The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (83 page)

The castle stands in oleander on hills with the Alps or is it the Appenine range behind it, overlooking the downward terraces trucked out and sliced away for low-roofed dead suburban villas and across the motorway to the wooden shacks and the white houses of cracked stucco under a forest of aerials and down again to the metropolitan sprawl below which is dying of the greed and brashness of the north and beyond, the bay the straits at the tiptoe of the foot upon thine eye wo die Zitronen glühen.

So you take off, racing down to the wine dark sea of infrasexuality for there has been a complete reorganisation of flute-players along the slum stretch of shore, trash filthy, as the young god swims out slicing the water with nothing in his head and spitting out foam like words of love into the chaparral of a canyon in the desert where the ear is full of sirensong under the shade of a red rock out of Eliot who’s Eliot or a hollow man saying always always.

herself to always keep—always? always death said things in moments of passion which is a seventeenth century concept or even Byzantine out of the romance of Tariel in the tigerskin which he reads in the original Georgian do you know it it’s wonderful. I know the text yes, I’ve even taught it but in translation I didn’t know you could read Georgian how clever of you. It is so easy to hide in an idyll, the invariants of which are the place, no longer Arcadia but simply the anti-town and the rustic love song manifest through fixed motifs like deference and letting him take you over and light the way in his own land, plunging into the dimension of his unknowing as he sleeps stretching out his arm to feel you in his dreams you could dip into for his accurate boymouth moves towards yours murmuring oh it’s lovely my lying here close to you having erections all night and finding you there unless he laughs and says I’m sorry it’s only the garlic oh I thought it was me. It is easy to seize the text in its moment not of gesture but of dialogue with all preceding texts as death and birth involved in a dialectic to the death with one another, reading what you want into it, seeing too many hoops in the rear of the mind and coming upon at this point nothing at all, an absent language given in the silence of the pen, despite or because of the ensconcement in the natural pressure to possess you for ever by repeat performance please please marry me.

The fall was into language. But you should know Boolean algebra dear lady it would help you considerably I simplify look the connectives are and or if not.

Be careful of words Stavro, they are lures and have unexpected results.

If you mean they’ll persuade you that’s what I want, for that is the operative word we must not seem to be adopting a threatening attitude but persuade the authorities to accede to our demands which however cannot reach their end because when an unsuitable young man proposes and proposes call his bluff he’ll soon get cold feet upon these eyes of thine.

I’m very touched, Stavro, and thank you. But let’s take it lightly.

But I love you. And last night you said you loved me.

You’re not serious, are you?

Of course I’m serious.

Then I’d better be blunt. It’s out of the question.

You mean you’re rejecting me?

Nnno. I’m rejecting myself for you. Why marriage anyway? I’m much older than you are for one thing.

You can’t be. I’m the one who’s old, I’m past thirty already and I’ve wasted my life. How can you be older well a couple of years at most.

My dear, women lie about their age but not usually upwards.

But. But. It doesn’t matter. Why you look so young you’re so beautiful. Your skin is like a shoolgirl’s and your body

Thank you. But you don’t have to be gallant, not in. this. Besides I am much scarred as you know, and no lady Dorian Grey.

Who’s she?

And one day suddenly soon it will all collapse and you’ll see me as I am, you being still young and handsome.

I love you as you are. For better for worse in sickness in health the lot. I’ll pursue you and pursue you if that’s what you want I will not let you go.

The axis of desire uniting them authorises a semidyllic interpretation of the two actants as a virtuoso performer subject and an object instituted by itself as valueless through a negative portrait in order to evade the valuelessness of the subject performer. Thus the narrative utterance:

NU = F: transfer 

The transfer can then be interpreted at the same time as a privation or as a disjunction (depending on the level) or as an attribution or as a conjunction (depending on the level) thus representing the circulation of value-objects topologically as an identification of the deictic transfers with the terms of a taxinomic model, each isotopic place (where the performances occur) consisting of two deixes that are conjunctive but equivalent, at the fundamental level, to the contradictory terms out of Oriental and Celtic mists that nobody utters these days, or, if somebody does, can only be met by syntagmatic silence although words are urgently demanded and the demand can only degenerate into useless chatter. She who explains herself is lost.

You’re very sweet. And because of that I’m being honest with you. I could have lied to make it last until you moved on in the nature of things to the fresher flesh of younger girls.

Never. I’ll never love anyone but you.

But I promessi sposi, no. I don’t want it, and besides it wouldn’t work, you have all those years to live through and I can tell you they are crucial years when one finally faces oneself, painfully, and grows up.

You’re treating me like a child.

I’m sorry. You are a man, I know, though in some ways still a child, like all of us.

All right then, that’s what I want, that’s what you have to give me, yourself, your body, and the wisdom of those years, I need it I need it. And you need me, I know, I want to find the child in you again and bring it out to meet me.

Let’s enjoy it while it lasts my love, it’s beautiful.

But that’s just why it will last. Why are you so pessimistic? I’ve never proposed in my life, Amanda proposed to me and so did Maddy and I refused you can’t, you mustn’t reject me I can’t bear being rejected.

