Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  Two women, one dark and one fair, wearing parkas, blue wool watch caps on their heads, inspecting a row of naked young men, hairy-legged, many-toed, pale and shivering, who hang on hooks in a meat locker where the temperature is a constant 18 degrees. The women are tickling the men under the tail, where they are most vulnerable, with their long white (nimble) fingers tipped with long curved scarlet nails. The young men squirm and dance under this treatment, hanging from hooks, while giant eggs, seated in red plush chairs, boil.

  Conversations with Goethe

  November 13, 1823

  I WAS walking home from the theatre with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum-colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.

  December 9, 1823

  Goethe had sent me an invitation to dinner. As I entered his sitting room I found him warming his hands before a cheerful fire. We discussed the meal to come at some length, for the planning of it had been an occasion of earnest thought to him and he was in quite good spirits about the anticipated results, which included sweetbreads prepared in the French manner with celery root and paprika. Food, said Goethe, is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.

  January 11, 1824

  Dinner alone with Goethe. Goethe said, “I will now confide to you some of my ideas about music, something I have been considering for many years. You will have noted that although certain members of the animal kingdom make a kind of music—one speaks of the ‘song’ of birds, does one not?—no animal known to us takes part in what may be termed an organized musical performance. Man alone does that. I have wondered about crickets—whether their evening cacophony might be considered in this light, as a species of performance, albeit one of little significance to our ears. I have asked Humboldt about it, and Humboldt replied that he thought not, that it is merely a sort of tic on the part of crickets. The great point here, the point that I may choose to enlarge upon in some future work, is not that the members of the animal kingdom do not unite wholeheartedly in this musical way but that man does, to the eternal comfort and glory of his soul.”

  Music, Goethe said, is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of History.

  March 22, 1824

  Goethe had been desirous of making the acquaintance of a young Englishman, a Lieutenant Whitby, then in Weimar on business. I conducted this gentleman to Goethe’s house, where Goethe greeted us most cordially and offered us wine and biscuits. English, he said, was a wholly splendid language, which had given him the deepest pleasure over many years. He had mastered it early, he told us, in order to be able to savor the felicities and tragic depths of Shakespeare, with whom no author in the world, before or since, could rightfully be compared. We were in a most pleasant mood and continued to talk about the accomplishments of the young Englishman’s countrymen until quite late. The English, Goethe said in parting, are the shining brown varnish on the sad chiffonier of civilization. Lieutenant Whitby blushed most noticeably.

  April 7, 1824

  When I entered Goethe’s house at noon, a wrapped parcel was standing in the foyer. “And what do you imagine this may be?” asked Goethe with a smile. I could not for the life of me fathom what the parcel might contain, for it was most oddly shaped. Goethe explained that it was a sculpture, a gift from his friend van den Broot, the Dutch artist. He unwrapped the package with the utmost care, and I was seized with admiration when the noble figure within was revealed: a representation, in bronze, of a young woman dressed as Diana, her bow bent and an arrow on the string. We marveled together at the perfection of form and fineness of detail, most of all at the indefinable aura of spirituality which radiated from the work. “Truly astonishing!” Goethe exclaimed, and I hastened to agree. Art, Goethe said, is the four per cent interest on the municipal bond of life. He was very pleased with this remark and repeated it several times.

  June 18, 1824

  Goethe had been having great difficulties with a particular actress at the theatre, a person who conceived that her own notion of how her role was to be played was superior to Goethe’s. “It is not enough,” he said, sighing, “that I have mimed every gesture for the poor creature, that nothing has been left unexplored in this character I myself have created, willed into being. She persists in what she terms her ‘interpretation,’ which is ruining the play.” He went on to discuss the sorrows of managing a theatre, even the finest, and the exhausting detail that must be attended to, every jot and tittle, if the performances are to be fit for a discriminating public. Actors, he said, are the Scotch weevils in the salt pork of honest effort. I loved him more than ever, and we parted with an affectionate handshake.

  September 1, 1824

  Today Goethe inveighed against certain critics who had, he said, completely misunderstood Lessing. He spoke movingly about how such obtuseness had partially embittered Lessing’s last years, and speculated that it was because Lessing was both critic and dramatist that the attacks had been of more than usual ferocity. Critics, Goethe said, are the cracked mirror in the grand ballroom of the creative spirit. No, I said, they were, rather, the extra baggage on the great cabriolet of conceptual progress. “Eckermann,” said Goethe, “shut up.”

  Well we all had our Willie & Wade records ’cept this one guy who was called Spare Some Change? ’cause that’s all he ever said and you don’t have no Willie & Wade records if the best you can do is Spare Some Change?

