XVI-XX

CHAPTER XVI



And strange it is

That nature must compel us to lament

Our most persisted deeds.



--Antony and Cleopatra





We found Thea's house ready. If it was her house. Perhaps it was Smitty's. I thought I'd find out in due time. There was no rush about it.

The towers and roofs of town appeared and then were hid many times in knots of mountain and back of cliffs of thousands of feet before the descending road became a street and we arrived in the cathedral square, or zocalo. There we parked, and, the way to the villa being narrow, we had to walk. Even normally we'd have been met by a gang of kids, beggars, loafers, hotel-touts, and so forth, but the eagle on my fist brought out a mob from the shops and bars and from the awning" covered market just below the cathedral. A lot of people recognized Thea and sounded off with yells and yelps, whistles, picked-up sombreros, and in this turbulent escort that raised a dust around us we climbed a few hundred yards above the zocalo on the pointy stone terraces, to the gate of the villa. "Casa Descuitada," I read on a blue tile under the branches of pomegranate trees--Carefree House. We entered, and the cook and houseboy met us. Mother and son, they stood a good distance apart, both with bare feet on the red stone of the porch, she by the kitchen and he by the bedroom door. In her shawl she carried an infant, and at the sight of the bird, even in his hood, started to back into the kitchen. We took the bird away. The toilet became his mews; he perched on the waterbox or cistern where the sound of trickling seemed to please him. The boy, Jacinto, tagged after to see how we handled him. He was thrilled.

Sometimes I thought that if to earn money was the reason for this goofy undertaking I should devote myself to the money question and "

" 343 how to make a killing; then I'd set Caligula free or give him away. But I knew that to make money was not Thea's objective. I didn't overlook the nobility of her project, how ancient it was, the kind of ambition that was involved or the aspect of game or hazard; I even was aware of a link to earliest times in the great venture of domestication. Yes, for all my opposition and dread of the bird, wishing him a gargoyle of stone or praying he would drop dead, I saw the other side of it, and what was in it for her, that she was full of brilliant energy. But I thought, What was wrong with the enjoyment of love, and what did there have to be an eagle for? So then, if I had dough at least there couldn't be that pretext.

Then I understood, next, how to think idly of money is terribly frivolous. Being unreasonable perhaps about the capture of the lizards, Thea nevertheless had a bird and had made a start, whereas my thought of money was only a flutter of imagination. What was I doing in breeches and campaign hat down here in Central Mexico if I wanted to be serious about it? In short, I saw anew how great a subject money is in itself. Here was vast humankind that meshed or dug, or carried, picked up, held, that served, returning every day to its occupations, and being honest or kidding or weeping or hypocritic or mesmeric, and money, if not the secret, was anyhow beside the secret, as the secret's relative, or associate or representative before the peoples.

Here we arrived, and lunch was served to us--soup, chicken with black mole sauce, tomato and avocados, coffee and guava jelly. And this strange, mouth-inflaming delicate food, as I was eating, was what brought my mind to this question of the dollar.

The house was handsome and wide, deeper than appeared from outside, because from the garden you descended to the rooms. The walls were reddish and floors darker red or green tile. There were two patios, one with a fountain and barrel-shaped oxhide chairs; the other was by the kitchen, a sort of old stable yard, and here we continued Caligula's training. He flew down to us from the tiles of the shed where Jacinto slept.

From the porch where we ate we had the town and the cliffs before us. Nearly immediately below was the zocalo, the dippy bandstand and its vines, the monstrous trees around. The cathedral had two towers and a blue-varied belly of dome, finely crusted and as if baked in a kiln, overheated, and in places with the mutilated spectrum that sometimes you split out of brick. It was settled uneven on the stones of the square, and occasionally in the midst of admiration gave you a heavy, squalid, gut-sick feeling, so much it incorporated all that was in the surroundings. The bells clung like two weak old animals, green and dull and the doors opened on a big gloom in which stood dead white altars and images slashed and scratched with axes, thorns, raked with black woundssome of these flashy with female underpants on their hips, nail-cloven and hacked as they were, and bleeding as far as their clothespin white fingers. Then on a hill to one side was the cemetery, white and spiky, and on another side and higher in a star of connecting gullies was a silver mine, and there you could see where the force of great investment had dented. The mountainside was eaten for some distance by machine. I was intrigued and climbed up there one day. It certainly was odd what mechanisms you saw all over Mexico, what old styles there gnawed and crawled, pit or tunnel makers, and machine scarabaeuses, British and Belgian doojiggers, Manchester trolleys or poodle locomotives at the head of sick cars covered with blanketed men and soldiers.

Within the town still, along the road to the mine, the garbage was thrown into a little valley, hummocky with soft old decays; the vultures hung over it all day. At one of the highest points you could see, in a cliff, there was a waterfall. Sometimes it was covered in a cloud, but there usually flew the slight smoke of water, paler than the air, above the treeline. A good deal below were pines, at the widows' peaks of wrinkled rock; and then more tropical trees and flowers, and the hot stone belt of snakes and wild pigs, the deer, and the giant iguanas we had come to catch. Where they hung out the light was very hot.

In a Paris or a London where the distinction of the sun isn't so great, in the grays and veilings, it isn't credited with its full power, and many southern people have envied those places the virtues it's possible to think of having in the cool or cold. I believe Mussolini was not kidding about blasting pieces out of his Alps and Apennines to let the cold foggy currents of Germany over the peninsula and make the Perugini and the Romans into fighters. That same Mussolini who was slung up dead by the legs with shirt tails drooped off his naked belly, and the flies, on whom he had also declared war, walked on his empty face relaxed of its wide-jawed grimace, upside down. Ay! And his girl friend with poor breasts bullet-punctured also hung by the feet. But what I want of the contrast of broadcast or exposing versus discreet light is to suggest what the claims are, or the illusions, the discreeter seems to allow. Now I've mentioned that Thea carried among other pictures one of her father, taken in the south of China, in a rikshaw. She put it on the dresser, tucked in the mirror frame, and I often found myself studying him, his white shoes of far manufacture off the ground being used by the dish-faced Cantonese. In his white suit. And I thought what there m 345 was to such being picked for special distinction. Maybe I looked at him with special regard as lover or future husband of his daughter. But anyway, he was sitting gentlemanly up in the human taxi. Around him spectators from the millions gowping at him, famine-marks, lousevehicles, the supply of wars, the living fringe of a great number sunk in the ground, dead, and buzzing or jumping over Asia like diatoms of the vast bath of the ocean in the pins of the sun.

Well, in the hot light I saw the wild mountain, the semitropical band of it where the iguanas haunted in the big leaves and gorgeous flowers, the laborers and peasants, and I didn't realize right away how many visitors from the cool and cold were paying their good dough to be here.

Very near us was a luxury hotel, the Carios Quinto. Its swimming pool shone in the garden, blue and white like heavenly warmth and weather, and there were large foreign cars in the drive. Acatia was beginning to attract people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo but now wanted to be out of the way of politics. There were already some Spaniards here, from both sides of the disaster, and also some Frenchwomen, and Japanese and Russians, a family of Chinese who ran a bar and manufactured rope-soled alpargatas. The American colony was large, and so the place was boiling and booming. I knew little about that at first.

It entertained me to look into the gardens of the Carios Quinto next door, the bar on the terrace, the swimmers in the pool, the riding parties setting out, the small deer kept in a wire pen. The manager was an Italian; he wore diplomatist's pants and a claw-hammer coat that accommodated his wide prat. His hair was smooth and his face confident for others, worried toward himself. I noticed how quick his fingers were, in and out of his vest pockets where many of his functions started.

From our wall Thea introduced me to him; he was called da Fiori.

There was a private end of the garden for his own family on which our bedroom window looked down. In the morning old da Fiori, his tiny father, came out in a cap and old English type of suit, dark green, fuzzy, with a belt on the jacket and chestnut buttons. He brushed the ends of his whiskers with hairy knuckles, and when he walked, his little feet 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 the air. Caligula made a noise. I don't believe he had ever in his life been hurt and his astonishment was enormous. He tore off the lizard, and when he had already squeezed and wounded it past recovery he hopped off. I couldn't show it, but it did my heart good to see Caligula so offended.

He sorted among the feathers with his beak to find the hurt place.

Thea was furious at him, her face red. She shouted, "Get him! Go finish him!" But when he heard her voice he rose up and flew to her for his usual meat. Since he came to her she had to let him land and extended her arm. But she was very angry. "Oh, the dirty bastard! We can't let him run away from a little bit of an animal like that. What'll we do? Augie, don't you grin about it!"

"I'm not, Thea, it's the sun making me squint."

"What should we try now?"

"I'll pick up the lizard and call Caligula back. The poor thing is almost dead."

"Jacinto, kill the lagarto," Thea said.

With pleasure the boy ran from the shed on bare feet and hit the creature on the head with a stone. I laid it, dead, on my gauntlet, and Caligula didn't refuse to come but he wouldn't eat. He shook the lizard with fury and let it drop to the ground. When I offered it a second time, now a dusty dead thing, he did the same.

"Oh, that damned crow! Get him out of my sight!"

"Now, Thea, wait a minute," I said. "This has never happened to him before."

"Wait? He only came out of an egg once. How many times did he have to do that? He's supposed to have instincts. I'll wring his neck.

How is he going to fight the big ones if a little nip does this to him?"

"Why, if you're hurt, what do you expect?"

But that was my humanizing again, and she shook her head. She believed fierce nature shouldn't be like that.

I put the eagle on his waterbox, and gradually Thea let me pacify her. I said, "You've done wonders with this bird already. You can't miss. We'll make it, sure. After all, he doesn't have to be as terrible as he looks. He's still a young bird."

At last, in the afternoon, she got over her anger and proposed for the first time that we go to Hilario's bar in the wcalo for a drink. While she was unpleasantly stirred against Caligula I felt a little condemned with him.

Though Thea was specially loving when we went into the room to change for Sunday p. m. in the zocalo. She took off her clothes. The outer were rugged, the inner silky. And when she was naked, smoking a cigarette, she looked at me differently as I sat shirtless and pulled off my boots in the heated shade and the radiated color of the tiles. I went and put my head on her breast. But I knew that, both in love, we were not quite the same in our purpose. She had the idea of an action for which love makes you ready and sets you free. This happened to be connected with Caligula. He meant that to her. But as she suspected now that he preferred brought meat to prey, perhaps she thought also, about me, whether I could make the move from love to the next necessary thing.

We rose from bed and dressed. In the lace blouse she wore, how soft she looked. Her hair fell long on her back. She took my arm, not because she needed its support on the sharp cobbles, but to keep close, and in the shade of the fruit trees she looked very much as she had in St. Joe on the swing, a young girl.

Since the Fenchels had owned the Acatia house for many years Thea was acquainted in the town. But at Hilario's bar we sat at a small table; she didn't want company. Nevertheless, people came over to greet her, to ask after her sister, her aunt and uncle, and Smitty, and of course to give me the once-over. Many of these remained. Thea continued to hold my arm.

To my Chicago eyes these others mostly looked far and odd. Now and then Thea explained who or what they were, and I didn't always understand her. So then this bald old German had been a dancer, and on this side was a jeweler, and the blonde, his wife, came from Kansas City; here was a woman of fifty who was a painter, and the man with her was a sort of cowhand, or Reno-cowhand; and coming up now was a rich fairy, once a queen. Here was a woman who opened a mouth of intelligence on you; she seemed to look at me severely; I thought, at first, because I had taken Smitty's place. Her name was Nettie Kilgore and she turned out to be not bad at all, only sometimes impatient in look, and something of a lush. She didn't care a hang about Smitty.

Well, I'd known plenty of grotesque people before, but none who had made it their life's specialty. The foreign colony of this town represented Greenwich Village, or Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There was a Polish exile, there was an Austrian with a beard, there was Nettie Kilgore; there were a pair of writers from New York, one named Wiley Moulton, the other, his friend, simply called Iggy; there also was a young Mexican, Talavera, whose father owned the taxi service and rented out horses. A man who sat near Iggy turned out to be the second husband of Iggy's first wife. His name was Jepson and he was the grandson of an African explorer. Well, all this was new to me, and so it went. While Thea and I, fresh from bed, sat side by side. It was curious amusement and didn't much touch me. I was nearly as much entertained by the kinkajou Hilario had in a cage and I fed it potato chips. This large-eyed little animal.

I felt flattered when people assumed I was the eagle's master. Of course I said, "Oh, Thea is his real boss," but people seemed to feel that only a man could cope with a bird of that size. All except the handsome brown strong young chap, Talavera, who said he knew how good Thea was with animals. I didn't altogether care for his contribution to the conversation, though I have to admit he looked to be in a different class from the rest of this gang. I couldn't get over their queemess. The person who sat next to him seemed to have a kind of bony crest to the middle of his head, and the back of his hand was like the instep of another man's foot--white, thick, and dead-appearing. Then Nettie Kilgore.

Then Iggy, red-eyed. Then a man I secretly named Ethelred the Unready--like Grandma Lausch or Commissioner Einhorn, I would sometimes do that, give a name. Then Wiley Moulton, the weird-story writer. He was big-bellied and long-haired; his face was sort of subtle, with brown lids; his teeth were small and tobacco dyed; his fingers seemed all back-bent at the last joint.

There was hard work in some of these people, that they made the most partial little good climb around in tremendous mountain ranges of opposition to prove itself.

"So you're going to catch these monsters with your bird?" said Moulton.

"Yes, we are," said Thea quite calmly. It was a great thing about her that she could not be swayed to make small changes of plan or views in order to get on with people. "I don't like monkey games," she always said.

"It has been done," I observed.

And now again the public band in the zocalo, just below, began to pound and smite, so the air quivered with the ragged march. It was nearly twilight. Young people promenaded, but in rapid time, so you felt flirtation and desperate flying, both. Firecrackers jumped in the air. A blind fiddler played and howled, with dance-of-death scrapes, serenading the tourists. Then the cathedral started to ring the bells, the deepest voice of that big, crusted sadness. So with this noise the conversational people were silenced for a time; they drank their beer or knocked off their shots of tequila with tastes of salt licked from the thumb in the stylish Mexican way and bites of lime.

Thea wanted Moulton's help with the articles; when you could hear your own voice again she asked him about that.

"I'm not in that line now," he said. "I make more by sticking to Nicolaides." Nicolaides was the editor of the pulp magazine Moulton contributed to. "I had a bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I'd rather write for Nicolaides. Besides it takes all the strength I've got to turn out the installments."

I felt that Moulton had in store all kinds of words and in fact would say anything. Anything! He only waited for the conversation to give him the chance.

"But you did write magazine articles at one time," said Thea, "and you can show us how to do it."

"I take it Mr. March is not a writer."

* "No." I answered for myself.

What he was fishing for was my calling. I suppose he knew that I didn't have one I could announce even to these worldly people--for I imagined they were of the great world, and they just about were. Moulton smiled at me, and not without kindness. With the deep creases of his eyes, he took on a powerful resemblance to a fat lady of the old neighborhood.

"Well, in a pinch maybe Iggy can help if I can't."

Moulton and Iggy were friends, but this recommendation everybody knew was a joke, because Iggy specialized in blood-curdlers for Doc Savage and Jungle Thrillers. He couldn't write anything else.

I liked this Iggy Blaikie. His real handle was Gurevitch, but that didn't have the dash that went with the proud Anglo-Saxon names of his heroes. So as Gurevitch was abandoned and Blaikie had never been real in the first place he became entirely Iggy. He had a real poolroom look. The boy with the bucket in Nagel's corner, a little weavy and punchy himself. He wore an apache jersey and a pair of the rope-soled sandals from the Chinese shop; he was lean but his face was flushed and gross, with bloodshot green eyes and mouth of froggy width, the skin of his throat creased, dirty, half shaved; his voice was choky and his conversation only part coherent. Except by someone experienced in sizing up such people, who would have known he was innocent, he might have been taken for a dope peddler, a junk-pusher, or minor hoodlum. His was a case of a strongly misleading appearance.

As to young Talavera, I didn't know just what to make of him. It was obvious that he looked me over measuringly, and he made me conscious, from the outside, of how I seemed, with tanned face and freestyle hair. I felt foolish somewhat, but I had to grant after all that I had studied him too. I wasn't experienced enough to be suspicious of the young man and native of the place who attaches himself to the foreign visitors, especially to women. Such are the broke characters to whom ancient names belong, in Florence in front of Gilli's Cafe, or the young men in tight pants who wait around at the top of the funicular in Capri for Dutch or Danish girls to pick up. And if I had been that experienced I might not have been quite right about Talavera. He was a mixed type. Very handsome, he looked like Ramon Navarro of the movies, both soft and haughty, and was said to be a mining engineer by profession; that was never proved but he had no need of work, his father was rich, and Talavera was a sportsman.

I said to Thea, "I don't think that young fellow likes me much."

"Well, what about it?" she answered carelessly. "We're only renting horses from his father."

For Caligula we first tried a burro, but though he stood hooded on the saddle and was well secured, the burro was bowed with terror and its head bristled. We then tried horses, and they were shy of him. I couldn't keep my seat when Thea handed Caligula up to me. And she herself wasn't more successful. Finally Talavera Senior brought out an old horse who had been through the Zapatista rebellion and wounded in guerrilla battles. To be ridden by a picador was all this gray animal appeared fit for, and be gored in the ring. But he was first-rate with the eagle. I would have said myself there was more sorrow than anything else in his accepting the bird on his back. Old Bizcocho, that was what this horse was called; it was hard to make him go at more than a fast amble, though he still had a few bursts of speed in him.

