16. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 928-995

Chapter XXIV

Augie and Stella get married, but first Augie has to have one of his life-examining chats, this time with an Armenian named Mintouchian in a Turkish bath. (Bellow is perhaps making some kind of grim joke by putting an Armenian in a Turkish bath, but I'll resist exploring that.) Mintouchian is a wealthy lawyer, and his mistress, Agnes Kuttner, is a friend of Stella's. "These two, Agnes and Mintouchian, were the only people we ever saw when I got liberty from the base on weekends." Mintouchian and Agnes had met in Cuba, and he pays off her husband to make him stay there. But his chief role in the novel is a familiar one: "He was another of those persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage."

And as usual, Augie resists the advice but finally gives in to it. When Mintouchian tells him tales of the woe that is in marriage, he asks, "how are these stories supposed to apply, just now, before my marriage?" Mintouchian back-pedals a bit, but Augie gets the point obliquely: "I would never agree that love had to be adultery. Never! Why, imagine! Even if I had to admit that many lovers were adulterers, such as Paolo and Francesca or Anna Karenina, Grandma Lausch's favorite. Which led my mind toward suffering that got mixed with love." As, so far, it has been in Augie's love life. He asks Mintouchian what he's getting at:

He answered readily, "Secrets. Society make us have some, of course. The brotherhood of man wants to let us out of them by the power of confession. But I must beget secrets. I will be known by secrets at my death, like St. Blas who was killed by wool combs and was made the patron saint of woolcombers."

So Augie opens up to Mintouchian: "I have always tried to become what I am. But it's a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Mintouchian reassures him, "You must take your chance on what you are." Augie receives this advice with gratitude.

And then it turns out that Mintouchian himself needs reassuring. He has discovered that Agnes recently pulled a scam: She had claimed she was mugged in Central Park and a diamond ring was stolen. She collected five thousand dollars in an insurance claim, but Mintouchian has discovered that she faked the mugging even to the extent of choking herself with her own hands. One of her friends actually has the ring. Mintouchian doesn't know why she feels compelled to do such a thing when he provides all the money she needs. But once again, it fits with his notion that the world is full of secrets.

Including Mintouchian, of course, as Augie finds out when he meets Mrs. Mintouchian. She tells him, "I know that Harold has his secrets. I mean, he thinks he has. I really know all about him, because I think about him all the time. It isn't so hard if you spend all your time thinking about somebody. I don't even have to leave this room."  

Chapter XXV

So the wedding takes place despite any intentions Mintouchian may have had in discouraging it. And in fact he arranges the catering for the wedding luncheon and buys the flowers. Augie is "drugged with love." He remembers thinking, when he was recovering from the hernia operation in County Hospital a year ago, "how of all our family, including old Grandma, Simon was the only one who had managed to stay out of an institution. But now I didn't have any more reason to envy him." He had graduated from training at Sheepshead the day before the wedding, and the Merchant Marine had paid for new teeth to replace the ones that had been kicked out in Mexico. The only blot on the occasion is that Augie is due to ship out soon after the wedding, and that Stella is leaving for the Aleutians as part of a USO show. In addition to Mintouchian, the wedding party also includes Agnes (wearing a high collar to conceal her throat), Sylvester, Robey, and Frazer.

Two days later, Augie leaves for Boston to ship out. He reassures Stella that this new device called radar will protect the ship from any submarines. (And if you don't catch the foreshadowing there, you don't read enough fiction.) The ship, the Sam MacManus, is old, but Augie has his own office for his combined bookkeeping and pharmacist's duties. "In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, out to Alaska. Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant." He also becomes "ship's confidant" -- the guy people went to for advice. "Clem knew what he was talking about when he urged me to come into the advice business. Here I was doing it free of charge, and in dangerous conditions."

He listens to various worries and sexual confessions and the like. "If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it's in the nature of a memorial. For on the fifteenth day out when we were off the Canaries, the Sam MacManus was sent down by a torpedo." In the confusion he finds a lifeboat, but the mechanism for lowering it gets jammed. He climbs into the boat to try to free it, and it falls into the water and knocks him overboard. When he resurfaces he sees another boat a hundred yards away and swims toward it. Another man is clinging to it, and Augie helps him climb into the boat, but when he calls for the man to help him in, he gets no response. Finally he manages to clamber aboard and finds the man just sitting there. Angrily, Augie slugs him but he doesn't respond. "He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-the-headlights eyes. Augie curses him, but he still doesn't react.

