– Only a little sandwich. It was Jellif I wanted and meringues, and you were too selfish to get me any. Or Miss Emmett any.
– If you were less bloody selfish yourself you’d do something about cooking a meal or something instead of golloping sugar like some great glossybottomed mare.
– I don’t like to be spoken to like that.
– I’ll speak any way I want to.
– Not to me you won’t.
We stared at each other in the realization that this was a fair simulacrum of the start of a married quarrel. Fate, or the procession of events, or the manic economy of nature (a bizarre idea, I suppose) took over our big eyes and opening mouths and made them the response to a new ringing of the doorbell. A schoolfriend I used to. stay with – Gabriel Bellini – had a collie dog which, in a quite friendly spirit, used to take the head of the Siamese cat in his mouth. One day when I was there he yawned and, seeing the cat near and knowing his mouth to be still open, he thought he might as well take advantage of this to have the cat’s head in. A rare kind of economy, really. Anyway, the bell rang and the only thing to do, after the cliché responses, was to go and answer it. I went downstairs, heart hammering, etc., and she followed me.
The person at the door was familiar to us both. Catherine cried:
– Dr Fonanta, oh, Dr Fonanta!
To me he was the jelyfman, but he was also, I now realized, someone I had seen before coming to Castita. That name Fonanta phonated a memory: the New York eatery, the crippled man dictating notes on French history and French peasant soup to a tape-recorder. He was hatless and on crutches, he was gloveless and showed a ceramic hand. Parked by the kerb behind him was a long polished Origen 70 with a thuggish driver at the wheel. He said, in the French voice that, I heard now, was the same as had dictated in New York and riddled here in Grencijta towards the end of my little openair show, with soft courtesy:
– I considered I had better come round.
– Oh yes, oh yes, Dr Fonanta, come in Dr Fonanta.
He hobbled in and Catherine got him to the armchair in the livingroom, fussing as if she thought he ought to have rugs around him and his feet in a footcosy. She evidently thought highly of Dr Fonanta. For me, there were a lot of new puzzles here to be worked out. I said:
– First you were in New York and then you’re here and now you’re here, in this house I mean –
– Yes yes, I remember very well. I had to lecture at Columbia that evening. You, by the way, must be Catherine’s brother.
His baldness shone at the ceiling and his eyes at me. It was a clever goodtempered face set above the wreck of the body. But I remembered that he was a rotten poet: not so clever, then. Catherine said to me, him, both:
– How did you, where –
– I had a visit from Inspector Preparatis, Dr Fontana said. He was flanked by motorcyclists, very impressive. Something about a message emanating from my secretary. I have no secretary now, of course. Only Umberto out there in the car. The inspector wanted to know what they, the police, ought to do about the message. He talked of improbabilities and being made a laughing-stock and so on. I told him he could act on the information received, insane though it appeared, but he seemed doubtful. It’s a matter of waiting till the serious big men at headquarters realize how wide the bounds of seriousness are.
– So the airport remains closed, I said. Ah, God.
– What I meant, Catherine said, holding her chair down firmly in this world where so many reasonable laws were being suspended, was how you two know each other.
– Many things, smiled Dr Fonanta. Questions and answers, a dead artist called Sib Legeru, poor leonine unleonine Dr Gonzi.
– Sib Legeru, I said. You knew precisely where his works are. Why did you let me waste time searching?
– Ah, a waste of time, was it? Interesting.
– Oh, we’re in such trouble, Catherine cried out, oh, we’re in such terrible trouble.
– And while I’m here, Dr Fonanta said, ignoring her and reading my face as though it were really a printed book, lines and all, I’d like to have another look at those works.
The nuance of contempt came ill from so poor a poet. Then an orchestral crash of despair made my body shake. I said:
– It’s. Not. Really. Poss.
– Not really possible. Again, interesting. You’ve burnt them? Sold them? Packed them off already to some great academic conservatory of nonsense in the United States?
– I’ve. Lost. The.
– Key. No problem there. Umberto has an iron shoulder.
