Crazy Cock (23 page)

Tony Bring lay in his bed and Vanya lay in hers. The first day said Vanya aren't you worried and he answered no. On the second day said Vanya what are you going to do and he answered nothing. The third day said Vanya I'm going to notify the police and he made no reply. But instead of notifying the police she went out and got drunk and when she returned she was raving about cathedrals and rats and athletes with bull necks; she even ceased to be original and called herself “an arrow of yearning for the other shore.” Toward morning she began to sing off-key and scream and shriek, she got up and held the walls apart with her dirty palms. The Danish sisters rapped on the floor with their shoes. This having no effect, the only thing left to do was to throw a pail of water over her, which was done. Thereupon she slept as calmly as if she were in a straitjacket and Tony Bring examined her toenails, which were long and bent. In the morning Hildred walked in, her eyes glassy, and all the explanation that she offered was that she had met a poet, saying which she tumbled into bed without even removing her velvet suit, which now had only twenty-two or twenty-three balls down the front, all of them empty and each and every one of them veined with cicatrices.

She had a long, long sleep and when she awoke no one knew whether it was seven in the morning or seven at night. She opened the window and collected a bowl of snow. Then she went out and bought food—heaps of food—and said how beautiful it was out of doors. Two things were good for the complexion and two only: a damp climate, such as
England had, and wet snow. No matter what she touched on there was snow on her tongue. Her eyes were still glassy, and though her spirit was bright it was strangely bright, snow-bright, and after she had eaten she vomited and the beautiful glow on her cheeks that had come with the snow disappeared and her skin looked as it had always looked—flour-white, satiny, heavy, languid. With her bright red lips and her bright round eyes she was like a fever-wraith and her talk had fever in it.

From the day the blizzard set in, which was Lincoln's birthday, until Washington's birthday Tony Bring never got out of bed except to go to the bathroom. He was down with hemorrhoids. In a box containing a tube of ointment which Hildred purchased at the druggist they found a description of the malady printed in five languages. The English read as follows:

Hemorroides

Hemorroides
are varicous veins produced by the dilatation of the veins of the body rectum. They are due chiefly to constipation and enteritis and can be internal or external. Sometimes itchings accompany the push. The saddle is nearly always painful.

Our Treatment

Avoid in food all that can inflame the system such as spiced food, game, etc.

Eat little meat. To become almost a vegetarian.

Not be constipated, but above all never to take drastics such as Scamonee, Aloes, Jalap.

Take light infusions of Bourdaine or still better Paraffin oil.

Local Treatment

Use the canule to bring into the rectum a little
Sedosol
. In cases of itchings rub gently with
Sedosol
and the soothing effect is felt immediately.

Take great care before every application to make a good lotion of hot boiled water.

Our product, which is a real new piece of science, does not grease or stain the skin and is put away very easily even with cold water.

Twice a day, therefore, they turned him over on his stomach and doctored his rectum. Between times they lubricated his system so thoroughly and conscientiously that if he had been a Linotype machine or a Diesel engine he would have functioned smoothly for a year to come. But he was a trying patient. Instead of being grateful to them for their pains he yelled and cursed. He complained because the ice melted too fast and grumbled when they refused to read to him. He asked for
Jerusalem
by Pierre Loti and they brought back Claude Farrere—
L'Homme Qui Assassina
. They were busy again putting arms and legs together, dyeing wigs, making hinges, sewing garments for their shooting gallery of Lilliputians. All day long and far into the night they labored, and while they labored they banged and scraped and whistled and sang in Russian and French and German, and they tossed off vodkas and gorged themselves with sandwiches, with caviar and sturgeon. They removed the old bulbs which had given out a yellow, sickly light and substituted daylight lamps. The effect was shattering. It seemed to him as if his flesh were a mass of splinters, that his nerves were exposed and scraped. He could feel the veins in his rectum throbbing,
the blood bubbling there as if it were coursing through a wild pulse. And of what interest to him was their wild gibberish about Picasso and Rimbaud or the Comte de Lautréamont? They talked as if they were already seated on the
terrasse
in front of the Dôme. They even fixed the date of their going and disputed hotly as to which line they would take and whether they would live in a cheap hotel or rent a studio. They knew in advance that they would not be taking baths except at long intervals, that Camels would be too expensive to smoke, and that a sou wouldn't buy even a brass button.

