Blue Voyage: A Novel (14 page)

Coo-hoo
, Parthenia! I see you, Maybelle! I know it was you who slapped me, Nottie Lottie!… There’s a corporal in the grass … Smith, impersonating a satyr, runs with a resinous torch and thrusts it under a translucent chlamys, igniting it. Parthenia is burned. Goes off flaming. Ha ha!… Splendid old Smith … This is what it is to be
homo sapiens,
the laughing animal, the animal who remembers and foresees … Smith and the clairvoyant—the clairvoyant corporal springs out of the deep grass, skull-faced and hideous, and grimly pursues poor old Smith, who screams among the tombstones—Flottie, Hyacintha, Partha, Flow, Boybell, Dole, Violent. He is felled like an ox. To what green altar, oh mysterious priest? And all his crispy flanks in garlic dressed. The uses of assonance. Gloom and gleam. Birth and death. Love and live. Mingle and mangle. Fix and flux. Prick and puck. Pop and pap. Twit and tot. Point and punt. Dram and dream. So near and yet so far … What if it were at last possible to talk of
everything
with a woman? To keep no secrets, no dark recesses of the mind, no dolors and danks, which could not be shared with her? But then she would have ceased to be attractive. Is it simply because we have to
pose
before her … to pretend to be angels … the angel with the sword?…
Ah, the awful fixed curve of determinism
! M
ISERY
… You overhear all these reflections, Cynthia?… All, maggot … Forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive me. I am horrible but I am penitent. I will crawl on my knees to the Bilbao Canal and drink of its filthy waters. I will bathe in slime. I will fill my belly with ashes. I will go naked, and show the corns on my feet, the mole on my right fess. I will work for ninety-nine years in a Chinese rice field, sleeping in the mud. I will pray to Kwannon to purify my heart. I will hop on one foot all the way from Sofia to Jerusalem, speaking to no one, and die at the foot of the cross: the weeping cross. You have seen, in Mount Auburn cemetery (beautiful isn’t it), that tombstone of white marble … with a marble lamb … upon which, annually on a certain day, two drops of blood are found? Those drops of blood are mine. Expiation. On the twenty-eighth of February each year, in the evening, I go there and cut my left wrist, letting two drops fall on the stone. Twenty-eight is my fatal number. The moon is shining when I arrive. Snow is on the ground and on the graves. Snow covers the obscene vaults. Crows are asleep in pine trees. The snow plough moans along Mt. Auburn Street … And I, solitary, grieving, expiate the sin and horror of the world—its grossness, its cruelty, its ugliness; its triviality, its vileness, its deceit. Bowed with sorrow, I ascend the little snow-covered hill by the tower, pass over it westward, and come to the Lamb. Then I take from my wallet a razor blade (Gillette) and gash slightly the left wrist … In heaven, those two drops of blood fall like thunderclaps. The angels fly up like doves. God, asleep, has a dream. He dreams: “The infinite darkness is gashed redly with a sword, and from the gash pours a torrent of blood. I am no longer unconscious suffering—I become an awareness and a shape. I am the region worm—the undying and infinite and eternal caterpillar; and I am the host of red-eyed ants who attack him in every part and devour him forever. The infliction and reception of pain comes to me from every particle of the caterpillar world. And the particles become more conscious. The chorus of suffering swells unceasingly: it is the sound of the world—the sound of sorrow. Who will teach me how I may again return into the darkness of nescience? What Siegfried will ring his ram’s horn and destroy both Fafnar and himself? What messianic atom among my wailing myriads will so crucify himself and die that his death will carry in its train A
LL
D
EATH
?… I writhe with all my length … Oh, man, save me!… But all I hear is the sound of gnawing and moaning, the sound as of the ten million silkworms which in China, at night, keep travelers awake with their champing of mulberry leaves … C
LAP
! C
LAP
!… What is that? Two drops of blood! Man begins to destroy himself: out of horror for his own nature, at the nature of Me. It is the beginning of the end! Ah! peace will return to me! I will return at last into the womb of nothing!” …
Tin-tin
. Two bells. One o’clock. I ought to be asleep. One three five seven nine eleven thirteen fifteen. Two four six eight ten twelve … One four seven ten thirteen sixteen nineteen twenty-two twenty-five … I’m on my belly with my palms crossed under my chest, right cheek on pillow. But the right nostril obstructs. On my back again, carefully, these damned ship-folded bedclothes come apart so easily. The cat’s prayer. Give us this day our daily mouse. And forgive us our trespusses as we forgive those who trespuss against us … I really ought to give up this awful habit of punning. Just the same, I always regretted not saying, when her knitted sleeve caught in the log and stopped its ticking (reducing the day’s run), “A miss is as good as a mile!” That was when we were discussing Brooke’s poetry. And I quoted—“
