But I see I haven’t got any closer to giving my reasons for going to Africa, and I’d better begin somewhere else.
Shall I start with my father? He was a well-known man. He had a beard and played the violin, and he …
No, not that.
Well, then, here: My ancestors stole land from the Indians. They got more from the government and cheated other settlers too, so I became heir to a great estate.
No, that won’t do either. What has that got to do with it?
Still, an explanation is necessary, for living proof of something of the highest importance has been presented to me so I am obliged to communicate it. And not the least of the difficulties is that it happened as in a dream.
Well, then, it must have been about eight years after the war ended. I was divorced from Frances and married to Lily, and I felt that something had to be done. I went to Africa with a friend of mine, Charlie Albert. He, too, is a millionaire.
I have always had a soldierly rather than a civilian temperament. When I was in the Army and caught the crabs, I went to get some powder. But when I reported what I had, four medics grabbed me, right at the crossroads, in the open they stripped me naked and they soaped and lathered me and shaved every hair from my body, back and front, armpits, pubic hair, mustache, eyebrows, and all. This was right near the waterfront at Salerno. Trucks filled with troops were passing, and fishermen and paisanos and kids and girls and women were looking on. The GIs were cheering and laughing and the paisans laughed, the whole coast laughed, and even I was laughing as I tried to kill all four. They ran away and left me bald and shivering, ugly, naked, prickling between the legs and under the arms, raging, laughing, and swearing revenge. These are things a man never forgets and afterward truly values. That beautiful sky, and the mad itch and the razors; and the Mediterranean, which is the cradle of mankind; the towering softness of the air; the sinking softness of the water, where Ulysses got lost, where he, too, was naked as the sirens sang.
In passing—the crabs found refuge in a crevice; I had dealings afterward with these cunning animals.
The war meant much to me. I was wounded when I stepped on that land mine and got the Purple Heart, and I was in the hospital in Naples quite a while. Believe me, I was grateful that my life was spared. The whole experience gave my heart a large and real emotion. Which I continually require.
Beside my cellar door last winter I was chopping wood for the fire—the tree surgeon had left some pine limbs for me—and a chunk of wood flew up from the block and hit me in the nose. Owing to the extreme cold I didn’t realize what had happened until I saw the blood on my mackinaw. Lily cried out, “You broke your nose.” No, it wasn’t broken. I have a lot of protective flesh over it but I carried a bruise there for some time. However as I felt the blow my only thought was truth. Does truth come in blows? That’s a military idea if there ever was one. I tried to say something about it to Lily; she, too, had felt the force of truth when her second husband, Hazard, punched her in the eye.
Well, I’ve always been like this, strong and healthy, rude and aggressive, and something of a bully in boyhood; at college I wore gold earrings to provoke fights, and while I got an M.A. to please my father I always behaved like an ignorant man and a bum. When engaged to Frances I went to Coney Island and had her name tattooed on my ribs in purple letters. Not that this cut any ice with her. Already forty-six or forty-seven when I got back from Europe after V-E Day (Thursday, May 8) I went in for pigs, and then I confided to Frances that I was drawn to medicine; and she laughed at me; she remembered how enthusiastic I had been at eighteen over Sir Wilfred Grenfell and afterward over Albert Schweitzer.
What do you do with yourself if you have a temperament like mine? A student of the mind once explained to me that if you inflict your anger on inanimate things, you not only spare the living, as a civilized man ought to do, but you get rid of the bad stuff in you. This seemed to make good sense, and I tried it out. I tried with all my heart, chopping wood, lifting, plowing, laying cement blocks, pouring concrete, and cooking mash for the pigs. On my own place, stripped to the waist like a convict, I broke stones with a sledgehammer. It helped, but not enough. Rude begets rude, and blows, blows; at least in my case; it not only begot but it increased. Wrath increased with wrath. So what do you do with yourself? More than three million bucks. After taxes, after alimony and all expenses I still have one hundred and ten thousand dollars in income absolutely clear. What do I need it for, a soldierly character like me! Taxwise, even the pigs were profitable. I couldn’t lose money. But they were killed and they were eaten. They made ham and gloves and gelatin and fertilizer. What did I make? Why, I made a sort of trophy, I suppose. A man like me may become something like a trophy. Washed, clean, and dressed in expensive garments. Under the roof is insulation; on the windows thermopane; on the floors carpeting; and on the carpets furniture, and on the furniture covers, and on the cloth covers plastic covers; and wallpaper and drapes! All is swept and garnished. And who is in the midst of this? Who is sitting there? Man! That’s who it is, man!
