The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics) by Saul Bellow
“I’ll tell you some other time.”
I ran down to the zócalo 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 águila. 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.
“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 rebozo, 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 Einhorn, 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 fact,” 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 with 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 Cuernavaca 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 was 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 that 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 ca
She said, “Are we going to be stuck here all night?”
“It could have been even more permanent than that. And I told 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 I 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 shelter-half 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 tha
“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 cast-off 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.