Читать книгу Echo's Bones - Samuel Beckett - Страница 11

ECHO’S BONES

The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor ­incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them. Then they are free among the dead by all means, then their troubles are over, their natural troubles. But the debt of nature, that scandalous post-obit on one’s own estate, can no more be discharged by the mere fact of kicking the bucket than descent can be made into the same stream twice. This is a true saying.

At least it can be truly said of Belacqua who now found himself up and about in the dust of the world, back at his old games in the dim spot, on so many different occasions that he sometimes wondered if his lifeless condition were not all a dream and if on the whole he had not been a great deal deader before than after his formal departure, so to speak, from among the quick. No one was more willing than himself to admit that his definite individual existence had in some curious way been an injustice and that this tedious process of extinction, its protracted faults of old error, was the atonement imposed on every upstart into animal spirits, each in the order of time. But this did not make things any more pleasant or easy to bear. It occurred to him one day as he sat bent double on a fence like a casse-poitrine in delicious rêverie and puffed away at his Romeo and Juliet that perhaps if he had been cremated rather than inhumed directly he would have been less liable to revisit the vomit. But happily for all of us this thought was too egregious to detain him long. He tried all he knew, without shifting his position however, to conceive of his exuviae as preserved in an urn or other receptacle in some kind person’s sanctum or as drifting about like a cloud of randy pollen, but somehow he could not quite bring it off, this simple little flight. Was it possible that his imagination had perished in the torture chamber, that non-smoking compartment? That would indeed be something to be going on with, that would be what a Madden prizeman, his eyes out on stalks like a sentinel-crab’s with zeal and excitement, would call a step in the right direction.

To state it then fairly fully once and for all, Belacqua is a ­human, dead and buried, restored to the jungle, yes really ­restored to the jungle, completely exhausted, conscious of his shortcomings, sitting on this fence, day in day out, having this palpitation, picking his nose between cigars, suffering greatly from exposure. This is he and the position from which he ventures, to which he is even liable to return after the fiasco, in which he is installed for each dose of expiation of great strength, from which he is caught up each time a trifle better, dryer, less of a natural snob. These predicates do not cover him, no number of them could. If as dense tissue of corporeal ­hereditaments – ha! – he was predicateless, how much more so then as spook? But cover they do the mean, the least presentable, aspect of his cruel reversion, three scenes from which, the first, the central and the last, we make bold to solicit as likely material for this fagpiece, this little triptych.

To begin then at the beginning, he felt himself nodding in the grey shoals of angels, his co-departed, that thronged the womb-tomb, distinctly he felt himself lapsing from a beatitude of sloth that was infinitely smoother than oil and softer than pumpkins, he found himself fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs so long lapped in gloom, and the next thing was he was horsed as it were for major discipline on the fence as see above, the bells pealing in all the steeples, his pockets crammed with ­cigars. He took the band off one of these, lit it, looked into his heart and exclaimed:

‘My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked, all the old pains and aches of me soul-junk return!’

Hardly had this thought burst from his brain as a phosphate from the kidneys when a woman shot out of the hedge and stood before him, serene yet not relaxedly gay. There she stood, frankly alluring him to come and doubt not, stretching forth to hug him her holy hands pullulant with a million good examples. There was nothing at all of the grave widow or anile virgin about her, nothing in the least barren in her appearance. She would be, if she were not already, the fruitful mother of children of joys.

‘They call me Zaborovna’ she simpered.

‘I don’t hear what you say’ said Belacqua. ‘Speak up will you.’

Now it must be clearly understood that there were no stews where Belacqua came from, no stews and no demand for stews. But here in the dust with night getting ready to fall it was quite a different matter. Belacqua felt he had been dead a long time, forty days at least.

‘You are Belacqua’ she said ‘whom we took for dead, or I’m a Dutchman.’

‘I am’ said Belacqua, ‘restored for a time by a lousy fate to the nuts and balls and sparrows of the low stature of animation. But who is we and who are you?’

‘I told you’ she said, ‘Zaborovna, at your service; and we, why little we is just an impersonal usage, the Tuscan reflexive without more.’

‘The mood’ said Belacqua, ‘forgive the term, of self-abuse, as the English passive of masochism.’

‘How long do you expect to be with us?’ said Zaborovna.

‘As long as I lived’ said Belacqua, ‘on and off, I have the feeling.’

