Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  Coming to New York for the second time I came to see Moira who was right or wrong about Jody or who was simply concerned for me. When Moira left me to go to America I suppose I wanted her to go. After that I was with no other woman for long. Her image always came to me when I was with another woman, so that I was aware of something of myself fatally withheld, a corrosive element, which infected my passion with irony. I came to America not because I identified this something with the ghost of Moira – I don’t suppose she would ever have left if she hadn’t felt I withheld something even from her – but because the doubt which affected me came clothed in her image, the memory of her obscuring the more impalpable and graver ghost. I made the journey to have done with the prevarication.

  There was more than a year’s experience we had lived apart, more than a year during which I had lived even more precariously than we had done together in Paris and during which, Moira, in America, hadn’t. The apparent change in her attitude disconcerted me.

  “What are your plans?”

  “Plans?” On shipboard I had felt like a flood victim marooned on a raft.

  “I mean you can’t stay here, not permanently,” Moira said.

  “Couldn’t we eat first?”

  “I’m sorry, Joe. Of course we can! I didn’t mean to be like this... I wanted you to come... I really did... we’ll worry about all that later, in a week or two when you decide what you’re going to do...”

  Moira had met me at the boat but had gone back to work leaving me to go alone to her apartment. Waiting for her to come, fingering the objects that had been ours when we were together in Paris, playing with the Siamese cat we bought in a pet shop on the Champs Elysées, I wondered at her returning to work. It had all happened so quickly at the taxi that I hadn’t, with all the confusion at disembarkation, had the opportunity to question her about it. It was only when I got to the apartment that I began to wonder. It wasn’t exactly anger I felt, it was a kind of frustration, almost disgust. I had travelled three thousand miles and Moira couldn’t take the afternoon off. I went out for a drink, walking for the first time in my life down Bleecker Street which many friends in Paris had spoken of. By the time she came home I had decided I was being unreasonable. After all, we were no longer lovers. What did I know about her affairs? She had her own life to live.

  I looked at her now and said: “What made you go back to work this afternoon? It must have been nearly four by the time you got there.”

  “I have a job. I have to earn my living,” Moira said in the voice an adult sometimes adopts to answer a child.

  I know now that she had a more cogent reason. She was demonstrating to someone that she was no longer involved with me. But I didn’t know that then. “Fuck work,” I said, bringing us to the edge of an old difference.

  “You’ll find New York different, Joe,” Moira said, nervously lighting a cigarette.

  Watching the little scowl on her face as it bunched forwards towards the match, I felt exasperation. Her proprietory tone as she spoke of New York struck me as ludicrous and angered me at the same time. She had already deprived me of my welcome, and now she was excluding me from the city. And yet I felt sure she didn’t intend to wound me.

  “I mean it’s not like Paris,” she went on, and behind the familiar top-heavy voice I sensed her uneasiness. “Some of the things we used to think...”

  “I don’t want to hear your recantations. I haven’t changed.”

  It was becoming dark in the small apartment. Moira reached over and turned on a small table lamp. I got up and stared uncertainly out of the window which gave onto a small yard. I could still make out the silhouette of an old-fashioned water tower over one of the buildings a few blocks away. The tinge of blue in the twilight gave it an enchanted look.

  “Moira, do you remember the view from the little chambre de bonne near Bastille?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “But, Joe, I have changed. It makes me mad to think of all those Americans in Paris always talking against America.”

  “What do you expect them to talk against, Egypt?”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “Yes, I know. But as a foreigner I didn’t get the impression that they were anti-American nor that they were always talking against America. And when they did it was usually an understandable reaction to the ugly monolithic mug that America was turning towards the rest of the world at this or that particular time; they, as Americans, wanted Europeans to know that all Americans didn’t have the same attitude. I hope they were right.”

  “They were bums! All they did was talk!”

  “Some of them talked in French,” I said wearily, “and anyway, you don’t have to study in Paris. It’s a liberal education just to be there. Moira, I wonder if you ever thought about what I think.”

