Famous Last Words (11 page)

will work, I promise you. I’ve seen it work a hundred thousand times. And here comes the bit about the money, you

see…”

I held my breath.

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What did she have in mind?

“As for you,” she said, smoothing out one glove and making a perfect hand of it, “all those ladies have sons and

daughters. Or, most of them do. And, once they hear about your expertise in languages, why, take your pick and name your price!”

It made sense.

“As for me—” and here she smoothed the second glove,

face down on top of the other “—it may come as some

surprise, Mister Mauberley, but one of my talents happens to be a very great expertise with a deck of cards. In fact it is not too boastful to claim my poker skills are a match for any man’s. And I stress the word man. Because it is the men I want to play. It is the men who have the money. It is the money that 1 need. It is…”

She waited.

Then she smiled the saddest smile I’ve ever seen and said: “I only want one thing. I only want my life.”

She is renowned—and justly so—for her smile.

In those days, it was battered out of tin. Now gold. But battered, nonetheless.

When this is read, remember that: the hammer blows. The baseball bats.

This now begins to fade.

I do not know when 1 became her lover in my mind; as

I had been Dmitri’s lover in my mind; and countless others’

since. In my mind. 1 do know this: it was her audacity that won me. Her ruthless stillness, seated in her place in the lobby of the old Imperial Hotel, with her feet in the dragon’s mouth, waiting to be seen; her awareness, even then, that she had a place in time. And ves—she was debonair: the first to laugh; the last to weep: the best of company. And brave. It was not and it has not boon a fearful thing to watch her climb.

“I ivani my life,” she had said.

And, since my father died, I had been waiting for someone—anyone—to say those words out loud.

At this point, Quinn got down from the chair on which he had been standing and sat with the candle in his hands and closed his eyes.

His neck was sore. He was not even sure how long he had been standing on the chair—almost falling over backwards, shifting the candle from hand to hand, squinting at the writing, losing it in and out of focus.

At last he got up and set the candle in the centre of the desk and lit yet another cigarette. The whole room smelled of smoke and candle stubs—much the same, he imagined,

as it must have smelled to Mauberley at work on his “frescoes”.

For a moment—and perhaps it was his own shadow—he

caught a vision of the writer writing: pinned in his blanket, with his hair all matted with plaster dust, his fingers jetting out of finger less gloves and the silver pencil never pausing, gouging out the words. But Quinn, disoriented, looked up and saw not words but pictures: animals drawn on the ceiling above his head. Deer—bison—stars—the moon and

Mauberley’s handprint. Maybe he had needed to create another image of the world: innocent and shining, like the one

the Duchess of Windsor had intended when she said; “we

are led into the light and shown such marvels as one cannot (efl…And then…”

Quinn turned. He looked at the words that Mauberley had written on the walls.

And he thought; “we have an obligation to fight back.” And he went on reading.

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Ezra Pound has one mad eye: his left. And there were times I thought he saw the world through it alone, as if the other eye were blind. But now, as I write this here, I think about the world outside these windows and I see it as being the world that Ezra always saw: the world of chaos, fire and rage. I never heard him once remark upon the beauty of the world, the stuff of other poet’s dreams—of splendour in the grass; but only of the human world, whose beauty all was lost or passed.

Ezra will be condemned, 1 know, for what he’s said and

done: his broadcasts and his writings. But he will only be condemned because the world cannot acknowledge that the mad have visions of the truth. Ezra will be destroyed for no better reason than that no one wants to be seen by a madman—lest the madman call him “brother”. It will be somebody’s

job to pull him down and say he was the cause of

madness; thus disposing of the madness in themselves,

blaming it all on him. “We should never have done these things,” they will say, “were it not that men like Pound and Mussolini, Doctor Goebbels and Hitler drove us to them.

Otherwise, we should have stayed at home by our quiet

hearths and dandled our children on our knees and lived out lives of usefulness and peace. …” Missing the fact entirely that what they were responding to were the whispers

of chaos, fire and anger in themselves. All of which Ezra could see from the very first with his one mad eye.