‘You mean with intermissions?’ she said.

‘Do you know’ said Belacqua, ‘I like the way you speak very much.’

‘The way I speak’ she said.

‘I find your voice’ he said ‘something more than a roaring-meg against melancholy, I find it a covered waggon to me that am weary on the way, I do indeed.’

‘So musical’ she said, ‘I would never have thought it.’

It was high time for a pause to ensue and a long one did. The lady advanced a pace towards the fence, clearly she was sparring for an opening, Belacqua pulled furiously at the immense cigar, a bird, its beak set in the heaven, flew by.

‘Too late!’ he exclaimed at last in piercing tones. ‘Too late!’

‘What is too late?’ said Zaborovna.

‘This encounter’ said Belacqua. ‘Can’t you see my life is over?’

‘Oh’ she said, in a voice something between a caress and a dig in the ribs, ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’

In the echo of the above pause she seized her opportunity, transferred her slyly grave deportment to the knees and thighs of the revenant, which parts of him trembled in the chill of the hour. A colony of rooks made their evening flight and darkened the sky, yes actually darkened the sky. Belacqua polished off his cigar, pressed it out fiercely against the rail, elevated his mind to God, crossed himself a thousand times.

‘Forgive me’ he said, ‘I’m as bad as Dr Keate of Eton, I can see his shaggy red brows distinctly, I can’t recall your name for the moment.’

‘Zaborovna’ she said, ‘yours to command, Miss Zaborovna Privet, put your arm about her won’t you.’

Belacqua, whom nothing could teach not to spit and dig for clotted mucus in the presence of ladies, shanghaied now a snot on his cuff and brought his eyes that were so sore with one thing and another, whinging and the light that quick-change artist, close up to those, sparklers of the first water and in which he seemed to discern a number of babies, of the Privet, who after a short and gallant struggle was constrained to look away, so searing, so red-hot and parallel, were the prongs of his gaze. Away she looked to the cool, not to say bitter, east and observed her shadow, like an old man’s desire, prone and monstrous on the grass, but not a sign of her pick-up’s, out of whose lap she sprang at once and stood on the ground well to one side, thinking that perhaps she had been seeing single, and looked again. But her first impression was confirmed by the absence of any shadow but the fence’s and her own, projected in tattered umber far across the waste. The sun was there all right, belting away in the west behind, ignoring him completely. This body that did not intercept the light, this packet of entrails that had shed the ashen spancels, she looked it up and down. He had produced a razor from some abyssal pocket and was lovingly whittling a live match. This when pointed according to his God he used to pierce a deep meatus in a fresh cigar, visit his teeth all round, top and bottom, light the cigar. Then he made to throw it away but recovered himself in time and stuck it like a golf tee in the stuff of his pullover.

Tears rushed down the cheeks of Zaborovna as she hurled herself into the arms of her prey, no easy matter.

‘Wipe them’ said Belacqua.

He was most ardent and sad all of a sudden, a Gilles de Rais twinkle in his eye. How long then was this, this – ha! – strangury of decency going to go on, going to go on. The Privet was present, panting away to no apparent avail, wilful waste, like the beatific paps of a nun of Minsk; while as for himself, cold as January at the best of times, he was no more capable now, when any moment might be the last of the current lot, ring him back to the gloom where stews and therefore Privets had no sense, of rising to such a buxom occasion than Alfieri or Jean-Jacques of dancing a minuet. Yet he was sorely tempted to try, that was the bitch of it.

‘Dry those handsome eyes’ he said as distinctly as the cigar would allow. ‘Don’t drown the babies I see there for a corpse in torment.’

He withdrew the cigar, put his features into a sudden spin of anguish, righted them no less abruptly, replaced the cigar. That was the kind of thing he meant, that was the torment coming to the surface to breathe. Now she knew.

Soothed by this kind clonus she said:

‘It is not so much you as your shadow. What has befallen it?’

Now the fact of the matter is that a personal shadow is like happiness, possession of being well deceived, hypnosis, (1) ­apprehensible only as a lack. A stranger’s shadow, the shadows of natural things, of trees, wings, ocean clouds and the rest, one goes honing after these and indeed it is hard to imagine how one could ever manage without them. But one’s own, except in the case of a very nervous subject, (2) is as unobtrusive as the motion of the earth, to adopt the system of Galileo, that dials it.