We took him out of town to a flat place, first, to practice. Out beyond the cemetery and its bones that lay accidental on the ground, the reek of flowers along the white tomb walls: first I on the gray animal who clopped slow, the eagle braced on my arm; then Thea on another horse; and Jacinto in his white sleeping-suit garb and dark feet carried just above the ground riding a donkey. We would pass a funeral, often of a child, and the father himself with the casket on his head would step out of the road--so would the whole cortege, musicians included--and with his eyes, like the milk of blackness, a few Mongolian mustache hairs fine and long on the savage bulges of his mouth, even afflicted, and while inimical, would follow the eagle as he passed. There would be the same whisper, "Mira, mira, mira--el dguila, el dguila!" So we'd pass by the white stones and walls that scaled in the heat, the iron prickles, the bones of death, the sleepers' clothes flappy and humiliated at the back; and also the little fever-slain child that rode inside.

We got up to the plateau, from which the town lay half covered in a picturesque hole, and there practiced with Caligula to get him used to a take-off while in motion. When he learned that, Thea's confidence in him entirely came back. In fact we did it well. He sat on my arm, I stirred old Bizcocho to move faster, and the eagle took hold strongly with his feet and wrung me through the demon's glove. I struck the hood and then slipped the swivel--I had to drop the reins to do this and grip with my knees--and Caligula put forward his breast with a clap of the huge wings and started to take the air.

In a few days Bizcocho was ready, and in tremendous excitement, one morning, we went out for the giant lizards. Jacinto came with us' to flush them out of the rocks, and we climbed down the mountainside I to their tropical place. There the heat was thick; it collected stagnant in the rocks, which were soft and eaten by rain acids into grottos and Cambodian shapes. The lizards were really huge, with great frills or sails--those ancient membranes. The odor here was snaky, and we seemed in the age of snakes among the hot poisons of green and the livid gardenias. We waited, and the cautious kid went to poke under leaves with a long pole, for the iguanas were savage. Then on a ledge above us I saw one who looked on, but as I pointed him out we saw the Elizabethan top of him scoot away. These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen, and they would jump anywhere and from any height, with a pure writhe of their sides, like fish. They had great muscles, like fish, and their flying was monstrously beautiful. I was astonished that they didn't dash themselves into pellets, like slugs of m .353 quicksilver, but when they smashed down they continued without any pause to run. They were faster than the wild pigs.

I was anxious for Thea. I knew what a state she was in. The place was steep, there was no room to maneuver, and she wheeled and plunged her horse. I had the burden of the eagle, and the old Zapatista gray couldn't turn fast though he was game enough and understood taking chances. So I heard more than I saw most of the time.

"Thea," I shouted, "for Chrissake, don't do that!"

But she was crying something to Jacinto and at the same time waved to me to get into position. She wanted to get the lizards driven down a slope of stones where they had no cover. Sometimes silver, sometimes dusty, gray, statue-green they looked as they flew. Finally she signaled me to strike the eagle's hood and slip his leash. I took a lurch, Bizcocho started downslope on the loose rocks, Caligula gripped me; I slipped the drawstring and took off the hood, drew the swivel, and he went up, forward in the deep air of the mountainside, once again up toward the high vibrations of blue. Coming and going in stages, he went to a great height to wait on.

Thea sprang to the ground to seize the pole from the boy. He was just sweeping it through the thick growth and tore off magnificent flowers as red as meat that tumbled down in the wave of ferns, and he cried, "Ya viene!" An iguana fled down the rock. s. Caligula saw him and made his pitch. Feathered and armored he looked in his black colors, and such menace falling swift from heaven. Down the iguana made his pure leap too, crashed, ran, doubled at Caligula's stoop, slithered from the snatch of the talons, rolled, fought over his belly from the shadow that haunted him so fast, flew again. I saw the two sharp fierce faces, and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried, and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks.

Thea yelled, "After him! Get him! There he goes!" But the eagle didn't pursue down the slope; he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn't be heard any more he folded them.

He didn't fly to me.

Thea shrieked at him, "You stinking coward! You crow!" She picked up a stone and flung it at him. Her aim was wide; Caligula only raised his head when it struck above him.

"Stop that, Thea! For the love of God, stop! He'll tear out your eyes!"

"Let him try to come at me, I'll kill him with my hands. Let him just come near!" She left her mind with fury, and there was no sense in her eyes. I felt my arms weak, seeing her like this. I tried to keep her from throwing another stone, and when I couldn't I ran to unstrap the shotgun for use, and also to keep it from her. Again she missed, but this time came close, and Caligula took off. As he rose I thought. Goodby bird! There he goes to Canada or to Brazil. She pulled at the breast of my shirt and with great pain and tears she cried, "We wasted our time with him, Augie. Oh, Augie. He's no good. He's chicken!"

"Maybe the thing hurt him."

"No, he was the same with the little one. He's scared."

"Well, he's gone. He beat it."

"Where?" She tried to look, but I reckon couldn't see well for the tears. And I wasn't any longer sure, either, wliich of various spots in the sky he was.

"I hope he flies to hell!" she said with a shiver of anger. Her face burned. At his fraud, that he should look such a cruel machine, so piercing, such a chief, and have another spirit under it all. "Is he hurt if he flies like that?"

"But you threw rocks at him," I said. And once again I felt implicated, because he had been tamed on my arm.

Well, it was hard to take this from wild nature, that there should be humanity mixed with it; such as there was in the beasts that embraced Odysseus and his men and wept on them in Circe's yard.

At home, when we got there sadly, we sent the- horses back to Talavera's with Jacinto. Thea wouldn't have had the spirit to walk back from the stables, and I didn't want to leave her now. Entering the patio, we heard cries from the cook, who ran into the kitchen with her baby because Caligula was going back and forth on the shed roof.

I said to Thea, "Here's the eagle, he's back. What do you want to do about him?"

She said, "I don't care. I don't want to do anything. He just came back for his meat, because he's too much of a coward to hunt for it."

"I disagree. He's back because he doesn't feel in the wrong. He simply isn't used to animals that fight when he grabs them."

"For all I care you can feed him to the cats."

I took some meat from a basket by the stove and went out to him; he came to my fist, and I hooded him and passed the swivel, then put him on the waterbox, his dark cool place.

About a week passed and I was his sole custodian. Thea interested herself in other things. She set up a darkroom and started to develop the films she had taken en route. The eagle was left to my care; I exercised and handled him alone in the patio, like one man who rows a large lifeboat by himself. And at this time also I had an uneasy gut, an attack of dysentery, and thus saw him more often than I ordinarily would have cared to. The doctor prescribed Carbosome and told me to stay off tequila and town water. I had perhaps been taking a little too much of that smoky tequila, which made you unreliable if you weren't used to it.

But the slump from nobility of pursuit harmed everybody. The house was dull while Thea was in her laboratory. Dull isn't perhaps the word when you consider what disappointment and wrath were kept down.

And also I couldn't stay in bed while Caligula was being neglected, if only for the reason that he'd become dangerous through hunger, let alone the humane side of it.

Beneath some paper stored for kindling beside the fireplace I found a big volume, without covers and in fine type. It contained Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels.

I don't recall what ingenious person made this collection, but it certainly was a whopper. Two days it rained, and I was sunk in it while wet wood tried to burn and I tossed in whole bundles of resinous ocote to try to make a blaze. It was too wet to fly Caligula. I stood upon the toilet seat and fed him through the hood, pushed the meat on him in order to get back as quickly as possible to the book. Utterly fascinated I was, and forgot how I sat on my bones, getting up lamed, dazed by all that boldness of assumption and reckoning. I wanted to talk to Thea about this, but she was too preoccupied with other things.

I said, "Whose is this book?"

"Just a book. Somebody's."

"Well, this is some splendid stuff."

She was glad I had found something to interest myself in but didn't care about the topic. She laid her hand to one side of my face and kissed me on the other; however, that was only to send me on my way.' I took a stretch in the rainy garden. From the wall I saw old da Fiori in the arbor as he picked his nose.

Then I went to get my rubber poncho, for I had a great craving for company. Thea had asked me to get some photographic paper, which gave me an errand. As I marched down the wide, terraced stony stages in the slow rain there was a shaggy long-legged pig who lay in the red mud of the ditch, and a chicken stood on him and pecked the lice. And the gramophone was playing at Hilario's through a loudspeaker, Tres cosas hay en la vida Salud dinero y amor 356 " and next something winding and slow by Claudia Muzio or maybe Amelita Galli-Curci from Jewels of the Madonna. Eleanor Klein once had had that record. It made me feel sad, though not in a low state.

In my foul-weather gear I passed before the cathedral where the beggars soaked in their wool colors and showed their lopped puckered limb ends. I left some coins behind; after all, the dough originally was Smitty's; I thought some of it should pass on.

From Hilario's second-floor porch of flowers somebody called me and banged on the tin shield of Carta Blanca beer to get my attention.

It was Wiley Moulton, who said, "Come on up." I was glad to.

Besides Iggy there were two other people at the table who at first seemed man and wife to me. He was pushing fifty but behaved younger, a dry, thin, tall person. But I looked first at the girl, introduced to me merely as Stella. I was happy to see her. She ranked everything in the house, man, beast, and plant, as far as beauty went. Her features rose very slightly from the surface of her face, full of sense; her eyes were, I guess I'd say, amorous. It was natural that I should be happy to see her; I think, the way revolutionists feel the hands of passersby to know whether they're common people or aristocrats, when you're in love you also make identifications like that. Stella was this man Oliver's girl.

And although when he looked at me he appeared to be at ease he was suspicious, and that's the irrationality of people, for he had arranged to make himself envied instead.

Moulton soon made it clear that I wasn't unattached. "Hah, Bolingbroke," he said.

"Who's that, me?"

"Of course you. You can't look like a personage and not expect to receive an illustrious name. Something clicked when I saw you, and I | said there's a man who ought to be Bolingbroke if he isn't already. You don't mind, do you?"

"Could anyone mind being Bolingbroke?"

Each, according to his tendency, had a look of pleasantry, with malice or with sympathy.

"This is Mr. March. Bolingbroke, what's your first name?"

"Augie."

"How is Thea?"

"Fine."

"We haven't seen you two much. Must be that eagle that keeps you busy."

"He does, we are busy."

"I admired you like anything when you arrived in the station wagon and I saw you take out that bird. I was sitting up here and watching the whole thing. But I understand he's flunked."

"Who said so?"

"Oh, the word went around that he was a flop."

That little bastard Jacinto!

"Is it true, Bolingbroke--is that mighty bird funky? Is he yellow?"

"Why," I said, "that's a lot of nonsense! How's one eagle different from another? They're all more or less the same. An eagle is an eagle, a wolf a wolf, a bat a bat."

"You're right, Boling. I'd say in our species, even, we're pretty much alike. Just the same, the differences are interesting. So what about your eagle?"

"He's not ripe yet for this kind of hunting. But he will be soon. Thea's a great trainer."

"I wouldn't deny it. But if he's timid he must have been a lot easier to train than a real triple-threat, piss-and-vinegar eagle like the one that actually caught those lizards a while back."

"Caligula is a bald American, the strongest and most savage kind."

I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and a! l other greater effort falls on its face. On behalf of the writers I had been reading I felt a grievance too.

"Oliver is editor of a magazine," said Iggy. "Maybe he wants the story on your eagle."

"Which magazine is that?"

"Wilmot's Weekly."

"Yes, we drove down for a holiday," said this Oliver.

He looked rather silly, frail in the head, with thready lips, small mustache, and knobby cheekbones. Obviously he was a lush, and a very vain man. It was only recent, his coming up in the world. Moulton and Iggy had known him back in New York, and one of the first things Moulton told me about him was that only a couple of years before if you let this Oliver into your house you ran the risk that he would steal some of your clothes and hock them for whisky; and when last heard from he was in the booby-hatch for the insulin cure, with the screaming meemies. Yet here he was, dressed to kill, with a new convertible and this beauty who was supposed to be an actress. And he was really the editor of Wilmot's Weekly. Of which he now said, "We're interested mainly in political articles."

"Well, Christ, Johnny, don't try to tell me it's all so serious in your mag--all think-pieces. It never used to be."

"Under the new owners everything is different. You know," he said, and changed the subject in a way that soon became predictable. "I wrote my autobiography last week. Just before we started out. It took a week. Childhood one day, boyhood next, and the rest in five days flat. Ten thousand words a day. It's coming out next month." When he talked about himself it was with such satisfaction that for the moment he looked healthy and well, glossy. Then he had a relapse when the topic got away from him, and seemed very meager.

Stella said, "We're staying at the Carlos Quinto. Come and have a drink with us."

"Yes, why don't we," said Oliver. "We ought to take advantage of it; it's costing plenty. We can sit in the garden at least."

I went away, for I was really worked up about the eagle after Moulton's ribbing. I'd have thought, myself, that Caligula's flop would give me a sort of pleasure, but, curiously, that wasn't how it worked out. Before, he had interfered with love; but now that he had flopped he did even more harm. Suddenly Thea and I appeared to have lost the place, and I was bewildered. What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of Utopias at a peculiar time. In those Utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?

I went home determined that we would not back down but fly Caligula and catch those giant iguanas, just like that other American couple.

First I wanted to collar Jacinto for blabbing, but I couldn't find him.

Nor was Thea in the house. The cook told me, "Est·n cazando."

I said, "QuÈ?"

"Culebras," said she, in that voice that was like a haywisp of antiquity, it was always so thin and distant.

I looked the word up in the dictionary. They had gone to hunt snakes.

Caligula was in his closet.

At night they returned. A band of town kids tagged after them, some of Jacinto's gang, and yelled to one another by the fiery gate light of Casa Descuitada. In a box Jacinto carried two snakes.

"Where have you been, Thea?"

"We caught these pit vipers--fine ones."

"Who? All these kids weren't with you, were they?"

"Oh no. We picked them up on the way back when Jacinto told them what we had."

"Thea, you're marvelous to go out and catch them. It's great! But why didn't you wait for me? They're dangerous, aren't they, these things?"

"I didn't know when you were coming back. A charcoal burner showed up and told me he had seen vipers, so I went right out after them."

She put them in one of the cases we had made ready for the iguanas, and that was the start of her collection. In time the porch became a snake gallery, so that the cook wanted to quit, fearing for her kid.

The moment was right to mention the eagle, when Thea was freshened by her success. She listened and was reasonably ready to be swayed, agreeing that Caligula should have another try. I never thought I'd be pleading for him with her. Jacinto went to Talavera's for tile horses next morning. At the gate of the villa I got the traps ready, the cages and the pole, and when Jacinto returned we were there with Caligula, who, as usual, loqked great, dangerous. I frowned at Thea's occasional skeptical glance toward him. We set out. Now and then I talked to him and stroked him with a feather. I said, "Old man, this time you'd better do your stuff."

We came to the same place, the iguanas' haunt, and I took a higher position than the last time, to give Caligula a better view of that stony slope. We stood then. His grip was very sharp; I tried to transfer some of his weight to the thigh, not hold him continually on my raised arm.

Bizcocho twitched off the ferocious flies of this place who pinned themselves sparkling on his gray ribs.

Thea rode below, and I saw her through a floor of ferns. I caught glimpses also of Jacinto climbing on the turrety white rocks and began to hear some of the giants scuttle and crash when they leaped and fled, and see the voluptuary flowers tremble heavily.

Suddenly I got the idea of what it was to hunt, not with a weapon but with a creature, a living creature you had known how to teach because you'd inferred that all intelligences from the weakest blink to the first-magnitude stars were essentially the same. I touched him and stroked him. As if to check up on me Bizcocho turned his head. And just then Thea whipped the bandanna from her hair, the prearranged signal. I found the cord of the hood and gave the galloping fall on the saddle, feeling called upon not to spare myself. Bizcocho started off very fast. I must have picked too abrupt a downcourse, for the old horse went faster than he ever had. I gripped with my thighs and I pulled the hood and swivel. I was shouting, "Go to it!" when I too suddenly began to go, over the head of thu horse as he struck with his hoofs for balance on the sliding stone. He was falling and so was I. I felt the push of Caligula's spring as he left my arm, and then I saw the color of my own blood on the slope of stones. I struck and slid. I heard Bizcocho's crazy neigh and Jacinto's cry.

"Roll, go on rolling!" shouted Thea. "Augie, darling, roll! He's kicking!

He's hurt!"

But one of Bizcocho's hoofs caught me square in the head, and I was out.







CHAPTER XVII



It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there's a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes.

And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.

Well, that poor Bizcocho, he cracked my skull, but he had broken a leg and Thea shot him. Unconscious, I didn't hear the explosion. She and Jacinto dragged me up on her horse. The boy mounted with me and held me up like a sack of meal. The blood was spilling from my head, and I had lost some teeth too, from the lower jaw. So, sagging in Jacinto's arms with the bandanna Thea had used for signaling so soaked it couldn't absorb more blood, I was carried to the doctor's house. When we were nearly there I gave myself a heave and said, "Where's the eagle?"

