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《American Ghosts and Old World Wonders》
Lizzies Tiger -1
When the circus came to town and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way. It was the time of the greatest parsimony in their fathers house; everyone knows the first huhousand is the most difficult and the dollar bills were breeding slowly, slowly, even if he practised a little touch of usury on the side to prick his cash in the dire of greater productivity. In aen years time, the War betweeates would provide rich pigs for the coffin-makers, but, back then, ba the Fifties, well -- if he had been a praying man, he would have gone down on his knees for a little outbreak of summer cholera or a touch, just a touch, of typhoid. To his chagrin, there had been nobody to bill when he had buried his wife.
For, at that time, the girls were just freshly orphaned. Emma was thirteen, Lizzie four -- stern and square, a squat regle of a child. Emma parted Lizzies hair in the middle, stretched it back over each side of her bulging forehead and braided it tight. Emma dressed her, undressed her, scrubbed her night and m with a damp flannel, and humped the great lump of little girl around in her arms whenever Lizzie would let her, although Lizzie was not a demonstrative child and did not show affe easily, except to the head of the house, and then only when she wanted something. She knew where the power was and, intuitively feminine in spite of her gruff appea99lib?hts, but here only shadowy undergrowth, stirring, and then the call of a night bird.
The pig paused to rootle the earth, but when Lizzie reached out to stroke it, it shook its ears out of its eyes and took off at a great pato the tryside. However, her attention was immediately diverted from this disappoi by the sight of a man who stood with his back to the lights, leaning slightly forward. The cider-barrel-spigot soued itself. Fumbling with the front of his trousers, he turned round and tripped over Lizzie, because he was a little unsteady on his feet and she was scarcely to be seen among the shadows. He bent down and took hold of her shoulders.
"Small child," he said, and belched a puff of acridity into her face. Lurg a little, he squatted right down in front of her, so they were on the same level. It was so dark that she could see of his faly the hint of moustache above the pale half-moon of his smile.
"Small girl," he corrected himself, after a closer look. He did not speak like ordinary folks. He was not from around these parts. He belched again, and again tugged at his trousers. He took firm hold of her right hand and brought it tenderly up between his squatting thighs.
"Small girl, do you know what this is for?"
She felt buttons; serge; something hairy; something moist and moving. She didnt mind it. He kept his hand on hers and made her rub him for a minute or two. He hissed between his teeth: "Kissy, kissy from Missy?"
Lizzies Tiger -2
She did mind that and shook an obdurate head; she did not like her fathers hard, dry, imperative kisses, and ehem only for the sake of power. Sometimes Emma touched her cheek lightly with unparted lips. Lizzie would allow no more. The man sighed when she shook her head, took her hand away from the crotch, softly folded it up on its fingers and gave her hand ceremoniously back to her.
"Gratuity," he said, felt in his pocket and nipped her a heraightened up and walked away. Lizzie put the in her pinafore pocket and, after a moments thought, stumped off after the funny man along the still, secret edges of the field, curious as to what he might do .
But now surprises were going on all round her in the bushes, mewings, squeaks, rustlings, although the funny man paid no attention to them, not even when a stately fat woman rose up under his feet, huge as a moon and stark but for her stays, but for black cotton stogs held up by garters with silk rosettes on them, but for a majestic hat of black leghorn with feathers. The woman addressed the drunken man angrily, in a language with a good many ks in it, but he ploughed on indifferently and Lizzie scuttled unseen after, casting an inquisitive backward glance. She had never seen a womans naked breasts since she could remember, and this pair of melons jiggled entrangly as the fat woman shook her fist in the wake of the funny man before she parted her thighs with a wet smad sank down on her knees again in the grass in whiething unseen moaned.
Then a person scarcely as tall as Lizzie herself, dressed up like a little drummer-boy, somersaulted -- head over heels -- directly across their paths, muttering to himself as he did so. Lizzie had just the time to see that, although he was small, he was not shaped quite right, for his head seemed to have been pressed into his shoulders with some violence, but then he was gone.
Dont think any of this frightened her. She was not the kind of child that frightens easily.
Then they were at the back of a tent, not the big, striped tent, but another, smaller tent, where the funny man fumbled with the flap much as he had fumbled with his trousers. A bright mauve, ammoniac reek pulsed out from this tent; it was lit up inside like a ese lantern and glowed. At last he mao unfasten a inside. He did not so much as attempt to close up after him; he seemed to be in as great a hurry as the tumbling dwarf, so she slipped through too, but as soon as she was inside, she lost him, because there were so many other people there.
Feet of ers had worn all the grass from the ground and it had been replaced by sawdust, which soon stuck all over the mudpie Lizzie had bee. The tent was lined with cages on wheels, but she could not see high enough to see what was ihem, yet, mixed with the everyday chatter around her, she heard strange cries that did not e from human throats, so she knew she was on the right track.
She saw what could be seen: a young couple, arm in arm, he whispering in her ear, she giggling; a group of three grinning, gaping youths, poking sticks within the bars; a family that went down in steps of size, a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, down to a baby of ierminate sex in the womans arms. There were many more present, but these were the people she took at of.
The gagging stench was worse than a summer privy and a savage hullabaloo went on all the time, a r as if the sea had teeth.
She eeled her ast skirts and trousers and scratched, bare legs of summer boys until she was standing beside the biggest brother of the staircase family at the front of the crowd, but still she could not see the tiger, even if she stood on tiptoe, she saw only wheels and the red and gold base of the cage, whereon was depicted a woman without any clothes, much like the one in the grass outside only without the hat and stogs, and some foliage, with a gilded moon and stars. The brother of the staircase family was much older than she, perhaps twelve, and clearly of the lower class, but and respectable-looking, although the entire family possessed that pale, peculiar look characteristic of the mill operatives. The brother looked down and saw a small child in a filthy pinafore peering and straining upwards.
" Veux-tu voir le grand chat, ma petite?"
Lizzie did not uand what he said, but she knew what he was saying and nodded assent. Mother looked over the head of the good baby in the lace bo as her son heaved Lizzie up in his arms food look.
"Les poux. . ." she warned, but her son paid her no heed.
"Voilà, ma petite!"
The tiger walked up and down, up and down; it walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned. It burned shtly, she was scorched. Its tail, thick as her fathers forearm, twitched bad forth at the tip. The quick, loping stride of the caged tiger; its eyes like yellow s of a fn currency; its round, i, toy-like ears; the stiff whiskers stig out with an artificial look; the red mouth from which the bright noise came. It walked up and down on straw strewn with bloody bones.
The tiger kept its head down; questing hither and thither though i of what might not be told. All its motion was slung from the marvellous hau held so high you could have rolled a marble down its back, if it would have let you, and the marble would have run down an oblique ail it rolled over the domed forehead on to the floor. In its hihe tense muscles keened and sang. It was a miracle of dynamic suspension. It reached one end of the cage in a few paces and whirled around upon itself in one liquid motion; nothing could be quicker or more beautiful than its walk. It was all raw, vivid, exasperated nerves. Upon its pelt it bore the imprint of the bars behind which it lived.
The young lad who kept hold of her g tight as she lunged forward towards the beast, but he could not stop her clutg the bars of the cage with her little fingers aried but he could not dislodge them. The tiger stopped in its track halfway through its mysterious patrol and looked at her. Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes of New England entered with a shock the flat, mineral eyes of the tiger.
It seemed to Lizzie that they exged this card for an eime, the tiger and herself.
Then something strange happehe svelte beast fell to his knees. It was as if it had been subdued by the presence of this child, as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need meat. But only "as if". All we could see was, it k. A crackle of shock ran through the tent; the tiger was ag out of character.
Its mind remained, however, a law unto itself. We did not know what it was thinking. How could we?
It stopped r. Instead it started to emit a rattling purr. Time somersaulted. Space dimio the field of attractive force between the child and the tiger. All that existed in the whole world now were Lizzie and the tiger.
Then, oh! then. . . it came towards her, as if she were winding it to her on an invisible string by the exercise of pure will. I ot tell you how much she loved the tiger, nor how wonderful she thought it was. It was the power of her love that forced it to e to her, on its knees, like a pe. It dragged its pale belly across the dirty straw towards the bars where the little soft creature hung by its hooked fingers. Behind it followed the serpentih of its ceaselessly twitg tail.
There was a wrinkle in its nose and it buzzed and rumbled and they ook their eyes off one ahough her had the least idea what the other meant.
The boy holding Lizzie got scared and pummelled her little fists, but she would not let go a grip as tight and senseless as that of the newborn.
Crack! The spell broke.
The world bounded into the ring.
A lash cracked round the tigers ivorous head, and a glorious her into the cage brandishing in the hand that did not hold the whip a three-legged stool. He wore fawn breeches, black boots, a bright red jacket frogged with gold, a tall hat. A dervish, he; he beed, crouched, pointed with the whip, menaced with the stool, leaped and twirled in a brilliant ballet of mimic ferocity, the dance of the Taming of the Tiger, to whom the tamer gave no ce to fight at all.
The great cat unpeeled its eyes off Lizzies in a trice, rose up on its hind legs aed at the whip like our puss Ginger feints at a piece of paper dangled from a string. It batted at the tamer with its enormous paws, but the whip tio fuse, irritate and torment it and, what with the shouting, the suddeed baying of the crowd, the dreadful fusion of the signs surrounding it, habitual , a lifetimes training, the tiger whimpered, laid back its ears and scampered away from the whirling man to an obscure er of the stage, there to cower, while its flanks heaved, the picture of humiliation.
Lizzie let go of the bars and g, mudstains and all, to her young protector for fort. She was shaken to the roots by the attack of the trainer upoiger and her four-year-old roots were very he surface.
The tamer gave his whip a final, ptuous ripple around his adversarys whispers that made it sink its huge head on the floor. Then he placed one booted foot oigers skull and cleared his throat for speech. He was a hero. He was a tiger himself, but even more so, because he was a man.
"Ladies alemen, boys and girls, this inparable tiger known as the Sce of Bengal, and brought alive-oh to Boston from its native ju three short months before this present time, now, at my imperious and, offers you a perfect imitation of docility and obedience. But do not let the brute deceive you. Brute it was, and brute it remains. Not for nothing did it receive the soubriquet of Sce for, in its native habitat, it thought nothing of ing a dozen brown-skinned heathen for its breakfast and following up with a couple of dozen more for dinner!"
A pleasing shudder tihrough the crowd.
"This tiger," and the beast whickered ingratiatingly when he , "is the veritable ination of blood lust and fury; in a single instant, it turn from furry quiesto three hundred pounds, yes, three hundred pounds of death-dealing fury.
"The tiger is the cats revenge."
Oh, Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Cuddles, who sat mewing soriously oepost as Lizzie passed by; who would have thought you seethed with such rese!
The mans voice dropped to a fidential whisper and Lizzie, although she was in such a state, suerves, reised this was the same man as the one she had met behind the cider stall, although now he exhibited such erect mastery, not a single person ient would have thought he had been drinking.
"What is the nature of the boween us, between the Beast and Ma me tell you. It is fear. Fear! Nothing but fear. Do you know how insomnia is the plague of the tamer of cats? How all night long, every night, we pace our quarters, impossible to close our eyes for brooding on what day, what hour, what moment the fatal beast will choose to strike?
"Dont think I ot bleed, or that they have not wounded me. Under my clothes, my body is a palimpsest of scars, scar upon scar. I heal only to be once more broken open. No skin of mihat is not scar tissue. And I am always afraid, always; all the time in the ring, in the cage, now, this moment -- this very moment, boys and girls, ladies alemen, you see before you a man in the grip of mortal fear.
"Here and now I am in terror of my life.
"At this moment I am in this cage within a perfect death trap."
Theatrical pause.
"But," and here he khe tigers h his whipstock, so that it howled with pain and affront, "but. . ." and Lizzie saw the secret frog he kept within his trousers shift a little, ". . . but Im not half so scared of the big brute as it is of me!"
