Story :Looking for Mr. Green 1

 

Looking for Mr. Green 1

 

[ Story - Full text. ]

Saul Bellow

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Whatever you are going to do,
do it with all your energy…

 

¿Hard work? No, it really wasn't that hard. George Grebe was not used to walking or climbing stairs, but the physical difficulties of his new job were not what cost him the most. He was dedicated to handing out charity checks in the black neighborhood, and although he was a Chicago native, that was not a part of the city that he knew very well: he needed depression to introduce her to him. No, it really wasn't hard work, not if it was measured in meters or kilograms, but nevertheless he was beginning to feel the pressure, to realize its characteristic difficulty. I was able to find the streets and the numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter with little experience near the camouflage of the prey. It was also an unfavorable day: autumn and cold, a dark time,windy. Well, in any case, in the deep pockets of the trench, instead of shells, what he was carrying was the checkbook, with the holes for the filing cabinet axes, holes that reminded him of organ card holes. He didn't look like a hunter either; he had a completely ordinary silhouette, sheathed in that Irish conspirator coat. He was slim, but not tall, with his back straight, and his legs looking threadbare soaked in a pair of old tweed pants, worn and frayed on the underside. With this rectitude he kept his head forward, so that his face was red from inclement weather; and it was a rather interior face, with gray eyes that persisted in some kind of idea and yet seemed to avoid defining a conclusion.He was wearing sideburns that somehow surprised you with the hard curl of blond hair and the effect of affirming its length. He was not as tame as he seemed, nor was he as young; in any case, he made no effort to appear what he was not. He was an educated man; he was single; somehow it was simple; without getting drunk, he liked to have a drink; and he had not had good luck. He did not deliberately hide anything.

He felt that his luck today was better than usual. When he had shown up at work that morning, he had expected to be locked up in the charity office with an administrative job, because he had been hired as such at the center, and was glad to have, instead, the freedom of the streets, for which he received with joy, at least initially, the rigor of cold and even the blowing of the icy wind. On the other hand, he was not making much progress with the distribution of checks. It is true that it was a job of the municipality; nobody expected one to put too much enthusiasm in a job in the municipality. His supervisor, young Mr. Raynor, had practically told him so. However, he still wanted to get it right. For a reason, when I knew how quickly I could hand out a handful of checks,he would also know how much time he could set aside for himself. Also, customers would be waiting for the money. That was not the most important thing, although he certainly cared. No, he wanted to get it right, just to get it right, to do a job decently, because he rarely had a job that required this kind of energy. Now he had too much energy from this particular one; once it had started to arrive, it flowed too hard. And, at least for the moment, he was frustrated: he couldn't find Mr. Green.because he rarely had a job that required this type of energy. Now he had too much energy from this particular one; once it had started to arrive, it flowed too hard. And, at least for the moment, he was frustrated: he couldn't find Mr. Green.because he rarely had a job that required this type of energy. Now he had too much energy from this particular one; once it had started to arrive, it flowed too hard. And, at least for the moment, he was frustrated: he couldn't find Mr. Green.

So he stood with his big braid and a big envelope in his hand and the papers that popped out of his pocket, wondering why it was so difficult to locate a person who was too weak or sick to go to the office to cash their own check. But Raynor had told him that it was not going to be easy to locate them at first and had given him some advice on how to do it.

— If you see the postman, he is the first person you have to ask, and his best bet. If you can't get in touch with him, try the neighborhood shops and merchants. Then the doorman and the neighbors. But you will see that the closer you get to your man the fewer people will help you. They prefer not to say anything.

— Because I am a stranger.

— Because you are white. We would have to employ a black man to do this job, but right now we don't have, and besides you have to eat too, and this is a public job. The works must be done. That applies to me too. Be careful, not that I'm exonerating myself from anything. I have three more years of experience than you, that's all. And a law degree. If not, it could be you

the one on the other side of the desk and I could be going outside on this cold day. With the same pasta they pay us both and for the same reason exactly. ¿What does my law degree have to do with it? But you have to deliver these checks, Mr. Grebe, and being stubborn will help you, so I hope you are.

