Dream of Fair to Middling Women Page 13

  In this Kimmerea not of sleep Narcissus was obliterated and Phoebus (here names only, anything else would do as well, for the extremes of the pendulum) and all their ultra-violets. Sometimes he speaks of himself thus drowned and darkened as “restored to his heart”; and at other times as “sedendo et quiescendo” with the stress on the et and no extension of the thought into the spirit made wise. Squatting in the heart of the store he was not quiet. Cellineg-giava finickety scrolls and bosses, exposed to the fleers of uneasy poets. If to be seated is to be wise, then no man is wiser than thee. That class of cheap stinger.

  But the wretched Belacqua was not free and therefore could not at will go back into his heart, could not will and gain his enlargement from the gin-palace of willing. Convinced like a fool that it must be possible to induce at pleasure a state so desirable and necessary to himself he exhausted his ingenuity experimenting. He left no stone unturned. He trained his little brain to hold its breath, he made covenants of all kinds with his senses, he forced the lids of the little brain down against the flaring bric-à-brac, in every imaginable way he flogged on his cœnaesthesis to enwomb him, to exclude the bric-à-brac and expunge his consciousness. He learned how with his knuckles to press torrents of violet from his eyeballs, he lay in his skin on his belly on the bed, his face crushed grossly into the pillow, pressing down towards the bearings of the earth with all the pitiful little weight of his inertia, for hours and hours, until he would begin and all things to descend, ponderously and softly to lapse downwards through darkness, he and the bed and the room and the world. All for nothing. He was grotesque, wanting to “troglodyse” himself, worse than grotesque. It was impossible to switch off the inward glare, wilfully to suppress the bureaucratic mind. It was stupid to imagine that he could be organised as Limbo and wombtomb, worse than stupid. When he tried to mechanise what was a dispensation he was guilty of a no less abominable confusion than when he tried to plunge through himself to a cloud, when, for his sorrow, he tried to do that. How could the will be abolished in its own tension? or the mind appeased in paroxysms of disgust? Shameful spewing shall be his portion. He remains, for all his grand fidgeting and shuffling, bird or fish, or, worse still, a horrible border-creature, a submarine bird, flapping its wings under a press of water. The will and nill cannot suicide, they are not free to suicide. That is where the wretched Belacqua jumps the rails. And that is his wretchedness, that he seeks a means whereby the will and nill may be enabled to suicide and refuses to understand that they cannot do it, that they are not free to do it. Which does as well as anything else, though no better, to explain, since it is always a question here below of explaining, why the temper of Belacqua is bad as a rule and his complexion saturnine. He remembers the pleasant gracious bountiful tunnel, and cannot get back. Not for the life of him. He keeps on chafing and scuffling and fidgeting about, scribbling bad spirals with an awful scowl on the “belle face carrèe”, instead of simply waiting until the thing happens. And we cannot do anything for him. How can you help people, unless it be on with their corsets or to a second or third helping?

  It makes us anxious, we are quite frank about it, with such material and such a demiurge. Belacqua cannot be petrified in the moment of recoil, of backwash into composure, any more than the rest of them. He has turned out to be simply not that kind of person. Only for the sake of convenience is he presented as a cubic unknown. At his simplest trine, we were at pains to say so, to save our bacon, save our face. He is no more satisfied by the three values, Apollo, Narcissus and the anonymous third person, than he would be by fifty values, or any number of values. And to know that he was would be precious cold comfort. For what are they themselves—Apollo, Narcissus and the inaccessible Limbese? Are they simple themselves? Like hell they are! Can we measure them once and for all and do sums with them like those impostors that they call mathematicians? We can not. We can state them as a succession of terms, but we can't sum them and we can't define them. They tail off vaguely at both ends and the intervals of their series are demented. We give you one term of Apollo: chasing a bitch, the usual bitch. And one term of Narcissus: running away from one. But we took very good care not to mention the shepherd or the charioteer or the healer or the mourner or the arcitenens or the lyrist or the butcher or the crow; and very good care not to mention the hunter or the mocker or the boy howling for his pals or in tears or in love or testing the Stygian speculum. Because it did not suit us and would not have amused us and because the passage did not call for it. But if at any time it happen that a passage does call for a different term, for another Apollo or another Narcissus or another spirit from the wombtomb, and if it suit and amuse us (because if not the passage can call until it be blue in the face) to use it, then in it goes. Thus little by little Belacqua may be described, but not circumscribed; his terms stated, but not summed. And of course God's will be done should one description happen to cancel the next, or the terms appear crazily spaced. His will, never ours.