  “I don’t want to argue, Joe. We’ll go out and eat. I’m sorry about today. We’ll go out and eat. We’ll probably meet some people you know.”

  “Oh? Has another flying saucer arrived?”

  For a man of imagination, of tentative will, it is not simple to adapt to the rude government of modern times. Extreme predicaments, if I do not bore the reader with such a frivolous topic, call for extreme measures of adaptation, significantly at an individual level. Hymns to democracy will not eliminate human differences, or will do so only when they incite murder, and then at our peril. After all the cant, I am the ground of all existence. God said it. Say it after him. All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.37 It is a kind of transcendence, it involves expression, and a symbolic object; the latter by the way. The critics who call upon the lost and the beat generations to come home, who use the dead to club the living, write prettily about anguish because to them it is a historical phenomenon and not a pain in the arse. But it is pain in the arse and we wonder at the impertinence of governments, which by my own experience and that of my father and his father before him have consistently done everything in their power to make individuals treat the world situation lightly, that they should frown on the violence of my imagination – which is a sensitive, responsive instrument – and set their damn police on me who has not stirred from this room for fifteen years except to cop shit...

  The Way of the Black One is crooked and full of a Curse! Ayeeh! Ayeeh! Og, escaped from the ordeal of the Bitter Waters, and come through Thunder and Lightning to Sheridan Square, took shelter under a Traffic Light, under lancing Blue Rain which washed away the left leg of his Abominable Trousers, leaving him exposed. Nevertheless, Og, a man of Experience, to whom both Mandala and Chaos were as an Open Book, and who had felt upon his Lewd Lip divers Nymphets with the Intimacie of a Moustache, hoped in his present disguise as a Tibetan Prayer Wheel to pass still for an Innocent Pedestrian. To distract his attention from the Fact of his Inadequate Shelter, he practised a Surprised Smile and shifted his Dirty Spike from his Crotch to his Surgically Elongated Nostril. Fuzz ran to Arsehole too frequently these days, he reflected, caressing the Innocent Nostril with the smell of his Bad Balls.

  Fink saw him where he stood, turning his Prayer Wheel and leering with Assumed Innocence at bystanders. Fink’s Toothless Lower Jaw cupped his stubbly Upper Lip like a Treacly Spoon or Hot Snatch and he pressed himself like a Rampant Fungus to the Wall.

  Fay’s Blue Thighs trembling under her Black Fur Coat were aware of themselves all the way along West 10th.

  In a Nearby Cinema, Berti Lang, the Manager, was standing in the Velvet Foyer, invoking Impure Thoughts of Beryl Smellie’s Bum. Berti’s Wife, Chrissie, was the Cashier at the same Cinema, but she was presently in St Vincent’s having her Operation. Agnes Bane, the Senior Usherette and his wife’s Informer, was at that moment out of the Cashbox where she was deputizing for Chrissie and at the Ladies’ Toilet for her Evening Pee. Thus Berti was detained in the Foyer.

  When A
gnes returned she reported the Presence of an Undesirable Woman in the Ladies’ Toilet but Berti was quite short with her much to her Astonishment. He even took off his Glasses and polished them and that as Agnes Knew was something he did only when he was hot and bothered. He left her and went like a Bent Hairpin towards the Auditorium.

  Meanwhile, in the Ladies’ Restroom, Fay was probing the back of her Ice-Blue Hand with her Dirty Spike. She was intent on her Bloody Work.

  In the Auditorium Berti watched Beryl Smellie where she stood in the Half-Darkness against tall red Velvet Curtains. That was how he had imagined her, a White Stain on the Red, caressed with the Body Smells and Scents of the Auditorium, and when he moved down the aisle towards her with his Official Step his penis prickled against his Miami Beach Underpants and grew hard. Close to her, Unseeing Eyes following her Profile to the Screen, he stood, and against her Fair Meat his forefinger wiggled like an Obsequious Worm.

  If I let him feel my Seemly Snatch, calculated Beryl, I can get away at once, meet Fay in the Can, and split.

  She did.