He showed his red maw in a laugh.
"For I bring to bear upon its killer instinct a rational mans knowledge of the power of fear. The whip, the stool, are instruments of bluff with which I create his fear in my arena. In my cage, among my cats, I have established a hierarchy of fear and among my cats you might well say I am top dog, because I know that all the time they want to kill me, that is their project, that is their iion. . . but as for them, they just dont know what I might do . No, sir!"
As if ented by the notion, he laughed out loud again, but by now the tiger, perhaps insed by the ued blow on the nose, rumbled out a clear and introvertible message of disaffe and, with a quick jerk of its sculptured head, flung the mans foot away so that, caught off-balance, he half toppled over. And theiger was no longer a thing of stillness, of hard edges and clear outlines, but a whizz of blad red, maw and es, in the air. On him.
The crowd immediately bayed.
But the tamer, with enormous presenind, seeing as how he was drunk, and, in the circumstances, with almost uny physical agility, bounced backwards on his boot-heels and thrust the tool he carried in his left hand into the fierce tigers jaws, leaving the tiger w, gnawing, destroying the harmless thing, as a ragged black boy quickly unlatched the cage door and out the tamer leaped, unscathed, amidst hurrahs.
Lizzies stunned little face was now mottled all over with a curious reddish-purple, with the heat of the tent, with passion, with the sudden access of enlighte.
To see the rest of the stupendous cat act, the audience would have had to buy aicket for the Big Top, besides the ticket for the menagerie, for which it had already paid, so, relut on the whole to do that, in spite of the promise of s and dang ladies, it soon got bored with watg the tiger splintering the wooden stool, and drifted off.
"Eh bien, ma petite," said her boy-o her in a sweet, singsong, ing voice. "Tu as vu la bête! La bête du cauchemar!"
The baby in the lace bo had slept peacefully through all this, but now began to stir and mumble. Its mother nudged her husband with her elbow.
"On va, Papa?"
The ing, smiling bht his bright pink lips down on Lizzies forehead for a farewell kiss. She could not bear that; she struggled furiously and shouted to be put down. With that, her cover broke and she burst out of her disguise of dirt and silence; half the remaining gawpers ient had kin been bleakly buried by her father, the rest owed him money. She was the most famous daughter in all Fall River.
"Well, if it aint Andrew Bordens little girl! What are they ucks doing with little Lizzie Borden?"
John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore-1
NOTE:
John Ford (1586-c.1639). English dramatist of the Jacobean period. His tragedy, Tis Pity Shes a Wliore, ublished in 1633. "Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got/With folded arms and melancholy hat." (Choice Drollery, 1656.)
John Ford (1895-1973). Ameri film-maker. Filmography includes: Stagecoach (1938); My Darling Clementine (1946); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns." (John Ford, Andrew Sinclair, New York 1979.)
There was a rancher had two children, a son and then a daughter. A while after that, his wife died and was buried uwo stiailed together to make a cross because there was no time, yet, to carve a stone.
Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighbourly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness? her. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an o in which she drowned.
She told her boy: "Look after your sister." He, blond, solemn, little; he ah sat with her in the room of logs her husband split to build. Death, with high cheek-bones, wore his hair in braids. His invisible presen the mocked the existence of the . The round-eyed boy clutched his mothers dry hand. The girl was younger.
Theher lay with the prairies and all that careless sky upon her breast, and the children lived in their fathers house. So they grew up. In his spare time the rancher chiselled at a rock: "Beloved wife of. . . mother of. . ." beh the space at the top he had left for his own name.
America begins and ends in the cold and solitude. Up here, she pillows her head upon the Arctiow. Down there, she dips her feet in the chilly waters of the South Atlantie of the perpetually restless albatross. America, with her torso of a woman at the time of this story, a woman with an hlass waist, a waist laced so tightly it snapped in two, a a belt of water there. America, with your child-bearing hips and your crotch of jungle, your swelling bosom of a nursing mother and your cold head, your cold head.
Its tral paradox resides in this: that the top half doesnt know what the bottom half is doing. When I say the two children of the prairie, suckled on those grees, were the pure children of the ti, you know at ohat they were norteamerios, or I would not speak of them in the English language, which was their language, the language that silehe babble of this tis multitude of tongues.
Blond children with broad, freckled faces, the boy in dungarees and the little girl in gingham and sunbo. In the old play, one John Ford called them Giovanni and Annabella; the other John Ford, in the movie, might call them Johnny and Annie-Belle.
Annie-Belle will bake bread, tramp the linen and cook the beans and ba; this lily of the West had not spare time enough to pause and sider the lilies of the field, who never do a hands turn. No, sir. A womans work is never done and she became a woman early.
The gaunt paterfamilias would drive them into town to chur Sundays with the black Bible on his knee wherein their names and dates of birth were inscribed. In the buggy, his shy, big-boow-headed son i, dark, Sunday clothes, and Annie-Belle, at thirteen, fourteen, increasingly asto and rendered shy by her own lonely fl. Fifteen. How pretty she was growing! They came to pray in Gods house that, like their own, was built of split logs. Annie-Belle kept her eyes down; she was a good girl. They were good children. The widower drank, sometimes, but not much. They grew up in silence, in the enormous silence of the empty land, the silehat swallowed up the Saturday-night fiddlers tune, mocked the rare laughter at weddings and christenings, echoed, a vast margin, around the sermons of藏书网 the preacher.
Silend spad an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.
Since his wife died, the rancher spoke rarely. They lived far out of town. He had no time for barn-raisings and church suppers. If she had lived, everything would have been different, but he occupied his spare moments in chiselling her gravestohey did not celebrate Thanksgiving for he had nothing for which to give thanks. It was a hard life.
The Ministers wife made sure Annie-Belle knew a thing or two when she judged it about the time the girls bleeding started. The Ministers wife, in a vague, pastoral way, thought about a husband for Annie-Belle, a wife for Johnny. "Out there, in that little house on the prairie, so lonesome. . . Nobody for those young folks to talk to cept cows, cows, cows."
What did the girl think? In summer, of the heat, and how to keep flies out of the butter; in winter, of the cold. I do not know what else she thought. Perhaps, as young girls do, she thought that a stranger would e to town and take her away to the city and so on, but, since her imagination began and ended with her experiehe farm, work, the seasons, I think she did not think so far, as if she knew already she was the object of the object of her own desire for, in the bright light of the New World, nothing is obscure. But when they were children, all they knew was they loved each other just as, surely, a brother or a sister should.
She washed her hair in a tub. She washed her long, yellow hair. She was fifteen. It ring. She washed her hair. It was the first time that year. She sat on the porch to dry her hair, she sat in the rog-chair which her mother selected from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, where her father would never sit, now. She propped a bit of mirror on the porch railing. It caught the sun and flashed. She bed out her wet hair in the mirror. There seemed to be an awful lot of it, tangling up the b. She wore only her petticoat, the men were off with the cattle, nobody to see her pale shoulders except that Johnny came back. The horse threw him, he knocked his head against the stone. Giddy, he came back to the house, leading his pony, and she was busy untangling her hair and did not see him, nor have a ce to cover herself.
"Why, Johnny, I declare --"
Imagine an orchestra behind them: the frame house, the porch, the rog-chair endlessly rog, like a cradle, the white petticoat with eyelet lace, her water-darkened hair hanging on her shoulders and little trickles running dowween her shallow breasts, the young man leading the limping po藏书网ny, and, inexhaustible as light, around them the tender land.
The "Love Theme" swells and rises. She jumps up to tend him. The jogged mirror falls.
"Seven years bad luck --"
In the fragments of the mirror, they ko see their round, blond, i faces that, superimposed upon one another, would fit at every feature, their faces, all at ohe same face, the face that never existed until now, the pure faerica.
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY
(Long shot) Farmhouse.
(Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.
Wissin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Mia, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in whiything is possible.
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY
(Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.
"Love Theme" up.
Dissolve.
No. It wasnt like that! Not in the least like that.
He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.
Annabella: Methinks you are not well.
Giovanni: Heres you and I. I think you love me, sister.
Annabella: Yes, you know I do.
And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they khey must not do it. . .do what? How did they know what to do? From watg the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were try children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the others face as if it were their own.
[Music plays.]
Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.
For pitys sake, I beg you!
[She kneels.]
Annabella: On my knees,
Brother, even by our mothers dust, I charge you
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
Love me, or kill me, brother.
[He kneels.]
Giovanni: On my knees,
Sister, even by our mothers dust, I charge you
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
Love me, or kill me, sister.
EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY
Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.
Empty rog-chair, rog, rog.
It is the boy -- or young man, rather -- who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work sists of the vague, undistinguished "work" of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.
And I imagine him with an intelligenourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet deh allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique panion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.
For surely it ot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!
Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? "Look after your sister." But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew holeasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.
Giovanni: I am lost forever.
Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.
INTERIOR. MINISTERS HOUSE. DAY
Diable. Ministers wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.
MINISTERS WIFE: Taint right, just aint right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.
MINISTERS SON: Shes terribly pretty, Mama.
The Ministers wife and the Miurn to look at the young man. He blushes slowly but prehensively.
The rancher knew nothing. He worked. He kept the iron core of grief within him rustless. He looked forward to his solitary, once-monthly drink, alone on the porch, and on those nights they took a d slept together in the log uhe patchwork quilt made in the "log " pattern by their mother. Each time they lay dowogether, as if she obeyed a voice that came out of the quilt tellio put the light out, she would extinguish the dle flame between her fiips. All around them, the tactility of the dark.
She pohe irreversibility of defloration. Acc to what the Ministers wife said, she had lost everything and was a lost girl. Ahis ge did not seem to have ged her. She turo the only one she loved, and the desolating space around them dimio that of the soft grave their bodies dented in the long grass by the creek. When winter came, they made quick, dangerous love among the lowis in the barn. The snow melted and all was green enough to blind you and there was a vinegarish smell from the rising of the sharp juices of spring.９９lｉb? and Toltec gods appear in giant forms. The church seems to have disappeared.
Wheual is done, all clears; the interior of the church is a shambles, however, the Christ over the altar cast down on its face. Johnny and the t pick themselves up from the floor, where the wind has left them. The t is coughing horribly, his face is livid; the rite has nearly killed him.
Outside, all is calm now, a clear, bright night. The moon is ba the heavens again. Johnny, a man in the grip of a mania, stern, firm, helps the shaking t to his feet.
"Where is the on?"
"He has e. Hes waiting. Hell give it to us."
Outside, against the wall, so still hes almost part of the landscape, an Indian sits in the dark, poncho, slouch hat, waiting, impassive.
The t, leaning heavily on Johnny, greets the Indian with some courtly ceremony. But Johnny barks: "Got the gun?"
"I got it."
The gun ges hands. Johnny grabs it.
"How much?"
"On at," says the Indian and grins. "On at."
He tips his hat. His pony, in the graveyard, grazes on a grave. The two Europeans watch him walk towards his pony, mount, ride. In the immeillness of the night, his hoofbeats diminish.
Johnny is the Wier repeater in his hands; it looks perfectly normal. Not used to guns, he ha clumsily. His disappoi is obvious.
"Whats so special about it? Could have bought one iore."
"It will fire seven bullets," says the t, impassive as any Indian. "And the seventh bullet is the ohat he put in it, it belongs to him."
"But --"
"The seventh bullet is the devils own. He will fire the seventh shot for you, even though you pull the trigger. But the other six t miss their targets. Though youve never used a gun before."
Incredulous, Johnny takes aim, fires at a movement in the darkness. He rushes towards the scream. His target, Teresas kitten, dead.
"Five left now, for your own use," says the t. "Use them sparingly. They e at a high price."
Teresa wants her kitten. "Kitty! Kitty!" But the kitte e. "The dogs have eaten it," says Teresas mother. "And hold still, Teresa, youre wriggling like an eel; how I fit your wedding-dress. . . ?"