  Belacqua, of all people, to be in such a hotch-potch! Something might yet be saved from the wreck if only he would have the goodness to fix his vibrations and be a liū on the grand scale. But he will not. It is all we can do, when we think of this incommensurate demiurge, not to get into a panic. What is needed of course is a tuning-fork, faithful unto death, that is to say the gasping codetta, to mix with the treacherous liûs and liūs and get a line on them. That is what we call being a liū on the grand scale. Someone like Watson or Figaro or Jane the Pale or Miss Flite or the Pio Goffredo, someone who could be always relied on for just the one little squawk, ping!, just right, the right squawk in the right place, just one pure permanent liū or liū, sex no bar, and all might yet be well. Just one, only one, tuning-fork charlatan to move among the notes and size ‘em up and steady ‘em down and chain ‘em together in some kind of a nice little cantilena and then come along and consolidate the entire article with the ground-swell of its canto fermo. We picked Belacqua for the job, and now we find that he is not able for it. He is in marmalade. Like his feet.

  It would scarcely be an exaggeration to maintain that the four-and-twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages than the days and nights of this hopeless man produce variety. Yet, various though he was, he epitomised nothing. Sallust would have made a dreadful hash of his portrait.

  By them that knew him, by them that loved him and by them that hated him, he was not forgotten. By them also who when called upon could place him without any doubt subsisting in their own minds as to the correctness of their ascriptions but to whom he was not ordinarily very present, an unremarkable person at the best of times, he was not neglected. He was fatally recognisable and wilfully cut, so little capable even as a behaviourist of versatility did he appear. The hats of friends flew off spontaneously to him as he passed, their arms flared up on his passage, and very often, more often than not, because he waddled forward bowed to the ground or screwed inward to the stores, their kindly sheets of glass, he would not respond, and always he hastened to pass, that was a great need with him, to pass, not to halt in the street, even when the man was nice, or else they crossed over grossly like the Pharisee or if they saw the disaster coming too late put on a spurt and dashed past with faces most incompetently blank or broached a long complicated observation eagerly to their companion if they had the good fortune to be accompanied. What was curious was that never, never by any chance at any time, did he mean anything at all to his inferiors. No, there we are wrong, there were exceptions to that, and one most charming. Yet it is not so very wide of the mark to say that day after day, year in and out, he could enter at the same hour the same store to make some trifling indispensable purchase, he could receive his coffee at the same hour in the same café from the hands of the same waiter, remain faithful to one particular kiosque for his newspaper and to one particular tobacconist for his tobacco, he could persist in eating at the same house and in taking his drink before and after in the same bar, and never know his assiduity to be recognis
ed by as much as a smile or a kind word or the smallest additional attention, say a little more butter on his sandwich than would naturally fall to the share of the odd chance client, or a more generous part of curaçoa in his apéritif. Almost it seemed as though he were doomed to leave no trace, but none of any kind, on the popular sensibility. Is it not curious that he should be thus excluded from the ring of habitués and their legitimate benefits? He had no success with the people, and he suffered profoundly in consequence. The purchase of a stamp or a book of tram-tickets or a book on the quay or in a shop entailed without fail, notwithstanding the humility, the timorousness, almost the tenderness, of his approach, a disagreeable passage of arms with the vendor. Then he became furious, red in the face. To register and post a packet was out of the question. In the bank it was torture to present a cheque even amply provided for.

  He never grew accustomed to this boycott.

  Children he abominated and feared.

  Dogs, for their obviousness, he despised and rejected, and cats he disliked, but cats less than dogs and children.

