Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  —From the Autobiography

  I am writing to you, Hannahbella, from a distant country. I daresay you remember it well. The King encloses the opening pages of his autobiography. He is most curious as to what your response to them will be. He has labored mightily over their composition, working without food, without sleep, for many days and nights.

  The King has not been, in these months, in the best of spirits. He has read your article and declares himself to be very much impressed by it. He begs you, prior to publication in this country, to do him the great favor of changing the phrase “two disinterested and impartial arbiters” on page thirty-one to “malign elements under the ideological sway of still more malign elements.” Otherwise, he is delighted. He asks me to tell you that your touch is as adroit as ever.

  Early in the autobiography (as you see) we encounter the words: “My mother the Queen made a mirror pie, a splendid thing the size of a poker table …” The King wishes to know if poker tables are in use in faraway lands, and whether the reader in such places would comprehend the dimensions of the pie. He continues: “… in which reflections from the kitchen chandelier exploded when the crew rolled it from the oven. We were kneeling side-by-side, peering into the depths of a new-made mirror pie, when my mother said to me, or rather her celestial image said to my dark, heavy-haired one, ‘Get out. I cannot bear to look upon your donkey face again.’”

  The King wishes to know, Hannahbella, whether this passage seems to you tainted by self-pity, or is, rather, suitably dispassionate.

  He walks up and down the small room next to his bedchamber, singing your praises. The decree having to do with your banishment will be rescinded, he says, the moment you agree to change the phrase “two disinterested and impartial arbiters” to “malign elements,” etc. This I urge you to do with all speed.

  The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural condition. The country is prosperous, yes, and he understands that the people value peace, that they prefer to spin out their destinies in placid, undisturbed fashion. But his destiny, he says, is to alter the map of the world. He is considering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but interesting, complex, dicey, even. He would very much like to consult with you about them. He asks you to change, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase “egregious usurpations” to “symbols of benign transformation.” Please initial the change on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.

  Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: “I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new sunrise to console me, my shaving kit with its dozen razors (although I shaved a dozen times a day, the head was still a donkey’s) banging against the Walther .22 in my rucksack. After a time I was suddenly quite tired. I lay down under a hedge by the side of the road. One of the bushes above me had a shred of black cloth tied to it, a sign, in our country, that the place was haunted (but my head’s enough to frighten any ghost).” Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? “I ate a slice of my mother’s spinach pie and considered my situation. My princeliness would win me an evening, perhaps a fortnight, at this or that noble’s castle in the vicinity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that neither royal blood nor novelty of aspect prevailed for long against a host’s natural preference for folk with heads much like his own. Should I en-zoo myself? Volunteer for a traveling circus? Attempt the stage? The question was most vexing.

  “I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, under the hedge.

  “ What’s this?’ I said.

  “ ‘Soft,’ said the new arrival, ‘don’t be afraid, I am a bogle, let me abide here for the night, your back is warm and that’s a mercy.’

  “ ‘What’s a bogle?’ I asked, immediately fetched, for the creature was small, not at all frightening to look upon and clad in female flesh, something I do not hold in low esteem.

  “ ‘A bogle,’ said the tiny one, with precision, ‘is not a black dog.’

  “Well, I thought, now I know.

  “ ‘A bogle,’ she continued, ‘is not a boggart.’

  “ ‘Delighted to hear it,’ I said.

  “ ‘Don’t you ever shave?, she asked. ‘And why have you that huge hideous head on you, that could be mistaken for the head of an ass, could I see better so as to think better?’

  “ ‘You may lie elsewhere,’ I said, ‘if my face discountenances you.’

  “‘I am fatigued,’ she said, ‘go to sleep, we’ll discuss it in the morning, move a bit so that your back fits better with my front, it will be cold, later, and this place is cursed, so they say, and I hear that the Prince has been driven from the palace, God knows what that’s all about bat it promises no good for us plain folk, police, probably, running all over the fens with their identity checks and making you blow up their great balloons with your breath—’

  “She was confusing, I thought, several issues, but my God! she was warm and shapely. Yet I thought her a strange piece of goods, and made the mistake of saying so.