  “Fay!” she called in the Ladies’ Toilet. “Fay!”

  “Dbaeioug eukuh...”

  “Fay!”

  “Dbaeiou...”

  At that moment, as the door from the Foyer was pushed open to admit a Stream of Ladies, Beryl was aware of Music which signified the End of a Feature.

  I had just finished my third blood-drawing, a small sketch of a schizoid white phagocyte. I thought three would be enough to constitute evidence if I were ever hauled into court for marks. I doubted if the Supreme Court would go along with the impertinent counsel that a man should not be allowed to draw his own blood for the purpose of painting pictures.

  When all other means fail me I employ a mechanical device.

  IT’S NOT FAR FROM Flushing to the Village. There’s a train as far as 42nd Street, but again I won’t go in. There’s nothing for me to go there for now. It is as if plague struck my shadow city... and the rest fled. Only the citadel remains, for those who aren’t behind bars.

  The citadel, centre everywhere, circumference nowhere; lethal dose variable. It happens to many that they can no longer go outside the citadel. For one reason or another.

  I remember nights without, cold streets, unfriendly saloons, great distances. Fear. Nine hours until daylight (not that that made much difference, except that you can sit in the park amongst people who play), no reason for being anywhere rather than anywhere else, and without. (There is no one in this city before whom I can weep.) Noticing things like traffic signals and lights in porches and on empty lots; the failure to notice would bring back the reality of being without the citadel. The alien city. The hostile faces. The bars blared and the automobiles were particularly like spaceships. A corner drugstore opened its crocodile jaws and exhaled yellow light. Four crooked figures set wide apart at the counter, four men, and a stand of bright paperbacks. (The dispensary, like the vault of the old lady of Thread-needle Street, was in the rear.) Walk along 8th Street after midnight and feel the men lean towards you. – Some other time my dears, some other time.

  “I regret everything,” I say aloud to the typewriter. And mentally I draw blinds. But I forget, or adapt, or metamorphose. The persistence of bodily process does for the resolve.

  A cigarette. I operate the roller to see better what I have written:

  – Alone again. I might say amen but don’t or can’t. My way is not the way of the Sansaras, to shake frail claws for bread and spit on women. I must walk in crowded places, until I am murdered by my own contempt. I am alone again and write it down to provide anchorage against my own mutinous winds.

  Reading what I have written, now, then, I have a familiar feeling that everything I say is somehow beside the point. I am of course incapable of sustaining a simple narrative... with no fixed valid categories... not so much a line of thought as an area of experience... the immediate broth; I am left with a coherence of posture(s). I thrust my chair back from the table and stand up in the small wooden cabin. – Moreover, what’s not beside the point is false. Two steps across the cabin to the little mirror splashed with toothpaste and the viscid remains of mosquitoes, greeting my own sudden reflection: “N’est-ce pas, motherfucker?”

  I need a shave. A smear of soot on my right cheek. I move closer until my nose is almost touching the glass and stare vacuously at the pupils of my eyes.

  Butter I forgot to put on ice has melted to a state of sticky semi-transparency in its soot-flecked saucer. With a movement of distaste I lift it from where it lies on a spread copy of Dahlberg’s The Sorrows of Priapus.38 Something in the text catches my eye:

  According to Philo, Cain was a profligate, and all malcontents are licentious.

  Cain. Third profligate, first poet-adventurer, he creased her massive centrale, moved his carcassonne through her pairoknees into her soft spain before Moses engraved tablets. Not enough to lament, Jeremiah, even the decay of symbols. The butter, where to put it... the cabin seems abnormally cluttered up with all manner of debris, crunch, a damn eggshell pushed gently by the toe of my boot under the battered cast-iron coal stove... there. I place it carefully on a small shelf beside scissors (so that’s where they are!), jam and insect spray; then sit down with relief and look again at the paper in the typewriter.

  – The trouble with me, I reflect, is that I look pruriently over my own shoulder as I write and I’m all the time aware it’s reality and not literature I’m engaged in.