Augie looks for the oars so they can row around and pick up survivors, but there is only one oar. "There was nothing to do but sit and drift.... And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light of boat of [sic] raft to be seen anywhere." There is enough food and water to last two people for quite a while, and smudgepots and flares for signaling.

Finally his companion speaks, to say he recognizes him as "Mr. March, the purser." He identifies himself as "Basteshaw, ship's carpenter," and as a fellow Chicagoan. Augie recognizes the name: There had been a Basteshaw who had had some real estate dealings when Einhorn was in the business. It turns out to have been Basteshaw's father, who "was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupgreens King." Augie remembers that Einhorn used to call him "Butcher-Paper." Basteshaw the son has no fond memories of his father, which shocks Augie, whose mind is occupied with thoughts of family and friends, "whether I'd ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhorn, Clem." Basteshaw tells Augie his father drowned when he had a mild heart attack and fell into the water. On the day he died, Basteshaw "put on his old man's best Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man would never let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch." Augie feels sorry for the father.

Basteshaw also tells him that he broke up the engagement his father had arranged for him with his cousin Lee, with whom he had been sleeping. She had a fatal lung condition, "So I told her I couldn't possible marry her. Why string her along?" Augie is enraged at this: "He had hastened her death. I couldn't bear the look of him for a while." But even though he realizes that his boatmate is a creep or worse, Augie realizes he has to get along with him, so he continues to listen to his stories, including one of Basteshaw's narcoleptic Aunt Ettl, who slept for fifteen years, and then one day woke up and went about her business as if nothing had happened. For Basteshaw, this is a lesson in the value of inertia.

"The next poet laureate of England -- I figure -- prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on him? That doesn't mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab's immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power."

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

(The "next poet laureate of England" Basteshaw refers to is presumably T.S. Eliot, who never achieved that honor.)

Augie's estimation of Basteshaw begins to improve. "And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had been wrong." He asks how someone so obviously educated wound up as a ship's carpenter. Basteshaw tells him that "he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biologist, which he liked best of all." And that he had been fired from six universities because of his "strange ideas." Going to sea gave him time to work on his experiments. He also tells Augie that his aim in life is to be a Renaissance cardinal, "A wicked one,smoking with life, neighing and plunging." And that he grew so bored because of his inability to fulfill this aim that he decided to study boredom itself and "become the world's leading authority on it." Augie is "stupefied. I watched hm climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain."

And then he claims to have created life in the laboratory: that's what the six universities threw him out for claiming. And he had continued his experiments on board the MacManus, so some of the protoplasm he had created is now floating in the ocean. Augie has a horrified thought that it might survive somehow and begin to evolve.

Soon Basteshaw begins to see what he thinks are signs that the boat is drifting closer to land. And then one day Augie thinks he sees a ship on the horizon. He gets a smudgepot ready to signal with, but Basteshaw asks why he wants to do that. Augie realizes that Basteshaw doesn't want to be rescued. He makes no move to help as Augie lowers the pot overboard and the signal smoke begins to rise. Augie loses sight of the ship, and Basteshaw claims he was hallucinating. He says they are drifting due east, and will land in Spanish territory. They will be interned, he says, and he can stay there for the rest of the war and do his research. Augie, he says, can be trained as his assistant. Augie wants no part of this plan.

The smudgepot is still giving off smoke, and when Augie turns to scan the horizon, Basteshaw hits him with the oar. "Then I made a rush for him, and the minute I got my hands on him I felt I'd kill him if I could, that much rage was in me." But Basteshaw is stronger; he overpowers Augie, and ties him up in Augie's own clothes. That night, when Basteshaw falls asleep, Augie manages to get loose. But when he goes to Basteshaw to tie him up, he discovers that Basteshaw is burning with fever and his heart is racing. Augie turns a piece of canvas into a makeshift poncho, and sits up with his adversary all night.