— Yes, I am quite stubborn.

Raynor squeezed hard with an eraser into the old dirt on his table, left-handed, and said:

— Sure, what else if I wasn't going to answer that question. In any case, the problem that is going to be found is that they do not like to give information about anyone. It seems to them that you are a plainclothes detective or a tax collector or that you are going to deliver a subpoena or something like that. Until you've been seen around the neighborhood a few times and people know you're solely from charity.

The weather was dark, the ground was frozen, the Thanksgiving date was approaching; the wind played with the smoke, scattering it down, and Grebe missed his gloves, that had been left in Raynor's office. And no one wanted to admit that he knew Green. It was after three in the afternoon and the postman had already made his last delivery. The closest grocer, who was also black, had never heard the name Tulliver Green, or at least he said so. Grebe was inclined to think it was true, that in the end she had convinced the man that all he wanted was to write a check. But I wasn't sure. I needed experience interpreting looks and signs and, what's more, the will not to be thrown back or denied information or even the force to intimidate if necessary.If the shopkeeper knew anything, he had easily gotten rid of him. But since most of your sales were made to people who charged for charity, what reason could you have to hinder the delivery of a check? Perhaps Green, or Mrs. Green, if there was one, were clients of another shopkeeper. And was there a Mr. Green? One of Grebe's great difficulties was that he had not looked at any of the files. Raynor should have let him read the records for a few hours. But apparently he didn't consider it necessary, probably because he believed the job was not important. ¿What was the point of preparing systematically to deliver a few checks? But now he had to find the doorman. Grebe observed the building amid the wind and darkness of that day in late November: on one side,posters trampled and hardened by ice; on the other, an automobile junkyard and then the infinite work of the cube-like housing blocks surrounded by garbage fires; two blocks with sloping brick porches, three floors and a concrete staircase leading to the basement. He started down and entered the underpass, where he tested on several doors until one opened and found himself in the boiler room. There someone got up and went to him, scraping the coal dust and leaning under the canvas-covered pipes.three floors and a concrete staircase that led to the basement. He started down and entered the underpass, where he tested on several doors until one opened and found himself in the boiler room. There someone got up and went to him, scraping the coal dust and leaning under the canvas-covered pipes.three floors and a concrete staircase that led to the basement. He started down and entered the underpass, where he tested on several doors until one opened and found himself in the boiler room. There someone got up and went to him, scraping the coal dust and leaning under the canvas-covered pipes.

— Are you the doorman?

— What do you want?

— I'm looking for a man who supposedly lives here, Green.

— What Green?

— Ah, they may have more than one! — Grebe said with renewed hope —. I am looking for Tulliver Green.

— I thought I can't help you, he said. I don't know any.

— He is a crippled man.

The doorman stood in front of him. ¿Was it possible that he himself was crippled? ¡Oh my God! ¿What if it was? Grebe's gray eyes searched with difficulty and excitement to see if they saw him better. But no, he was just very short and he was leaning. He had a head that had just woken up from meditation, a thin beard of hair, low, broad shoulders. His black shirt and burlap sack he wore as an apron gave off an intense smell of sweat and charcoal.

— Tullido how?

Grebe reflected and replied with the light voice of unblemished innocence:

— I don't know. I have never seen it. — This hurt him, but his only option was to lie and he didn't feel like doing it —. I am handing out charity checks to the most desperate cases. If he were not crippled he would come to collect it himself. So I said it is crippled. In bed or in a wheelchair, is anyone like that in this house?

This type of openness was one of Grebe's oldest talents, such as going back to childhood. But here it did not help him.

— No, he said. I have four buildings like this that I take care of. I don't know all the tenants, because it doesn't talk about the tenants of the tenants. The rooms go from hand to hand, all day there are people who move. I can't fire you.

The doorman opened the filthy lips, but Grebe did not understand it with the noise of the valves and the air jet that turned into a flame in the oven. However, he knew what he had said.

