Dream of Fair to Middling Women (6 page)

Ain't he advanced for his age!

Here they had killed the lyrical October days, the magic film of light. And there, in its neutral sleep, the landscape was spending a slow phase. A man, a burly man, Nemo to be precise, paused on O'Connell Bridge and raised his face to the tulips of the evening, the green tulips, shining round the corner like an anthrax, shining on Guinness's barges. Behind him, spouting and spouting from the grey sea, the battalions of night, devouring the sky, soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence. The city would be hooded, dusk would be harried from the city.

From the Bridge, then, along the right bank, at that hour, it was Ronsard as far as the Park Gates. Magic, or, Deliverance from Love. At Island Bridge, a pang of light in the whore's garret. At Chapelizod, after the long journey, the long hour when darkness fills the streets, it was Homer. He spews, and we lick it up. The snug chez Isolde was a great perturbation of sweaty heroes come hastening down from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham in time for
a pint of nepenthe or moly or half-and-half. There he would have one or two and then he would tram back and go to the pictures, he would slip into the womb of the Grand Central burning on the waterside, and then he would crawl back home across the cobbles and his heart is a stone.

Confidence : on va déménager… gaz ! électricité ! salle de bains ! ascenseur ! vide-ordures !… Ah, que la vie est belle !

He drew himself up to his full height, he had to, and named the day, and in the bitter morning handed her forth through the glass door and locked it behind them and put the key in her pocket and they set off for the station. Unspeakably lovely he thought she was in her coarse tweed mantle and the pale green casque reducing the fanlight of the forehead to an absurd white fin. Before them marched briskly a stout little local tart, his little laundress, pushing his effects in a frail hand-truck. The Smeraldina-Rima bought the tickets, for herself a return and for him a single. He was getting happier and happier—a mixture of rum and Reisefieber; he felt drawn to the plump little washerwoman when she blushed over the tip he gave her and waved, apparently moved, as the train drew out. Tears to his eyes. The Smeraldina was very still and silent, wringing her hands, bowed towards the floor in her corner seat. He waxed more and more excited. He crossed over and sat down beside her and played with the dimple between her brows, at the root of the nose. He prodded it gently with the yellowed nail of his index-finger, a nail bitten so close that the dimple got more of the pad than of it, and he knuckled it too with his swollen knuckle. At school he used to crack his fingers and had never been able to shake off the
habit. She snatched off the casque, she extirpated it, it sailed in a diagonal across the compartment, her head fell back on his fairly manly shoulder and with her right arm taking a purchase on his neck, heedless of the baby anthrax that he always wore just above his collar, she slewed herself round on top of him.

“There there” he hushabied “there there. Nicht küssen” he said slyly “bevor der Zug hält.”

Now she moaned, pianissimissima, and cold-bloodedly so, we regret to suspect. But he, be that as it may, was so lucid and fresh and gay, lit with rum and his temperature up, that to attempt any form of consolation was not to be thought of. Till Wien he held it, in a vision of ice-floes and stars and diamonds and steel and mica and feldspar and gulfs and brasiers and foam, and she lay there inert, surely uncomfortable, on top of him, muttering her German lament: “Dich haben! Ihn haben! Dich haben! Ihn haben!” They flew off in a taxi to a jeweller's where he bought her an exquisite silver powder-box, cockled, flat almost, ribbed and chased, a fragile silver conk, for her vanity bag. Very fine. Then to a Friseur for powder to fill it many times over. Then to a café. Then to the station. They whipped round and round the Stefanskirch, regardless, enlaced in the spacious open Wagen, through the scarifying morning. In the café he shed the last ballast and went aloft and talked and talked, and she crooned over the gift. Her eyes sped from her wrist-watch to his flaming face and back again from his flaming face to the wrist-watch and then settled in an ecstasy and an agony on the gift. She was like a bird, the eyes darting this way and that, then the little chirrup, the muted twitter, like an incantation, over the gift. Like a bird and like a child, with something bright and pretty to play with and someone to love and a Viennese Schokolade with
lashings of cream to eat. The platform absquatulation was very mild, vaguely disagreeable, like an introduction. For him, lit with rum and fever and the erotico-mystic French highballs that her horse-sense found horrid, it was the most natural thing in the world to sustain with sang-froid the act of severance that to a man of say Mallarmé's complexion, high-mettled and viveur, communicated an anguish of such strength as to cause an azure mist to condense on his glasses. The Smeraldina bit her lip with great skill and did the brave girl until the Platznehmen of the porters became final. Then her tears fell fast and furious. A hiccup convulsed the train. Off flew the green helmet…

