Humboldt's Gift

  So he talked to me, and I kept thinking about his fate. His fate! And I couldn’t tell him my thoughts. They were not transmissible. Then what good were they? Their oddity and idiosyncrasy was a betrayal. Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meaning, and a man should believe what he said. This was Hamlet’s complaint to Polonius when he said, “Words, words, words.” The words are not my words, the thoughts not my thoughts. It’s wonderful to have thoughts. They can be about the starry heavens and the moral law, the majesty of the one, the grandeur of the other. Ulick was not the only one that took lots of paper. We were all taking paper, plenty of it. And I wasn’t about to pass any paper off on Ulick at a time like this. My new ideas, yes. They were more to the point. But I wasn’t ready to mention them to him. I should have been ready. In the past, thoughts were too real to be kept like a cultural portfolio of stocks and bonds. But now we have mental assets. As many world views as you like. Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They’re all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or has true strength or speaks straight to the soul. It was this paper-taking, this passing of highbrow currency that had finally put my back up. But my back had gone up slowly, reluctantly. So now I wasn’t ready to tell Ulick anything of genuine interest. I had nothing to offer my brother, bracing himself for death. He didn’t know what to think about it and was furious and frightened. It was my business as the thoughtful brother to tell him something. And actually I had important intimations to communicate as he faced the end. But intimations weren’t much use. I hadn’t done my homework. He’d say, “What do you mean, Spirit! Immortality? You mean that?” And I wasn’t yet prepared to explain. I was just about to go into it seriously myself. Maybe Renata and I would take a train to Taormina and there I could sit in a garden and concentrate on this, giving it my whole mind.

  Our serious Old World parents certainly had produced a pair of American clowns—one demonic millionaire clown, and one higher-thought clown. Ulick had been a fat boy I adored, he was a man precious to me, and now the fatal coastline was in view before him and I wanted to say, as he sat looking sick behind the wheel, that this brilliant, this dazing shattering delicious painful thing (I was referring to life) when it concluded, concluded only what we knew. It did not conclude the unknown, and I suspected that something further would ensue. But I couldn’t prove a thing to this hardheaded brother of mine. He was terrified by the approaching blank, the flowering pleasant-day-in-May conclusion with the cliff of coal behind it, the nice cool hole in the ground. So all I could really say to him if I spoke would go as follows: “Listen here, do you remember when we moved down to Chicago from Appleton and lived in those dark rooms on Rice Street? And you were an obese boy and I a thin boy? And Mama doted on you with black eyes, and Papa flew into a fit because you dunked your bread in the cocoa? And before he escaped into the wood business he slaved in the bakery, the only work he. could find, a gentleman but laboring at night? And came home and hung his white overalls behind the bathroom door so that the can always smelled like a bakeshop and the stiff flour fell off in scales? And he slept handsome and angry, on his side all day, with one hand under his face and the other between his drawn-up knees? While Mama boiled the wash on the coal stove, and you and I disappeared to school? Do you remember all that? Well, I’ll tell you why I bring it up—there are good esthetic reasons why this should not be wiped from the record eternally. No one would put so much heart into things doomed to be forgotten and wasted. Or so much love. Love is gratitude for being. This love would be hate, Ulick, if the whole thing was nothing but a gyp.” But a speech like this was certainly not acceptable to one of the biggest builders of southeast Texas. Such communications were prohibited under the going mental rules of a civilization that proved its right to impose such rules by the many practical miracles it performed, such as bringing me to Texas from New York in four hours, or sawing open his sternum and grafting new veins into his heart. To accept the finality of death was part of his package, however. There was to be no sign of us left. Only a few holes in the ground. Only the dirt of certain mole-runs cast up by extinct creatures that once burrowed here.

  Meantime Ulick was saying that he was going to help me. For fifty thousand dollars he would sell me two points in an already completed project. “That ought to throw off between twenty-five and thirty percent. So if you got an income of fifteen thousand, plus what you picked up by your scribbles, you could be comfortable in one of the cheap countries like Yugoslavia or Turkey, and tell the Chicago gang to fuck itself.”

  “Lend me the fifty grand, then,” I said. “I can raise that much in a year’s time and repay you.”

  “I’d have to go to the bank for it myself,” he said. But I was a Citrine, the same blood ran in our veins, and he couldn’t expect me to accept so obvious a lie. He then said, “Charlie, don’t ask me to do such an unbusinesslike thing.”

  “You mean that if you advanced me the dough, and if you didn’t make a little something on me, your self-respect would suffer.”

  “With your gift for putting things succinctly, what things I could write,” he said, “seeing that I know a thousand times as much as you. Of course I have to take a little advantage. After all, I’m the guy who puts the thing together—the whole ball of wax. But it would be the minimum basic. On the other hand, if you’re tired of your way of life, and you sure ought to be, you could settle here in Texas and become filthy rich yourself. This place has big dimensions, Charlie, it’s got scale.”