  The appearance of domestic animals of all kinds he disliked, save the extraordinary countenance of the donkey seen full-face. Sometimes also however, when walking through a series of fields, he would feel a great desire to see a foal, the foal of an old racemare, under the hull of its dam, bounding.

  The fact of the matter is, we suppose, that he desired rather vehemently to find himself alone in a room, where he could look at himself in the glass and pick his nose thoroughly, and scratch his person thoroughly what is more wherever and for as long as it chose to itch, without shame. And troglodyse himself also, even though it were without success, if and for whatever length of time he was pleased to do so, banging and locking the door, extinguishing, and being at home to nobody.

  To two sources he was prone to ascribe the demolition of his feet.

  One: it was upon their outer rim that as a child, ashamed of his limbs that were ill-shaped, the knees that knocked, he walked. Boldly then he stepped off the little toe and the offside malleolus, hoping against hope to let a little light between the thighs, split the crural web and perhaps even, who could tell, induce a touch of valgus elegance. Thereby alas he did but thicken the ankle, hoist the instep and detract in a degree that he does not care to consider from the male charm, and, who knows, the cogency, of the basin.

  Two: as a youth, impatient of their bigness, contemptuous of the agonistic brogue, he shod them à la gigolo (a position he never occupied) in exiguous patents.

  In the little village of aged peasant men and women and their frail grandchildren, the hale having fled to a richer land, situated half-way down the vale, a sweet vale now we look back on it, that lies so unevenly between Como and a point that most likely shall be nameless on the Lake of Lugano, the sweet Val d'Intelvi, oershadowed north and south, or would it be north-west and south-east, by the notable peaks of Generoso and Galbiga, he interviewed as quite a callow signorino mighty nailed boots for climbing. The cobbler sat in his dark store, he twisted the uppers this way and that.

  “Oh!” he cried “la bella morbidezza! Babbo è morto. Si, è morto.”

  Imagine what cunning was required to associate these affirmations, the second of which was so obviously true that no filial client of Piedmont could ever have had the heart to question the former.

  Belacqua bought the boots, he bought them for 100 lire or thereabouts, on sound and strong feet the money had been well spent. In the morning he clattered off in them in high fettle, his comrade having first in vain exhorted him:

  “Do now as I do, put on two pairs of socks, bandage the feet well with rags, soap well the insides.”

  Macché! But laetus exitus etc., we all know that, the joyful going forth and sorrowful coming home, and sure enough in the afternoon declining Belacqua was to be seen, and in effect by a group of aged compassionate contadine was seen, crouched in the parched grass to the side of the cobbled way that screws down so steeply from the highest village of that region to the valley where he lived. He whimpered, he was utterly fatigued, the new boots sprawled in the ditch where he had cast them from him, the bloated feet trembled amongst the little flowers, with his socks he had staunched them, the bells of the cattle high above under the crags aspersed him, he cried for his Mother. A fat June butterfly, dark brown to be sure with the yellow spots, the same that years later on a more auspicious occasion, it was inscribed above on the eternal toilet-roll, was to pern in a gyre about a mixed pipi champêtre, settled now alongside his degradation. His comrade had left him, he had gone forward, he had gone up to the cloudy cairns, he would make a victorious circuit and sweep down home to his zabbaglione. Belacqua slept. Again he woke, the moon had raised her lamp on high, Cain was toiling up his firmament, he had taken over. Above the lakes that he could not see the Virgin was swinging her legs, Cain was shaking light from his brand, light on the just and the unjust. That was what he was there for, that was what he was spared for. Belacqua culled the boots, he plucked them forth from the ditch, thenceforward he would refer to them grimly as the morbid Jungfraulein, he knotted their cruel laces the better to carry them, and discalced but for his bloody socks, under the laggard moon, eternal pearl of Constance and Piccarda, of Constance whose heart we are told was never loosed of its veil, of Piccarda alone but for her secret and God, he picked his steps home as a barefoot hen in a daze would down the steep Calvary of cobbles to the village in the valley where he lived.

  Of the morbid Jungfräulein some months later he made a present to a servant for whom he thought he cared. The servant, a neat little suave little ex-service creature, was fitted to them according to his own account à la Cinderella (more correctly, but there is no time to go into that, Arsecinder). But he pawned them and drank the proceeds.

