Dream of Fair to Middling Women (8 page)

We find we have written
he is
when of course we meant
he was.
For a postpicassian man with a pen in his fist, doomed to a literature of saving clauses, it is frankly out of the question, it would seem to be an impertinence—perhaps we should rather say an excess, an indiscretion—stolidly to conjugate
to be
without a shudder. What we meant of course was that he
was
a great, big, inward man, etc., then. Now he is once more a mere outside, façade, penetrated, if we may pilfer to reapply the creditable phrase of Monsieur Gide, by his façade, delighting, as you can see, in swine's draff for all he is fit. But during the two months odd spent in the cup, the umbra, the tunnel, punctuation from the alien shaft was infrequent and then, thanks to his ramparts, mild. Even so they used to drive him crazy, the way a crab would be that was hauled out of its dim pool into the pestiferous sunlight, yanked forth from its lair of moss and stone and green water and set to fry in the sun.
They:
Lucien, Liebert, the Syra-Cusa. Lucien was the least noxious. He did not flounce in with a bright gay swagger and clang like the Syra-Cusa, and he was not to be heard bouncing and scuttling up the stairs and along the passage, bursting with the very latest and love and ideas (God forgive him, yes, ideas) like Liebert. Lucien oozed in, he crept up to the door and slid in on a muted tap-tap. Then his conversation was choice, he spoke slowly and quietly, with great distinction, he was intelligent, he had a fine depressed intelligence, damped in a way that was a pleasure. Nor did he lay himself out to persuade, à la Liebert, nor titillate and arouse, à la Syra-Cusa, he did not talk
at
a person, he just balladed around at his own sweet aboulia, and—oh douceurs !—he kept on the mute.

“A passage in Leibnitz” he said “where he compares matter to a garden of flowers or a pool of fish, and every flower another garden of flowers and every corpuscle of every fish another pool of fish…” he essayed the gesture and smiled, a drowned smile, “gave me the impression that Æsthetics were a branch of philosophy.”

“Ah” said Belacqua.

“Whereas, of course,” he sighed “they are not.”

“No?”

“No no” he said “there is no relation between the two subjects.”

The smile was terrible, as though seen through water. Belacqua wanted to sponge it away. And he would not abandon the gesture that had broken down and now could never be made to mean anything. It was horrible, like artificial respiration on a foetus still-born.

Another day, catching sight of his hand in a glass, he began to whinge. That was more in Belacqua's own line and did not discompose him in the same way. Lucien did not know how to deal with his hands.

He used to tell stories—mostly of his own invention—about the grouch of Descartes against Galileo. Then he would laugh over them like a girl, a profuse giggle. “Idiot, idiot” he would giggle.

It was he who one day let fall nonchalantly, a propos of what we don't happen to know, so nonchalantly that it must have been his and not another's: “Black diamond of pessimism.” Belacqua thought that was a nice example, in the domain of words, of the little sparkle hid in ashes, the precious margaret and hid from many, and the thing that the conversationalist, with his contempt of the tag and the
ready-made, can't give you; because the lift to the high spot is precisely from the tag and the ready-made. The same with the stylist. You couldn't experience a margarita in d'Annunzio because he denies you the pebbles and flints that reveal it. The uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with a style, never gives you the margarita. But the writing of, say, Racine or Malherbe, perpendicular, diamanté, is pitted, is it not, and sprigged with sparkles; the flints and pebbles are there, no end of humble tags and commonplaces. They have no style, they write without style, do they not, they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret. Perhaps only the French can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.

Don't be too hard on him, he was studying to be a professor.

But Liebert and the Syra-Cusa were a cursed nuisance. How can we bring ourselves to speak of Liebert? Oh he was a miserable man. He was a persecution. He would come in in the morning, at the first weals of dawn, and drag the bedclothes off the innocent Belacqua. What did he want? That is what is so hard to understand. Nothing would do him but to elucidate Valéry. He declaimed Valerian abominations of his own.

“He is the illegitimate cretin” said Belacqua, worn out, behind his back one fine day to the scandalised Lucien, “of Mrs. Beeton and Philippus Bombastus von Hohenheim.”