A hunting accident would never make Thea shed tears, even one as bad as this. She didn't cry at all. As I was deafened from faintness or from blood or hair or soil in my ears, I didn't hear but rather saw how she cursed Caligula. I felt a wave or'divot of my scalp curl or wrinkle on my head. I glimpsed how her hand, which held my leg tight, was streaked with red. Her pallor was very hot. With that depth and hollow narrowness of sight that you have at such moments her face came before me with spots of light on it from the pattern of brass eyelets on her hat, a spatter of heat across the bridge of her nose and on her lips.

My hearing cleared; I heard the kids cry, "Es el amo del dguila!" El dguila! Who was doing loops somewhere in the heavens with great pinions, with Turkish feather pants and rending beak. The whole height of space appeared very great to me. I felt I crept along at the bottom of it. Thea said, "You've lost a tooth." I nodded. I knew where the gap was. But sooner or later you're bound to lose some teeth.

From the doctor's yard two women came for me with furled stretcher, and they laid me on it. I kept fading in and out, extremely weak. But as we went through the patio I was conscious and admired the day, which was notably beautiful. However, I thought next that it was because of me that Bizcocho was dead, that he had survived wild Zapatista night of guerrilla shooting and slithering and probably been present when men were crucified or their bellies filled with ants, that he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him.

The doctor had a flower in his buttonhole when he came forward, and he was smiling. But basically he was gloomy. His room stunk of drugs and ether. I got a dose of ether that made me reek for days after.

I kept puking. I was covered with bandages; my face was stiff with the crusts of scratches. I could eat only gruel and turkey soup, and I couldn't stand myself. Inside the turban of bandages I heard a hissing as if I had a faucet or jet there. From the pain and this hiss or trickle I suspected that gloomy smiler of doing a bad job and I worried about my skull because of the careless Mexican approach to slaughter, sickness, and burial; but the doctor turned out later to have done a good job. But then I suffered, I was low, eyes deep circled, cheeks drawn in, gap-toothed. In the bandages I seemed to myself to resemble my mother and at times my brother Georgie.

And even after the scratches healed and the headaches dimmed down I was gnawed and didn't know from what cause. Thea also became very restless. Caligula's washout and my being such a chump as to spur poor Bizcocho from the top of a bluff terribly disappointed her. With her eagerness and boldness, that she should be held back g by my incompetence after having undertaken this, planned it out, I mastered the animal, was very hard to take. Thea sent Caligula away to her father's friend in Indiana, for his Trianon zoo. I thought how the old desert rat in Texarkana would enjoy hearing about this. I hobbled out to see the eagle, caged and crated, loaded on the wagon. The white patch of maturity was beginning to show on his head; the eye wasn't a bit less imperial and his beak with its naked purposes of breathing and tearing just as awesome as before.

I said, "Good-by, Calig."

"Good-by and good riddance, you phony," said Thea. We were near tears, both of us, from the crackup of hopes and ridiculing of expectations. The gauntlets and hood lay for a long time in a corner and took on oblivion.

As Thea sat with me and minded and nursed me for a feiv weeks it became more and more clear that if she didn't show any unrest there were other expressions that didn't appear on her face either.

When I started to recover I didn't want her to hang around for my sake and company, if she was going to look like this. We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn't want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn't want it to be afte; snakes that she went. But somebody had tipped her off to some green and red vipers, and what didn't show in her looks, patient toward me as I lay deaf and gaunt in my turban, in the sequel of the great flopwhat didn't show was how she sat and dreamed of catching these snakes.

I recognized that she was bored and needed action.

At first she went after wild pigs and such creatures, to l: eep me satisfied, but later she brought home snakes from the mountains in a burlap sack. Because of the good it did her I didn't squawk about it.

I could measure her improvement daily with the eye. Only I didn't want her to go hunting alone, and I urged her to get some of her friends to accompany her, not just Jacinto. There was a huntiig set in town, and sometimes the doctor went out with her, sometimes young Talavera.

So I was alone and went around the villa in robe and bondages, into the garden, along the porch with the snakes who writhed in the straw and raced their tongues I had a cold eye for them. I felt it was less from horror than from antagonism. After all, I had timed an eagle and got somewhere with wildlife, so I could claim s certain amount of courage. I didn't have to be clothed in intrepidity all the time or love all creatures. There was a kind of snake smell, like the smell of spoiled mango or rotten hay, the same as where we hai hunted the giant iguana.

When I wasn't too restless I sat in one of the bullhide chairs and read the Utopia book. I still had the dysentery bug and in the morning often felt that heavy drape of the guts that made me run to fhe biffy, Caligula's old roost. There I kept the door open. It gave m; a view of the entire town, which now, late fall, after the deepest teats had passed off, was very beautiful. There weren't real seasons liere, but the shadows of harsher climates varied the months, from the north or from the south. Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. This blus beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it. Otherwise I schlepped around useless and melancholy, feeling like a slob. As my cheeks had fallen, their bones became large and my eyes appeared a little sleepy, from the uneasiness they'd have shown had they opened wider. I grew a kind of Indian mustache of fair hair by the sides of my mouth too.

Thea drank her coffee, told me to be well, put on her sombrero of brass eyelets, and went out to the horses. I would come and watch her mount. With just the slight heaviness of confident body she sat in the saddle. She no longer asked me whether I wanted her to stay with me, only recommended that I take a walk in the afternoon. I said I'd see ' about it., v.'

Moulton and Iggy came to visit me, and Moulton said, "Boling, you look like hell," so I felt even more sad over myself and was in the dumps, with omens that moved around in my heart.

Stella too, Oliver's girl friend, regretted that I didn't look better when I talked to her from the garden wall. I observed there was a shadow over her also. These days I was drinking up a fair amount of tequila limonada, and I invited her to join me. She refused. Regretfully she said, "I wish I could. One of these days maybe I will. I'd like to talk to you. But you know we're supposed to move out of the Carios Quinto." I didn't know, and before I could find out why, thin Oliver:; ' came lifting his feet over the flowers, his horsy ankles in gartered;;' I silk socks, his little red mouth sullen. He took her away from the wall, not even talking to me. ^: |'

What was wrong with him?

Moulton said he was jealous.

"And she says they're moving out."

"Yes, Oliver rented that Jap's villa. The Jap has to go back to Nagasaki. Oliver says the biddies at the Carios are giving Stella the treatment. Because they know they aren't married. If I had a girl like that, a lot I'd care what some old bags were saying!"

"But why is he settling down here? Doesn't he have that magazine y to take care of in New York?" 'S "He runs it from Mexico," said Iggy.

Moulton said, "Bushwah! He's here because he's in dutch." i I "You think he embezzled money?" said Iggy, astonished, j Moulton looked as though he knew much more than he judged fit 'I to tell. Satchel ass. His portly hard middle hung over with a shirt il- | lustrated with pineapples. He even had a faint shame of the apparition he made in the sunlight. His lids were as dark in stain as his smoker's fingers, and he had the blinking habit.

"Jepson says he heard he wants to throw a big party on account of Stella in the villa, to show those old bitches at the Carlos," said ^gy"He's going to show everyone, and knock people down with his success. Whoever thought he was nothing but an international bum, and that's everybody in the world who ever laid eyes on him, now's going to be shown. Boy! People are right where he left them, and he's going to come back and wow them. He has been around the world too, but he didn't know it because he was drunk." As he said this, Oliver appeared to my thought in a shack of Outer Mongolia, where soldiers in quilted coats saw him lying in his vomit in a stupor. Moulton liked to show that ill, miserable things and rubbish supplied the unity of the world. Only amusement supposedly made this tolerable, and so he specialized in amusement. All these people, the whole colony, did that.

Well, they visited me at the villa. Then after half an hour Mouiton ran out of talk. They had stamped out a dozen butts, and Moulton began to look terribly bored. He had exhausted this particular corner where we sat and so looked sick that he had to stay.

"Bolingbroke," he said, "you don't have to stick around the house because you wear that turban. Come down to the zocalo. We'll meet folks there or play on the fribble machine. Come along, Boling. To horse."

"Yes, come on, Boling."

"Not you, Iggy. Go home. Eunice raises hell with me because I keep you away from work."

"But I thought you were divorced, Iggy?" I said.

"He is, but his wife keeps him on a chain. She makes him stay with the kid while she and the new husband go out."

Down at Hilario's we sat amid the flowers of the porch, over the square. They were the simpler flowers of cooler weather. Except the red poinsettia, star of Christmas, with velvet thrust-out peaks, the leader in splendor. It said a lot to me th^t these flowers should have no power over their place of appearance, nor over the time, and yet be such a success of beauty and plaster the insignificant wall. I saw also the little kinkajou who roved over his square of cage in every dimension, upside down, backwards. In the depth of accident, you be supple--never sleepy but at sleeping time.

And Moulton sat and continued his satire on Iggy. Eunice took the checks from New York and kept Iggy on a budget. But Iggy didn't know how to handle dough. He'd only go to the foco rojo with it, and the girls would take it away. Iggy with his bloodshot green eyes and froggy kindly mouth felt praised, sort of, pictured among the whores of the foco rojo.

"Eunice needs the money for the kid. Or I'd lose it to you in poker.

That's what gets Wiley, he can't win real jack off me."

"Hell, what would I care if I didn't see Jepson lush in here with your money, the money he gets out of Eunice?"

"Why, you're nuts! He's got his own. His grandfather had an expedition to Africa. No bunk."

To be near his daughter, an overpetted dark little kid, Iggy lived in the same villa as his ex-wife. It was mostly in order to protect her and the kid from Jepson. I think Iggy probably still loved Eunice.

I went around with him and with Moulton now. As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn't strong enough to go with Thea but wasn't too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony. I couldn't deny their appeal. I learned their language fast. But also fatigue of them came fast.

And the strange thing was, you know, how you woke early in the morning and saw the air, a light gold, thin but strong before daily influences took it away from you. But you felt no reason why, as far as the air itself was concerned, these influences had to be such as they were, low, anxious, or laughable.

Under the pomegranate tree, on the wood bench, Iggy asked me to help him with his difficulties. His story was hung up and he had to have a plot angle. There is a busted ensign on the beach who be' comes a rummy. A half-breed proposes to him to run coolies illegally ainto Hawaii. But among the plantation hands he discovers there are Sspies, so the old U. S. officer in him is stirred, and he's going to surrender the whole swatch of them to the authorities. But he has to fight it out with the lascar who now suspects him. Iggy worried out his story, and I went on bare feet for the tequila bottle.

Then Moulton came and we left. The cook had fixed lunch, but I didn't like to eat alone. I bought tacos in the market, which made my gut worse, or I got a sandwich at the Chinaman's.

So things shouldn't cram on his mind but be orderly. Bacon had music played in the next room when he thought out the New Atlantis. But down in the zdcalo all day the machines played "Salud Dinero" or "Jalisco," and there was furious noise, the rapid dual hammer of the mariachis and the yockering of the lame-tongue blind fiddler and crazy scrapes, plus the bang of bus motors and bells, and this mingling was the bed of my disharmonies. So mostly I felt confusion, and dangers that were as terrible as the sky and mountain sights were gorgeous in their painting. The town whirled and howled as it hit the stride of its season.

While Iggy doped out how the American and the half-breed would fight it out over the signals to warn the coast guard we were on the way to Moulton's hotel. He coaxed me to stay while he ground out his installments of men from Mars. He hated his work; the solitude of it above all. I'd sit on the roof outside his room, droop-shouldered hands hung large from my knees, and look toward the knotted mountains and wonder in my sun-dimmed mind where Thea might be.

Coming from the cigarette-gray room to think, Moulton paced in shorts that showed his concave knees and thick huge legs; he narrowed the eyes of his great face and looked at the town as though it were all a racket. He poured a drink, he was a chain-smoker; and in the business of mixing, lighting, dragging, flipping, blowing smoke through his satirical nose, there seemed to be contained about all he thought really worth effort. He was mighty bored. And he understood how to make me go through the long characteristic moment of his mood--this ash, ice, butts, lemon peel and sticky glass, panting space of empty time. He saw to it his lot was shared, like everybody else, and did something with you to compel you to feel what he felt. Moulton could even put it in words himself. He said, "Boredom is strength, Bolingbroke.

The bored man gets his way sooner than the next guy. When you're bored you're respected." With small nose, gross thighs, and those back-bent smoke-dyed fingers, he obliged me with this explanation, and he thought to have more effect on me than he really ever could have. When I didn't argue he v/as satisfied that he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake. A conversation was something he could run well, so he liked the reality of his life to be that of conversations. I was on to this.

"Ah well, let's have a break and play blackjack." He carried a deck of cards in his shirt pocket. So he blew the cigarette dust from the table and cut for the deal, and when he saw my glances still going out to the mountains he said, to distract me, not roughly, "Yeah, she's up there. Come on, chum, deal me. Okay. Take yourself. Want a side bet? I bet I get the deal from you in ten minutes."

Moulton was a big boy for a game of cards, poker most of all.

We played at Hilario's at first, and when Hilario kicked about these long sessions that lasted far into the night we moved over to the filthy BP-"

Chinese restaurant. Very soon I began to put all my time into gambling.

It seems the ancient Huron tribe thought gambling was a remedy for some illnesses. Maybe I had one of those illnesses. Moulton must have too. He had to be betting continually. I matched pesos with him, cut for high card, played fribble--which was what he called pinball-- and even put-and-take, with a little top. I was lucky and also skillful at poker, which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom.

Moulton complained, "Brother, you must have studied with the Capablanca of poker. I can't tell when you're bluffing because you always look so innocent. Nobody can really be as innocent as all that." This was true, though I would have said I actually did intend to be as good as possible. That's how much I myself knew. But Jesus, Lord! Dissembling!

Why, the master-dissemblers there are around! And if nature made us live and do as worms and beetles do, to escape the ichneumon fly and swindle other enemies by mimicry, and so forth--well, all right!! But that's not our problem.

With Thea too I behaved as though nothing was wrong, and yet I knew we were slipping. If I didn't show what despair this caused it was a lead-pipe cinch to bluff Moulton out with only a jack.

Why these snakes? Why did she have to hunt snakes? She came back with heaving sackfuls, which made my intestines go wrong with reaction; and then she gave them such loving treatment that I could see nothing in it but eccentricity. You had to be careful not to provoke them into striking the glass, because it gave them mouth sores hard to cure. And in addition they had parasites that got between the scales,. and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis. Toughest of all was the casting of the skins, which was like labor when they couldn't writhe out of the epidermis and even their eyes were clouded with a dirty milk. Thea sometimes took forceps to help them or covered them with damp rags to soften the skin, or she put the more restless ones in water and in the water set a block of wood afloat so the beast might rest its little head when fatigued with swimming. But then they would gleam out, one day, and their freshness and jewelry would give even me pleasure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the cast skin from which they were regenerated in green or dots of red like pomegranate seeds or varnished gold crust.

Meanwhile Thea and I were not satisfied with each other. I was resentful of the snakes and that she tended them. I felt myself between two peculiarities, hers and the peculiarity of the town in full .369 stride of its season. But I didn't tell her. When she asked me how about coming out with her to hunt I said I wasn't well enough yet. So she looked at me, and the thought was very prominent that after all I was lushing and playing cards, so if I stood before her skinny, ill, and with secret thoughts smoldering, what remedy could we ever agree on?

"I don't like that gang you're with," she said.

"They're harmless," I casually answered, but it was not a harmless kind of answer.

"Why don't you come out with me tomorrow? Talavera has a safe horse for you. There are some places I want to show you, wonderful places."

"Well, that'll be swell," I said. "When I feel more ready."

I had tried to put Caligula over and that was enough of a trial; I had stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. I'd be damned if I could get myself into Thea's excitement about catching snakes. It was too extreme a way of making out, with that vigor that couldn't be satisfied in ordinary pursuits. If she had to go and snatch these dangerous animals by the throat with a noose, and keep them and milk their venom from them, okay. But I knew at last that definitely there was one thing that was not for me.

She was gone for two days in the mountains. When she returned I heard of it but didn't go up to the house; I was in a game at Louie Fu's and couldn't leave. Next morning I saw her in the garden, in riding breeches and the heavy boots she wore for snaking, thick and sturdy so that fangs couldn't pierce. Her white skin showed she was unwell, sullen; she hadn't rested and she craved and smarted, she wanted to punish me. Under the eyes there was a thickening of trouble.

From her head the black hair gave back the heat of the sun, and along those particular hairs of irregular departure from her forehead there burned the red thread that was part of the secret of the black.

She said fiercely, "Where were you!"

"I got in very late."

She was hot, shaky, and hasty, and heavy clear tears gave her eyes that crazy largeness of grievance that sometimes they would get. I thought she would sob, but she only shook.

"I kind of expected you, the night before last," I said, and she didn't answer me. We were both sore but not prepared really to fight. What she shook with was breaking and not increasing anger.

"What do you see in those people down there?" she demanded.

"I think they must make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula.

They make fun of me."

"You think I'd let them do that?"

"I know them better than you do. That Moulton stinks."

She lit into Wiley Moulton and other residents. I listened, and in this way we ignored our real differences. We couldn't yet stand a fight.

Sometimes I almost convinced myself that I was ready to bat around the mountains with the snake nooses and cameras and guns. I could have used some action, because I was nervous and overcharged and because I longed that she and I should be back as we had been in Chicago. But I never could quite bring myself to go.

