Читать книгу Dr. Sax - Jack Kerouac - Страница 26

“I AM TOO FEEBLE TO GO ON,” says the Wizard in the Castle bending over his papers at night.

“Faustus!” cries his wife from the bath, “what are you doing up so late! Stop fiddling with your desk papers and pen quills in the middle of the night, come to bed, the mist is on the air of night lamps, a dewll come to rest your fevered brow at morning,—you’ll lie swaddled in sweet sleep like a lambikin—l’ll hold you in my old snow-white arms–and all you do’s sit there dreaming—”

“Of Snakes! of Snakes!” answers the Master of Earthly Evil–sneering at his own wife: he has a beak nose and movable jaw-bird beak and front teeth missing and something indefinably young in bone structure but imponderably old in the eyes–horrible old bitch face of a martinet with books, cardinals and gnomes at his spidery behest.

“Would I’d never seen your old fink face and married you–to sit around in bleak castles all my life, for varmints in the dirt!”

“Flap up you old sot and drink your stinking brandignac and conyoles, fit me an idea for chat, drive me not mad with your fawter toddle in a gloom . . . you with your pendant flesh combs and bawd spots–picking your powderies in a nair–flam off, frish frowse, I want peace to Scholarize my Snakes–let me Baroque be.”

By this time the old lady’s asleep… Wizard Faustus hurries in his wrinkly feet to a meet with Count Condu and the Cardinals in the Cave Room … his footsteps clang along an iron underhall–There stands a gnome with a pass key, a little glucky monster with web feet or some such —heavy rags wrapped around each foot and around the head almost blinding the eyes, a weird crew, their leader sported a Moro saber and had a thin little neck you’d expect from a shrunk head… The Wizard comes to the Parapet to contemplate.

He looks down into the Pit of Night.

He hears the Snake Sigh and Inch.

He moves his hand three times and backs, he waves a bow with his wrists, and walks down the long sand hill of a grisly part of the Castle with shit in the sand and old boards and moisture down the mossy ratty granite walls of an old dongeon–where gnome children masturbated and wrote obscenities with whitewash brushes like advertisements of Presidents in Mexico.

The Wizard, with a loll of his sensual tongue, dislodges a piece of meat from his front teeth, deep in folded-arm meditation at the head of the gutted bird.

He still bears the horrible marks of his strangulation and occupation by the Devil in the 13th century:—a high collar in the old Inquisition style he wears to partially conceal signs of ravages by Satan in the long ago–an ugly twist–