“Why?”
“He doesn’t like you. He likes Toni.”
“I’m not exactly nuts about him myself.”
“Don’t be a tough guy.”
Chaim paid the bill. “Well, so I’ve been to Spain,” he said.
“And what did you find?”
“Find?”
“Yes.”
“You are very young.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Don’t be angry. It’s just that my hair is falling out.”
The sky was softening, André noticed. It was the colour of melancholy. The cognac felt warm in his belly, his arms dropped languorously beside him … if it would stop now, right now.…
“Why are you helping me, Chaim? Got my salvation all figured out?”
“Don’t be a silly boy.”
André grinned nastily.
“I have faith in men,” Chaim said. “I would rather act on that faith than be miserable and without it like you.”
“But maybe I’m right just the same, eh, Chaim?”
“Maybe, but is that really important?” Chaim got up. “It’s stupid to talk,” he said. “Paint this; the sea, the sky, evening, two men talking, one angry, the other old.”
“What if I loved her and I was mad?”
“Now where in the hell did you get that idea?”
“My grandfather was mad. In his last years anyway. They say I get it from him.”
“You’re not mad, André. A bit crazy perhaps.”
They shook hands. André felt small and poor in spirit.
“André …” Chaim began shyly. He shuffled from one foot to another. It was the first time André had ever seen him embarrassed. It made him, André, feel insecure. Chaim was, had to be, unshakable. “In case …” He began again. “No, that’s silly. Look, boychick, you’re a fine painter. Paint always. I believe in you.”
André smiled self-consciously. “I’m going, Chaim. This kind of farewell stuff upsets me. Good luck, old man.”
“I’ll see you on Thursday.”
“Well, I hope so, anyway.”
Chaim watched him walk away. I will never see him again, he thought. “Cosmi,” he called. “Cosmi, bring me another bottle of muscatel.”
VI
Chaim was gone.
André sat in a bar on the Calle de Sangre and he ordered another drink. He felt trapped and alone and the cognac was not doing him any good yet. His head was full of pain and he could not think clearly. One more drink, just one, he thought, and then I’ll go up to Toni’s.
The next bar was practically empty and he left after one drink.
Finally he found a bar that suited him. It was dilapidated, anonymous, and there were many flies. Labourers, leathery-faced, sat around woodenly. The oily waiter, who waddled and had no neck, was probably a German. André called him over. He was a Belgian. Oui, he had been in the Legion and fought in many guerres. Afrique du Nord, Spaneesh land (oui, he spoke Eng-lissh), against les nègres when there were grèves, and against les boches, claro, in the Great War. Àndré told him to go away. And to himself he thought, feeling fine on the cognac now, how do you say f— off in Spanish. He must ask Pepe.
Pepe. He was invited there for dinner.…
André spilled his drink on the table and with his finger he traced wet designs on the wood. He did a drawing of the waiter. He was lying on a tray, surrounded by vegetables, and there was an apple in his mouth.
André got up.
It was still twilight. He thought: This is the interval, all the world is sighing human, time for vermouth and mild applejack, whisky blanc for the habitants in St. Jovite and a lucky other few, rest for the unknowing men, unfocus.
Dere’s no hidin’ place down dere,
Dere’s no hidin’ place down dere,
Oh I went to de rock to hide my face,
De rock cried out, “No hidin’ place,”
Dere’s no hidin’ place down dere.
Whoops, don’t totter.
The street, hazy, was cradled by a warming light. On a street bench an aged gypsy woman held a newspaper cupped under her chin. She smiled into the cooling sky, a saucerful of sun quivering in her frail grip. Her hands were livid, death was coming. But squinting into the going-away sun she seemed happy at last to be unaware of people warped by greed and misery passing quickly.
André kneeled down by the bench and kissed the gypsy woman’s hand. He looked up at her, and he said: “Sing me a song.”
He let his head fall on her lap.
She laughed. Her teeth, there were only three, were yellow. “I’m too old,” she said.
