Tropic of Capricorn Read Free

sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot about him, abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at the time and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral too – what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were, friends and relatives all congregated about the bier and allof them bawling like sick monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass. She was such a rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she didn’t believe in disease and didn’t believe in death either, she raised such a stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not her beloved Jack! No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable. He was dead and there were no two ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of it. I didn’t waste any tears over it. I couldn’t say that he was better off because after all the “he” had vanished.
He
was gone and with him the sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I let a loud fart – right beside the coffin.
    This caring too much – I remember that it only developed with me about the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn’t care enough. If I had really cared I wouldn’t be here now writing about it: I’d have died of a broken heart, or I’d have swung for it. It was a bad experience because it taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn’t want to smile, to work when I didn’t believe in work, to live when I had no reason to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of doing what I didn’t believe in.
    I was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it’s a wonder things didn’t explode around me.
    It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had nothing to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting themselves comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another, and never enough in it to keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as I was hired I was fired. I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired distrust. Where-ever I went I fomented discord – not because I was idealistic but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of everything. Besides, I wasn’t a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt. People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn’t give a damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn’t get it. But after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to speak.I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time – now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations – I was more like God, if anything.
    This went on from about the middle of the war until … well, until one day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company – the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America – towards the close of the day, prepared to go through with it. I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job.
    The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on the