Dream of Fair to Middling Women (10 page)

Out from the tunnel therefore he came, it clanged behind him, the libido sentiendi flared up, and he purled along in a foxy meditation. To begin with he considered offensive the tigress tone of the old multipara's letter. “Pull yourself together and come on”! It was easy to talk. He composed a letter in his mind:

“… had you gone to the trouble of taking cognisance of the terms of my letter to your delicate and third or fourth daughter (and no doubt, in the excitement of the moment you might have
arranged
to do that) you would scarcely, I believe, have conveyed so unreflected a tone to your recommendations. My letter was affectionately to the effect that I, unwell and confined to my room, might be obliged to postpone my departure for a day or two. I occupy one of the many positions that separate death from indifference to your daughter the Smeraldina-Rima. I am suffering from DIARRHCEIA. There is no reason why this affliction should turn out to be fatal, nor yet jeopardise my feeling for the Smeraldina-Rima…” and so on. Then he
thought better, he thought, no, I can't send a thing like that, and anyway I don't know how to write a stinger in English, I always overdo it. In French I can write a fine stinger, but in English I overdo it. And it is possible that Mammy is acting for what she conceives to be the best for all parties. It's that great heifer of a pucelle bawling out of her beauty-sickness—that's the one I want to get. I'll get up, I'll take a train this very day, I'll arrive beginning to look like St Francis skull-gazing, and then when the thing fiascoes I can I told you so.

He lay there working it all out on the bed and already the Reisefieber burned him. He left the bed in a spasm, he wired “Gewiß” and went.

Down you get now and step around. Two hours menopause at least. Drag your coffin my lord. Half a day and I'll be with. HIER! The bright beer goes like water through the shortsighted fliegende Frankfurter porter. In Perpignan exiled dream-Dantes screaming in the plane-trees and freezing the sun with peacock feathers and at last at least a rudimentary black swan with the blood-beak and HIC! for the bladderjerk of the little Catalan postman. Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus! Here oh here oh art thou pale with weariness. I hope yes after a continental third-class insomnia among the reluctantly military philologists asleep and armed as to nasals and dentals. Laughter. Ten Pfenige in such a dainty slot gives the la I am bound to concede and releases the
appropriate tonic for the waning love. Moderate strength rings the bell. Like hell it does. Cosi fan tutte with the magic flute. Even in the Xmas holidays. Half a day and I'll be in.

Up to time then after this little railway-station rectification here she comes advancing up the railway-platform like a Gozzi-Epstein, careful not to lose the platform ticket that yet ten Pfenige cost had, insisting on the Garden of Eden in Mammy's furcoat, scarcely suggestive within the mild aphrodisiac of cheap loose black cardboard Russian buskins legs and limbs that even flexed nervously in black hose stretched to breaking point and viewed from a carefully selected Blickpunkt against a very special quality of hard light during œstrum were not alas even reasonably exciting. The truly tremendous bowel of the hips (frequent and easy) breaking out and away from the waistroot (Lupercus a liability) like a burdocked bulb of Ruffino and the two hoops of the buttocks received an almost Rhineline from the dark peltsheath. Sheath within sheath and the missing sword. Not forgetting for a moment this was the suit he had bought for next to nothing from a lefthanded indivisible individual, with a charitable desire to justify his fatigue, he forced his right hand down past the craggy coxa (almost a woman's basin in these trousers) into the glairy gallant depths and fished up a fifty. A cigarette quick for maxillas and malas and the ticket handy there in the breast of my reefer and the heavy valise to snatch him down skilfully detached and meagre into the loveglue and a smoke after that was nearly as good as in the Maison du Café.

“At last!”

“Beloved!”

“Taxi!”

Vie de taxi. Je t'adore ä l'égal.

Carry your coffin my lord. Männer. Moving east to the segregation of the sexes. Ausgang on the right. Rule of the road. Lady on right arm. Nonsens unique. Astuce. But sleep on the right side. Gentle reader don't overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the Armistice with a pubic lanugo and

BELACQUA

we had to call him and no indolent virgin is his sister (indolent virgin!) and he does not much care whether he plays the tinkle-tinkle of a fourhander or not but he won't facing the keyboard observe the rule of the road (a megalomaniac you see with his head in his thighs as a general rule) so we ask you to humour now what naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation, pray that he will let a few good sighs out of him ere it be too late and speedy promotion from the Godbirds.