Its a store-bought wedding-dress, e oagecoach from Mexico City. All white lace. And a veil! In front of the clouded mirror in Teresas bedroom, Maria pops the veil on her daughters head; what a picture. But Teresa sulks.
"I dont want to get married."
Too bad, Teresa! Tomorrow you must and will get married.
I wont. I wont!
You wont wheedle your father out of this one, not this time.
Teresa, in her wedding finery, picks out a few notes of the "Wedding March" on her piano; furious, she slams the lid shut.
Johnny, at the piano in the whorehouse, plays a few bars of the "Wedding March"; a wedding guest, drunk, flings his glass at the mirror behind the bar, smashing it. The whores superstitiously huddle and mutter. The place is packed out with wedding guests, all notable villains. But there is too much tension to be any joy. Roxana, unsmiling, rings up the price of a replat mirror on her cash register. The t, morose, stoops over his drink at the bar. The wedding guests treat him with genial pt.
Teresa creeps out of her bedroom window, steals along the street, ceals herself hastily in the shadows when an Indian on a pony es riding dowreet.
Her lover waits for her by the scummy pond. Take me away. Save me! He strokes her hair with the first sign of tenderness. Perhaps he will take her away, if she bear to look at him after the holocaust. Perhaps. . .
Its very late, now. Only the t stays up. Hes gazing at the recumbent form of a wedding guest passed out on the floor, sn. The whores have stuck a feather hat on the visitors head, taken off his trousers, daubed his face with rouge.
When Johnny es in, the t silently pours him a drink. He looks at the boy with, almost, love -- certainly with some emotion.
"I could almost ask you. . ."
Johnny smiles, shakes his head, whistles a few bars of Chopins "Funeral March".
"But then. . . be good to the little Teresa. The prince of darkness is a gentleman. . . "
Maybe. Maybe not. But, maybe. . .
How Teresas hair tangles in the b! A great bustle in the Mendoza encampment; theyve got a carriage for her, decked it with exuberant paper flowers. But she herself is nervous, anxious; she chews at her underlip, she lets the women dress her as if she were a doll. Her mother, oddly respectable in black, weeps copiously. Teresa, in her wedding-dress and veil, suddenly turns to her mother and hugs her vulsively. The womaurns the embrace fiercely.
Johnny kisses the photographs of his father and mother. Its time. Unhandily carrying the rifle, in his music students black velvet jacket, elegant, deadly, mad, he goes towards the church.
Theyve put back the rococo, suffering Christ; Johnny crouches beh him, hiding uhe skirts of the altar cloth. He tests the weight of the gun in his hand, peers through the sights.
The t wont go to the wedding. No, he wont! He wo out of bed. Please, Roxana, dont you go to the weddiher! What? Not see my little eresa get married? And you should e, too, you irreligious old man. Arent you fond of Teresa?
But the t is sick this m. He t crawl out of bed. He coughs, stares at the ominous bloodstains on his handkerchief.
"Im dying, Roxana. Dont leave me."
Though the bridegroom has arrived already, a huge brute, the image of Teresas father. He takes his place before the altar. The gregation rustles. The an plays softly.
Roxana, late, troubled, untidily dressed, slips in at the back of the church.
Teresa steps out of the flower-decorated carriage in front of the church. Shes really worried, now, looking desperately around for Johnny. Her mother kisses her, again; this time, the girl doesnt respond, shes got too mu her mind. Her mother and the Mendoza women folk ehe church. Her father, a little dressed up, boots polished, offers her his arm.
Traditional gasps as she walks down the aisle -- isnt she lovely! Even if her eyes search round and round the church for her rescuer. Where he be? What will he do to save me?
The an rings out.
Teresa arrives beside her bridegroom. From beh her veil, she gives him a swift glance of furious dislike. The priest says the first words of the wedding service.
Johnny flings back the altar cloth, leaps oar, shoots point-blank the wide-eyed, open-mouthed Mendoza.
Mendoza tumbles backwards dowar steps.
Silehen, shouting. Then, gunfire. Havoc!
But no bullet touch Johnny; he shoots the bridegroom as the bridegroom leaps forward to attack him; shoots three -- four -- into the crowd of Mendoza desperadoes, two men fall.
Teresa, in her wedding finery, stands speechless, shocked.
Her mother, wailing, rushes from the crowd towards her dead husband.
Johnny aims, shoots Maria. She drops dead on to the body of her husband.
Teresa at last wakes up. She rushes through the havo the church; she is appalled, the world has e to an end.
Roxana fights free of the crowd and goes running after her. The church is a melee of shots, noise, gunsmoke.
Outside the church, the girl and womaeresa t speak. Roxana hugs her, grabs her hand, pulls her dowh, towards the whorehouse.
Johs from the church door. Now hes like a mad dog. Blazing, furious, deadly -- carrying a gun.
By the scummy pool, Roxana hears Johnny ing after them. She drags Teresa faster, faster -- the girl stumbles over her white lace hem, now filthy with dust and blood. Faster, faster -- hes ing, the murderers ing, the devil himself is ing!
The ts mistress and the beloved little Teresa run towards the whorehouse, where the t gazes out of the window; run towards him, with the madman hot on their heels.
The t opens the whorehouse door.
Hes carrying the rifle that hangs on the wall of the bar.
Slowly, shakily, he raises it.
Hes aiming at Johnny.
Teresa sees him, breaks free of Roxanas hand, dashes back towards her lover -- to try to protect him? Some reason, suffit to her hysteria.
Johnny, startled, halts; so the old mans turned against him, has he? The old mans turned his own magic rifle on the young ohe acolyte!
He takes aim at the t, fires the seventh bullet.
Hes fotten its the seventh bullet, fottehing except the sudden ease with which he kill.
He fires the seventh bullet and Teresa drops dead by the side of the scummy pool. Her lace train slides down into the water.
The t bursts into a great fit of tears. Roxana kneels by the dead girl, uselessly speaks to her, closes her eyes gently. Crosses herself. Gives the weeping t, slumped on the whorehouse veranda, a long, dark look.
The crowd spills out of the church. Johnny drops his gun, turns, runs.
Coda
Almost the desert. White, fantastic rocks, sand, burning sun. Johnny stole one of the Mendozas horses; now it founders beh him. He shades his eyes; theres a village in the distance. . .
But this village seems deserted. A weird, shabby figure in his music-students black jacket, he draws water from the well, drinks. At last, a thin, ragged, filthy child emerges from the derelict house.
"The smallpox came. All dead, all dead."
Flies buzz on an unburied corpse in a murky interior. Johnches. Hes white-faced, fevered -- you would have said, a man with the devil pursuing him.
At the end of the village, gazing across the acres of desert before him, a figure is propped against the wall, a figure so still, so silent as at first to seem part of the landscape. He smiles to see Johnny stumbling towards him.
"I was waiting for you," says the Indian who sold Johnny the gun. "We have some busio clude."
The Merchant of Shadows-1
I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant ema ans.
Id never get used to California. After three years, still the ented visitor. However frequently I had been disappointed, I still couldnt help it, I still tingled with expectation, still always thought that something wonderful might happen.
Call me the I Abroad.
All the same, you take the boy out of London but you t take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lihusiastic but shaky. I call gas "petrol", and so on. I dont io go native, Im not here food, Im here upon a pilgrimage. I have hied me, like a holy palmer, from the dishevelled capital of a foggy, three-ered island oher side of the world where the light is only good for water-colourists to this place where, to wax metaphysical about it, Light was made Flesh.
I am a student of Light and Illusion. That is, of ema. When first I clapped my eyes on that HOLLYWOODLAND sign ba the city now five hours hard drive distant, I thought Id glimpsed the Holy Grail.
And now, as if it were the most everyday thing in the world, I was on my way to meet a legend. A living legend, who roosted on this lonely cliff-top like a forlorn seabird.
I arked in a gravelled loed botty, she turned upon the camera a toothy smile. Shed been quite pretty, in a spit-curled way. She said I could have the snap for a couple of hundred dollars but I was on a tight budget and thought it wouldnt add much to the history of film.
Fhtfully, von Mannheim had left Germany in good time, but he started over in Hollywood at the bottom (five the double entendre). His ast, however, was brisk. Assistant art director, assistant director, director.
The masterpieanns Hollywood period is, of course, Paracelsus (1937), with Charles Laughton. Laughtons great bulk swims into pools of scalding light out of greater or lesser shoals of darkness like a vast monster of the deep, a great, black whale. The movie haunts you like a bad dream. Mann did not try to give you a sense of the past; instead, Paracelsus looks as if it had been made in the middle ages -- the gargoyle faces, bodies ed with ague, gaunt with famine, a claustrophobise of a limited world, of ic, cramped unfreedom.
The Spirit of ema cameos in Paracelsus as the Gnostic goddess of wisdom, Sophia, in a kind of Rosicru sabbat se. They were married, by then. Mann wanted his new bride nude for this sabbat, which caused a stir at the time aually he was forced to shoot only her disembodied face floating above suggestive shadow. Suggestive, indeed; from his piece of sleight of hand sprang two myths, one, easily discredited by afiados of the rest of her oeuvre, that she had the biggest knockers in the business, the other, less easily dismissed, that she was thickly covered with body hair from the sternum to the knee. Even Manns ex-assistant director believed the latter. "Furry as a spider," he characterised her. "And just as damhal." Id smuggled a half-pint of Jack Daniels into his geriatric ward; he waxed virulent, he warned me to take a se kit to the interview.
Paracelsus was, needless to say, one of the greatest box-office disasters in the history of the movies. Plans were shelved for his long-dreamed-of Faust, with the Spirit either as Gret or as Mephistopheles, or as Gret doubling with Mephistopheles, depending on what he said in different interviews. Mann was forced to perpetrate a hack job, a wallowing melo with the Spirit as twins, a good girl in a blonde wig and a bad girl in a blae, from which his career never recovered and her own survival truly miraculous.
Shortly after this notorious stinker was released to universal jeers, he did the A Star is Born bit, although he walked, not into the sea, but into the very swimming pool, that one over there, in which his reliow disposes of her glassware.
As for the Spirit, she found a new director, was rumoured to have undergone a little, a very little plastic surgery, and, the year, won her first Oscar. From that time on she was unstoppable, though always she carried her tragedy with her, like a perma widows veil, givihe spooky allure of a bain princesse lointaine.
Who liked to keep her guests waiting.
In my nervous ennui, I cast my eyes round and round the terratil I came upon something passing strange in the moist earth of a flowerbed.
Moist, therefore freshly watered, though not by whatever it was had left such amazing spoor behind it. No big-game hunter I, but I could have sworn that, impressed on the soil, as if in fresh crete outside Graumanns ese Theatre, was the print, uhe tiger lilies left it, of a large, clawed paw.
Did you know a lions mane grows grey with age? I didnt. But the geriatric felihat now emerged from a clump of something odorous beh the cryptomeria had snow all over his hairy eaves. He appeared as taken aback to see me as I was to bump into him. Our eyes locked. Face like a boxer with a broken heilted his enormous head to one side, opened his mouth -- God, his breath was foul -- and roared like the last movement of Beethovens Ninth. With a modest blow of a single paw, he could have batted me arse over tip off the cliff half-way to Hawaii. I wouldnt say it was mufort to see hed had his teeth pulled out.
"Aw, e on, Pussy, he dont want to be gummed to death," said a cracked, harsh, aged, only residually female voice. "Go fetch Mama, now, theres a good boy."
The Merchant of Shadows-2
The lion grumbled a little in his throat but trotted off into the house with the most toug obediend I took breath, again -- I noticed Id somehow managed not to for some little time -- and sank into one of the white metal terrace chairs. My poor heart was going pit-a-pat, I tell you, but the personage who had at last appeared from somewhere in the darkening pouher apologised for nor expressed about my nasty shock. She stood there, arms akimbo, surveyih a satirical, pierg, blue eye.