Basteshaw is out of his mind with fever in the morning, but late that day Augie sights a British tanker that rescues them. They are well past the Canaries and off the coast of Africa. The ship takes them to Naples, where they are hospitalized. After he tells Basteshaw that he saved his life, and that they were way off course, Basteshaw refuses to speak to him again. Six months later, Augie returns to New York, where Stella is waiting for him.

Chapter XXVI

Augie abandons his idea of a school and foster home, telling Mintouchian, "it was a goofy idea that I should educate children. Who am I to educate anybody? It wasn't so much education as love. That was the idea." Anyway, Stella isn't keen on the idea, and "Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was I who loved her most." When the war ends, Augie and Stella move to Europe. At a cafe he runs into Hooker Frazer, who is working with the World Education Fund, and Augie tells him that Stella works in the movies and he has gotten involved, through Mintouchian, in a slightly shady business involving international trade. They have an apartment in Paris that they from "an old Britisher and his French wife."

One day, when Stella comes home from the film studio, she takes a bath and calls out to Augie for a towel. When he joins her in the bathroom, he has an epiphany.

It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Through their friend Alain du Niveau Augie learns a few of Stella's secrets -- "I said that Stella lied more than average, unfortunately. She told me a number of things that weren't so; she forgot to tell me others that were so." One of them is about Cumberland, whose mistress she had been before she took up with Oliver. Augie had suspected something of his presence when he first knew Stella in New York, living in a style and an apartment that were somewhat beyond her means, and receiving mysterious bills and business correspondence. After du Niveau lets his name slip, he confronts Stella about Cumberland, and she confesses, though she reminds Augie of his own brushes with the law. He is set back: "Was I going to be wrong again?" But after he talks to Mintouchian, the matter is relegated to the bygone.

Simon and Charlotte come to visit in Paris, and Simon is impressed: "My kid brother has turned out to be a man of the world." When he asks Simon about Renée, Simon doesn't want to talk about it, but Charlotte clues Augie in: "Evidently Simon's trouble with Renée had been all over the Chicago papers, and she took it for granted that I had read about it. No, I hadn't heard a thing." Renée had sued Augie claiming he had fathered her child. But there were three other men who could be the father. All along, Renée had been planning to blackmail Simon, collecting matchbooks from the restaurants he took her to and writing the date inside the cover. In the end, she married someone else.

Augie has to drive to Bruges on a business deal, and he takes the maid, Jacqueline, with him so she can visit her family in Normandy. On the way she tells him, "the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!" The idea of it, that one person's dream may be another person's painful memories, causes Augie to laugh. But it also reminds Augie of the persistence of people's dreams and ambitions.

Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop in this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

15. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 893-927

Chapter XXII

Returning to his Chicago haunts, Augie begins working on getting a teaching certificate, and the school at which he does his practice teaching employs his old neighbor, Kayo Obermark. Augie also buys a used Buick, which won't start on cold mornings without a push. Kayo nags him about not being married and becoming a father. "I seemed to have critics everywhere," Augie reflects, and he tells Kayo "my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated." In fact, Augie's drift through life has been a series of manipulations: by Grandma, by Einhorn, by Simon, by the Renlings, by the Magnuses, and by Thea -- among others. He asserts that "Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that's the worst of being helpless."

Kayo invites Augie home to meet his wife, and while he's there Kayo's brother-in-law offers to buy the Buick. Augie sells it to him for one hundred eighty dollars, paid by check, but then the brother-in-law insists they play poker. Kayo and his brother-in-law's wife play too, but Augie is the only winner. He gives Kayo his money back on the way home, but the brother-in-law stops the check when the Buick stops running, and Augie has to come fetch it.

He resumes his affair with Sophie Geratis, who is married now. But Sophie's husband has turned out to be gay, and she wants to divorce him and marry Augie. Despite Kayo's advice, Augie isn't ready to get married and tells Sophie so. She says, "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry.... Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard." Augie tells her that all he knows about his father is that he drove a truck for a laundry. But he knows that Sophie "would have scolded me for my own good too much."