– How much, I asked warily, gulping and regulping at a lump of ghastly bread that would not go down, flattening myself as if at bay against the wall where the cuckooless clock tocked, letting down its chain entrails, do you know?
– Know? Know? About what?
– About about – You’ve no right to say what you said, nonsense you said. Apples and roast pork, you –
– Not the best of my poems, true, but it does at least make sense. We’ll come to aesthetics later. You, Faber, put on a creditable performance the other day, though you were fascinatingly reluctant to answer riddles. I had Umberto follow you. Did you not perceive his shadowing bulk? At the Batavia Hotel he obtained confirmation of your identity. But I knew already, well enough. All the rest follows. Girl’s voice to police, riddle answer, the name Fonanta. You’ve succumbed, Faber, I surmise. It was your answer, not hers.
– I don’t see what –
– Time enough. Let us skip dull intermediacies for the moment. How and where is dear Miss Emmett, by the way?
– She comes into it, I said, as you damn well probably know. She’s under sedation now. A matter of shock.
– Things are going well, Dr Fonanta beamed. A pity there’s no eclipse tonight. I gather there’ll be fireworks, though. There’s probably some rotting meat about somewhere.
Catherine and I shared a look of guilt at that. I went out to the kitchen without a word. The beef was as alive as a telephone exchange. I picked up the dish, averting my eyes, and walked as steadily as a waiter to the front door, out, up the narrow path, the meat computerizing like mad, and then safaried through the overgrown garden to a point from which I hurled the gesturing meat into bramble, ranunculus and monstrous cocoacoloured leaves. Newly environmented, the decaying horror became part of the life cycle. For good measure I threw also the china dish, but that would be only a fracted artefact, unabsorbable into any ultimate meaning, a mere mean signpost of transient frivolous culture. Then I went back to the house. Dr Fonanta shone at me:
– Catherine has told me curious news.
– Cur curi –
– Things are proceeding very nicely to their consummation. As I said before you went out, there’s probably some rotting meat about somewhere.
– I threw it away.
– I think not, Faber. Never mind. All will end well. You are good at wordgames. You should also be good at palinlogues.
I did not understand for a moment what he meant. I was thinking that his glee was the inhuman one of some fictional intellectual higher policeman who sees suffering as the expulsable pipesmoke that fills a room devoted to the pleasures of jigsaws or battleplans. The whole of history has been taken up with pretence after pretence that the void between the two voids can be filled up with something other than play. Yet if nature does all the serious work, what is there left for man?
– I approach something like elation, Dr Fonanta said over his crippled body and ceramic left hand.
17
Here is an account, which my drunkenness at the time and later impairment of memory have probably rendered inaccurate, of my marriage to my sister.
The elephants had buns and the performing seals fish and the growling carnivores meat. The birds, caged hawks on the bridegroom’s side of the ring, talkers on the bride’s, had nothing. Most of the congregation was still in ring gear, including makeup, but Father Costello, or Pongo, had dismantled his face and was disclosed as an eager
and ascetic cleric in bags and checks and rags that were perhaps no more bizarre than any of the traditional sacerdotal outfits. His voice was refined Anglo-Irish and he preached at some length.
– Not altogether fanciful to descry something of our lost prelapsarian innocence revived here in this perfect round, symbol, like the marriage ring itself, of God’s eternal unity.
We stood there, I swaying slightly, Catherine in a kind of creased white sack dug from the bottom of a packed bag, Mr Dunkel by my side with the ring ready. Dr Fonanta, in his elation, had sent his ironshouldered thug out to buy something cheap and simple from a chain general store called Bwunmirketu. He was undoubtedly mad but so, of course, was everybody else. He would be along later, he’d said. He would revive Miss Emmett and give her certain discreet instructions. He had talked no more of Sib Legeru but I had, of course, like you, read his palinlogue.
– Adam and Eve and the tamed and feeding beasts on the terrestrial level. On the celestial level the entire creation glorifying its maker through the divinely bestowed gift of diversion. We are all God’s jongleurs; we play and tumble before His throne for His weary delectation.
