The End of a Primitive Read Online Free PDF Page B

him at the bar. He recalled trying to kiss her, and her asking him to go with her the next day out to a used car lot near Atlantic Beach, across the street from Cab Calloway’s roadhouse, where she was to pick up a new Cadillac she had ordered; and him telling her he’d like to but he had to go down to the 57th Street dock where he was picking up a new ocean liner he’d ordered; and her getting angry and telling him to go to hell; and him saying he wished she’d got angry before drinking seven Scotch highballs at his expense.
    “Everybody’s lonely in this goddamn city,” he thought bitterly.
    He’d come home and begun drinking gin and reading Gorki’s Bystander , hoping the combination would render him unconscious. But the story came and went as he read on into the early hours, confusing itself with stories of his own imagining, until he’d become entombed in a completely new and frightening world. And still his thoughts had kept on churning, turning back to one passage and another, here and there snagged by a line like one’s clothes in a bramble thicket: “To love, to love! Life is so frightful—it is torment if one doesn’t love!…An habitual—just grasp this!—an habitual lack of desire on the part of others to look into your soul kindly, tenderly…You must learn this: all women are incurably sick with loneliness. This is the cause of all that is incomprehensible to you men—unexpected infidelities, and everything. None of you seeks, none of you thirsts for such intimacy with a human being as we do…” And always they came back to the passage describing the drowning of Boris, Clim’s friend, and the line: “Clim heard someone in the crowd question gravely, doubtfully: ‘ But was there really a boy? Perhaps there was no boy at all! ’”
    —Jesse Robinson.
    —mmmm…Jack Robinson…James Robinson…Jeff Robinson…Jim—we have no Jesse Robinson listed here.
    —J-E-S-S-E…Jesse…You must have me on the list…
    —mmmm… Jeff … Jim …
    —But I lived in the world for forty-one years…
    —mmmm…
    —I was a writer! I wrote two books—about blacks.
    —mmmm…
    —I was an American—a black American…I wrote about the black problem in America….
    —Ah yes! A very grave problem. We are very much concerned about the black problem….
    —Then certainly you’ve heard about me. I wrote two books about the black problem. It was all in the newspapers, in the book review sections. They reviewed my books. One of them said—I remember quite well: Robinson writes like a Dark Avenging Angel with his pen dipped in gall…You must have heard of me!
    — Jesse Robinson…Let’s see… Jeff … Jim …Funny…Are you absolutely sure there was a Jesse Robinson?…Perhaps there was no Jesse Robinson at all!
    “Just think: half the men and women in the whole world in these few moments are loving one another, even as you and I are…My dearest, my unexpected one…”
    —Perhaps there was no Jesse Robinson at all!…
    “Or magnanimity, of compassion toward a woman, in a word!…”
    —Lawd! There ain’t nobody in this coffin!
    —Ain’t Jesse Robinson—
    —Nobody!
    —But Jesse Robinson—
    —Who’s Jesse Robinson?
    —He de one wu’t died uf lonesomeness. Say fust time in hist’ry uh nigger die frum lonesomeness. In all de newspapers….
    —But ain’t nobody in dis coffin!
    —Lemme see…mmmm…empty as a minister’s plate!…But whar de body of Jesse Robinson?
    —Now you is askin’ me…Ah doan b’lieve dare evah wuz uh Jesse Robinson tuh bagin wid!…
    Abruptly he opened his eyes. The cigarette butt was burning his fingers and he mashed it out in the cheap glass ashtray atop a battered, ancient, mahogany radio cabinet that served as a night table. Beyond the ashtray was a half-emptied package of Camel cigarettes, a half-eaten, twenty-five cent bar of milk chocolate, a half-emptied, pint-sized carton of milk, a small white enamelled alarm clock with a broken crystal, and a