about Paris being a place of ease and mentions caime, ordre, luxe, et volupte, and yet there is this toil being done. Every precious personality framed dramatically and doing the indispensable work. If Stella weren't bound to do her hardest work we wouldn't be in this city of calm and luxury, so called. The clothes, the night clubs and entertainment, the supposed play of the studio and the friendship of the artists--who strike me as being characters of pretty high stomach, like our buddy Alain du Niveau--there's nothing easy in it. I'll tell you about this du Niveau. He's what the Parisians call a noceur, meaning that it's always the wedding night for him or that he plays musical beds. That's just about the least of it. Anyway, I would have preferred to stay in the States and have children. Instead I'm in the bondage of strangeness for a time still. It's only temporary. We'll get out of it. I said that Stella lied more than average, unfortunately. She told me a number of things that weren't so; she forgot to tell me others that were so. For instance, she said she was getting money from her dad in Jamaica. There was no such party in Jamaica. She had never gone to college either. And she had never cared anything about Oliver. He wasn't the important man. The important one was a big operator whose name was Cumberland. It wasn't she who first told me about him. I found out from someone else that there was such a man. And then she told me that this Cumberland was a crook. Of morals, that is; in business he was not only respectable but great. In fact he was one of these powerful characters whose pictures don't even get into the papers because they're too strong to be named. And gradually this man, with whom she had taken up while still a high-school girl, built up to be about like Jupiter-Ammon, with an eye like that new telescope out at the Mount Palomar observatory, about as wicked as Tiberius, a czar and mastermind. To tell the truth, I'm good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists. After Basteshaw clobbered me I took an oath of unsusceptibility. But this oath is probably a mice-and-man matter, for here the specter of one of this breed was over me. Brother! You never are through, you just think you are! The first I heard about this Cumberland was from Alain du Niveau, who was in New York during the war, in the movie industry. Mintouchian knew him, and Agnes. He was originally a friend of Agnes. When we met he told me he was a descendant of the Due de Saint Simon. I'm always a sucker for lineage, but this du Niveau didn't really look very good. He had blue whiskyish eyes in his tight-packed heavy face with its color of bad good-health. Although he probably meant no harm by it he had a very insolent expression. Thin and sandy, his hair was combed like a British officer's, neat and bleak. His shoes were fleece-lined; his long overcoat was all beautiful suede, down to the ankles; his body was thick. He was a chaser and wolf after girls on the subway. He'd tell you himself how he picked up women, and as he described it these poor weak birdies when he got them alone were like