Libra by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page B

from the spines, faded into time. Here was Das Kapital, three volumes with buckled spines and discolored pages, with underlinings, weird notes in an obsessive hand. He found mathematical formulas, sweeping theories of capital and labor. He found The Communist Manifesto. It was here in German and in English. Marx and Engels. The workers, the class struggle, the exploitation of wage labor. Here were biographies and thick histories. He learned that Trotsky had once lived, in exile, in a working-class area of the Bronx not far from the places Lee had lived with his mother.
    Trotsky in the Bronx. But Trotsky was not his real name. Lenin’s name was not really Lenin. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.
    The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
    He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
     
     
    Marguerite browned flour in a heavy-bottomed pan. They watched each other eat. She was always right there, hands busy, eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses. He could see the strain and aging in her face, the flesh going taut at the hairline, and he felt something between pity and contempt. They watched TV in the next room. Miniature willow baskets hung on the wall. Her skull was showing through.
    “Lillian says I spoil you to a T. You think you own me, she says.”
    “I’m your son. You have to do what I want.”
    “I admit this, which I shouldn’t say a word, but your brothers were a burden on my back. They demanded attention which it was not humanly possible to give. This is where the human element comes in. When I think of all the tragedies. Your daddy felt a pain in his arm, out mowing. The next thing I know.”
    “They’re in the service to get away from you.”
    “When I think of being a grandparent who is denied affection. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. I took you to Godchaux’s in a stroller.”
    Ever since he could remember, they’d shared cramped spaces. It was the basic Oswald memory. He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death’s-head teeth. He knew what she would say, saw the gestures before she made them.
    “I am entitled to better.”
    “So am I. I’m the one. I have rights,” he said.
    He helped her hang half-moon wall shelves. He would find a communist cell and become a member. This was a city with a hundred kinds of foreigners and ideas and influences. There were people who ran ads in the paper to seek favors of a patron saint. There were people who wore berets, who did not speak ten words of English. Down at the docks he saw oppressed workers unloading ninety-pound banana stems from Honduras. He would find a cell, be given tasks to prove himself.
    “Lillian expects endless thanks. She lives off thank-yous and you’re-welcomes.”
    “She thinks we’re one jump up from handouts in the street.”
    “She thinks we’re beholden,” Marguerite said. “I was a popular child. I am willing to stand on the facts.”
    They’d lived with her sister Lillian on French Street. They took an apartment on St. Mary Street,