And suddenly there’s no meaning in our kiss
…
And your lit, upward face grows, where we lie, Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, and dumb and mad and eyeless, like the sky
…” I told her also of the Catholic poetess (so tiresomely self-conscious and exquisite) who remarked about his poem “
Heaven
”—“So stupid, don’t you think? So very stupid!” Squamous, omnipotent, and kind. Mrs. Battiloro frightens and annoys me in the same way. What was her phrase about Moore, when I repeated his comment on Yeats? Something deliciously Victorian. Hm. Offensive … No. Noisome. No.—What the devil! Lie in wait for it. How exasperating, especially when sleepless. O
DIOUS
! Yes. An odious person! I laughed, and she was annoyed. She didn’t invite me to come again—I said good-by to her in the dining room, where she was giving instructions to the maid for the dinner party. Who was coming to that dinner party? How I longed to know! Good-by, she said, and turned back to her silver and her refectory table (which I had been brought to see!). Refractory table. That’s what old man Tucker always called it—frosty-faced old fool. Table tipping. Ectoplasm. That reminds me of old Duggan in his shirt sleeves behind the counter, taking his false teeth out of the cigar box on the window sill. I ought to have told Cynthia about him. When his wife died! “I miss her terribly, the lovely little dear … I was looking at her grave … It looks sort of bare. I ought to set out some flowers there. I thought maybe some Christian anthems would look nice?” Chrysanthemums. When I took M. there, hoping to get Duggan to repeat it (how heartless), it all went off like clockwork, even to the furtive tear on his cheek. Poor old Duggan. His wife was like the sheep knitter in
Alice
. Cancer of the liver. Dying in that shabby little shop, selling tins of tobacco, ten cents’ worth of stale peppermints, sardines, glue, shoe strings. Patient and kind. I was his only friend—almost impossible to get away from him some evenings—he followed me to the door, talking, reluctant to have me go … Breaking out violently about some of his neighbors—particularly the O’Briens, whom he hated. Their hens getting into his yard, “smelling up” the place, waking his wife in the morning. A God-damned nuisance. I’ve complained, and I’ll keep right on complaining. Yes, by God, I will: Think they own the place by God … The shop shut, and cheap crepe hanging from the latch. The curtains drawn. Afterward he had a fox-terrier pup to keep him company—it was run over and killed. Then a timid little mongrel, sleeping in a box by the stove. “Yes, you know, she keeps me company—and you’ll be surprised how much she understands” … He got his own meals—bacon and fried potatoes. Moonshine whisky—a fine plume he used to breathe out sometimes in the evening! “These travelers you know—
they
know where to get it” … The Greens were nice to him when his wife died—but nobody else was. Not a soul. Poor old man. M
ISERY
. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Would you like to kiss your father? No. The others were lifted up and kissed the dead face, surprised. Why did I refuse? Shyness and horror. The people sitting there, after the service, staring and weeping. The parson wearing a queer thing with white sleeves and the Bible with a pale purple ribbon, and the parson’s mouth getting moist at the corners when he talked. Then we sat in the carriage … feeling that we oughtn’t to talk or look out … Trot trot. Clop clop. The palmettos swayed and flashed. The moss was hanging in long gray streamers. The shell road glared in the sunlight. Too hot to walk barefoot. What flower had that been that smelled so sweet?… Tuberoses … The mortuary tuberose. Tomb-smelling tuberose. Trot trot. The sidewalks lined with crowds of staring niggers, niggers smelling blood and death. That murder I saw from the front “stoop”—
bang bang bang bang bang,
and the man’s felt hat falling off, and his head sinking down on his breast, and the niggers flocking like ravens, flocking and cawing, while the murderer (a fireman whom I knew, who owned a pet monkey) stood there in his shirt sleeves, unmoving, as if surprised at what he’d done …
Was
it he who walked past the porch, a year later, in shirt sleeves, carrying an empty coal scuttle? Back from the penitentiary, or the chain gang?… Disappointed at not seeing the mark on his face. If I had kissed him—or perhaps it didn’t show anyway. Somebody said—Harry it was—that one of his eyes had come out and rolled across the floor. The bloodstained mattress had been put in the outhouse—I and Harry went and looked at it, pretending that we were looking for the kittens.