Fear is the function of his narrative. Fear of rejection affecting initial performance that grows by gratitude into terror of loss, inflating the performative to wild inventio pronunciato exordium propositio not of the absent father but of the absent son as object of exchange while below, within the self-same text, run the refutatio the fleeing silent peroratio from the other fear of your acceptance and your otherness. You know you will forestall it by rejecting him soon, very soon, organising a chiasmus to make him reject you, which he will with cowardice and that will hurt. But he is a child and you are a woman invented by another in a parting shot.

I want to take you over.

I want to look after you why look at the way you keep losing things your car documents for instance you need someone to remind you of ordinary existence.

I want to be everything to you, father husband son and brother as you’re everything to me. I’m offering you security and a calm relationship.

Yo no ti offresco riqueza, Ti offresco mi corazón.

You’re laughing at me.

I’m not, I just feel gay. How do you know I need or want security and not perhaps adventure? No it won’t do Stavro (rappel: chiasmus) Besides, you’ll only hurt me.

I’ll never never hurt you. I give you my word  

With all your goodly words you me endow.

You forget that I’m a gentleman.

Scrubbing the diagrams of previous passions at the flick of a switch with a spirit-loaded pen coming up every ninety minutes for a shared pursuit of the same insistently mise-en-abysmal dialogue with recursivity to right or left that is almost preventing the idyll from developing its fixed motifs such as the rustic love-song and the equivocal use of past-oral terms for sexual ends by thrusting in a chaotic pressure for the non-choice of courses although the boastfulness of the shepherd remains as he retells himself into acceptability, waving his curriculum vitae as a white flag, rehandling his signifiers into an Orthodox church as narrative matrix of outmoded myths we’ll get married in each wearing a crown or a crumbling castle we’ll do up look shall we buy that one which is not your discourse but a disc-organised trompe-l’oeuil sauve qui peut and the thighs of the Syracuse Venus not to mention the display of visceral organs overflowing from excess of amorous anguish. But if you distance yourself you see only the mannikin ensconced still in his mother’s lap like an open grave a circular O with a blob off-centre and a struggle to double death. The process is infinite within each quest another quest for high adventure in a high romance. Pick up your picaroon fantasy and go fort-da. But why security and what do you mean by security you don’t even seem to have a job.

Speaks the king’s daughter to the prince disguised as poor younger son or the binary bourgeois lady of the left anxious not to take ten steps back to unpaid mortgages and seeing men through their theses and early publications stereotyping their index? Of course I have a job, I mean I had but I resigned, Maddy made it impossible for me.

Oh, where?

In Porlock.

Where’s that?

Well in England. It’s a new university.

Oh? Revolutionary?

No thank goodness. It’s a language centre.

And what did you teach?

Albanian.

Goodness, is that a subject?

It’s not only a subject it’s a language.

Well I know, I meant

It may be connected with Etruscan, a great civilisation. Virgil was an Etruscan and so was Julius Caesar. And other languages too, Russian and Georgian. And Linguistics.

Linguistics? Oh, good for you.

But I want to switch to comparative literature. I have a friend in Lima in Peru, there’s a new university starting up and they need people, and he says if I just turn up, oh come with me to Lima.

I’ve heard of this place, it sounds interesting and very radical. But then you wouldn’t like it would you. Tell me, how is it that you, so young, are against revolution? It has to happen you know.

Revolution is for adolescents. And I’m not young, I seem young to you because you’re older, though not so much, oh it could work, please, it’s in the family, my mother was older than my father, my brother married an older woman I believe in it I need you I’ve done nothing, I feel old and my life’s a mess, but with you, I know, I just know it will all come right, I feel this tremendous strength, please please don’t turn me down, I want to catch up the lost years, now now, we have so little time my youth is gone.

You who hope to get through hell in a hurry, consulting your watch and removing it. You see I have brought these books. This is a best-seller and sometimes you write like it when the pressure of breast-selling reality forces you to open doors that nevertheless lead into one another through an inexorable typology of embedded digressions and an incompetent heroh competence again with the rapid foisting as usual of this or that candidate whenever there is a vacancy and no quorum left, whose pygmylion desire and wild performative nevertheless generates a text unless the motivation is reversed. Any agent can enter into a relation with any predicate. The notions of subject and object do not correspond to a difference in nature but to a place in the proposition uniting for instance two lovers. Hence there is no need to talk of hero villain seducer traplayer and lawbearer these rules are interchangeable. Sometimes however you vanish into a linguistic edifice you have erected, you or the garlic, in a six-hour nightly timetable which is very exhausting, crumbling your viscerally disorganised resistance to prove what? That the timetable exists the moment it has been uttered as a possibility? That the lover of the moment will be untactfully dropped with scene and summary as is forescene thus unbalancing the cost on the one hand and on the other the mean culpa justifying the felix end in an eternal game of vinciperdi, though the economy of the narrative is seriously impaired and may crash into a middle class crisis? Or that it is more difficult for a phallus-man to enter the I of a woman than for the treasurer of signifiers to enter the paradisco terrestre?