But there comes a day, there always comes a day of tears and madness.
Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger. It only said one thing, I want, I want!
And I would ask, “What do you want?”
But this was all it would ever tell me. It never said a thing except I want, I want, I want!
At times I would treat it like an ailing child whom you offer rhymes or candy. I would walk it, I would trot it. I would sing to it or read to it. No use. I would change into overalls and go up on the ladder and spackle cracks in the ceiling; I would chop wood, go out and drive a tractor, work in the barn among the pigs. No, no! Through fights and drunkenness and labor it went right on, in the country, in the city. No purchase, no matter how expensive, would lessen it. Then I would say, “Come on, tell me. What’s the complaint, is it Lily herself? Do you want some nasty whore? It has to be some lust?” But this was no better a guess than the others. The demand came louder, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want! And I would cry, begging at last, “Oh, tell me then. Tell me what you want!” And finally I’d say, “Okay, then. One of these days, stupid. You wait!”
This was what made me behave as I did. By three o’clock I was in despair. Only toward sunset the voice would let up. And sometimes I thought maybe this was my occupation because it would knock off at five o’clock of itself. America is so big, and everybody is working, making, digging, bulldozing, trucking, loading, and so on, and I guess the sufferers suffer at the same rate. Everybody wanting to pull together. I tried every cure you can think of. Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.
Among other remedies I took up the violin. One day as I was poking around in a storeroom I found the dusty case and I opened it, and there lay the instrument my father used to play, inside that little sarcophagus, with its narrow scrolled neck and incurved waist and the hair of the bow undone and loose all around it. I tightened the bow screw and scrubbed on the strings. Harsh cries awoke. It was like a feeling creature that had been neglected too long. Then I began to recall my old man. Maybe he would deny it with anger, but we are much alike. He could not settle into a quiet life either. Sometimes he was very hard on Mama; once he made her lie prostrate in her nightgown at the door of his room for two weeks before he would forgive her some silly words, perhaps like Lily’s on the telephone when she said I was unkillable. He was a very strong man, too, but as he declined in strength, especially after the death of my brother Dick (which made me the heir), he shut himself away and fiddled more and more. So I began to recall his bent back and the flatness or lameness of his hips, and his beard like a protest that gushed from his very soul—washed white by the trembling weak blood old age. Powerful once,
his whiskers lost their curl and were pushed back on his collarbone by the instrument while he sighted with the left eye along the fingerboard and his big hollow elbow came and went, and the fiddle trembled and cried.
So right then I decided, “I’ll try it too.” I banged down the cover and shut the clasps and drove straight to New York to a repair shop on 57th Street to have the violin reconditioned. As soon as it was ready I started to take lessons from an old Hungarian fellow named Haponyi who lived near the Barbizon-Plaza.
At this time I was alone in the country, divorced. An old lady, Miss Lenox from across the way, came in and fixed my breakfast and this was my only need at the time. Frances had stayed behind in Europe. And so one day as I was rushing to my lesson on 57th Street with the case under my arm, I met Lily. “Well!” I said. I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, not since I put her on that train for Paris, but we were immediately on the old terms of familiarity just as before. Her large, pure face was the same as ever. It would never be steady, but it was beautiful. Only she had dyed her hair. It was now orange, which was not necessary, and it was parted from the middle of her forehead like the two panels of a curtain. It’s the curse of these big beauties sometimes that they are short on taste. Also she had done something with mascara to her eyes so that they were no longer of equal length. What are you supposed to do if such a person is “the same as ever”? And what are you supposed to think when this tall woman, nearly six feet, in a kind of green plush suit like the stuff they used to have in Pullman cars and high heels, sways; sturdy as her legs are, great as her knees are, she sways; and in one look she throws away all the principles of behavior observed on 57th Street—as if throwing off the plush suit and hat and blouse and stockings and girdle to the winds and crying, “Gene! My life is misery without you”?
