My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (19 page)

The bed in his room at the Argentina was lumpy. Sleep difficult. He was beginning to fear sleep anyway: it held too much danger. Yet he had no choice: the asymmetrical shot of a runner—himself?—(no longer a swimmer) . . . What mocking sound out there? Bats in the . . . ? Nightmare alley . . . Hay, w-wait! . . . wasn't that an old Bogart-Eddie . . . No, you're thinking of
The Wagons Roll at Night
. Go to sleep, tough guy. You've made your own bed of nails. He who lurks in the company of hyped-up cons, charmed thieves, rejected marks, the damned in flight from search warrants, outlaws with golden arms, carpetbaggers, elastic molls, addicts who wheeze, killers in Little Caesar-shoes, forbearers in search of big money, Cagney-dudes turned Camus-sharp, Studs Lonigan dupes, wild-side-walkers, dudes in Houdini-getups whispering farewell my lovely, and ex-skateboard freaks with butterflies tattooed on their proletarian buttocks, cannot expect to soar in unsentenced clean flight with restful sober falcons. Maltese? No, no . . . sleep. Your days will become indistinguishable. You thought you were like a gray boy, could grow up and marry a Vassar girl, settle down on Moby-Dick, your yacht, out there . . . ? Pull—
pull
harder: conflict is connecting with yang and exchange is tangled into yin. Thought you smarter than Invisible Man, joker! You pastoral cowboy on the run! Will you run to faith or with facts? The priest will hand you over to cops. Vice versa: if Gary Cooper or Wayne don't get you first at gunpoint, gunslinger. What was that noise—out there . . . in, i-in, uh, the hall . . . Public Enemy ain't here now, bud, to spoon feed ya. For crysake! Clean up your act—grow up! Pity: you can't turn to anything ’cause you don't believe: oh, you remember hearing about the Black Madonna in Poland? if you were a God-fearing Christian you'd be able to trot with your guitar or harmonica up the Jazna Gora at Pauline and sink to your holy knees before the icon and beg forgiveness or go to the Holy Grail or . . . oh, hell, forget it. You think Mexico or South America the answer. How can you be sure you're not being observed right now, that Schnitzler and Signard and Armegurn are not all connected? Maybe you should've never left the ghetto,
swindler: might've been better to marry your secret design or, yeah, how about the first grownup woman to take your skinny butt to bed: remember Mabel Study? Presser with thick arms, fried hair, red eyes with yellow rims: rusty feet, huge sagging mammary glands: and when those hard black thighs opened on that two-bit hotel bedroom you smelled her machine's steam lift to befuddle your face. Yet your youth and inexperience and, bygolly, your teenage hardon, led the way. Mentally maybe you never left that plateau! Did you leave that episode baptized in her steam? You humped away at her hardness till you couldn't hump anymore. Then you knew she went home to her dingy house full of ill-conceived hungry children. You on the other hand threw your “proud” head back and went in search of . . . of what? . . . to have married her: a sturdy life of brainrot to protect you from this gruesome plight. Nobody knew your name then. Nobody knows it now. Native son? Naw. You remember Defoe—ha! “My true name is so well known . . . that it is not to be expected I should set my name on the account of my family to this work . . . It is enough to tell you . . . the name Moll Flanders so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am . . . ” You're now on a roller-coaster to the . . . May as well: O picaro! You devilish old Lazarillo de Tormes! Huh? God protects the victims . . . ?

 . . . Cooler up here—after a good two hundred and fifty tunnels: Hem at seventeen was abed here back when the Universite Degli Studi di Milano was a hospital. As in Catania, the school was right in the city—Old Town, actually. His hotel: seven minutes' walk away. Professor Ina Bulletti, who'd just had a cancer operation, emitted a sense of vast humility. Her handshake was like walking in rain on a sunny day. She must have been sixty. “I met you once in the states but that
was years ago. You wouldn't remember . . . ” Her smile was self-effacing. “Your work will be the subject of a whole chapter in a book I'm writing.” They finished their coffee and went across the street with its old street-car tracks toward the university. It was midafternoon and people were going back to work. She led him into the courtyard then along the walkway to the Instituto di Lingua and Litteratura Inglese e Letturatura. She was chairman of that outfit. As she rapped about the author he felt a strange twitch: wanted to turn himself by voodoo or hype or hip or volcanic faith into a snail safely housed inside a Prince Albert tin at the bottom of the last ditch on the outskirts of the last cockfight with wagerers screaming, shouting, calling through cocaine-thick voices for more blood. Keep close to the action. She gave him an upbeat introduction. Mason started off talking about his early influences—mentioned Vittorini, bridged this with the French thing, connected to Toomer's magical rendering of soft, lingering shadows, the dew and dusk, morning mist and mulattoes, sweetness of a land without Spring snow. His language was like stepping nervously in fine grained cowboy boots made by Santa Rosa 1906. He hooked this whole romantic mood to Claude's hectic, joyful exploration of nightlife in Harlem and gave them the wonderful details of that ol' banjo strummer rambling mentally and physically about Marseilles. The whole so-called lecture was a merry-go-round of egocentric, brash jive with references that some of them caught only because they were students of Bulletti. This stuff was sculptured language; cryptic skip-system junk; pretzels; jigsaw hunks. After the show the “champ” got a big hand then went to the toilet where he did
not
find a message from headquarters scrawled on the booth wall. A Nazi symbol, yes, but no word from Control. Although Professor Bulletti took him to Santa Maria delle Grazie to see those cracked and faded figures, it made him feel like a bleeding tunnel through a stone mountain.

