Saul Bellow - Ravelstein

There were bursts of tribal music from the town at night. The roosters cut short your sleep. But I wasn't sleeping much, and could eat only corn flakes. I complained of the tap water and Rosamund, now very worried, went often to the shop to carry back heavy bottles of water.

I was obviously sick but I couldn't let it be said that I was. I felt that I was having abnormal thoughts, and by and by it became apparent that I was worrying away at the problem of evolution. Of course I believed in evolution-who could refuse to accept the thousands of proofs? What was not obvious was that it had happened through random changes as so many scientific true believers were convinced. "_Anything__ can happen, given time enough, and billions of years give you time for all the mistakes and blind alleys." Watson, the geneticist, had laid down the law on this. But as I said to Rosamund, arguing still with Watson, if you took into account the subtle resources of the body, thousands of them, too subtle to be accidental, Watson was talking rough carpentry-boys woodshop or manual training, not fine cabinet work.

In retrospect I'm sorry-I grieve for Rosamund, who now saw that I was sick. She tried to prepare remedies in her little kitchen. She cooked dinners that I would normally have eaten with pleasure. But the meat in the market was gross. When she made soups, I couldn't bear to swallow a spoonful. The French family below went on cooking shit dishes it maddened me to smell.

"How can nice, decent, agreeable, civil people bring themselves to cook-and eat! — such a stinking mess!"

Rosamund said, "It would upset them if I were to ask for the windows to be shut. But don't you think you should see a doctor? There's a French doctor down the road. We've seen his shingle dozens of times."

We were on the porch having a glass of wine before the dinner I would be unable to get down. I ate the stuffed olives Rosamund put out. I like them stuffed with anchovies, Spanish-style. Here only the pimiento ones were available. You couldn't study a Caribbean evening sky without thinking of God, I was finding. Nor think of God without your own dead coming into it. Then you renewed your connection with your dead and ended by making as honest an estimate as you could bear-reviewing a lifetime of activities, affections, attachments. In this I didn't do at all well.

And as I owed it to Rosamund to do everything possible to get to the scientific bottom of things, I went next day to see the doctor. Americans don't take much stock in foreign medicine. They're inclined to think that a French doctor will say you have a _crise de foie__ and must cut down your intake of red wine. The doctor down the way had nothing to say about wine. He told me, however, that I had a case of dengue. Well, that wasn't too bad. Dengue is a tropical dis ase carried by mosquitoes; you treat it with quinine. So I added local quinine to the Quinaglute the American doctor-Schley, the very doctor who had scolded Ravelstein for smoking minutes after he was released from intensive care-had prescribed to keep my heart from running away with me.

Rosamund went once more to the pharmacy-a three-mile round trip without protection from the sun. She seemed partly re assured by the French doctor's diagnosis. However serious dengue might be it was treatable.

The neighbors, whose dinner stinks drove me up the wall offered their help. They said they stood ready to drive me to the hospital at the town of M. forty kilometers away. The road was scenic but jammed, as I was well aware, with decayed farm vehicles and _guaguas__ (buses).

The doctor was mild, "understated,' as we say, not inclined to make melodramatic diagnoses. I decided therefore to accept my dengue without fuss and drink the quinine mixture he prescribed. Rosamund and I read _Antony and Cleopatra__ together, recalling Ravelstein's dictum that without great politics the passions could not be represented. Rosamund wept when Antony said, "I am dying Egypt, dying," and when Cleopatra put the asp to her breast. After this we got into bed and slept, but not for long.

On the cool tile of the bathroom I fainted. It was dark and I had been groping myself out of the room when I fell. Rosamund couldn't lift or roll me onto the bed. She ran down to wake the land lady, who immediately telephoned for an ambulance. When I was told that the ambulance was on its way, I said I'd never agree to go to the hospital. I had seen enough of such places. Colonial medicine, especially in the tropics, was very chancy.

Rosamund said, "You _must__." But when she saw how obstinate I was she went down again to call the doctor on the landlady's telephone. He was five minutes down the road. Very decent about be ing wakened, he shone his flashlight down my throat and into my eyes. Two burly orderlies now filled up the doorway with a furled stretcher. These black men in coveralls had already begun opening the stretcher on the floor when I stopped them saying, "I ain't going nowhere."

Rosamund asked the doctor for an opinion and he said, "Well, it isn't absolutely _nйcessaire__ if he is so opposed." He sent the ambulance away. It didn't make a great difference to the orderlies, who left in silence. It was the engine of the ambulance that did the snarling.

We somehow got rid of the rest of the night, and in daylight, without a mention of breakfast, I sat outside looking toward the black reefs-atmosphere and water doing what they always do. One of the attractions of the season were the clouds of pale moths, a soft yellow variety. They were not big nor were they beautifully marked, hovering out to sea and back, again to the vegetation.

Rosamund was below, using the landlady's telephone, which had never before been available to us. The landlady would take no messages for us. Guests were not allowed to make calls. But I was sick now, and she didn't want me to croak on the premises. I thought this must be apparent to Rosamund as well and oddly enough I had almost no feeling one way or another. The sun hadn't risen yet and there was just light enough to distinguish fluid from solid-a sea-a kind of flatness, and a corresponding inner emptiness. Only Rosamund, normally flexible, ladylike, deferential, and genteel now revealed (no question about it) an underlying hardness and the will that showed how well prepared she was to deal with the bad character of the landlady and the bureaucratic hard-heartedness of the airline's telephone staff. And when she climbed upstairs she said, smiling slightly, "We go back early tomorrow. There are plenty of seats out of San Juan because it's Thanksgiving Day. The flights to San Juan were the problem. But I said it was a medical emergency. They say they'll have a wheelchair waiting."

A wheelchair! I would never have guessed I was as sick as all that. It turned out that inexperienced Rosamund saw the facts more clearly than anyone. I never anticipated crises or emergencies.

Could we count on a taxi so early in the morning? Yes. For one thing, because the all-business, middle-aged, handsome, severe Afro-Caribbean landlady had taken note last night of the ambulance and the doctor. Probably she had had a word with the conscientious, not entirely truthful young Frenchman. But she didn't need his warning; one look at my wrinkled, bad-luck, pre-dawn face on the outdoor staircase would have been enough.

Rosamund, frightened by now, was only too glad to leave. Her pale-dark face was now reset for Boston, with its thousands of doctors. She seemed to have gotten the message: It was certain death to stay on the island. She asked me, "Which books and papers do we dump?" This was easy enough. "Let's get rid of all the heavy volumes. And especially Browning's _Collected Poems__." I had turned against Browning. I classed him now with the cuisine and the French neighbors.

What I wouldn't discard was my friend Durkin's magazine-the cannibal number. I was hung up on the roasting human flesh, on the cannibals and the severed heads looking upward from the blood-sprinkled grass at the orchid-covered cliffs. The human flesh being eaten crowded into my-I admit it-contaminated consciousness. It was my sickness that made me peculiarly susceptible. I wouldn't have left these pages behind for anything. I could plead sickness as my cover. But they disappeared during the flight.