by John K. Cox
“Larron means swindler,” said the goldsmith without looking up at me.
I was astonished.
“That was my dog’s name,” I said to conceal my embarrassment.
“Strange!” he remarked.
“He liked to steal plums.”
“Plums?” said the goldsmith, looking up at me.
“It cost him his life,” I said.
“Strange,” he said. “And you want me to make you a ring out of this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” said he. “Of course, that’s your business.”
Then I said, “You mean you really can’t make a ring out of it.” In those days I didn’t pay any attention to trains. But they tormented me with their screams without my even being conscious of it. Some kind of dark presentiment grew in me, a dread of their howling.
Nonetheless I said one evening, to my own surprise, “I’m afraid of trains.”
“You aren’t afraid of anything,” she said. “You don’t need to be scared.”
“I’m also afraid of dogs,” I said.
“Oh!” she said, but she was unable to say anything more. The moment she had rounded her mouth to say “oh,” I glued my lips to hers, so that our kiss intoned a dark note of repentance, a hollow, protracted “oh . . . oh . . . oh . . .” which swelled up and thinned until it burst with a light pop, like a bubble.
“Oh!” she repeated, and now her voice was huskier, more intoxicated.
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” she said.
“I shouldn’t have said that. You shouldn’t have permitted me to say it.”
“What?” she asked.
“That thing about the trains and the dogs. I shouldn’t have verbalized that. If I hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t be thinking about it now.”
We lay in the dry leaves next to the railway embankment.
I have never been able to explain what goes on inside me. As soon as I sense, from a slight rumbling of the ground, that a train is approaching, I am overcome by my masculine instincts and some sort of anxiety, agitation, which compels me to dash under the wheels.
“Hold me,” I said. “Tight.”
“Are you frightened again?” she asked. “There aren’t any dogs here. Or did you hear something?”
“Yes,” I said. “The cracking of pits between their eye-teeth.”
“That’s the watchman making his rounds.”
“No,” I said. “Just hold me tight.”
As the train thundered past, making a whirlwind of the withered foliage that we had thrown together in a pile, I trembled, on the verge of fainting. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, I began to sob.
“Take a look!” she said. “Look!”
It was dark enough that I didn’t need to blush. Furthermore, I wasn’t even ashamed of crying. I thought about coming up with an explanation for her, but I gave up on that too. I even liked the fact that I had cried in front of her.
“Look here, you lunatic!” she repeated. “Look what I found.” Only then did I open my eyes.
She was holding a blonde rag doll in the palm of her hand. I took hold of its chintz dress with two fingers, pulled up its little skirt, and laughed out loud.
“This is our baby,” I said. “Immaculate conception.”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Good,” she said. “Let’s baptize her.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s toss her under a train. She has a snout like that bulldog that the car ran over.”
She looked at the doll’s face for a moment, then gave a small cry and flung her, spinning, over the embankment.
I felt nothing but the sawdust from the doll’s guts coating my face like sand.
“Strange,” she said, when she had torn herself away from my lips.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s strange?”
She lay on her back in the withered leaves, staring up at the dark night sky.
But all the stuff between us had started a long time before that.
Back at the time I think I first met her, I was feverishly demanding answers from life, and so I was completely caught up in myself—that is, caught up in the vital issues of existence.
Here are some of the questions to which I was seeking answers:
—the immortality of the soul
—the immortality of sex
—immaculate conception
—motherhood
—fatherhood
—the fatherland
—cosmopolitanism
—the issue of the organic exchange of matter and
—the issue of nourishment
—metempsychosis
—life on other planets and
—out in space
—the age of the earth
—the difference between culture and civilization
—the race issue
—apoliticism or engagement
—kindness or heedlessness
—Superman or Everyman
—idealism or materialism
—Don Quixote or Sancho Panza
—Hamlet or Don Juan
—pessimism or optimism
—death or suicide
and so on and so forth.
These problems and a dozen more like them stood before me like an army of moody and taciturn sphinxes. And so, right when I had reached issue number nine—the issue of nourishment—after having solved the first eight problems in one fashion or another, the last addition to the list turned up: the question of love . . .
Broken down into its component parts, this issue had—in a concrete case—the following determinants:
Question: What color are her eyes?
Hypotheses: Green, blue, blue-green, the color of ripe olives, aquamarine, like the evening skies over the Adriatic, over Madagascar, over Odessa, over Celebes; like the sea at Brač, at the Cape of Good Hope, etc.
Question: The color of her hair?
Hypotheses: Brown, blonde, like fairy hair, hair like the Lady of the Lake’s, the color of mellow moonlight, of pure sunny flax, of a sunny day . . .
Her voice?
The voice of a silver harp, of a viola with a mute, of a Renaissance lute, the voice of a Swedish guitar with thirteen strings, of Gothic organs or a miniature harpsichord, of a violin staccato or a guitar arpeggio in a minor key.
Her hands, her caresses?
Her kisses?
Breasts, thighs, hips?
