Dream of Fair to Middling Women Page 9
“Out!” she loosed a piercing cackle “so siehst Du aus!”
Indeed what with his slugging-a-bed in the morning and soaks with the Mandarin in the evening and in the afternoon his absorption in a Vasari he had found in his host's library and the latest pictures hanging on his host's wall and the inneffectual darts he was liable to make at the piano at any hour of the day or night and his objection to going out to be frozen to death when there was nothing to prevent him from hatching a great thought over the stove, he was only able, in the week that elapsed between his arrival and Silvester, three times to promenade her, and two of these times Mammy, whose Spreegeist infuriated the Madonna beyond measure, came with. The Madonna was displeased, this was not the treatment she was used to. So the only evening they spent alone together was marred by a copious tiff with tears to follow.
All this pitted of course with the usual fiascos and semi-fiascos, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in an absence of all douceness; Mammy getting more and more fed up as herself as happy beldam waned in her mind, the Mandarin very bottle-nosed and courtly and gestural and somehow Venetian, waiving his patria potestas on all available occasions.
Silvester, when high tea had passed from them, found him seated to himself on the settee in the candlelight of course with a bottle of course again. If they were not there they would be in a minute. He felt very bad. Would he last into the New Year, that was the question. He feared to fall to pieces. He thought he was going light, not so much in the head as in the centre, vaguely the midriff. The least heedlessness now on my part, he thought, and I fly at once to pieces.
He had read all the opening of Vasari and wondered why, so little did it matter. The even-fisted pettifogger. What mattered? He mattered.
He goggled like a fool at the shrieking paullo-post-Expression of the Last Supper hanging on the wall fornenst him, livid in the restless yellow light, its thirteen flattened flagrant egg-heads gathered round the tempter and his sop and the traitor and his burse. The tempter and the traitor and the Jugendbund of eleven. John the Divine was the green egg at the head of the board. What a charming undershot purity of expression to be sure! He would ask for a toad to eat in a minute.
Ask (we are sorry, we fear he is off again under the limen, it is not our fault) for your toad, John, to eat, swallow a viper or a scorpion or a morpion and let me tell all you boys what it feels like to be in Old Nick's bath. I am in the extreme centre of Old Nick's bath, I have gone light in the centre, I am at the frontiers of the boundless, I am the scourged cream of human adversity, yes, the quintessence and the upshot. A whore, boys, is a deep ditch of diabolic water, there am I, shall I then be hot in a cold cause, is it fair to expect that, would it not be much nicer to know a few good digs of compunction and clip Jesus straight away and stand fast for ever? Oh sometimes as now I almost think: nothing is less like me than me. It must be either that I am not adequately alkaline or that there is a cavity needing filling under my navel spiral where the big weight ought to be. Fire and stone and torment by skewering. Four skewers and a good dig with a blade and there you have a Pro-Cathedral. And the pros and cons.
Oh very well so then in that case since you insist my fiery petrifactors, first of all then algebraically, take the firstfather in the eburnine sacristy. No appetite for the Passover, boys, but have it your own way. A dream of lines palped the dust the dust of the ground. Yah! My time is at hand. Now come off it out of that on to the gravel. The difficult art of shortening, boys, temper and fresco, in oil and miniature on wood and stones and canvas, tarsia and tinted wood for stories, etching with iron and printing with copper, follow the man with the pitcher, niello, the enamel of the goldsmith and gold and damask having a high time together, go upstairs with the goodman, figures on glass and flowers and figurines on cloth of gold and stories and waterpassions on earthern jars, is it I, the most beautiful invention of the woven arras, the carving the vexing of steels and jewels, is it I. Yah! Now what would be very nice to know is what all this lapidary catlap that we hear about a heavyweight majority putting the shot to the glory of got to do with one little putto, ah the dear little putto, for the colours and the hair-pencils and the most modest predella. I go as it is written of me. A fico and a fouter for your stags of amber and your pines of bronze and your marble love-potions and your frozen fugues, as it is written so help me but woe to that man, and your mard of gold sculpppt and foil of silver painted and the swivelling snivelling miracle of your belly-cum-bum totalities and realities, dee ’and is wid me, and the fatal slip of a hairy hand. Who are your patrons? Greeks? Kings? Lovers? Gladly for Apelle a warrior's lust, the ravishing Campaspe. Yah! Wid me on dee table. You can keep your George Bernard Pygmalion. And your prostated elephantiatics. The man of my peace. Did you never hear tell how Big George cubed a nude in a corslet and a mirror and a sleeping cistern? Hath lifted up his heel against me. Wet doom of lime. That thou doest do quickly. A ewe can grow gold. And it was night. Oh the moon shines bright on Aceldama, his boots are crackling, for want of…
Pardon now just consider the treasurer's bowels clotting the lush blood. Always trust the medical vestryman for the stercoraceous detail.