  Yet again, in the full swing of the premature Spring sales in the pleasant land of Hesse, he bought, though discouraged by his knacky beloved who was with him as it happened, what looked like, and no doubt was, a stout pair of elastic-sides. Five Reichmarks he payed for them.

  “There is always, I know,” he complained to the tickled salesgirl “one foot larger than the other. But it is the left foot, is it not, that is ordinarily the larger?”

  The salesgirl gave way before a greater than she: the shopwalker. Falling at once, like all his frockcoated, lecherous, pommaded and impotent colleagues, for the mighty Smeraldina-Rima, he abounded in informations.

  “But it is well known” he gasped, preening his morning-coat, “that the left foot exceeds the right.”

  “Sir” Belacqua corrected him “it is the right that pinches.”

  “No no” he said “the left, that is our experience.”

  “But I am telling you” said Belacqua, pausing in his lunges on the polished parquet, “that it is my right that is made to suffer by this pair of boots that I have not yet bought from you.”

  “Ah” the shopwalker was very urbane and sure of his ground “my dear sir, that is because you are left-handed.”

  “That is not so” said Belacqua.

  “What!” he was astonished, raking the bored Smeraldina with an X-Ray up-and-downer, “what! he is not left-handed?”

  “In my family” conceded Belacqua “there is left-handling. Never was I left-handed, sir, never.” That was a lie.

  “Never!” echoed the shopwalker with filthy irony “never! are you quite sure, sir, of that?”

  The salesgirl, an hypertrophied Dorrit, hovered on the outskirts, fearful to be amused and ready, in a manner of speaking, to be tapped whenever that might be required of her by her employers.

  “Gnnnädiges Fräulein” said Belacqua, turning on his nose for the accent, “can you perhaps explain how it is…?”

  “Well sir” began the Dorrit “I think…”

  “Hah!” smiled the shopwalker, very narquois, “yes deary…”

  “I think” the Dorrit spoke up bravely “that this is how it is…”

  “Are you listening, Smerry” asked Belac
qua anxiously “because I may not understand…”

  “Since” pursued the Dorrit “it is the experience, as you have heard, of the trade, that the left foot exceeds the right, it has become the tradition, in the case of all wear not made to measure, to build the left boot rather more spacious than the right…”

  “That is to say” cried Belacqua, in a sudden illumination, having understood all after all, “the right boot rather less spacious than the left!”

  “So that” the Dorrit developed her thought in a superb cadence “the rare client whose feet are equal in size, you sir” she curtsied slightly to the rare client “is obliged to pay for the asymmetry of an article that is primarily addressed to the average client.”

  “Smerry!” cried Belacqua, in a transport, “did you hear that?”

  “Brothers and sisters” said the Smeraldina heavily “have I none, but…”

  The boots were bought for all that, but, strong and shapely as they were, they failed to give satisfaction, and some months later poor Belacqua, whose exclusion from the benefits of the group extended even unto a pair of feet that were, in the gross if not in detail, monstrously symmetrical, passed them on quietly, without any fuss, to an inferior.

  The only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity.

  Now it occurs to us that for the moment at least we have had more than enough of Belacqua the trinal maneen with his wombtomb and likes and dislikes and penny triumphs and failures and exclusions and general incompetence and pedincurabilities, if such a word may be said to exist. And though we had fully intended to present in some detail his more notorious physical particularities and before switching over to Dublin cause him to revolve for a rapid inspection before you, just as many and many a time he himself had caused to girate on its swivelling pedestal, the better to delight in its ins and outs and ups and downs, the dear little Buonarotti David in the Bargello, we let ourselves be so carried away by his feet, the state they are in, that we have no choice now, you will all be delighted to hear, but to renounce that intention. In particular we had planned to speak of his belly, because it threatens to play so important a part in what follows, his loins, his breast and his demeanour, and spell out his face feature by feature and make a long rapturous statement of his hands. But now we are tired of him. We feel, we simply cannot help feeling, that the rest must wait until we can all turn to it for relief.