Rapallo: March 7th, 1936

Ezra is feeding the cat. He tosses little bits of goatmeat at it where it sits on the roof. Most of the pieces of goatmeat roll down off the tiles and land on the grass, but the cat won’t come down after them. It just sits there, stupefied by heat and flies. Ezra thinks this is all very amusing—rolling meat into tight little bullets and firing them up at the cat. But I find it rather irritating, since I’m desperate to concentrate

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on the pile of newspapers down beside my deckchair and

the notebook balanced on my lap and the fact that every single piece of lead I insert in my pencil is determined to break today, no matter how many times I fill it. Maybe it doesn’t want to write. Maybe it has the same sense I have—

cum sybiHa—of impending doom.

They’ve done it. The Germans. Hitler, rather. He sent in the Reichsivehr to occupy the Rhineland. Yesterday. In spite of all his promises, he just went in and did it; no fuss: nothing. Not a word from France or England. Mute. The

murder of Dollfuss; the invasion of Abyssinia. Now this.

Games of chance. And it makes me very nervous. I say so to Ezra.

Ezra says; “the world is too much with us” and flings

another ball of meat. Amen. My father said so too.

“But what if there’s a war?”

“Then good.”

“Good?”

“It’s what the Boche do best, ain’t it?” fDiaIects. Everything is a joke.) “Better a var—vot? Oddervise we got a rheffolution.

. .hunh?”

My mouth hangs open. Damn him. He doesn’t care if they

pull it all down. The whole precarious structure.

“We have their assurances,” I remind him. “Their promises.

No more wars. Hitler and Mussolini…”

Ezra’s eyes glaze over. His mouth moves. Silence.

“Listen,” I say to him, “don’t you understand how fine

the line is here?” I lean out towards him, clutching my notebook, stabbing my wrist with my pencil. “All we’re

asking for is a bulwark against the Bolshevists! Not 1914!”

“BuJIshitists, please.”

I refuse to laugh. “They’re changing the definitions, Ezra”, I say to him. “Hitler and Mussolini are changing the definitions.

Breaking their promises. It’s…”

“Ids da Joos vot done it. Dey was da Bolsheveki. Nod da Rooshun pipple. Jus da )oos. Hidler gonna kip a promis mid a Joo? Ya crazy! So mek var! Good an goddam var. Dat vey we got kaput! No more rheffolution.”

All I can do is sit back and stare at him: my knees together.

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rubbing my wrist with its purple puncture. My pulse is

racing. My mind goes blank. Ezra really doesn’t seem to understand. He makes me so angry, shrugging the way he

does: totally unimpressed, even though the headlines are six inches deep, even though Dorothy’s radio positively shouts it from the house. From Ezra, nothing. )ust another ball of goatmeat, lobbed against the tiles.

At last the cat has finally caught one and sits there chewing, with its head on one side.

“But think of the chances he’s taking,” I say.

“Who?”

“Hitler. What if the French and the British respond to one of these moves of his?”

Ezra fires off another salvo and winks at me and says;

“be less afraid of movement than of standing still.” And he puts his fingers (farmer’s fingers) up against his temple, tapping the veins. “AD things are a flowing,” he says. “So says Heraclitus.”

Heraclitus: for whom all things began with fire. Maybe be sat too long in the sun like Ezra and the cat. Dreaming with their heavylidded eyes. Disconnected. Floating, when dammit, the world is real and vulnerable.

“Let them march and make their wars and get it over

with,” says Ezra. “Then we can finally come to the only subject that matters: money.”

Dorothy’s radio stutters in the living room. Static. Hitler is speaking: far away, as always.

Ezra has fallen silent. His face is like a bearded beet. His jaws keep moving. Words unspoken. Odd. He frightens me.

Sometimes he’ll say things: just the middle parts of sentences.

Then he expects you to know what he’s talking about.

And when you don’t—and say you don’t—he scowls as if

you’d only half a brain. “You never pav attention,” he says.

Pay attention indeed! He owns half my mind. I have a

dozen notebooks filled with his advice. So must nearly all the writers writing now in English: “sfand in the middle of your work: throw out half of what you’ve gol; ivrile (lie way you talk—like a livenfieth-cenlurv human being… .”

And now look at him. Can a poet come to this?

All his ideas are stolen from somebody else’s game preserve.