Quick now with an eight cylinder accelerando there I am the twilight mummyfœtus, the old heart becalmed in snowbroth, paralysed before this diademitonic Caesarian of a livid spectrum, ripped from Dan unto Beersheba, tight-lipped, rapt in the upper torture-chamber. The Rabbi, the lemon-egg, the non-playing captain, wearing the blazer wove, would you believe it, from the throat, where it must have been clasped, throughout, facing, not seeing, down the operating-table's length, on his right hand naturally, his green of course toady. What a desolation of Bullscrit hesitation and the Y of the crossroads to run between this head and that boosom. My darling from the power of the dog, whose darling, bloody well you, was it wine and myrrh that like the last breakfast or the white handkerchief of any polyglot musical pallid brigand of a pessimist he received not? Pink of course for the insidious chairman, the perfidious very much more than papal key, with the little phallic pouch trapped in his plump pink palpers, his lips parted for the garden, or was it vinegar and gall maybe, a boil on his neck that I cannot see, his Gilles de Rais orbs, quite too Rio-Santo, focussed on the patibulary melancholy of the lemon of lemons, was it vinegar then or hyssop on the sponge or the reed of hyssop, and of course before gliding on to more pleasant topics allusion must be made to blood-faced Tom with his bow-tie moustache disbelieving in the Sherry Cobbler that is my. A masterly study, boys, there's no getting away from it, of what I once saw described as the bulliest feed in ‘istory if the boyscouts ‘adn't booked a trough for th'eleventh's eleventh eleven years after, and there not as much as the weeniest gutta of Sehnsucht between the eloquent boards of this book. Did they slit your palate Thérése Philosophe? Only the labia minora? Well I am glad to know that.
“Of all the Bitchlein” he said “speaking as a cad, that schweigen niemals im Wald, or ever unclasped a starchèd snood before my incompetence and of all the respectably abgeknutscht (pump it out, pump it out like a very snot-cork: abbb-gekkk-kkknnn-nutscht) heifers that ever wasted collop-tight bloomers on my bloodless nonchalance, you are the champion, you are the Queen of Spain, and I do not care for cocoanuts, I never did care for cocoanuts.”
Oh Florence Florence concerning the branny desquamation of my papular pustular variola inform the medical man. Dust me Florence with violet or starch powder. Rub me with spirits of wine or brandy. See how the litmus is depressed by my incontinence. Place me in an airbed. Raise me slightly. Lower the drawsheet. Hoist the restraining-sheet. See I am seized with a vomiting. My tongue is foul and my bowels are confined. I am irritable in manner. I resent being disturbed. I am intolerant of light. I am observed to pick at the bedclothes. It is the end. My breathing stops for half an hour. I pass everything nolens volens under me. My face becomes not merely pale but dusky. I perspire profusely. I sink gradually. I die in a convulsion. Swathe me oh swathe me in oakum or
charpie. Knot my cord twice. Place me in my flannel receiver, gently does it. The brightest bottle and the best is the one with the caoutchouc teat. At eighteen months, not before, give me pounded meat and light puddings. I have a rather third or fourth generation snuffle, very trying, and my buttocks ache in the absence of emerald stools. Give me koumiss and manna and a torrestial clyster of Revalenta Arabica. Wrap me in my isolation sheet. Mammy I am sorry to say has pigmentation of the mammæ, a clavus hystericus, a phantom tumour, a spurious pain, two vats of colostrum, the whites and a white leg. She is a domestic servant of pale aspect. Enquire carefully into her lochia. Pharoah her nipples with Kólnischeswasserbrand. Shin up her udder-rope with glycerine of belladonna. I am found after a pleasant little supper of cheese wine and spirits sleeping soundly in the knee-and-elbow position, my head enlarged, my abdomen distended and my cute little fontanelle wide open. There is only one thing to do: stupe me in turpentine. The bed shakes and I go blue. I attempt to drink boiling water from the spout of the teakettle. Remove the fire-dogs, fleams, knives, razors, round pans, batteries, slipper pans, catheters, rods, écra-seurs, probes, bougies, pumps, bistouries, charcoal, Al-lingham's clamp, don't forget Allingham's clamp, and Higginson's syringe. Bind me oh bind me in huckaback. Telephone for Surgeon Battey, Ballsbridge two and a bit. See how my sweat is yellow, see how it stains my pilch. My pus is laudable yellow sweet and faint. Sponge