Cain’s Book (22 page)

What are you going to say to Mona?

“She’s great,” Geo said, “like she’s not small. I can get a good grip on her ass... but sometimes I feel like young, untired pussy.”

There’s not much young pussy in sight today. Hatless women with bare pink legs in broken shoes, red, flat, suspicious faces. But in the strong sun and the glint of the
silvery water everything is at peace. Occasionally a man calls out to someone on another scow. The water laps gently at the bilges and moves back, bubbling. A small red and black tug with a large
white C painted on its funnel hoots and moves away from the side of a scow and quickly towards the head of the tow. The scows are four abreast in seven tiers. Some of them have roof gardens, a kind
of window box in which one can sit in the midst of geraniums. A circular came with our last pay cheque: “Captains desiring geraniums please notify paymaster at the New York office
immediately.”

The green trees; the fragrance of the trees in the water-travelled wind avoided the nostril that twitched to find a word to express it. The hairs of the earth’s body; to
get beyond the abstraction it was necessary to sink or soar, and that was wordless, my sitting there in the summer wind, sinking, soaring. But then my mind came back, like a scythe, to reap the
corn, to refine the sensual elisions. From the tropisms of vegetables, my ancestors, no exit except through symbol, the scaffoldings of imagination. An indignity for a man to be a tree which knows
other trees sexually but not women.

I was sitting, stripped to the waist in the sun, the light river wind like a cool feather at my skin, my thighs prickling on the painted wood seat, the sweat there at the loins in my shorts,
smelling my own summer smell and the tar smell of the scow, a hanging warmly about my belly of summer air, and a consciousness of the hairs at my crotch in prickling sweat. I was smelling the trees
and the summer air, conscious of knowing the instant of living in the summer afternoon. A moment ago, lust, with an elation behind my nose and eyes, twitched like a blade of grass at my scrotum,
and my gaze came to rest on a fat woman under a beach umbrella perched hugely in the foreground of distant hills... put a pillow under it dear and I’ll ram it home. Between the big knees and
the big arse, thighs, God-given and gratefully accepted, the luscious seedy melon slice of Eve, greedy for get, and to beget. She had red hair.

My mother had red hair. That worried me. Her body was creamy and varicose-veined at the legs. The thought of a red sex worried me. It was incongruous, almost occult... a single item of
uncorrelatable evidence disturbing my general picture of her, pointing to a vast and formless hinterland of experience which, because she was my mother, I felt constrained to shun. I should have
needed a new language for it. I was never able to get beyond the idea of her as “my mother”. And yet at a time which I cannot in its uniqueness recall I came bursting bloodily out from
between her spread thighs, head first, they said, as one thrown. Her goodness was legendary and my total experience of her – “She was a gem, she was,” Aunt Hettie said after her
death – consisted in a vague colouration of particulars within the general construct of her sanctity. Only the mute knowledge of her constant loving of me was vivid as the seditious thought
of the red sex. As I grew up that became a symbol whose meaning I was unable to comprehend, always there, strange, substantial, rather horrifying. Even up to her death I did not become aware of the
woman. I realized that clearly for the first time when I looked at her face in the coffin. The others touched her hair. But to me it was the hair of a bad dead doll, undertaker’s colour, and
I didn’t know her.

And I moved out of the past back into my glance at the woman under the umbrella who now reminded me of Ella (why not?) whom I had picked up on the night train from Liverpool to
London a week after I said goodbye to my father. Only the blue nightlight was on in the crowded compartment and I felt her belly and thighs under a spread coat. When we arrived at Victoria we took
a taxi to where she lived in Notting Hill Gate. I remember being conscious of the fact that I was looking at the upper half of a naked woman. She was in the bed with the bedclothes drawn up far
enough to obscure her navel. Half an hour before, she had got up. The soles of her feet made a flat thocking sound on the floor. In an upright position her big belly piled itself up on its own
ripple just above her crinkly black pubic hairs. Her fat thighs trembled with the shock of her step. I watched them approach and pass. When she came back I met her on my knees. To see her close,
her abdomen falling outwards towards my singing face, caused both me and what I was looking at to lose in separateness. I underwent a kind of catharsis. I remember my eyes moving from her hips to
her navel and down, the whiteness exploding softly under the pressure of lips and fingertips, the heat, the skin close, odorous, opaque, yellowish, and pitted almost like pumice stone, a mass which
lost all distinctness as it came to rest against my forehead. Her body jerked softly, nameless, absolute. I rose from her later and went to the lavatory. When I returned she was already back in the
bed. I looked directly at her, my attention held by the soft wad of hair at her armpit. Except to tell me her name she scarcely spoke. Ella Forbes. I knew nothing about her. I suspected she was
married. Perhaps her husband was a commercial traveller, like Hector. She carried an assortment of articles purchased in a chemist’s in her large, bucket-shaped handbag. She was a Catholic. I
knew that because she was wearing a rosary she didn’t take off. Her nipples were corkish. I approached on my tongue, quitting her deeply indented navel to move upwards between them, and
finally I contained the warm silver crucifix in my mouth. Strong white teeth and thick lips. She used numerous cosmetics. The nails of her fingers and toes were enamelled a cyclamen red. For a few
hours we were able to annihilate ourselves in each other. There was no complicated syntax between us.