“Then I’ll sing for you. But, mind you, it’s in American.” He began:
Oh de rock cried out, “I’m burnin’ too,”
Oh de rock cried out, “I’m burnin’ too,”
Oh de rock cried out, “I’m burnin’ too,”
I want to go to hebb’n as well as you,
Dere’s no hidin’ place down dere.
The old woman applauded. André kissed her again, and skipped away.
In the next bar André made a speech in French. The men applauded, wineskins were passed around, and altogether they sang Los Quatro Generales. Afterwards André stood up on a table and recited, or tried to recite, I Sing of Olaf in Spanish. He told them the poem had been written by a great man in a stifled land where, nevertheless, there were many great men. He told them stories about the great men and he tried to teach them how to sing Alouette. Then, he confided in them. He said: “I am a mad man.”
He left the bar, and the men made him promise to come back. The bartender said: “Como su casa.”
Outside, André sang:
Oh de sinner man he gambled an’ fell,
Oh de sinner man he gambled an’ fell,
Oh de sinner man gambled, he gambled an’ fell;
He wanted to go to hebben, but he had to go to hell,
Dere’s no hidin’ place down dere.
He stepped into the doorway of her rooming house and suddenly a chill came over him. He began to climb the stairs and on the second landing he met Kraus. André, tottering, stopped and stared. Kraus, oddly enough, appeared frightened. André laughed.
“I’m charmed to …”
“Oh, not again. What are you doing here?”
“Are you going up to her room in your drunken condition?” Kraus asked.
André shoved his hands in his pockets. He hoped that Kraus would not notice that he was shivering. “What do you want from us?” he asked.
A twitch developed on Kraus’s lip and André felt triumphant.
“Well …?”
Kraus’s face seemed ashen in the poor light of the hallway.
“I do not want to fight you,” Kraus said.
“What?”
“She, Theresa …”
“What about Chaim?”
Kraus shrugged his shoulders.
“So it was you!”
“Yes.”
Yes, just like that. Yes.
André laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed because Chaim was a useful man and he laughed because Kraus was a brute. He clutched the banister and doubled up laughing. He laughed because Ida was dead and he laughed because probably he did not love Toni. He laughed because he was drunk. He laughed and laughed. He laughed because he was feverish and he laughed because the doctors said he would go mad. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he laughed.
Kraus slapped him and André stopped laughing. “You are mad,” he said.
“She wouldn’t let you touch her.”
And for an instant, briefly, they stared into each other’s eyes.
“I am going to kill you,” André said, and he continued up the stairs again, trying not to stagger.
His head was throbbing and he was soaked in sweat. He knew the symptoms of his migraines backwards, but he pretended not to know. He opened up the door to the room. Toni was dressing.
She jumped up when she saw him. “Andr
é!”
“I just met Kraus on the stairs.”
“André, you look ill. Did he hit you?”
“I’m not ill. I’m drunk.”
“Oh.”
Golden legs climbing into a skirt.
André handed her a cigarette. He lit it for her. “Did you get into bed with him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he force you?”
“No.”
All he could see was the two of them in bed. She, in his arms, panting.
“You must try to understand André. He was crying like a child. I felt sorry for him.”
Still, something was broken. He felt empty. “I understand,” he lied. “I love you and I understand.”
She came into his arms and he shivered.
“André, you’re ill. Your skin is burning.”
He sat down uneasily. His eyes were not so much shocked as absolutely innocent and uncomprehending. “Chaim is leaving Spain tonight,” he said. “They closed the club, he was here on a false passport. Roger told them, probably because of us.”
“Oh, André.”
Yeah, he thought. I know. Oh, André. “We will get married tomorrow, and join him in Paris on Thursday.”
Toni puffed deeply on her cigarette and a hollow formed in her cheeks. Her hair was all tangled up. She turned on him suddenly, her eyes passionately deep. “Do you really want to marry me?”
“I don’t know.”
“André, don’t be angry. It would mean leaving my country, my people. You never really loved me. You feel sorry for me. That is not enough.”