She assured him in a letter that she walked the streets as one demented, only returning to Dunkelbrau by the midnight train. And the squall caught him just beyond the frontier, shortly after the visit of the customs-officers, and with such violence that he envied the manhood of Toussaint l'Ouverture and heard the hooves of the wheels stating all night a dark thesis:

Whoso hath with his good-will

lost what he ought to love

shall with sorrow lose

what he hath loved

Driving through the dark that precedes the dawn to his room beyond the river on the Montagne Ste-Geneviève he was greatly distressed in the head. All night the parrots had swung roosting from his palate. His feet were in hot pulp. His body was foul and so were his clothes. He stank after the journey. As they coursed unimpaired down into the well of the city a magic dust lapsed from the desolate hour, from the disastrous expulsion of the morning, livid
strands in the east of placenta praevia, dust of his dove's heart, and covered him. Douceurs… There are souls that must be saved and there are souls that must not be saved. The magic, the Homer dust of the dawn-dusk. But it was only a dim impression, no more than the tumultuous cœnæsthesis (bravo!) of the degenerate subject. The facts—let us have facts, facts, plenty of facts—were: his feet, that they were in treacle, his fetid head, a swoon of halitosis, his altogether too tainted conditions. Lucien's shoulder was against his, he was thoroughly ashamed of himself, of the offensive state he was in.

“My dear man” he said, careful not to turn his head, “you really ought not to have given yourself the trouble of getting up at this unearthly hour merely in order that you might greet me a little earlier than you would have done in the ordinary course of events. You see I am so exhausted and stupefied after that abominable journey that I am incapable of the least movement of intelligent camaraderie. I can scarcely forgive myself for having been the cause of your putting yourself out so, because I know that you are no more of an early bird than I am myself, for nothing. ' Ad I had the least suspicion that I was to be so lamentable on arrival I would indeed have written to beg you to forego your kind arrangement and give me instead rends-toi for the afternoon in one of the cafés of the quartier. But it did not occur to me that a railway-carriage, a mere railway-carriage, could work such a prodigious alteration. I left Vienne, you know, as spruce and as keen as a new-ground hatchet. Then again I suppose it is wrong of me to suggest that the railway-carriage, and it alone, is responsible, when it was doubtless only one of a multitude of circumstances, no more, no doubt, than the sympathetic site of my disaggregation. Algia for the dear girl, the rum fairies taking wing in
a fume, a nameless dejection, a collapse into the deep subnormal slough to compensate the exaltation and the fever of departure, that old bastard of Augustin strumming his blues all night—these and innumerable other inchoate liminal presentations clubbed together to destroy me.”

They arrived. Vigorously the chauffeur hoisted down the bag and placed it on the glimmering pavement.

“Can you pay this man” said Belacqua “because I spent my last Groschen on a bottle.”

Lucien payed the man off.

“I can only express my appreciation” said Belacqua by way of conclusion, as the taxi faded away into the gloaming, “of your charming gesture by apologising for myself, by asking your pardon for the fact of myself.”

Lucien's arms began to flutter.

“My dear friend” he said in a low, earnest tone, “please, I implore you, do not, do not apologise. I spent the night up with Liebert, who by the way asks most anxiously after you. We dine together this evening—provided of course” he added in a little gush, cocking up his bright eye, “that that is agreeable to you?”

The Syra-Cusa: her body more perfect than dream creek, amaranth lagoon. She flowed along in a nervous swagger, swinging a thin arm amply. The sinewy fetlock sprang, Brancusi bird, from the shod foot, blue arch of veins and small bones, rose like a Lied to the firm wrist of the reins, the Bilitis breasts. Her neck was scraggy and her head was null. Faciem, Phœbe, cacantis habes. She was prone, when brought to dine out, to puke, but into her serviette, with decorum, because, supposedly, the craving of her viscera was not for food and drink. To take her arm, to flow together, out of step, down the asphalt bed, was a
foundering in music, the slow ineffable flight of a dream-dive, a launching and terrible foundering in a rich rape of water. Her grace was supplejack, it was cuttystool and cavaletto, he trembled as on a springboard, jutting out, doomed, high over dream-water. Would she sink or swim in Diana's well? That depends what we mean by a maiden.