1. Cf. Titania and the Ass.

2. Cf. Richard III.

Belacqua looked wildly about him.

‘God I don’t know at all’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I had it.’

Zaborovna delivered herself now and not a moment too soon of the butterfly doctrine noted above. It was true, she said, of more things than heartsease (a woman’s term) and shadow. It was only a chance, she said, that she had seen hers at all. She would pay more attention to it in future. She looked to make sure it was still there.

‘You may be right’ said Belacqua. ‘I don’t say you’re not. I’m a marked man whatever way you look at it.’

There is more in it than that, thought Zaborovna, but hist!

‘Every evening during the season’ she said, ‘Saturdays ­excepted, I lend myself to sublime delinquencies in the old town where I lodge, and lodge in some splendour believe me. Happily to-night I am not booked.’

The sun set, the rooks flew home. Why did Belacqua always seem to be abroad at this hour of lowest vitality surely? Portions of a poem by Uhland came into his mind. They received short shrift.

‘No crows where I come from’ he said, ‘God be praised.’

‘Ah’ said Zaborovna. ‘Then there is a God after all?’

‘Presumably’ said Belacqua. ‘I know no more than I did.’

He seemed to have recovered from his sense of bereavement. Nevertheless she was right, there was more in it, as the sequel may well show, than he thought.

‘I should be happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.

A long black cylindrical Galloway cow, in her heyday a kind and quick feeder, now obviously seriously ill with rinderpest, red-water and contagious abortion, staggered out of the ground fog, collapsed and slipped calf. It was all over in a flash.

‘Happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.

‘When you say “put me up”’ said Belacqua, ‘what do you mean exactly?’

Not having properly sized up her man she kept the wrong things back.

‘You are far too hospitable’ said Belacqua, ‘I couldn’t dream of it.’

The cow, greatly eased, on her back, her four legs indicting the firmament, was in the article of death. Belacqua knew what that was.

‘And you don’t utter all your mind’ he said, ‘unless I am greatly mistaken.’

‘Well then’ she said, ‘fried garlic and Cuban rum, what do you say to that?’

‘Human rum!’ exclaimed Belacqua.

‘Cuban’ she said, ‘a guinea a bottle.’

Something simply had to happen, the ground-fog lifted, the sky was mare’s-tail and shed a livid light, ghastly in the puddles that pitted the land, but beautiful also, like the complexion in Addison’s disease. A child, radiant in scarlet diaper and pale blue pilch, skipped down off the road and began to sail a boat.

‘Though you hedge’ said Belacqua, ‘Miss Privet, yet do you win, and my shame be my glory.’

‘That’s a sensible cadaver’ said Zaborovna. She began to back away most gracefully.

‘Let the deadbeats get on’ said Belacqua, ‘I can’t bear a crowd.’

The faithful, seeded with demons, a dim rabble, cringing home after Vespers, regrettably not Sicilian. In the van an Editor, of a Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly, his po hat cockaded fore and aft with a title-page and a poem of pleasure, a tailor of John Jameson o’Lantern dancing before him; next, a friend’s wife, splendid specimen of exophthalmic goitre, storming along, her nipples up her nose; next, a Gipsy Rondo, glabrous but fecund, by-blow of a long line of aguas and iluminaciones; next, Hairy, leaning back, moving very stiff and open; next, in a covered Baby Austen, the Count of Parabimbi and his lady; next, trained to a hair, a nest of rank outsiders, mending in perfect amity a hard place in Eliot, relaxing from time to time to quire their manifesto: ‘Boycott Poulter’s Measure!’; next, as usual in the thick of the mischief, a caput of highly liberally educated ex-eunuchs, rotating slowly as they tottered forward, their worn buttocks gleaming through the slits in their robes; next, Caleken Frica, stark staring naked, jotting notes for period dialogue with a cauter dipped in cocoa round the riddle of her navel minnehaha minnehaha; next, a honeymoon unicorn, brow-beating his half-hunter; next, a Yogi milkman, singeing his beard with a standard candle, a contortionist leprechaun riding in his brain (abdominal); next, the sisters, Debauch and Death, holding their noses. So they passed by and passed away, those mentioned and one or two more, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last – a fully grown androgyne of tempestuous loveliness – after the rest, and after the last a spacious nothing.