Except for the jarring circumstahat in one hand she held a stainless steel, many-branched dlestick of awesomely chaste design, she looked like a superannuated lumberjack, plaid shirt, blue jeans, workboots, butch leather belt with a giant silver skull and crossbones for a buckle, coarse, cropped, grey hair esg from a red bandana tied Indian-style around her head. Her skin was wrinkled in pinpricks like the surface of Parmesan cheese and a putty grey in colour.
"You the ohats e about the thesis?" she queried. Her di ure hillbilly.
I burbled in the affirmative.
"Hes e about the thesis," she repeated to herself sardonically and disforted me still further by again cag to herself.
But now an ear-splitting roar announced a was about to ehis Ma, or Pa, Kettle perso down her dlesti the terrace table, briskly struck a mat the seat of her pants and applied the flame to the wicks, dissipating the gathering twilight as She rolled out the door. Rolled. She sat in a e and ivory leather wheel-chair as if upon a portable throne. Her right haed negligently on the lions mane. She was a sight to see.
How long had she spent dressing up for the interview? Hours. Days. Weeks. She had on a white satin bias-cut lace-trimmed negligee circa 1935, her skin had that sugar almond, one hundred per t Max Factor look and she wore what I assumed was a wig due to the unnatural precision of the snowy curls. Only shed gooo far with the wig; it gave her a Medusa look. Her mouth looked funny because her lips had disappeared with age so all that was left ainted-irapezoid.
But she didnt look her age, at all, at all -- oh, no; she looked a good ten or fifteen years youhough I doubt the vision of a sexy septuagenarian was the one for which shed striven as she decked herself out. Impressive, though. Impressive as hell.
And you k ohis was the face that launched a thousand ships. Not because anything lovely was still smouldering away in those old bones; shed, as it were, transded beauty. But something in the way she held her head, some imperious arrogance, demahat you look at her and keep on looking.
At once I went into automatic, I assumed the stance of gigolo. I picked up her hand, kissed it, said: "Enté", bowed. Had I not been wearing sneakers, Id have clicked my heels. The Spirit appeared pleased but not surprised by this, but she couldnt smile for fear of crag her make-up. She whispered me a throaty greeting, eyeing me in a very peculiar way, a way that made the look in the lions eye seem positively vegetarian.
It freaked me. She freaked me. It was her star quality. So thats what they mean! I thought. Id never before, nor am I likely to again, entered such psychic force as streamed out of that frail little old lady in her antique lingerie and her wheel-chair. And, yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was old as the hills; it was as though she got the most extraordinary sexual charge from being looked at and this charge bounced ba the looker, as though some meism inside herself verted yard into sexual energy. I wondered, not quite terrified, if I was for it, know what I mean.
And all the time I kept thinking, it kept running through my head: "The phantom is up from the cellars again!"
Night certainly brought out the st of jasmine.
She whispered me a throaty greeting. Her faded voice meant you had to crouch to hear her, so her cachou-flavoured breath stung your cheek, and you could tell she loved to make you crouch.
"My sister," she husked, gesturing towards the lumberjack lady atg this performance of domination and submission with her thumbs stu her belt and an expression of unrelieved icism on her face. Her sister. God.
The lion rubbed its head against my leg, making me jump, and she pummelled its greying mane.
"And this -- oh! youll have seen him a thousand times; more exposure than any of us. Allow me to introduce Leo, formerly of MGM."
The old beast cocked its head from side to side and roared again, in unmistakable fashion, as if to identify itself. Mickey Mouse does her chauffeuring. Every m, she takes a ride er.
&quratia artis," she reminded me, as if guessing my thoughts. "Where could he go, poor creature, when they retired him? Nobody would touch a fallen star. So he came right here, to live with Mama, didnt you, darling."
"Drinkies!" announced Sister, magnifitly clattering a wele, bottle-laden trolley.
After the third poolside martini, which was gin at which a lemon briefly sneered, I judged it high time to broach the subject of Hank Mann. It itch dark by then, a few stars burning, night sounds, sea sounds, the creak of those metal chairs that seemed to have been designed, probably on purpose, by the butch sister, to break your balls. But it was difficult to get a word in. The Spirit was briskly cheg out my knowledge of s history.
"No, the art director certainly was not Ben Carre, how absurd to think that!. . . My goodness me, young man, Wallace Reid was dead and buried by then, and good riddao bad rubbish. . . Edith Head? Edith Head design Nancy Carrolls pateher evening dress? Who put that into your noddle?"
Now and then the lion sandpapered the bay hand with its tongue, as if to show sympathy. The butch sister put away gin by the tumblerful, two to my one, and creaked resonantly from time to time, like an old door.
"No, no, no, young man! Laughtoainly was not addicted to self-abuse!"
And out of the dark it came to me that that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no fl shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Iy, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of impendii, so that I shivered, and Sister, alert aher f or plicitous, sloshed another half pint of gin into my glass.
Then Sister belched and announced: "Gonna take a leak."
Evidently equipped with night vision, she rolled off into the gloaming from whence, after a pause, came the tinkle of running water. Shed gone back to Nature as far as toilet training was ed, cut out the frills. The raunchy sound of Sister making pee-pee brought me down to earth again. I clutched my tumbler, for the sake of holding something solid.
"About thish time," I said, "you met Hank Mann."
Night and dlelight turhe red mouth black, but her satin dress shone like water with plankton in it.
"Heinrich," she corrected with a click of orthodontics; and then, or so it seemed, fell directly into the trance for, all at once, she fixed her gaze on the middle distand said no more.
I thankfully took advantage of her lapse of attention to pour my gin down the side of my chair, trusting that by the morrow it would be indistinguishable from lion piss. Sister, king her deaths head belt-buckle as she readjusted her clothing, came back to us an藏书网delight and turn away their eyes. But when the punters dare to look again, they enter only his/her seraphic smile and, lo and behold! the trun has turned into a magid.
When ahe Queen of Hearts/Moose taps Daisy the Cow with her wand, Daisy the Cow gives out with a chorus of "Down by the Old Bull and Bush".
In Pantoland-2
THE BEASTS
1 The Goose in Moose is, or so they say, the Hamlet of animal roles, introspective and moody as only a costive bird straining over its egg might be. There is a full gamut of emotion in the Goose role -- loyalty aion to her mother; joy and delight at her own maternity; heartbreak at loss of egg; fear and trembling at the wide variety of gruesome possibilities which might occur if, in the infiercouplings of possible texts which occur all the time in the promiscuity of Pantoland, oory effortlessly segues into aory, so that Moose twins up with Jad the Beanstalk, involving an egg-hungry ogre, or with Robin Hood, incorporating a goose-hungry Sheriff of Nottingham. hat the Goose, like the Dame, is a female role usually, though not always, played by a man. But the Goose does not represent the exaggerated and parodic femininity of ahe Gooses femininity is real. She is all woman. Withe trality of the egg in her life. So the Goose deserves an interpreter with the sophisticated teique ahy fender of the onnagata, the female impersonators of the Japanese Kabuki theatre, who make you weep at the sadness i in the sleeves of a kimono as they quiver with suppressed emotion at a womans lot.
Because of this, and because she is the prime focus of all attention, the Goose in Moose is the premier animal role, even more so than. . .
2 Dick Whittingtons Cat: Dick Whittingtons cat is the Scaramouche of Pantoland, limber, agile, and going on two legs more often than on four to stress his status as intermediary between the world of the animals and our world. If he possesses some of the chthonic ambiguity of all dark messengers between different modes of being, heless he is never less than a perfect valet to his master and hops and skips at Dicks bidding. His is therefore less of a starring role than the Goose, even if his rat-catg activities are tral to the a and it is a difficult to imagine Dick without his cat as Morecambe without Wise.
hat this cat is male almost to a fault, uionably a tom-cat, and personated by a man; some things are sacrosanct, even in Pantoland. A tom-cat is maleness personified, whereas. . .
3 Daisy the Cow is so female it takes two whole men to represent her, one on his own couldnt hack it. The back legs of the pantomime quadruped are traditionally a thaask, but the front ehe ce to indulge in all manner of antics, flirting, flattering, fluttering those endless eyelashes and, sometimes, if the coordinatioweewo ends is good enough, Daisy does a tap-dance, which makes her massive udder with its many danglis dip and sway in the most salaanner, bringing bae the notion of a basic crudely reproductive female sexuality of which those of us who dont lactate often do not like to be reminded. (They have lactation, geion all the time in mind in Pantoland.)
This rude femaleness requires two men to mimic it, as Ive said; therefore you could call Daisy a Dame, squared.
These three are the principal animal leads in Pantoland, although Mother Hubbard, a free-floating Dame who might turn up in a, always es apanied by her dog but, more often than not, Chuckles gets in o here, and real animals dont t. Pantomime horses crop up anywhere and mimic rats are not fio Dick Whittington but inhabit derellas kit, even drive her coach; there are mid lizards too. Birds. You need robins to cover up the Babes in the Wood. Emus, you get sometimes. Ducks. You .
When Pantoland was young, and I mean really young, before it got stage-struck, iime of the sky wolf, wheility festivals filled up those vat, dark, solstitial days, we used to see no differeween ourselves and the animals. Bruno the Bear and Felix the Cat walked and talked amongst us. We lived with, we loved, we married the animals (Beauty and the Beast). The Goose, the Cat and Daisy the Cow have e to us out of the paradise that little children remember, whehought we could talk to the animals, to remind us how once we khat the animals were just as human as we were, and that made us more human too.
THE PRINCIPAL BOY
What an armful! She is the grahing in Pantoland.
Look at those arms! Look at those thighs! Like tree trunks, but like sexy tree trunks. Her hats are huge and plumed with feathers; her gleaming, exiguous little knicks are made of satin and trimmed with sequins. As Prince Charming, she is a veritable spectacle of pure glamour although, as Jack, her e might start off a touch more pleasant and, as Dick, she o look like a London apprentice for a while before she gets to try on that Lord Mayor schmutter. For Robin Hood, shell wear green; as Aladdin, the East is signified by her turban.
You tell she is supposed to be a man not by her shape, which is a ventional hlass, but by her body language. She marches with as martial a stride as it is possible to achieve in stiletto heels and throws out her arms in wide, generous, all-enpassing, patriarchal gestures, as if she owhe earth. Her maleness has an antique charm, even, nowadays, a touch of wistful Edwardiana about it; no Principal Boy worth her salt would want to personate a New Man, after all. Shes goo the bother of turning herself into a Principal Boy to get away from the washing-up, in the first place.
In spite of her spilling physical luxuriance, whisures that, uhe more ambivalent Dame, the Principal Boy is always referred to as a "she", her voice is a deep, dark brown and, when raised in song, could raise the dead. Who, who ever heard her, could ever fet a Principal Boy of the Old School leading the chorus in a rousing military parade aion of, say, "Where are the boys of the Old Brigade?"
e to that, where are the Principal Boys of the Old Brigade? In these anorexic times, there is less ahigh to slap. Girls, nowadays, are big-bosomed, all right, due to implants, but not deep-chested any more. Principal Boys used to share a hollow-voiced, bass-baritone bonhomie with department-store Father Christmases but "Ho! ho! ho!" is heard no more in the land. In these lean times, your average Principal Boy looks more like a Peter Pan, and pre-pubesce isnt what youre aiming for at a fertility festival, although the presence of actual children, i numbers, laughing at that which they should not know about, is indispensable as haviablished the success of preg fertility festivals.
The Principal Boy is a male/female cross, like the Dame, but she is never played for laughs. No. She is played for thrills, for advehe romance. So, after innumerable adventures, she ends up with the Principal Girl in a number where their voices soar and swoon together as in the excruciatingly erotic climactic aria of Monteverdis LInazione di Poppaea, performed as it is in the present day always by two ladies, one playing Nero, one Poppaea, due to male castrati being thin on the ground in spite of the population explosion. And, as Principal Boy and? Principal Girl duet, their four breasts in two décolletages jostle one another for pre-eminen the eyes of all observers. This is a thrill indeed but will not make babies uhey then dash out and borrow the turkey-baster from the Christmas-dinner kit. There is a kind of sorship i in the pantomime.
