Tropic of Capricorn (22 page)

Because she had such a marvellous ass and because it was also so damned inaccessible I used to think of her as the Pons Asinorum. Every schoolboy knows that the Pons Asinorum is not to be crossed except by two white donkeys led by a blind man. I don’t know why it is so, but that’s the rule as it was laid down by old Euclid. He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day – I suppose purely to amuse himself – he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys
that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn’t part with it for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt, which by the way she never referred to it all – as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labelled fuck. You might diddle and piddle, but you must not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn’t really think because your mind was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theatre on which the owner had left his opera hat.

Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at meal times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal. The
only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt. You’d be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too, this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.

Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most “personal” hard-on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it wasn’t quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with her legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first-comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does it’s volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wild-cat. Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself – and watch out that you don’t get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but
with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy: it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull it down in a night. She will pull it down and pee on it, and nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And when I said about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most “personal” hard-on imaginable I meant it; she would break down the
personal
erection and hand you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod. You might not get very far with Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could travel far and no mistake about it. Once you came within earshot of her it was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish fly. Nothing on earth could bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledge-hammer.

It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is a lie. It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny trowel in his hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other side. The idea was to tunnel through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the nec plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh. And of course there was no end to the digging. The best I might hope for was to get stuck in the dead centre of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all around, and stay stuck there forever. That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at. On the other hand I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort; it was impossible for me to stay stuck anywhere, even in the dead centre of the earth. It was most imperative to find and enjoy the metaphysical fuck, and for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new tableland, a mesa of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the vultures flew at random.

Sometimes sitting in a park of an evening, especially a park littered with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be going towards Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that suddenly she would begin to fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to fly, I knew I
would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the digging and the wallowing. Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other disturbances, it seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding a corner. That is, she would suddenly be lifted from the ground for the space of a few feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but just that sudden involuntary lift, whether real or imaginary it didn’t matter, gave me hope, gave me courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.

There were megaphones inside which yelled “Go on, keep going, stick it out,” and all that nonsense. But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would set the alarm dock in order to be up and about at a certain hour,
but why up and about?
Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved. Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn’t it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and just board an aeroplane for China? But the body follows
after
the mind. The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it gets particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in opposite directions.

Labouring with the trowel was bliss; it left the mind completely free and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoe laces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and overexasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the promised tableland would hove in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that’s holy. These misadventures happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began to approach it. Everybody had at
one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It disappeared overnight – sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No Man’s Land and it stank with the litter of invisible deaths. If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the “zone between” idea. Here the bullet flew and the corpses piled up: then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a stench.

This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable. What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt; it must be mentioned only in
de luxe
editions, otherwise the world will fall apart. What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. But
fuck,
the real thing,
cunt,
the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than nitroglycerine. To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a Sears-Roebuck catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church. On page 23 you will find a picture of Priapus juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he is standing in the shadow of the Parthenon by mistake; he is naked except for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for the occasion by the Holy Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan. Long distance is on the wire demanding to know if they should sell short or long. He says
go fuck yourself
and hangs up the receiver. In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy of our Lord Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and then taken to Abysinnia to be pounded with quoits and other objects. The weather seems to be fair and warmer, as usual, except for a slight mist rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of Neptune’s balls which were castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the Manicheans in the time of the Pentecostal plague. Long strips of horse meat are hanging out to dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient times. Hard by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a thirty-six horse-power engine and no cutout. The harvest is in and the workers are counting their wages in the
distant fields. This is the flush of dawn on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world, now faithfully reproduced for us in colour thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and other patient zealots of industry. But this is not the way it looked to the men of Homer’s time who were on the spot. Nobody knows how the god Priapus looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the end of his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to dream. It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected if I am wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus peal and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green marshland in which the Chocktaws were making merry with the Navajos: in the air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned with marigolds. He saw also a huge slate on which was written the body of Christ, the body of Absalom and the evil which is lust. He saw the sponge soaked with frogs’ blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was not big enough to cover out iniquities. He saw these things in the whilomst moment when the Navajos were making merry with the Chocktaws and he was so taken by surprise that suddenly a voice issued from between his legs, from the long thinking reed which he had lost in dreaming, and it was the most inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant and ferocious cacchinating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths. He began to sing through that long code of his with such divine grace and elegance that the white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge purple eggs all over the green marshland. Our Lord Christ got up from his stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he was, he danced like a mountain goat. The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the warlike Igorotes and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.

This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a
great deal. It is no longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is scatological, eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden.
Verboten.
And so the Land of Fuck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I constrained to speak mythologically. I speak with extreme unction, and with precious unguents too. I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white marigolds, the oleanders and the rhododendrons. Up with the thorns and the manacles! Christ is dead and mangled with quoits. The fellaheen are bleaching in the sands of Egyptis, their wrists loosely shackled. The vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh. All is quiet, a million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese. The moon is up and the Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently, the stars twitch and bleat, the rivers slip their banks. It’s like this … There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk: there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap: there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive: there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy: there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time: there are telegraphic cunts which practise the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried breadcrumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter: there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble
on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?