It seemed to me that I had to continue playing poker. I was ahead and couldn't quit. Moulton kept yelling how I had drawn blood on everybody; I had to give people their chance for revenge. So I had a deck of cards between my fingers as their most familiar object, and actually I became a very dexterous and fancy dealer. Soon people were looking for me who didn't even know me, and I seemed to be running a game at the Chinese restaurant. Louie Fu in his coat sweater was of that opinion even. I was Bolingbroke or the Eagle Man to tourist strangers who sat in the game, world-tour burns, Moulton called them.

My pockets were full of different foreign currencies. I didn't know exactly what I had. But I did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's.

There was no longer any refrigerator with bills in the greens and dishes; Thea never seemed to think to offer me an allowance. If I hadn't been sick I'd have felt well-off, prosperous, with my pounds, dollars, pesos, and Swiss francs. But it was only my superficial luck that was good; I was rattled, I was bandaged in an unclean bandage, gaunt, the town seemed to want to blow its silly self to pieces, Thea was collecting coral snakes and rattlers, I had to win a fight of patience with my anxious backside to sit at Louie's, or in somebody's hotel room, or even at the foco rojo where the game sometimes moved.

There the whores were in the rear; in front there was a little bar which was a soldiers' hangout, before the tourists took over. The soldiers read comic books, ate beans, and drank pulque. Rats walked on the beams. The girls cooked, swept, or read too, or washed their hair in the yard. One half-naked kid with a garrison cap clonked on the marimba; the little black rubber balls on his sticks struck fast. I felt I had to do something well, so it shouldn't all be a total loss, and so I watched the cards.

I didn't convince Thea when I said that I'd go along with her just as soon as I felt up to it, nor did she convince me by her gestures toward me. She consented to keep me company in town some evenings, and it was good to see her legs in skirts, not covered by trousers. But it burned me up on the day her divorce papers came and I said, as I had figured to do, "Let's get married," and she simply shook her head.

Then I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let escape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father. Where at first it had disappointed me, and later graveled me more, this now gave me a harsh sting. For sure enough I had a glimmer of things from her standpoint, of how it is one thing to have a young man for your happy friend in the rosy days of love, and quite different the faulty creature to face in practical weather. I knew how I'd seem to her uncle, the powerful millionaire with his squash white-haired nose and his tailor-made Havanas. It was true that Thea defied him and aimed to become financially independent; but as she couldn't count on me she wouldn't cut herself off from her family for my sake. Had I been as enthusiastic on birds, snakes, horses, guns, and photography as she we might have made the grade. But I wouldn't have read a light meter for gold, I didn't want to capture snakes, and I felt ornery about it all. I hoped Thea would tire of it; while she, I suppose, waited for me to get tired of Moulton and Co.

It was one fiesta after another meantime. The band plunged in the zocalo, clashed, drummed, and brayed; the fireworks bristled and ran off in strings, the processions swayed around with images. A woman died of a heart attack at a five-day drunk: party, and there were scandals.

Two young men, lovers, had an argument about a dog and one of them took an overdose of sleeping pills. Jepson forgot his jacket in the foco rojo; the madame herself, Negra, brought it to the house.

Iggy's ex-wife locked Jepson out, so he begged to sleep on Moulton's porch. Moulton wouldn't let him stay because he tried to borrow money, he drank his whisky. Now Jepson was living in the street, but as the town was foaming his sorrow wasn't particularly noticeable in it. Wolves or wild swine or the giant iguanas themselves or stags wouldn't have been either if they had slipped in from the mountains.

A bright dust blew around and whitened the nights. The hotels and shops wanted there should be a hullabaloo and paid money for the music and shots and tolling, but to keep up these long fiestas cash wouldn't have been enough, and the energy for them must have come from the olden-time worship of those fire snakes and smoke mirrors and gruesome monster gods. Even the dogs ran and mumbled as if fresh back from their errand in the land of death, Mictlan. The old belief of the Indians was that dogs carried the souls of the dead there.

There was an intestinal-amoeba epidemic which was hushed up, but funerals tangled with the other processions. There were big enter372 tainments. A Cossack chorus sang in the cathedral; the priest had never had such a crowd inside, and it made him frantic; he scolded and clapped his hands at everyone, crying we were in la casa de Dios. It didn't do a bit of good with that crowd. I can't say those Russians looked out of place in the zocalo in their tunics, boots, and tucked-in pants, musing around at night, burning their long cigarettes. A Brazilian-Italian opera company did La Forza del Destiiw. They sang and throbbed powerfully, but as though they didn't believe any of it themselves. Therefore I was skeptical too. Thea didn't come back for the second act. Then there was an Indian circus that gave a grim performance. The equipment of the acrobats was as if ripped out of an old foundry; the horses were shabby; the performers were solemn Michoacan Indians, and they stunted without nets or any safety devices.

The savage little girls who came out in their soiled trousers to juggle and walk the wires and perform other tasks never smiled or bowed.

Thus in this town I didn't see anything familiar, except in reminiscence--as when those Russians made me remember Grandma Lausch.

Until one day when it was fairly quiet and I was sitting on a bench in the zocalo petting a kitten that tried to get into my armpit, and several large cars drove up to the cathedral. They were old cars but powerful, with something cast-iron about them, the long hoods, the low sling of expensive European automobiles. Immediately I knew there was a personage in the middle car, for bodyguards emerged from the two others, and I wondered who it was that could. be so important and yet so run-down. Among the rest were two Mexican policemen, grouchy and proud of their tunics, which they smoothed straight right away; but the guards were Europeans or Americans, in leather jackets and leggings. Their hands were on their holsters and they were jittery; it seemed to me they didn't know the first thing about their job. So I judged, having now and again, in Chicago, seen the real thing.

It was a cool day. I wore the thick jacket with many pockets that Thea had bought for me on Wabash Avenue, the one that could save you in the wilderness. But it was zipped open, as I sat in the sun. The kitty was nuzzling and kneading under my arm with her paws--I felt her little spine with satisfied amusement and I watched to see who would come out of the center limousine now that the arrangements were complete. An aide gave the nod and a guard started to work the handle of the door, who obviously didn't have the hang of it, and all stood helpless during this embarrassment till the opposite door impatiently was thrown back with iron bump from the extreme wads of old upholstery, and heads of a foreign comb, specs, beards bent for ward within the beautifully polished glass. Here and there was a briefcase; I thought I recognized something political about these briefcases.

One person was saying something, smiling and chatty, into the chauffeur's phone. And then the principal figure came out with a spring; he was very gingery and energetic, debonair, sharp, acute in the beard.

He addressed himself without waste of attention to the study of the front of the cathedral. He wore a short coat with fur collar, large glasses, his cheek was somewhat soft but that didn't take away from an ascetic impression he gave. As I looked at him I decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the great Russian exile, and my eyes grew big. I always knew my entire life would not go by without my having seen a great man; and strangely enough my thought was of Einhorn, condemned to sit in a chair and study faces in the papers and limited to seeing only the people who chanced to come by. I was very enthusiastic and right away stood up.

The beggars and loafers were already collecting in their Middle Ages style, the touts and schnorrers and the others uncovering their damages and stock-in-trade woes from bandages and rags. Head thrown back, Trotsky regarded and estimated the vast church, and with a jump in which hardly anything elderly appeared he went up the stairs and hastened in. There was a surge after him; the people with the briefcases--members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had briefcases like those--and also a huge man with hair like a woman's, and some of those queer bodyguards, and quite a few crutchhoppers and singsong limosnita beggars who true enough were near dead, as they claimed, went through the dark gap of the church door.

I too wanted to go in; I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things. So I was wild with enthusiasm; it bumped up inside my skull like the handle of a broom and made me recall that my head still was bandaged and I should go easy. I stood watching till he came out again.

But the reason for telling you all this is that one of the bodyguards turned out to be my old friend Sylvester, the onetime owner of the Star Thpater, the engineering student from Armour Tech, the exhusband of Mimi Villars' sister, the former subway employee. I recognized him in his Western-style rig. Ye gods! How severe, melancholy, duty-charged, and baffled he looked! Same as the others, he packed a pistol; the spread of his pants was wide at the back and his belly hung over the belt. I hollered at him, "Sylvester! You, Sylvester!" He looked sharply at me, as if I took a dangerous liberty; yet he was curious. I | was full of glee, and my head was pounding. My face got very red with Ji laughter and excitement, because I was so extremely happy to see him.

"You damned fool, Sylvester, don't you know who it is? It's Augie March. You mean to stand there and not recognize me? I haven't changed that much, have I?"

"Augie?" he asked and smiled a little with dark bitter lips, incredulous.

His question made an uncertain creak in his throat.

"Of course! It's me, you dope! Jesus, how did you get here? What are you doing with that hardware?"

"How did you land down here? Gosh, we sure get around. What's wrong with your head?"

"I fell off a horse," I said, and in spite of my joy at seeing him I quickly ran through in my mind a variety of reasonable, and not especially true, accounts. But he didn't ask, which astonished me. It now astonishes me less, for I know more about how people get preoccupied.

"Gee, it's swell tosee you, Sylvester. How come you're doing this?"

"I got assigned to it--what do you mean? They wanted somebody with a technological background."

Technological background! As I was laughing still from pleasure at meeting him I could get away with a laugh over this too. Poor Sylvester, with this story about being a technician. Well, well, whatever we got out of this meeting it sure wasn't going to be the truth. I had prepared a story myself, should he ask me what I was up to. That's how it is. One day's ordinary falsehood if you could convert it into ":; silt would choke the Amazon back a hundred miles over the banks. '

However, it never appears in this form but is distributed all over like the nitrogen in potatoes.

"So?" I said. "You're with Trotsky all the time, you know him well, I guess? It must be marvelous. I wish I could know him!"

"You?"

"Gosh, I suppose I wouldn't fit in. What's he like? Do you think I could at least meet him, Sylvester? You could introduce me."

"Yeah? Just like that?" said Sylvester, amused, with his heavy eyes.

"It couldn't be more complicated than you think, could it? You're a funny guy. But look, I have to go. When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you; we'll have a beer. You remember Frazer from Chicago? He's one of the old man's secretaries. Don't for"et now." Another guard was calling him, and he trotted away to the cars.

Oliver cursed the Japanese for the delay about the villa, but finally the Japanese sailed for Japan and Oliver moved in and prepared to throw a huge party and have the best society in town. That would poison his enemies at the Carlos Quinto. Moulton helped him make up a guest list and invitations were sent out to the old residents. Mostly a lot of riffraff turned up, however, in observance of his troubles, which were by then public and had been for some time. A Treasury agent came to town, and he didn't hide his identity but told everyone, with swell humor, what he was. He sat spread on one of Hilario's wireharp chairs and drank beer as if on a holiday, or fed peanuts to the kinkajou. Oliver managed to look indifferent when he went through the square, he and Stella as usual dressed up to the eyes. The more he looked self-possessed, the more it was a, disaster, and I was sorry for him. Stella was scared. She sometimes tried to make me understand that she'd like to talk to me about this. I never thought it unnatural that I should be the one she wanted to discuss her troubles with. However, there was no chance to do it. Oliver watched her very closely.

I said to Moulton, "What do they want Oliver for? It must be serious or they wouldn't have sent a man from Washington."

"The guy says income-tax evasion, but it must be worse than that.

Oliver's a vain, silly type, but he wouldn't be so dumb as to get in that sort of trouble. It's worse."

"Poor Oliver!"

"He's a jerk."

"Maybe so. But fundamentally--I mean, as a man."

"Oh, fundamentally," he said thoughtfully. But then he seemed to shake himself out of it and said, "Maybe fundamentally too he's a jerk."

Meanwhile it was in a terrible way instructive to see how Oliver behaved, how unruffled he tried to appear. But he was always in small ways losing control. One afternoon he got into a fight with old Louie Fu. Louie, he was queer enough, with his Spanish-Chinese cackles, and in addition he was also a terribly economizing old man, and I suppose in famine China he may have known what it was to pick grains out of manure; so it was nothing much to him now to pour the drinks people didn't finish into a single pop bottle. With his unassertive chest covered with gray knots of a loopy sweater, at the zinc counter, he poured together what was left of orange pop one day and put it in the icebox; Oliver caught him and punched him in the face. This was terrible. Louie screamed. His family was infuriated and started to yell. All we foreigners started up from the card game. The police appeared and closed in from the front door. I took Stella by the hand through the curtain of beads into the other half of the shop, where they sold drygoods, and as we came into the street we saw a gang swirl out and follow the arrestees to city hall and the magistrate's court. Louie's eye was already covered by a large stain and his throat was full of cords as he shouted. Oliver got one of the Mexican guitar-playing fancy-boys to interpret for him. And the defense he made was that what Louie had done was very dangerous because of the amoeba.

Oliver couldn't have done worse than to claim he was protecting public health. The magistrate slapped his hand down en seguida on this irresponsible rumor of dysentery. He was large and squat, a man who raised bulls for the ring, and he wore his hat in the court like a businessman-prince, this dark powerful person. He named a whopping fine which Oliver paid on the spot, looking sporting, if grim, and also entertained. Money was one thing he didn't seem to lack. And how did Stella take this--in her sleeveless lace dress and wearing a hat? She appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for myself whatshe was up against. With so much going on in the town I hadn't given it the consideration it called for. Why, even, did she need to wear such an elegant dress to Louie Fu's afternoon poker game? It must have been that she had no dresses except elegant ones, and no places to visit except those Oliver took her to. It was very odd. She said, "I have to talk to you one of these days. Soon."

But this was not the time. Oliver was now with us and said to Moulton and Iggy various peculiar things, such as, "I've been to courts the world over." And, "Now they can't go on pretending about the trots, that there isn't any amoeba," And, "That yellow old c---sucker, at least I taught him a lesson."

Listening, I felt quite queer myself, in my bandages, cards and currencies in my pockets, my heart tight in my breast and toes free in the huaraches. I felt like someone who might come into the vision of a theosophist, that kind of figure.

At dinner Thea said, "I hear there was a riot in town. Were you in it, too?"

I didn't care for that. Why must she put it like that? I told her the story, or rather gave her a version of what happened. Anyway, she frowned. As I spoke of Stella I realized that I wanted to represent her as in love with Oliver. Thea didn't believe me.

"Augie," she said, "why don't we get away from here? At least while the season lasts. Let's get away from these people."

"Where do you want to go?"

"I thought we'd drive to Chilpanzingo."

Chilpanzingo was down in the hot country. But I was willing to go.

I would go. But what would I do there?

"There are some interesting animals down there," she said.

So I answered evasively, "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon."

"You look run-down," she said, "but how can you expect to look anything else when you lead such a life? You never touched a drop before you got down here."

"I never had much reason to. I don't get stinking drunk either."

"No," she said, bitter, "just enough to carry you through your mistakes."

"Our mistakes," I corrected her.

So we sat at the dinner table, full of trouble and under the shadow of disappointment and anger. Then, after long thought, I said to her, "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world."

She looked at me more warmly than she had in a long time. I wondered if there was something we might do in Chilpanzingo instead of hunting snakes. But she didn't say there was.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.







CHAPTER XVIII



So I agreed to go down to Chilpanzingo with Thea; there was an interval, extremely short, when we both showed gratitude. I appreciated it that she let up her severity, and she was happy that she was still my preference. So on the night of Oliver's house-warming party she said, "Let's go and see what it's like," and I understood that she wanted to do something for me, because I wanted to go. Did I! I was wild to go, having been in the house for two days straight in support of my good intentions. I looked carefully at her and saw how she sustained her smile to back up her suggestion, but I thought. Hell, let's!

I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them.

And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything.

Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering. So of course I knew she didn't want to go; but I did, badly, and my thought was, If I can stand her snakes, she can take this for one evening.

I changed into good clothes, therefore. I took off my turban and wore only a patch of bandage over the shaved place. Thea put on an evening dress with black silk rebow. But there was nobody to take note how we arrived. I've never seen such a goons' rodeo as that party. When we got to the villa we found ourselves in the overflow of a mob that covered the street. I saw the most amazing male and female burns, master-molds of some of the leading turpitudes, fags, apes, goofs, and terminal and fringe types, lapping, lushing, gabbing, and celebrating notoriety. Because it was no secret that Oliver was wanted by the government and that this was a big last fling. Probably Thea was the only person in tovv'n who didn't know what was happening.

Some of the guests were lying in the garden with bottles, about to pass out or already looped in full; the Japanese flowers were trod down and tequila empties floated in the fish pond. Things had been taken out of the hands of the servants, and people poured for themselves, broke off chunks of ice with candlesticks, grabbed glasses from one another. In the patio the hired orchestra fiddled weakly and the soberer company danced. Thea wanted to leave immediately, but as she began to say so I saw Stella by an orange tree. She made me a small sign, and I had to go and talk to her; I was very eager. Annoyed that Thea tried to pull me away as soon as we had arrived, I didn't look at her. And when Moulton in a dinner jacket but still in short pants asked her for a dance I handed her over. I thought her dislike for him was exaggerated and it wouldn't do her any harm at all to go around the floor with him once or twice.

