Tropic of Capricorn

  When it was all over she opened her eyes wide and stared at me, as though she were taking me in for the first time. I hadn’t a word to say to her; the only thought in my head was to get out as quickly as possible. As we were washing up I noticed a note on the floor near the door. It was from Kronski. His wife had just been taken to the hospital – he wanted her to meet him at the hospital. I felt relieved! it meant that I could break away without wasting any words.

  The next day I had a telephone call from Kronski. His wife had died on the operating table. That evening I went home for dinner; we were still at the table when the bell rang. There was Kronski standing at the gate looking absolutely sunk. It was always difficult for me to offer words of condolence; with him it was absolutely impossible. I listened to my wife uttering her trite words of sympathy and I felt more than ever disgusted with her. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We walked along in absolute silence for a while. At the park we turned in and headed for the meadows. There was a heavy mist which made it impossible to see a yard ahead. Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he began to sob. I stopped and turned my head away. When I thought he had finished I looked around and there he was staring at me with a strange smile. “It’s funny”, he said, “how hard it is to accept death.” I smiled too now and put my hand on his shoulder. “Go on,” I said, “talk your head off. Get it off your chest.” We started walking again, up and down over the meadows, as though we were walking under the sea. The mist had become so thick that I could barely discern his features. He was talking quietly and madly. “I knew it would happen,” he said. “It was too beautiful to last.” The night before she was taken ill he had had a dream. He dreamt that he had lost his identity. “I was stumbling around in the dark calling my own name. I remember coming to a bridge, and looking down into the water I saw myself drowning. I jumped off the bridge head first and when I came up I saw Yetta floating under the bridge. She was dead.” And then suddenly he added: “You were there yesterday when I knocked at the door, weren’t you? I knew you were there and I couldn’t go away. I knew too that Yetta was dying and I wanted to be with her, but I was afraid to go alone.” I said nothing and he rambled on. “The first girl I ever loved died in the same way. I was only a kid and I couldn’t get over it. Every night I used to go to the cemetery and sit by her grave. People thought I was out of my mind. I guess I was out of my mind. Yesterday, when I was standing at the door, it all came back to me. I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and the sister of the girl I loved was sitting beside me. She said it couldn’t go on that way much longer, that I would go mad. I thought to myself that I really was mad and to prove it to myself I decided to do something mad and so I said to her it isn’t her I love, it’s you, and I pulled her over me and we lay there kissing each other and finally I screwed her, right beside the grave. And I think that cured me because I never went back there again and I never thought about her any more – until yesterday when I was standing at the door. If I could have gotten hold of you yesterday I would have strangled you. I don’t know why I felt that way but it seemed to me that you had opened up a tomb, that you were violating the dead body of the girl I loved. That’s crazy isn’t it? And why did I come to see you to-night? Maybe it’s because you’re absolutely indifferent to me … because you’re not a Jew and I can talk to you … because you don’t give a damn, and you’re right … Did you ever read The Revolt of the Angels?”

  We had just arrived at the bicycle path which encircles the park. The lights of the boulevard were swimming in the mist. I took a good look at him and I saw that he was out of his head. I wondered if I could make him laugh. I was afraid, too, that if he once got started laughing he would never stop. So I began to talk at random, about Anatole France at first, and then about other writers, and finally, when I felt that I was losing him, I suddenly switched to General Ivolgin, and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle, like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible, heart-rending sobs. “I knew you would do me good,” he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away. “I always said you were a crazy son of a bitch … You’re a Jew bastard yourself, only you don’t know it … Now tell me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn’t I tell you she was a good lay? And do you know who she’s living with, Jesus, you were lucky you didn’t get caught. She’s living with a Russian poet – you know the guy, too. I introduced you to him once at the Café Royal. Better not let him get wind of it. He’ll beat your brains out … and he’ll write a beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses. Sure I knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony. His old man was a Nihilist. The whole family’s crazy. By the way, you’d better take care of yourself. I meant to tell you that the other day, but I didn’t think you would act so quickly. You know she may have syphilis. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just telling you for your own good …”

