“Thanks for the lift, baby.”
“My pleasure. Thank you for the wine. What kind did you say it was?”
“Vino de casa mixed with a mere smidgen of old Dr. Hammerfinger’s essence of instant powdered Power-Pack brand acid. Brewed by gnurrs in the secret laboratories of UCLA in preparation for the big all-Europe turn-on.”
“Whatever it was, it surely was, “Cordle said deeply. “Pure elixir to me. You could sell neckties to antelopes with that stuff; you could change the world from an oblate spheroid into a truncated trapezoid...What did I say?”
“Never mind, it’s all part of your trip. Maybe you better lie down for a while, huh?”
“Where gods command, mere mortals must obey,” Cordle said iambically. He lay down on the front seat of the car. Thoth-Hermes bent over him, his beard burnished gold, his head wreathed in plane trees.
“You okay?”
“Never better in my life.”
“Want me to stand by?”
“Unnecessary. You have helped me beyond potentiality.”
“Glad to hear it, baby, you’re making a fine sound. You really are okay? Well, then, ta.”
Thoth-Hermes marched off into the sunset. Cordle closed his eyes and solved various problems that had perplexed the greatest philosophers of all ages. He was mildly surprised at how simple complexity was.
At last he went to sleep. He awoke some six hours later. He had forgotten most of his brilliant insights, the lucid solutions. It was inconceivable: How can one misplace the keys of the universe? But he had, and there seemed no hope of reclaiming them. Paradise was lost for good.
He did remember about the onions and carrots, though, and he remembered The Stew. It was not the sort of insight he might have chosen if he’d had any choice; but this was what had come to him, and he did not reject it. Cordle knew, perhaps instinctively, that in the insight game, you take whatever you can get.
The next day, he reached Santander in a driving rain. He decided to write amusing letters to all his friends, perhaps even try his hand at a travel sketch. That required a typewriter. The conserje at his hotel directed him to a store that rented typewriters. He went there and found a clerk who spoke perfect English.
“Do you rent typewriters by the day?” Cordle asked.
“Why not?” the clerk replied. He had oily black hair and a thin aristocratic nose.
“How much for that one?” Cordle asked, indicating a thirty-year-old Erika portable.
“Seventy pesetas a day, which is to say, one dollar. Usually.”
“Isn’t this usually?”
“Certainly not, since you are a foreigner in transit. For you, one hundred and eighty pesetas a day.”
“All right,” Cordle said, reaching for his wallet. “I’d like to have it for two days.”
“I shall also require your passport and a deposit of fifty dollars. “
Cordle attempted a mild joke. “Hey, I just want to type on it, not marry it.”
The clerk shrugged.
“Look, the conserje has my passport at the hotel. How about taking my driver’s license instead?”
“Certainly not. I must hold your passport, in case you decide to default.”
“But why do you need my passport and the deposit?” Cordle asked, feeling bullied and ill at ease. “I mean, look, the machine’s not worth twenty dollars.”
“You are an expert, perhaps, in the Spanish market value of used German typewriters?”
“No, but—”
“Then permit me, sir, to conduct my business as I see fit. I will also need to know the use to which you plan to put the machine.”
“The use?”
“Of course, the use.”
It was one of these preposterous foreign situations that can happen to anyone. The clerk’s request was incomprehensible and his manner was insulting. Cordle was about to give a curt little nod, turn on his heel and walk out.
Then he remembered about the onions and carrots. He saw The Stew. And suddenly, it occurred to Cordle that he could be whatever vegetable he wanted to be.
He turned to the clerk. He smiled winningly. He said, “You wish to know the use I will make of the typewriter?”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Cordle said, “quite frankly, I had planned to stuff it up my nose.”
The clerk gaped at him.
“It’s quite a successful method of smuggling,” Cordle went on. “I was also planning to give you a stolen passport and counterfeit pesetas. Once I got into Italy, I would have sold the typewriter for ten thousand dollars. Milan is undergoing a typewriter famine, you know; they’re desperate, they’ll buy anything.”
“Sir,” the clerk said, “you choose to be disagreeable.”
“Nasty is the word you were looking for. I’ve changed my mind about the typewriter. But let me compliment you on your command of English.”
“I have studied assiduously,” the clerk admitted, with a hint of pride.
“That is evident. And, despite a certain weakness in the Rs, you succeed in sounding like a Venetian gondolier with a cleft palate. My best wishes to your esteemed family. I leave you now to pick your pimples in peace.”
Reviewing the scene later, Cordle decided that he had performed quite well in his maiden appearance as a carrot. True, his closing lines had been a little forced and overintellectualized. But the undertone of viciousness had been convincing.
Most important was the simple resounding fact that he had done it. And now, in the quiet of his hotel room, instead of churning his guts in a frenzy of self-loathing, he had the tranquilizing knowledge of having put someone else in that position.
He had done it! Just like that, he had transformed himself from onion into carrot!
But was his position ethically defensible? Presumably, the clerk could not help being detestable; he was a product of his own genetic and social environment, a victim of his conditioning; he was naturally rather than intentionally hateful—
Cordle stopped himself. He saw that he was engaged in typical onionish thinking, which was an inability to conceive of carrots except as an aberration from oniondom.
But now he knew that both onions and carrots had to exist; otherwise, there would be no Stew.
And he also knew that a man was free and could choose whatever vegetable he wanted to be. He could even live as an amusing little green pea, or a gruff, forceful clove of garlic (though perhaps that was scratching at the metaphor). In any event, a man could take his pick between carrothood and oniondom.
There is much to think about here, Cordle thought. But he never got around to thinking about it. Instead, he went sightseeing, despite the rain, and then continued his travels.
The next incident occurred in Nice, in a cozy little restaurant on the Avenue des Diables Bleus, with red-checkered tablecloths and incomprehensible menus written in longhand with purple ink. There were four waiters, one of whom looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo, down to the cigarette drooping from his long lower lip. The others looked like run-of-the-mill muggers. There were several Scandinavian customers quietly eating a cassoulet, one old Frenchman in a beret and three homely English girls.
Belmondo sauntered over. Cordle, who spoke a clear though idiomatic French, asked for the ten-franc menu he had seen hanging in the window.
The waiter gave him the sort of look one reserves for pretentious beggars. “Ah, that is all finished for today,” he said, and handed Cordle a 30-franc menu.
In his previous incarnation, Cordle would have bit down on the bullet and ordered. Or possibly he would have risen, trembling with outrage, and left the restaurant, blundering into a chair on the way.
But now—
“Perhaps you did not understand me,” Cordle said. “It is a matter of French law that you must serve from all of the fixed-price menus that you show in the window.”