Since Oliver's trial when Stella said she had to talk to me I had been all worked up, I realized now. I didn't know what had got into me that I was so excited. But I was sure this was something I was bound to figure in; the play would go to me. So I got away from Thea on the dancing patio, aware how she appealed to me not to leave her, and how angry, also, she was. But it wouldn't really hurt her and I'd find out about this other thing. I could see another case much more clearly than my own, and because of that vagueness and incapacity that I felt about going to Chilpanzingo, or throwing myself more blind and deeper down into Chilpanzingo, I perhaps needed an opportunity to be definite and active and to believe that definiteness and action still existed. But in fact I also felt assailed by weakness when I saw Stella beckon. Not that I intended anything toward her. I thought merely I'd feel swayed, but nothing would happen. I'd be confidential with a beautiful woman. This was terribly pleasing to me, inasmuch as it followed, with self-appreciation, that such a woman would naturally turn for help to a man in her own class. I forgot that I had fallen from the horse on my face, and looked it. That's the kind of thing you're apt to forget. But it did occur to me that the last time I had been called aside like this for a discussion apart was with Sophie Geratis, when 3SO we had fallen into each other's arms. And what did I think of that?

But some involutional, busy, dippy horsefly in me made such a mad fuss of love over this treasure of crystal-sugar esteem I didn't think much of that at all. Of course at the same time I was very serious; I knew she was in trouble. But that she chose me to consult with and to ask for helpfor what else could she do but ask help? was like a kindness she did me and I was under obligation to her before she spoke even a word.

She said, "Mr. March, I count on you to help me."

Immediately I was overwhelmed. I said, "Oh, sure, certainly. I'll do all I can." Down me went a shiver of willingness. My thought was fuzzy, yet my blood excited. "What can I do though?"

"I'd better tell you what the situation is. Just let's get out of this crowd first."

"Yes," I agreed, looking around. She assumed that I was watching out for Oliver and said, "He's not here. I don't expect him for half an hour yet." It was Thea, however, of whom the thought burdened me, just as much. But when Stella took my hand and led me deeper into the trees I felt her touch leap through my arm and further, and as I went along with her my sense of consequences was never weaker, not even when I committed robbery. I was full of curiosity to hear the truth about Oliver, yet I knew he was as light a being as I had ever weighed in my judgment.

"You must know about the government man who's here to get Oliver," she said. "Everybody knows. But do you know why he's here?"

"No, why?"

"Wilmot's Weekly was bought by money that came from the Italian government. There was a fellow in New York who did it. His name is Malfitano. He bought the magazine and made Oliver editor. All the important things that were printed were planned in Rome. Now this Malfitano was arrested a couple of months ago; that's why we didn't go back. I don't know what he was arrested for. Now they've sent this government man for Oliver."

"Why?"

"I don't know why. I know about the entertainment world. Ask me why something is in Variety and I can maybe explain it."

"They probably want him to give evidence against this Italian. I believe the smartest thing would be for him to go back. Oliver is just one of those old-time journalists who don't see any difference between one government and the next."

She misunderstood me. "He's not so terribly old."; "He should make a deal and go back to testify."

"That's not what he aims to do," she said.

"No? Don't tell me he's going to try to run away? Where to?"

"I can't tell. It wouldn't be fair."

"To South America? He's wacky if he thinks he can. And that will make the thing serious, if they have to chase him. Why, he's small fry."

"No, he thinks it was a very serious thing."

"And what do you think?"

"I think I've had about enough," she said. She looked with her wide swimming eye-surfaces in which the lanterns from the garden were changed entirely into the lights of her meaning. "He wants me to come with him."

"No! Down to Guatemala, Venezuela. Where--?"

"That's one thing I don't want to say, even though I trust you."

"But on what? Does he have money socked away? No, he wouldn't have. You'd be on the beach with him somewhere. He probably hopes you love him that much. Do you?"

"Oh--not that much, no," she said as if it was something she hoped to find the degree of. I suppose she had to say she loved him somewhat, to give herself character. Why, that po6r, bony, dopey skull and romantic jumping-jack of an Oliver! I saw his imaginary luck of money and car and love collapsing, and was bitter for him in a kind of fleeting way. I caught a glimpse of her ingratitude too, but I couldn't for long see anything to her discredit. Before her, hid in the trees from the crackling party, I felt something happen to me that drew upon my character in the most vital part, where I couldn't prevent.

"The party is supposed to be just a cover-up," she said. "He went out to take the car down the road and hide it, and then he's coming back for me. He says the cops are ready to arrest us."

"Oh, he is loony," I said with fresh conviction. "How far does he expect to get in that red convertible?"

"In the morning he's going to ditch it. He's really serious. He's carrying a gun. And he has gone a little crazy. He was pointing it at me this afternoon. He says I want to two-time him."

"That poor fool! He thinks he's a big-league fugitive. You'll have to get away from him. How did you ever get into a fix like this?"

I knew this was a foolish question to put to her. She couldn't tell me. About some paths of life either you guess or you never know, because you can't be told. Yes, it was very foolish; but then I was aware of many wrong things said and done which I nevertheless couldn't stop.

"Well, I've known him for quite a while. He was likable, and he had lots of money."

"Oh, all right, you don't have to tell me."

She said, "Didn't you come to Mexico in something like the way I did?"

So that was what she thought we had in common. "I came because I was in love."

"Well, she is so lovely that of course that's a difference. But all the same," she said with a sudden shrewdness and frankness--and I might have known it was there--"it's her house, isn't it, and all the things are hers? What have you got of your own?"

"What have I got?"

"You don't have anything, do you?"

Of course I wasn't going to be such a hypocrite as to argue with her and put on a face, as though I had never in all the world given a momentary thought, not even a one, to the matter of money. For what was that stuff in my pockets, that assorted dough, my winnings, the rainbow foreign currencies I had raked in at the Chinaman's? Even czarist rubles had been thrown in the pot, for which I blamed those Cossack singers. Don't worry, I had been mindful of money, all right, so I knew what she was talking about.

"I do have something," I said. "I can lend you enough to get away on. Don't you have any money at all?" At this moment of our conversation we were very close together in understanding.

"I have a bank account in New York. But what good does that do me now? I can give you a check for the pesos you lend me. There's no money I can lay my hands on right away. I'd have to go to Mexico City and wire from Wells Fargo to the bank."

"No, I don't want a check."

"It won't bounce--you don't have to worry about that!"

"No, no. I'll just take your word for it. I meant that you don't have to give me any check at all."

"What I thought of asking was whether you'd take me to Mexico City," she said.

This I had been expecting, though I don't think I ever intended to do anything about it. Now, when it came, it did something to me. I shivered, as if my fate had brushed me. Admitted that I always tried to elicit what I hoped for; how did people, however, seldom fail to supply it so mysteriously?

"Why--why, where does that suddenly fit?" I said, treating it not merely as a plan for her safety but as a proposal involving me. The holleration and screeches of the party were loud and the narrow grove of oranges where we were seemed like the last strip of field the harvesters are cutting. Any minute I awaited some drunk interrupter or a blazing couple crashing in. I knew I had to get out and start looking for Thea. But first this had to be attended to. "You don't have to put it to me that way," I said. "I'll help you anyway."

"You're getting ahead of yourself. I don't blame you, but you are.

Maybe I'd even feel bad if you didn't, but... I can't be as vain as to think I deserve the very best way of escaping from my trouble. You don't even know me. And all I should think about now is getting away from this poor guy who's lost his mind."

"I'm very sorry. I apologize. I talked out of turn."

"Oh, you don't have to apologize. We know what the score is here, pretty much. I admit I was often looking, and I have thought of you.

But one of the things I thought is that you and I are the kind of people other people are always trying to fit into their schemes. So suppose we didn't play along, then what? But we don't have the time to go into it now."

To these words that she spoke I responded tremendously, I melted toward her. I was grateful for her plain way of naming a truth that had been hanging around me anonymously for many long years. I did fit into people's schemes. It was an emotion of truth that I had, hearing this. Mainly of truth. For I will admit that among other things I considered that here was a woman who wouldn't put me on trial for my shortcomings or judge me. Because I was tired of being socked on the head and banged by judgments. But that was all.

However, we had no time to go into this further. Oliver would be coming back right away. He had packed her things and taken them away, all but a few articles she had hidden from him.

"Listen," said I, "I can't take you to Mexico, but what I can do is take you a good way out of town, where you'll be safe. Meet me by the station wagon in the zocalo. Which way was he going? You can trust me. I don't especially want to see him get caught. I have no reason to."

"He was going toward Acapulco."

"Okay, that's fine. We'll go the other way."

So he wanted to catch a ship at Acapulco, did he, the poor jerk! Or was he plotting to escape through the jungle into Guatemala, as brainsoftened as that? Why, if the Indians didn't murder him for his black and white sport shoes he'd die of exhaustion.

I hurried to find Thea. She had gone, Iggy told me, leaving Moulton in the middle of the floor. "She was quite in a mood," said Iggy. "We looked for you. Then she said for me to tell you she was pulling out for Chilpanzingo first thing in the morning. She was all nervous and shaking, Bolingbroke. Where did you disappear?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

I ran down to the zocalo and opened the station wagon. Soon Stella arrived and slipped in. I threw off the brake and twisted the ignition key. From disuse the battery was low; and the starter chattered but the motor failed to turn. Not to run the battery any lower I nervously took to the crank. As I began to turn it I right away had a crowd to watch me, that unfailing bunch of a Mexican square that comes to maintain its secret view of life. Sweating with the crank, I was in a furious rage, and I said to a few of them, "Beat it! Scat, goddam you!" But this fetched only jeers and scorn, and I heard my old title, el gringo del dguila. My heart was full of murder toward them, as toward the motorman that day on the State Street line when the slugger was in pursuit of me. But I put my breast against the radiator and heaved. Stella hadn't had the sense to duck down--I suppose she had to see what was happening and be ready for flight. Now she had been recognized by the bystanders, and it was too late.

"Augie, what are you doing?"

I had prayed that Thea had gone straight back to Casa Descuitada to pack for Chilpanzingo, but she was here, and the crowd around me at the station wagon had brought her over. She stared at Stella through the windshield.

"Where are you going with her? Isn't she the hostess? Why did you dump me at that horrible party?".

"Oh, I didn't dump you."

"With that terrible Moulton. No? Well, I couldn't find you."

I couldn't pretend that it was an extremely serious thing to have left her alone at that party. "It was just for a few minutes," I said.

"And now where are you going?"

"Listen, Thea, this girl is in a lot of trouble."

"Is she?"

"I'm telling you she is."

Stella didn't come out, or change her position behind the spotted dust of the glass.

"And are you getting her out of trouble?" said Thea, angry, ironic, and sad. x* 385 THH ADVENTURES "You can think what you want about me," I said, "but it's because you don't understand how urgent it is, and that she's in danger."

I was full of the frantic hurry of escape, and in true fact I already felt caught.

As for Thea, enfolded in the rebow, she stared at me--hard, begging, firm and infirm, all together. There was something about Thea of a nervousness, and she was a kind of universalist, believing that where she stood the principal laws were underfoot. And this made her tremble, but also she was daring. So at a time like this I didn't know what to expect from her.

One thing more: she was, like Mimi, a theoretician about love.

She was different from Mimi in that Mimi really intended to do everything for herself if others failed her. And maybe Mimi didn't even need others except as witnesses or accessories. Thea knew better than that.

I had heard from various men, and especially from Einhom, about women's fanaticism in love, how for them all life was knotted around this one thing whereas men found several other vital places of attachment and therefore were more like to avoid monomania. You could always get part of the truth from Einhorn.

"It's a fad," I said. "Oliver went crazy and tried to kill her today."

"What are you trying to give me! Whom could that poor idiot hurt?

Besides, why do you have to be the one to protect her? How do you get into this?"

"Because," I said, impatient over logic, "she asked me to take her out of town. She's trying to get to Mexico City, and she can't get on the bus here. The police might try to pick her up too."

"Even so, where do you come in?"

"But don't you see? She asked me!"

"Did she just? Or did she ask because you wanted her to?"

"Now how would I do that?" I said.

"As if you didn't know what I was talking about! I've seen you with women. I know what you look like when a handsome woman or even not such a handsome woman passes by."

I said, "Well--" about to assert how normal that was. Then I wanted to say instead, "What about the men out East, that Navy officer and the others?" But I held this back even though it crawled into my throat with a bitter taste. Minutes counted now; I remembered, however, seeing the Mexican faces that listened to this wrangle as if it were the New Testament. "Why do you have to do this?" I said. "Can't you take my word for it she's in danger? Let me do something for a change. We can take up these other things later, in private."

"Do you have to rush like this because of Oliver? Can't you protect her from him here?"

"I told you he was dangerous. Look!" I was out of my mind, nearly, with impatience. "He's going to try to get away and he wants to drag her v.'ith him."

"Oh, she's going to ditch him and you're helping her."

"No!" I almost yelled, then dropped my voice low. "Don't you understand any part of what I'm trying to tell you? Why are you being so stubborn?"

"For God's sake, go then, if you have to go. What are you arguing with me for! Are you waiting for my permission? Because you won't get it. You're telling me something ridiculous. She doesn't have to go with him if she doesn't want to."

"Right, she doesn't, and I'm helping her to get away."

"You? You'll be glad if Oliver doesn't have her."

I threw myself on the crank, ramming it in the shaft.

"Augie, don't go! Listen, we're supposed to go to Chilpanzingo in the morning. Why don't we, take her up to the house? He won't dare bother us up there."

"No, this is something I've decided to do. I promised."

"Why, you're ashamed to change your mind and do the right thing!"

"Maybe so," I said. "You may understand this better, but that won't stop me."; "Don't go! Don't!"

"Well," I said, turning to her, "suppose you come along. I'll drive her up to Cuemavaca and we'll be back in a few hours."

"No, I won't come along."

"Then I'll see you later."

"By a little flattery anyone can get what he wants from you, Augie.

I've told you that before. Where does that put me? I came after you.

I flattered you. But I can't outflatter everyone in the world."

She stabbed me hard with this, and suffered as she did so. I knew I'd bleed a long time from it. I grabbed and gave an inhuman twist to the crank. The kick of the motor tore at my arms, and I jumped to the wheel. In the headlights I saw Thea's dress; she v/as standing still and probably she was waiting to see what I would do. My real desire was to get out. But already the car had gone a way over the cobbles and it seemed to me that having just got it under way I couldn't check it.

That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.

I took the turn for Cuernavaca, a climbing, steep road, black, badly marked. We rose above the town, which sat like embers in its circle; and I put on as much speed as I dared, for enough people had seen us in the square so that Oliver would quickly know. I thought if Stella could hire a taxi in Cuernavaca it would be better than the bus, for the bus made all the one-horse stops and Oliver could easily catch up with it. '

At a terrible rate for that dark road we climbed toward Cuernavaca, even while, in the black air and orangy fragrance which we burned through in our speed, the danger we were escaping appeared smaller and slighter every minute; flying up the mountain in the machine from tliat pipsqueak Oliver began to seem what Thea had thought it was-- foolish. This silent Stella in the seat, who lit cigarettes with the dashboard lighter in such apparent calm of mind, it was hard to think how she could have taken seriously the ability of a man like Oliver to do harm. Even if he had threatened her with his gun it must have been in a kind of dither, and more than likely she was escaping from his trouble not his threats.

"I see some lights in the road," she said.

They were flares; it was a detour. I went very slow over the ruts of an old cari track until I came to a big arrow nailed pointing upward.

There were wheel marks in both directions. Having detoured to the right, I bore left, and that was a mistake. We went up a narrowing, long way, I heard brush and grass underneath but was scared to try to back down and went on looking for a widening of the road where I could maneuver a turn. I came to one I reckoned I could try, and I twisted hard and raced the motor, for I dreaded to stall. The clumsy wagon just failed to make the circle. Cautious, I eased out the clutch, the gear in reverse, but the transmission was poor; the clutch grabbed and the lurch killed the engine. Which was just as well, there being an unusual softness under the rear right wheel. When I went out I saw that it rested on a tuft of grass right on the edge of a deep drop.

I couldn't measure the distance below, but we had been climbing a good while, and it wouldn't have been any mere fifty feet. I was all over sweat, and I lightly opened the other door and said to Stella, low, "Quick!" which she understood, and she slipped out. Reaching through the window, I turned the wheels and drew the gearshift back to neutral position. The car rolled a few feet and stopped against the mountain wall. But the battery was dead now, and the crank wouldn't work.

She said, "Are we going to be stuck here all night?"

"It could have been even more permanent than that. And I told 388:.

Thea I'd be back in a few hours," I said. Of course she had heard the whole conversation between Thea and me. This fact made an enormous difference. It was just as if, after that talk in the orange grove, Thea had given Stella and me a new introduction to each other. Was I so vain and nonsensical, and was Stella so unscrupulous? We didn't speak about it. Stella could, and did, act as though it was no use answering the accusations of an overwrought woman. As for me, I thought that if what Thea said of me was true, then the truth must be sticking out all over me, and if it was so plain there was nothing much to say. And after all the rush and anxious sweat and urgency, to be here on the mountain like the millipede with one bank of legs suddenly out of commission while the other tried to continue with haste, gave me an unpleasant sort of feeling inside.

"If there were a couple of men to pick up the front end and straighten us out we could get a start by rolling."

"What," she said, "roll with those lights?" The lights were just a feeble yellow. "Anyhow, where are you going to find two men to help you?"