“Does he love you?”
“You don’t understand. I love you, André, but I don’t know if it would work out.”
He sat down beside her on the bed and for a long time he stroked her hair gently.
Finally, she said, “What shall we do?”
“Come to France with me.”
“All right.”
He got up. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“To my room. I don’t feel well. I think I’ll paint for a while.”
“No drinking?”
“I don’t really mind that you went to bed with him,” he said.
“Do you want me to come with you now?”
“No. Not now.”
He walked over to her again and stroked her black hair. “You are beautiful,” he said.
She smiled.
“Is it, Toni … Do you think that I cannot love?”
“There is something rotten inside you. Together we shall fight it.”
“Good-bye.”
“Hasta mañana.”
“Si, guapa.”
VII
What was that song?
Yes, I’m leavin’, leavin’, Mama,
Oo’ – But I don’t know whichaway to go.
I’m leavin’, leavin’, Mama,
But I don’t know which way to go.
He was slipping down a ladder, every rung rejecting him.
The bottle was on the floor beside the bed.
Another drink.
André could not sleep.
The bed was a ship whirling in a stormy sea yet standing still at the same time.
His body was no longer a well-integrated unit but instead a bunch of ridiculous, unrelated items. Something to be tabulated, like clothing returned from the laundry. Some arms, some legs, a few organs and private parts, so many fingers and dirty feet, and a head twirling, superfluous and independent, in still faraway water. He would have lifted up his arm to anchor his floating head but he knew if he did this his arm would snap off. Also that his fingers were molasses and if he attempted to grasp the bedpost they would stick to the metal in puddles. God will punish you, his father always used to say. The grating hullabaloo of the rats fussing in the woodwork came to him again and he slipped down further under the blankets to keep his head from being exposed. An hour’s sweat had dried on his body. The itch was a constant agony. He was going mad! He laughed weakly.
Sentences, not thoughts, came –
A body and a head, thin body big head, are lying on my bed.
I am a madman,
this is my spout.
Pour me out,
pour me out.
In the neighbourhood theatre somebody or something like him was doing fiendish things on the screen; sometimes the yahoo on the screen and his more rational self would snap into an idiot focus, but the fusion was always blurred.
I’m dead! Tomorrow I’m going to come back and look at my dead body and tickle my dead body, tomorrow after breakfast. I wonder if my dead body will look peaceful like dead bodies are supposed to look? Yo-yo-hum and a bottle of rum. The corpse will have to be shipped back to America for mama and that’s going to cost money. Cash, brother, cash. Put up or shut up!
Slowly the madness in him subsided. Entr’ acte for the damned. Time for drinks and time for cakes. Exhausted, breathing heavily, he lay back on his pillow sinking abysmally.…
The elastic mustn’t snap …
What if the whole bed is full of them, he thought. What if right now a rat is picking at the dandruff in my hair? Suddenly he trembled. Now I’m travelling through that undiscovered country from whose bourn … He pleaded with the engulfing vagueness. I’m up! Jesus, I even know what’s going on. He tested this last thought aloud to find out about his voice. The sounds were jarring but he recognised it as his own flat untuneful baritone. Winding through a spinning progression of questions and answers he soon convinced himself that everything stinging in the bed was him. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away The rats are scribbling prophecies on the ceiling and jitterbugging on my floor. Madman boogie! He tried to laugh. (Turn over the record, jack.) The upshot was a lunatic cackle in an empty subway. Next he tried to bribe himself about switching on the lights. If he did this there would at least be a cigarette. Unable to hoist himself into any conclusion he began to whine and think about home, about why he had ever left and if he could ever possibly go back.…
It was the London nightmare again.
