Dream of Fair to Middling Women (17 page)

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 Belacqua 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.

Then we feel also that this hyphenating is getting out of hand. Cacoethes scribendi, the doom of the best of penmen.

From Cuxhaven, after a very dark night in Altona, he took ship back to the land. The second night out, Cherbourg that noon having been delivered of the Yanks, he drew himself forth and down from the hot upper couchette where he lay and climbed the steep little ladder out from the well of steerage-class, if steerage can be said to have any class at all. It was quiet at this hour, that was only to be expected, the spit of deck so it was, by day a reeking perturbation of Poles and Hamburgers, happy to get away or grieved to go, getting on to something good against the long Atlantic hours or staunching their national tunes. There was one enormous bosthoon of a Pole, like a civic guard, a fresh and young Pole, a button-burster, in brilliant check trousers that stuck, inter alia, to his opulent thighs, and cinched in a short ultramarine double-dugger. He was the cock, he owned the deck. It was quiet now, it had been scoured sweet and clean by the night, the night that was fine by the grace of God and his Abbé Gabriel. A fair September night on the bosom of the deep.

Now the day is over, Belacqua is on the deep blue sea, he is alone on the deck of steerage-class. What shall we make him do now, what would be the correct thing for him to think for us? To begin with, of course, he moves forward, like the Cartesian earthball, with the moving ship, and then on his own account to the windy prow. He can go no further with security. He leans out to starboard, if that
means landward when land is to the right of the ship's motion, and scans the waste of waters, the distant beacons. Was it Beachy Head or the Isle of Wight, was it Land's End or tragic lightboats standing afar out about the shallows of the sea, or lightbuoys moored over the shoals? They were red and green and white and they lancinated his heart, they brought down his lips and head over the froth of water. If I were in, he thought richly, and it up to me to swim to one of those lights that I can see from here—how would I know that land was there, I would see no light from the level of the sea, I would certainly drown in a panic.

Does he remain bowed over the rail, his hair in the wind, his spectacles in the breast of his reefer, peering at the seethe of flowers, the silver fizz of flowers, scored by the prow? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he does. Then in his brain also the molecules must ferment in sympathy, panic-stricken they must seethe, saddened and stilled when he raises his eyes to the beacons, then off again on the boil when he brings his head down once more over the swell, the black swell where he might well be and it up to him to do something about it and trying to float and making a dreadful hash of that and spending rather than fostering his strength the while he cast round for an issue and a direction in which to paddle deliberately away, using the breast-stroke their Father had taught them, when they were tiny, first John, then him.

That was in the blue-eyed days when they rode down to the sea on bicycles, Father in the van, his handsome head standing up out of the great ruff of the family towel, John in the centre, lean and gracefully seated, Bel behind, his feet speeding round in the smallest gear ever constructed. They were the Great Bear, the Big Bear and the Little Bear; aliter sic, the Big, Little and Small Bears.
That will never be known for certain now. As in single file they sped along the breakwater each one of the vast iron lids of the shafts that had been sunk for some reason or other in the concrete coughed under the wheels; six wheels, six coughs; two great râles, two big and two little. Then silence till the next lot. Many was the priest coming back safe from his bathe that they passed, his towel folded suavely, like a waiter's serviette, across his arm. The superlative Bear would then discharge the celebrated broadside: B-P! B-P! B-P! and twist round with his handsome face wreathed in smiles in the saddle to make sure that the sally had not been in vain. It had never been known to be in vain. It would have been furnished by John or Bel had the occasion been let pass by Father. The occasion had never been known to be let pass by Father. The priest always pressed his trigger. He shared that distinction with, among other stimuli, a dish of curry. A dish of curry always pressed Father's trigger.