  “ ‘Sir,’ she answered, ‘I would not venture upon what’s strange and what’s not strange, if I were you,’ and went on to say that if I did not abstain from further impertinence she would commit sewer-pipe. She dropped off to sleep then, and I lay back upon the ground. Not a child, I could tell, rather a tiny woman. A bogle.”

  The King wishes you to know, Hannahbella, that he finds this passage singularly moving and that he cannot read it without being forced to take snuff, violently. Similarly the next:

  “What, precisely, is a donkey? As you may imagine, I have researched the question. My Larousse was most delicate, as if the editors thought the matter blushful, but yielded two observations of interest: that donkeys came originally from Africa, and that they, or we, are ‘the result of much crossing.’ This urges that the parties to the birth must be ill-matched, and in the case of my royal parents, ‘twas thunderously true. The din of their calamitous conversations reached every quarter of the palace, at every season of the year. My mother named me Duncan (var. of Dunkey, clearly) and went into spasms of shrinking whenever, youthfully, I’d offer a cheek for a kiss. My father, in contrast, could sometimes bring himself to scratch my head between the long, weedlike ears, but only, I suspect, by means of a mental shift, as if he were addressing one of his hunting dogs, the which, incidentally, remained firmly ambivalent about me even after long acquaintance.

  “I explained a part of this to Hannahbella, for that was the bogle’s name, suppressing chiefly the fact that I was a prince. She in turn gave the following account of herself. She was indeed a bogle, a semispirit generally thought to be of bad character. This was a libel, she said, as her own sterling qualities would quickly persuade me. She was, she said, of the utmost perfection in the female line, and there was not a woman within the borders of the kingdom so beautiful as herself, she’d been told it a thousand times. It was true, she went on, that she was not of a standard size, could in fact be called small, if not minuscule, but those who objected to this were louts and fools and might profitably be stewed in lead, for the entertainment of the countryside. In the matter of rank and precedence, the meanest bogle outweighed the greatest king, although the kings of this earth, she conceded, would never acknowledge this but in their dotty solipsism conducted themselves as if bogles did not even exist. And would I like to see her all unclothed so that I might glean some rude idea as to the true nature of the sublime?

  “Well, I wouldn’t have minded a bit. She was wonderfully crafted, that was evident, and held in addition the fascination surrounding any perfect miniature. But I said, ‘No, thank you. Perhaps another day, it’s a bit chill this morning.’

  “ ‘Just the breasts then,’ she said, ‘they’re wondrous pretty,’ and before I could protest further she’d whipped off her mannikin’s tiny shirt. I buttoned her up again meanwhile bestowing buckets of extravagant praise. ‘Yes,’ she
said in agreement, ‘that’s how I am all over, wonderful.’”

  The King cannot reread this section, Hannahbella, without being reduced to tears. The world is a wilderness, he says, civilization a folly we entertain in concert with others. He himself, at his age, is beyond surprise, yet yearns for it. He longs for the conversations he formerly had with you, in the deepest hours of the night, he in his plain ermine robe, you simply dressed as always in a small scarlet cassock, most becoming, a modest supper of chicken, fruit and wine on the sideboard, only the pair of you awake in the whole palace, at four o’clock in the morning. The tax evasion case against you has been dropped. It was, he says, a hasty and ill-considered undertaking, even spiteful. He is sorry.