— Well thanks anyway. Sorry to bother you. I'm going to go back upstairs to see if I can find someone who knows him.

Once again it went out into the cold air and into the darkness of the street and returned from the basement entrance to the door of the building, locked in the middle of the brick pillars, to start climbing the third floor. He was crushing pieces of plaster with his feet; some bronze strips from which the carpet had been held pointed to ancient limits on both sides of the corridor, where the cold was more intense than on the street; it reached the bones. The lobby floor looked like a stream from the gushing water. He thought sadly, as he heard the wind whistle around the building with a sound similar to that of the oven, that this was a good example of refuge. Then he lit a match in the dark and looked for names and numbers in the middle of the doodles on the walls. He saw written expressions of the type WHITE HORSES and ID TO HELL,zigzags, cartoons, sexual doodles, and curses. The sealed chambers of the pyramids and the caves of the human dawn were also decorated.

The information on the card was: Tulliver Green, 3D apartment. There were no more names, however, or more numbers. With shoulders down and eyes crying cold, expelling steam when breathing, He walked down the hall and said that if he had been lucky enough to have a temper, he would have clasped one of the doors to howl: « Tulliver Green! ». Until I had results. But he had no scandals inside and continued to burn matches, passing the light through the walls. In the back, in a corner of the hall, he discovered a door that he had not seen before and thought it was worth investigating. When he called it seemed empty, but he opened a young black woman, barely older than a girl. It opened just a little so as not to lose the warmth of the room.

— Yes, he said?

— I'm from the district charity office, the one on Prairie Avenue. I'm looking for a man named Tulliver Green to deliver his check. ¿Do you know him?

No, I did not know him; but he thought that she had understood nothing of what he had said. He had a dreamy and sleep-like face, very soft and black. He was wearing a men's jacket and squeezed it down his throat. His hair was three directions, sideways and crosswise, curled forward in the form of a loose cripple.

— Is there anyone around here who could inform me?

— I just moved in last week.

He realized that she was trembling, but even that tremor was like a sleepwalker, and there was no sharp cold consciousness in the large, calm eyes of her pretty face.

— Very well, thank you, miss. Thank you — he said again, and turned to knock on other doors.

In one they invited him in. He did it grateful, because inside he was warm. The room was full of people, and when he entered they were silent: ten people or twelve, perhaps more, sitting on benches like in Parliament. There was no light proper, but a softened darkness coming from the window, and everyone found it huge, men wrapped in heavy work clothes and winter coats and women, huge too, with sweaters, hats and old skins. And besides, a bed and bedding, a black kitchen, a piano covered to the ceiling with papers, a dining table in the old style of prosperous Chicago. In the midst of these people, Grebe, with his pink color accentuated by the cold and his shorter stature, entered as a scholar.Even though they greeted him with smiles and goodwill, he knew, before a single word was said, that all the currents were against him and that he was not going to get anything there. However he started talking.

— Does anyone here know how I can deliver a check to Mr. Tulliver Green?

— Green? — answered the man who had brought him in. He wore short sleeves and a plaid shirt, and had a strange head, taller than broad, vastly larger than normal and longer as one of those first war military hats; veins entered her strongly from the forehead —. I have never heard him name. ¿Are you sure you live here?

— This is the address they gave me at the office. He is a sick man and will need his check. ¿No one knows how to tell me where I can find it?

He held the guy and waited for an answer, with the crimson wool scarf rolled around his neck and peeking over the braid, pockets filled with the checkbook and official forms. They must have realized that he was not a student employed in the afternoons by an invoice collector, cunningly trying to impersonate a charity employee. Perhaps they recognized that he was an older man who knew for himself what necessity was, that he had more than a median experience of what it was to have a hard time. It was quite evident if you looked at the marks under his eyes and on the sides of his mouth.

— Does anyone know this sick man?

— No, he said.

Everywhere he saw heads that denied and smiles that said no. No one knew. And it may have been true, he thought, standing there silent in the human darkness, earthy and musky-smelling of that place while the murmur continued. But he couldn't be really sure.