In the young thought of Belacqua, stocked now against its own interests, confused in a way that was not native to it, the Smeraldina-Rima and the Syra-Cusa were related and compared, just as Lucien may later enter the scales with Chas. The burden of his argument was:

here, in a given category (skirts), are two independent items: on my right, the powerfully constructed Smeraldina-Rima: on my left, the more lightly built Syra-Cusa. Beautiful both, in so far as before the one as before the other I find myself waxing pagan and static, I am held up. If it be not beauty, the common attribute here that dynamises, or, perhaps better, inhibits me, then it is something else. That is a hair not worth splitting. The important thing is that I may, may I not, suppose that these two dear measures of discrete quantity could be coaxed into yielding a lowest common one of the most impassioning interest in the sense that in it might be expected to reside the quintessential kernel and pure embodiment of the occult force that holds me up, makes me wax pagan and static, the kernel of beauty if beauty it be, at least in this category (skirts).

But, poor Belacqua, do you not realise that the essence of beauty is predicateless, transcending categories?

It had indeed occurred to poor Belacqua that such was the case.

But I would like very much to know, he proceeds, how I can handle heterogeneous entities. Kindred items, cognate ones, like in kind, these I fancy can be reduced to a deep common point of divergence. Somewhere is the magic point where skirted beauty forks, giving me and all that have eyes to see, on the one hand, the Smeraldina-Rima, the heavy brune, on the other, the Syra-Cusa, the welter brunette. But to relate, say, volume to line, a beautiful hen, say, to a beautiful dry-point… Get along with you! No node can branch, here to the beauty of a bird, there to the beauty of a dry-point. (If indeed a dry-point can ever be said to be beautiful.) I cannot establish on a base
Aa,
where A is hen and
a
dry-point, a triangle with the desired apex, because, and you will appreciate this disability, I am unable to imagine the base
Aa.

Unfortunate Belacqua, you miss our point,
the
point: that beauty, in the final analysis, is not subject to categories, is beyond categories. There is only one category, yours, that furnished by your stases. As all mystics, independent of creed and colour and sex, are transelemented into the creedless, colourless, sexless Christ, so all categories of beauty must be transelemented into yours. Take it, deary, from us: beauty is one and beauties uni generis, immanent and transcendent, totum intra omnia, deary, et totum extra, with a centre everywhere and a circumference nowhere. Put that into your pipe, dear fellow, and smoke it slowly.

But in the young thought of Belacqua, stocked, as we have said, and confused in a way that was opposed to its real interests, a pullulation of Neue Sachlichkeit maggots, the two girls simply had to be compared, as, at a later stage, Lucien and Chas may have to be.

Suddenly it did not matter a curse, not a tinker's curse, all these people, Smerry, Syra, Lucien, Chas, such names!, lonely grit. All egal. The wombs that bear me, he thought, and the wombs that bore me and the arces formæ and the arses formæ. Egal. EGAL. A scurry of grit in the mistral. (His thought was young and there was no Alba, only the name, magic name, incantation, abracadabra, two slithers, th, th, dactyl trochee, dactyl trochee, for ever and ever.) They took a good pull on their features, on the precious little eager clothed pudibond body, they pumped up an opinion, they let it come, through a nozzle of fake modesty and fair breeding: “it seems to me…” You were spattered all over. Then you reorganised yourself, the brisk homunculus, you pursed up your mouth like a bud, pompier, cul de coq, out oozed the phrase, cack: “I think I agree with you…”, “I think I don't altogether agree with you…” That was when they were not too busy doing something to you, raping you, pumping your hand, frôling you like a cat in rut, clapping you on the shoulder, smelling at you and rubbing up against you like a dog or a cat, committing every variety of nuisance on you, or making you do something, eat or go for a walk or get into bed or get out of bed or hold on or move on, too busy committing nuisance on you or chivvying you into committing nuisance on yourself to have occasion to turn on the nozzle of fake modesty and fair breeding. Quatsch quatsch quatsch. Grit in the mistral, tattered starlings in the devil's blizzard, and all bursting with hope, faith, charity and good works, so pleased that they could do this and so proud that they could say that, sniffing at you and snatching at you and committing decorous nuisance with the nozzle.