  I press the tabulator, to sluice away my uncertainty, and begin to type:

  – An old man called Molloy or Malone walked across country. When he was tired he lay down and when it rained he decided to turn over and receive it on his back. The rain washed the name right out of him.

  It’s a question of making an inventory. This afternoon I stood in the yard of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation and felt like making an inventory of the things and relations that are near me now.

  – Cain’s Book: that was the title I chose years ago in Paris for my work in progress, in regress, my little voyage in the art of digression. It’s a dead cert the frontal attack is obsolete.

  And it’s not the first time I’ve felt like making an inventory. (A little Lucifer constantly discovering himself after his eviction.) I have tried more than once. Everything I have written is a kind of inventorizing. I don’t expect ever to be able to do much more, and the inventories will always be unfinished. The most I can do is to die like Malone with a last dot of lead pinched between forefinger and thumb, writing perhaps: Mais tout de même on se justifie mal, tout de même on fait mal quand on se justifie.39

  From time to time I think up epilogues for Cain’s Book. God knows if I’ll ever be able to put a stop to this habit. I would need an eye in the back of my head and a hand to propel me by the scruff of my own neck. Wanting them, and with the creeping behind, the sudden onsets of panic, the epilogues are easily explained. To fall on myself from above, like the owl on the wee grey mouse.

  Outside, on the canal, a tug hoots. I get up and go outside on the catwalk, the narrow strip of deck between the door of the cabin and the stern of the barge. The small green tug moves swiftly past me and continues on its way down the canal towards the East River. The deck under me rises and falls gently with the swell.

  The unloading crane has temporarily stopped work. The operator is on the dock, talking to one of the dock hands. A light blue Ford, its large tail lights blinking red, is going through the gate of the yard onto the street.

  The canal water is smooth again in the wake of the tug, a muddy grey-green colour, its dull mirror surface bearing a scum of oil, dust, paper, and an occasional plank of wood. There are two yellow sand scows at the yard at the other side of the canal. The scow which is nearly light looms over the loaded scow like a pier over a low-lying jetty. On the light scow which will be pulled out with the tide is a Portuguese Negro and his woman and his dog. The cabin of the other scow is locked up.

  Earlie
r in the afternoon I sat outside on the catwalk and watched the Negro who stood watching his scow being unloaded. The crane over there has a distinctive putter. Even across the short breadth of the canal it seems to come from a great distance, like the sound of a tractor in a field far away, and that sound mingled with the sound of all the other cranes working on the canal, and they swung about, the grabs rising and falling, hawsers straining, and they were like big steel birds with no wings and no plumage, nodding and pecking all the afternoon. The man was smoking a pipe. His woman came out of the cabin from time to time with a bucket of slops or to hang up wet clothes. I couldn’t make out her features clearly, but she was wearing a drab, almost colourless smock, and she was blonde. I got the impression she was big, with heavy buttocks and strong thighs.

  Scow women are not often beautiful. The exceptions are the transients. I never spoke to a woman who looked forward with equanimity to dying on the scows. Women more than men have a need for roots and the shifting barge life with its hard, primitive conditions breaks down a woman’s resistance. And it doesn’t happen often, a woman’s dying on a scow. When it does, it is like when Geo was lying at Newburgh and the old wino woman fell in and got drowned, at night, and they dragged her out with a boathook in the early morning, her clothes sodden and her face purplish-grey. The police visited all the scows lying there at the time to try to find out whom she had been with. No one claimed her. As Geo said, she might have been pushed in, and anyway, who was going to admit to a woman like that? He was just taking his morning fix, Geo said, when this loud knocking came on his door. A beetle in a child’s tin can. He thought they had come for him, that someone had tipped them off about the heroin. By the way they knocked he knew it was the fuzz, Authority – there were three of them, one was in plain clothes, an old guy of about sixty. It was he who spoke: “Where’s your woman, son?” It had taken a moment for that to register. Geo’s mind was anchored to the shit and works he’d stashed quickly away in the table drawer. “Where’s your woman, son? She not come back last night?” Geo is always having narrow shaves.