So, this is how she came striding up to me, with this precious baroque burden, with the gait of a tame beast of prey and the wind in her hair.
It was like this:
It was right when I—along with Billy Wiseass—wanted to dedicate myself to philosophy, and we had without much effort just arrived at that famous ninth problem, when he proposed that we skip it, since it was pretty vulgar and of no interest to real philosophers, and instead dedicate ourselves to astronomy and begin that whole business about the stars and planets.
Naturally I agreed.
To this end we sold all our things (that is to say, his coat and mine, and several books that we had wrung out like lemons and thus could have tossed into schoolhouse urinals anyway) and moved into a mansarda, a small attic loft on the outskirts of the city. There we gaped at the stars day after day, or rather night after night, and discovered several galaxies we had never before heard about or seen. We christened one star from the constellation of Orion “Undiscovered Love,” and a second one “Billy Wiseass,” and a third star we christened with my name (let’s let that stay a little secret), and a fourth we named in a straightforward and pretty vulgar manner: Hunger.
In this way we justified our inconsistency and our return to the grand and unworthy question bearing the cabalistic number 9.
“Allow me,” I said, “to introduce my friend to you: Billy Wiseass.”
“Oh,” she remarked. “You must surely be a philosopher.”
“No,” I said. “He’s an astro
nomer.”
“Yes,” Billy Wiseass said, “and he’s a—”
“—globetrotter,” I interrupted, aiming for his rawest nerve. (I’ve never liked to bare my true nature in public.)
“Oh,” she replied and her eyes skimmed across a cloud.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve just returned from the Cape of Good Hope by way of the Côte d’Azur.”
“Lucky you!” she said.
“Lucky us?” I asked.
“Lucky us,” said Billy Wiseass.
The autumn of the year 7464 (according to the Byzantine calendar) was foggy and wet, yet the foliage turned yellow and dried up overnight, so that one morning I was astonished to discover that the branches were as naked as pipes. All of this occurred so unexpectedly!
“So what’s your name, actually?” she asked the next day. “I assume it’s not ‘Cape of Good Hope.’”
“Orphée,” I said. “Orpheus.”
Billy Consummate Liar confirmed it:
“Look here, Magdalena,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you be called Eurydice? He undoubtedly meant to suggest that next . . . Right, Orpheus?”
“Of course,” I said. “That goes without saying. If you have no objection.”
“Oh,” she said. “How strange you are!”
Then, a surprise attack:
“So where’s your guitar, Orpheus?”
“In the attic,” I said.
“Which attic?” she asked.
“We live there because of its proximity to the stars. You understand. We will rename ‘Hunger’. . . ‘Eurydice.’ Do you like that idea?”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“In order for one star at least to bear your name.”
“My name isn’t Magdalena.”
“Who said anything about Magdalena? I said ‘Eurydice.’”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t care. But I would like to see this star.”
“Certainly,” I said. “We will select a star that is worthy of your name.”
ATTIC (I)
The next day I led her up the dark wooden stairs to the attic. I had already chased Billy Wiseass out, and I explained away his absence by expressing my amazement that he wasn’t around.
“That’s not nice of him,” I said.
“It’s not,” she agreed.
“Maybe he left to go to the observatory,” I said in his defense.
“But where is your guitar?” she asked, casting a glance around the room.
The room resembled the hold of one of those small sailboats pitching back and forth on the high seas, lost in the dark of night. On the walls the dampness had sketched out wondrous designs of the flora and fauna that bloom and thrive only in dreams. On the ceiling was a depiction of the birth of the world from the embrace of dewy sleep and tentative wakefulness, while in the four corners stood symbolic illustrations of the four continents: the African summer, the Asian spring, the snows of America, European autumn.
Mastodons and reptiles grazed on the walls, and hummingbirds plucked thick mucus from the eyelashes of a woolly mammoth. Flocks of wild doves (the last examples of which were to be found in this attic) and cranes and swallows covered the walls, forming an enormous wedge in the shape of the numeral 1, thereby providing an illustration of biblical brotherhood and the mythical marvel of friendship: And the swallow will build its nest in the ear of the mastodon, and the hummingbird will comb the leopard’s mane with its silvery beak, and the woodpecker will clean the teeth of the crocodiles of Niagara and the Holy Nile. (The Gospel according to Billy Wiseass, translated into Mansardic from the Galactic and rendered in verse by –——, known as Orphée or Orpheus.)
With our fingernails we had copied out Latin and Greek maxims all over the wall (wherever it didn’t detract from the pictures drawn by the hand of dampness). We abided by them like the Ten Commandments and, in times of intellectual crisis and despair, we recited them like prayers of purification. They were guideposts to truth, lux in tenebris, as Billy Wiseass said. Who else would have hit upon the notion that people needed to carve maxims into the wall ad unguem, “by means of their very fingernails, until the blood spurts.”
Here are some bits of wisdom from the Temple of the Attic:
Jos arta, caci se prostituat!