  This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy everything around me – the wife, the job, my friends, the “nigger wench”, as he called Valeska, and so on. “I think some day you’re going to be a great writer,” he said. “But,” he added maliciously, “first you’ll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don’t know what the word means yet. You only think you’ve suffered. You’ve got to fall in love first. That nigger wench now … you don’t really suppose that you’re in love with her, do you? Did you ever take a good look at her ass … how it’s spreading, I mean? In five years she’ll look like Aunt Jemima. You’ll make a swell couple walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you. Jesus, I’d rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You wouldn’t appreciate her, of course, but she’d be good for you. You need something to steady yourself. You’re scattering your energies. Listen, why do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to have a genius for picking up the wrong people. Why don’t you throw yourself into something useful? You don’t belong in that job – you could be a big guy somewhere. Maybe a labour leader … I don’t know what exactly. But first you’ve got to get rid of that hatchet-faced wife of yours. Ugh! when I look at her I could spit in her face. I don’t see how a guy like you could ever have married a bitch like that. What was it – just a pair of streaming ovaries? Listen, that’s what’s the matter with you – you’ve got nothing but sex on the brain … No, I don’t mean that either. You’ve got a mind and you’ve got passion and enthusiasm … but you don’t seem to give a damn what you do or what happens to you. If you weren’t such a romantic bastard I’d almost swear that you were a Jew. It’s different with me – I never had anything to look forward to. But you’ve got something in you – only you’re too damned lazy to bring it out. Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to myself – if only that guy would put it down on paper! Why you could write a book that would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head. You’re different from the Americans I know; somehow you don’t belong, and it’s a damned good thing you don’t. You’re a little cracked, too – I suppose you know that. But in a good way. Listen a little while ago, if it had been anybody else who talked to me that way I’d have murdered him. I think I like you better because you didn’t try to give me any sympathy. I know better than to expect sympathy from you. If you had said one false word to-night I’d have really gone mad. I know it. I was on the very edge. When you started in about General Ivolgin I thought for a minute it was all up with me. That’s what makes me think you’ve got something in you … that was real cunning! And now let me tell you something … if you don’t pull yourself together soon you’re going to be screwy. You’ve got something inside you that’s eating you up. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t put it over on me. I know you from the bottom up. I know there’s something griping you –
and it’s not just your wife, nor your job, nor even that nigger wench whom you think you’re in love with. Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong time. Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m making an idol of you but there’s something to what I say … if you had just a little more confidence in yourself you could be the biggest man in the world to-day. You wouldn’t even have to be a writer. You might become another Jesus Christ for all I know. Don’t laugh – I mean it. You haven’t the slightest idea of your own possibilities … you’re absolutely blind to everything except your own desires. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know because you never stop to think. You’re letting people use you up. You’re a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth of what you’ve got I could turn the world upside down. You think that’s crazy, eh? Well, listen to me … I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you to-night I thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn’t make much difference whether I do it or not. But anyway, I don’t see much point in doing it now. That won’t bring her back to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I don’t want to sick off yet … I want to do some good in the world first. That may sound silly to you, but it’s true. I’d like to do something for others …”

