III
There was noise and splashing about in the cold water. «What purity of flesh, kissed by the pale star,» Athalia said. «Ohhh!» admired Quildet. Silence reigned, disturbed only by the laughter of Aretusa and Phoebe, now bathing companions of slender Maggie. «This is an expression of near ritual unction,» added Athalia, «the water’s virginity unsoiled by clothing. Oh, Franciscan Maggie! Oh, humble religious woman!» Quildet whistled an unfavorable tune between his teeth. But, against all reason, Thalie approved of it. «What a melody!» she said. «Is it from your land of hard sun? Oh, kiss me!» What could he do: Nogueres kissed her. «Well,» uttered Athalia. «I thank you for this experience.» And she also proceeded to undress. «Dear Lady Spinster, you see that I’m just an African,» Nogueres believed himself obliged to say. «You will not impose upon me any idealized performance, I dare hope, dear Lady.» «Alas! When I wanted to ask you your opinion about J. de Nazareth!» Athalia exclaimed. «I only know,» Nogueres responded «that religious feeling must be supported now, distinctly, and above science.» «Agreed,» agreed Athalia. «The formula is this: the really beautiful, etc., and whatever liberating type of syncretism to round things off.» Nogueres’ eyes passed over Athalia’s brown skin. «Ah, syncretism, Lady Spinster!» Quildet said. «I have always been partial to theories of syncretism.» And he bent down forcefully, more out of duty than willingness, to pick up Athalia, intending, altruistically, to carry her off to the brush of the oak wood with its barn owls. «No, not this, I’ll scream,» the woman warned. Nogueres breathed: Athalia was heavy. «Are you condemning me to an idealized performance?» asked, with sweet reproach, Quildet, the hypocrite. «This is a vile subject, my dear,» Athalia attenuated. «Let us talk about other, more elevated things, it is preferable.» A Sandow12 of silence stood between the two people equally but oppositely affected. «A thinness of ideas has never, ever taken me for a victim; and I’m not just saying that. And now, on the other hand . . . » Athalia said bitterly. «Don’t pay any attention to it, we all find ourselves there. I, myself . . . » consoled Nogueres. «Perhaps everything would work better if you were to get dressed,» he concluded, a bit bored. «Oh, I understand; thank you!» the middle-aged Athalia responded to an ambiguous Nogueres. And she dressed. The spring-like nakedness of Maggie and her companions continued to cut a profile in the moonlight. Athalia looked at the suspended Nogueres and gave it a shot. «A pedagogical conversation is probably the best therapy for an engrossed savage,» she said, subconsciously betrayed by the memory of a poster of the Methodist Missions. «How many times smaller is the moon than the Earth?» «Forty-nine,» Quildet, answered mechanically, hypnotized, spying off into the distance. The stubborn silence’s dominance returned, but Athalia didn’t lose heart. She searched her memory again, with application and honesty.
«Have you ever been to England?» inventive, she finally said with a flash of hope in her eyes.
The polite Nogueres suddenly reacted, in an unexpected way.
«No, never,» he bellowed. «But I should like to go there.»
And he fled quickly toward Maggie’s unfurling beauty, Maggie the erudite novelist, nude and wet in the stream.
* * *
11 A designated area where medieval competitions between knights, such as jousts, were celebrated. The name of the present day Barcelona neighborhood El Born, among other areas in Catalunya, is derived directly from this word. –RrP
