Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read online

  A low capital in the crypt of the Basilica Saint-Sernin in the most beautiful city of Toulouse is carved to represent a rat gnawing its way into a globe. The Dutch cheese of La Fontaine's fable of the catawampus that withdrew from the cares of this world? We think not.

  The fact of the matter is we do not quite know where we are in this story. It is possible that some of our creatures will do their dope all right and give no trouble. And it is certain that others will not. Let us suppose that Nemo is one of those that will not. John, most of the parents, the Smeraldina-Rima, the Syra-Cusa, the Alba, the Mandarin, the Polar Bear, Lucien, Chas, are a few of those that will, that stand, that is, for something or can be made to stand for something. It is to be hoped that we can make them stand for something. Whereas it is almost certain that Nemo cannot be made, at least not by us, stand for anything. He simply is not that kind of person.

  Supposing we told now a little story about China in order to orchestrate what we mean. Yes? Lîng-Liûn then, let us say, went to the confines of the West, to Bamboo Valley, and having cut there a stem between two knots and blown into same was charmed to constate that it gave forth the sound of his own voice when he spoke, as he mostly did, without passion. From this the phœnix male had the kindness to sing six notes and the phoenix female six other notes and Lîng-Liûn the minister cut yet eleven stems to correspond with all that he had heard. Then he remitted the twelve liû-liū to his master, the six liū male phœnix and the six liû female phœnix: the Yellow Bell, let us say, the Great Liu, the Great Steepleiron, the Stifled Bell, the Ancient Purification, the Young Liū, the Beneficient Fecundity, the Bell of the Woods, the Equable Rule, the Southern Liū, the Imperfect, the Echo Bell.

  Now the point is that it is most devoutly to be hoped that some at least of our characters can be cast for parts in a liù-liū. For example, John might be the Yellow Bell and the Smeraldina-Rima the Young Liū and the Syra-Cusa the Stifled Bell and the Mandarin the Ancient Purification and Belacqua himself the Beneficient Fecundity or the Imperfect, and so on. Then it would only be a question of juggling like Confucius on cubes of jade and playing a tune. If all our characters were like that—liù-liū-minded—we could write a little book that would be purely melodic, think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-figured teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear. (Which is more or less, if we may say so, what one gets from one's favourite novelist.) But what can you do with a person like Nemo who will not for any consideration be condensed into a liû, who is not a note at all but the most regrettable simultaneity of notes. Were it possible to oralise say half-a-dozen Lîng-Liûn phoenix arising as one immortal purple bird from the ashes of a common pyre and crying simultaneously, as each one saw fit, a cry of satisfaction or of disappointment, a rough idea of the status of this Nemo might be obtained: a symphonic, not a melodic, unit. Our line bulges every time he appears. Now that is a thing that we do not like to happen, and the less so as we are rather keenly aware of the infrequency of one without two. Dare we count on the Alba? Dare we count on Chas. Indeed we tend, on second thoughts, to smell the symphonic rat in our principal boy. He might just manage, semel et simul, the Beneficient Fecundity and the Imperfect; or, better still, furnish a bisexual bulge with a Great Iron of the Woods. But ping! a mere liû! We take leave to doubt it.

  Anyhow the next thing was a tiff with a lady, oh a proper lady, who told Belacqua to his brazen face that he was treating her like dirt and behaving like a cad, taking everything and giving nothing; and he said behind her back that she was jealous of the Smeraldina-Rima. This lady, whom we propose to polish off now once and for all, had a great deal of the predatory masochism of the passionate Quaker. She felt that going through hell was all my eye unless some peeping Nightingale got a thrill out of it. She wouldn't allow you to do anything for her, but it was a real pleasure, if you see what we mean, to refuse. Now of course he was too ecstatic a spectator altogether to come down to the mark from that point of view. Miranda was not in his class at all. He might conceivably have suffered mildly with those whose sufferings he saw reported in the continental press. But sonst, in the words of the song, gar nix.

  The real presence was a pest because it did not give the imagination a break. Without going as far as Stendhal, who said—or repeated after somebody—that the best music (what did he know about music anyway?) was the music that became inaudible after a few bars, we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best. This is not to suggest that the lady in question did that. We simply mean that at the time we are referring to she was not an object at all, no, not an object in any sense of the word. Is that what we mean? What do we mean? Anyway, what it boils down to in the end is this: that he did not want to be slavered and slabbered on by her, he thought it would be nice to be slavered and slabbered on elsewhere for a change. So he packed a bag and made to depart. His Father said “tant pis, good-luck”, lifted his shoulders and paid for his ticket. His Mother put her head into the taxi and before she broke down (the Mother, not the taxi) breathed “be happy”, as if to insinuate: “again and again I request you to be merry”. Long John Silver, the Polar Bear and a dear friend, on whom we are inclined to count to put a stop to this chronicle, waved a Mallarmean farewell from the Carlyle Pier. At Ostend he secured a corner seat in a through horsebox to Wien and defended it for 29 hours against all comers. The last 599 kilometres on beer (terrible stuff!), and in a horsebox, not a corridor coach, which explains why he stepped hastily out of the train at the Westbahnhof and looked feverishly up and down the platform.