Another friend, Clem Tambow, has an idea: He and Augie will open a vocational counseling service. Clem is about to get his psychology degree, so he'll give aptitude tests and Augie can conduct interviews. Augie rejects the idea as too much of a scam. He tells Clem that he has had a revelation: "since I've been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn't utilize even ten percent of what I already knew.... Anything that just adds information that you can't use is just plain dangerous." So he wants to simplify his life: He wants to buy a little land and settle on it. He'll "get married and set up a kind of home and teach school." He'll get his mother and his brother out of their respective institutions, and he'll get the students for his school from state institutions. He'll teach woodworking and maybe his brother George can teach shoe repair. "Maybe I'll study languages so I could teach them. My mother could sit on the porch and the animals would come around her, by her shoes, the roosters and the cats. Maybe we could start a tree nursery."

Clem scoffs at Augie's little utopia, starting with the students: "You think you'll love them so they'll turn into little Michelangelos and Tolstois, and you'll give them their chance in life and rescue them, so you'll be their saint and holy father. But if you make them so good, how will they get along in the world?" Augie wants to be a king, he says, "You sonofabitch, you want to be the kind goddam king over these women and children and your half-wit brother. Your father ditched the family, and you did your share of ditching too, so now you want to make up for it."

Augie persists in this daydream, however, and even thinks about marrying Sophie. But then Pearl Harbor is attacked, and suddenly his attention shifts elsewhere: "At first I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn't wait to go and fight. I was a madman in the movies and yelled and clapped in the newsreel." But when he goes to volunteer he discovers that he has developed a hernia from the fall with Bizcocho. So he goes into County Hospital to have the operation done.

Sophie visits him every day in the hospital, though she thinks he's crazy for having the operation when it could get him out of the draft. Her husband has been drafted, which she sees as another reason for Augie to stick around. "Simon came to see me and threw a bag of oranges on the bed. He bawled me out that I hadn't gone to a private hospital." Padilla has let his girlfriend use Augie's room while he was in the hospital, so he's essentially living there, too. So he lets Augie move into his own place. "It took me many long months to get better, and I was doing very poorly. And about this time I got a letter from Thea, APO San Francisco, telling me that she had married an Air Force captain."

Augie goes to visit his mother, and they go for a walk. On their way back, Simon drives up with a blond woman in the car. He signals to Augie not to let their mother know about the woman. Simon "was making real dough now. A company he had invested in was manufacturing a gimmick for the Army." After taking their mother home, Simon introduces Augie to his mistress, Renée. "It was a hard thing for me to get through my head, after I came to know her, that she could be so important to him," Augie recalls. She seems immature and somehow suspicious and uncertain to him. Though Simon proclaims his love for Renée, "He was romantic about Charlotte too. And Renée had to bear it and know she could never have any exclusive claim on him." Augie reflects, however, that he had treated Stella pretty much the same way when Thea turned up in his life. Renée gets her own by demanding from Simon everything that Charlotte has. They fight about it: "Charlotte has her own money, don't you realize that?" Renée replies, "But not what you want. I've got that."

While waiting to recover from the hernia operation, Augie takes a job as a salesman with a business machine company -- a plum job made available by the wartime manpower shortage. But he remains eager to get into the service, to Simon's disgust -- Simon has been declared 4F because of an ear problem. The Army and Navy continue to reject Augie, so he joins the Merchant Marine. While he's waiting to go to Sheepshead Bay for training, Augie runs into Simon, who tells him that Renée tried to commit suicide -- though he admits that she may have been faking it. Charlotte had found out about Renée and told Simon that it had to stop. After a meeting in which Renée cursed Charlotte and both Charlotte and Simon slapped Renée, Simon paid Renée off and sent her to California. But she had come back and telephoned Simon with the news that she was pregnant. Simon told her he didn't care and called her a crook. "After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself." So he went to check on her and found her unconscious. She is in her fourth month of pregnancy, and he asks Augie what to do.

"What's there to do? Nothing. There'll be a kid now. Who knows but that this is the way you and George and I happened to come into the world."

Chapter XXIII

Augie applies to the Purser's and Pharmacist's Mate School, but has to do training on Chesapeake Bay first. In Baltimore there are letters from friends, including Sophie, who has joined her husband at Camp Blanding. "She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters." They return to Sheepshead, where he studies bookkeeping and "ship's doctoring." Stella Chesney, whom he helped get out of Mexico, is in New York. He learns that Oliver had promised to make her a star in Hollywood, and that they had wound up in Mexico on a kind of side trip. On a weekend leave, Augie and Stella resume their affair, and he falls in love with her.