However, the first thing she actually said was, “I am engaged.”
“What, again?” I said.
“Well, I could use your advice. We are friends. You are my friend, you know. I think we’re each other’s only friends in the world, after all. Are you studying music?”
“Well, if it isn’t music then I’m in a gang war,” I said. “Because this case holds either a fiddle or a tommy gun.” I guess I must have felt embarrassed. Then she began to tell me about the new fiancé, mumbling. “Don’t talk like that,” I said. “What’s the matter with you? Blow your nose. Why do you give me this Ivy League jive? This soft-spoken stuff? It’s just done to take advantage of common people and make them bend over so as to hear you. You know I’m a little deaf,” I said. “Raise your voice. Don’t be such a snob. So tell me, did your fiancé go to Choate or St. Paul’s? Your last husband went to President Roosevelt’s prep school—whatchumajigger.”
Lily now spoke more clearly and said, “My mother is dead.”
“Dead?” I said. “Hey, that’s terrible. But wait just one minute, didn’t you tell me in France that she was dead?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then when did she die?”
“Just two months ago. It wasn’t true then.”
“Then why did you say it? That’s a hell of a way. You can’t do that. Are you playing chicken-funeral with your own mother? You were trying to con me.”
“Oh, that was very bad of me, Gene. I didn’t mean any harm. But this time it is true.” And I saw the warm shadows of tears in her eyes. “She is gone now. I had to hire a plane to scatter her ashes over Lake George as she wanted.”
“Did you? God, I’m sorry about it,” I said.
“I fought her too much,” said Lily. “Like that time I brought you home. But she was a fighter, and I am one, too. You were right about my fiancé. He did go to Groton.”
“Ha, ha, I hit it, didn’t I?”
“He’s a nice man. He’s not what you think. He’s very decent and he supports his parents. But when I ask myself whether I could live without him, I guess the answer is yes. But I am learning to get along alone. There’s always the universe. A woman doesn’t have to marry, and there are perfectly good reasons why people should be lonely.”
You know, compassion is useless, too, sometimes I feel. It just lasts long enough to get you in dutch. My heart ached for Lily, and then she tried to con me.
“All right, kid, what are you going to do now?”
“I sold the house in Danbury. I’m living in an apartment. But there was one thing I wanted you to have, and I sent it to you.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“It’s a rug,” she said. “Hasn’t it come yet?”
“Hell, what do I want with your Christly rug! Was it from your room?”
“No.”
“You’re a liar. It’s the rug from your bedroom.”
She denied it, and when it arrived at the farm I accepted it from the delivery man; I felt I should. It was creepy-looking and faded, a Baghdad mustard color, the threads surrendering to time and sprigs of blue all over it. It was so ugly I had to laugh. This crummy rug! It tickled me. So I put it on the floor of my violin studio, which was down in the basement. I had poured the concrete there myself but not thick enough, for the damp comes through. Anyway, I thought this rug might improve the acoustics.
All right, then, I’d come into the city for my lessons with that fat Hungarian Haponyi, and I’d see Lily too. We courted for about eighteen months, and then we got married, and then the children were born. As for the violin, I was no Heifetz but I kept at it. Presently the daily voice, I want, I want, arose again. Family life with Lily was not all that might have been predicted by an optimist; but I’m sure that she got more than she had bargained for, too. One of the first decisions she made after looking over the whole place as lady of the house was to get her portrait painted and hung with the rest of the family. This portrait business was very important to her and it went on until about six months before I took off for Africa.
