GEORGE MONTEIRO
629
Yet at his back, at other times, he hears the facts of history. A scene he
had once witnessed "kept rising in his mind":
He had once watched a colony of ants perish in a hearth fire. They
had been hibernating in the trunk of a tree and had not awakened
while their home was being chopped into two-foot lengths. However,
the warmth of the fire, which was licking the walls of their domicile,
aroused them from their lethargy. Rushing out of the one available
exit they discovered themselves on an island in a sea of flame. Some
ran wildly here and there, exploring their remaining terrain to the last
inch. Others kept close to the hole from which they had issued, occa–
sionally diving down only to run out again when the increasing heat
warned them of their imminent destruction.
A few, bolder than the rest, dropped from the smoking bark, and
were shriveled before they had fallen on to the bed of incandescent
coals.
The scene kept rising in his mind. Sometimes he likened the ants
to Jews who were being butchered as they fled from their flaming
houses. Sometimes he was an ant, not knowing which way to turn in
the conflagration that threatened
him.
His brain was too distraught to
criticize his mixed metaphors. Besides, the picture was not evoked by
his will but seemed to rise up before him of its own volition.
(It hardly seems coincidental that Hemingway includes a similar insect
parable in
A Farewell to Arms,
though his telling of it stops short of Loeb's
Professor Mercado's interpretation of it as a parable of the terrible histor–
ical fate of Jews.)
Loeb's novel does not pretend to resolve the problems of Jewish self–
identity and anti-Semitism that it brings up, though John Mercado does
reveal that he is a Jew just after he has made love to the Russian woman
who has captivated him. Fittingly, she calls herself
Cl{~opatre,
identifying
herself as a "type of the Fatal Woman" who, as Mario Praz defines her in
The Romantic Agony,
"massacred in the morning the lovers who had passed
the night with her." If Loeb's machinations of plot, always a bit silly, turn
entirely so-its more serious implications petering out in trivialities-there
is one notable exception at the end that almost redeems it. Cleopatre's last
words ring ominous and prophetic of what would befall the Jews at the
hands of the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s. "Le Monsieur Uohn
Mercado], I am sorry for him. He was cursed before he came into the
world.... It is but a kindness when we remove him and his kind from the
earth."