Was she a vain person, or injurious or cynical, it couldn't make any difference now. Or was I a foolish, uncorrected, blundering, provisional, unreliable man, this was taken away as of no account and couldn't have any sense or meaning. 

He has to return to the base on Monday morning, and he is on his best behavior for fear that his next weekend leave will be canceled. He hurries back to her the next Saturday and finds her sick in bed, partly because she was worried if he really loved her. He proposes to her, and they decide to get married once his training at Sheepshead is over.

12. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 797-838

Chapter XVII

Augie suffers a concussion and loses some teeth, but Bizcocho breaks a leg and has to be shot, which Augie regrets: "he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him." When Caligula returns, he is shipped off to her the zoo run by the friend of Thea's father.

After a few weeks of recuperation, Augie suggests that Thea continue her expeditions. "We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn't want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn't want it to be after snakes that she went." So for a while she contents herself with hunting wild pigs, but eventually comes home with a bag of snakes. Augie is through with hunting, though he doesn't tell her that, and suggests that she gets some friends to go with her. Sometimes Talavera accompanies her.

Still plagued by dysentery as well as his injuries, Augie continues reading in the utopia book. The weather also provides some comfort: "Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. The blue beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it." He also talks to Stella, Oliver's girlfriend, over the wall between the house and the hotel, and she tells him that they are moving out of the hotel into the villa owned by the Japanese man, who has to return to Nagasaki. As they are talking, Oliver comes up and takes her away, without speaking to Augie. Moulton tells Augie that Oliver is jealous.


Augie begins hanging out more with the exiles.

As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn't strong enough to go with Thea but wasn't too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony.

He spends much of his time with Iggy, while he is writing his tales about men on Mars, and at the bar playing poker, "which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom."

The tension with Thea continues to grow, partly because Augie loathes her snake collection: "they had parasites that got between the scales, and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis." So even after he regains his health, Augie continues to claim that he's not strong enough to go out hunting with her. For her part, she is disgusted by the set Augie hangs out with. "I think they must make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula. They make fun of me." Augie denies it.

He has become hooked by poker. "I was ahead and couldn't quit." His pockets are full of his winnings in various currencies. "I didn't know exactly what I had. But I did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's." When the divorce papers come, he asks Thea to marry him, but "she simply shook her head." Augie suspects that it's because of their differing social status: "I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let escape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father."

Leon Trotsky

One day he sees several cars drive up in front of the cathedral, and watches as bodyguards emerge from the cars. Finally the man they are protecting emerges. "As I looked at him I decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the great Russian exile." With him are men with briefcases: "members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had briefcases like those." And then he recognizes one of the bodyguards as "my old friend Sylvester, the one-time owner of the Star Theater, the engineering student from Armour Tech, the ex-husband of Mimi Villar's [sic] sister, the former subway employee." He calls out to Sylvester, and they talk for a while. He asks for an introduction to Trotsky, but Sylvester puts him off, saying, "When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you; we'll have a beer." He also mentions that Mimi's ex-lover, Frazer, is one of Trotsky's secretaries.

Oliver is preparing to have a big party when he finally moves into the villa owned by the Japanese man, but before that a Treasury agent shows up in town, and rumor has it that Oliver is in some sort of trouble. He feigns indifference, but it is evident to Augie that Stella is afraid of what might happen. She signals to Augie that she'd like to talk to him about it, but "Oliver watched her very closely." Oliver gets into more trouble when he discovers that Louie Fu, the owner of the Chinese restaurant where they often gather, is pouring the leftovers from orange soda bottles into a single bottle at the end of the day. "Oliver caught him and punched him in the face," and is hauled into jail for it. The city magistrate is not sympathetic to Oliver's defense "that what Louie had done was very dangerous because of the amoeba." The magistrate doesn't want word getting out that dysentery is rife in the town, so he gives Oliver a heavy fine. Stella, who is present in the court, "appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for myself what she was up against."

When Thea hears about all of this, she suggests that they leave town and get away from the exiles until the summer tourist season is over. She wants to drive down to Chilpanzingo, "in the hot country." He tries to hedge: "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon." But Thea is determined to get away, and blames his slow recovery on his drinking. "You never touched a drop before you got down here." So he gives in: "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world." But he wonders what he will do there.