  The effect or concert of effects, unimportant as it seems to us and dull as ditchwater as we happen to know, that elicited the Smeraldina-Rima, shall not, for those and other reasons that need not be gone into, be stated. Milieu, race, family, structure, temperament, past and present and consequent and antecedent back to the first combination and the papas and mammas and paramours and cicisbei and the morals of Nanny and the nursery wallpapers and the third and fourth generation snuffles… That tires us. As though the gentle reader could be nothing but an insurance broker or a professional punter. The background pushed up as a guarantee… that tires us. The only perspective worth stating is the site of the unknotting that could be, landscape of a dream of integration, prospective, that of Franciabigio's young Florentine in the Louvre, into which it is pleasant to believe he may, gladly or sadly, no matter, recede, from which he has not necessarily emerged. We never set any store by the creased pants of the confidence trickster. The Smeraldina-Rima is not demonstrable. She has to be taken or left. Belacqua did a little of both. She obliged him to.

  She had an idea she was studying music and eurhythmies in the very vanguardful Schule Dunkelbrau, ten miles out of town, on the fringe of the wild old grand old park of Modelberg. This park was more beautiful and tangled far than the Bois de Boulogne or any other multis latebra opportuna that it is possible to imagine, quieter and fresher, except on Sundays when the swells used to drive out from town to take the air and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the Evites. The Dunkelbrau gals were very Evite and nudist and shocked even the Modelbergers when they went in their Harlequin pantalettes, or just culotte and sweater and uncontrollable cloak, to the local Kino. All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygienic and promotive of great strength and beauty. In the summer they lay on the roof and bronzed their bottoms and impudenda. And all day it was dancing and singing and music and douches and frictions and bending and stretching and classes—Har-monie, Anatomie, Psychologie, Improvisation, with a powerful ictus on the last syllable in each case. Friendly intercourse between teacher and student was encouraged and Apfelmus was the staple of diet and sometimes a group would dart up to town for a concert or an Abknutschen. In the middle, the thick and the heat and the stress, of all this, the Smeraldina-Rima was everybody's darling, she was so young and had such a lovely face and am
used the gals with foul stories and improvised so well. Behold Herr Arschlochweh, Swiss and melancholy and highbrow and the Improvisationslehrer. The Smeraldina-Rima stimulated this gentleman to certain velleities of desire, or so at least she allowed it to be understood, and sure enough that was Belacqua's own impression when he saw them together, which, let it be said forthwith, was not often. The Smeraldina never looked like being able to play the piano, but she had a curious talent for improvisation, which came up in her conversation. When she was in form, launched, she could be extremely amusing, with a strange feverish eloquence, the words flooding and streaming out like a conjuror's coloured paper. She could keep a whole group, even her family, convulsed with the ropes and ropes of logorrhœa streaming out in a gush. Her own Mammy used to foam at the mouth and the Mandarin was forgotten.

  “Oh” coughed Mammy on these occasions “she ought to be on the halls” and the Smeraldina would broach another bobbin.

  She liked Arschlochweh and adored Improvisation; but the Anatomiestunde and the bending and stretching she did not like. “Pfui!” she was disgusted, lifting her shoulders and spreading her hands like the Mandarin, “pfui! the old body!”; and that raised the hopes of Belacqua until she made it clear, which she did in many ways, that she did not mean at all what he had hoped rather she might.

  Because her body was all wrong, the peacock's claws. Yes, even at that early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbub-bubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched aloft on top of this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo of a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God but he often thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.

  On the fringe of the village, empty, invested with dilapidation, squatted the big blue Hof, four-square about a court-yard of weeds. There he lived, in a high dark room smelling of damp coverlets, with a glass door opening on to the park. To get to his room he could enter the Hof from the last village street and walk across the court-yard, or better still make the circuit of the corridors, or again he could come at it deliberately from the other side, from the park. As far as he knew, as he could hear, he had the whole of this side, the park aspect, to himself. At night, to be sure, the rats, galavanting and cataracting behind the sweating wall-paper, just behind the wall-paper, slashing the close invisible plane with ghastlily muted slithers and somersaults. Coming back after kissing the Madonna goodnight under the arch of the school buildings, ten minutes’ walk through the park away, and arranging at what time they could see one another (see one another!) next morning, he thought of the rank dark room, quiet, quieted, when he would enter, then the first stir behind the paper, the first discreet slithers.