  So we all took our Willie & Wade records down to the Willie & Wade Park and played all the great and sad Willie & Wade songs on portable players for the beasts of the city, the jumpy black squirrels and burnt-looking dogs and filthy, sick pigeons.

  And I thought probably one day Willie or Wade would show up in person at the Willie & Wade Park to check things out, see who was there and what record this person was playing and what record that person was playing.

  And probably Willie (or Wade) would just ease around checking things out, saying “Howdy” to this one and that one, and he’d see the crazy black guy in Army clothes who stands in the Willie & Wade Park and every ten minutes, screams like a chicken, and Willie (or Wade) would just say to that guy, “How ya doin’ good buddy?” and smile, ’cause strange things don’t bother Willie, or Wade, one bit.

  And I thought I’d probably go up to Willie then, if it was Willie, and tell him ’bout my friend that died, and how I felt about it at the time, and how I feel about it now. And Willie would say, “I know.”

  And I would maybe ask him did he remember Galveston, and did he ever when he was a kid play in the old concrete forts along the sea wall with the giant cannon in them that the government didn’t want any more, and he’d say, “Sure I did.” And I’d say, “You ever work the Blue Jay in San Antone?” and he’d say, “Sure I have.”

  And I’d say, “Willie, don’t them microphones scare you, the ones with the little fuzzy sweaters on them?” And he’d say to me, “They scare me bad, potner, but I don’t let on.”

  And then he (one or the other, Willie or Wade) would say, “Take care, good buddy,” and leave the Willie & Wade Park in his black limousine that the driver of had been waiting patiently in all this time, and I would never see him again, but continue to treasure, all my life, his great contributions.

  Henrietta and Alexandra

  ALEXANDRA WAS reading Henrietta’s manuscript.

  “This,” she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.”

  Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence.

  “Yes,” she said. “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.”

  There was a moment of contemplation.

  “I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.”

  “How much is that in our money?”

  “Two hundred sixty-six dollars.”

  “Bless Babel,” Alexan
dra said, and took her friend in her arms.

  Henrietta said: “Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, interested in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and knew the same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine was piss and some not and I had not been told . . . other things. Still I had been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would be all over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved through a period of depression, the depression engendered by the realization that I had placed myself beyond the pale, there I was, beyond the pale. Then I discovered that there were other people beyond the pale with me, that there were quite as many people on the wrong side of the pale as there were on the right side of the pale and that the people on the wrong side of the pale were as complex as the people on the right side of the pale, as unhappy, as subject to time, as subject to death. So what the fuck? I said to myself in the colorful language I had learned on the wrong side of the pale. By this time I was no longer a young girl. I was mature.”

  Alexandra had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart.

  THEORIES OF THE SACRED HEART

  LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE SACRED HEART

  CONFLICTING CLAIMS OF THE GREAT CATHEDRALS

  THE SACRED HEART IN CONTEMPORARY ICONOGRAPHY

  APPEARANCE OF SPURIOUS SACRED HEARTS AND HOW THEY MAY BE DISTINGUISHED FROM THE TRUE ONE

  LOCATION OF THE TRUE SACRED HEART REVEALED

  HOW THE ABBÉ ST. GERMAIN PRESERVED THE TRUE SACRED HEART FROM THE HANDS OF THE BARBARIANS

  WHY THE SACRED HEART IS FREQUENTLY REPRESENTED SURMOUNTED BY A CROWN OF THORNS

  MEANING OF THE TINY TONGUE OF FLAME

  ORDERS AND CEREMONIES IN THE VENERATION OF THE SACRED HEART

  ROLE OF THE SACRED HEART SOCIETY IN THE VENERATION OF THE SACRED HEART

  Alexandra was also a member of the Knights of St. Dympna, patroness of the insane.

  Alexandra and Henrietta were walking down the street in their long gowns. A man looked at them and laughed. Alexandra and Henrietta rushed at him and scratched his eyes out.

  As a designer of artificial ruins, Alexandra was well-known. She designed ruins in the manners of Langley, Effner, Robert Adam and Carlo Marchionni, as well as her own manner. She was working on a ruin for a park in Tempe, Arizona, consisting of a ruined wall nicely disintegrated at the top and one end, two classical columns upright and one fallen, vines, and a number of broken urns. The urns were difficult because it was necessary to produce them from intact urns and the workmen at the site were often reluctant to do violence to the urns. Sometimes she pretended to lose her temper. “Hurl the bloody urn, Umberto!”

  Alexandra looked at herself in the mirror. She admired her breasts, her belly, and her legs, which were, she felt, her best feature.

  “Now I will go into the other room and astonish Henrietta, who is also beautiful.”

  Henrietta stood up and, with a heaving motion, threw the manuscript of her novel into the fire. The manuscript of the novel she had been working on ceaselessly, night and day, for the last ten years.

