Tropic of Capricorn (7 page)

All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are
different,
are veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is
different
from the usual skyscraper à l’américaine. In this skyscraper
there are no elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If you are searching for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what
I
want, what
I
like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we’re going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being she’s all right, Valeska, seeing as how she’s six feet under and by now perhaps picked clean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked clean too, by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different tint, a different odour.

The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of it whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.

Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew from the vice-president’s office happened to espy her. He was horrified, so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn’t observed anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically proposed to give her a better position in Havana. No talk of the blood taint. Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they would like to promote her – to Havana. Valeska came back to the office in a rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She said she wouldn’t budge. Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all
went out to dinner together. During the course of the evening we got a bit tight. Valeska’s tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to put up a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly that if she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at first. I said I meant it, that I didn’t care what happened. She seemed to be unduly impressed; she took me by the two hands and she held them very gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye and said she didn’t believe it. But we went to dinner again that night and we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said – “why don’t you let me lend you a hundred dollars?” The next night I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off. About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street. When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was just the thought that if anything happened – if the wife were to kick-off – I wouldn’t feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started homeward.

It’s strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the edge
of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet – part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of Teddy charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor’s office I didn’t have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings … We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she’d never be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night in a
bistrot,
as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over tile Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores,
I felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal –
unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the other it made no difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there. Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more insatiable I become. There is no limit to it. There could be no end, and there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me again with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.

A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was born a half hour too late. It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the 25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus Christ … perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that’s the sort of guy I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration – with a bad set-up, in other words. They say – the astrologers, I mean – that it will get better and better for me as I go on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what do I care about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would have given me a fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the break occurred I keep putting
it back further and further, until there is no other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. “Always dragging behind, like a cow’s tail” – that’s how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed? Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing seems clear, however – and this is a hangover from the 25th – that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic.
Fanatic!
I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I
believed –
and the rest of the world did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn’t even treachery, what I have in mind. Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something
less
than treachery. It’s a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can’t believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails – that’s only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood’s still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such
things as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh.
Keep off the grass!
That’s the motto by which people live.

If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right yourself. Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an unnatural gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world to-day who understand the meaning of such a statement – the Jews and the Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a strange predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men: the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one.

If one isn’t crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. It’s as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a super-normal life, like the Chinese. That is to say, one is
unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don’t even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy – it is something monstrous and evil. You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This tool is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you.