Dream of Fair to Middling Women (7 page)

Vuolsi cosî colà, dove si puote

ciô che si vuole, e più non dimandare…

Colà? And where might that be, if it is not a rude question? Behind the gas-works, deary, behind the gas-works.

Money came from the blue eyes of home, and he spent it on concerts, cinemas, cocktails, theatres, apéritifs, notably these, the potent unpleasant Mandarin-Curaçao, the ubiquitous Fernet-Branca that went to your head and settled your stomach and was like a short story by Mauriac to look at, oxygéné and Real-Porto, yes, Real-Porto. But not on opera, never under any circumstances on opera, unless he was dragged, nor, after a bit, on brothels. Liebert forced him to see the… the Valkyrie à demi-tarif. Une merveille ! Only to be turned away. Belacqua laffed and laffed.

“Go home” they said gently “and get out of your cyclist's breeches.”

Liebert tore aside his coat.

“My plus fours” he cried “my beautiful plus fours!”

“Your friend” they explained, approving the drab trousers of Belacqua, “is convenable. You—no. You must go away. “

Belacqua sprained the rim of his belly. The perfect Wagnerite in half-hose, turned away from the chevauchée!

“You take mine” he begged “and I'll take yours. We'll go across to the Biard and change. I'm not keen.”

He stood in the vestibule of the National Academy of Music and pressed his respectable trousers on the suffocating Liebert. He implored him in vain to take his
trousers, they were at his entire disposal for the rest of the evening, they were his to do what he liked with. But no, not on any account. Who was Wagner anyhow?

“Who is Wagner?” said Belacqua.

“Yes” said Liebert testily “who is he anyhow?”

“He is a roaring Meg” said Belacqua “against melancholy.”

Nor on brothels…

Which carries us forward into a very tender zone indeed, to a clarification that cannot be dodged and is of a most difficult and delicate nature. Prima facie, it is shocking. We set our principal boy down in this gay place and at the same time insist that he eschewed its bawdy houses. That is shocking to begin with. And we tremble lest the whole conduct of his life during this period, when we shall have gone into it and placed before you in as discreet and mildly worded a relation as is compatible with franchise the considerations that compelled him to certain conclusions and the course of action that enabled him to carry on very well, oh very well and quite nicely, without recourse to such excellent institutions of pleasure and hygiene, we tremble, we said so so far back that we had better say it again, lest it should appear that his conduct was not merely shocking, but positively
choquant.

Quickly now, and bravely, and with a quick prayer to you to be just for a few moments grave, we quaver a very shaky proposition:

Love condones… narcissism.

We pause, we beseech you not to mind the terminology, nor allow yourselves to be angered by the terminology, and
we raise, in fear and trembling we do it, the proposition a notch.

Love demands narcissism.

Do not take us up too fast, hear us out. Forbid the terms to heat you. No one knows better than we do that stated so barely they are very nasty. Therefore we place ourselves on all our knees, beginning with the right, we bend our body profoundly, and beseech you out of the midst of this respectful posture of multiple genuflexion to hold your horses before you condemn us. In fact we pray for gravity all round. We take it that a grave climate surrounds us. What we want to do is not at all to convince you, but to persuade you. And what gravity, with the best will in the world, is proof against the generalisation, the western bull and his final bellow? If you could manage provisionally, until after the operation, a deliberate:
credo quia absurdum, ut intelligam,
our cheeks would be saved such a blushing, you have no idea, and our lips an insidious speaking. If we can rely on you (and you) to suspend hostilities for the space of just one paragraph (one in a bookful, is that exorbitant?) and abdicate your right to be entertained, then we can disarm too and say what we have to say, for said it must be, per fas et nefas, how we have no idea, we dare not think, urbanely at least, and, so far as in us lies, without style. This is a humiliating exordium, but we feel as nervous as a cat in a bag. And just one more request: believe us when we say that when we said, brusquely, screwing up our courage, not to the sticking point, but to the plunge:
Love demands narcissism,
we meant that in a certain case, his, possibly, by all means, an isolated case, a certain quality of loving (as understood and practised by him, by him alone of all lovers if it pleases you to think so, it would not
be in our interest to deny it) imports a certain system of narcissistic manœuvres. That is all we meant. Just that. That is the writhing proposition that we would more than willingly refrain from bringing cautiously forward, the umble proposition that will out, that we beg now, if you will be so kind as to lower the lights, to introduce.