  “Alexandra! Aren’t you going to rush to the fire and pull the manuscript of my novel out of it?”

  “No.”

  Henrietta rushed to the fire and pulled the manuscript out of it. Only the first and last pages were fully burned, and luckily, she remembered what was written there.

  Henrietta decided that Alexandra did not love her enough. And how could nuances of despair be expressed if you couldn’t throw your novel into the fire safely?

  Alexandra was sending a petition to Rome. She wanted her old marriage, a dim marriage ten years old to a man named Black Dog, annulled. Alexandra read the rules about sending petitions to Rome to Henrietta.

  “All applications to be sent to Rome should be written on good paper, and a double sheet, 8⅛ inches × 10¾ inches, should be employed. The writing of petitions should be done with ink of a good quality, that will remain legible for a long time. Petitions are generally composed in the Latin language, but the use of the French and Italian languages is also permissible.

  “The fundamental rule to be observed is that all petitions must be addressed to the Pope, who, directly or indirectly, grants the requested favors. Hence the regulation form of address in all petitions reads Beatissime Pater. Following this the petition opens with the customary deferential phrase ad pedes Sanctitatis Vestrae humillime provolutus. The concluding formula is indicated by its opening words: Et Deus . . . expressing the prayer of blessing which the grateful petitioner addresses in advance to God for the expected favor.

  “After introduction, body and conclusion of the petition have been duly drawn, the sheet is evenly folded length-wise, and on its back, to the right of the fold line, are indited the date of the presentation and the petitioner’s name.

  “The presentation of petitions is generally made through an agent, whose name is inscribed in the right-hand corner on the back of the petition. This signature is necessary because the agent will call for the grant, and the Congregations deliver rescripts to no one but the agent whose name is thus recorded. The agents, furthermore, pay the fee and taxes for the requested rescripts of favor, give any necessary explanations and comments that may be required, and are at all times in touch with the authorities in order to correct any mistakes or defects in the petitions. Between the hours of nine and one o’clock the agents gather in the offices of the Curial administration to hand in new petitions and to inquire about the fate of those not yet decided. Many of them also go to the anterooms of secretaries in order to discuss important matters personally with the leading officials.

  “For lay persons it is as a rule useless to forward petitions through the mails to the Roman Congregations, because as a matter of principle they will not be considered. Equally useless, of course, would be the enclosing of postage stamps with such petitions. Applications by telegraph are not permitted because of their publicity. Nor are decisions ever given by telegraph.”

  Alexandra stopped reading.

  “Jesus Christ!” Henrietta said.

  “This wine is piss,” Alexandra said.

  “You needn’t drink it then.”

  “I’ll have another glass.”

  “You wanted me to buy California wine,” Henrietta said.

  “But there’s no reason to buy absolute vinegar is there? I mean couldn’t you have asked the man at the store?”

  “They don’t always tell the truth.”

  “I remember that time in Chicago,” Alexandra said. “That was a good bottle. And afterwards . . .”

  “How much did we pay for that bottle?” Henrietta asked, incuriously.

  “Twelve dollars. Or ten dollars. Ten or twelve.”

  “The hotel,” Henrietta said. “Snapdragons on the night table.”

  “You were . . . exquisite.”

  “I was mature,” Henrietta said.

  “If you were mature then, what are you now?”

  “More mature,” Henrietta said. “Maturation is a process that is ongoing.”

  “When are you old?” Alexandra asked.

  “Not while love is here,” Henrietta said.

  Henrietta said: “Now I am mature. In maturity I found a rich world beyond the pale and found it possible to live in that w
orld with a degree of enthusiasm. My mother says I am deluded but I have stopped talking to my mother. My father is dead and thus has no opinion. Alexandra continues to heap up indulgences by exclaiming ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ which is worth an indulgence of fifty days each time it is exclaimed. Some of the choicer ejaculations are worth seven years and seven quarantines and these she pursues with the innocent cupidity of the small investor. She keeps her totals in a little book. I love her. She has to date worked off eighteen thousand years in the flames of Purgatory. I tell her that the whole thing is a shuck but she refuses to consider my views on this point. Alexandra is immature in that she thinks she will live forever, live after she is dead at the right hand of God in His glory with His power and His angels and His whatnot and I cannot persuade her otherwise. Joseph Conrad will live forever but Alexandra will not. I love her. Now we are going out.”

  Henrietta and Alexandra went walking. They were holding each other’s arms. Alexandra moved a hand sensuously with a circular motion around one of Henrietta’s breasts. Henrietta did the same thing to Alexandra. People were looking at them with strange expressions on their faces. They continued walking, under the shaped trees of the boulevard. They were swooning with pleasure, more or less. Someone called the police.