"He thinks he can, with his Minox. He is sort of a nut. I suppose that when people are young and full of enthusiasm, you say, 'All that youth and enthusiasm,' but as they grow older you just say, about the same behavior, 'What a nut.' He was very excited by your experience. What actually did the man do, Uncle? He exhibited himself. Did he drop his trousers?"
"No."
"He opened them. And then he took out his tool. What was it like? I wonder... Did it occur to him that your eyesight wasn't good enough to see?"
"I don't know what occurred to him. He didn't say."
"Well, tell me about his thing. It wasn't actually black, was it? It must have been a purple kind of chocolate, or maybe the color of his palms?"
Wallace's scientific objectivity!
"I don't wish to talk about it, really."
"Oh, Uncle, suppose I were a zoologist who had never seen a live leviathan but you knew Moby Dick from the whaleboat? Was it sixteen, eighteen inches?"
"I couldn't say."
"Would you guess it weighed two pounds, three pounds, four?"
"I have no way to estimate. And you are not a zoologist. You just this minute became one."
"Uncircumcised?"
"That was my impression."
"I wonder if women really prefer that kind of thing."
"I assume they have other interests in addition."
"That's what they say. But you know you can't trust them. They're animals, aren't they."
"Temporarily there is an animal emphasis."
"I'm not taken in by the gentle-dainty-lady line. Women are lustful. They're raunchier than men in my opinion. With all respect for your experience and knowledge of life, Uncle Sammler, this is a field where I wouldn't be inclined to take your word. Angela would always say that if a man had a thick dick--excuse me, Uncle."
"Angela is perhaps a special case."
"You prefer to think she's off the continuum. What if she's not?"
"I'd like to drop the subject, Wallace."
"No, it's really too interesting. And this is pure objectivity, not a dirty conversation. Now, Angela gives a good report on Wharton Horricker. It seems he's a long, strong fellow. She says, however, that he takes too much exercise, he's too muscular. It's hard to get tender emotions from a man who has such steel cable arms and heavy thick weight-lifting pectorals. An iron man. She says it interferes with the flow of tender feeling."
"I hadn't thought about it."
"What does she know about tender feeling? Just some guy between her legs--Everyman is her lover. No, Anyman. They say that fellows that beef themselves up like that--'I was a ninety-pound weakling'--that such fellows are narcissistic pansies. I don't judge anybody. What if they are homosexuals? That's nothing any more. I don't think homosexuality is simply a different way of being human, I actually think it's a disease. I don't know why homosexuals fuss so much and proclaim themselves so normal. Such gentlemen. Of course they have us to point at and we're not so great. I believe this boom in faggots was caused by modern warfare. One result of 1914, that slaughter in the trenches. The men were getting blasted. It was obviously healthier to be a woman than a man. It was better to be a child. Best of all is to be an artist, combining child, woman, or dervish--do I mean a dervish? A shaman? A necromancer is probably what I mean. Plus millionaire. Many a millionaire wants to be an artist, or a kid or woman and a necromancer. What was I talking about? Oh, Horricker. I was saying that in spite of all that physical culture and weight lifting he was not a queer. But that he did have a fantastic image of male strength. A person making a determined self-effort. Angela's job seemed to be to take him down a few pegs. She's weepy about him today, but she's a pig, and hell be forgotten tomorrow. I think my sister is a swine. If he's got too much muscle, she's got too much fat. What about that fat bust interfering with the flow of tender feeling? What did you say just now?"
"Not a word."
"Sometimes at night, last thing before sleeping, I go through a whole list of people and call them all swine. I find it's marvelous therapy. I clear my mind for the night. If you were in the room, you'd only hear me saying, 'Swine, swine, swine!' Not the names. Each name is mental. Don't you agree that shell forget Horricker by tomorrow?"
"I think she may. But I trust she's not too lost."
"She's a female-power type, the femme fatale. Every myth has its natural enemies. The enemy of the distinguished-male myth is the femme fatale. Between those thighs, a man's conception of himself is just assassinated. If he thinks he's so special she'll show him. Nobody is so special. Angela represents the realism of the race, which is always pointing out that wisdom, beauty, glory, courage in men are just vanities and her business is to beat down the man's legend about himself. That's why she and Horricker are finished, why she let that twerp in Mexico ball her fore and aft in front of Wharton, with who-knows-what-else thrown in free by her. In a spirit of participation."
"I didn't know that Horricker had such a presumptuous image of himself."
"Let's get back to that other matter. What else did the man do, did he shake the thing at you?"
"Not at all. But the subject is becoming unpleasant. He was warning me not to defend the poor old man he robbed. Not to inform the police. I had already tried to inform them."
"You, naturally, would feel sorry for those people he robs."
"It's ugly. Not that I have such a tender heart."
"You've probably seen too much. Weren't you invited to testify at the Eichmann trial?"
"I was approached. I didn't feel up to it."
"You wrote that article about that crazy character from Lodz--King Rumkowski."
"Yes."
"I often think a man's parts look expressive. Women's too. I think they're just about to say something, through those whiskers."
Sammler did not answer. Wallace sipped his whisky as a boy might sip Coca-Cola.
"Of course," Wallace said, "the blacks speak another language. A kid pleaded for his life--"
"What kid?"
"In the papers. A kid who was surrounded by a black gang of fourteen-year-olds. He begged them not to shoot, but they simply didn't understand his words. Literally not the same language. Not the same feelings. No comprehension. No common concepts. Out of reach."
I was begged, too. Sammler however did not say this.
"The child died?"
"The kid? After some days he died of the wound. But the boys didn't even know what he was saying."
"There is a scene in War and Peace I sometimes think about," said Sammler. "The French General Davout, who was very cruel, who was said, I think, to have torn out a man's whiskers by the roots, was sending people to the firing squad in Moscow, but when Pierre Bezhukov came up to him, they looked into each other's eyes. A human look was exchanged, and Pierre was spared. Tolstoy says you don't kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look."
"Oh, that's marvelous! What do you think?"
"I sympathize with such a desire for such a belief."
"You only sympathize."
"No, I sympathize deeply. I sympathize sadly. When men of genius think about humankind, they are almost forced to believe in this form of psychic unity. I wish it were so."
"Because they refuse to think themselves entirely exceptional. I see that. But you don't think this exchange of looks will work? Doesn't it happen?"
"Oh, it probably happens from time to time. Pierre Bezhukov was altogether lucky. Of course he was a person in a book. And of course life is a kind of luck, for the individual. Very booklike. But Pierre was exceptionally lucky to catch the eye of his executioner. I myself never knew it to work. No, I never saw it happen. It is a thing worth praying for. And it is based on something. It's not an arbitrary idea. It's based on the belief that there is the same truth in the heart of every human being, or a splash of God's own spirit, and that this is the richest thing we share in common. And up to a point I would agree. But though it's not an arbitrary idea, I wouldn't count on it."