How the piles alone are sufficient to make a man nervous and irritable; they weigh you down and make you feel as if your insides were dropping out. They can become so cursedly unbearable that the thought of hanging by the wrists becomes an unmitigated pleasure. But when, all day long, and far into the night, the place is turned into a carpenter shop and there is the sound of glasses clinking and tongues wagging, a man may be excused for going off his nut. And Tony Bring behaved exactly as if he had gone cuckoo. He yelled with pain or rage, and then he sang, and after that he cursed or laughed. If they mentioned Picasso he would talk about Matisse, or that wild man Czobel, and neither Czobel nor Matisse meant anything to him, nor did anybody, but he wanted to be heard and drown them with words, or if he couldn't drown them asphyxiate them because if they went on talking and talking he felt his guts would turn to sawdust and it would be the tale of the fake tinder fungus all over again. Injecting bisulfide of carbon or arsenate of lead wouldn't help a damned bit. A man who's being strangled in the rectum, who asks nothing more of the world than a saddle of cracked ice, can't be expected to have the temper of
a saint or the heroism of a god. He wants to be left alone in peace and quiet, in a dark room preferably, and listen to some kind angel read aloud from some enchanting or disenchanting book. He doesn't want to hear of poems bordered by copper light or houses that open like oysters. He doesn't want to amuse himself with Chinese puzzles, for it was nothing less than a Chinese puzzle and would always remain one where Hildred had gone the night of the blizzard when she stepped out in a velvet suit with hollow silver balls down the front to mail a letter and then after not showing up for three days and nights neither telegraphing nor telephoning suddenly walks in with glassy eyes saying that she had met a poet and not even a punctuation mark beyond this. And if she thought everything could be put straight again by calling in a sawed-off, hammered-down runt of a doctor she was mistaken. He wouldn't have any cheap kikes tinkering with him, not even with his rectum. But the doctor came just the same and it was the old trick of slipping a thermometer under the tongue and asking questions you couldn't answer. A strange thing was that instead of talking about Capablanca or Einstein the doctor spoke of Hilaire Belloc, who he said was a scholar without wisdom, and anyway for the Gentile to deal with the Jews was like running a race with your legs tied because the Jewish mind was keen, quick, slippery, capable of turning over a thousand times to the Gentile's once. Hildred, who was greatly offended by her husband's rudeness, ushered the doctor to the front door and apologized, and the doctor kissed her hand and said there was nothing to worry about. “He's lazy . . . he's malingering,” he said. And so with a light heart she returned to her carpenter shop and thereafter paid not the
slightest heed to groans, aches, screams, curses, threats, laughs, et cetera.

Left to himself, ignored like a broken umbrella, the pain gradually easing up, because with time everything passes, Tony Bring discovered that it was pleasant to lie back and rehearse the drama of his life—a drama that began, as he vividly recalled, from that moment when, sitting in his high chair, he recited like a trained dog some verses of German poetry . . . recited in the barbarous tongue of his barbarous ancestors. So vivid, accurate, and complete were his recollections that with a fierce, proud, crazy exultation he said to himself: If I lie here long enough I can string my whole life together, day by day. And certain days which for certain reasons stood out from the others like milestones he did actually live over again, hour for hour, minute for minute. Women who had so completely dropped from memory that a week ago he could not have summoned their image now came to life in strictest detail—height, weight, resistance, texture of skin, the things they wore, the way they embraced . . . everything . . . everything. Retracing the curve of his life he saw that it was not the broad, circuitous arc that one imagined to himself, that it was neither an arrow shot toward death nor the parabolic kiss of the infinite nor yet the noble symphony of biology; it was rather a succession of shocks, a seismographic record of oscillations, of peaks and dips and broad, tranquil valleys that were like divine menopauses.

L
ATE ONE
afternoon, as if electrified, he sprang out of bed, consumed a hearty meal in which he violated all the rules of diet that had been laid down for him, and began to write. The
louder they banged, the more they whistled and guzzled and sang, the better he wrote. The words rose up inside him like tombstones and danced without feet; he piled them up like an acropolis of flesh, rained on them with vengeful hate until they dangled like corpses slung from a lamppost. The eyes of his words were guitars and they were laced with black laces, and he put crazy hats on his words and under their laps table legs and napkins. And he had his words copulate with one another to bring forth empires, scarabs, holy water, the lice of dreams and dream of wounds. He sat the words down and laced them to chair with their black laces and then he fell on them and lashed them, lashed them until the blood ran black and the eyes broke their veils. What he remembered of his life were the shocks, the seismographic orgasms that said, “Now you are living,” “Now you are dying.” And the broad tranquil valleys that were coveted was the cud which cows chewed, was the love which women took between their legs and masticated, was a bell with an enormous clapper that broke the wind with its clangor. The peaks and the dips—there was the living, the rush of mercury in the thermometer of the veins, the pulse without a bridle. The peaks—saint going up to peep at the hinderparts of God . . . prophet with dung in his hands and foaming at the mouth . . . dervish with music in the balls of his feet, with snakes squirming in his entrails, dancing, dancing, dancing with maggots in his brain. . . . Not heights and depths, but ecstasy upside down, inside out, the bottom reaching as far as the top. Abasement not reaching just to the earth, but through the earth, through grass and sod and subterranean stream, from zenith to nadir. Everything that was loved being hated fiercely. Not the cold pricks of conscience, not the tormenting flagellation of the
mind, but bright, cruel blades flashing, scorn, insult, contumely, not doubting God but denying Him, flaying Him, spitting on Him.
But always God!