Turn on all the lights and take a good look round. Look at Jennie in Paris drinking a cognac at the bar of the Dôme. A few moments ago you noticed her extract her large
black tits from her wide brassiere and lay them on the copper bar. There they lie like overgrown eggplants on a tray of burnished gold, and with them she defies the room. Jennie is wearing a wig.
She is black and fat and nearing thirty-five and killing herself more or less purposively with drink. Back in the room at Montparnasse she says: “Honey, I’m not really so fat. I’m
just well-developed.”

“You’re fat and you’ve got a fat black ass.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Goddammit, you blonde blue-eyed nymphet! Will you open your legs?”

Feeling under your own belly the hard bristles of hers.

“Ugh.” Her nostrils tightening.

“Because two farts maketh no poem, dost think two bellies cannot?”

Jennie is always raped.

The taste of her still in your mouth. She is dressing in front of the mirror over the wash-basin. Fuck over, dress quick, is her experience. She seldom exhibits her nakedness, except in
defiance, in public places.

It occurred to me often that to be a user in New York was to lay oneself open to a whole system of threats, not only legal; for my mind always came back as I looked down at the
little heap of whitish powder to wonder what an analyst would find there. The horse is cut with all manner of adulterous powders, until, at the average user’s end, there remains three per
cent heroin. You can usually count on three per cent. But there are times when codeine or even a barbiturate is substituted for the real thing... so long as they stun you, they calculate. And so
you look to cop again, at once, and so it goes on. To administer an overdose a pusher has only substantially to raise the percentage of heroin in what he gives you. When you turn blue your friends
try to bring you round and if they cannot they discuss how to have your body discovered elsewhere, away from their pad so as not to bring the heat on them. An occasional corpse is found in a
parking lot.

I look back on all the moving from city to city and across continents. Sometimes a move was to another bed, to another room, and then suddenly, like an unguided missile, I
travelled a thousand miles. I remember travelling with Midhou third class on a third-class Greek steamer from Genoa to Piraeus with a vague plan to meet up with a girl who had flown to Athens, and
to walk to China. We were confined amongst cattle and other livestock to the bows, sailing across the Aegean to the Corinth canal. At the table in the dining room there was Midhou, the Algerian
without a country, and this old Orthodox Jew, and myself. Midhou didn’t speak English and the Jew didn’t speak French, so I was in the middle. Midhou was an Arab who couldn’t
bring himself to fight for anything, and certainly not for Arab nationalism. The Orthodox Jew, bearded, in sombre clothes, glanced distastefully at Midhou and spoke to me of the progress they were
making in Israel.

“Not like the Arabs. You wouldn’t believe it, my dear sir, how primitive they are... so backward, no sanitation...”

“
Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?
”
³⁴
Midhou said to me.

“He says you’re unsanitary.”

“
Merde! Petit con
!”
³⁵

The Jew nodded his head to confirm his own thoughts when he saw Midhou’s leer. At the first meal he discovered that the cooking wasn’t kosher. For the rest of the voyage he ate
apples and sardines and hard-boiled eggs while Midhou, three feet away, gnawed dripping bones.

All the women in third class were pregnant.

The notes from Athens were pretty much the same as notes from elsewhere:

A few notes about the hot, restless streets, but not really much about Athens. I found it more and more difficult to get outside my own skull.

S
O AMERICA WASN
’
T REALLY
very different from anywhere else when I finally arrived. A
question of degree.

That much I couldn’t go back on, and a great deal more besides.

I remember sailing into the Hudson River for the first time, on a troop ship. My first view of the Statue of Liberty, and then being amongst them, the high buildings, like matchboxes open and
shut. I had seen photographs of them, walked streets in the cinema, and, armoured by Hollywood and Aldous Huxley against experience – he was a boyhood hero of mine, and I’m glad to see
him on drugs at last – was consigned to the care of the indignant, and I came and went, in fear, trembling and security, like a zombie.

During the years in Paris I had my doubts about those who had nothing good to say about America just as I had my doubts about those who talked about Europe’s being dead. They were like my
father and his pal who always talked about the good old days. As a child I used to think that adults when they spoke always gave the impression that one lost something by still being alive and that
all places had been better in former times. Before I ever went there I heard that Paris was dead, and later I heard that Greenwich Village was dead... but I never found any place dead where a
number of men and women for whatever reason tried to strike permanently against uncreative work. In those places I found dissent, sedition, personal risk. And there I learnt to explore and modify
my great contempt.