Nevertheless I went to look for help and descended as far as the giant arrow pointing nowhere. Over the grass distances I couldn't be sure whether what 1 saw was stars or human lights, but I knew I better not try to find out now which they were. There'd be many a fall on terrain like this before I reached what possibly was a village. Or I might be trying to reach the southern heaven. And even to say "southern heaven" is to try to familiarize terrific convulsions of fire in the million light-year distances (and why, from space to space, does the occupancy have to be by fire?). There were falls, though, and also thorns and cactuses, from huge maguey to vicious leg-tearing pads; and animals too. No car came along the detour, and then it occurred to me that the next car that passed might be Oliver's. Was I waiting there for him to come and shoot at me with his pistol? I gave up and went back to the station wagon. There were some blankets and a shelterhalf in the back. As I hunted them with the flashlight I thought how much dislike I bore to this machine and the false positions it had put me in. I spread the canvas shelter-half on the wet grass, and when I crouched and was nearly still great speed and motion continued to go through me. I worried about Thea; I knew she was bound to let me have it. She'd never excuse me for this.

And now Stella was lying close to me, for it was cold. Her smell was tender, from her hair and face powder--I suppose the mountain coldness made a difference in the odor. I felt her weight full, both soft and heavy, from her hips and breasts. And if before I vaguely thought how I'd be swayed, there wasn't much vagueness now.

I suppose if you pass the night with a woman in a deserted mountain place there's only one appropriate thing, according to the secret urging of the world. Or not so secret. And the woman, who has done so much to be dangerous in this same scheme, the more she comes of the world the less she knows how to vary from it. I thought that in the crisis that seems to have to occur when a man and a woman are thrown together nothing, nothing easy, can happen until first one difficulty is cleared and it is shown how the man is a man and the woman a woman; as if a life's trial had to be made, and the pretensions of the man and the woman satisfied. I say I thought, and so I did. A considerable number of things. But I was terribly hot for this woman. As, suddenly, with a breathless impulse toward me, she was for me too. Her tongue was in my mouth, my hands were drawing up her clothes. It made no difference what other thought beat on me, it beat from outside. As her things came off, as in the cold of night her shoulders, her breasts, and her humid heat I fell on maddened me, my voice came out of me strangely. She talked rapidly in my ear, she heaved her body, pressed my face, gathered up her breasts, and she gave herself like a prize.

She did many things like a woman who had studied from men what it was that pleased them. This was in part innocent in her. It seemed an instant after blowing that, happily, she began to talk, every now and then kissing. It made her laugh that back at the party she had told me that I mistook her, and that I had apologized. I had known then that it had no more weight than a matchstick, that. The inevitability that brought us together on this mountain of wet grass was greater than the total of all other considerations. We had all known that, all three of us. After much making with sense, it's senselessness that you submit to. Thea foresaw that I'd do this. It annoyed me all the more with her, as though if she hadn't made the prediction it wouldn't have happened.

And I thought savagely that if she hadn't put herself in the way and told me what to do there wouldn't have been this struggle with my pride. It was my unreasonable idea that she had tried to spoil everything for me. But I could bring forth a lot more reasons without reaching as high as the foot of the inevitability.

Between Stella and me only one true subject was possible now, whether there was anything permanent between us. But I was thinking mostly of Thea. And as this couldn't be said, neither could any other genuine thing. Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things. She mentioned Thea once, saying that her standards were awfully high, it seemed. At last we were both silent, and then we slept, and that was more intimate than talk.

A similar night for me was, years after this, on a crowded ship from Palma de Mallorca to Barcelona. The cabins were full, and I slept on deck where there was a throng of what they call there the humble people, laborers in denim jumpers, whole families, babes at breast, young girls of delicate stomach vomiting in the sea, singers who pumped on the concertina, old people on the deck cargo--like dead, or musing, with awkward released feet and large bellies. A sad night, damp, with floating carbon flakes from the cheap fuel. The puny officers in white, stepping over the bodies on the boards. A young Texas girl shared my coat; she was frank to say she had sought out another American in the foreign crowd. So all night she lay close to me, and in the shrimp chill of dawn when the pink light of the rocking sea fell on us she reminded me powerfully of Stella.

That rising was in the Spanish commotion of the wet deck, and this other in the smoky white dawn sun and a freight-yard hush of mountains, like the silence after the crash of cars, here and there a skinny, armored cricket still trying out a trill. The gray-green cold came down from the rocks, the smoke from a village mixed with it. Such a smell of charcoal, the very smell of familiarity and welcome day to some, was the last tinge of foreignness to me. Stella stood rolled in the blanket and tried to look to the bottom of the cliff; the sight of that depth shriveled my stomach.

Some Indians, for a peso apiece, set the car straight. When we started to roll the engine caught, and we went on to Cuernavaca, where I hired a car to take her to Mexico, giving her all the dollars I had. She said she'd pay me through Wells Fargo, and there was all that talk about settling up indebtedness that's so hard to give a definite character. I didn't believe her, but money was the only subject we now could talk of. Gratitude wasn't all she felt, that's certain, but since she did have some gratitude to express, she stuck to that and let the rest go. She did say, however, "Someday, will you come see me?"

"Sure I will."

Waiting in the sun for the taxi, we were at the side of the market, by the flowers, and stood where the stones were slippery from the castoff blooms, just the light greasiness of flowers underfoot. Facing us were the butchers' stalls, and on the hooks the tripes and lights and the carcasses were slung, on which the flies gave out nearly a roar and bounded like the first drops of cloudburst on a red wall. Under a chopping block squatted a naked kid and he slowly made a strange color of defecation. We went slowly around the broad steel gallery, the glass roof rising over the packed tinware, peppers, beef, bananas, pork, orchids, baskets, and this flash, rage, the chitin, electric loud tissue-sound of fond love, the wild loving hum of the bluebottles and green. As if a huge spool were revolving that caught up all threads from the sunlight.

The driver came around. She made sure again that I had written down the name of her theatrical agent who always knew where to find her.

She kissed me, and her lips made an unknown sensation on the side of my face, so I asked myself what mistake might I be on the verge of making now. Whilst the cab moved slowly in the market crowd, I walked beside it and we pressed hands through the window. She said, "Thank you. You were a real friend."

"Good luck, Stella," I said. "Better luck..."

"I wouldn't let her be too rough on me if I were you," she told me.

I wasn't going to let her be rough, I thought as I went to face and to lie to Thea. I didn't really feel the sharpness of the lying I was prepared to do. I came back to her thinking I was now more faithful than before, so I believed I was going to maintain something more true than not. And I didn't expect to feel as bad as I did feel when I saw her in the garden, by a hedge that had turned out to have a red waxy berry.

She wore the punctured hat and was ready to start for Chilpanzingo. I too was ready to go immediately, if she'd let me. I wanted her back in the worst way. But then I decided I'd better not go. My idea now was that'l'd already given in too much to these strange activities; with the eagle, even, I should have called a halt, not seemed so unsurprised by every bizarre thing as if I had seen it before. But I was moving toward the future much too fast.

"Well! Here you come," she said harshly. "I didn't know whether to expect you. I thought you'd stay away. I think I'd have liked that better."

"All right," I said, "don't be so spoken in full. Just come to the point."

She did speak differently, next, and I was sorry I had asked her to.

On a sort of cry, and with mouth trembling, she said, "We're washed up--washed up! It's all finished, Augie. We made a mistake. / made a mistake."

"Now don't rush like that. Wait, will you? One thing at a time. If what's bothering you is that Stella and I--"

"Spent the night together!"

"We had to. But because I got on the wrong road, that's why."

"Oh, please, stop that, don't say that! It just poisons me to hear you sound like that," she said with uncontrollable wretchedness. Her look was very sick.

"Why, it's true," I insisted. "What do you mean? You shouldn't be jeaious like this. The car got stuck in the mountains."

"I could hardly get out of bed this morning. And now it's worse, it's worse. Don't tell me this story. I can't stand stories."

"Well," I said, looking down at the fresh-washed stones where the sun cooled all over, uneven, the green like velvet, "if you're bound to have such thoughts and be tortured by them, nobody can help that."

She said, "In a way I wish it were just my own trouble."

Somehow this made me stiffen toward her. "Well, it is your trouble,"

I said to her. "Suppose it was really what you think. It wouldn't be so hard to tell you after what you've told me about yourself, about the Navy man and so forth, while you were married to Smitty. You're quite a few up on me." We flushed, both of us, in each other's sight.

"I didn't think what I said to you would come back to me this way," she said unevenly, and this shiver of voice made me feel a chill, like briny thick ice on the shore in the first freezes, "or that there was a score to keep."

She looked very bad, with that more brilliant than friendly glance from her black eyes, her pallor very deep; her nostrils seemed as if they had accepted some of the sickness, smelled the poison she spoke of.

And the animals and animal objects, the oxhide chairs, the straw-rustle snakes, the horned and shaggy heads, all that had seemed to have raison d'etre got dull, useless, brutal, or to be a jumble, a clutter merely, when something was wrong with her. While she herself looked tired, tendony in the neck, pinched on the shoulders. She- didn't even smell right. And up and down she was gripped by the most frightful jealousy; she wanted, and needed, to do me harm.

For some reason I thought this would pass presently. But at the same time I trembled too. I said, "You can't even imagine that nothing happened, can you? And you have to assume that because we were together all night we made love too."

"Well, maybe it is irrational," she said. "But whether it is or not, can you tell me it really didn't happen? Can you?"

I was about, slowly, to do that, because it was necessary--and I felt monstrous to be putting up a lying face not having even washed Stella's odor from me--but Thea stopped me. She said, "No, don't, you'll only repeat the same thing. I know. And don't ask me to imagine anything.

I already have imagined everything. Don't expect me to be superhuman.

I won't try. It's too painful already, and a lot more than I thought I could stand." She didn't have any outburst of tears, but just like a sudden darkness, just that silent, they appeared in her eyes.

That softened or melted all my hardness, as if by this quick heat. I said, "Let's quit this, Thea," and came toward her, but she moved away.

"You should have stayed with her."

"Listen--"

"I mean it. You can be tender with me now. In ten minutes you could be with her, and fifteen minutes later with some other tramp. There isn't that much of you to go around. How did you get mixed up with this girl? That's what I want to know."

"How? I met her with Oliver, through Moulton."

"Why didn't she ask your friend Moulton then? Why you? Because you flirted with her."

"No, because she picked me for someone sympathetic. She knew how I was with you, and she must have thought I'd understand a woman's situation faster than somebody else would."

"That's just the kind of easy lie you often tell. She picked you because you look so damn obliging and she figured she could do what she wanted with you."

"Oh no," I said, "you're wrong. She was just in a bad spot and I felt for her." But I remembered, of course, in the orange grove, that sensation of something that drew on me in a vital place and where I couldn't stop it. Apparently Thea knew something about this too, which amazed. me. Back in Chicago she had predicted that I'd go for another woman who ran after me. If only she hadn't described me to myself so mercilessly hard though. There, however, in Chicago, I thought how pleased I was I didn't have to have secrets from her; now there was a dusky sort of fluctuation back from this, as if it were fatal to be without hidden things. "I really and truly wanted to help her," I said.

She cried, "What are you talking about--help! The man was picked up by the police just about as you were leaving."

"Who, Oliver?" It stunned me. "Arrested? I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he'd drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent, and I thought he'd force her--"

"That foolish, weak, poor drunk moron--force her? That girl? What did he force before? She didn't lie in bed at the point of a gun, did she?

She's a whore! But it didn't take her very long to see what you were like, that you'd be afraid to fall beneath her expectations, not be the man she wanted you to be, that you'd play her game. You play everyone's."

"You're mad because I don't always play yours. Yes, I reckon she did understand me. She didn't tell me to do this. She asked me. She must have seen I was fed up with being told--"

This made her look with intensified sickness at me, as if a new gust of it had hit her; she held her lip an instant with her teeth. Then she said, "It wasn't a game. I see you took it that way. Well, it wasn't, it was genuine. As far as I could make it, it was. It may have looked like a game to you. I guess it would. Maybe you wouldn't have anything else."

"We're not talking about the same thine. Not the love. It's the other things you're so fantastic about."

"Me--so fantastic?" she said with dry mouth and laid her hand over her breast.

"Well, how can you think you're not--the eagle, the other things, the snakes, hunting every day?"

It gave her another hurt.

"What, were you just being indulgent with me? About the eagle?

That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?"

I felt what a terrible thing I had done to her by this, and so I tried to mitigate it. "Don't those things ever strike you as queer, even for a minute?" I said.

This made her throat tighten, and the tears, before, were nothing to this tightness. She said, "A lot of things look queer to me too. Some of I them maybe much more than what I do seems to you. Loving you, that wasn't queer at all to me. But now you start to seem queer, like many other things. Maybe I am peculiar, that I only know these strange ways of doing something. Instead of sticking to the ordinary way and doing something false. So"--and I was silent, recognizing the right on her side in this--"you made allowances for me." I could scarcely bear how she suffered. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether she could add the next word, her throat kept so many other sounds back, in abeyance.

"I didn't ask you to--ever. Why didn't you say how you felt? You could have told me. I didn't want to seem fantastic to you,"

"You yourself, you never were. No, you weren't."

"You don't tell anybody, I suppose. But to me you didn't have to behave as you do with anyone else. You could have done as you couldn't with anyone else. Isn't there one person in the whole world to whom you could? Do you tell anybody? Yes, I guess love would come in a queer form. You think the queemess is your excuse. But perhaps love would bs strange and foreign to you no matter which way it happened, and maybe you just don't want it. In that case I made a mistake, because I thought you did. And you don't, do you?"

"What do you want to do to me, burn me down to the ground? It's just because you're so jealous and sore--"

"Yes, I am jealous. I feel very sick and disappointed, otherwise I probably wouldn't do this. I know you can't take it. But I'm disappointed.

I'm not just jealous. When I came up to your room in Chicago you had a girl, and when you came to see me I didn't ask you first whether you loved her or not. I knew it couldn't amount to much. But even if it had been important I thought I had to try! I felt mostly alone, as if the world were full of things but empty of people. I know," she admitted, dismaying me deeper than ever, "I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quiet tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them. Because my feeling can't be people's fault, so much. They don't make it. Well, I believed it must be you who could do this for me. And you could. I was so happy to find you. I thought you knew all about what you could do and you were so lucky and so special. That's why it's not just jealousy. I didn't want you to come back. I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more."

Now she bent her head. She was crying. The hat dropped from her head and held by the cord. Gripped hard in my chest like a sick squir- i rel trapped in a chimney, in the silky shudder of smoke, was a terrible stuck feeling. I tried to come near again, and she straightened, looked me in the face, and cried, "I don't want you to do that! I don't want it; I can't allow you to. I know you think this, that, or the other can; always be overlooked, but I don't.": She walked past me to the door, where she stopped. "I'm going to Chilpanzingo," she said. She had stopped crying.

"I'll come with you."

"No, you won't. There won't be any more games. I'm going there alone."

"And what am I supposed to do?"

"Don't ask me. You figure that out yourself."

"I get it," I said.

I was in the room collecting my stuff, burning, with tears and cries 3 that couldn't find an outlet from suffocation, and stones of pity heaped up in me, when I saw her descending to the zocalo with a rifle, and Jacinto with baggage behind her. She was leaving immediately. I wanted to yell to her, "Don't go!" as she had called to me last night in the zocalo, and tell her what a mistake she was making. But what I called her mistake was, in my own emotion, that she was abandoning me.

That was wnat made me tremble when I tried to call to her. She couldn't leave me. I ran through the house to holler from the kitchen garden wall.

Something about me scared the cook; she grabbed up her kid and beat it when she saw me. And suddenly I was as full of rage as of grief, so that they choked me. I tore open the garden door and ran pounding down toward the zocalo, but the station wagon was no longer there. I turned back and kicked open the gate of the house, looking for what to attack and smash. Swooping and bursting, I tore up rocks in the garden and hurled them at the wall, knocking down the stucco. I went into the living room and wrecked the oxhide chairs, the glassware, tore off curtains and pictures. Next, finding myself on the porch, I kicked to pieces the snake cases, overturned them, and stood and watched the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover.

Every last box I booted over.

Then I grabbed my valise and got out. I pounded down into the zocalo, sobbing in my chest.

On Hilario's porch, there was Moulton. I saw only his face above the Carta Blanca shield. He looked down. Him, the pope of rubble.

"Hey, Bolingbroke, where's the girl? Oliver is in the jug. Come on up here, I want to talk to you."

"Why don't you go to hell!"

He didn't hear.

"Why are you carrying a valise?" he said.

I went away and roamed the town some more. In the market place I met Iggy and his little daughter.

"Hey, where did you come from? Oliver was arrested last night."

"Oh, ft--Oliver!"

"Please, Bolingbroke, don't talk that way in front of the kid."

"Don't call me Bolingbroke any more."

I went around with him though, as he led the kid by the hand. We looked at the stalls and finally he bought the kid a cornhusk dolly.

He talked about his troubles. Now she was through with Jepson, should he remarry his wife? I had nothing to say, but felt my eyes burn as I looked at him.

"So you helped Stella get away, huh?" he said. "I guess you did right.

Why should she get it in the neck because of him? Wiley says in jail last night he was screaming about her running out on him."