But the question of gender remains vague because you have to hang on to the idea that the Principal Boy is all boy and all girl at the same time, a door that opens both ways, just as the Dame is Mother Eve and Old Adam in one parcel; they are both doors that open both ways, they are the Janus faces of the season, they look backwards and forwards, they bury the past, they procreate the future, and, by rights, these two should belong together for they are and are not ambivalent and the Principal Girl (q. does not v. in this work of reference) is nothing more than a pretty prop, even when eponymous as in derella and Snow White.
ankey came out of retirement and, ged on anthropology, dropped down on stage in Pantoland.
"I have e back to earth and I feel randy!"
She/he didnt have to say a word. The decor picked up on her unutterand all the pasteboard everywhere shuddered.
The Dame and the Principal Boy e together by the ese laundry. Aladdin has brought in his washing. They exge some banter about smalls and drawers, eyeing one another up. They know that this time, for the first time since sorship began, the script will ge.
"I feel randy," said ankey.
What is a fertility festival without a ritual copulation?
But it isnt as simple as that. For now, oh! now the hobby-horse is quite fot. The Phallic Mother and the Big-Breasted Boy must take sed pla the porary cast-list to some cricketer who does not even know enough to make an obse gesture with his bat, since, ie tweh tury, the pla is over-populated and four breasts in harmony is what we need more of, rather than babies, so ankey ought to go and have it off with Mother Hubbard and stop b Aladdin, really she/he ought.
Do people still believe in Pantoland?
If you believe in Pantoland, put your palms together and give a big hand to. . .
藏书网If you really believe in Pantoland, put your -- pardon me, vicar --
A fertility festival without a ritual copulation is. . . nothing but a pantomime.
ankey has e back to earth to restore the pantomime to its inal dition.
But, before scarlet drawers and satin knicks could hit the floor, a hook dropped out of the flies and struck ankey between the shoulders. The hook lodged securely in her red satin bustier; shouting and screaming, with a great display of sy shin, she was hauled back up where she had e from, in spite of her raucous protests, and deposited back amongst the dead stars, leaving the Principal Boy at a loss for what to do except to briskly imitate Gee Formby and start to sing "Oh, Mr Wu, Im telling you. . ."
As Umberto Ece said, "An everlasting ival does not work." You t keep it up, you know; nobody ever could. The essence of the ival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transie is here today and goomorrow, a release of tension not a restitution of order, a refreshment. . . after which everything go on agaily as if nothing had happened.
Things dont ge because a girl puts on trousers or a chap slips on a frock, you know. Masters were masters again the day after Saturnalia ended; after the holiday from gender, it was back to the old grind. . .
Besides, all that was years ago, of course. That was before television.
Ashputtle or The Mothers Ghost-1
THREE VERSIONS OF OORY
I THE MUTILATED GIRLS
But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle are it oilated sisters -- indeed, it would be easy to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, some sort of circumcision-like ritual chop, heless, the story always begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtles mother, as though it is really always the story of her mother even if, at the beginning of the story, the mother herself is just??t> about to exit the narrative because she is at deaths door: "A rich mans wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside."
he absence of the husband/father. Although the woman is defined by her relation to him ("a rich mans wife") the daughter is unambiguously hers, as if hers alone, and the entire drama s only women, takes place almost exclusively among women, is a fight between two groups of women -- in the right-hand er, Ashputtle and her mother; in the left-hand er, the stepmother and her daughters, of whom the father is unaowledged but all the same is predicated by both textual and biologiecessity.
In the drama between two female families in opposition to one another because of their rivalry over men (husband/father, husband/son), the men seem no more than passive victims of their fancy, yet their significe is absolute because it is ("a rich man", "a kings son") eic.
Ashputtles father, the old man, is the first object of their desire and their dissension; the stepmother snatches him from the dead mother before her corpse is cold, as soon as her grip loosens. Then there is the young man, the potential bridegroom, the hypothetical son-in-law, for whose possessiohers fight, using their daughters as instruments of war or as surrogates in the business of mating.
If the men, and the bank balances for which they stand, are the passive victims of the two grown women, then the girls, all three, are animated solely by the wills of their mothers, Even if Ashputtles mother dies at the beginning of the story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position more authoritative. The mhost domihe narrative and is, in a real sehe motive tre, the event that makes all the other events happen.
On her death bed, the mother assures the daughter: "I shall always look after you and always be with you." The story tells you how she does it.
At this point, when her mother makes her promise, Ashputtle is nameless. She is her mothers daughter. That is all we know. It is the stepmother who names her Ashputtle, as a joke, and, in doing so, wipes out her real name, whatever that is, banishes her from the family, exiles her from the shared table to the lonely hearth among the ders, removes her ti but honourable status as daughter and gives her, instead, the ti but disreputable status of servant.
Her mother told Ashputtle she would always look after her, but then she died and the father married again and gave Ashputtle an imitation mother with daughters of her own whom she loves with the same fierce passion as Ashputtles mother did and still, posthumously, does, as we shall find out.
With the searriage es the vexed question: who shall be the daughters of the house? Mine! declares the stepmother ahe freshly named, non-daughter Ashputtle to sweep and scrub and sleep on the hearth while her daughters lie between sheets in Ashputtles bed. Ashputtle, no longer known as the daughter of her mother, nor of her father either, goes by a dry, dirty, dery niame for everything has turo dust and ashes.
Meanwhile, the false mother sleeps on the bed where the real mother died and is, presumably, pleasured by the husband/father in that bed, uhere is no pleasure in it for her. We are not told what the husband/ father does as regards domestiarital fun, but we surely make the assumption that he a藏书网nd the stepmother share a bed, because that is what married people do.
And what the real mother/wife do about it? Burn as she might with love, anger and jealousy, she is dead and buried.
The father, in this story, is a mystery to me. Is he so besotted with his new wife that he ot see how his daughter is soiled with kit refuse and filthy from her ashy bed and always hard at work? If he sehere was a drama in hand, he was tent to leave the entire produ to the women for, absent as he might be, always remember that it is in his house where Ashputtle sleeps on the ders, and he is the invisible link that binds both sets of mothers and daughters in their violeion. He is the unmoved mover, the unseen anising principle, like God, and, like God, up he pops in person, one fine day, to introduce the essential plot device.
Besides, without the absent father there would be no story because there would have been no flict.
If they had been able to put aside their differences and discuss everything amicably, theyd have bio expel the father. Then all the women could have slept in one bed. If theyd kept the father on, he could have dohe housework.
This is the essential plot devitroduced by the father: he says, "I am about to take a busirip. resents would my three girls like me t back for them?"
hat: his three girls.
It occurs to me that perhaps the stepmothers daughters were really, all the time, hi藏书网s own daughters, just as much his own daughters as Ashputtle, his "natural" daughters, as they say, as though there is something ily unnatural about legitimacy. That would realign the forces iory. It would make his ivah the asdancy of the irls more plausible. It would make the speedy marriage, the stepmothers hostility, more probable.
But it would also transform the story into something else, because it would> provide motivation, and so on; it would mean Id have to provide a past for all these people, that I would have to equip them with three dimensions, with tastes and memories, and I would have to think of things for them to eat and wear and say. It would transform "Ashputtle" from the bare y of fairy tale, with its characteristic copula formula, "and then", to the emotional and teical plexity of beois realism. They would have to learn to think. Everything would ge.
I will stick with what I know.
resents do his three girls want?
&qu me a silk dress," said his eldest girl. &qu me a string of pearls," said the middle one. What about the third ohe fotten one, called out of the kit on a charitable impulse and drying her hands, raw with housework, on her apron, bringing with her the smell of old fire?
&qu me the first branch that knocks against your hat on the way home," said Ashputtle.
Why did she ask for that? Did she make an informed guess at how little he valued her? Or had a dream told her to use this random formula of unaowledged desire, to allow blind ce to choose her present for her? Unless it was her mhost, awake alessly looking for a way home, that came into the girls mouth and spoke the request for her.
He brought her back a hazel twig. She pla on her mrave and watered it with tears. It grew into a hazel tree. When Ashputtle came out to weep upon her mrave, the turtle dove ed: "Ill never leave you, Ill alrotect you."
Then Ashputtle khat the turtle dove was her mhost and she herself was still her mothers daughter, and although she had wept and wailed and loo have her mother back again, now her heart sank a little to find out that her mother, though dead, was no lone and henceforward she must do her mothers bidding.
Ashputtle or The Mothers Ghost -2
Came the time for that curious fair they used to hold in that try, when all the resident virgio dan front of the kings son so that he could pick out the girl he wao marry.
The turtle dove was mad for that, for her daughter to marry the prince. You might have thought her own experienarriage might have taught her to be wary, but no, needs must, what else is a girl to do? The turtle dove was mad for her daughter to marry so she flew in and picked up the new silk dress with her beak, dragged it to the open window, threw it down to Ashputtle. She did the same with the string of pearls. Ashputtle had a good wash uhe pump in the yard, put oolen finery and crept out the back way, secretly, to the dang grounds, but the stepsisters had to stay home and sulk because they had nothing to wear.
The turtle dove stayed close to Ashputtle, peg her ears to make her dance vivaciously, so that the prince would see her, so that the prince would love her, so that he would follow her and find the clue of the fallen slipper, for the story is not plete without the ritual humiliation of the other woman and the mutilation of her daughters.
The search for the foot that fits the slipper is essential to the enat of this ritual humiliation.
The other woman wants that young man desperately. She would do anything to catch him. Not losing a daughter, but gaining a son. She wants a son so badly she is prepared to cripple her daughters. She takes up a carving knife and chops off her elder daughters big toe, so that her foot will fit the little shoe.
Imagine.
Brandishing the carving khe woman bears down on her child, who is as distraught as if she had not been a girl but a boy and the old woman was after a more essential portion than a toe. "No!" she screams. "Mother! No! Not the knife! No!" But off it es, all the same, and she throws it in the fire, among the ashes, where Ashputtle finds it, wonders at it, and feels both awe and fear at the phenomenon of mother love.
Mother love, which winds about these daughters like a shroud.
The prince saw nothing familiar in the face of the tearful young woman, one shoe off, one shoe on, displayed to him in triumph by her mother, but he said: "I promised I would marry whoever the shoe fitted so I will marry you," and they rode off together.
The turtle dove came flying round and did not or coo to the bridal pair but sang a horrid song: "Look! Look! Theres blood in the shoe!"
The priurhe ersatz ex-fia once, angry at the trick, but the stepmother hastily lopped off her other daughters heel and pushed that poor foot into the bloody shoe as soon as it was vat so, nothing for it, a man of his word, the prince helped up the new girl and once again he rode away.
Back came the na??gging turtle dove: "Look!" And, sure enough, the shoe was full of blood again.
"Let Ashputtle try," said the eager turtle dove.
So nouttle must put her foot into the hideous receptacle, this open wound, still slid warm as it is, for nothing in any of the mas of this tale suggests the prince washed the shoe out betweetings. It was an ordeal in itself to put a naked foot into the bloody shoe, but her mother, the turtle dove, urged her to do so in a soft, g that could not be denied.
If she does not pluhout revulsion into this open wound, she wo to marry. That is the song of the turtle dove, while the other mad mother stood impotently by.
Ashputtles foot, the size of the bound foot of a ese woman, a stump. Almost an amputee already, she put her tiny foot in it.
"Look! Look!" cried the turtle dove in triumph, even while the bird betrayed its ghostly nature by being progressively more and more immaterial as Ashputtle stood up in the shoe and eo walk around. Squelch, went the stump of the foot in the shoe. Squelch. "Look!" sang out the turtle dove. "Her foot fits the shoe like a corpse fits the coffin!
