Black Spring (15 page)

“Omoplate?” says Jill promptly.

“No, not that. Omo … omo …”

“Omphalos?”

“No, no. Omo … omo …”

“I’ve got it,” cries Jill. “Omophagia!”

“Omophagia, that’s it! Do you like that word? Take it away with you! What’s the matter? You’re not drinking. Jill, where the hell’s that cocktail shaker I found the other day in the dumbwaiter? Can you imagine it-a cocktail shaker! Anyway, you people seem to think that literature is something vitally necessary. It ain’t. It’s just literature. I could be making literature too-if I didn’t have these refugees to feed. You want to know what the present is? Look at that window over there. No, not there … the one above. There! Every day they sit there at that table playing cards-just the two of them. She’s always got on a red dress. And he’s always shuffling the cards. That’s the present. And if you add another word it becomes subjunctive….”

“Jesus, I’m going to see what those girls are doing,” says Jill.

“No you don’t! That’s just what they’re waiting for -for you to come and help them. They’ve got to learn that this is a real world. I want them to understand that. Afterwards I’ll find them jobs. I’ve got lots of jobs on hand. First let them cook me a meal.”

“Elsa says everything’s ready. Come on, let’s go inside.”

“Anna, Anna, bring these bottles inside and put them on the table!”

Anna looks at Jabberwhorl helplessly.

“There you are! They haven’t even learned to speak English yet. What am I going to do with them? Anna … bier! ‘Raus mit ‘em! Versteht? And pour yourself a drink, you blinking idiot.”

The dining room is softly lighted. There is a candelabra on the table and the service glitters. Just as we are sitting down the phone rings. Anna gathers up the long cord and brings the apparatus from the piano to the sideboard just behind Cronstadt. “Hello!” he yells, and unslacking the long cord, “just like the intestines … hello! Oui! Oui, madame … je suis le Monsieur Cronstadt … et votre nom, s’il vous plait? Oui, it y a un salon, un entresol, une cuisine, deux chambres a coucher, une Salle de bain, un cabinet … oui, madame…. Non, ce n’est pas cher, pas cher du tout … on peut s’arranger facilement … comme vous voulez, madame…. A queue heure? Oui … avec plaisir…. Comment? Que dites-vous? Ah non! Au contraire! ca sera un plaisir … un grand plaisir…. Au revoir, madame!” Slamming it up-“Kuss die Hand, madame! Would you like your back scratched, madame? Do you take milk with your coffee, madame? Will you …?

“Listen,” says Jill, “who the hell was that? You were pretty smooth with her. Oui, madame … non, madame! Did she promise to buy you a drink too?” Turning to us-“Can you imagine it, he has an actress up here yesterday while I’m taking a bath … some trollop from the Casino de Paris … and she takes him out and gets him soused….”

“You don’t tell that right, Jill. It’s this way … I’m showing her a lovely apartment-with a dumbwaiter in it-and she says to me won’t you show me your poetry —poesie … sounds better in French … and so I bring her up here and she says I’ll have them printed for you in Belgian.”

“Why Belgian, Jab?”

“Because that’s what she was, a Belgian-or a Belgianess. Anyway, what difference does it make what language they’re printed in? Somebody has to print them, otherwise nobody will read them.”

“But what made her say that-so quick like?”

“Ask me! Because they’re good, I suppose. Why else would people want to print poems?”

“Baloney! “

“See that! She doesn’t believe me.”

“Of course I don’t! If I catch you bringing any prima donnas up here, or any toe dancers, or any trapeze artists, or anything that’s French and wears skirts, there’s going to be hell to pay. Especially if they offer to print your poems!”

“There you are,” says Jabberwhorl, glaucous and glowbry. “That’s why I’m in the real estate business…. Go ahead and eat, you people…. I’m watching.”

He mixes another dose of cognac and pepper.

“I think you’ve had enough,” says Jill. “Jesus, how many of them have you had today?”

“Funny,” says Jabberwhorl, “I fixed her up all right a few moments ago-just before you came-but I can’t fix myself up….”

“Jesus, where’s that goose!” says Jill. “Excuse me, I’m going inside and see what the girls are doing.”

“No you don’t!” says Jab, pushing her back into her seat. “We’re gonna sit right here and wait … wait and see what happens. Maybe the goose’ll never come. We’ll be sitting here waiting … waiting forever … just like this, with the candles and the empty soup plates and the curtains and … I can just imagine us sitting here and some one outside plastering a wall around us…. We’re sitting here waiting for Elsa to bring the goose and time passes and it gets dark and we sit here for days and days…. See those candles? We’d eat ‘em. And those flowers over there? Them too. We’d eat the chairs, we’d eat the sideboard, we’d eat the alarm clock, we’d eat the cats, we’d eat the curtains, we’d eat the bills and the silverware and the wallpaper and the bugs underneath … we’d eat our own dung and that nice new fetus Jill’s got inside her … we’d eat each other….”