He was spacing—not quite sure where he was: was this Zocalo and was he feeding the stupid pigeons peanuts—? Never mind: it was lonely being a fugitive. Had somebody slipped a different name into his little blue book? Say, Jack Verbb or Geechee McKee or Gauz Gazabo or Heavy Hebe or—Cut it out. He'd come through more tunnels, he knew. Italy? It had to be: then why this feeling of Mexico City—chatter, tinsel, beeps, rumble, screech. Gringo negro on the run! If only the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan were there to hide in, lie still in. You must have a bad, bad hangover: this is
Italy! Italy I said!
Sure, sure. And I'm on my way to the Empire of Genova, right. Correct. Roger. Check. One thing he needed was time. There was a cactus taste in his sour mouth just beneath the whim of scotch. The tavern smelled faintly of kerosene. He missed his Monet Fall surfaces, the Mediterranean: though it wasn't far. Finally, he saw the road sign: Pisa. Took exit. Tried to hold up the falling structure with all he had. Crowds of tourists cackled at his effort as he gave up, crawling to safety as the edifice tumbled. But it wasn't Pisa that he wanted was it. No, that Empire. Back in his vehicle he turned on the radio to try to short circuit the circle of his flapping fangs. The radio, in English, said, “Hi. I'm still your friend. Keep on trucking.” It turned out to be an American rock star making it big in Italy. Then there was an American punk star singing an interesting hit full of pals and gals guys and girls dudes and dames. It made him laugh till tears.

In Genova and totally a victim of vertigo Mason flapped his wings and threw his voice against an auditorium ceiling. If he could make his whirling voice
true
, being in brackets wouldn't matter: swastika and cross both could exist within the confinement of a triangle. He read: “He felt his heart had been cut out. He could still feel a draft where holes had been driven into
his head. He was Still Life with Holes. Hard of hearing, he didn't listen to Florence whispering, the pineapple and chocolate lap of her bitter tongue. The flesh of his body seemed all he had—at the moment. His enemies—unclean spirits—tied him down and searched through, back far into, his cave, up into the flue of his flamed mind, down through his Coca Cola-cold blood, in the shoestrings and telephone wires of his being. They cut sharply not only along the flesh but deeper into the fanged bone. Devils! No yolk, no jelly! Only the ashes of an ancient West African village, a teepee pole, the scarred boots of an Irishman, the apron of an Irishwoman. He smiled. Alone in himself, things howled at him in the mineral night. First snow, through gray heat: he could almost see a white bank glowing in fog. Flakes wide apart. Black limbs of emotional trees with Springtime pink blossoms. He hoped for renewal, a kind of life, to unseat the lame-duck. Florence held him but not closely, not with feeling, with enjoyment. She also held a large bunch of artificial flowers. Going deeper into himself he found a jazzhall full of brass: nobody'd ever robbed
this
place: decked with scarred, juice-stained, tough furniture. But walking in the city—for him, as he remembered it now while lying in bed—was a comfort, a distraction: in front of an antique shop on a narrow cobbled street an old woman—Celt in disguise?—with a mullet-face wearing a tartan fumbled at the window of a bar he was about to enter. She couldn't see in there: wasn't wearing her specs. Flaccidly pretending to be seriously involved in life, she touched her tam-o-shanter gingerly then pulled her fifty-year-old dress unstuck from her girdle; found her rhinestone glasses then looked through her luster at the imitation figures moving around: he was one. A full silty sky was clamped firmly overhead. It was carnival time in these streets. Confetti floated from high windows. He looked into the woman's alarmist-eyes: they were paste and gem quartz: salmon tongue, spotted. She aimed her best eye at a big tree by the cathedral: it was just a way to avoid the piercing and derailing eye of Mason. What did he
want?
The state of his mind: noise. He liked it: it made him want to go to the
center of the carnival, dream there, as though inside the delicate fluttering heartbeat of a nuclear holocaust: he'd ride a ferris wheel—oiled by faith and politics. He'd drink pig-tea from a wooden creosote-dipped cup, dip horse-snuff: it was always the same when he tried to reconnect with lost Celt or to find the root of C or the siren or Kangaroo Eye or Wind Voice or Chiro or—: they were each so distinct; interfaces yet interchangeable.