"See how well I look after you, my darling!"
2 THE BURNED CHILD
A burned child lived in the ashes. No, not really burned -- more charred, a little bit charred, like a stick half-burned and picked off the fire. She looked like charcoal and ashes because she lived in the ashes since her mother died and the hot ashes burned her so she was scabbed and scarred. The burned child lived on the hearth, covered in ashes, as if she were still m.
After her mother died and was buried, her father fot the mother and fot the child and married the woman who used to rake the ashes, and that was why the child lived in the unraked ashes, and there was nobody to brush her hair, so it stuck out like a mat, nor to wipe the dirt off her scabbed face, a?t>nd she had to do it for herself, but she raked the ashes and slept beside the little cat and got the burned bits from the bottom of the pot to eat, scraping them out, squatting on the floor, by herself in front of the fire, not as if she were human, because she was still m.
Her mother was dead and buried, but felt perfect exquisite pain of love when she looked up through the earth and saw the burned child covered in ashes.
"Milk the cow, burned child, and bring back all the milk," said the stepmother, who used to rake the ashes and milk the cow, once upon a time, but the burned child did all that, now.
The ghost of the mother went into the cow.
"Drink milk, grow fat," said the mhost.
The burned child pulled on the udder and drank enough milk before she took the bucket bad nobody saw, and time passed, she drank milk every day, she grew fat, she grew breasts, she grew up.
There was a maepmother wanted and she asked him into the kit to get his dinner, but she made the burned child cook it, although the stepmother did all the cooking before. After the burned child cooked the dihe stepmother sent her off to milk the cow.
"I want that man for myself," said the burned child to the cow.
The cow let down more milk, and more, and more, enough for the girl to have a drink and wash her fad wash her hands. When she washed her face, she washed the scabs off and now she was not bur all, but the cow was empty.
"Give your own milk, ime," said the ghost of the mother ihe cow. "Youve milked me dry."
The little cat came by. The ghost of the mother went into the cat.
"Your hair wants doing," said the cat. "Lie down."
The little cat unpicked her raggy lugs with its clever paws until the burned childs h>.air hung down nicely, but it had been so snagged and tahat the cats claws were all pulled out before it was finished.
"b your own hair, ime," said the cat. "Youve maimed me."
The burned child was and bed, but stark naked.
There was a bird sittin99lｉｂ?g in the apple tree. The ghost of the mother left the cat a into the bird. The bird struck its ow with its beak. Blood poured down on to the burned child uhe tree. It ran over her shoulders and covered her front and covered her back. When the bird had no more blood, the burned child got a red silk dress.
"Make your own dress, ime," said the bird. "I"m through with that bloody business."
The burned child went into the kit to show herself to the man. She was not burned any more, but lovely. The ma off looking at the stepmother and looked at the girl.
"e home with me a your stepmother stay and rake the ashes," he said to her and off they went. He gave her a house and money. She did all right.
"Now I go to sleep," said the ghost of the mother. "Now everything is all right."
3 TRAVELLING CLOTHES
The stepmother took the red-hot poker and burhe orphans face with it because she had not raked the ashes. The girl went to her mrave. In the earth her mother said: "It must be raining. Or else it is snowing. Uhere is a heavy dew tonight."
"It isnt raining, it isnt snowing, its too early for the dew. My tears are falling on yrave, mother."
The dead woman waited until night came. Then she climbed out ao the house. The stepmother slept on a feather bed, but the burned child slept on the hearth among the ashes. When the dead woman kissed her, the scar vahe girl woke up. The dead woman gave her a red dress.
"I had it when I was ye."
The girl put the red dress on. The dead woman took worms from her eyesockets; they turned into jewels. The girl put on a diam.
"I had it when I was ye."
They went together to the grave.
"Step into my coffin."
"No," said the girl. She shuddered.
"I stepped into my mothers coffin when I was ye."
The girl stepped into the coffin although she thought it would be the death of her. It turned into a coad horses. The horses stamped, eager to be gone.
"Go and seek your fortune, darling."
Alice in Prague or The Curious Room-1
This piece was written in praise of Jan Svankmayer,
the animator ue, and his film of Alice
Iy ue, o was winter.
Outside the curious room, there is a sign on the door which says "Forbidden". Inside, inside, oh, e ahe celebrated DR DEE.
The celebrated Dr Dee, looking for all the world like Santa Claus on at of his long, white beard and apple cheeks, is plating his crystal, the fearful sphere that tains everything that is, or was, or ever shall be.
It is a round ball of solid glas.s and gives a deceptive impression of weightlessness, because you see right through it and we falsely assume aioween lightness and transparency, that what the light shihrough ot be there and so must weigh nothing. In fact, the Doctors crystal ball is heavy enough to inflict a substantial injury and the Doctors assistant, Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, often weighs the ball in one hand or tosses it bad forth from oo the other hand as he pohe fragility of the hollow bone, his masters skull, as it pores heedless over some tome.
Ned Kelly would blame the murder on the angels. He would say the angels came out of the sphere. Everybody knows the angels live there.
The crystal resembles: an aqueous humour, frozen:
a glass eye, although without any iris or
pupil -- just the sort of transparent eye, in
fact, which the adept might strue as apt
to see the invisible;
a tear, round, as it forms within the eye, for
a tear acquires its characteristic shape of a
pear, what we think of as a "tear" shape, only
i of falling;
the shining drop that trembles, sometimes, on the
tip of the Doctors well-nigh se, tending
towards the flaccid, yet heless sustainable
and disible m ere, and
always reminds him of
a drop of dew,
a drop of dew endlessly, tremulously about to fall
from the unfolded petals of a rose and, therefore,
like the tear, retaining the perfe of its
circumferenly by refusing to sustain free fall,
remaining what it is, because it refuses to bee
what it might be, the antithesis of metamorphosis;
a, in old England, far away, the sign of the
Do Drop Inn will always, that jovial pun, show an
oblate spheroid, heavily tinselled, because the
sign-painter, in order to demonstrate the idea of
"drop", needs must represent the dew i of
falling and therefore, for the purposes of this
parison, not resembling the numinous ball
weighing down the angelic Doctors outstretched
palm.
For Dr Dee, the invisible is only another unexplored try, a brave new world.
The hinge of the sixteenth tury, where it joins with the seveh tury, is as creaky and judders open as relutly as the door in a haunted house. Through that door, in the distance, we may glimpse the distant light of the Age of Reason, but precious little of that is about to fall ue, the capital of paranoia, where the fortuellers live on Golden Alley in cottages so small, a good-sized doll would find itself cramped, and there is oain house on Alchemists Street that only bees visible during a thick fog. (On sunny days, you see a stone.) But, even in the fog, only those born on the Sabbath see the house anyway.
Like a lamp guttering out in a retly vacated room, the Renaissance flared, faded ainguished itself. The world had suddenly revealed itself as bewilderingly infinite, but sihe imagination remained, for after all it is only human, finite, our imaginations took some time to catch up. If Francis Ba will die in 1626 a martyr to experimental sce, having tracted a chill whilst stuffing a dead hen with snow on Highgate Hill to see if th??at would keep it fresh, in Prague, where Dr Faustus once lodged in Charles Square, Dr Dee, the English expatriate alchemist, awaits the maion of the angel in the Archduke Rudolphs curious room, and we are still fumbling our way towards the end of the previous tury.
The Archduke Rudolph keeps his priceless colle of treasures in this curious room; he he Doongst these treasures and is therefore forced to he Doctors assistant, the unspeakable and iron-visaged Kelly, too.
The Archduke Rudolph has crazy eyes. These eyes are the mirrors of his soul.
It is very cold this afternoon, the kind of weather that makes a person piss. The moon is up already, a moon the colour of dlewax and, as the sky discolours when the night ies on, the moon grows more white, more cold, white as the source of all the cold in the world, until, when the winter moon reaches its chill meridian, everything will freeze -- not only the water in the jug and the ink in the well, but the blood in the vein, the aqueous humour.
Metamorphosis.
In their higgledy-piggledy disorder, the twigs on the bare trees outside the thick window resemble those random scratgs made by ohat you only see when you lift your wineglass up to the light. A hard frost has crisped the surface of the deep snow on the Archdukes tumbled roofs and turrets. In the snow, a raven: caw!
Dr Dee knows the language of birds and sometimes speaks it, but what the birds say is frequently banal; all the raven said, over and over, was: "Poor Toms a-cold!"
Above the Doctors head, slung from the low-beamed ceiling, dangles a flying turtle, stuffed. In the dim room we make out, amongst much else, the random juxtaposition of an umbrella, a sewing mae and a disseg table; a raven and a writing desk; an aged mermaid, poor wizened creature, cramped in a foetal position in ajar, her ream of grey hair suspended adrift in the viscous liquid that preserves her, her features rendered greenish and somewhat distorted by the flaws in the glass.
Dr Dee would like, for a mate to this mermaid, to keep in a cage, if alive, or, if dead, in a stoppered bottle, an angel.
It was an age in love with wonders.
Dr Dees assistant, Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, is also looking fels. He is gazing at the sheeny, reflective s of his sg disc which is made of polished coal. The angels visit him more frequently than they do the Doctor, but, for some reason, Dr Dee ot see Kellys guests, although they crowd the surface of the sg disc, g out in their high, pierg voices in the species of bird-creole with which they unicate. It is a great sado him.
Kelly, however, is phenomenally gifted in this dire and notes down on a pad the intonations of their speech which, though he doesnt uand it himself, the Doctor excitedly makes sense of.
But, today, no go.
Kelly yawns. He stretches. He feels the pressure of the weather on his bladder.
The privy at the top of the tower is a hole in the floor behind a cupboard door. It is situated above another privy, with another hole, above another privy, another hole, and so on, down seven further privies, seven more holes, until your excreta at last hurtles into the cesspit far below. The cold keeps the smell down, thank God.
Dr Dee, ever the seeker after knowledge, has calculated the velocity of a flying turd.
Although a man could hang himself in the privy with ease and fort, seg the rope about the beam above and laung himself into the void to let gravity break his neck for him, Kelly, whether at stool or making water, never allows the privy to remind him of the "long drop" nor even, however briefly, admires his own instrument for fear the phrase "well-hung" recalls the noose which he narrowly escaped in his native England for fraud, once, in Lancaster; for fery, once, in Rutlandshire; and for perf a fideri Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
But his ears were cropped for him in the pillory at Walton-le-Dale, after he dug up a corpse from a churchyard for purposes of neancy, or possibly of grave-robbing, and this is why, in order to ceal this amputation, he always wears the iron mask modelled after that which will be worn by a namesake three hundred years hen a try that does not yet exist, an iron mask like an upturned bucket with a slit cut for his eyes.
Kelly, unbuttoning, wonders if his piss will freeze i of falling; if, today, it is cold enough in Prague to let him piss an arc of ice.
No.
He buttons up again.
Women loathe this privy. Happily, few venture here, into the magis tower, where the Archduke Rudolph keeps his colle of wonders, his proto-museum, his "Wunderkammer", his "et de curiosites", that curious room of which we speak.
Theres a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the ao the question: "Where was I before I was born?"
In the beginning was. . . what?
Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it tains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you siime began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.
Kelly oook the Archduke aside and offered him, at a price, a little piece of the beginning, a slice of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself, which Kelly claimed he had obtained from an Armenian, who had found it on Mount Ararat, growing in the shadows of the wreck of the Ark. The slice had dried out with time and looked very much like a dehydrated ear.
The Archduke soon decided it was a fake, that Kelly had been fooled. The Archduke is not gullible. Rather, he has a boundless desire to know everything and an exceptional generosity of belief. At night, he stan藏书网ds on top of the tower and watches the stars in the pany of Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler, yet by day, he makes no move nor judgement before he sults the astrologers in their zodiacal hats a, in those days, either an astrologer or an astronomer would be hard put to it to describe the differeween their disciplines.