Lucien recoiled. Because every one that knew the man thought he was wonderful. He appeared one night with a portable gramaphone and put on the… the Kleine Nacht-musik and then Tristan and
insisted on turning out the light.
That was the end of that. Belacqua could not be expected to see him any more after that. But ill will was a
thing that Liebert could not bear. Malevolent he could not bear to be. So when he went to England he quoted Belacqua as his bosom butty, ami unique and all the rest. And he picked up a slick English universitaire (hockey and Verlaine) in the provinces somewhere, she was a she-woman to her finger-tips, and by heaven he had to marry her. Belacqua laffed and laffed. He remembered how Liebert used to visit Musset in the Père Lachaise and sitting by the tomb make notes for a meditation and then come home in the bus and pull out photographs of the current pucelle who was so wonderful (elle est adorable, oh elle est formidable, oh elle est tout à fait sidérante) and who drove him so crazy and had such a powerful effect on him and gave him such a lift. He detailed the powerful effect, he set forth the lift, with piscatorial pantomime. A truly miserable man.

Why we want to drag in the Syra-Cusa at this juncture it passes our persimmon to say. She belongs to another story, a short one, a far far better one. She might even go into a postil. Still we might screw a period out of her, and every period counts. But she remains, whatever way we choose to envisage her, hors d'oeuvre. We could chain her up with the Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba, our capital divas, and make it look like a sonata, with recurrence of themes, key signatures, plagal finale and all. From the extreme Smeraldina and the mean Syra you could work out the Alba for yourselves, you could control our treatment of the little Alba. She might even, at a stretch, be persuaded to ravish Lucien, play the Smeraldina to Lucien's Belacqua. She could be coaxed into most anything. Ça n'existe pas. Except to keep us in Paris for another couple of hundred words. The hour of the German letter is not yet come. A paragraph ought to fix her. Then she can skip off and strangle a bath attendant in her garters.

The Great Devil had her, she stood in dire need of a heavyweight afternoon-man. What we mean is she was never even lassata, let alone satiata; very uterine; Lucrezia, Clytemnestra, Semiramide, a saturation of inappeasable countesses. An endless treaclemoon at the Porte de la Villette with a chesty Valmont in crimson sweater, tweed casquette and bicycle clips—her tastes lay in that direction. Her eyes were wanton, they rolled and stravagued, they were laskivious and lickerish, the brokers of her zeal, basilisk eyes, the fowlers and hooks of Amourrr, burning glasses. Strong piercing black eyes. Otherwise we think the face ought to have been in togs. But from throat to toe she was lethal, pyrogenous, Scylla and the Sphinx. The fine round firm pap she had, the little mamelons, gave her an excellent grace. And the hips, the bony basin, coming after the Smeraldina-Rima's Primavera buttocks ascream for a fusillade of spanners, fessades, chiappate and verberations, the hips were a song and a very powerful battery. Eyes—less good, to be frank, than we make out, our pen carried us away—and the body like a coiled spring, and a springe, too, to catch woodcocks. And hollow. Nothing behind it. She shone like a jewel in her conditions, like the cinnamon-tree and the rich-furred cony and Æisop's jay and Pliny's kantharis. Another of the many that glare. She was always on the job, the job of being jewelly.

“She lives” said Belacqua, altogether extenuated, one day behind her back to Lucien, “between a comb and a glass.”

The best of the joke was she thought she had a lech on Belacqua,
she gave him to understand as much.
She was as impotently besotted on Belacqua babylan, fiasco incarnate, Limbese, as the moon on Endymion. When it was patent,
and increasingly so, that he was more Octave of Malivert than Valmont and more of a Limbo barnacle than either, mollecone, as they say on the banks of the Mugnone, honing after the dark.

One calamitous night Belacqua, on fire, it is only fair to say, with Ruffino, was affected by her person with such force that he pressed upon her, as a gift and a mark of esteem (mark of esteem!) a beautiful book, one that he loved, that he had stolen from shelves at great personal risk; with pertinent dedication drawn by the short hairs from the text. The crass man. His lovely book! Now he has only the Florentia edition in the ignoble Salani collection, horrid, beslubbered with grotesque notes, looking like a bank-book in white cardboard and a pale gold title, very distasteful. Not indeed that there is a great deal to be said in favour of Papa Isodoro, with his primos and secundos and apple-dumpling readings. But the book itself was nice, bound well, with a bad reproduction of the Santa Maria del Fiore prestidigitator, printed well on paper that was choice, with notes that knew their place, keeping themselves to themselves. He pressed this treasure upon her. Lit with drink he forced her to take it. She did not want it, she said she did not. It was no good to her, she would never read it, thank you very much all the same. Now if he happened to have such a thing as a Sadie Blackeyes… But he pestered and plagued her till she gave in to get rid of him and took it. Then she left it in a bar and he dragged her back from the Batignolles to near the Gobelins to retrieve it.