me down quickly the night sweats of phthisis. Sterilise the harelip needles for my Cockburn nævus, I have five. Wipe him with a soft cloth, put him into his glass, tempt him with a little milk, salt him a little and he'll disgorge, rinse him a little and he'll do again. Pass over the flexile collodion of the British Bulldog's Pharmacopoeia. Rub me in neatsfoot. Pinch my feet firmly but not too firmly all the same, twist my toes in all directions, knead my small muscles, knead my large muscles, grasp my legs, one by one, run the hand up me firmly, strike the muscles very firmly, effleurage you know and pétrissage and a tantinet of tapotement, pinch my abdomen all over, in both hands firmly grasp my abdomen, firmly draw the flesh downwards to the colon, be firm in all things, pinch the whole of my back, make a sweep—whoosh!—several times downwards quickly the length of my spina bifida, skate-roll my bottom, bruise my flexors, batter my extensors, leave me in the blanket. Inunction for my exanthem and—handy-dandy!—I expire in my Gorgonzola varnish. His pinky-spongies floated.
Calm, her lovely white face averted, bosom and belly well forward, shoulders back, holding with both hands the long stiff scroll, she sustained his girds with a kind of anti-aircraft vigilance that brought a fleer to his mobile lips as he trundled through the Tuileries on the platform of the A1 bis now the AA clenching his bladder beneath his chic shower-proof. The wattmen tittered as I tottered on purpose for radiant Venice to solve my life. Mes pieds. Mes larges pieds. Aux cors sempiternels. Very neat. Very smart and astute to be sure. Calvary through the shock-absorbers. Con… stan-ti-no.pel. S.M.E.R.A.L.D.I.N.A.R.I.M.A. How long oh Lord has this been going on. Nicht küssen bevor der Zug hält.
“That is bad dialogue” she said bitterly “God has tormented me all my life” she said, with an extraordinary movement of expansion, “that is no way to speak to Ophelia. Why do you complicate the Sauladen with trying to be yourself? Such a babby” she sneered “I haff to laff.”
Without turning her head or loosening her pose she let out sideways at him smartly with the scroll.
Oh and I dreamed he would come and come come come and cull me bonny bony double-bed cony swiftly my springal and my thin Wicklow twingle-twangler comfort my days of roses days of beauty week of redness with mad shame to my lips of shame to my shamehill for the newest of news the shemost of shenews is I'm lust-belepered and unwell oh I'd rather be a sparrow for my puckfisted coxcomb bird to bird and branch or a coalcave with golden veins for my wicked doty's potystick trimly to besom gone the hartshorn and the cowslip wine gone and the lettuce nibbled up nibbled up and gone nor the last day of beauty of the red time opened its rose struck with its thorn oh I'm all of a gallimaufry and a salady salmagundi singly and single to bed she said I'll have no toad-spit about this house and whose quab was I I'd like to know that from my cheerfully cuckooed Dublin landloper and whose foal hackney mare toeing the line like a Viennese Taübchen take my tip and clap a padlock on your Greek galligaskins ere I'm quick and living in hope and glad to go snacks with my twingle-twangler and grow grow into the earth mother of whom clapdish and foreshop.
“Hure!” backing away to face her against the casement “Hure! Hure!” with a sudden yearning for the life and passion of Dmitri Karamazov. But being Belacqua he settled his bottom on the sill, evacuate, his heart more moved than with a trumpet, his want upon him as a man of shield, “Hure! Hure!” in his waistcoat-pocket prose-poem diapason now, seeking an arsehold. Then the proud hell-blond beauty receded or perhaps seemed only so to do as gravely with the indifferent movement of my succubus my Infanta defunct oh Schopenhauer stepped across her the hard breastless Greek slave or huntress the hard nautchgal through the appointed evening down the shingle that sweats already for the algor of Bilitis to the act of darkness on the hard rucks of shingle that knuckle into our hot pelts our dry pelts and bruise the bones of our loins of our shoulders, all night, if she comes the lil pute, shaming wasting the flesh, forcing down my shoulders my buttocks on the hard icy berries of shingle that lapse and wedge and drive up like knuckles into the kidneys the withers, Lesbia, rather stiff and small and oh so compact, she tailed off very da capella into a kind of stela you might nearly say and back into the picture loomed the Smeraldina-Rima looking momently I thought sodden flav mammose poppata immensely slobbery-blubbery.