*
Quod non est in actis (in artis!) non est in mundo.
*
Plenus venter non studet libenter.
*
Nulla dies sine linea.
*
Abyssus abyssum invocat.
*
Nec vivere carmina possunt.
*
Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus.
*
Ho bios brakhus, hê de tekhnê macra.
*
Castigat ridendo mores.
*
Amo, ergo sum.
*
Credo quia absurdum.
*
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.
*
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
*
Gnohti saeuton.
*
Habent sua fata libelli.
*
Os homini sublime dedit.
*
Pectus est quod disertos facit.
*
Albo lapillo notare diem.
*
Mens agitat molem . . .
Do you recall, Billy Wiseass, the cry:
—O ubi campi!
And that wise teaching we did not wish to follow:
—Primum vivere, deinde philosophari!
And this example of arrogance:
—Hic tandem stetimus nobis ubi defuit orbis.
(Here we finally stand, a place that has fled our earth.)
Oh, that attic!
On the floor there was grimy straw that had been strewn about and trampled; it was teeming with roaches, so that in the middle of the gray day (the window was plugged up with rags and faded old newspapers) you could hear the straw rustling beneath their tiny feet. We had placed our books on the bed and wrapped them in diapers of cellophane, but even there the rats found them and so we had to keep the most important copies under a bell jar weighted down with a rock. Billy Wiseass had swiped the glass cover from The Three Elephants for this purpose; he had simply clapped it down over his head and announced to all the folks there: “With this I shall travel to the stars.” Everybody (including the waiter) laughed at this joke, so witty, and given his age, so ambitious. Under this bell jar we stored the following books: Spinoza’s Ethics in Latin, the Holy Scriptures in Hebrew, Don Quixote, the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, Breton’s Second Manifesto, a Handbook of Diet Foods, Pensées d’un biologiste by Jean Rostand, Yoga for Everyone, Jeans’s book on the stars, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Stendhal’s On Love, Weininger’s Sex and Character, reproductions of Van Gogh prints in a pocket edition, and an international train timetable.
Our clothes were hung on hooks in the ceiling, exactly in the middle, where Venus’s vagina was to be found, having been sketched in there, in the shape of a shell and seaweed, by the marvelous imagination of the dampness. On these hooks protruding from Venus’s flesh were suspended Billy’s black velvet pants and my black ties, of which I had in those days approximately two hundred. On another peg hung a nylon bag in which we kept our toothbrushes, shoe polish, pomade, and shaving supplies. In one corner or in the middle of the room (it actually had no definite location) there was an old-fashioned rocking chair, with an already unraveling wicker seat, which stood us in good stead for philosophical conversations and daydreams. Whichever one of us was running amok at the moment used to rock in that creaking chair and utter Pythian prophecies and visions. A dull, cracked mirror hung a bit crookedly above the washbasin, which was made of the most diaphanous Chinese porcelain and reverberated with every word like a seashell.
“It isn’t actually a guitar,” I said.
“It’s not a guitar?”
“It’s a Renaissance lu
te,” I said. “You’re probably wondering . . .”
“Oh!” she said, alarmed. “Something is crawling up my leg.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “A mouse, for sure.”
“A mouse?!”
“Well, what else could it be? The snake’s already asleep.”
“Oh, God!”
“It’s over there, under the bell-jar by the books. We extracted all the poison from it. I brought it back from Ceylon,” I noted with pride.
“And what do you want with a snake?” she asked.
“Are you familiar with the legend of Orpheus? Of course you must know it.”
“He tamed wild animals with his songs,” she said, trembling.
I continued:
The boulders opened their portals before him, and the
Andes and Cordilleras bent their ears to hear.
“So where is this thing of yours, this . . . Renaissance guitar?”
“Lute,” I corrected her.
“Okay, then. Lute.”
Then I opened the rusty little door for cleaning soot out of the stove, and a swarm of squeaking mice and rats came hurtling out.
She leapt onto the bed.
“Now, Eurydice, you are going to hear the song of Orpheus,” I said and struck up a tender arpeggio in a minor key.
I sang softly:
A rose petal your pillow will be,
and tulips your footsteps will mourn.
She sat with her legs folded beneath her and watched me—with fright or with amazement, I don’t know.
Then she said: “Look! Look!”
“Eurydice,” I said with pathos in my voice. “You can stretch out your legs.”
She was staring, dumbfounded, at the little iron door. With the dignity and discipline of ants or worker bees, a column of cockroaches was climbing up the wall toward the opening. They waited for the last mouse tail to be yanked in before continuing.
When the final bug had made its way up the wall, I clapped the iron door shut with my foot and started singing:
A rose petal your pillow will be,
and tulips your footsteps will mourn.
“Not now,” she said. “Not now, please.”
(That must have been later. At least one light-year later. I believe that the light from the star named Eurydice—which I caught sight of at that moment—set out on its journey on the day that I first beheld Eurydice, and I believe that her “no” at this moment meant that we needed to wait until the light of that encounter had reached us.)