An intellectual poacher, that’s what he is. Hunting

in the Dark Ages. Bringing home trophies so exotic they’re extinct by the time he gets them through the door. A tour of Ezra’s mind is like a tour of that room at the Hemingways’

where Ernest’s game is displayed on the walls—all those mounted heads and horns and hooves without bodies… .And the gun racks. The arsenal of personal furies… .

Ezra never speaks but that he spits a bullet from a dove’s mouth.

“Going to put a pond right there,” he says pointing down the yard. “Pound’s Pond. You like that?”

I can’t even smile. Half my mind is marching into the

Rhineland, wondering what will happen when the cheering stops. “Where will you get the water?” I ask. The lawn has died for lack of rain, even now in the rainy season.

“Out of the earth—where else? You think the ground is

a Jew and can’t be made to give?”

I don’t really want to talk about it. Why would I want to talk about the digging of a pond when the careful world we’ve made is tottering along the edge of chaos?

“Not too deep a pond, of course,” he says. “Not any deeper than that”—and he shows about three or four feet of depth by slicing the air with his hand. “Just enough to float the moon in.” He laughs. “You ever hear that story?”

I shake my head.

Ezra throws another peIFet at the cat.

“Chinese poet, Old Man Li Po, went down off his porch

one night—dead drunk—and drowned in his pond.” He

began to roll more meat in his palms. The smell was appalling.

Ezra didn’t seem to mind it at all. “Wanted to embrace

the moon, you see? Thought it was down there waiting

for him in the water. Drunk as an old goat. Fell in love with the moon. So goes the legend. Fact is, he probably thought it was some young lady’s behind… .” He laughed. “Got a great hard-on and thought, I’ll just go down there and creep up behind her…see how she feels, this pale. round-bottomed lady. And drowned.” He hits the cat. “Bull’s eye!”

The cat doesn’t make a sound, but only narrows its gaze.

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I wait for Ezra to explain the story. Nothing is forthcoming.

Finally, I say; “so now you want a pond of your

own to drown in. Is that it?”

“Mebbe. Lots of poets drowned over time… .” He sticks out his lower lip-as he thinks about it. “Shelley down the coast. Viareggio.”

Yes.

“All washed up,” says Ezra. chuckling. Then he falls silent working his jaws so hard I can hear his grinding teeth.

“Ezra…?” I rattle the papers. I’m concerned. I’m supposed to be writing a series for the London Daily Mail about the success of Mussolini’s regime. I can write about the success of Fascism, yes—but not about a regime hell-bent on war.

“Ezra?”

“No.” he says, his eyes half-closed. “You want to talk

about the world—and I don’t want to hear it. All my life I’ve talked about the world. Broke my teeth, chewing the world’s ear. Now screw ‘em. Fuck ‘em, my friend. Let ‘em go march and get it over with…” He stands up. “Me? I will bide my time. I have the answers all locked up in here. And one day, mark my words, the call will come. Benito Mussolini will march back home from Addis Ababa, dust himself off and

lay down his sword and say to someone: ‘bring me Pound.’

You wait! It’s coming. There will be a knocking at the gate—

and I’ll be here.”

“Sitting on your porch—or lying in your pond?”

He doesn’t like that. He looks right at me and says; “at least I am not impeccable: stiff from spats to collar. And I don’t wear gloves when I undo my flies. And I am not a flit.”

I cannot breathe.

Finally, he savs; “that God damn cat is cra/.y. baking up there in the sun. So 1 will do it ;i tavour and bring it down.”

He goes towards tin” Irau-to where lie kcrps tin-garden tools. 1 still cannot spo;ik or brr.illu’ nr nnivr. Dorothy looks out the window. Sin’ has lurin’d oil her radio no\ ;ind (an hear her husband rattling .ill tin-rakrs .md hoes and shovels—and she sees mi; silting pair .is my suit in (lie yellow

deckchair.

“What’s going on?” she says.

“God damn neighbour’s cat is on the roof,” says Ezra,

muffled inside the shed.

Dorothy looks at me. I do my best to shrug. “It’s been there all day,” I say.

“It’s up there every day,” says Dorothy, leaning down out of the window, shouting at Ezra. “Why can’t you leave it alone?”

Ezra re-emerges with a bamboo stick in his hand. “Ever

kill a cat?” he says to me, ignoring his wife.

I’d never killed a thing. And I say so.