Felo de se
. Being pushed forward, in the crowd at the cemetery, to the edge of the grave. Sandy soil. An arrangement of pulleys and bands of canvas. Ashes to ashes. A little dust taken in the same parson’s clean fingers. And dust to dust. Then the shovels, more businesslike.—My father. My father which art in earth. It was just over there he took my picture once, on the bluff by the river. In the white duck sailor suit. Hollow be thy name.… Julian, who said that it was always in the presence of death, or in the thought of it, that life, and therefore love (reproductive) most astonishingly asserted itself. He meant the merely physical. Quite understandable. Ain’t Nature horrible? Love and Death. In Latin almost the same—ditto Italian. Death sacred and love profane. Eunice telling me of her friend the trained nurse, Miss Paine. Miss Paine was fond of poetry, she read Keats and Shelley. Periodically, she developed a taste for lubricious fiction. Presbyterian. Strong self-control,—but also strong passions. On that case in East Orange, on the night when the father died, the son, aged eighteen, through whose room she had to pass, put out his hand to her. She said afterward she couldn’t understand it—it had seemed so right. So absolutely right. The strain, the exhaustion, the grief, all breaking down into this other, this divine ecstasy, in which suffering has supremely its place. Her only experience of passion. Age: thirty. For a month afterward she did nothing but pray: the whole of Sunday spent at church. Forgive us, for we know not what we do. M
ISERY
. A child crying somewhere. The most desolating of all sounds is the sound of a child crying. Harrowing—makes you feel helpless. Might as well run, but then you can’t forget it. The echo rings in your ear.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh
…
oo-oo-oo … ah-h-h-h … oo-oo-oo-oo …
the first thing we do when born is cry. All language therefore must develop out of the sound of crying—it is probably most affecting when
plangent
for that reason. Make a note of that—and remember it. Spring it on somebody as if I’d always known it. There, there darling, don’t cry. There, there, darling, don’t cry. By baby bunting. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall. Lullaby.
Traumerei
. My father whistled the
Lorelei
to the cat—he had a theory that the
Lorelei,
whistled slowly, was infuriating to cats. But the cat seemed to be delighted. He would now be—let me see. He was thirty-seven. From nought is 8. Fifty-five. What would he think of me, I wonder. Would I be afraid of him still? I am taller than you are. I am more intelligent than you are. Freer from fetishes than you are … Look! You see that scar? You gave that to me, holding my hand in the gas jet … You see these plays? they come from the deep wound you inflicted on my soul … You see the unhappy restlessness with which I wander from continent to continent, this horrified and lack-luster restlessness which prevents me from loving one person or place for more than a season, driving me on, aimless and soulless? This is what you did to me by depriving me of my mother … Think of Silberstein saying that he wants to find his mother. He wants to die. O God—O God. To die—to die in the middle of a deep sleep, to sink deeper and deeper into the darkness … That’s of course, what
he
wanted—that poem he left on the table—the darkness—“
closer, closer all about, Blotting all the light of living out
.” Intra-uterine reversion. Perhaps the fact that
he
—will prevent
me
. Explode it. It was a sort of exhibitionism, leaving a poem on the table like that—defeated ego. Vanity. See what a great spirit has left you. Mighty, I spread my wings and left you … I suppose I liked him when I was very small, before the other kids were born—before I can remember. He must then have fascinated me and drawn me out powerfully and skillfully. Yes, I can feel that he did. There was something angelic about him—later it became diabolic. The angel that revolted. My God, what basilisk eyes, eyes that shot through you, tearing out thoughts, blood, and vertebrae. “Where is that other letter?” “There wasn’t any other letter.” “Look at me. Where is that other letter?” “But there wasn’t any other letter.” “You brought back three letters. Do you deny that you gave one of them to your mother?” “There were only two letters!” “Why did you sneak in by the back door?” “It was because there were some boys I didn’t want to meet——” “Don’t lie to me!… Why did you come in by the back door?” “It was because I saw ‘Butch’ Gleason.” … O God have mercy upon us. Pity us and have mercy upon us. Shine down upon us, star of the sea, and guide us gently to the haven of Heaven. Manumit us from slavery to our passions; deliver us from the tyranny of all-too-human reason. Take from us that part which makes us to suffer, and at whose bidding we bring suffering to others. And lead us down into darkness forever. M