‘Bad one by one’ said Belacqua, ‘very bad all together.’

A frightful sound as of rent silk put the heart across him.

‘There never was such a season for mandrakes’ said Zaborovna.

‘Alas’ said Belacqua, ‘Gnaeni, the pranic bleb, is far from being a mandrake. His leprechaun lets him out about this time every Sunday. They have no conduction.’

The dead cow would soon be a source of embarrassment.

‘You remember the wonderful lines’ said Belacqua:

‘A dog, a parrot or an ape . . .

Engross the fancies of the fair.’

Zaborovna let a ringing guffaw.

‘Did you see the Parabimbi’ she said. ‘Where did she get her crucified smile, the little immaculate conception?’

Belacqua descended resolutely from the fence, took up a hole in his belt, plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a Partagas, the sweetest contingency by a long chalk to come his way for many a day, lit it, thought, Now if there should turn out to be a Voltigeur in this assortment . . . !, and said:

‘Whenever you are ready Miss.’

She tossed back the hissing vipers of her hair, her entire body coquetted and writhed like a rope, foamed into a bawdy akimbo that treed, cigar and all, her interlocutor. Poor fellow, there he was, petrified, back on the fence. And Zaborovna, one minute the picture of exuberant continence, the next this Gorgon! Truly there is no accounting for some people. Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities. So at least it seemed to Belacqua, not for the first time, numbed now on the fence. He himself varied by all means, but as something, some rhythmic principle whose seat he rather thought was in the pit of his stomach. An almanac of his inconstancies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages than they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods. Exaggeration or not, that was how it struck Belacqua, more forcibly now, as he adhered firmly to the fence and heard with great thankfulness the floes of shock crack in his heart-box, than perhaps ever before.

A quantity of phrases presented themselves to Zaborovna, who thus to her annoyance found herself faced with the alternative of saying nothing or preferring one.

‘The garlic won’t be worth eating’ she said and at once ­repented her choice, as though she had had the least part in it, the pretty creature. So astute in some matters, so crass in others, so crass-astute in as many again, intruding like a flea her loose familiarities into the most retired places, how can she ever expect, as she does, to excel?

But now for it and like a lamb he followed her steps, up hill and down dale, to her lodging, where having arrived in the core of the darkest hour he at once devoured the garlic, tossed off the white rum, threw them thus mingled, after the manner of Ninus the Assyrian, higgledy-piggledy on the stones, mentioned that he was bemired with sins, naked of good deeds and the meat of worms, and then to his astonishment was ravished, but ravished out of the horrid jaws agape for the love-feast, the wrinkled gums and the Hutchinson fangs, which bit into nothing more fruity than what she afterwards described to a bosom pal as the dream of the shadow of the smoke of a rotten cigar, (3) just as the first sun opened a little eye in the heaven of blue Monday and gave light to a cock, ravished in the sense of reassumed, the first dose of resurgence having acted, into the lush plush of womby-tomby.

3. The Voltigeur!

To proceed, after what seemed to Belacqua countless as it were eructations into the Bayswater of Elysium, brash ­after brash of atonement for the wet impudence of an earthly state – the idea being of course that his heart, not his soul but his heart, drained and dried in this racking guttatim, should qualify at last as a plenum of fire for bliss immovable – he appears to us again and more or less in the familiar attitude all set for his extraordinary affair with the spado in tail, if such a curious animal can be said to exist. Perched then on the lofty boundary of a simply enormous estate, guzzling a cheroot, the air filled with the camembert odours of goat, the stags belling fit to burst, tears for the betossed soul (his misnomer) flowing freely which was all to the good, he received such a stunning crack on his eminent coccyx, that little known funny bone of amativeness, that he all but swooned for joy. Never had he experienced such a tingling sensation, it was like having one’s bottom skaterolled with knuckle-dusters.

‘Whoever you are’ he cried, ‘Jetzer or Juniperus —’

No answer.

‘Firk away’ he screamed, ‘firk away, it is better than secret love.’

‘Love’ said a wearish voice behind him, ‘turn round my young friend, face this way do, and tell me what you know of that disorder.’

Belacqua did as he was bid, because a little bird told him, do you see, that his hour had come and that it would be rather more graceful, not to say more sensible, to take it by the forelock, and looked down on a bald colossus, the Saint Paul’s skull gathered into ropy dundraoghaires and a seamless belcher, dangling to and fro that help to holy living a Schenectady putter, clad in amaranth caoutchouc cap-à-pie, a cloak of gutta percha streaming back from the barrel of his bust, in his hand a gum tarboosh.