“How comes it” he expostulated “even making allowances I know after all these years in a foreign land you speak your native tongue so badly?”
Breasting the air ridiculously it seemed she kept a sharp look-out over his shoulder. Like a big white-and-liver bitch sitting in a window wanting to bark. He wanted to say come off it in the name of God and was going to when she dropped everything.
“Egal” she said, loud and rude, “egal.”
“So badly” he insisted “so badly.”
Thirteen not twelve times impure. Got you there merde snarled the prognathous Commendatore grinding his bicuspids in a rictus. Quip. Name. Age. Birth. Premature or Fulltime. Nursed or Handfed. By a polar bear Sam oh the fulva vulva merde in one or other of the Hebrides peeping and creeping at the hontes sangsuelles of the gutter Nicolettes squatting bereft of diaper and pilch merde merde merde in the dews of the stews, just look at my cephalic index the browstone crushing the eyes, and looking I recall with some pleasure as being almost a touching won't you thing or moving like a far bugle in glades at sunset though maybe inclined to be a bit too Yellow Love and An Ankou for the liking of such as you and me an anecdote not relating this time for once for a wonder to the sphincter of poor Lelian prostated probably in some horrid nasty station hotel with the Muttering Delirium and the Summer Diarrhœa and confluent noli me tangere rodent ulcers lancinating his venter, incubating the nits what nits bloody well you in the scarf of his cuticle, the black spots encrimsoned on his sacrum, his mouth a clot of sordes, his clubbed digits plucking at the counterpane, his rhonchi not to mention his inspirating (there's no call to labour this particular aspect of his malaise) crepitous mucous sonorous sibilant crackling whistling wheezing crowing and would you believe it stridulous, strangled with the waterbrash and a plumjuice sputum, the big slob of a catamite, dear oh dear how did he ever get himself into such a state, and a complete Racine drowning in the bidet… Douceurs… ! Ugh that word gives me the chinks doesn't it you? There are souls that must be saved and. When I peter out in a nightsweat as we all high and lowly must sooner or later one of these fine days Florence shall be instructed shall she not or reminded to foist deep down oh douceurs the antiseptic tampons. Father to-day woman mygodmygod I thirst basta father into thy hands. With his mind a blank (now that is a point that cannot be too stringently stressed) he sudde
nly was pleased to want all the candles quenched but one and it set carelessly on the good grand and draw not the curtains you stupid girl, Mammy a taste of the moody, a wagon for me who am weary on the way, something too soft without the notes, break the chords for the love of God, soft and low and slow and pleasant as a signet of rubies and ad my libidinem, though I declare I'm in such great form to-night that I wouldn't put it past me to weasel a whimper out of Bacharachnidean Eggs without Words.
The way the Madonna threw up her shoulders and collapsed all damp disappointment one would think she had been looking for milk in a little bird or a male tiger. That is clear enough anyhow. Mammy slammed the piano and the Mandarin looked up fiercely from his pyrotechnics.
“Silvester” said Mammy, in a dead voice.
By heaven but the paramour turned very nasty at this. And then, he would like to know, what might that have to do with the tide coming in, he would be intrigued to know that, flinging himself about in a regular pet.
“If you don't bring her out” (he might well tremble at such an ominous recitative) telescoping her neck till the vast mottled jowl came to rest on what putting such an opportunity steadfastly behind us we'll call the sternum, bowed forward over the dangling bloodballast of her swollen paws, “you're a b---“.
The pyrotechnist responded to the trigger with a superb shoulder-elbow-palm-and-eyebrow ikey.
“Between the yeeeears” he groaned, convulsed, “look at the night.” Anguish of supplication. “The old town” he wheezed “Gewohnheitstier don't be a goat.”
The spasm was very severe. Death may occur on third or fifth day. Don't break my incisors, merely pass a suppository of pancreatised caviar and bankerout my wits. If there is any difficulty in removing my trousers cut down the off seam, don't be afraid, a warm bland drink of warm wan wine and tickle my fauces, for the redness swelling heat and pain opium guttatim.