Then he saw my valise for the first time and said, "Oh-oh, I'm sorry, man! Busted up, huh?"

I flinched, my face twisted, I made a dumb sign and then burst into tears.







CHAPTER XIX



The snakes escaped I presume to the mountains. I didn't go back to Casa Descuitada to find out. Iggy took me to a room in the villa where he stayed. For a time I didn't do anything, only lay in the small warm stone cell at the top of the house. You climbed the stairs till they gave out and then continued the rest of the way up a ladder. There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he'd do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt.

Iggy came and kept me company. There was a low chair on which he sat for hours without saying a word, his chin drawn inward so that his neck was creased and swollen, and his trousers tied at the bottom with the strings of the alpargatas like those of a bicycle rider who doesn't want his cuffs to tangle in the chain. So he sat, his head sunk and his green eyes with inflamed lids. Now and then the church bell would sound, lurching back and forth as if someone were carrying" water that was clear, all right, but in a squalid bucket, and stumbling jand slipping on the stones. Iggy knew I was in a crisis and didn't want 11 me to be alone. But if I tried to say anything he turned the edge of it back against me and accepted nothing of what I told him even after he had encouraged me to talk. Of course I told him everything, to the end of my breath, and then I felt as if he had covered my face with his hand and wouldn't let me say any more. So after this stifling had happened a few times I quit talking. I thought he came to be merciful and stayed to be sure I choked. He got some obscure revenge out of me at the same time that he pitied me.

Anyway, he sat by the dry handsome wall on which the sun fell in over the ledge where the pigeons landed with their red feet and fanned down dust and straw. Sometimes he would actually lay his cheek to the plaster.

I knew I had done wrong. And as I lay and thought of it I felt my eyes roll as if in search of an out. Something happened to my forgetting power, it was impaired. My mistakes and faults came from all sides and gnawed at me. They gnawed away, and I broke out in a sweat, and turned, or felt the vanity of turning.

I'd try again and say, "Iggy, what can I do to prove I love her?"

"I don't know what. Maybe you couldn't prove it because you don't."

"No, Iggy, how can you say that! Can't you see how it is?"

"Why did you go away with that broad then?"

"That was kind of a revolt or something. How should I know why!

I didn't invent human beings, Iggy."

"You don't know the score yet, Boling. I'm sorry for you," he said from his wall, "honest I am. But this has got to happen to you before you get anywheres. You always had it too good. You got to get knocked over and crushed like this. If you don't you'll never understand how much you hurt her. You've got to find out about this and not be so larky."

"She's too angry. If she loved me she wouldn't be so angry. She needs some reason to be so angry.".

"Well, you gave her it."

It was no use trying to argue with Iggy, so I lay silent and argued and pleaded in my mind with Thea instead, but I only kept losing more and more. Why had I done it? I had wounded her badly, I knew it. I could see it as clearly as I could see her saying, white, with a strained throat, "I am disappointed!"

"Well, honey, listen," I wanted to tell her, "of course everybody is disappointed sometime or another. Why, you know that. Everybody gets damaged, and everybody does some damage.

Especially in love. And I've done you this damage. But I love you, and you should forgive me so we can continue."

I ought to have taken my chances with the snakes in the hot mountains, creeping after them with nooses on the brown soil up there, instead of hanging around the dizzy town where things were even more dangerous.

It had hit her hard when I revealed what I thought of her hunting.

But hadn't she also tried to carry me to the ground and crush me with the attack she made on me, saying how vain I was, how unreliable, how I was always looking at other women and had no conscience? And was it true, as she said, that love would appear strange to me no matter what form it took, even if there were no eagles and snakes?

I thought about it and was astonished at how much truth there actually was in this. Why, it was so! And I had always believed that where love was concerned I was on my mother's side, against the Grandma Lausches, the Mrs. Renlings, and the Lucy Magnuses.

If I didn't have money or profession or duties, wasn't it so that I could be free, and a sincere follower of love?

Me, love's servant? I wasn't at all! And suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was sick of myself. I thought that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I wasn't a bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that Mexico from beyond the walls would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the bone dust and twisted, spiky crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and lizards.

Now I had started, and this terrible investigation had to go on. If this was how I was, it was certainly not how I appeared but must be my secret. So if I wanted to please, it was in order to mislead or show everyone, wasn't it, now? And this must be because I had an idea everyone was my better and had something I didn't have. But what did people seem to me anyhow, something fantastic? I didn't want to be what they made of me but wanted to please them. Kindly explain! An independent fate, and love too--what confusion!

I must be a monster to make such confusion.

But no, I couldn't be a monster and suffer both. That would be too unjust. I didn't believe it. '

It wasn't right to think everyone else had more power of being. Why, look now, it was clear as anything that it wasn't so but merely imagination, exaggerating how you're regarded, misunderstanding how you're liked for what you're not, disliked for what you're not, both from error' and laziness. The way must be not to care, but in that case you must know how really to care and understand what's pleasing or displeasing in yourself. But do you think every newcomer is concerned and is watching? No. And do you care that anyone should care in return? Not by a long shot. Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can't care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong.

All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what's real. And that's disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind--mere humanity.

But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty, the , 401 instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.

This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world --with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies--becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version.

I certainly looked like an ideal recruit. But the invented things never became real for me no matter how I urged myself to think they were.

My real fault was that I couldn't stay with my purest feelings. This was what tore the greatest hole in me. Maybe Thea couldn't stand many happy days in a row either, that did occur to me as a reason for her cooling off. Perhaps she had this trouble too, with her chosen thing.

The year before, when Mimi was in trouble, Kayo Obermark had said to me that this happened to everyone. Everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing. It might be in the end that the chosen thing in itself is bitterness, because to arrive at the chosen thing needs courage, because it's intense, and intensity is what the feeble humanity of us can't take for long. And also the chosen thing can't be one that we already have, since what we already have there isn't much use or respect for.

Oh, this made me feel terrible contempt, the way I felt, riled and savage.

The f----slaves! I thought. The lousy cowards!

As for me personally, not much better than some of the worst, my invention and special thing, was simplicity. I wanted simplicity and denied complexity, and in this I was guileful and suppressed many patents in my secret heart, and was as devising as anybody else. Or why would I long for simplicity?

Personality is unsafe in the first place. It's the types that are safe.

So almost all make deformations on themselves so that the great terror will let them be. It isn't new. The timid tribespeople, they flatten down heads or pierce lips or noses, or hack off thumbs, or make themselves masks as terrible as the terror itself, or paint or tattoo. It's all to anticipate the terror which does not welcome your being.

Tell me, how many Jacobs are there who sleep on the stone and force it to be their pillow, or go to the mat with angels and wrestle the great fear to win a right to exist? These brave are so few that they are made the fathers of a whole people.

While as for me, whoever would give me cover from this mighty free-running terror and wild cold of chaos I went to, and therefore to temporary embraces. It wasn't very courageous. That I was like many others in this was no consolation. If there were so many they must all suffer the same way I did.

Well, now that I knew of this I wanted another chance. I thought I must try to be brave again. So I decided I'd go and plead with her in Chilpanzingo, and say that though I was a weak man I could little by little alter if she'd bear with me.

As soon as I had decided this I felt much better. I went to the peluqueria and had myself shaved. Then I ate lunch at Louie Fu's and one of his daughters pressed my pants for me. I was overwrought but primed with hopes too. I already saw how she'd whiten in the face as she denounced me, and her eyes darken and flash out at me. But also she'd throw her arms around me. Because she also needed me. And all her eccentric force, which came from doubt as to whether her desire could ever trust someone again, would stop and rest on me.

Imagining how this would be, I melted, my chest got hot, soft, sore, and yearning. I saw it already happening. It's always been like that with me, that fantasy went ahead of me and prepared the way. Or else, as it seems, the big heavy personal van, dark and cumbersome, can't start into strange terrain. But this imagination of mine, like the Roman army out in Spain or Gaul, makes streets and walls even if it's only camping, for the night.

While I sat in my shorts and waited for my pants, Louie's dog came out. Listless and fat, she smelled like old Winnie. She stood square before me and gazed. Not wanting to be stroked, she backed away with clicking claws when I reached out, and she showed little old teeth. Not that she was sore, but wanted to go back to her isolation. So she did, under the curtain with an extreme sigh. She was very old.

The bus, an old rural schoolbus from the States, arrived like the buckboard of olden times. I was already inside, holding my ticket, when Moulton came up and said through the window, "Come out, I want to talk to you."

"No, I won't."

"Come," he said earnestly. "It's important. You'd better."

Iggy said, "Whyn't you mind your own business, Wiley?"

Moulton's big brow and squash nose were covered with a white sweat. "Will it be better if he walks into something and gets knocked over?" he said.

I got out. "What do you mean, knocked over?" I asked.

Before Iggy could interfere, if he was about to try, Moulton clasped my hand next to his hard belly, drew my arm taut under his, and with burly haste he made me walk a few fast steps on the stones and rosy garbage, on my turned-over heels.

"Get onto yourself," he said. "Talavera was Thea's friend, old man.

He's there with her in Chilpanzingo."

I tore loose. I was going to get my fingers into his neck and choke him to death.

"Ig," he yelled, "you better hold on to him!" Iggy who was just behind us took hold of me.

"Let go!"

"Wait, you're not going to kill him right here with cops and everybody around. You better beat it, Wiley. He's pulling like a bull."

I wanted to smash Iggy to the ground too as he held my arm.

"Now wait, Boling. Find out first if it's true. Chrissake, use your head!"

Moulton was going backwards while I dragged Iggy on my arm.

"Don't be a foolish bastard, Boling," said Moulton. "It's true all right. You think I want trouble with you? I only did it to help, so you wouldn't get hurt. It's dangerous down there. Talavera will kill you."

"Look what a favor you done him!" said Iggy. "Look at his face!"

"Is it true he went down there with her, Iggy?" I said, stopping. I was so clawed and bit inside I could hardly get out this question.

"He was her boy friend here before," Iggy said. "A guy told me yesterday that Talavera took off for Chilpanzingo right after Thea."

"When was he--?"

"A few years ago. Why, he was living at Casa Descuitada, just about," said Moulton.

I couldn't any longer stay on my feet and slumped down against the bandstand. I covered my head with my hands and shivered, my face on my knees.

Moulton was severe toward me. "I'm surprised the way you take it, . March," he said.

"How do you want him to take it? Stop layin' it on him," said Iggy- "He acts like a kid and you encourage him," Moulton said. "This has happened to me, it's happened to you. It happened to Talavera when she showed up with Smitty and then with him."

"No, it didn't. Talavera knew she was married."

"What's the difference? Even if Talavera is a chorus-boy horse-rider he has his feelings. Well, shouldn't a man find out when this happens to him? Shouldn't I have found out? Shouldn't you have found out? This is one of those damn facts that have got to be known."

"But the guy still loves her. You got mad when somebody put the blocks to your wife, but not because you loved her."

"Well, does she love him?" said Moulton. "Then what was she doing in the mountains with Talavera after March got knocked on the dome and was laid up?"

"She was doing nothing in the mountains with him," I cried out, raging again. "If he's in Chilpanzingo now, he's just in Chilpanzingo and not with Thea."

He stared at me, acting full of curiosity. He said, "Brother, I bet you see exactly what everybody else sees, but you just stick by your opinions.

Why didn't she tell you he was her old boy friend? And what were they doing, just having a debate of yes or no, and she didn't get off her horse for him?"; "Nothing went on. Nothing! If you don't stop talking I'll ram one of these stones down your throat!"

But he was terribly roused too and bound to go on; he wasn't just trifling but intended something. His eyes were open large and fixed on me.

"Too bad, friend, but women have no judgment. They aren't just for happy young fellows like you. What do you want to bet her britches came down for him, and she didn't save all her sweet little things for you?"

I jumped at him. Iggy held me from the back, and I picked him off the ground and tried to get rid of him by dashing him against the bandstand, but he clung, and when I threw my weight backwards and crushed him so he'd let go, he gasped, "Christ, you lost your mind?

I'm keepin' you outa trouble."

Moulton had already gotten away, down the busy street that led to the market. I yelled after him, "Okay, you filthy slob sonofabitch. You wait. I'll kill you!"..

"Quit that, Boling, there's a cop with his eye on you."

An Indian policeman sat on the running board of a nearby car. He probably was used to drunken gringos wrangling and scrapping.

Iggy had forced me down on my knee; he still clutched my arms.

"Can I let you loose now? You won't run after him?" I uttered a kind of sob and shook my head. He helped me to stand up. "Look at you covered with muck. You'll have to change your clothes."

"No, I haven't got time."

"Come on to my room. I'll get this stuff off you at least with a brush."

"I'm not going to miss that bus."

"You mean to say you're going down there anyway? You must be cracked."

But I had decided I'd go, I washed my face at Louie's and got into the bus; my place was taken there, and all the early birds who had watched me by the bandstand appeared to have understood what it was about, that I was a poor cabron who had lost his woman.

Iggy entered the bus with me. He said, "Never mind him. He tried to make her himself and propositioned her a dozen times. He was dying to get her. That's why he was interested in you and would come up to the villa. At Oliver's party he tried to make her again. It was why she left so fast."

It didn't matter so much; it was about like a burning match next to a four-alarm fire.

"Don't go getting into a fight there. You'd be nuts. Talavera will kill you. . Maybe I should come and keep you out of trouble. You want me to?"

"Thanks. Just let me alone." He didn't really want to come with me.

The old bus made a sudden noise, as of sewing machines in a loft.

Through the fumes the cathedral seemed as if reflected in a river.

"Shoving off," said Iggy. "Remember," he warned me again as he got to the ground, "you're foolish to go. You're just asking for it."

As the bus rolled down from the town a peasant woman kindly shared her edge of the seat with me. When I sat down I felt it start to burst through me again. Oh, fire, fire! Spasms or cramps of jealous sickness, violent and burning. I held my face and felt that I might croak.

What did she do it for? Why did she take up with Talavera? To punish me? That was a way to punish somebody!

Why, she was guilty herself of what she accused me! Was I looking over her shoulder at Stella? Well, she was looking over mine at Talavera and had revenge ready right away.

Where was that little cat we used to have in Chicago? All at once I wondered. Because one time when we had been away in Wisconsin for two days and came back at night this little thing was crying from hunger. Then Thea started to weep over it and put it inside her dress while we drove to Fulton Street market to feed it a whole fish. And where was this cat now? Left behind somewhere, nowhere special, and that was how permanent Thea's attachments were.

Then I thought that I had loved her so, it was a pleasure to me that the creases at the joints of our fingers were similar; so now with these fingers she would touch Talavera where she had touched me. And when I thought of her doing with another man what she had done with me, that she would forget herself the same, and praise him and kiss him, and kiss in the same places, gone out of her mind with tenderness, eyes wide, hugging his head, opening her legs, it just about annihilated me. I watched in my imagination and suffered horribly.

I had wanted to marry her, but there isn't any possession. No, no, wives don't own husbands, nor husbands wives, nor parents children.

They go away, or they die. So the only possessing is of the moment. If you're able. And while any wish lives, it lives in the face of its negative.

This is why we make the obstinate sign of possession. Like deeds, certificates, rings, pledges, and other permanent things.

We tore toward Chilpanzingo in the heat. First the brown stormy mountains, then badland rocks and green Florida feathers. As we rolled into the town someone jumped on the side of the bus for a free ride, grabbing my arm and digging his fingers into it hard. I fought and tore it free. In jumping off this joy-rider whacked the palm of my hand as I reached after him. It stung, and I was furious.

Here was the zocalo. White filthy walls sunk toward the ground and rat-gnawed Spanish charm moldered from the balconies, a horrible street like Seville rotting, and falling down to flowering garbage heaps.

I thought if I saw Talavera on the street I'd try to kill him. What with? I had a penknife. It wasn't dangerous enough. In the square I looked for a shop where I could buy a knife, but I saw none. What I did see was a place that said "Cafe." It was a square black opening in a wall, as if dug free in the Syrian desert from thousand-years' burial. I went in with the object of stealing a knife off the counter. There weren't any knives there, only tiny spoons with braided necks in the sugar. A piece of white mosquito net hung down torn, like close, fine work done to no useful purpose.

Coming out of the cafe, I saw the station wagon parked in front of a New Orleans ironwork kind of a place from which there were pieces missing. Without thinking any more of knives, I ran there and went inside. No clerk was at the desk; there was only an old man who cleaned the sand of the path in the decayed patio. He told me Thea's room number. I had him go up and ask if she would see me. She herself called to me from a gap in the shutter. What did I want? I went up the stairs swiftly, and at the big wooden double doors of her room I said to her, "I have to talk to you."

She let me in, and when I entered I looked first for signs of him.

There was the usual mess of clothes and equipment. I couldn't tell whether any of it belonged to him. But it wouldn't have made any difference.

I was determined to go beyond any such things. "What do you want, Augie?" she said again. I looked at her. Her eyes were not as keen as usual and she looked ill; above, her brilliant black hair was slipping from its combs. She wore a silk coat or robe. Apparently she had just put it on. In heat like this she preferred to go naked in her room. When I wanted to recall how she was, naked, I found I could do it very well. She saw my eyes on her lower belly and her hand descended to hold the edge of the robe there. Seeing that colorful, round-fingered hand descend I bitterly felt how my privilege had ended and passed to another man. I wanted it back.