‘I fear I caught you’ said this strange figure ‘with my last long putt. I got right under the beggar.’

‘Then you have lost your ball’ said Belacqua. ‘What a shame!’

‘I make my own’ said the giant, ‘I have some hundred thousand in a bag at home.’

‘Where do you suppose’ said Belacqua ‘all this is leading to?’

‘I am Lord Gall’ said the colossus, ‘if that means anything to you. Lord Gall of Wormwood. This is Wormwood. Possibility of issue is extinct.’

‘Fecks’ said Belacqua, ‘never say die, the law won’t.’

‘The law is a ginnet’ said Lord Gall. ‘Did I ever tell you that one?’

‘I may know it’ said Belacqua, ‘there aren’t many I haven’t forgotten at one time or another. But fire away.’

‘It’s a prime story’ said Lord Gall, ‘told me in a dream, or rather a vision. I’ll communicate it as we go along.’

‘Forgive me’ said Belacqua, ‘but go along whither?’

‘By heaven’ exclaimed Lord Gall, ‘I have it all mapped out, believe me or believe me not. I don’t know who you are, but that you will do me the hell of a lot of good I have little doubt. In fact I was thinking —’

Lord Gall blushed and could not go on. He tormented the tassel of his tarboosh. Belacqua urged him to conceal nothing.

‘We are quite alone’ he said ‘except for a goat somewhere.’

‘Well’ said Lord Gall, ‘I was thinking, if you did not mind, of addressing you in future as Adeodatus.’

He let fall the putter, settled the tarboosh firmly on his head, reached up with his arms and set Belacqua gently on the ground beside him.

‘Take my hand’ he said.

Timidly Belacqua made a little fist, placed in the monstrous bud, glowing with rings, of his patron, who suffered it to nestle there and even treated it to a long long fungoid squeeze that was most gratifying no doubt. Lord Gall stood, vibrating from head to foot, the cloak cracking like a banner, the sweat distilling through the caoutchouc in sudden stains, getting up steam in fact. Then abruptly he moved forward with a kind of religious excitement that jerked Belacqua clean off his feet.

‘Steady’ said Lord Gall.

Belacqua made a perfect landing and scuttled along in great style, a willing little pony.

‘Now then’ said Lord Gall. ‘When our Lord —’

‘Your putter sir’ cried Belacqua, ‘you have left it behind.’

‘Pox on my putter’ roared Lord Gall, vexed to the pluck, ‘I have quiverfuls at home.’

Faster and faster they sped over the pasture, paved with edible mushrooms which Lord Gall scattered and spurned like a great elephant and big, Belacqua would have staked his reputation, with truffles. Yet he did not dare suggest that they should stop and fill their hankies.

‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall, ‘do you heed me?’

Belacqua felt that this was a piece of rhetoric. He was right.

‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall for the third time ‘stood in need of a mount and before the ass, to her undying credit, agreed unconditionally to carry him, he made overtures to the horse, who required notice of the question, and to the mule and ginnet, who bluntly refused.’

‘The pigdogs!’ cried Belacqua.

‘Therefore’ proceeded Lord Gall ‘the Lord laid a curse on the mule and the ginnet, whose gist was that they should go no farther. With the twofold result that —’

‘Primo’ piped Belacqua.

‘Primo: they have a glorious time. Secun —’

‘In what sense’ said Belacqua ‘do they have a glorious time?’

As a train from a tunnel or a lady from a tank of warm ­water so now a wail, compound of impatience and rosy pudency, burst from the kidney-lipped maw of the raconteur.

‘You hog’s pudding’ he cried, ‘but inasmuch as they are not tenants in tail, what else?’

The oaths and groans of the unhappy man were happily to some extent drownded in a cyclone of wrath and disdain, something between the crowing of croop and a flushing-box doing its best, which at this juncture sprang up in his lights, bust all the bronchi, tattered the pleura, came thrashing and howling up his windpipe like an unclean spirit and left him quite breathless. But in his twenty-five stone of blubber, brawn, bone and bombast there was still ample motion to keep him going again his bellows should mend, which they very soon did he was thankful to say and did say.