– Get on with it and get it over, tuxedoed Mr Dunkel muttered. Then he gave me another of the so-termed baleful looks that, I perceived, were all that he had ever given poor Llew. Llew had not been liked at all by anybody, except a couple of girl bareback riders with pert hard faces but really superb bodies who, standing now near naked with the rest of the congregation, could hardly take their eyes off Catherine. They obviously believed that I had put Catherine in the family way somewhere along the endless circuit, and that, lugging her luggage and pregnancy, she had caught up with me here.
– It is no accident surely that those pioneers the martyrs under the Caesars attained their first glimpse of the ultimate in a circus ring.
As for Aderyn the Bird Queen, she stood behind me, stony and hennaed, in a turquoise robe and a cataract of false hair. It was totally impossible to tell what was going on in her mind.
– And so I return to our present joyful purpose.
Was that irony intentional? I tried to stiffen as the moment of untruth approached, and Catherine succeeded in stiffening. She had been well premedicated by Dr Fonanta, who had had his thug bring in a black bag which contained, along with a sphygmometer and an enema machine, a ranged spectrum of pills. One of the barebacked riders, oval bitchy face and madonna hair, smirked at me, and what with this, the sight of her breasts and thighs, and the whole generalized randy atmosphere of any wedding (but here there were also hugemembered beasts, though caged, and uncaged docile elephants whose long copulations, since they had been exulted in by Cardinal Newman, were able to form a legitimate subject for a brief cadenza in Father Costello’s sermon), I found myself segmentally stiffening, and perhaps visibly to some, since Llew’s best blue suit had skintight pants.
Father Costello’s marriage service was either something new and ecumenical, or else a work of his own composition. I was asked:
– Do you, Llewelyn, take this woman Catherine willingly into the temple of matrimony, to feed and fructify her, clothe and adorn her, make her sleep sound and her waking pleasant, as time shall run to the loosening of the bond, the garland become a chain and amity turn to acrimony?
What could I answer but that I did?
– Do you, Catherine, take this man Llewelyn as your pillar, helpmeet, support and stay, as a source of joy and fury, of bread and brood, so long as lust shall last and love live?
I may not have remembered that quite right. Catherine, like any regular bride, fought dry tears and would not answer. Father Costello said kindly:
– Courage, child.
Catherine seemed to nod, and this was taken as sufficient assent. Dunkel handed me, at Father Costello’s gesture, the ring that Dr Fonanta had had bought, and Father Costello guided my ring-carrying hand from Catherine’s thumb to ringfinger, each phrase of his formula passing a finger over till the right one was reached:
– The Father be your house, the Son be your table, the Comforter be the sweet air blowing through. And this holy act be you-and-you made You.
At that he thrust Catherine’s finger into the ring, which was a little loose. The band, which had brought its instruments down into the other ring, immediately brayed and thumped into a wedding march I had never heard before:
etc.
Aderyn gave us both a cold kiss and, while the released congregation made for the buffet tables, Dunkel dragged me to one side to give me a sort of blessing:
– Now, you young bastard, let this be the end of your stinking games and filthy irresponsibility. She doesn’t look much and I’m screwed if I understand how you got tied up with her, but I’ll bet it was something nasty and typical. Anyway, it’s only because your mother asked me nicely that you’re having it for tonight, so keep it clean, get it, pig?
– Fuck you, belly, I said amiably. What tonight, what’s it, man?
– My trailer, Dunkel said, raying out hate from behind his pebble glasses and looking, perhaps because of the glasses, a little like Pine Chandeleur, thought older. I yearned towards that holyshirted bastard as to the unincestuous dolphined seas of freedom, thinking at the same time that there was too much duplication going on, as though the Llew-me duo had infected the nearer world, thinking at the same time that Dunkel had no right to a trailer if he did his work and sleeping in hotel rooms.
– Clean, he repeated, you filth. Then he went over to join the glass and bottle clinkers.
– Clean, yes, I answered, meaning it. There would be no spilling of anything tonight. There would be a vigil with the transistor radio I would borrow from that young elephant dung sweeper over there, who was playing pop all to himself, oblivious of the blasts of the band. The news must come through soon, and with it the reopening of the ways out of Castita.