  But this reference to scale, to large dimensions, didn’t fill me with business ambitions, it only reminded me of a stirring lecture by a clairvoyant that I had read on the plane. Now that did impress me deeply and I tried to comprehend it. After the two Cubans and the man from Boston got into the Cadillac with us and began to smoke cigars, so that I became carsick, to think about clairvoyance was as good a thing to do as any other. The car tore out of town, following the coastline. “There’s a great fish place along here,” said Ulick. “I want to stop and buy Hortense some smoked shrimp and smoked marlin.” We pulled in and got some. Starving, Ulick ate pieces of marlin before the fish was removed from the scale. Before it could be wrapped he had already pulled off the tail-end.

  “Don’t gorge,” I said.

  He paid no attention to this, and he was quite right. He gorged. Gaspar, his Cuban crony, took the wheel and Ulick sat in the back with his fish. He kept it under the seat. “I want to save this for Hortense, she dotes on it,” he said. But at this rate nothing would be left for Hortense. It wasn’t for me to conjure away a whole lifetime of such extraordinary greed, and I should have let him be. But I had to put in my brotherly two cents, giving him just the touch of remorse you wanted from your family on the eve of open-heart surgery as you crammed yourself with smoked fish.

  At the same time I was concentrating on the vision the clairvoyant had described in such extraordinary detail. Just as soul and spirit left the body in sleep, they could also be withdrawn from it in full consciousness with the purpose of observing the inner life of man. The first result of this conscious withdrawal is that everything is reversed. Instead of seeing the external world as we normally do with senses and intellect, initiates can see the circumscribed self from without. Soul and spirit are poured out upon the world which normally we perceive from within—mountains clouds forests seas. This external world we no longer see, for we are it. The outer world is now the inner. Clairvoyant, you are in the space you formerly beheld. From this new circumference you look back to the center, and at the center is your own self. That self, your self, is now the external world. Dearest God, there you see the human form, your own form. You see your own skin and the blood inside, and you see this as you see an external object. But what an object! Your eyes are now two radiant suns, filled with light. Your eyes are identified by this radiance. Your ears are identified by sound. From the skin comes a glow. From the human form emanate light, sound, and sparkling electrical forces. This is the physic
al being when the Spirit looks at it. And even the life of thought is visible within this radiance. Your thoughts can be seen as dark waves passing through the body of light, says this clairvoyant. And with this glory comes also a knowledge of stars which exist in the space where we formerly felt ourselves to stand inert. We are not inert but in motion together with these stars. There is a star world within us that can be seen when the Spirit takes a new vantage point outside its body. As for the musculature it is a precipitate of Spirit and the signature of the cosmos is in it. In life and in death the signature of the cosmos is within us.

  We were now driving through swampy, reefy places. There were mangroves. Here was the Gulf sparkling alongside. There was also a great deal of clutter, for the peninsula was a dumping ground and an old-car cemetery. The afternoon was hot. The great black Cadillac opened and we got out. The men, excited, striding off in all directions, studying the ground, trying to get the lay of the land and already struggling with future building problems. Gorgeous palaces, stunning towers, and thrilling gardens of crystal dew arose from their flaming minds.

  “Solid rock,” said the Boston Irishman, scraping the ground with his white calfskin shoe.

  He had confided to me that he wasn’t an Irishman at all, he was a Pole. His name, Casey, was shortened from Casimirz. Because I was Ulick’s brother, he took me for a businessman. With a name like Citrine what else would I be? “This guy is a real creative entrepreneur. Your brother Julius is imaginative—a genius builder,” said Casey. As he spoke, his flat freckled face gave me the false smile that swept the country about fifteen years ago. To achieve it, you drew your upper lip away from the teeth, while looking at your interlocutor with charm. Alec Szathmar did it better than anyone. Casey was a large, almost monumental and hollow-looking person who resembled a plainclothes dick from Chicago—same type. His ears were amazingly crinkled, like Chinese cabbage. He spoke with pedantic courtliness, as if he had taken a correspondence course originating in Bombay. I rather liked that. I saw that he wanted me to put in a good word for him with Ulick, and I understood his need. Casey was retired, a partial invalid, and he was seeking ways to protect his fortune from inflationary shrinkage. Also he was looking for action. Action or death. Money can’t mark time. Now that I was committed to spiritual investigation, many matters presented themselves to me in a clearer light. I saw, for instance, what volcanic emotions Ulick was dissembling. He stood on a rubble elevation, eating smoked shrimps from the paper bag, and pretended to take a cool view of this peninsula as a development site. “It’s promising,” he said. “It’s got possibilities. But there’d be some terrible headaches here. You’d have to start by blasting. There’ll be a hell of a water problem. Sewage, too. And I don’t even know how this is zoned.”

  “Why, what you could do with this is a first-class hotel,” said Casey. “Apartment houses on each side, with ocean frontage, beaches, a yacht basin, tennis courts.”

