Tropic of Capricorn (14 page)

“And supposing,” says Curley suddenly, “that I tell him I stole the money in order to help you out? What then?” He began to laugh hysterically.

“I don’t think O’Rourke would believe that,” I said calmly. “You can try it, of course, if you think it will help you to clear your own skirts. But I rather think it will have a bad effect. O’Rourke knows me … he knows I wouldn’t let you do a thing like that.”

“But you did let me do it!”

“I didn’t tell you to do it. You did it without my knowledge. That’s quite different. Besides, can you prove that I accepted money from you? Won’t it seem a little ridiculous to accuse me, the one who befriended you, of putting you up to a job like that? Who’s going to believe you? Not O’Rourke. Besides, he hasn’t trapped you yet. Why worry about it in advance? Maybe you could begin to return the money little by little before he gets after you. Do it anonymously.”

By this time Curley was quite used up. There was a little schnapps in the cupboard which his old man kept in reserve and I suggested that we take a little to brace us up. As we were drinking the schnapps it suddenly occurred to me that Maxie had said he would be at Luke’s house to pay his respects. It was just the moment to get Maxie. He would be full of slobbering sentiments and I could give him any old kind of cock-and-bull story. I could say that the reason I had assumed such a hard-boiled air on the phone was because I was harassed, because I didn’t know where to turn for the ten dollars which I needed so badly. At the same time I might be able to make a date with Lottie. I began to smile thinking about it. If Luke could only see what a friend he had in me! The most difficult thing would be to go up to the bier and take a sorrowful look at Luke.
Not to laugh!

I explained the idea to Curley. He laughed so heartily that the tears were rolling down his face. Which convinced me, by the way, that it would be safer to leave Curley downstairs while I made the touch. Anyway, it was decided on.

They were just sitting down to dinner when I walked in, looking as sad as I could possibly make myself look. Maxie was there and almost shocked by my sudden appearance. Lottie had gone already. That helped me to keep up the sad look. I asked to be alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted on accompanying me. The others were relieved, I imagine, as they had been conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon. And like the good Germans they were they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted. As I was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware of
Maxie’s eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and smiled at him in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. “Listen, Maxie,” I said, “are you sure they won’t hear us?” He looked still more puzzled and grieved, but nodded reassuringly. “It’s like this, Maxie … I came up here purposely to see you … to borrow a few bucks. I know it seems lousy but you can imagine how desperate I must be to do a thing like this.” He was shaking his head solemnly as I spit this out, his mouth forming a big O as if he were trying to frighten the spirits away. “Listen, Maxie,” I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad and low, “this is no time to give me a sermon. If you want to do something for me lend me ten bucks now, right away … slip it to me right here while I look at Luke. You know, I really liked Luke. I didn’t mean all that over the telephone. You got me at a bad moment. The wife was tearing her hair out. We’re in a mess, Maxie, and I’m counting on you to do something. Come out with me if you can and I’ll tell you more about it …” Maxie, as I had expected, couldn’t come out with me. He wouldn’t think of deserting them at such a moment … “Well, give it to me now,” I said, almost savagely. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I’ll have lunch with you downtown.”

“Listen, Henry,” says Maxie, fishing around in his pocket, embarrassed at the idea of being caught with a wad in his hand at that moment, “listen,” he said, “I don’t mind giving you the money, but couldn’t you have found another way of reaching me? It isn’t because of Luke … it’s …” He began to hem and haw, not knowing really what he wanted to say.

“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered, bending over Luke more closely so that if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to … “for Christ’s sake, don’t argue about it now … hand it over and be done with it … I’m desperate, do you hear me?” Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn’t disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin reverently I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell whether it was a single or a ten-spot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and
straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with hysterical laughter.

At the corner, by the lamp post, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence, Curley suddenly says: “
Did you get it?
” That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the guts but a pleasurable pain.