Meanwhile there were the jollifications to be got through. Aderyn had done everybody well. On trestletables there were gin, whisky, wine, cauldrons of ice, Coco-Coho, sandwiches and even a sort of improvised wedding cake – a cherry affair smeared with icing and crowned with two celluloid dolls that, appropriately, had no sex. The Great Giro, in tight braided pants and a claret messjacket of the sort called an arsefreezer, was stuffing himself with bread. I said, smiling:
– Your plates have come in useful, yes?
Figlio d’una vacca puttana troia, stoppati il culo.
– Not fair to my mother, that, man. Stuff you too, garlicky pisspot.
There were, I found, plenty of simple circusfolk ready to sneer or snarl at me, and in a variety of languages. One blond muscular trapeze artist called Carlo drew spits and umlauts out of a black Finnish night, and a lady like a schoolmistress who was in charge of the seals (these had now been put to bed in a tank and could be heard roaring plaintively, left out of the fun) spoke bitterly at me what sounded like debased Sophocles. Well, perhaps poor Llew had deserved all this, but he had paid the price. It was my duty really to give the assembly, on this final or postfinal appearance, the full rich randy rank nasty quiddity of that dead useless boy, but somehow I hadn’t the heart, man. Almost meekly I told the baffoed liontamer (and lions too, it was all lions, from Loewe on) to get pedicated by that lousy scratching old mog with an unwashed mane and be newly infected with jungle syphilis. One of the bareback girls, I saw, had taken Catherine aside, presumably to instruct her in techniques of eluding my filthier demands. Aderyn, whose bad eye looked worse, was statelily sipping raw gin and ice with the ringmaster, who had removed his corset and was scratching his released paunch. I went over to join the clowns, who, still in tomato noses, were arguing metaphysics with Pongo or Father Costello. Perhaps this was really an underground seminary. The band began to play a lumpish waltz, hoofed and heavy, with trombone farts and clarinet squitters. The liontamer danced with the sealwoman. A nearly toothless mahout made Jumbo, or Alice, prance on hind legs, weaving the fore ones, wreathing its lithe proboscis. But this was like talking shop in the mess an
d was soon put a stop to. The drink softened some of the enmity towards me and converted it into mere sneering pity. One of the clowns, breaking off his critique of the Kantian Ding an sich, said:
– You’re landed, Kerl. There’s justice in the world and I say no more.
– As a man rose, Father Costello twinkled, so shall he seep.
I saw the bitchy madonna bareback girl turning alone from a table with a sandwich in her hand. Rose, yes. I would dance with her to hide what the sight of her made rise, what her pressure would make rise further. Filthy, coarse. But I was Llew. I was also Miles. Would Llew have leaped with such relish on a piece of yummy protest? For some reason I caught a sudden memory of the proprietress of the Batavia Hotel talking of the day after the day after tomorrow. What was the word now? And, whatever it was, why? I went up to the girl and said:
– A dance, eh? Like for the last time and old time’s sake, eh? May I like have the pleasure of?
– Dance? But you don’t dance.
Her accent was of the kind I liked least: provincial British entering the big world via America. But how can a man doubt there is some great beneficent or evil ultimate when his hands tremble towards such bowls of junket and firm yet delicate erections of curves and silver? I said breathily:
– It’s not the dancing. In my arms, I want you like in my arms, man, for the last time before the darkness of wholly mattress money.
And I had them already clawing her. She filled her mouth with her sandwich, trapping a squirt of ketchup with her tongue, then made big droll eyes, wriggled her pelvic basin, and swam with a parody of abandon into my embrace. So we danced under the working lights to the tier upon tier upon tier they towered of yawning seats, while the band thumped and farted its waltz, my cock crowed through the darkness, and Catherine, whose face showed nothing but drugged eager tranquillity, was still being instructed in matters of total irrelevance. Then the ringmaster, dancing near, the pony mistress he had but recently cursed in his arms, cracked the whip of his voice with:
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