  “It sounds easy,” said Ulick. Oh cunning Ulick, my darling brother! I could see that he was in an ecstasy of craftiness. This was a place that might be worth hundreds of millions, and he came upon it just as the surgeons were honing up for him. A fat cumbered clogged ailing heart threatened to lay him in the grave just as his soul came into its most brilliant opportunity. You could be sure that when you were dreaming your best somebody would start banging at the door—the famous Butcher Boy from Porlock. In this case, the kid’s name was Death. I understood Ulick and his passions. Why not? I was a lifetime Ulick subscriber. So I knew what a paradise he saw in this dumping ground—the towers in a sea-haze, the imported grass gemmy with moisture, the pools surrounded by gardenias where broads sunned their beautiful bodies, and all the dark Mexican servitors in embroidered shirts murmuring “Si, señor”—there were plenty of wetbacks crossing the border.

  I also knew how Ulick’s balance sheets would look. They’d read like Chapman’s Homer, illuminated pages, realms of gold. If zoning ordinances interfered with this opportunity he was prepared to lay out a million bucks in bribes. I saw that in his face. He was the positive, I the negative sinner. He might have been wearing sultry imperial colors. I might have been buttoned into a suit of Dr. Denton’s Sleepers. Of course I had a big thing to wake up to, a very big challenge. Now I was only simmering, still, and it would be necessary at last to come to a full boil. 1 had business on behalf of the entire human race—a responsibility not only to fulfill my own destiny but to carry on for certain failed friends like Von Humboldt Fleisher who had never been able to struggle through into higher wakefulness. My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.

  The reason why the Ulicks of this world (and also the Cantabiles) had such sway over me was that they knew their desires clearly. These desires might be low but they were pursued in full wakefulness. Thoreau saw a woodchuck at Walden, its eyes more fully awake than the eyes of any farmer. Of course that woodchuck was on his way to wipe out some hard-working farmer’s crop. It was all very well for Thoreau to build up woodchucks and fume at farmers. But if society is a massive moral failure farmers have something to sleep about. Or look at the present moment. Ulick was awake to money; I, with a craving to do right swelling in my heart, was aware that the good liberal sleep of American boyhood had lasted half a century. And even now I had come to get something from Ulick—I was revisiting the conditions of childhood under which my heart had been inspired. Traces of the perfume of that sustaining time, that early and sweet dream-time of goodness still clung to him. Just as his face was turning toward (perhaps) his final sun, I still wanted something from him.

  Ulick treated his two Cubans as deferentially as the Polish Casey treated him. These were his indispensable negotiators. They had gone to school with the proprietors. At times they hinted that they were all cousins. To me they looked like Caribbean playboys, a recognizable type—strong fatty men with fresh round faces and blue, not especially kindly, eyes. They were golfers, water-skiers, horsemen, polo-players, racing-car drivers, twin-engine pilots. They knew the Riviera, the Alps, Paris, and New York as well as the night clubs and gambling joints of the West Indies. I said to Ulick, “These are sharp guys. Exile hasn’t dulled them any.”

  “I know they’re sharp,” said Ulick. “I’ll have to find a way to put them into the deal. This is no time to be petty—my God, Chuckie, there’s plenty here for everybody this time,” he whispered.

  Before this conversation occurred we had made two stops. As we were returning from the peninsula, Ulick said he wanted to stop at a tropical fruit farm he knew. He had promised Hortense to bring home persimmons. The fish had been eaten. We sat with him under a tree sucking at the breast-sized, flame-colored fruit. The juice spurted over his sport shirt, and seeing that it now had to go to the cleaner anyway he wiped his fingers on it as well. His eyes had shrunk, and moved back and forth rapidly in his head. He was not, just then, with us. The Cubans took Hortense’s golf bag from the trunk of the car and began to amuse themselves by driving balls across the fields. They were superb powerful golfers, despite their heavy bottoms and the folds of flesh that formed under their chins as they addressed the ball. They took turns, and with elastic strength whacked the elastic balls—crack!—into the unknown. It was pleasing to watch this. But when we were ready to leave it turned out that the ignition keys had gotten locked up in the trunk. Tools were borrowed from the persimmon farmer, and in half an hour the Cubans had punched out the lock. Of course they damaged the paint of the new Cadillac. But that was nothing. “Nothing, nothing!” said Ulick. He was burned up, too, naturally, but these Gonzalez cousins could not be freely hated now. Ulick said, “What is it—some hardware, a touch of paint?” He rose, heavy, and said, “Let’s stop now and get a drink and something
to eat.”

  We went to a Mexican restaurant where he devoured an order of chicken breasts with molé sauce—a bitter spicy chocolate gravy. I could not finish mine. He took my plate. He ordered pecan pie à la mode, and then a cup of Mexican chocolate.

  When we got home I said I would go to my motel and lie down; I was very tired. We stood together in his garden for a while.

  “Do you even begin to get the picture of this peninsula?” he said. “With this land I could do the most brilliant piece of business in my life. These smart-ass Cubans will have to go along. I’ll sweep those bastards with me. I’ll develop a plan—while I’m convalescing I’ll get a survey done, and a map, and when I make my pitch to those lazy Spanish jet-set bastards, I’ll be prepared with architect’s models and all my financing ready. I mean if, you know. Do you want to try some of these loquats?” He reached gloomily into one of his trees and picked handfuls of fruit.

  “I’m bilious now,” I said, “from all I’ve eaten.”