Now we seem to have got the substance of the Syra-Cusa. She was a cursed nuisance. Be off, puttanina, and joy be with you and a bottle of moss.

Toutes êtes, serez ou fûtes,

De fait ou de volonté, putes,

Et qui bien vous chercheroit

Toutes putes vous trouveroit…

Quoted by Chas, many a long day later, on a painful occasion, by his dear friend Jean du Chas, who came to a bad end.

There, until the light of the day should be gone, he lay on his back on the bed, in the maw of the tunnel. The head lay in the cup of the palms clasped behind it, the thumb-nails scratched together rythmically the little boss of amativeness, the spread flexed arms were the transepts of a cross on the bolster, the knees were drawn up and parted to make a Judas-hole. He looked out between the knees, across the low bedrail, out through the tainted window. He heard snatches of a response from a dissertation on the sixth precept of the Decalogue:
elevate his mind his mind to God, invoke Him, signo crucis se munire… Deum placidum placidumdumdum invocare. B. Virginem… an-gelum custodem
… He lay on his back on the bed gawking out like a fool at the end of the day. First, the bare tree, dripping; then, behind, smoke from the janitor's chimneypot, rising stiff like a pine of ashes; then, beyond, beyond the world, pouring a little light up the long gully of the street that westers to the Luxembourg, half blinded by the sodden boughs, sending a little light into the room where he lay spreadeagled on the hot bed, blessed and ineffably remote, the tattered flowers of the evening, sweet colour of sapphire, an uncharted reef of flowers. There the harlot lives for ever, the throttled harlot, breaking with her hands
the yellow gold and dividing the enamel. There she squats, Yang, for ever and for ever, crying on a spray of blossom, Yang, the geisha Rahab, garotted by the eunuchs, the princess of the eunuchs…

His Mother had bought turf from two little boys who had stolen it off the bog, whose parents incited them to steal turf off the bog. On two counts, subsequently, by the Civic Guards, those plush bosthoons, they were indicted: breach of turbary and cruelty to the ass. They hawked it round from door to door in an ass and cart, and his Mother wrote to say she had bought half a load. Now therefore the room where they sat was more sanctum than ever when the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn. His Mother went to sleep over the paper, but when she went to bed she would lie awake. “The perils and dangers of this night…” What were they? John came slouching down from his forge for a cup of scald. His father assembled his arsenal of cold pipes, turned on the book, connected up, and it did the rest. That was the way to read—find out the literary voltage that suits you and switch on the current of the book. That was the mode that every one had known, the corduroy trousers and bunch of blue ribbon mode. Then it goes. The wretched reader takes off his coat and squares up to the book, squares up to his poetry like a cocky little hop-me-thumb, hisses up his mind and pecks and picks wherever he smells a chink. And the old corduroy mode, when you switched on and put in the plug and dropped everything, let yourself go to the book, and it do the work and dephlogisticate you like a current of just the right frequency, once gone is gone for ever. Except with luck on certain occasions that may bring it back, and then you know where you were. To the convalescent, well again
and weak, the old mode may come back; or in winter, in the country, at night, in bad weather, far from the cliques and juntas. But his Father had never lost it. He sat motionless in the armchair under the singing lamp, absorbed and null. The pipes went out, one after another. For long spells he heard nothing that was said in the room, whether to him or not. If you asked him next day what the book was like he could not tell you.

Chas, the dark seraphim in his heart, turned off all the lights in his big room, and with a little heavy hammer that he had, pounded up his gramophone records. “Je les ai
concassés”
he wrote “tous jusqu'à l'avant-dernier.” The trams, the Blackrock, the Dun Laoghaire, the Dalkey, one Donnybrook and a little single-decker bound for Sandy-mount Tower, cried up to him from the causeway of Nassau Street, and passed.