Consider him, loving the Smeraldina-Rima, and half the continent removed from smell and sound of her breathing. Ay, notwithstanding the Dunkelbrau defloration, loving the Smeraldina-Rima. Absence makes the heart grow fonder is a true saying. In his own way, having her according to his God, as he threatened he would. Hoc posito, how could a reasonable use of the brothel, measured by his system of reference, which of course is the one we are obliged to refer to for this passage, have constituted the least outrage to the sentiment he entertained for his distant bloom, the light, melody, fragrance, meat and embracement of his inner man? But: the inner man, its hunger, darkness and silence, was it left entirely outside the brothel, did it not participate at all in the shady communion of the brothel? It was not and it did. Again: it was not and it did. Inwardly, after the act, into the sanctuary whose provision depended on her or on thought of her, whose assuaging belonged to her or the passional thought, the vision, of her, there entered peace and radiance, the banquet of music. That was so. She ceased to be bride of his soul. She simply faded away. Because his soul, by implication, had as many brides as his body. The rare miracle of fulfilment that had been ascribed and referred to her, exclusively to her, with which she in his mind had been identified, the gift of magic from her, real and ideal, to the soul, about which his entire preoccupation with her was organised, whose collapse as an imminent recurrence, had
that been thinkable, would have involved automatically the collapse of that preoccupation, this miracle and this magic, divorced from her and from thought of her, were on tap in the nearest red-lamp. That was so. Beatrice lurked in every brothel. The usual over, its purveyor null as before, there began the other outpour, streaming into the parched sanctuary, a gracious strength and virtue, a flow of bounty. Always and only after the usual and the purveyor of the usual, conditioned by them and flooding over them, over the garbage of the usual and the cabbage-stalks of sex, obliterating them, only then at the end, when it was time to rise and go, was dispensed the inward spilling. And not only over the garbage of the usual and the cabbage-stalks, but over the Smeraldina-Rima herself, over her impermeable oneness and her monopoly as his donator. That was the position. The bloom—not that in his mind or in her person she was ever floral, but merely for the sake of the antithesis—in virtue of this strange emanation issuing finally from the garbage and flowing back upon it to submerge it, was each time identified and obliterated with the cabbage-stalks. That was not nice. So he refrained, during this period, from entering houses of ill-fame. It was intolerable that she should break up into a series of whores simply because he, cursed by some displaced faculty of assimilation, by this demented hydraulic that was beyond control, found himself obliged to extract from the whore that which was not whorish, but, on the contrary, the fee-simple of the Smeraldina-Rima, who, as it seemed then to him, had either to remain one and indivisible, or else disappear altogether, become a negligible person. And the more intolerable as he was already braced against her disintegration, if not into the multiple whore, at least into the simple whore. One and indivisible. The booby would insist
on that. Incorruptible, uninjurable, unchangeable. She is, she exists in one and the same way, she is everyway like her herself, in no way can she be injured or changed, she is not subject to time, she cannot at one time be other than at another. That or—nullity. Whore and parade of whores. He plastered the poor girl with the complete pleroma. And then he had all the trouble in the world getting them to stick. He hauled her thus adorned, in spite of himself, into the brothel; and there, as explained, all the fine feathers came off. There, as one and as spirit, as spirit of his spirit, she was abolished.

Whereas in the other mansion, the mansion of him whose shoe was loosed, the process was reversed. He committed fraud—but had her, her in spirit, her according to his God, in place of that terrible anachronism of inward flowing that dethroned and dishonoured her in his mind. Her by fraud, but in spirit and with finality, alone in that other mansion. (At least that was his impression, he was satisfied, God help him, in that impression.) In the brothel, from the insignificance that was not she, of course not, he elicited (sua culpa and sua culpa) the reality that could only be she, dared only be she—and was not. There, in the brothel, suddenly at one with the inward rapture, the horrible confusion between the gift and the giver of the gift. The carnal frivolity, broached in the first place in order that the real spirit might never be degraded to the rank of succubus, yielded the real spirit. That was an abominable confusion, a fragmentation of the realities of her and him, of the reality in which she and he were related. Whereas now, alone, by fraud, he forced her to play the whore, he exploited her unreal and arbitrary to the end that he might annex her real and unique, to the end that the gift, when it came pouring in, assuaging like an overtone, might also
be the giver, to the end that he might be spared Beethoven stated through a bagpipe. When he excluded her carnally, broaching without scruple this and that carnal detail on the understanding, she being not flesh, but spirit, that no real issue was thereby involved, then she was denied to him in spirit (getting tired of that word), she was abolished as spirit. Now, when she was first glibly postulated as flesh, wilfully distorted by him into the carnal detail, then she was conferred upon him in spirit, as spirit she was affirmed. Adopting a fraudulent system of Platonic manualisation, chiroplatonism, he postulated the physical encounter and proved the spiritual intercourse. Fearful of being assumed alone, without her, or, worse still, with the carnal detail, into the champaign of the morning, he compelled her to have a share in his darkness.