— What's wrong with that man? — said the one with the head in the shape of a military hat.

— I have never seen it. All I can say is that you cannot come in person to collect your money. It is my first day in this district.

— Who gave you a number that you don't?

— I don't think so. But where else can I ask about him? — He felt that this persistence amused them a lot and somehow he shared that fun for facing them so tenaciously. Although he was smaller and lighter, he was still at his thirteen and did not resign. He looked at them again with his gray eyes, fun and also with a kind of courage. On the bench a man spoke to her from the throat, with words impossible to catch, and a woman responded with a wild and shrill laugh, which was soon cut off.

— Well, then nobody is going to tell me?

— No one knows.

— At least, if you live here, you must pay someone a rent. ¿Who manages the building?

— The Greatham Company. On Calle Treinta y nine. Grebe wrote it down in his notebook. But, on the way back to the street, with a sheet of paper carried by the wind that stuck to his leg while he reflected on what he was going to do next, it seemed like a very poor indication to follow her. That Green probably didn't live in an apartment, but in a room. Sometimes there were up to twenty people in the same apartment; the real estate agent would know only the main tenant. And people couldn't even tell who the renters were. In some places, beds were used even in turns, and night guards or bus drivers, or night slum cooks, they got up after sleeping during the day and left their beds to their sister, their nephew or even a stranger,they had just got off the bus. There were many newcomers in that tremendous and infested part of the city between Cottage Grove and Ashland, wandering from one home to another and from one room to another. When you saw them, how could you know them? They did not have bundles on their backs or looked picturesque. One only saw a man, a black man, who walked down the street or drove a car, like everyone else, with his thumb closed on a train or bus ticket. So how was I to know how to distinguish them? Grebe thought that the Greatham agent would laugh at such an idea.¿How could i meet them? They did not have bundles on their backs or looked picturesque. One only saw a man, a black man, who walked down the street or drove a car, like everyone else, with his thumb closed on a train or bus ticket. So how was I to know how to distinguish them? Grebe thought that the Greatham agent would laugh at such an idea.¿How could i meet them? They did not have bundles on their backs or looked picturesque. One only saw a man, a black man, who walked down the street or drove a car, like everyone else, with his thumb closed on a train or bus ticket. So how was I to know how to distinguish them? Grebe thought that the Greatham agent would laugh at such an idea.

But how it would have simplified his job to be able to say that Green was old, blind, or tubercular. An hour in the archives, taking notes, and I would have had no need to have this downside. When Raynor gave him the checkbook Grebe asked:

— How many things should I know about these people?

And Raynor had looked at him as if Grebe was preparing to accuse him of trying to make the job look more important than it was. Grebe smiled, because by then they got along very well, but nevertheless he had been willing to say something similar when the mess of Staika and her children began in the office.

Grebe had waited a long time to get this job. He did it thanks to the help of a former schoolmate who pulled some threads in the Municipal Council office. It was someone who had never been his close friend, but who suddenly was compassionate and interested: furthermore, delighted to show him how far he had come, and how well he did even in this difficult time. Well, he was getting out of trouble with force, just like the Democratic administration itself. Grebe had come to visit him at the town hall and had lunch at a bar counter or had beer together at least once a month for a year, and in the end he had managed to get a job. He didn't care that he was assigned the lowest grade on the administrative scale, not even being a messenger, although Raynor thought so.

This Raynor was an original guy and Grebe had immediately become fond of him. As was appropriate on the first day, Grebe arrived early, but waited long enough, because Raynor was late. In the end, he suddenly appeared in his office in the form of a cubicle as if he had just jumped off one of those huge red trams on Indian Avenue that were flying past. His thin, wind-tanned face smiled and said something breathless to himself. With his hat, a small felt hat, and his coat, with a velvet neck well attached to his own neck, and with the silk scarf that highlighted the nervous tic of his chin, he swayed and turned around in the swivel chair, with his feet up, so he kept jumping a little bit like that sitting. Meanwhile he measured Grebe with his eyes,unusually long and slightly sardonic eyes. So both men sat for a while, saying nothing, while the supervisor took the hat off his head and placed it on his lap. His hands, hands darkened from the cold, were not clean. A steel beam passed through that small makeshift room from which machine straps had once hung. The building was an old factory.The building was an old factory.The building was an old factory.