He got through the Genova episode somehow without remembering it: he did it well and nobody knew he wasn't there. At Hotel Cosimo near the opera house. A message from Professor Pauliani Poggi: “If you're up to it, my husband and I'd enjoy having you come to dinner tonight. Just buzz when you arrive . . . ” Dinner went so smoothly he hardly noticed he
was
there. And the lecture the next morning took care of itself: despite his strange hard-to-follow reference to conquistadores raping the be Jesus out of Indians and to Cortes and hidden eyes and what was meant to be a joke about the wallpaper in his hotel room (“ . . . of the glittering sword planted in the neck of a defiant black bull—repeated eight thousand tiny times all around him on the wall . . . ”). Mason didn't let his bat-infested head spoil things. Although he'd gotten on well with pure Pauliani and guarded Gino, answered student questions and shaken hands with the faculty, he left with wild birds riding his back and monkeys clinging to his legs. He even stopped to rest, on his return to Nice, in a tree: a leafless old black tree. Demented goblins and unfortunate old women (referred to as toothless witches) danced in dank moonlight below. Mules and goats dressed in formal attire paid their moist respects to . . . Mason almost escaped the beauty of their strangeness when he was about to be dragged before a firing squad to be shot for imitating a . . . But at the last minute he was needed to fill a vacancy in a gigantic choir. Yet he didn't know the Medieval song they were ready to unearth.

February was the aftermath of magic. Noel and le jour de l'an had gone so-so for a lonely loner. Now it was Carnival time again. On the day before somber Lent began they all went to Luceram for the
real
traditional feast and festival. It was a little-known event Jean-Pierre knew (“in some parts of France these medieval ceremonies still take place . . . ”) and he led them there. In the Alps-Maritimes near the Italian border the village charmed Mason on sight: filled him with tin-glazed happiness . . . Shivering, they entered the restaurant facing the village center. It was just after noon and the place was crowded with peasants and other workers seated around long closely arranged tables. These old men and women and children and young people were having a ball: loud boisterous talk; knives, forks, spoons, clicked against bowls. Lots of lip-smacking enjoyment! Coughing! Sudden outbursts of traditional songs! Hand-clapping. Jokes! Back-slapping. All in that great warm darkness of this tiny restaurant where two old women shuffled about serving everybody endless wine and bowls of steaming hot guts, spicy livers, thick kidneys—cooked together in a massive stew—and served in crude clay bowls with—believe me!—old hot-water cornbread (just like they make in the South!). Mason sat squeezed between Monique and Jean-Pierre. He guzzled down the table wine and nearly choked himself on the strong innards. Up front at one of the long tables by the door a furious political argument broke out between two farmers. Within ten minutes the guys calmed down and were embracing and kissing each other's cheeks. Then a rock sailed through the front window. A boy swept the glass behind the door and everybody went on eating and drinking and talking and laughing. Then one gray old blue-clad farmer toasted Monique's beauty and handed her his glass to properly share the salute since she didn't have one in hand. That's how she became the Queen of the Feast and ceremoniously got the shared-cup going around the room. Everybody took a sip and the whole place eventually burst into song. Mason, not knowing the French lyrics, only pretended to sing. From where they sat they could see through the front windows the festivities increasing in the square. A group
of youths and a couple of older men were stuffing the King. As fists beat on wooden tables for more wine and bowls were filled for the fourth and fifth times, Mason saw the awesome effigy being erected on a pole at the center of a pile of twigs, paper, boxes, branches, and old planks. The clowns were gathering around the King. It wasn't till Mason and his friends were ready to rejoin the festival that he noticed, carved into the table top at his right, this: Zizi/Nobody.
Nobody?
Wasn't that an English word? Just a passing curio. Then they went out, thanking the waitresses on the way. The dancing'd already started: they joined the gyrating maypole-line as it wobbled and giggled and bumped its way around the King. Already the sun had dropped behind the hills and somebody struck a big match to the rubbish. Smoke zigzagged up from the little spark. Smoke-smell quickly filled the square. Dancers danced harder to keep warm. The fire wasn't much yet. Kids from shadows were still throwing snowballs at those in the square. Dancers now were ideal targets but took it good-naturedly. Mason got bopped on the head once or twice. Monique got one in the eye—which caused her to stop for a few moments: the snowballs were like fishbones in delicious fish. In ten minutes or so it was dark and the flames were leaping taller than men. The King's trousers began to crackle and the smell of burning rags whirled about the dancers. When his crotch burned away the clowns and dancers and spectators all cheered. Snowball-throwers too came out of shadows and clapped. From here on out it was all joy and hysterics: everybody went apeshit when the King was consumed to the neck and had only a head left to offer. When the head fell all holy hell broke loose and the dancing and clowning, like the tiger chasing Little Black Sambo around the tree, turned them to butter: everybody was wiped out, spent . . .