Such were the dreadful manœuvers required of him at this period by the nature of his sentiment for the Smeraldina-Rima. They had to be discovered. They constituted, given his youth, his salad days, a forced move.

Da questo passo vinti ci concediamo…

The labour of nesting in a strange place is properly extenuating. The first week and more went to throwing up a ring of earthworks; this to break not so much the flow of people and things to him as the ebb of him to people and things. It was his instinct to make himself captive, and that instinct, as never before or since, served him well and prepared a great period of beatitude stretching from mid-October to Xmas, when deliberately he escaladed the cup so scooped out of the world and scuttled back to the glare of her flesh, deserting his ways of peace and his country of quiet. But for two months and more he lay stretched in the
cup, sheltered from the winds and sheltered from the waters, knowing that his own velleities of radiation would never scale the high rim that he had contrived all around and about, that they would trickle back and replenish his rumination as marriage the earth and virginity paradise, that he could release the boomerangs of his fantasy on all sides unanxiously, that one by one they would return with the trophy of an echo. He lay lapped in a beatitude of indolence that was smoother than oil and softer than a pumpkin, dead to the dark pangs of the sons of Adam, asking nothing of the insubordinate mind. He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire. They moved gravely, men and women and children, neither sad nor joyful. They were dark, and they gave a dawn light to the darker place where they moved. They were a silent rabble, a press of much that was and was not and was to be and was never to be, a pulsing and shifting as of a heart beating in sand, and they cast a dark light.

If that is what is meant by going back into one's heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off. The lids of the hard aching mind close, there is suddenly gloom in the mind; not sleep, not yet, nor dream, with its sweats and terrors, but a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity, thronged with grey angels; there is nothing of him left but the umbra of grave and womb where it is fitting that the spirits of his dead and his unborn should come abroad.

He understood then, when he came out of the tunnel, that that was the real business, the Simon Pure of this frail life that has already been described as being all temptation and knighthood, fake temptations and sham squabbles, highly delightful underclothes (dessous de femme “Mystère”) and boy-scouts, patrol-leader Charlie chasing the barley. Torture by thought and trial by living, because it was fake thought and false living, stayed outside the tunnel. But in the umbra, the tunnel, when the mind went wombtomb, then it was real thought and real living, living thought. Thought not skivvying for living nor living chivvying thought up to the six-and-eightpenny conviction, but live cerebration that drew no wages and emptied no slops. In the tunnel he was a grave paroxysm of gratuitous thoughts, his thoughts, free and unprofessional, nonsalaried, living as only spirits are free to live. And the fuss that went on about the monologue and dialogue and polylogue and catalogue, all exclusively intérieur. Oh the belle blague ! That did make him tired. And the Gedankenflucht! The Pons Asinorum was a Gedankenflucht. In the umbra and the tunnel no exchanges, no flight and flow, no Bachkrankheit, but thought moving alive in the darkened mind gone wombtomb. Le train ne peut partir que les paupières fermées. Hee! Hee! The prurient heat and the glare of living consumed away, the bloomers and the boyscouts abolished, the demireps and the Saint-Preux and the baci saporiti and other abolished, he was in the gloom, the thicket, he was wholly a gloom of ghostly comfort, a Limbo from which the mistral of desire had been withdrawn. He was not proud, he was not a bird of the air, passing off into outermost things, casting out his innermost parts, his soul at stool, per faecula faeculorum, setting his neb in the heavens. He was not curious, he was not a fish
of the sea, prowling through the paths of the sea, darting and coiling through the deeps of the world and the ordures of time that perish behind. He is a great, big, inward man, continent, sustenant, versus internus. Jawohl.