A real empty stomach and a rotting soul, flaking at the sides, walked love and love through the purple bomb-gutted streets of the victorious city. The yellow pasteboard moon hanging like a bright lollypop in the black sky illuminated a building on Old Kent Road. From the other side the building was really only a wall. While waiting for the fall of the man who had entered a window on the fourth storey of the building that was only a wall, a stinging hose of urine ran down André’s right trouser leg. The man must have never quite fallen to the bottom as he stood there and stood there for three whole weeks without ever hearing a goddam sound. The fetor of his own dry urine mixed with the floating ambrosial stink of the dead violet flowers being pumped on to the pavement through the drainpipes. Ernie, hollow-eyed spiv with a No face, sold American-made nylons on Trafalgar Square.
A perfume advert, posted in neon dream blood over the Haymarket.
Out of the heavens – to you
MY SIN
de inez blumberg
Ernie ruined at least three pairs when a sore burst under his thumbnail and running green pus cascaded over the silk in a blinding viscous fountain. From the top of his colonnade a one-eyed admiral of another time and place tottered precariously as the pigeons heaped still more piles of excrement on the gawking tourists below. The young bobby with a foreign gaffer in his arms beamed while a stray arm snapped the shutter of a Kodak, exploding the whole area in a firecracker of light. Simultaneously and nearby a Welsh whore spat. Nobody noticed. Rats floating by in pools of gangrene had clogged the streets again.
One thing I’ll say about the Limeys, a man waving a copy of Time magazine shouted, they sure can take it!
On insecure concrete bases the imperial lions drooped lugubriously, nicotinic teeth beginning to crack and fall. Hairless bodies, pimpled bodies, gleaming like rotting meat in the sun. Nobody had been kind enough to tear out their eyes so André rushed over a
nd wrenched them out with the branch of a dead tree. A professionally blind pauper woman approached an enlightened whore with flowers. TWO BOB! I wouldn’t wipe me bloody arse with your flowers.
I wonder, another tourist with an airmail copy of Superman comics folded under his arm wondered, whether we’ll ever be able to make anything of this?
Flung into Westminster Abbey on the tide of a frantic mob André saw more Kodaks and women chewing gum trample on the tombs of Samuel Butler and Charles Dickens. He got the idea and began to pick vigorously at his ass while standing on Alex Pope. The guide obliged his fact-greedy audience, informing them that as the abbey was so jammed with the immortal dead many of the poets were buried standing up. If there’s no more room, André considered aloud, burn my body on hot flame and sprinkle my ashes in the public urinals. When the Russians arrive they may piss their guts out on my cranium. Vomit got stuck in his throat and to avoid suffocation he rushed outside. Ida loves Manny ’48 was carved on the railing of Westminster Bridge.
For several ages he stumble-wandered through the twilight alleys of Soho drinking and vomiting up blood-red wines like a consommé of an anger offered up as a hate-broth to the gods.
Later, in Piccadilly, he got angry with Eros. With a handy can-opener he ripped open his stomach, wrapping a mile of slimy intestines around a railing while rent flesh flapped in the wind. Tossing leaking kidneys heavenwards he studied his heart, mouldy but still beating, on the pavement. A legless orphan with a bent arm and his nose on sideways gave him a quick shove before he could finish disembowelling himself. The spectre snarled; move on, gov’ner, we’ve seen all this before.
He took to flight, racing across oceans and worlds, but he could not escape the mockery of the whores chuckling in the vacuum.
Eighteen tiny red dots behind six others of an unusual shade of green floated to and fro in the mist. So after all, André aroused to semi-consciousness penetrated the fog, so after all …
If he switched on the lights he would have to see the rats! His cigarettes were nearby on the table and he managed to light one in the dark. Listening to the darkness, he was conscious of the sharp scuffle of the rats and the loud beating of his heart. Puffing flaccidly at his cigarette, his last link with sanity, he tried to shake from his mind the persistent visual image of a decapitated dead rat. Inky spurts of blood trickled slowly out of the rat’s neck. The grey body coughed convulsively and the belly gradually flattened out like a punctured tube. He watched the lighted end of his cigarette butt shudder in the darkness. There was no longer an outer objective world. (And perhaps, he thought with sudden delirious vision, there never was.)
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