Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 24

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers. Breavman forgot everything he learned from Lisa’s small body.

Oh, how their lives had emptied from the time they crawled out from under the bed and stood up on their hind legs!

Now they longed for knowledge but undressing was a sin. Therefore they were an easy touch for the postcards, pornographic magazines, home-made erotica peddled in school cloakrooms. They became connoisseurs of sculpture and painting. They knew all the books in the library which had the best, most revealing reproductions.

What did bodies look like?

Lisa’s mother presented her with a careful book and they searched it in vain for straight information. There were phrases like ‘the temple of the human body,’ which may be true, but where was it, with its hair and creases? They wanted clear pictures, not a blank page with a dot in the centre and a breathless caption: ‘Just think! the male sperm is 1,000 times smaller than this.’

So they wore light clothing. He had a pair of green shorts which she loved for their thinness. She had a yellow dress which he preferred. This situation gave birth to Lisa’s great lyric exclamation:

‘You wear your green silk pants tomorrow; I’ll wear my yellow dress, so it’ll be better.’

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

He was about to send for a volume advertised in a confession magazine which promised to arrive in a plain, brown wrapper, when, in one of the periodic searches through the maid’s drawers, he found the viewer.

It was made in France and contained a two-foot strip of film. You held it to the light and turned the little round knob and you saw everything.

Let us praise this film, which has disappeared with the maid into the Canadian wilderness.

It was titled in English, with beguiling simplicity, ‘Thirty Ways to Screw.’ The scenes were nothing like the pornographic movies Breavman later witnessed and attacked, of naked, jumpy men and women acting out the contrived, sordid plots.

The actors were handsome humans, happy in their film career. They were not the scrawny, guilty, desperately gay cast-offs who perform for gentlemen’s smokers. There were no lecherous smiles for the camera, no winking and lip-licking, no abuse of the female organ with cigarettes and beer bottles, no ingenious unnatural arrangement of bodies.

Each frame glowed with tenderness and passionate delight.

This tiny strip of celluloid shown widely in Canadian theatres might revitalize the tedious marriages which are reported to abound in our country.

Where are you, working girl with supreme device? The National Film Board hath need of you. Are you growing old in Winnipeg?

The film ended with a demonstration of the grand, democratic, universal practice of physical love. There were Indian couples represented, Chinese, Negro, Arabian, all without their national costumes on.

Come back, maid, strike a blow for World Federalism.

They pointed the viewer to the window and solemnly traded it back and forth.

They knew it would be like this.

The window gave over the slope of Murray Park, across the commercial city, down to the Saint Lawrence, American mountains in the distance. When it wasn’t his turn Breavman took in the prospect. Why was anybody working?

They were two children hugging in a window, breathless with wisdom.

They could not rush to it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had to be in love. They thought they were but they would give themselves a week just to make sure.

They hugged again in what they thought would be among their last fully clothed embraces.

How can Breavman have regrets? It was Nature herself who intervened.

Three days before Thursday, maid’s day off, they met in their special place, the bench beside the pond in the park. Lisa was shy but determined to be straight and honest, as was her nature.

‘I can’t do it with you.’

‘Aren’t your parents going away?’

‘It’s not that. Last night I got the Curse.’

She touched his hand with pride.

‘Oh.’

‘Know what I mean?’

‘Sure.’

He hadn’t the remotest idea.

‘But it would still be O.K., wouldn’t it?’

‘But now I can have babies. Mummy told me about everything last night. She had it all ready for me, too, napkins, a belt of my own, everything.’

‘No guff?’

What was she talking about? The Curse sounded like a celestial intrusion on his pleasure.

‘She told me about all the stuff, just like the camera.’

‘Did you tell her about the camera?’

Nothing, the world, nobody could be trusted.

‘She promised not to tell anyone.’

‘It was a secret.’

‘Don’t be sad. We had a long talk. I told her about us, too. You see, I’ve got to act like a lady now. Girls have to act older than boys.’

‘Who’s sad?’

She leaned back in the bench and took his hand.

‘But aren’t you happy for me?’ she laughed, ‘that I got the Curse? I have it right now!’