  He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile. It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something quite alien to me. I thought to myself – if only we could change skins! Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than anything was the thought that he wouldn’t even enjoy the funeral – his own wife’s funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites. But they weren’t. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they really didn’t grasp it at all – not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me. And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had to be filled – with limburger sandwiches and beer and Kümmel and turkey legs if there were any about. They wept in their beer, like children. And the next minute they were laughing, laughing over some curious quirk in the dead person’s character. Even the way they used the past tense had a curious effect upon me. An hour after he was shovelled under they were saying of the defunct – “he was always so good-natured” – as though the person in mind were dead a thousand years, a character of history, or a personage out of Nibelungen Lied. The thing was that he was dead, definitely dead for all time, and they, the living, were cut off from him now and forever, and to-day as well as to-morrow must be lived through, the clothes washed, the dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck down there would be a coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it would be all in the daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow was sinful because God, if there was a God, had ordained it that way and we on earth had nothing to say about it. To go beyond the ordained limits of joy or grief was wicked. To threaten madness was the high sin. They had a terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvellous to behold if it had been truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than dull German torpor, insensitivity. And yet, somehow, I preferred these animated stomachs to the hydra-headed sorrow of the Jew. At bottom I couldn’t feel sorry for Kronski – I would have to feel sorry for his whole tribe. The death of his wife was only an item, a trifle, in the history of his calamities. As he himself had said, he was born unlucky. He was born to see things go wrong – because for five thousand years things had been going wrong in the blood of the race. They came into the world with that sunken, hopeless leer on their faces and they would go out of the world the same way. They left a bad smell behind them – a poison, a vomit of sorrow. The stink they were trying to take out of the world was the stink they themselves had brought into the world. I reflected on all this as I listened to him. I felt so well and clean inside that when we parted, after I had turned down a side street, I began to whistle and hum. And then a terrible thirst came upon me and I says to meself in me best Irish brogue – shure and it’s a bit of a drink ye should be having now, me lad – and saying it I stumbled into a hole in the wall and I ordered a big foaming stein of beer and a thick hamburger sandwich with plenty of onions. I had another mug of beer and then a drop of brandy and I thought to myself in my callous way – if the poor bastard hasn’t got brains enough to enjoy his own wife’s funeral then I’ll enjoy it for him. And the more I thought about it, the happier I grew, and if there was the least bit of grief or envy it was only for the fact that I couldn’t change places with her, the poor dead Jewish soul, because death was something absolutely beyond the grip and comprehension of a bum guy like myself and it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as knew all about it and didn’t need it anyway. I got so damned intoxicated with the idea of dying that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God above to kill me this night, kill me, God, and let me know what it’s all about. I tried my stinking best to imagine what it was like, giving up the ghost, but it was no go. The best I could do was to imitate a death rattle, but on that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I almost shit in my pants. That wasn’t death, anyway. That was just choking. Death was more like what we went through in the park: two people walking side by side in the mist, rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word between them. It was something emptier than the name itself and yet right and peaceful, dignified, if you like. It was not a continuation of life, but a leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not even as a grain of dust. And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because why would one want to come back. To taste it once is to taste it forever – life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes. Sure, it’s tough to choke on your own spittle – it’s disagreeable more than anything else. And besides, one doesn’t always die choking to death. Sometimes one goes off in his sleep, peaceful and quiet as a lamb. The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as they say. Anyway, you stop breathing. And why the hell should one want to go on breathing forever? Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture. The poor human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way out. We don’t quibble about going to sleep. A third of our lives we snore away like drunken rats. What about that? Is that tragic? Well then, say three-thirds of drunken rat-like sleep. Jesus, if we had any sense we’d be dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all die in bed tomorrow, without pain, without suffering – if we had the sense to take advantage of our remedies. We don’t want to die, that’s the trouble with us. That’s why God and the whole shooting match upstairs in our crazy dustbins. General Ivolgin! That got a cackle out of him … and a few dry sobs. I might as well have said limburger cheese. But General Ivolgin means something to him … something crazy. Limburger cheese would be too sober, too banal. It’s all limburger cheese, however, including General Ivolgin, the poo
r drunken sap. General Ivolgin was evolved out of Dostoievski’s limburger cheese, his own private brand. That means a certain flavour, a certain label. So people recognize it when they smell it, taste it. But what made this General Ivolgin limburger cheese? Why, whatever made limburger cheese, which is x and therefore unknowable. And so therefore? Therefore nothing … nothing at all. Full stop – or else a leap in the dark and no coming back.

  As I was taking my pants off I suddenly remembered what the bastard had told me. I looked at my cock and it looked just as innocent as ever. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the syph,” I said, holding it in my hand and squeezing it a bit as though I might see a bit of pus squirting out. No, I didn’t think there was much chance of having the syph. I wasn’t born under that kind of star. The clap, yes, that was possible. Everybody had the clap sometime or other. But not syph! I knew he’d wish it on me if he could, just to make me realize what suffering was. But I couldn’t be bothered obliging him. I was born a dumb and lucky guy. I yawned. It was all so much god-damned limburger cheese that syph or no syph, I thought to myself, if she’s up to it I’ll tear off another piece and call it a day. But evidently she wasn’t up to it. She was for turning her ass on me. So I just lay there with a stiff prick up against her ass and I gave it to her by mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she must have gotten the message sound asleep though she was, because it wasn’t any trouble going in by the stable door and besides I didn’t have to look at her face which was one hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her the last hook and whistle – “me lad it’s limburger cheese and now you can turn over and snore …”