12 Eugen Sandow (1867–1925): Prussian bodybuilder and strongman, referred to as the “father of modern bodybuilding.”
Panets Walks His Head
«It has to be Olympian,» advised Efrem Pedagog, gesturing amply. «Olympian, which is to say, felt and understood with plenitude. Like me, debilitating modesty aside.» He coughed. «Is that you yet?» he then asked, with peremptory interest, Amadeu Panets who was listening to him. «Not really, I think, not yet,» Panets, an Alderian, confessed. «It has to be, young man,» said Pedagog severely. «And how?» Amadeu inquired. «Oh, it’s really quite easy,» Efrem expounded. And he fell into meditation. Panets didn’t insist. «Olympian, Olympian? I don’t get it,» he said, having parted from the Master. And he went to consult Saurimonda, accredited health practitioner. «Breath or saliva?» were the given choices from firm commercial willfulness. «Cards,» chose Panets. «My set isn’t that good. But whatever,» Saurimonda said. Shuffled. «In your case: head high,» Saurimonda read. «The cards have spoken.» Panets checked them. «Poor me, what a bother,» Panets complained. «Patience. You’ll get used to it in no time,» Saurimonda mused. «Ok,» Panets interrupted. «When?» «Take your leave from here!» Saurimonda disinterestedly said, with a laugh as fat and beneficent as a bishop. «Willfulness.» His will was bitter. «Ugh!» Saurimonda let out. But Panets was already gone. «And now what, Panets?» Amadeu asked himself on the way back home. «Head high? I mean, it has to get to Olympian proportions.» And he stretched out his head as best he could. «Stiff neck?» Semproniana asked with a caregiver’s impulse. «Olympism,» Panets declared arrogantly. And he spoke at length all evening long about the satisfying fact of his being a mother’s son like the one most so, and about the erudite subject of “one man, one vote.” «Misery!» the sad and fecund Semproniana said. «Do you want a massage for your stiff neck?» There was a silence full of vacillations. «Yes, it hurts,» Panets accepted in defeat. But the following day he returned, well rested, to being stubborn about his head. «It’s hard, but I have to get used to it,» Panets heartened himself by saying. And he left. «Hey, what do you think, Maestro?» Panets asked Efrem Pedagog after running into him. «Let’s see? Well, well, well: a noble head this is,» Pedagog approved. «I predict in you a brave and authentic trend toward olympism.» «Yes!» «Carry on, young man,» Pedagog said. And they went their separate ways. That night there was no need for massages. «Panets, dear, don’t be so hard-headed,» his wife said. «If this still . . . » «Better that you quiet yourself, Pronianeta,» Panets threatened. «I know what I’m doing to myself.» And months passed over his definitively surging head. «If this is olympism, it’s easy,» Panets said when his sternocleidomastoid and adjacent muscles adequately toughened. «Long live olympism!» And he surrendered, within the inches he’d acquired, to the passion of feeling and understanding with plenitude. «I am a citizen,» Panets confessed to himself. «I’m an admired citizen, surely.» And his head climbed another inch. «Who’s that with the imposing head?» the people asked. «That? Panets,» voices explained. «The head makes him seem important, a milestone-man. Introduce him to me,» people said. And Panets was presented. «He has a doctrine,» the people approved. «And it seems that his head knows all the best of what has been written, thought, or played over the centuries,» the people praised. «Perhaps I’m not just an admirable citizen,» Panets felt. And he wrote verses. And he triumphed. «The great poet of our land: Amadeu Panets,» one critic wrote, «knows how to conjugate the complexity of sounds within skillful architecture, at the same time giving, if he must, the simple note of words vertically and intelligently emerging, noisy and sovereign, risen quails, with a ring of remarkable virginity. His work has surpassed us, going as far as to leave us breathless, as though fogged in a lexicographic shiver of surprises.» The shiver, on the rebound and with delight, tickled Panets’s spine, and his head grew another inch. «I already know I’m a poet, but that’s not enough, dammit!» Amadeu, to motivate himself, said after some time had passed. And he chose four or five more activities, studious ones, and excelled in all of them: what material could he deny the majesty of his head? Ah, enough, enough I tell you all, what a handsome head Amadeu Panets had! Inch by inch it invaded every possible human activity. Technicians opposed him with useless reticence. «You don’t understand,» said the envious technicians, stragglers on the Olympian road. «As if. With this head?» Panets exalted. And from the corners of the land everyone had already seen the cause of his head’s height. «Look here, I’m telling you: things are going to end badly for this guy,» Quildet Nogueres, over the long haul, surmised. «He
coasts by, nevertheless,» the crowd began to realize. And doubts began popping up. «Well, maybe he does it a little too much. When all is said and done, who is he?» the people questioned. Classifications rained down. «A genius of logic,» one sector of opinion affirmed. «He doesn’t refine his ideas!» the technicians rebutted. «An orator,» said another rumor. «He never finishes anything off with a period,» argued the technicians. «A formidable man of action,» a third group offered up. «Action?» «That head is a hindrance!» they said in protest. «Would you all deny that he’s also a poet?» the good-spirited daisies ostentatiously unfurled. «A vile one!» discounted all the ungrateful protesters of the eternal and fluid younger generation. «Who is he and what is he, then?» the people asked, growing angry. «An Olympian, ladies and gentleman,» Panets said, smiling as he clarified that for them. «Olympian?» Efrem Pedagog, who in the meantime had become hepatic, ridiculed. «Certainly not! If he is Panets, it’s Panets alone who walks his head.» «We know a cure for his head,» the people said. And a shower of stones was unleashed against that head that could be seen from any distance, that unhideable head. Panets fell and struggled with death for months and months, but the stones didn’t get the best of his eminent head. «I’m going out, you know?» Panets said, stable by now, to Semproniana. «It’s been a while since I’ve walked it, and it agrees.» «Wretched me!» the wife cried. «You’re treating it as though it were . . . » «Olympian, xst!» said Panets, caressing it. «You first, pass, let’s go,» he said sweetly to his head. And he left. «I said things were going to end badly for this guy,» Quildet surmised. «And to think that, if there were a cure, it would have been nothing but a case of stiff neck!» lamented, between her sobs, sad, fertile, legitimated Semproniana.
French Quasi-Story of Samson, Rediscovered
To Antoni San Juan, fulfilling an old promise.