And the lady that even in this very short and public space of time and notwithstanding that fur has no conductive properties of the appropriate kind worth speaking of has succeeded in transmitting certain unexpectedly stimulating sensations to her young visitor, were we not obliged to dub her the

SMERALDINA-RIMA

though most anything else would have done as well and notably Hesper we fancy would have been better and anything that comes in handy for short. He handed her into the cab of the Wagen with its charming deep Bluepoint zoster and spoke the address confidently to the chauffeur who but a moment previously had thought to light a cigarette and now naturally was in no kind of humour to start his engine and set off but was not slow to yield to the
promising accent of the callow tourist whose heavy fibre case he hoisted vigorously on board on his left beside him and clipping the yet intact Ova between a rubbery helix and hypertrophied mastoid process gratified in his dialogue doubtless his nearest colleagues with what no doubt was a passionate Hessian epigram, set his machine angrily in motion, suffering with a kind of hopeless interest the refracted deportment of his clients.

Down the cobbled alley then of bitter Xmas trees, trembling in many and many an umbral stasis twixt tram and trottoir, the superb Wagen flew towards the spire that eliminates in impeccable imperial alignment the now dim height of Hercules and the mean cascade sullen and abandoned dropping, the little there was of it and because it bloody well had to, down the choked channel of Hohen-zollern rocaille, snowclad, upon the castle.

“Where did you get the hat?” Another glaucous helmet.

“Do you like it?”

“Very nice do you?”

“Oh I don't know do you?”

Snotgasp of reliefhilarity in honour of private joke.

“It goes with the ring.”

He turned over the hand and looked at the warts. Two dwindling warts in the shadow of the Mount Venerean. Warts in the valley of the shadow of.

“Your warts are better.”

Ostentatiously he clapped his mouth upon the place. She squeezed the Giudecca of her palm against the centre of distribution, nailing his malas with thumb and index. That was lovely. In the rue Delambre with a silk handkerchief did he not stem and staunch the vomitdribble of littérateur deaddrunk and cornuted what's more into the bargain on Pernod Fils and Pick-me-up? How often had he
not denied all knowledge of Hernani? Poor Hamlet rolling his belly waxes and tapers the spike of his navelthread for the red waistcoat. The beadlust. By no thinking shall he consume that enterprise, by no new thoughts shall he altogether be released from the postulate of his undertaking. Fast in the black sand.

Let us off the tutti chords now and tell us frankly shutting your eyes like Rouletabille what you think of our erotic sostenutino. Crémieux hold your saliva and you Curtius, we have a little note somewhere on Anteros we do believe, in fact we seem to remember we once wrote a poem (Nth. Gt. George's St. triphthong Corporal Banquo,
if
you please) on him or to him cogged from the liquorish laypriest's Magic Ode and if we don't forget we'll have the good taste to shove in the little ducky-diver as a kind of contrapuntal compensation do you comprehend us and in deference to your Pisan penchants for literary stress and strain.

Well really you know and in spite of the haricot skull and a tendency to use up any odds and ends of pigment that happened to be left over she was the living spit he thought of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. Ne suis-je point pâle? Suis-je belle? But certainly pale and belle my pale belle Braut with a winter skin like any old sail in the wind. The root and the source betwixt and between the little athletic or aesthetic bit of a birdneb was indeed we assure you a constant source of delight and astonishment, when his solitude was not peopled and justified and beautified and even his sociabilities by a constipated coryza, to his forefinger pad and nail, rubbing and plumbing and palping and boring it just as for many years he polished (ecstasy of attrition!) his glasses or suffered the shakes and gracenote strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Szopen or
Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whosoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thanks Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thanks Mr Field) and a Kleinmeister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thanks Mr Beckett), or crossed the Seine or the Pegnitz or the Tolka or the Fulda as the case might be and it never by any possible chance on one single solitary occasion occurring to him that he was on all such and similar occasions (which we regret to say lack of space obliges us regretfully to exclude from this chronicle) not merely indulging in but pandering to the vilest and basest excesses of sublimation of a certain kind. The wretched little wet plug of an upperlip, pugnozzling up and back in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils was happily to some small extent mollified and compensated by the fine full firm undershot priapism of under-lip and chin, a signal recovery to say the least and a reaffirmation of the promise of sentimentic vehemence already so gothly declamatory in the wedgehead of the strapping fizgig. From time to time she positively only had to snatch off her amice to be a birdface and to have put Pope John Kissmine and Orchids in mind of his Puerpetually Suc-courbusting Lady as she positively must have appeared on at least two probabionary occasions:
primo,
skewered, there's no other word for it, to her loggia by the shining gynaecologist;
secundo,
confined, by Thermidor, in the interests of her armpits, to her bathroom, shamed in mind, yes, and yet—grieving for the doomed olives. Well we must say and no offence meant, that class of egoterminal immaculate quackery and dupery gives us the sick if anything does. Whatever she was she was not that kind. We suppose we can say she looked like an ulula in pietra serena, a parrot in a Pietà. On occasions that is. Not we need scarcely point out in the helmet of salvation.

