Dream of Fair to Middling Women (12 page)

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 suddenly 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.

Now then oh my Helper. The Greek bath drives sadness from the mind. Free among the dead. Oh in peace oh for the Selfsame. Optumo optume optumam operam. The demon of irony the life of irony the diamond. Lean on
the orange-peel wonderfully made by the Lemon-sole that your… er… soul may arise from its weariness. So. Viel Vergnügen.

“Now” she bickered, toiling up the steps, “of course we can't get in.”

He felt weak after his visions. But his little mind was clear, clear as a bell, the poet's mind, par excellence and parenthèse:

Clear and bright it should be ever,

Flowing like a crystal river,

Bright as light and clear as wind…

With his mind then in this condition for the moment, brilliantly lit, canalised and purling, he said:

“Yes of course we can, it's not twelve yet.”

They pushed at the heavy door together and passed through the crowded vestibule to the stair-head.

“Didn't I tell you” he said “that we could get in?”

The Ratskeller was a revel-rout. They stood at the stairhead looking for a table.

“Now” she said “of course we won't get a table. Why wouldn't you come on when I wanted you to?”

It did look indeed as though they would not get a table.

“There is no good staying here” he said “there is nothing to be done here. We can't get a drink. Come on.”

“Come on where?”

“We'll go to the Barberina and get a drink.”

“It'll be gleich at the Barberina.”

“Not at all” he said. “Come on.”

“Anyhow we'll miss midnight.” There was certainly evil and madness in her heart at that moment. “Why wouldn't you…”

“We won't” he recited “if you'll come on now quick.”

He coaxed her back through the vestibule and pulled at the big door. It was locked.

“We can't get out” he said.

The Madonna scrabbled at the door. She panted with anger. He, evacuate, leaned up against the wall. He stood in great need of a drink.

“It's no good” he said “you can't get out.”

She turned on him like a leopardess, but he had not the smallest inclination to have her ruin him or anything of that kind.

“Quick” she frothed “try the other.”

These things take time. In due time he was back.

“Locked” he said “we're locked till the year's out.”

The Smeraldina-Rima began to giggle:

“We're locked in between the years!” She fell back against the wall and began to make limp passes at him with her hands, tittering from head to foot. He looked at his watch.

“It will all be over in a minute” he said “and then we'll get out and go to the Barberina and have a nice quiet drink. It's just twelve.”

The Madonna did not want a nice quiet drink. She catapulted herself off the wall and swaggered past him, the bold allumeuse, to the stair-head. She curved herself over the rail and her thin black dress clung to her posteriors. He followed up beside her.

“Back in a sec” he said, and walked gingerly down the little stairs.

“Fow-fow!” she called gaily down after him. That was a
private joke and he fluttered a hand to it without turning round however. She watched him thread a passage through the press with his usual exaggerated aloofness. A man or two noticed and hailed. The women, after a glance, dismissed him from their minds. This circumstance did not escape her. She watched him waddle remote and nonchalant into the W. C. Abandoned on the crowded stair-head, watching him limp into the W. C., she suddenly understood that there was nothing to be done, that poor Bel was lost and that perhaps his life was over. She felt sorry for him and tears collected in her eyes.

A hand descended with familiarity on her shoulder. She pushed herself off the rail without resentment and turned to face the plump chess champion and petty financier who, as well she knew, coveted vaguely her favours. He exulted.

“The beautiful girl” he said “will come to our table? She will join us at our table?”

He was fat and fascinating like a satrap. He had the women he wanted, and he wondered did he want this one. So he had not had her yet.

“Who's with you?” she asked, warding him off. He named three bucks or toffs, notorious gigerls, and pointed them out.

“Sorry” she said “I'm with Bel.”

Now he had beaten Belacqua at chess, he had brought him home incapable from the old town, so he knew him. He found him naïf and a dull vain dog and a patent baby-lan. He was a shrewd man.

“That's not a reason” he mocked “when there is place for two.”

“Sorry” she repeated.

He pushed his head forward at her.

“But why not?” he insisted, softly, more night of Egypt than ever.

“He wouldn't sit with you” she said, after a moment's hesitation.

“So!” he smiled without the least resentment “So!” he was genuinely touched. “See you later” dared he hope, and withdrew.

The clock of the Rathaus now struck the hour, the revellers joined hands and sang their chorus. The remarkable divisibility of twelve entered the head of Belacqua who, having underestimated his need, was now pressing his forehead against the cool porcelain. “Prosit Neujahr!” he said in a very weak and scranny voice indeed and pulled the joystick. On the way back he was stopped by the Belshazzar who had spied him approaching from afar and broken away from the three gigerls, leaving them swaying in a restricted garland, to intercept him.

“So” he opened “and how are you?”

“A little unwell” said Belacqua “and how are you?”

“Come and join our little party” moved the Belshazzar.

“Sorry” said Belacqua “I am with the Smeraldina.”

“Come” whispered the Balshazzar, to an indescribable spasm of his gross attractive face, “come with the Smeraldina, both of you come.”

That seemed to Belacqua fair enough. When he reached the stair-head he found his partner conversing with a most charming young fellow.

“Dare I?” said Belacqua, hovering on the outskirts.

The young man receded for the Madonna to step smartly up to her escort. She eyed him attentively.

“What is it?” she said “you're as white as a sheet.”