What relieved me more than anything was the sight of the bill I had filched from Maxie’s wad. It was a twenty dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that idiot, Maxie, there were still more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives. If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. I don’t know why it should have made me feel so, but it enraged me. The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly as possible – a five-spot would fix him up – and then go on a little spree. What I particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn’t a spark of decency in her. Where to meet one like that …
just like that?
Well, get rid of Curley first. Curley, of course, is hurt. He had expected to stick with me. He pretends not to want the five bucks, but when he sees that I’m willing to take it back, he quickly stows it away.

Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy. The immense, frozen solitude of the million-footed mob, the cold, waste fire of the electrical display,
the
overwhelming
meaningless of the perfection of the female who through perfection has crossed the frontier of sex and gone into the minus sign, gone into the red, like the electricity, like the neutral energy of the males, like planets without aspect, like peace programmes, like love over the radio. To have money in the pocket in the midst of white, neutral energy, to walk meaningless and unfecundated through the bright glitter of the calcimined streets, to think aloud in full solitude on the edge of madness, to be of a city, a great city, to be of the last moment of time in the greatest city in the world and feel no part of it, is to become oneself a city, a world of dead stone, of waste light, of unintelligible motion, of imponderables and incalculables, of the secret perfection of all that is minus. To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money,
but what makes money make money?

Again the dance hall, the money rhythm, the love that comes over the radio, the impersonal, wingless touch of the crowd. A despair that reaches down to the very soles of the boots, an ennui, a desperation. In the midst of the highest mechanical perfection to dance without joy, to be so desperately alone, to be almost inhuman because you are human. If there were life on the moon what more nearly perfect, joyless evidence of it could there be than this. If to travel away from the sun is to reach the chill idiocy of the moon, then we have arrived at our goal and life is but the cold, lunar incandescence of the sun. This is the dance of ice-cold life in the hollow of an atom, and the more we dance the colder it gets.

So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimetre of lust running to dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable
defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in the impeccable lunar consistency. This is the icy white maidenhead of love’s logic, the web of the ebbed tide, the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the centre of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

In the moment all is dear to me, clear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with
many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look
into
the eyes or
through
the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the corners of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream’s substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

Thus moments pass, veridic moments of time without space when I know all, and knowing all I collapse beneath the vault of the selfless dream.

Between these moments, in the interstices of the dream, life vainly tried to build up, but the scaffold of the city’s mad logic is no support. As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am levelled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ’s, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of
little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is imperfectible. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature as it is projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic. I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until the time comes again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to destroy. I shall make no judgments, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will come to me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will die as they lived, in disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of redemption. If one says to me, you must be religious, I shall make no answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there’s a cunt waiting for me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I shall make no answer. There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the corner, but the mother who bore me turned many a corner and made no answer, and finally she turned herself inside out
and I am the answer.

Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is infinitely better, while attending death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment. Infinitely better, as life moves towards a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make them while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

I’m thinking now about the rock fight one summer’s afternoon long long ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My Cousin Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn’t know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to
show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies. That’s how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they caught us I don’t know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home: we had cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey Kesselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding, Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dresses and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them that it was almost like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys – we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight.

When I left my cousin at the end of the summer I didn’t see him again for twenty years or more. When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the look of innocence he wore – the same expression as the day of the rock fight. When I spoke to him about the fight I was still more amazed to discover that he
had forgotten that it was we who had killed the boy: he remembered the boy’s death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I had had any part in it. When I mentioned Weesie’s name he had difficulty in placing her. Don’t you remember the cellar next door …
Joey Kesselbaum?
At this a faint smile passed over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary to remember events that had happened so far back in the past.