Just at this moment Pinochinni comes in to say good night. She’s hanging her head like and there’s a quizzical look in her eye.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?” says Jill. “You look worried.”

“Oh, I don’t know what it is,” says the youngster. “There’s something I want to ask you about… . It’s awfully complicated. I don’t really know if I can say what I mean.”

“What is it, snookums?” says Jab. “Say it right out in front of the lady and the gentleman. You know him, don’t you? Come on, spit it out!”

The youngster is still holding her head down. Out of the corner of her eye she looks up at her father slyly and then suddenly she blurts out: “Oh, what’s it all about? What are we here for anyway? Do we have to have a world? Is this the only world there is and why is it? That’s what I want to know.”

If Jabberwhorl Cronstadt was somewhat astonished he gave no sign of it. Picking up his cognac nonchalantly, and adding a little cayenne pepper, he answered blithely: “Listen, kid, before I answer that question if you insist on my answering that question-you’ll have to first define your terms.”

Just then there came a long shrill whistle from the garden.

“Mowgli!” says Cronstadt. “Tell him to come on up.91

“Come up!” says Jill, stepping to the window.

No answer.

“He must have gone,” says Jill. “I don’t see him any more.”

Now a woman’s voice floats up. “Il est saoul … completement saoul.”

“Take him home! Tell her to take him home!” yells Cronstadt.

“Mon mari dit qu’il faut rentrer chez vous … oui, chez vous.”

“Y’en a pas!” floats up from the garden.

“Tell her not to lose my copy of Pound’s Cantos,” yells Cronstadt. “And don’t ask them up again … we have no room here. Just enough space for German refugees.”

“That’s a shame,” says Jill, coming back to the table.

“You’re wrong again,” says Jab. “It’s very good for him.”

“Oh, you’re drunk,” says Jill. “Where’s that damned goose anyhow? Elsa! Elsa!”

“Never mind the goose, darling! This is a game. We’re going to sit here and outlast ‘em. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam today…. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you people sat here just like you are and I began to grow smaller and smaller … until I got to be just a tiny, weeny little speck … so that you had to have a magnifying glass to see me? I’d be a little spot on the tablecloth and I’d be saying-Timoor … Ti-moor! And you’d say where is he? And I’d be saying-Timoor, logodaedaly, glycophos-phates, Billancourt, Ti-moor … 0 timbus twaddle down the brawkish brake … and you’d say….”

“Jesus, Jab, you’re drunk!” says Jill. And Jabberwhorl glausels with gleerious glitter, his awbrous orbs atwit and atwitter.

“He’ll be getting cold in a minute,” says Jill, getting up to look for the Spanish cape.

“That’s right,” says Jab. “Whatever she says is right. You think I’m a very contrary person. You,” he says, turning to me, “you with your Mongolian verbs, your transitives and intransitives, don’t you see what an affable being I am? You’re talking about China all the time … this is China, don’t you see that? This… this what? Get me the cape, Jill, I’m cold. This is a terrible cold … sub-glacial cold. You people are warm, but I’m freezing. I can f eel the ice caps coming down again. A fact. Everything is rolling along nicely, the dollar is falling, the apartments are rented, the refugees are all refuged, the piano is tuned, the bills are paid, the goose is cooked and what are we waiting for? For the next Ice Age! It’s coming tomorrow morning. You’ll go to the window and everything’ll be frozen tight. No more problems, no more history, no more nothing. Settled. We’ll be sitting here like this waiting for Anna to bring in the goose and suddenly the ice will roll over us. I can feel the terrible cold already, the bread all icicled, the butter blenched, the goose gazzled, the walls wildish white. And that little angel, that bright new embryo that Jill’s got under her belt, that’ll be frozen in the womb, a glairy gawk with ice-cold wings and the lips of a snail. Jugger, jugger, and everything’ll be still and quiet. Say something warm! My legs are frozen. Herodotus says that on the death of its father the phoenix embalms the body in an egg made of myrrh and once every five hundred years or so it conveys the little egg embalmed in myrrh from the desert of Arabia to the temple of the sun at Heliopolis. Do you like that? According to Pliny there is only one egg at a time and when the bird perceives that its end is near it builds a nest of cassia twigs and frankincense and dies upon it. From the body of the nest is born a little worm which becomes the phoenix. Hence bennu, symbol of the resurrection. How’s that? I need something hotter. Here’s another one…. The firewalkers in Bulgaria are called Nistingares. They dance in the fire on the twentyfirst of May during the feast of Saint Helena and Saint Constantine. They dance on the red-hot embers until they’re blue in the face, and then they utter prophecies.”

“Don’t like that at all,” says Jill.