Framis’s fat wife was in the small Isabelian salon, conversing about life with Quildet Nogueres. «Of an evident softness, but not at all appealing,» Quildet thought while speaking at length and looking her over. «Not appealing or not at all appealing: how would I have to put it if I had to write it now?» Quildet absentmindedly wondered. He scanned, with a little anguish, his memory of grammar, which was in eternal rebellion. «You contradict yourself, dear,» he heard Ophelia placidly assure him. «O, I would love to believe that you’ve lost the thread of your line of thought.» Having returned from a small mental obstacle race, Quildet turned red and laughed. «Pardon me,» Quildet lied. «Your radiant eyes, perhaps, are at fault.» Pleased, Framis’s fat wife sprawled across the sofa and expressed a perfectly polite, intimate desire. «You are slightly afraid,» the lady said. «Sit down beside me, Nogueres, and overcome your timidité,» she commanded him. Quildet obeyed in silence—his ingenuity in an extremely human solution of continuity. «Soft,» Quildet returned to his thought after that inevitable pause. «Quite a worked and morbid maturity. She’s never skimped on her sensory reception, nor on delicacy, and now, smooth and delicate before me, amidst softness and damask. Soft and delicate and, with everything, not appealing, or not at all appealing; what bad luck!» «It has to be confessed that your age is quite a difficult one,» the woman meanwhile said. «I tremble, on the one hand, at the incapacity to translate the world of experiences into action, and I believe, what’s more, that the evils of the past can end up being repeated, car voici de nouveau le goût de la mort entre mes dents,» and Ophelia bit into a chocolate with the voluptuousness of great training. «In place of living we aspire to talk, and tyrannical prohibitions forbid us from doing so,» she continued. «What, then, are we left with, my friend, in these difficult times?» «Truly,» Nogueres, with much good sense, agreed. «And I didn’t want to remind you, as it would end up being too vulgar, of the harshness of the contemporary economic battle. You would suffer knowing that for the majority of us, despite many, many parvenus having cars, simple subsistence is a problem.» «Hush!» the rich woman conceded, her eyes blank. «For example, I can’t see our Secundina, the doorkeeper, without my heart coming dislodged, no exaggeration. And the artist of the lofts, please, with the girl, the old woman, and Letizia, that poor, generically tubercular girl?» «What do you mean by “generically tubercular”?» Quildet inquired. «I mean that Letizia, so imaginative and pure before, is today just a sick person, a sick person with an ambiguous diagnosis; there are handfuls of them,» Ophelia said. «It would depress us to confirm,» added Quildet, «the effects of hardship on the fragility of our bodies.» Framis’s fat wife shook. «Enough with the imprudent comments, Nogueres,» she sighed, and a small morsel of pearl backed up into her inner canthus. «Remember, dear, that we live—hélas!—only once.» Scolded, scrupulous, he then approached a more frivolous theme to temper the severity of the dark subject. «And the young Italian is the wife of the painter or the poet?» Quildet asked. «Certainly not: maîtresse, and have a good day,» Framis’s fat wife enthused. «The other day Secundina confirmed that to me herself.» A few playful yelps interrupted the newly begun causerie. «Beloved perfection!» Ophelia, upon hearing them, exclaimed. «Oh, what a memory, mine! I had forgotten to tell you. He’s returned: the prodigal son returned to me this afternoon from his adventure.» «I congratulate you for it,» the pacific interlocutor barely murmured, as the yelps became exhortative and urgent. «Open the door for him, faites-moi la grâce,» Ophelia sang childishly to herself. An irrepressible repugnance crossed Nogueres’ face. «Volontiers,» acceded Quildet, chivalrously. «But your Pekingese has never been kind to me,» he reminded her. «Oh, no, he adores you! Open the door for him, mon ami,» she insisted. Resigned, a fatalist, Nogueres rose to comply with the tender order. A petulant canine curiosity entered like a flash of lightning and immediately began to commit vexatious indiscretions all around the legs of Nogueres’s trousers. «Forget about uncle and focus on maman, Samson,» sweet-talked the lady. «I will give you bonbons and chicken, love, but stop these instinctive impulses for me, and don’t ever escape again; I melt away with worry every time and get so skinny,» Framis’s fat wife caressingly said. «Little animals also want affection,» she pointed out, spiritually and blatantly, to Nogueres. «Soft, decidedly soft,» Quildet repeated to himself. «I like your smell, and the skill with which you use your shoes to entertain astonishes,» Framis’s fat wife remarked. «I have to go,» Nogueres suddenly announced. «Already. So soon?» Ophelia said, surprised. «Now that we’ve just undertaken the topic of life.» And, with Samson in her arms, she accompanied Quildet toward the exit, without suspecting—lacking foresight and inept at the interpretation of premonitory signs—that his departure, due to a few imponderable slights, was irrevocably definitive.
Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature) Page 11