— I am younger than you; I hope you don't mind taking orders from me — Raynor said —. But I don't have fun either. ¿How old are you?

— Thirty-five.

— And surely he thought he would be inside with the paperwork. But it just so happens that I have to send him outside.

— I don't care.

— And it is a majority of blacks that we have in this district.

— That seemed to me.

— Great. It will do well. C‘est un bon boulot. ¿Do you know French?

— A little.

— I thought I would have gone to college.

— Have you been to France? — Grebe asked.

— No, it's the French from the Berlitz school. I have been in Berlitz for more than a year, like many other people, around the world: the clerks in China and the brave in Tanganyika. In fact, I know that very well. That's how big the appeal of civilization is. They value it more than the account. But what do you want? What voulez-vous? Leo Le Rire and all the blatant newspapers, exactly as they do in Tanganyika. It must be very strange to be out there. But my reasons are that I intend to enter the diplomatic corps. I have a messenger cousin, and as he describes it it sounds enormously attractive. Travel in wagons lits and read books. While we ... What did you do before?

— To sales.

— Where?

— Sold canned meat at Stop and Shop. In the basement.

— And before that?

— Blinds, at Goldblatts’s.

— A permanent job?

— No. Thursdays and Saturdays. I also sold shoes.

— So he was also a shoemaker. All right. And before that? Here it is in the file. — Opened the file —. Saint Olaf Institute, professor of classical languages. Associate Professor, University of Chicago, 1926-1927. I have also studied Latin. Let's say some quotes: Dum spero spero.

— Dextram misero.

— Alea jacta est.

— Excelsior.

Raynor laughed out loud, and other employees came to look at him above the fake septum. Grebe also laughed, feeling pleased and comfortable. The luxury of having fun on a nervous morning.

When they were done and no one was watching or listening, Raynor said quite seriously:

— And why did you study Latin to begin with? ¿Did you want to be a priest?

— No.

— Just for pleasure? ¿For the culture? ¡Oh, the things people who can get out of it believe! — Suddenly it made everything funny and tragic at the same time —. I almost lost the clo for studying Law, and in the end I got it, what for? Now I earn twelve dollars a week more than you as a prize for having seen raw life and as a whole. I am going to tell you, as a cultured man, that even though nothing seems real, and that everything seems something different, and one thing for the other, and that for something even further away, the difference between twenty-five and thirty-eight dollars a week, regardless of the ultimate reality, is not a big deal. ¿Don't you think that was already clear to the Greeks? They were considerate people, but they did not part with their slaves.

This was much more than Grebe had expected for his first interview with his supervisor. He was too shy to show all the surprise he felt. He laughed a little, curious, and shook the ray of sunlight that covered his head with his corresponding speck of dust.

— Do you think I made such a big mistake?

— Of course it was great, and you realize now that the whip of difficult times has lacerated your back. You should have prepared yourself to have problems. Your family must have been well on money when he sent you to college. Stop me if I talk too much. ¿Did your mother pamper you? ¿Did your father give in to your whims? ¿Were you raised tenderly, with permission to go and find out what were the last things that took the place of all the others while the rest of the people worked in the filthy world of appearances?

— Well, no, it wasn't exactly like that — Grebe smiled. ¡« The filthy world of appearances »! Nothing less. But now it was his turn to surprise the other —. No, we were not rich. My father was the last authentic English butler in Chicago…

— Are you kidding me?

— Why should I be?

— With livery and everything?

— With livery and everything. Upstairs on the Costa Dorada.

— And did he want you to be educated as a gentleman?

— No, of course he didn't want to. He sent me to the Armor Institute to study chemical engineering. But when he died I changed schools.

Note: This story continue and finish on part two

With affection,

Ruben

Note: This story continue and end to second part.