“Neither do I,” says Jab. “I like the one about the little soul-worms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. Jill’s got one inside her too … it’s sprouting and sprouting. Can’t stop it. Yesterday it was a tadpole, tomorrow it’ll be a honeysuckle vine. Can’t tell what it’s going to be yet … not eventually. It dies in the nest every day and the next day it’s born again. Put your ear to her belly … you can hear the whirring of its wings. Whirrrr … whirrrr. Without a motor. Wonderful! She’s got millions of them inside her and they’re all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrrr … whirrrr. And if you just put a needle inside and punctured the bag they’d all come whirring out … imagine it … a great cloud of soul-worms … millions of them … and so thick the swarm that we wouldn’t be able to see each other…. A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what’s inside of you … the great vertiginous vertebration … the zoospores and the leucocytes … the wamroths and the holenlindens … every one’s a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too-the finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he slithers and slathers, he’s dithy and clabberous, he has a colon and intestines, he’s vermiform and ubisquishous. And Mowgli in the garden whistling for the rent, he’s a poem too, a poem with big ears, a wambly bretzular poem with logamundiddy of the goo-goo. He has round, auricular daedali, round robin-breasted ruches that open up like an open barouche. He wambles in the wambhorst whilst the whelkin winkles … he wabbles through the wendish wikes whirking his worstish wights… . Mowgli… owgli … whist and wurst….”

“He’s losing his mind,” says Jill.

“Wrong again,” says Jabber. “I’ve just found my mind, only it’s a different sort of mind than you imagined. You think a poem must have covers around it. The moment you write a thing the poem ceases. The poem is the present which you can’t define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don’t have to take a ferryboat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink. Did I ever tell you about it? There were two faucets, one called Froid and the other Chaud. Froid lived a life in extenso, by means of a rubber hose attached to his schnausel. Chaud was bright and modest. Chaud dripped all the time, as if he had the clap. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went to the Mosque where there was a clinic for venereal faucets. Tuesdays and Fridays Froid had to do all the work. He was a bugger for work. It was his whole world. Chaud on the other hand had to be petted and coaxed. You had to say “not so fast,” or he’d scald the skin off you. Once in a while they worked in unison, Froid and Chaud, but that was seldom. Saturday nights, when I washed my feet at the sink, I’d get to thinking how perfect was the world over which these twain ruled. Never anything more than this iron sink with its two faucets. No beginnings and no ends. Chaud the alpha and Froid the omega. Perpetuity. The Gemini, ruling over life and death. Alpha-Chaud running out through all degrees of Fahrenheit and Reaumur, through magnetic filings and comets’ tails, through the boiling cauldron of Mauna Loa into the dry light of the Tertiary moon; Omega-Froid running out through the Gulf Stream into the paludal bed of the Sargasso Sea, running through the marsupials and the f oramini-fera, through the mammal whales and the Polar fissures, running down through island universes, through dead cathodes, through dead bone and dry rot, through the follicles and tentacles of worlds unformed, worlds untouched, worlds unseen, worlds unborn and forever lost. Alpha-Chaud dripping, dripping; Omega-Froid working, working. Hand, feet, hair, face, dishes, vegetables, fish washed clean and away; despair, ennui, hatred, love, jealousy, crime … dripping, dripping. I, Jabberwhorl, and my wife Jill, and after us legions upon legions … all standing at the iron sink. Seeds falling down through the drain: young canteloupes, squash, caviar, macaroni, bile, spittle, phlegm, lettuce leaves, sardines’ bones, Worcestershire sauce, stale beer, urine, bloodclots, Kruschen salts, oatmeal, chew tobacco, pollen, dust, grease, wool, cotton threads, match sticks, live worms, shredded wheat, scalded milk, castor oil. Seeds of waste falling away forever and forever coming back in pure draughts of a miraculous chemical substance which refuses to be named, classified, labeled, analyzed, or drawn and quartered. Coming back as Froid and Chaud perpetually, like a truth that can’t be downed. You can take it hot or cold, or you can take it tepid. You can wash your feet or gargle your throat; you can rinse the soap out of your eyes or drive the grit out of the lettuce leaves; you can bathe the new-born babe or swab the rigid limbs of the dead; you can soak bread for fricadellas or dilute your wine. First and last things. Elixir. I, Jabberwhorl, tasting the elixir of life and death. I, Jabberwhorl, of waste and H2O composed, of hot and cold and all the intermediate realms, of scum and rind, of finest, tiniest substance never lost, of great sutures and compact bone, of ice fissures and test tubes, of semen and ova fused, dissolved, dispersed, of rubber schnauscl and brass spigot, of dead cathodes and squirming infusoria, of lettuce leaves and bottled sunlight … I, Jabberwhorl, sitting at the iron sink am perplexed and exalted, never less and never more than a poem, an iron stanza, a boiling follicle, a lost leucocyte. The iron sink where I spat out my heart, where I bathed my tender feet, where I held my first child, where I washed my sore gums, where I sang like a diamond-backed terrapin and I am singing now and will sing forever though the drains clog and the faucets rust, though time runs out and I be all there is of present, past and future. Sing, Froid, sing transitive! Sing, Chaud, sing intransitive! Sing Alpha and Omega! Sing Hallelujah! Sing out, 0 sink! Sing while the world sinks …”