The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (9 page)

Claude hit him on the side of the head with his open hand. Then Claude was on the ground. The man sunk his huge fist into Claude’s face; the latter’s nose seemed to explode, turn into a mass of red jelly. And he felt the man’s fist several more times, and the man’s boot as well.

VII.

After making his way to the hospital, where he received numerous stitches, he returned home, lay on the couch and cried. The woman-hunter in him, the man who sought out the beds of the females of the species for mere sport, seemed to be dying a tragic death; the body of Claude was now animated by a variety of weak and needy soul, a soul that cried out for Mirta’s stroke and affection, squealed to be treated to her coarse favours, ridden by her lard and grotesque self; and, exhausted from sleepless nights and unnatural emotional tension, he slept, dreamt of her as a great hippopotamus, her huge butt-like breasts spangled with a thousand greasy nipples and, crawling out from betwixt her gargantuan thighs, a multitude of beasts; a writhing viper of three heads; a slippery shark snapping at the air with blood-drenched fangs; a creature half scorpion and half man; a four-winged demon of storms who breathed hurricanes and pissed tidal waves; a dragon with the front feet of a cat and, for hind feet, the claws of a bird and a body shining with lubriciously wet scales; and others of complex and difficult to describe anatomy, some with huge proboscises, others with giant, flailing ears.

VIII.

Knowing that the man was there, holding tight to her wads of flesh, made him want her all the more; desire to sniff even the stench of their love making.

“
Oh, you are back,” she said, opening the door. She was wearing a transparent night-gown made out of some kind of synthetic material. It was not one of the garments he had bought her, but something cheaper, utterly whorish. “Your face does not look good. Not such a pretty boy anymore are you?”

“
Is he here?”

“
Egon? No, he is back in Berlin now.”

“
But . . .”

“
Shut up and come in. I know you have been craving me.”

He entered and kissed her neck.

“
I found a new place to live, a villa, and I want you and Egon to both be my roommates.”

“
You want us all to move in together?”

“
I have to get out of here dammit!” she cried peevishly. “The neighbours . . . they won’t stop complaining about the noise we make. . . .
Merde
! Do you think I should have to put up with that?”

“
But all of us together,” Claude said sullenly.

“
Well, if you don’t want to join us!”

“
This new place, how much is the rent?”

“
Four-thousand francs a month. Your share is twenty-five hundred.”

“
But four-thousand divided by . . .” The words died on his lips.

Mirta gave him an ominous look. “I don’t need to hear any complaints from you, boy. If you don’t like the arrangements you can just piss off.” And then she softened, her mood changed, she smirked. “Of course I only wanted to do it for you. . . . You had been complaining because I did not move in with you. . . . And then in the evening I might cook some nice meals for the three of us. . . . Raclette. . . . Lovely roast rabbit. . . . Lean flesh of ass.”

IX.

The place was giant, old and dirty, though grand in an infernal sort of way. Claude went from threshold to threshold, room to room, his voice echoing through the corridors and down the vast staircase. He cleaned, expended money on furniture and painted the walls himself, while Egon sat back, drank beer and grunted out instructions in German. He talked about football matches and told of how he had once killed a man in Hamburg by hitting him over the head with a cinder-block. Then Mirta would come in, exuding an odour of rancid grease, wearing tight leather trousers that emphasised her disgusting bulk; she would slide her tongue down Egon’s throat and then approach Claude, slap his flanks, pull his head down to her bosom while she loaded him with gross epithets.

She was a demon who could crush men with her enormous volume, destroy them with her sexual favours, a weapon was her very loins. Even when she was not physically there, he still felt some mass of congealed air around him; and prayed, on knees, with forehead glued to the ground, that he might hear her climactic bellow.

When he came home from work he was made to wear a cowbell about his neck and crawl around the house naked; the sound always alerted Mirta when he was near. Once, only once, he had the audacity to stuff the bell with hygienic tissue, but he was discovered and Egon beat him with a curtain rod. The hot meals he had been promised, the raclette, the roast rabbit, never appeared; instead, like a dog he was fed food from a can. She dressed him up like a clown, made him perform tricks like a trained seal. His dignity was flayed; at work he stooped like a hunchback and his colleagues avoided him; the boss had already reprimanded him twice for his slovenly appearance and distracted air; he was sure to be terminated before long.

And then summer ended and it was fall.

Rains came, day after day, and washed away the sides of hills, whole houses, parts of small villages. The lake ran over and threw its garbage and driftwood up over the embankments. Claude, during his lunch break, walked along the shore, through the park where he had first met her and then along the Viale Carlo Cattaneo. At the Viale Cassarate he stood on the bridge and stared down into the water. It was chocolate-brown and violent. It threw up liquid arms and dripping hands that seemed to grab, to want to pull him down, along, under. A whole tree drifted by. And he leaned over, tempted, and sacrificed several tears to the raging demon, which were mixed, broken into a trillion fragments, and thrown into the lake beyond.

He walked into the church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, sat down and wept. His bleary eyes looked up at the fresco there, that done by Bernardino Luini, of Christ Jesus crucified, but the work, the bright colours, the images of thieves, the sponge full of vinegar upraised on a reed, only made him feel more desperate.

X.

Egon, in the form of a great ox, suckled at her breast; he wore a crown plumed with ostrich feathers and on his back the skin of a panther. Claude saw her coupling with centaurs, fat-haunched satyrs, a minotaur; wallowing in pools of pus, her indecent body riveted by the lusts of countless beasts and devils. He woke up and walked to her room. Egon was there, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, his back, chest and legs were covered with thick black hair, like that of a wild animal. She lay twisted on the floor, the victim, of herself, of some brutal and perverted episode she had shared with the man. He turned, stared at Claude with dull, bloodshot eyes and Claude, frightened, slammed the door shut and then ran out onto the street screaming for the police like a woman.