He is not gullible. But he has his peculiarities.
The Archduke keeps a lion ed up in his bedroom as a species of watch-dog or, sihe lion is a member of the Felis family and not a member of the Cave em family, a giant guard-cat. For fear of the lions yellow teeth, the Archduke had them pulled. Now that the poor beast ot chew, he must subsist on slop. The lion lies with his head on his paws, dreaming. If you could open up his brain this moment, you would find nothing there but the image of a beefsteak.
Meanwhile, the Archduke, in the curtained privacy of his bed, embraces something, God knows what.
Whatever it is, he does it with suergy that the bell hanging over the bed bees agitated due to the jolting and rhythmic lurg of the bed, and the clapper jangles against the sides.
Ting-a-ling!
The bell is cast out of electrum magicum. Paracelsus said that a bell cast out of electrum magicum would summon up the spirits. If a rat gnaws the Archdukes toe during the night, his involuntary start will agitate the bell immediately so the spirits e and chase the rat away, for the lion, although sui generis a cat, is not suffitly a cat in spirit to perform the domestis of a ouser, not like the little calico beastie who keeps the good Doctor pany and often, out of pure affe, brings him furry tributes of those she has slain.
Though the bell rings, softly at first, and then with increasing fury as the Archduke nears the end of his journey, no spirits e. But there have been no rats either.
A split fig falls out of the bed on to the marble floor with a soft, exhausted plop, followed by a hand of bananas, that spread out and go limp, as if in submission.
"Why t he make do with meat, like other people," whihe hungry lion.
the Archduke be effeg intercourse with a fruit salad?
Or with Carmen Mirandas hat?
Worse.
The hand of bananas indicates the Archdukes enthusiasm for the newly discovered Americas. Oh, brave new world! There is a street in Prague called "New World" (Novy Svei). The hand of bananas is freshly arrived from Bermuda via his Spanish kin,bbr>.. who know what he likes. He has a particular enthusiasm for weird plants, and every week es to verse with his mandrakes, those warty, shaggy roots that ihe Archduke shudders pleasurably to think about it) in the sperm and water spilled by a hanged man.
The mandrakes live at ease in a special et. It falls to Ned Kellys relut duty to bathe each of these roots once a week in milk and dress them up in fresh linen nightgowns. Kelly, relutly, sihe roots, warts and all, resemble so many virile members, and he does not like to hahem, imagining they raucously mock his manhood as he tends them, believing they unman him.
The Archdukes colle also boasts some magnifit spes of the coco-de-mer, or double ut, which grows in the shape, but exactly the shape, of the pelvic area of a woman, a foot long, heft and clefted, I kid you not. The Archduke and his gardeners plan to effect a vegetable marriage and will raise the progeny -- man-de-mer or coco-drake -- in his own greenhouses. (The Archduke himself is a firmed bachelor.)
Alice in Prague or The Curious Room-2
The bell ceases. The lion sighs with relief and lays his head once more upon his heavy paws: "bbr>;Now I sleep!"
Then, from uhe bed curtains, oher side of the bed, begins to pour a veritable torrent that quickly forms into dark, viscous, livid puddles on the floor.
But, before you accuse the Archduke of the unspeakable, dip your finger in the puddle and lick it.
Delicious!
For these are sticky puddles of freshly squeezed grape juice, and apple juice, and peach juice, juice of plum, pear, or raspberry, strawberry, cherry ripe, blackberry, black currant, white currant, red. . . The room brims with the delicious ripe st of summer pudding, even though, outside, on the frozen tower, the raven still creaks out his melancholy call:
"Poor Toms a-cold!"
And it is midwinter.
Night was. Widow Night, an old woman in m, with big, black wings, came beating against the window; they kept her out with lamps and dles.
When he went bato the laboratory, Ned Kelly found that Dr Dee had nodded off to sleep as the old man often did nowadays towards the end of the day, the crystal ball having rolled from palm to lap as he lay ba the black oak chair, and now, as he shifted at the impulse of a dream, it rolled again off his lap, down on to the floor, where it landed with a soft thump on the rushes -- no harm done -- and the little calico cat disabled it at oh a swift blow of her right paw, then began to play with it, batting it that way and this before she administered the coup de grace.
With a gusty sigh, Kelly once more addressed his sg disc, although today he felt barren of iion. He reflected ironically that, if just so much as one wee feathery angel ever, even the oime, should escape the sg disd flutter into the laboratory, the cat would surely get it.
Not, Kelly khat such a thing ossible.
If you could see inside Kellys brain, you would discover a calculating mae.
Widow Night paihe windows black.
Then, all at ohe cat made a noise like sharply crumpled paper, a noise of inquiry and . A rat? Kelly turo look. The cat, head on one side, was sidering, with such scrupulous iy that its prickled ears met at the tips, something lying on the floor beside the crystal ball, so that at first it looked as if the glass eye had shed a tear.
But look again.
Kelly looked again and began to sob and gibber.
The cat rose up and backed away all in one liquid motion, hissing, its bristling tail stuck straight up, stiff as a broom haoo scared to permit even the impulse of attack upon the creature, about the size of a little fihat popped out of the crystal ball as if the ball had been a bubble.
But its passage has not cracked or fissured the ball; it is still whole, has sealed itself up again directly after the departure of the infinitesimal child who, suddenly released from her sudden fi, now experimentally stretches out her tiny limbs to test the limit of the new invisible circumference around her.
Kelly stammered: "There must be some rational explanation!"
Although they were too small for him to see them, her teeth still had the transparend notched edges of the first stage of the sed set; her straight, fair hair was cut in a stern fringe; she scowled and sat upright, looking about her with evident disapproval.
The cat, c ecstatically, now knocked over an alembid a quantity of elixir vitae ran away through the rushes. At the bang, the Doctor woke and was not astoo see her.
He bade her a graceful wele in the language of the tawny pippit.
How did she get there?
She was kneeling on the mantelpiece of the sitting room of the place she lived, looking at herself in the mirror. Bored, she breathed on the glass until it clouded over and then, with her finger, she drew a door. The door opened. She sprang through and, after a brief moments fusing fish-eye view of a vast, gloomy chamber, scarcely illuminated by five dles in one braid filled with all the clutter in the world, her view was obliterated by the clawed paw of a vast cat extended ready to strike, hideously increasing in size as it approached her, and then, splat! she burst out of "time will be" into "time was", for the transparent substance which surrounded her burst like a bubble and there she was, in her pink frock, lying on some rushes uhe gaze of a tender a with a long, white beard and a man with a coal-scuttle on his head.
Her lips moved but no sound came out; she had left her voice behind in the mirror. She flew into a tantrum a her heels upon the floor, weeping furiously. The Doctor, who, in some remote time past, raised children of his ow her aloil, her passio, she heaved and grunted on the rushes, knug her eyes; then he peered into the depths of a big a bowl on a dim shelf and produced from out of it a strawberry.
The child accepted the strawberry suspiciously, for it was, although not large, the size of her head. She s, tur round and round, and then essayed just otle bite out of it, leaving behind a tiny ring of white within the crimson flesh. Her teeth were perfect.
At the first bite, she grew a little.
Kelly tio mumble: "There must be some rational explanation."
The child took a sed, less tentative bite, and grew a little more. The mandrakes in their white nightgowns woke up and began to mutter among themselves.
Reassured at last, she gobbled the strawberry all up, but she had been falsely reassured; now her flaxen bumped abruptly against the rafters, out of the range of the dlestick so they could not see her face but a gigantic tear splashed with a metallic g upon Ned Kellys helmet, then another, and the Doctor, with some presenind, before they o hurriedly stru Ark, pressed a phial of elixir vitae into her hand. When she drank it, she shrank down again until soon she was small enough to sit on his knee, her blue eyes staring with wo his beard, as white as ice-cream and as long as Sunday.
But she had no wings.
Kelly, the faker, khere must be a rational explanation but he could not think of one.
She found her voice at last.
"Tell me," she said, "the ao this problem: the Governor of Kgoujni wants to give a very small dinner party, and invites his fathers brother-in-law, his brothers father-in-law, his father-in-laws brother, and his brother-in-laws father. Find the number of guests."1
At the sound of her voice, which was as clear as a looking-glass, everything in the curious room gave a shake and a shudder and, for a moment, looked as if it were painted on gauze, like a theatrical effect, and might disappear if a bright light were shone on it. Dr Dee stroked his beard reflectively. He could provide ao many questions, or knew where t..o look for answers. He had gone and caught a falling starre -- didnt a piece of it lie beside the stuffed dodo? To impreghe aggressively phallidrake, with its masity to the power of two, as implied by its name, was a task which, he pohe omnivorous Archduke, with his enthusiasm for erotic esoterica, might prove capable of. And the ao the other two imponderables posed by the poet were obtainable, surely, through the intermediary of the angels, if only one scried long enough.
He truly believed that nothing was unknowable. That is what makes him modern.
But, to the childs question, he imagine no answer.
Kelly, forced against his nature to suspect the presence of another world that would destroy his fiden tricks, is sunk in introspe, and has not even heard her.
However, such magic as there is in this world, as opposed to the worlds that be made out of diaries, only be real when it is artificial and Dr Dee himself, whilst a member of the Cambridge Footlights at uy, before his beard was white or long, directed a famous produ 藏书网of Aristophanes Peace at Trinity College, in which he sent a grocers bht up to heaven, laden with his basket as if to make deliveries, on the back of a giale.
Archytas made a flying dove of wood. At Nuremberg, acc to Boterus, a structed both an eagle and a fly ahem to flutter and flap across his laboratory, to the astonishment of all. In olden times, the statues that Daedalus built raised their arms and moved their legs due to the a of weights, and of shifting deposits of mercury. Albertus Magnus, the Great Sage, cast a head in brass that spoke.
Are they animate or not, these beings that jerk and shudder into such a semblance of life? Do these creatures believe themselves to be human? And if they do, at oint might they, by virtue of the sheer iy of their belief, bee so?
(In Prague, the city of the Golem, an image e to life.)
The Doctor thinks about these things a great deal and thinks the child upon his knee, babbling about the inhabitants of another world, must be a little automaton popped up from God knows where.
Meanwhile, the door marked "Forbidden" opened up again.
It came in.
It rolled on little wheels, a wobbling, halting, toppling progress, a clockwork land galleon, tall as a mast, advang at a stately if erratic paodding and beg and shedding iial fragments of its surface as it came, its foliage rustling, now stud perilously rog at a cra the stone floor with which its wheels ot cope, now flyier-skelter, almost out of trol, wobbling, clig, whirring, aric juggernaut evidently almost on the point of collapse; it has been a heavy afternoon.
But, although it looked as if etrically self-propelled, Arcimboldo the Milanese pushed it, pig up bits of the thing as they fell off, tut-tutting at its ruination, pushing it, shoving it, occasionally pig it up bodily and carrying it. He was smeared all over with its secretions and looked forward to a good wash o had beeuro the curious room from whe came. There, the Doctor and his assistant will take it apart until the ime.
This thing before us, although it is not, was not and never will be alive, has been animate and will be animate again, but, at the moment, not, for now, after one final shove, it stuck stock-still, wheels halted, wound down, uttering one last, gross, meical sigh.
A nipple dropped off. The Doctor picked it up and offered it to the child. Arawberry! She shook her head.
The size and prominence of the sedary sexual characteristidicate this creature is, like the child, of the feminine gender. She lives in the fruit bowl where the Doctor found the first strawberry. When the Archduke wants her, Arcimboldo, who designed her, puts her together again, arranging the fruit of which she is posed on a wicker frame, always a little different from the last time acc to what the greenhouse provide. Today, her hair is largely posed of green muscat grapes, her nose a pear, eyes filbert nuts, cheeks russet apples somewhat wrinkled -- never mind! The Archduke has a pent for older women. When the painter got her ready, she looked like Carmen Mirandas hat on wheels, but her name was "Summer".