  He is in a great open place. On his right hand, his blind side, a tall palissade of trees; on his left, the low village dwellings and the splayed embouchure of the last village street; behind, the Dunkelbrau sanctuary into which she has passed; ahead, the clump of bushes where he makes water and the narrow breach in the hedge. Past the breach he shall see, apex of the avenue in the long crouch of the Blockhof, the distant lit room. But his impression is that he had extinguished before ushering her out into the sharp October night! That is definitely his impression. Every night when he squeezes through the breach and is absorbed by the avenue, that is his impression. But now, before that happens, before he regains his boxful of obsidional insanity, he stands well out in the dark arena, his head cocked up uncomfortably at the starfield, like Mr Ruskin in the Sistine, looking for Vega.

  The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius. Now seen merely, a depthless lining of hemisphere, its crazy stippling of stars, it is the passional movements of the mind charted in light and darkness. The tense passional intelligence, when arithmetic abates, tunnels, skymole, surely and blindly (if we only thought so!) through the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis, it twists through the stars of its creation in a network of loci that shall never be co-ordinate. The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation, is figured in the demented perforation of the night colander. The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaftheads of its statement, its recondite relations of emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema. The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in a scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface. That was the circular movement of the mind flowering up and up through darkness to an apex, dear to Dionysius the Areopagite, beside which all other modes, all the polite obliquities, are the clockwork of rond-decuirdom.

  Nothing whatever of the kind of course occupied his fetid head nor was there room in his gravid heart for such strange feeling as he shuffles uneasily in the deeps of the desert place, peeping up like a fool at his dear little sweet little Fiinkelein, green, bright and in the Lyre, on his poutlip the grip of the two of hers where she had fastened on and clipped it in the peculiar way she had, in the old heart something getting ready to give a great leap when he would be through with the privacies of his toilet and heave into view of the rat-trap, and the tilted brain flooded no doubt with radiance come streaming down from the all-transcending hiddenness of the all-transcending super-essentially superexisting super-Deity. Sonst, in the words of the song, gar nix.

  Thus it was, evening after evening, without variety, and how, subsequently, he breasted the tides of the night and came through is more than we can tell you. But in the morning, not too bright or early, she would skip in in a most rudimentary woollen gymnasium sheath, the plump bright bare fleshstilts warmed up ad rudorem, and make tea to be drunk with a lemon. For weeks, until what we are about to relate to you came to pass, that was the best hour of the day: the night over, lying half asleep in the expectation of the desired footfall, opening the door on the clear keen park as soon as it declared itself, skimming through the variations of her oyster kiss against the boiling of the water, drinking buckets of weak tea mitigated with lemonjuice, smoking Macedonia. From that high hour the day slid down to the pit of the evening, night again, the crawl back from the school, the anguish before the beacon, the rats, the musty trap and the tides.

  Until she raped him.

  Then everything went kaputt.

  The implacable, the insatiate, warmed up this time by her morning jerks to a sexy sudorem, she violated him after tea. When it was his express intention, made clear in a hundred and one subtle and delicate ways, to keep the whole thing pewer and above-bawd. So utterly did she queer his pitch that he was moved to quote “le soleil est mort” in petto, and his time of the lilies shifted over to the night hours, sitting vigilant among the rats, alla fioca lucerna leggendo Meredith. The tiffs started. He followed her into the tiny Lebensmittel store where their habit it was to buy eggs and tomatoes later to be flogged up together in a kind of steaming Marie Laurencin polenta. She whirled round on him:

  “Make the door to” she cried, with an exaggerated shiver.

  “Make it to yourself” he said rudely.

  That kind of thing. Another time she kept him waiting and the supper he had made was spoiling, it was cooling rapidly. He heard her plunging down the avenue. Well you may run, he thought. She was all apologies.

  “Oh” she gasped “I met Arschlochweh and I had to get him to finger me a bit in my Brahms.”

  Brahms! That old piddler! Pizzicatoing himself off in the best of all possible worlds. Brahms! She started to coax and wheedle. Such a cat she could be.

  “Don't be cross with me Bel don't be so böse” stretching out the vowel in a moan.

  Brahms!

  “You don't love me” he
said bitterly “or you wouldn't keep me waiting for such Quatsch.”

  Still, bitched and all as the whole thing was from that sacrificial morning on, they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness. We confess we are so attached to our principal boy that we cannot but hope that she has since had cause to regret that first assault on his privities. Though it would scarcely occur to her, we believe, to relate the slow tawdry boggling of the entire unhappy affair, two nouns and four adjectives, to that lesion of Platonic tissue all of a frosty October morning. Yet it was always on that issue that they tended to break and did break. Looking babies in his eyes, the---, that was her game, making his amorosi sospiri sound ridiculous. So that one day he forgot his manners and exhorted her:

  “For the love of God will you not take a loiny cavalier servente and make me hornmad ante rem and get some ease of the old pruritus and leave me in peace to my own penny death and my own penny rapture.”

  No no no no, she would not let a man near her unless she loved him dearly, furchtbar lieb. And she was right and he was wrong and that was that—and would you be so kind as to take up position, my sad beautiful beloved? So. A man knows but a woman knows better.

  Next he is called on to sustain the letter, really a rather unpleasant letter, with more spleen in it than appears on a first reading:

  “Cher, (it ran)