Herzog (Penguin Modern Classics) by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141975030
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

He stirred. He’d better be on his way. It was growing late. He was expected uptown. But he was not yet ready to leave. He took a new sheet of paper and wrote Dear Sono.

She had gone back to Japan long ago. When was it? He turned his eyes upward as he tried to calculate the length of time, and he saw the white clouds rolling above Wall Street and the harbor. I don’t blame you for going home. She was a person of means. She owned a house in the country, too. Herzog had seen the colored photographs—an Oriental countryside with rabbits, hens, piglets, her own hot spring in which she bathed. She had a picture of the village blind man who came to massage her. She loved massages, believed in them. She had often massaged Moses, and he had massaged her.

You were right about Madeleine, Sono. I shouldn’t have married her. I should have married you.

But Sono had never really learned to speak English. For two years, she and Moses had conversed in French—petit nègre. He wrote, Ma chère, Ma vie est devenue un cauchemar affreux. Si tu savais! At McKinley High School, from a forbidding spinster, Miss Miloradovitch, he had learned his French. The most useful course I took.

Sono had seen Madeleine only once, but once was enough. She warned me as I sat in her broken Morris chair. “Moso, méfie toi. Prend garde, Moso.”

She had a tender heart, and Herzog knew that if he wrote her of the sadness of his life, she would certainly cry. Instantaneous tears. They had a way of appearing without the usual Western preliminaries. Her black eyes rose from the surface of her cheeks in the same way that her breasts rose from the surface of her body. No, he would not write her sad news of any sort, he decided. Instead, he allowed himself to picture her as she might be now (it was morning in Japan), bathing in her steaming spring, her small mouth open, singing. She bathed often, and sang as she washed, her eyes upcast and her lips dainty and tremulous. The songs were sweet and odd, narrow, steep, at times with catlike sounds.

During the troubled time when he was being divorced from Daisy and he came to visit Sono in her West Side apartment, she would immediately run the little tub and fill it with Macy’s bath salts. She unbuttoned Moses’ shirt, took off his clothes, and when she had him settled (“Easy now, it’s hot”) in the swirling, foaming, perfumed water she let drop her petticoat and got in behind him, singing that vertical music of hers.

“Chin-chin

Je te lave le dos

Mon Mo-so.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.