By Jove when we look back and think how chaste was the passion of mutual attraction that juxtaposed those two young people in the first instance! It is out of the questions, it is beyond our poor powers, to give you any idea of the reverence with which they—how shall we say?—clave the one to the other in an ecstasy and an agony of mystical adhesion. Yessir! An ecstasy and an agony! A sentimentical coagulum, sir, that biggers descruption. Don't we know for a positive fact that th'unhappy Belacqua, separated from his douce Vega by two channels and 29 hours third if he went over Ostend, tossing and turning and tightening the tender white worms of his nervi nervorum with the frogs' and the corncrakes' Chinese chromatisms, inscribed to his darling blue flower some of the finest Night of May hiccupsobs that ever left a fox's paw sneering and rotting in a snaptrap. E.g.

At last I find in my confusèd soul,

Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses,

The certitude that I cannot be whole,

Consummate, finally achieved, unless

I be consumed and fused in the white heat

Of her sad finite essence, so that none

Shall sever us who are at last complete

Eternally, irrevocably one,

One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies,

One with the bright purity of the fire

Of which we are and for which we must die

A rapturous strange death and be entire,

Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright,

Conjoined in the One and in the Infinite!

Lilly Neary has a lovely gee and her pore Paddy got his B.A. and by the holy fly I wouldn't recommend you to ask me what class of a tree they were under when he put his hand on her and enjoyed that. The thighjoy through the fingers and what do you suppose she wants for her thigh-beauty? A bitch-melba and a long long come and go before breakfast, toast and. Keycold Lucrece the chaste and the castaway in the cruel tights and Christ the useful culmination, fouterpounds through the fingers. No, more—more?—other, than that to my bright agenesia. No no don't admire that. No but I thought I thought perhaps honeysuckle round the cradle, custard and nutmeg on my grave, and the Eingang? Then he reddied his nose with the hand that came off her. Christ that was fine too. I wouldn't be seen looking at your Haus Albrecht Dürer, Adam Kraft my iron buck virgin. No smoking in the torture chamber. Not really you don't mean to tell me well well! Now the thin little sandy bony with the fine little stout son in Hanover, furchtbar all of a sudden with tears, now I must go and dien in the, the others do the streets but I go and dien in the, furchtbar, find a hotel, take a Wagen, no?, write, to hell with you, strive for your stout little hoffentlich ballbearing bastardpimp, I'll spend the night in the station, without the Benedictina, my old bald darling, your garret stinks of, I won't kiss your playful hand, daß heißt spielen, my dolorific nymphae and a tic doulheureux in th'imperforate hymen, what's the Dutch for randy, my dirty little hungry little bony vulture of a whorchen away up first-floor Burg-ward over the stream, I'll send you a Schein when I have a Schwips. No effing smoking do you hear me in the effing Folterzimmer. I had to ask her little sister and she closed me the vowel. I wonder did I do well to leave my notes at home, in 39 under the east wind, weind please. Well then
to get back to what we were saying when he'd picked his nose for a little bit and the thighs there Gott sei dank he rose did he not and left her playing there against the oak before the ash, oh don't infuriate me don't bother me, let me pay let me buy you etwas, eat my little Au gen Celery-ice Celeryice, did he not, and wandered up hill and down dale like the cat and the mouse in business together or the Marientotenkind. No no I
won't
say everything, I
won't
tell you everything. No but surely you see now what he am? See! Heiliger Brahmaputra! A hedgecreeper! A peeping Tom in bicycle-clips, the ones that go round! Well then up he rose and apprehended without passion round and about the Sabbath brushwood foothill couples. Yes to be sure of course you are right, it would be hard for you to understand my meaning, you see he led a fairly small fleshy lipped maiden I might have said Jungfrau into the wood I might have said Wald and creeped and peeped instead of. Oh did I do well to leave my notes at home. So then after another little bit he came back and stood looking with his tongue in his cheek instead of.