XI.

Later, after Egon had been extradited back to Germany and sent to prison, Claude would take the train, visit him, bring cartons of cigarettes, offerings of wool socks, and beg to hear about her.

“
She was a hellhole,” Egon would say, staring through the Plexiglas barrier with stupid eyes. “A damn hellhole . . . always got my chicken roasted.”

And then Claude, stuttering out his words, asked for specifics; he wanted that imprisoned golem to speak of every oily detail, of Mirta and her games.

XII.

Wearing a blue wool vest and pants that terminated at the ankles, pants brown with dirt on the knees and rump, he would walk along the cobbled streets. The dark pits of his eyes, the drooping of his lower lip, were all signs, of the complete collapse of the inner man. And then at home, in the little apartment he had moved into, he spent his time slapping his own face, fantasising about her, flinging the last of his manhood into the latrine.

He was abject, finished, because he would never find a woman half so disgusting as Mirta, and even his imagination was insufficient to supply the filth.

The Dancing Billionaire

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?

O sweet content!

Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex’d?

O punishment!

—
Thomas Dekker

I.

“
I am afraid that he is an ineffectual boy.”

“
Is a boy meant to be effectual? What exactly is it you expect him to effect?”

“
I have always hoped that he would become more . . . strident.”

“
You have strange ambitions and, pardon my saying, unrealistic expectations. Every human being has its own temperament,—an artistic nature should not be manhandled.”

“
I have the ambitions of a father. A man does not like to see his son peter out so early in life.”

“
I did not notice that he had ever petered on. To me he simply seems like a rather frail boy. He may not have the over——Well, the same bearing as his father, but he is a nice enough child. Have some sympathy for him Ralph. A man should love his offspring.”

The man and woman walked over the grounds, and though one man, one woman, they were the same of nose, of gesture, the family’s eyes, brownish beads floating on oval faces, jaws ever so slightly salient. . . . They rise on their toes, their gait uplifting in aspiration, uncapped pride. . . . Sun, moon; organs sexual, jointly different, german; beads quivering down the atavistic rosary, dropped from ovaries consanguineous, spermazoa mutual, produced in similar sessions of grave copulation.

II.

The child stood alone on the lawn beside the great house. You know that the sky was blue, that there were a few white clouds. You know that the weather was warm, and all around the smell of fresh cut grass.

He heard the laughter, from an open window, and knew that they, the adults, were within,—drinking things that he could not drink, bitter sweet, the cause of that mild, quaint delirium.

He walked to the tennis court and watched the groundskeeper pull minute weeds from the cracks. The man looked up and smiled at him, a little sadly, and he, condescendingly, smiled back.

With arms folded the child kicked his toe against the court—a piquant spasm of dissatisfaction—and studied the other opposite him: The man on hands and knees, his years doing little to distinguish him from the worm of the earth, the groping creature of the soil. A bird sang from a nearby tree. The young, upright human both enjoyed and respected that beauty of nature, though he might despise the callousness of man.

The groundskeeper, whose name was Oliver, took up the bucket of weeds he had pulled and walked to the flower garden. The child, whose name was Allen, followed him, without speaking. He watched in silent disdain and interest as Oliver weeded around the French marigolds, of which there was a full bed. He could smell the pregnant, female earth, but was not tempted to touch it, just as he liked the brown back of the man’s neck, wrinkled and rough, without desire for more intimate knowledge of its texture.

A butterfly fluttered by Allen, landing amid nearby carnations. He snuck up to it and grabbed it in his pale and delicate hands, crushing it, painting them with the powder of its wings.

“
A painted lady,” he lisped, letting the corpse drop to the ground.

*

His father, thick-figured, moustached, hair tending to mouse colour, a small glass of hard drink in hand; his father laughed, the sound swelling from deep in his torso, organic; teeth showing, a cigar rolling between fingers, smoke magnetizing toward the ceiling. . . . Allen saw the eyes meet him, momentarily, traitors of the man’s apprehension. . . . Yes, he, Ralph, was made nervous by that thin, China-white manikin standing there, that pompous sprout of unwanted fibre, that child against nature, even at such a young age haloed by an aura of self-satisfaction. God knows he must have questioned his wife’s fidelity, or put all the blame on her sickly, inbred line. But maybe that woman’s weakness, her frailty of carriage, her demi-royal descent, had been the real, original attraction. Was not love that melting confusion, recklessness, of contorted limbs, slavering of eyes, words said and compression of hopes to pain?

There were those suited giants, billowy women, enjoyment, or what adults call enjoyment, seek for. And in the library, where he wandered to with surly steps, a piece of marzipan in hand, dissolving in his mouth, creamed along his gums; in the library he saw her sitting. A girl about his own age, a large picture book on her lap.

“
Hello,” he said.

The scrutiny on his part was obvious, lids half closed, mouth slowly churning.

“
There is more in the kitchen,” he remarked.

“
More?”

“
There is more marzipan in the kitchen, if that’s what you want. I won’t get it for you, but it is sitting there,—a whole bowl of it.”

“
I don’t like marzipan, and I’m not to eat sweets except at dessert,” her girl’s voice, crisp with English accent, upper class cadence.

And then there was his aunt, echoing from without, calling his name.

“
Allen!” she cried, as she came blowing through the door. “There you are Allen. . . . There you are children,” her eyes wide with eccentricity.