Chapter XVIII

Before they can depart, however, Oliver's housewarming party takes place. Augie is eager to go, but he knows she doesn't. He rationalizes his forcing her to attend by thinking, "If I can stand her snakes, she can take this for one evening." But by the time they arrive at the party it's evident that it is turning into something of a wild rout, with guests passed out and empty tequila bottles floating in the fishpond. "Thea wanted to leave immediately, but as she began to say so I saw Stella by an orange tree. She made me a small sign, and I had to go and talk to her." Then Moulton comes up and asks Thea to dance, and although he knows she loathes Moulton and is angry with him for forcing her to come to the party, he leaves her on the dance floor and goes to find Stella. "But it did occur to me that the last time I had been called aside like this for a discussion apart was with Sophie Geratis, when we had fallen into each other's arms."

Stella tells him that the magazine Oliver edits had been bought with money from the Italian government, and the man who owns it has been arrested. "All the important things that were printed were planned in Rome." That's why the government agent has come for Oliver.  Stella doesn't know much more than that, except that Oliver wants to run away, perhaps to South America. Augie comments, "That poor fool! He thinks he's a big-league fugitive. You'll have to get away from him." He offers to lend her the money to leave, but she says she was hoping he'd take her to Mexico City himself. He tells her he can't do that, but that he can get her out of town.

He arranges to meet her with the station wagon, but when he goes to find Thea he finds she has left. Iggy tells him, "She was in quite a mood.... We looked for you. then she said to tell you she was pulling out for Chilpanzingo first thing in the morning. She was all nervous and shaking." So Augie goes to where the station wagon is parked and waits for Stella. The battery is low because the station wagon hasn't been driven for a while, and while he is trying to start it with a hand crank Thea shows up. He tells her that he is taking Stella to safety because "Oliver went crazy and tried to kill her today." Thea isn't buying it: "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." They argue, and she suggests that they take Stella to their house to protect her. He digs in his heels but suggests that she come along. "I'll drive her up to Cuernavaca and we'll be back in a few hours." When she refuses, he starts the car and leaves.

The road to Cuernavaca is steep and dark. There is a detour when they get out of town, but the sign pointing the way has been tampered with and he can't tell which direction to take. He decides to go to the left, but the road gets worse and worse, and when he tries to back up to turn around, the engine dies. He gets out and discovers that they are on the edge of a steep mountain. There is no one around to help, and the crank no longer works to start the station wagon, so they take canvas and blankets out of the car and bed down for the night. Both of them give in to their impulses and make love. Augie reflects, "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."

In the morning some men help them get the car turned around and when it starts to roll downhill the engine starts. They drive to Cuernavaca where he hires a car to take her to Mexico City and gives her all his money. She vows to pay him back, but he doesn't believe her.

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 the 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 the threads from the sunlight.

Stella gives him the name of her theatrical agent who, she says, will always know where to reach her.

He returns to Thea and finds her ready to leave for Chilpanzingo. He tries to tell her about the car breaking down in the mountains, but she isn't interested in hearing it. He bitterly replies, "It wouldn't be so hard to tell you after what you've told me about yourself, about the Navy man and so forth, while you were married to Smitty. You're quite a few up on me." They reach an impasse on this subject, and she tells him that Oliver was picked up by the police at about the time he was leaving with Stella. Augie admits, "I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he'd drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent and I though he'd force her --" But Thea just scoffs at the idea of Oliver forcing anyone, and suggests that Augie has been played by Stella.

Augie then delivers a cruel blow to Thea by revealing that he was just playing along with her on her hunting ambitions. She replies, "What, were you jut being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?" He tries to back down and claim that he never thought she was eccentric in her enthusiasms, but the damage has been done.

"I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quite tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them.... I was so happy to find you.... I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more." 

She tells him that she is going to Chilpanzingo without him. And when she leaves, he goes berserk, demolishing the furniture and curtains and pictures in the house, and destroying the snake cages, watching "the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover." He puts his things into a valise and goes into the village where, when he meets Moulton and Iggy, he curses them. But he follows Iggy into the market where, when Iggy sees his suitcase, he realizes what Augie has done. Augie bursts into tears.