  The King wonders whether the following paragraphs from his autobiography accord with your own recollections: “She then began, as we walked down the road together (an owl pretending to be absent standing on a tree limb to our left, a little stream snapping and growling to our right), explaining to me that my father’s administration of the realm left much to be desired, from the bogle point of view, particularly his mad insistence on filling the forests with heavy-footed truffle hounds. Standing, she came to just a hand above my waist; her hair was brown, with bits of gold in it; her quite womanly hips were encased in dun-colored trousers. ‘Duncan,’ she said, stabbing me in the calf with her sharp nails, ‘do you know what that man has done? Nothing else but ruin, absolutely ruin, the whole of the Gatter Fen with a great roaring electric plant that makes a thing that who in the world could have a use for I don’t know. I think they’re called volts. Two square miles of first-class fen paved over. We bogles are being squeezed to our knees.’ I had a sudden urge to kiss her, she looked so angry, but did nothing, my history in this regard being, as I have said, infelicitous.

  “ ‘Duncan, you’re not listening!’ Hannahbella was naming the chief interesting things about bogles, which included the fact that in the main they had nothing to do with humans, or nonsemispirits; that although she might seem small to me she was tall, for a bogle, queenly, in fact; that there was a type of blood seas superior to royal blood, and that it was bogle blood; that bogles had no magical powers whatsoever, despite what was said of them; that bogles were the very best lovers in the whole world, no matter what class of thing, animal, vegetable, or insect, might be under discussion; that it was not true that bogles knocked bowls of mush from the tables of the deserving poor and caused farmers’ cows to become pregnant with big fishes, out of pure mischief; that female bogles were the most satisfactory sexual partners of any kind of thing that could ever be imagined and were especially keen for large overgrown things with ass’s ears, for example; and that there was a something in the road ahead of us to which it might, perhaps, be prudent to pay heed.

  “She was right. One hundred yards ahead of us, planted squarely athwart the road, was an army.”

  The King, Hannahbella, regrets having said of you, in the journal Vu, that you have two brains and no heart. He had thought he was talking not-for-attribution, but as you know, all reporters are scoundrels and not to be trusted. He asks you to note that Vu has suspended publication and to recall that it was never read by anyone but serving maids and the most insignificant members of the minor clergy. He is prepared to give you a medal, if you return, any medal you like—you will remember that our medals are the most gorgeous going. On page seventy-five of your article, he requires you, most humbly, to change “monstrous over-reaching fueled by an insatiable if still childish ego” to any kinder construction of your choosing.

  The King’s autobiography, in chapters already written but which I do not enclose, goes on to recount how you and he together, by means of a clever stratagem of your devising, vanquished the army barring your path on that day long, long ago; how the two of you journeyed together for many weeks and found that your souls were, in essence, the same soul; the shrewd means you employed to place him in power, against the armed opposition of the Party of the Lily, on the death of his father; and the many subsequent campaigns which you endured together, mounted on a single horse, your armor banging against his armor. The King’s autobiography, Hannahbella, will run to many volumes, but he cannot bring himself to write the end of the story without you.

  The King feels that your falling-out, over the matter of the refugees from Brise, was the result of a miscalculation on his part. He could not have known, he says, that they had bogle blood (although he admits that the fact of their small stature should have told him something). Exchanging the refugees from Brise for the twenty-three Bishops of Ho captured during the affair was, he says in hindsight, a serious error; more bishops can always be created. He makes the point that you did not tell him that the refugees from Brise had bogle blood but instead expected him to know it. Your outrage was, he thinks, a pretext. He at once forgives you and begs your forgiveness. The Chair of Military Philosophy at the university is yours, if you want it. You loved him, he says, he is convinced of it, he still cannot believe it, he exists in a condition of doubt. You are both old; you are both forty. The palace at four A.M. is silent. Come back, Hannahbella, and speak to him.

  Jaws

  HOW is William to prove to Natasha that he still loves her? That’s the problem I’m working on, mentally, as I check the invoices and get the big double-parked trucks from the warehouses unloaded and deal with all the people bringing in aluminum cans for redemption. Benny, this black Transit cop who had ordered a hot pastrami on rye with mustard from our deli and then had to rush out on a call, is now eating his hot pastrami and telling me about this woman who was hanging out of a sixth-floor window over on Second Avenue where he and his partner couldn’t get at her. “She wouldn’t come in,” Benny says. “I said, go ahead and fly, Loony-tunes. I shouldn’t have said that. I made an error.”