A
ND THEN
one night Vanya rose up like a dolphin covered with mud and she said, “I'll go mad . . . go mad!” and he said to himself, Fine! Here we are at last . . .
go mad!
To go mad is to stop being a eunuch, to quit the fertile valleys, not to masturbate with paint or to change names. If she would only go mad he would embrace her in madness, she male and he female; he would put an infibulator on the house and they would die of excess. And the amphibious one, who changed sex with the seasons, who closed herself in like an oyster and called the two hard shells her mystery, she could nurse her mystery in iodine and mud. Colder than a statue, her voice lifeless, her eyes glassy, the one who was mystery stood beside the gut table. Like a sleepwalker stabbing herself over and over. A dress rehearsal before an empty house, an impromptu debacle in which the actress revenges herself upon the author. Wherever her feverish eyes turned there were arms and legs and purple wigs, and lying in a corner like an old mandolin was the Count and the Count had his ears cocked, straining to catch the gurgle of the drains, the fall of water falling, choked with ice and liquid fire and clots of blood and violets that muttered. She was like a sleepwalker stabbing herself over and over and out of the wounds that she gouged with a broken knife her magnificent ego spilled forth in sawdust gestures. Looking through the mist between her eyes she saw mountains and vast alkali sinks and mesas dotted with sagebrush where at night the thermometer dropped like an anchor and the wind moaned.

Big Vanya sat down and shut her ears so that everything might begin over again; she doubled up and went slack and her body rolled into a knot, her body legs and arms all snakes, a ball made of rubber bands. Immobile, breathing like a fetus, and if there were any thoughts in her they were drowned in her navel, if she had been asked her name she would not have known were it Miriam, Michael, David, Vanya, Esther, Ashteroth, Beelzebub, or Romanoff. So deeply, blindly, savagely did she crawl into herself that she was both womb and fetus and what moved and quivered in the beyond was like the thumping upon a swollen belly . . . thump, thump . . . a wild mare stamping on her belly, her croup curved like the arc of the sky.

With the statue standing there cold, eyes glassy, stabbing herself over and over, it was like a film in which the same shot is shot a hundred times. Every time the shutter clicked the eye plunged deeper into dream. Repetition death and the violence of death dream of living. Dream and death . . . the same shot shot a hundred times. With each click of the shutter the eye plunging deeper. Mute marble licked with eroticism, black ecstasy projected on screen-white fantasy. Hysteria. Hysteria of stone. Female stone shivering with music. Statue fornicating truth. Statue masturbating lies. Masturbation incessant, obscene . . . a rubber litany in a rubber dream. A hysterical woman with marble organs, a woman of marble with hysterical organs, a female stone spewing its guts is a fountain of fire breaking through ice. A hysterical woman may believe anything about herself—that she slept with Napoleon or offered her lips to God. She may say that she satisfied her appetite with goats or Shetland ponies, she may confess to loving six men at once and each of them with all her strength. She may shiver so with music that even the
memory of her passions disintegrates, collapses like a burning building. Everything burns away that is not stone. The organs remain intact, mute marble licked with eroticism, ecstasy hung on a white screen. Lock all the doors and set the house on fire, where the statue stands masturbating lies there will still be music, the shiver of stone on fire, fire gushing through ice. Stab her over and over, plunge the eye deeper into dream, nothing but the repetition of death, eyes glassed with ecstasy, each click of the shutter a lie, a fornication. When women with marble organs essay to sleep with God, divinity arrives at menopause. What was ancient drama, noble music of myth and legend, ends in prophylaxis. Those who once felt themselves characters see their lines and gestures dribble away in sawdust. Once the world was young and the wounds one bore one displayed proudly, because God had put His finger in the wounds and they were not meant to heal—they were to be borne with courage and suffering. And now we are riding out like rotten sloops to the storm and you can poke an umbrella through the gaping holes of our wounds—but there is no suffering, and no courage. We and our characters—for we are our characters—go down like deserted ships, sloops too rotten to weather the first storm.