So let’s look at a typical morning of my married life with Lily. Not inside the house but outside, for inside it is filthy. Let’s say it’s one of those velvety days of early autumn when the sun is shining on the pines and the air has a spice of cold and stings your lungs with pleasure. I see a large pine tree on my property, and in the green darkness underneath, which somehow the pigs never got into, red tuberous begonias grow, and a broken stone inscription put in by my mother says, “Goe happy rose …” That’s all it says. There must be more fragments beneath the needles. The sun is like a great roller and flattens the grass. Beneath this grass the earth may be filled with carcasses, yet that detracts nothing from a day like this, for they have become humus and the grass is thriving. When the air moves the brilliant flowers move too in the dark green beneath the trees. They brush against my open spirit because I am in the midst of this in the red velvet dressing gown from the Rue de Rivoli bought on the day that Frances spoke the word divorce. I am there and am looking for trouble. The crimson begonias, and the dark green and the radiant green and the spice that pierces and the sweet gold and the dead transformed, the brushing of the flowers on my undersurface are just misery to me. They make me crazy with misery. To somebody these things may have been given, but that somebody is not me in the red velvet robe. So what am I doing here?
Then Lily comes up with the two kids, our twins, twenty-six months old, tender, in their short pants and neat green jerseys, the dark hair brushed down on their foreheads. And here comes Lily with that pure face of hers going to sit for the portrait. And I am standing on one foot in the red velvet robe, heavy, wearing dirty farm boots, those Wellingtons which I favor when at home because they are so easy to put on and take off.
She starts to get into the station wagon and I say, “Use the convertible. I am going to Danbury later to look for some stuff, and I need this.” My face is black and angry. My gums are aching. The joint is in disorder, but she is going and the kids will be playing indoors at the studio while she sits for the portrait. So she puts them in the back seat of the convertible and drives away.
Then I go down to the baseme
nt studio and take the fiddle and start warming up on my Sevcik exercises. Ottokar Sevcik invented a technique for the quick and accurate change of position on the violin. The student learns by dragging or sliding his fingers along the strings from first position to third and from third to fifth and from fifth to second, on and on, until the ear and fingers are trained and find the notes with precision. You don’t even start with scales, but with phrases, and go up and down the strings, crawling. It is frightful: but Haponyi says it is the only way, this fat Hungarian. He knows about fifty words of English, the main one being “dear.” He says, “Dear, take de bow like dis vun, not like dis vun, so. Und so, so, so. Not to kill vid de bow. Make nice. Do not stick. Yo, yo, yo. Seret lek! Nice.”
And after all, I am a commando, you know. And with these hands I’ve pushed around the pigs; I’ve thrown down boars and pinned them and gelded them. So now these same fingers are courting the music of the violin and gripping its neck and toiling up and down on the Sevcik. The noise is like smashing egg crates. Nevertheless, I thought, if I discipline myself eventually the voice of angels may come out. But anyway I didn’t hope to perfect myself as an artist. My main purpose was to reach my father by playing on his violin:
Down in the basement of the house, I worked very hard as I do at everything. I had felt I was pursuing my father’s spirit, whispering, “Oh, Father, Pa. Do you recognize the sounds? This is me, Gene, on your violin, trying to reach you.” For it so happens that I have never been able to convince myself the dead are utterly dead. I admire rational people and envy their clear heads, but what’s the use of kidding? I played in the basement to my father and my mother, and when I learned a few pieces I would whisper, “Ma, this is ‘Humoresque’ for you.” Or, “Pa, listen—‘Meditation’ from Thaïs.” I played with dedication, with feeling, with longing, love—played to the point of emotional collapse. Also down there in my studio I sang as I played, “Rispondi! Anima bella” (Mozart). “He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Handel). Clutching the neck of the little instrument as if there were strangulation in my heart, I got cramps in my neck and shoulders.