But now, what devastation! Hair mashed, nose squashed, bosom pureed, belly juiced. The child observed this apparition with the greatest i. She spoke again. She queried early:
"If 70 per t have lost an eye, 75 per t an ear, 80 per t an arm, 85 per t a leg: ertage, at least, must have lost all four?"2
Once again, she stumped them. They pondered, all three men, and at last slowly shook their heads. As if the childs questiohe last straw, "Summer" now disied -- subsided, slithered, slopped off her frame into her fruit bowl, whilst shed fruit, some almost whole, bouo the rushes arouhe Milanese, with a pang, watched his design disie.
It is not so much that the Archduke likes to pretend this monstrous being is alive, for nothing inhuman is alien to him; rather, he does not care whether she is alive or no, that what he wants to do is to plunge his member into her artificial strangeness, perhaps as he does so imagining himself an orchard and this embrace, this pluo the suct flesh, which is not flesh as we know it, which is, if you like, the liviaphor -- "fica" -- explains Arcimboldo, displaying the orifice -- this intercourse with the very flesh of summer will fructify his cold kingdom, the snowy try outside the window, where the creaking raven endlessly laments the i weather.
"Reason bees the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure," said Freud.
One day, when the fish within the river freeze, the day of the frigid lunar noon, the Archduke will e to Dr Dee, his crazy eyes resembling, the one, a blackberry, the other, a cherry, and say: transform me into a harvest festival!
So he did; but the weather got er.
Peckish, Kelly absently demolished a fallen peach, so lost in thought he never noticed the purple bruise, and the little cat played croquet with the peach stone while Dr Dee, stirred by memories of his English children long ago and far away, stroked the girls flaxen hair.
"Whither est thou?" he asked her.
The question stirred her again into speech.
"A and B began the year with only ￡1,000 apiece," she announced, urgently.
The three men turo look at her as if she were about to pronoune piece of oracular wisdom. She tossed her blonde head. She went on.
"They borrowed nought; they stole nought. On the New Years Day they had ￡60,000 between them. How did they do it?"3
They could not think of a reply. They tio stare at her, words turning to dust in their mouths.
"How did they do it?" she repeated, now almost with desperation, as if, if they only could stumble on the correct reply, she would be precipitated back, diminutive, stern, rational, within the crystal ball and thence be tossed back through the mirror to "time will be", or, eveer, to the book from which she had sprung.
"Poor Toms a-cold," offered the raven. After that, came silence.
NOTE:
The ao Alices drums:
1 One.
2 Ten.
3 They went that day to the Bank of England. A stood in front of it, while B went round and stood behind it.
Problems and answers from A Taale, Lewis Carroll, London, 1885.
Alice was ied by a logi and therefore she es from the world of nonsehat is, from the world of non-sense -- the opposite of on sehis world is stricted by logical dedu and is created by language, although language shivers into abstras within it.
Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene
For a woman to be a virgin and a mother, you need a miracle; when a woman isbbr> not a virgin, nor a mother, either, nobody talks about miracles. Mary, the mother of Jesus, together with the other Mary, the mother of St John, and the Mary Magdalehe repentant harlot, went down to the seashore; a woman named Fatima, a servant, went with them. They stepped into a boat, they threw away the rudder, they permitted the sea to take them where it wanted. It beached them near Marseilles.
Dont run away with the idea the South of France was an easy option pared to the deserts of Syria, ypt, or the wastes of Cappadocia, where other early saints, likewise driven by the imperious need for solitude, found arid, inhospitable crevices in which to plate the ineffable. There were , square, white, Roman cities all along the Mediterranean coast everywhere except the place the three Marys landed with their servant. They landed in the middle of a malarial s, the Camargue. It was not pleasant. The desert would have been more healthy.
But there the two stern mothers and Fatima -- dont fet Fatima -- set up a chapel, at the place we now call Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. There they stayed. But the other Mary, the Magdalehe not-mother, could not stop. Impelled by the demon of loneliness, she went off on her own through the Camargue; then she crossed limestone hill after limestone hill. Flints cut her feet, sun burned her skin. She ate fruit that had fallen from the tree of its own accord, like a perfect Mani. She ate dropped berries. The black-browed Palestinian woman walked in silence, gaunt as famine, hairy as a dog.
She walked until she came to the forest of the Sainte-Baume. She walked until she came to the remotest part of the forest. There she found a cave. There she stopped. There she prayed. She did not speak to another human being, she did not see another human being, for thirty-three years. By then, she was old.
Mary Magdalehe Venus in sackcloth. Gees de La Tours picture does not show a woman in sackcloth, but her chemise is coarse and simple enough to be a peial garment, or, at least, the kind of garment that shows you were not thinking of personal ador when you put it on. Even though the chemise is deeply open on the bosom, it does not seem to disclose flesh as such, but a flesh that has more akin to the wax of the burning dle, to the way the wax dle is irradiated by its own flame, and glows. So you could say that, from the waist up, this Mary Magdalene is on the high road to penitence, but, from the waist down, which is always the more problematic part, there is the question of her long, red skirt.
Left-over finery? Was it the only frock she had, the frock she went wh in, theed in, the sail in? Did she walk all the way to the Sainte-Baume in this red skirt? It doesnt look travel-stained or worn or torn. It is a luxurious, even sdalous skirt. A scarlet dress for a scarlet woman.
The Virgin Mary wears blue. Her preference has sanctified the colour. We think of a "heavenly" blue. But Mary Magdalene wears red, the colour of passion. The two womewin paradoxes. One is not what the other is. One is a virgin and a mother; the other is a non-virgin, and childless. Note how the English language doesnt tain a specific word to describe a woman who is grown-up, sexually mature and not a mother, unless such a woman is using her sexuality as her profession.
Because Mary Magdalene is a woman and childless she goes out into the wilderness. The others, the mothers, stay and make a church, where people e.
But why has she taken her pearl necklace with her? Look at it, lying in front of the mirror. And her long hair has been most beautifully brushed. Is she, yet, fully repentant?
In Gees de La Tours painting, the Magdalenes hair is>.. well brushed. Sometimes the Magdalenes hair is as shaggy as a Rastafarians. Sometimes her hair hangs down upon, is iricably mixed up with, her furs. Mary Magdalene is easier to read when she is hairy, when, in the wilderness, she wears the rough coat of her own desires, as if the desires of her past have turned into the hairy shirt that torments her present, repentant flesh.
Sometimes she wears only her hair; it never saw a b, long, matted, u, hanging down to her knees. She belts her own hair round her waist with the rope with which, eaight, she lashes herself, making a rough tunic of it. On these occasions, the transformation from the young lovely, voluptuous Mary Magdalehe happy non-virgin, the party girl, the woman taken in adultery -- on these occasions, the transformation is plete. She has turned into something wild and strange, into a female version of John the Baptist, a hairy hermit, as good as ransding gender, sex obliterated, nakedness irrelevant.
Now she is oh such pole-sitters as Simeon Stylites, and other solitary cave-dwellers who uned with beasts, like St Jerome. She eats herbs, drinks water from the pool; she es to resemble an even earlier ination of the "wild man of the woods" than John the Baptist. Now she looks like hairy Enkidu, from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The woman who once, in her grand, red dress, was vice personified, has now retired to aential situation in which vice simply is not possible. She has arrived at the radiant, enlightened sinlessness of the animals. In her new, resple animality, she is now beyond choiow she has no option but virtue.
But there is another way of looking at it. Think of Donatellos Magdalene, in Florence -- shes dried up by the suns of the wilderness, battered by wind and rain, anorexic, toothless, a body entirely annihilated by the soul. You almost smell the odour of the kind of sanctity that reeks from her -- its rank, its raw, its horrible. By the ardour with which she has embraced the rigorous asceticism of penitence, you tell how much she hated her early life of so-called "pleasure". The mortification of the flesh es naturally to her. When you learn that Donatello intehe piece to be not black but gilded, that does not lighten its mood.
heless, you see the point that some anonymous Man of the Enlighte on the Grand Tour made two hundred years ago -- how Donatellos Mary Magdalene made him "disgusted with penitence".
Penitence bees sado-masochism. Self-punishment is its own reward.
But it also bee kitsch. sider the apocryphal story of Mary of Egypt. Who was a beautiful prostitute until she repented and spent the remaining forty-seven years of her life as a pe in the desert, clothed only in her long hair. She took with her three loaves and ate a mouthful of bread once a day, in the ms; the loaves lasted her out. Mary of Egypt is and fresh. Her face stays miraculously unlined. She is as untouched by time as her bread is untouched by appetite. She sits on a ro the desert, bing out her long hair, like a lorelei whose water has turo sand. We imagine how she smiles. Perhaps she sings a little song.
Gees de La Tours Mary Magdalene has not yet arrived at aasy of repentance, evidently. Perhaps, indeed, he has pictured her as she is just about to repent -- before her sea voyage in fact, although I would prefer to think that this bare, bleak space, furnished only with the mirror, is that of her cave in the woods. But this is a woman who is still taking care of herself. Her long, black hair, sleek as that of a Japanese woman on a painted scroll -- she must just have finished brushing it, reminding us that she is the patron saint of hairdressers. Her hair is the product of culture, not left as nature intended. Her hair shows she has just used the mirror as an instrument of worldly vanity. Her hair shows that, even as she meditates upon the dle flame, this world still has a claim upon her.
Unless we are actually watg her as her soul is drawn out into the dle flame.
We meet Mary Magdalene in the gospels, doing somethiraordinary with her hair. After she massaged Jesuss feet with her pot of precious oi, she wiped them with her hair, an image so astonishing aically precise it is surprising it is represented so rarely in art, especially that of the seveh tury, when religious excess aicism went so often together. Magdalene, using her hair, that beautiful with which she used to snare men as -- well, as a mop, a washcloth, a towel. And a slight element of the perverse about it, too. All in all, the kind of gaudy gesture a repentant prostitute would make.
She has brushed her hair, perhaps for the last time, and taken off her pearl necklace, also for the last time. Now she is gazing at the dle flame, which doubles itself in the mirror. Once upon a time, that mirror was the tool of her trade; it was within the mirror that she assembled all the elements of the femininity she put together for sale. But now, instead of refleg her face, it duplicates the pure flame.
When I was in labour, I thought of a dle flame. I was in labour for een hours. At first the pains came slowly and were relatively light; it was easy to ride them. But when they came more closely together, and grew more and more intehen I began to trate my mind upon an imaginary dle flame.
Look at the dle flame as if it is the only thing in the world. How white and steady it is. At the core of the white flame is a e of blue, transparent air; that is the thing to look at, that is the thing to trate on. When the pains came thid fast, I fixed all my attention on the blue abse the heart of the flame, as though it were the secret of the flame and, if I trated enough upon it, it would bey secret, too.
Soon there was no time to think of anything else. By then, I was entirely subsumed by the blue space. Evehey snipp９9lｉb?ed away at my body, down below, to finally let the baby out the easiest way, all my attention was trated on the core of the flame.
Ohe dle flame had dos work, it sself out; they ed my baby in a shawl and gave him to me.
Mary Magdaleates upon the dle flame. She ehe blue core, the blue absence. She bees something other than herself.
The silen the picture, for it is the most silent of pictures, emanates not from the darkness behind the dle in the mirror but from these two dles, the real dle and the mirror dle. Betweehe two dles disseminate light and silehey have trahe woman into enlighte. She t speak, wont speak. In the desert, she will grunt, maybe, but she will put speech aside, after this, after she has meditated upon the dle flame and the mirror. She will put speech aside just as she has put aside her pearl necklad will put away her red skirt. The new person, the saint, is being born out of this intercourse with the dle flame.
But something has already been born out of this intercourse with the dle flame. See. She carries it already. She carries where, if she were a Virgin mother and not a sacred whore, she would rest her baby, not a living child but a memento mori, a skull.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》