On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as though he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself with it. He seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting than to the wonderful past. As for me I recollect everything, everything that happened that summer, and particularly the day of the rock fight. There are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the food I am actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie’s little bud almost stronger than the actual feel of what is in my hand. The way the boy lay there, after we downed him, far far more impressive than the history of the World War. The whole long summer, in fact, seems like an idyll out of the Arthurian legends. I often wonder what it was about this particular summer which makes it so vivid in my memory. I have only to close my eyes a moment in order to relive each day. The death of the boy certainly caused me no anguish – it was forgotten before a week had elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the gloom of the cellar with her dress lifted up, that too passed easily away. Strangely enough, the thick slice of rye bread which his mother handed me each day seems to possess more potency than any other image of that period. I wonder about it … wonder deeply. Perhaps it is that whenever she handed me the slice of bread it was with a tenderness and a sympathy that I had never known before. She was a very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face was marked by the pox, but it was a kind, winsome face which no disfigurement could mar. She was enormously stout and she had a very soft, a very caressing voice. When she addressed
me she seemed to give me even more attention, more consideration, than her own son. I would like to have stayed with her always; I would have chosen her for my own mother had I been permitted. I remember distinctly how when my mother arrived on a visit she seemed peeved that I was so contented with my new life. She even remarked that I was ungrateful, a remark I never forgot, because then I realized for the first time that to be ungrateful was perhaps necessary and good for one. If I close my eyes now and I think about it, about the slice of bread, I think almost at once that in this house I never knew what it was to be scolded. I think if I had told my Aunt Caroline that I had killed a boy in the lot, told her just how it happened, she would have put her arm around me and forgiven me – instantly. That’s why perhaps that summer is so precious to me. It was a summer of tacit and complete absolution. That’s why I can’t forget Weesie either. She was full of a natural goodness, a child who was in love with me and who made no reproaches. She was the first of the other sex to admire me for being
different.
After Weesie it was the other way round. I was loved, but I was hated too for being what I was. Weesie made an effort to understand. The very fact that I came from a strange country, that I spoke another language, drew her closer to me. The way her eyes shone when she presented me to her little friends is something I will never forget. Her eyes seemed to be bursting with love and admiration. Sometimes the three of us would walk to the riverside in the evening and sitting on the bank we would talk as children talk when they are out of sight of their elders. We talked then, I know it now so well, more sanely and more profoundly than our parents. To give us that thick slice of bread each day the parents had to pay a heavy penalty. The worst penalty was that they became estranged from us. For, with each slice they fed us we became not only more indifferent to them, but we became more and more superior to them. In our ungratefulness was our strength and our beauty. Not being devoted we were innocent of all crime. The boy whom I saw drop dead, who lay there motionless, without making the slightest sound or whimper, the killing of that boy seems almost like a clean, healthy performance. The
struggle for food, on the other hand, seems foul and degrading and when we stood in the presence of our parents we sensed that they had come to us unclean and for that we could never forgive them. The thick slice of bread in the afternoons, precisely because it was not earned, tasted delicious to us. Never again will bread taste this way. Never again will it be given this way. The day of the murder it was even tastier than ever. It had a slight taste of terror in it which has been lacking ever since. And it was received with Aunt Caroline’s tacit but complete absolution.

There is something about the rye bread which I am trying to fathom – something vaguely delicious, terrifying and liberating, something associated with first discoveries. I am thinking of another slice of sour rye which was connected with a still earlier period, when my little friend Stanley and I used to rifle the icebox. That was
stolen
bread and consequently even more marvellous to the palate than the bread which was given with love. But it was in the act of eating the rye bread, the walking around with it and talking at the same time, that something in the nature of revelation occurred. It was like a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted to me in these moments I seem to have retained intact and there is no fear that I shall ever lose the knowledge that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was no knowledge as we ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye discussions is that they always took place away from home, away from the eyes of our parents whom we feared but never respected. Left to ourselves there were no limits to what we might imagine. Facts had little importance for us: what we demanded of a subject was that it allow us opportunity to expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we understood one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much
more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists. Alfie Betcha turned out to be an absolute bum: Johnny Gerhardt went to the penitentiary: Bob Kunst became a work horse. Infallible predictions. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing: on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.