I said with my face naming, "I came to ask if we could be together again."

"No, I don't think we can now."

"I hear Talavera is here with you. Is he?"

"Is it any business of yours?"

I took that for an affirmative and felt in great pain.

I said, "I suppose it isn't. But why did you have to take up with him right away? As soon as I had someone, you had to have someone.

You're no better than I am. You kept him in reserve."

"I think the only reason you're here is that you heard about him," she said.

"No, I came to ask how about another chance. He doesn't make so much difference to me."

"No?" she said with that white warmth of the face she had. She gave a momentary smile of thought.

"I could forget about him if you still wanted me."

"You'd be bringing him up every other day, whenever we had any trouble."

"No, I wouldn't."

"I know that now you're dying with worry that he'll come in and you'll have a fight. But he's not here, so you can set your mind at rest."

"So he was here!"

She didn't answer. Had she sent him away? Maybe she had. At least that mixed hope and anxiety could end. Of course I had been afraid.

But also I hoped I might have killed him. I'd have tried to. I already had thought this over. I pictured that he would have stabbed me.

She said, "You can't love me, thinking I'm with another man. You must want to murder the both of us. You must want to see him fall off a mountain ten thousand feet, and me in a coffin at my funeral."

I was silent, and while she stared at me, what a strange view I had of her in this moldery Hispanic room, the tropical sun in the gaps of the shutter--decay in the town, the spiky, twisted patch of grave iron on the slope, bleeding bougainvillaea bubbles, purple and tubercular on the walls, vines shrieky green, and the big lips and forehead of the mountains begging or singing; then the mess of the room itself, the rags and costly things which she used alike as they happened to come to hand, Kleenexes or silk underthings, dresses, cameras, cosmetics. She did things fast, hoping she did them right. Evidently she didn't believe what I had come to say. She didn't believe because she didn't feel, and didn't feel because of a broken connection.

"You don't have to decide now, Thea."

"No, well--I suppose not. I may feel differently about you later, but I don't think I will. Right now I have no use for you. Especially when I think how you behave with other people. I wish you all the harm I can think of. I wish you were dead."

"And I still love you," I said. And it must have been evident, for I wasn't lying. I stood and was shaking. But she gave no answer.

"Don't you want to have it again the way it was?" I said. "I think I could do it right this time."

"How do you know you could?"

"Most people are probably in the same condition I'm in. But there must be a way to learn to do better."

"Must there?" she said. "I guess you would think so."

"Of course. How would the hope be there at all otherwise? How would I know what to want? How did you know?"

"What do you want to prove by me and what I know?" She said in a low voice, "I've been wrong a good many times--more than I want to discuss with you." She changed the subject. "Jacinto sent me a message about the snakes," she said. "If you had been around I'd have hit you with something." < But I sensed that this was one offense of mine that didn't displease her. I had an impression of a smile of halfway appreciation of it. But I couldn't take much hope from that, because smiling and abstraction, obstinacy, intention to hurt, alternated fast in her cloudy white nervousness, and I saw she was unable to gather together her feelings toward 0 409 CHAPTER XX Back in Acatia I lay around. I hoped all the same to hear from Thea, and though it was useless I kept calling at the post office. Notified of nothing, I generally went, then, and drank tequila with beer chasers.

I no longer played poker at Louie's and saw none of that gang. Jepson was picked up for vagrancy and sent back to the States, thus Iggy's wife wanted him back. The little kid knew what it was all about, and when I saw them out walking sensed how sharp she was already, at her age, and pitied her.

So on some of the golden afternoons by the dive where I sat on a bench in neglected pants and dirty shirt and with three days of bristles, I had the inclination to start out and say, "0 you creatures still above the ground, what are you up to! Even happiness and beauty is like a movie." Many times I felt tears. Or again I'd be angry and want to holler. But while no other creature is reprimanded for its noise, for yelling, roaring, screaming, cawing, or braying, there is supposed to be more delicate relief for the human species. However, I'd go up one of the mountain roads where only an occasional Indian heard and wouldn't say what he thought of it, and there I'd speak my feelings aloud or I'd yell, and it made me feel better temporarily.

There was one companion I had for a few days, a Russian who had been dropped by the Cossack chorus after a fight. He still wore his serge tunic with white piping and all the spaces for bullets. He was very proud and nervous, he bit his nails. His scalp was bare and gave like a soft light on the handsome solemnity of his face, clean shaven at all times. His nose was straight, his mouth was held in with tender rancor, and he had black, continuous, illustrious brows. Damn, if he didn't look like a picture of the poet D'Annunzio that I once saw.

He drank and he was broke, and pretty soon he'd be picked up too, like Jepson. I had very little money left but I bought a bottle of tequila now and then, so he was attached to me.

Well, I felt about my relations with him somewhat as I did about Iggy's little girl, pitying her for what she had to understand. At first I was sorry he was my companion. But then I liked him better. And as I wanted to tell someone about Thea, I confessed all to him. I told the whole story. I thought he'd sympathize with me. Those many deep hash marks of enlistment with grief that he had on his forehead were what made me think so.

"So you see how rough it's been," I said. "I'm not having it easy. I suffer a great deal. Part of the time I'm half dead."

"Wait," he told me, "you haven't seen anything yet."

This made me furious with him. All in a rush I said to him, "Why, you lousy egotist!" I wanted to knock him down; I was drunk enough then to do it. "What do you mean, you runt! You cheesecloth Cossack you! After I've told you how I feel"

But he wanted to carry the emphasis over to how he felt. He with his naked head and reddened nose and rancor of the mouth. 'But he wasn't such a bad wretch at that. It was actually only natural. Why, he too had a life. He sat there hopeless. He smelled like a bygone brand of footpowder there had once been in the house. But all the same he was simpatico.

"All right pal," I said. "That's true, you have had a bad time. You may never see Harbin again, or wherever you're from."

"Not Harbin, Paris," he said.

"Okay, you poor jerk, Paris. Let it be Paris then."

"I had an uncle in Moscow," he said, "who dressed himself like a woman and went to the church. And he scared everybody because he had a beard and looked very fierce. A policeman said to him, 'You look to me, sir, like a man and not a woman.' So he said, 'Do you know, you look to me like a woman and not a man.' And he went away. Everybody was scared of him."

"This is very fine, but how does it mean I haven't seen anything yet?"

"I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible. Don't you think my uncle must have been desperate to go in that dark church and frighten everybody? He bad to use his powers.

He felt he had only a few years more to live."

Well, I pretended not to understand because it suited me to make him out as ridiculous, but I knew very well what he was trying to get across. Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential. This is a fact.

Finally I had to stop going around with him. He took to pimping for Negra who was the madame of the foco rojo, and I decided to make a move. I sold my fancy equipment, like the riding boots and the lifesaving Lake Huron jacket, to Louie Fu, and with the pesos I went to Mexico City. I gave up on waiting for Thea to forgive me. It was sad putting up at the Regina without her. The management and the chambermaids remembered her and the bird and saw I had come down in life; no station wagon, no bags, no wild beast, no happy joy and eating mangos in bed, etcetera. The assignation couples made noise at night, when this was no place for me. But it was cheap and so I closed my ears.

There was no dough from Stella at Wells Fargo. However, I had Sylvester's number at Coyoacan and could call him when flat broke.

First I thought I'd try Manny Padilla's cousin. He was nothing like Manny, but scrawny, red-skinned, glittering his teeth and hungry, a fast man with a buck. He wanted to be my guide to the city, but Thea had already shown me it; he wanted to introduce me to Spanish literature and finally he put the touch on me for some dough. He said he was going to buy me a blanket with it, but he never showed up again.

I ached in my body for Thea though I knew she was by now unobtainable and absolutely removed from me by the difficulty of her mind and the peculiarity of my own character. So I knocked around the city thinking things over. I'd watch the mariachis and death-song fiddlercripples or the flower-sellers and the bees feeding off the candystands.

Whichever way you turned there was the snow of one of the volcanoes and the whole mountain floating in. If I could help it I wouldn't look in a mirror those days, being haggard and ill. At one time I felt that if Death came up and tapped me on the shoulder, saying, "Ready?" I'd think it over a minute and then say, "Okay." So in a way I died somewhat, and if there was anything I knew by now it was how impossible it is to live without something infinitely mighty and great. However, the city was beautiful--even the unsightliness, misery, and scrawls were rich--it was warm, and this kept me going. My heart would complain and I felt sick, but not continually in the utmost despair.

At last I got in touch with Sylvester. He came to see me and lent me some dough. He wasn't saying much at first. I understood that he couldn't talk about political and confidential things.

"You look starved and raggedy," he said. "If I didn't know you I'd say you were one of these Pan-American burns. You've got to clean yourself up."

I felt as if I were an object Caligula had dropped about a thousand feet to the earth. The air screamed. The colors were about like the colors of Jerusalem. However, getting up stunned, I wanted to be steadfast.

Go and be steadfast though! Just like that! It's not a small order.

Sylvester realized that I wanted to get myself reconstructed and not go to wrack. He gave me his grin with little dark lines, always amused at me.

"My luck has been very bad, Sylvester," I said.

"I see. I see. Well, do you want to stick around here until it changes or do you want to go back to Chicago?"

"What do you think? I don't know what I should do."

"Stick around. There's a sympathizer who'll put you up for a while if Frazer asks him."

"I'd be glad. I'd be very grateful, Sylvester. Who is this sympathizer?"

"He's a friend of the Old Man from away back. He'd put you up. I don't like to see you go around the way you are."

"Gee thanks, Sylvester. Thanks."

So then Frazer came around and took me over to be introduced to the sympathizer, whose name was Paslavitch. He was a friendly Yugoslavian who lived in a little villa out in Coyoacan. Beside his mouth were deep folds and inside them grew little shining bristles, as the geode or marvel of the rock world is full of tiny crystals. He was a very original kind of person. His head was onion-shaped and clipped close. In the garden where he was when we met the heat was trembling off the top of his dome.

He said, "You are very welcome. I am glad to have company. Maybe you will give me English lessons?"

"Sure he will," said Frazer. Frazer's looks had changed too. I never understood better why Mimi had called him "Preacher." With the pucker of thought between his eyes he did look like a minister. And also like an officer of the Confederate Army. He appeared to have grave weights on his mind and to be preoccupied with superior things.

He left me with this Paslavitch, then, and for some reason I felt I was put in deposit or reserve, but I was tired and didn't much care what he had in mind. Paslavitch showed me the rooms and the garden. I gazed at the birds, caged and free, the hummingbirds in the flowers and the spiny applauding of the cactuses. Lying in the grass or standing along the path were Mexican gods who gripped and clutched on themselves and cooled their hot teeth and tongues in the blue air.

Paslavitch was a kind, worried, meek, stubborn man who covered Mexico for the Yugoslav press. He considered himself a Bolshevik and old revolutionary but he was a lacrimae rerum type if I ever saw one; everything was forever touching him, and he had tears the way a pine has gum to give. He played Chopin on the piano, and when he executed a particular march he'd say to me, "Frederic Chopin wrote this during a storm when he was in Mallorca with George Sand. She was sailing on the Mediterranean. When she arrived he said, 'I thought you were drowned!' Pressing on the pedals in his Mexican shoes, he made you think of Nero acting in a tragedy. Most of all this Paslavitch was in love with French culture and had a keen wish to teach me. In fact he had an obsession about teaching and was always saying, "Teach me about Chicago,"

"Teach me about General Ulysses S. Grant. I will teach you. I will tell you about Fontenelle's ham omelette. We will exchange."

He was very eager. "Fontenelle wanted to eat a ham omelette on a Friday but a terrible storm started, with thunder. So finally he threw the omelette out of the window and said to God, 'Seigneur! Tant de bruit pour une omelette.' " It could be illuminating. He'd sway, with closed eyes and tight pronunciation. Or else he'd tell me, "Louis Thirteenth loved to play barber and would shave his gentlemen whether they wanted it or not. Also he enjoyed to imitate dying agonies, so he would make faces, and furthermore he would spend the wedding night in the same bed with young couples and was the last expression of feudal degeneracy."

Maybe he was, but Paslavitch loved him because he was French.

He'd keep me after supper and repeat these conversations of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, de la Rochefoucauld and the Duchesse de Longueville, Diderot and a young actress, Chamfort and somebody else.

I liked Paslavitch but sometimes it was heavy going, being his guest.

I also had to go and play billiards with him at a club on the Calle de Uruguay. And to drink with him, when he felt like drinking. I did not want to do it in the afternoon because it reminded me too much of the tequila drinking I did in Acatla. But we'd sit and kill a few bottles of wine. Thousand soft moose-lashes of the copper forest sun passed through the trees; the garden was green while the woman's form of the volcano slept in the snow. I was a guest and guests have to go along with hosts. I paid my way by teaching him about the major leagues, etcetera.

Meanwhile I was building up my health somewhat, and then Frazer came around and sprung what he had been saving me for.

"You know that the GPU wants the Old Man's life," said Frazer.

I knew it. I had read in the papers about the machine-gun attack on his villa and Paslavitch had told me many other details.

"Well," said Frazer, "a man named Mink who is the chief of the Russian police has arrived in Mexico to take over the campaign against the Old Man."

"What a terrible thing! What can you do to protect him?"

"Well, the villa is being fortified, and we have a bodyguard. But the fortification isn't ready yet. The cops aren't enough to do the job.

Stalin is out to get him because he's the conscience of the revolutionary world.". "Why are you telling me this, Frazer?"

"Here's the thing. There's a scheme being discussed. Maybe the Old Man will shake the GPU by traveling incognito around the country."

"What do you mean, incognito?"

"This is confidential, March. I mean that he should take off his beard and mustache, cut his hair, and pass as a tourist."

Well, I thought this mighty queer. As if Gandhi should go dressed in a Prince Albert. That this formerly so mighty and commanding man should have to alter and humble himself. Somehow, though I had seen and known lots of trouble, this struck me very hard.

I said, "Whose idea is this?"

"Why it's been discussed," said Frazer in his professional revolutionary way, meaning it wasn't any of my business. "I trust you, March, or I wouldn't have suggested you for a part in this."

"Why, where do I come in?" I said.

He said, "If the Old Man is going to travel incognito as a visitor to Mexico he's going to need a nephew from the States."

"Me, you mean?"

"You and a girl comrade as husband and wife. Would you do it?"

I saw myself driving around Mexico with this great person, tracked by secret agents. I felt too worn out to take it on.

"There wouldn't be any hanky-panky with the girl," said Frazer.

"I don't even understand what you mean. I'm trying to recover from the injury of a love affair."

Please God! I thought, keep me from being sucked into another one of those great currents where I can't be myself. Naturally I wanted to be of help, and rescue and peril attracted me. But I wasn't up to it at all, going up and down the mountains of Mexico through the bazaar of red nature and dizzy with deaths and noises.

"I'm telling you this because the Old Man is very moral."

Frazer spoke as though he too were very moral. Tell it to the marines! I thought.

"He won't do it anyhow," I said. "It's a loony idea."

"That's for the people who've protecting him to decide."

But to me it seemed his appearance was his trademark. His head was.

Sooner than touch it he'd maybe let it be taken off him and kept just as it was for martyrdom. Kind of like St. John and Herod. And I had to stop and ask myself about martyrdom. Out in Russia was his enemy who didn't mind obliging him. He'd kill him. Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right. That's what passed through my mind.

"You'd have to pack a gun. Does that scare you?"

"Me? Of course not," I said. "Not that part of it."

I reflected in my private mind that I must have holes in my head like a colander not to refuse. Was I so flattered by the chance to be with this giant historical personality, speeding around the mountains? The car would rush like mad. The wild beasts would flee. The terrible earth would turn around. And he would be silent to me on his thoughts of nations and destiny. The lost world would call after us with secret voice, and behind us there would be a Jeam of international killers pursuing and waiting for their chance.

"Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves."

"That's not a good point of view," said Frazer.

"No? Maybe. It's just a thought."

"Will you do it?"

"You feel I'm the right sort of guy for it?"

"We need somebody who looks very American."

"I guess I could spare some time," I said, "if it doesn't take too long."

"A few weeks, just to shake off Mink and his men."

He went away, and I was sitting in the garden where the lizards were tickling in the grass and there was a choke of gorgeous color by the birds along the hot walls. The gods stood or lay and persisted in their gray volcano illustrations of what the forces of life are. Paslavitch was playing Chopin upstairs. My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair.

How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn't have o. ' 417 the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.

Paslavitch came out on his balcony in his blue bathrobe and asked meekly if I wanted a drink.

"Okay," I said. I was very worried about this whole scheme.

But it fell through, and when it did I was very glad. I had been in a clutch about it and lost sleep dreaming how we would chase from town to town all the way through Jalisco or out into the deserts. But the Old Man vetoed this. I wanted to send him a letter telling him how smart I thought he was, but then I thought it wouldn't be right for me to discuss secrets of his political activity. He must certainly have given a scream when they propositioned him on it.

Anyhow, I felt now that there was something about the effect of Mexico on me, that I couldn't hold my own against it any more and had better get back to the States. Paslavitch lent me two hundred pesos and I bought my ticket to Chicago. He was affected a lot by my going and told me many times in French that he would miss me. Likewise, I'm sure. He was a very decent guy. You don't meet so many such.