  I understand how that could be. This woman wanted to blend her head with Second Avenue and mess up the honor of the Transit Police, probably because somebody didn’t love her anymore. Mutilation, actual or verbal, is usually taken as an earnest of sincere interest in another person. Verbal presentations, with William and Natasha, are no good. So many terrible sentences drift in the poisoned air between them, sentences about who is right and sentences about who works hardest and sentences about money and even sentences about physical appearance—the most ghastly of known sentences. That’s why Natasha bites, I’m convinced of it. She’s trying to say something. She opens her mouth, then closes it (futility) on William’s arm (sudden eloquence).

  I like them both, so they both tell me about these incidents and I rationalize and say, well, that’s not so terrible, maybe she’s under stress, or maybe he’s under stress. I neglect to mention that most people in New York are under some degree of stress and few of them, to my knowledge, bite each other. People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.

  Natasha is a small woman with dark hair and a serious, concerned face. Good teeth. She wears trusty Canal Street – West Broadway pants and shirts and is maybe twenty-six. I met her three years ago when she came over to my little cubicle at the A&P at Twelfth Street and Seventh to cash a check, one that William had signed. Of course she didn’t have the proper ID, since she wasn’t William. But she was so embarrassed that I decided she was okay. “He’s a little peculiar about money,” she told me, and I was embarrassed. I thought, what’s with this guy? I thought he was probably some kind of monster, in a minor way. Then one day he came in to cash a check himself. “Why don’t you put your wife on your account?” I asked him. “I cash her checks because I know her, but sometimes I’m not here. Also, she must have trouble other places. I mean, I’m not telling you how to run your life.”

  William blushed. You don’t see that much blushing at A&P Twelfth Street. He was wearing a suit, a gray Barney’s pin-striped number, and had obviously just come from work. “She has a tendency to overspend,” he said. “It’s not her fault. She was
born to wealth and her habits never left her, even when she married me. When we had a joint account she never entered the checks in her checkbook. So we were always overdrawn and I finally closed the account and now we do it this way.”

  When Natasha found out about William’s affair with the girl at the office, I should say woman at the office, she came straight to me and told me everything. “It was at the office picnic in Central Park,” she said. “Everybody was playing badminton, okay? In bare feet. William was playing and I noticed that he had a piece of silver duct tape around his big toe. He had a cut, he said. William uses duct tape for everything. Our place is practically held together with duct tape. And then later on I noticed that this rather pretty girl was playing with a piece of duct tape on her ankle. She’d scraped her ankle. And that told me the story, right there. I confronted him with it and he admitted it. It was as simple as that.”

  Well, romance is not unknown at the A&P. We are an old and wise organization and have seen much. We are not called The Great Atlantic and Pacific for nothing, we contain multitudes and sometimes people lock gazes across the frozen rabbit parts and the balloon goes up, figuratively speaking. I counseled forbearance. “Don’t come down too hard on him,” I said. “William is clearly in the wrong in this matter, that gives you a certain edge. Don’t harangue or threaten or cry and weep. Calm, rational understanding is your mode. Politically, you’re way out in front. Act accordingly.”

  I think this was psychologically acute advice. It was the best I had to offer. What she did was, she bit him again. On the shoulder, in the shower. He was in the shower, he told me, and suddenly there was this horrible pain in his left shoulder and this time she did break the skin. He had to slug her in the hipbone to make her let go. “It’s the only time I’ve ever hit her,” he said. He poured Johnnie Walker Black over the wound and slapped a piece of duct tape on it and took a room at the Mohawk Motor Inn, on Tenth Avenue.