Читать книгу Einstein Intersection - Samuel R. Delany - Страница 10

Each night for a week I have lingered on the wild flags of the waterfront, palaces crowding to the left, brittle light crackling over the harbor in the warm autumn. TEI goes strangely. Tonight when I turned back into the great trapezoid of the Piazza, fog hid the tops of the red flagpoles. I sat on the base of one nearest the tower and made notes on Lobey’s hungers. Later I left the decaying gold and indigo of the Basilica and wandered through the back alleys of the city till well after midnight. Once I stopped on a bridge to watch the small canal drift through the close walls beneath the night-lamps and clotheslines. At a sudden shrieking I whirled: half a dozen wailing cats hurled themselves about my feet and fled after a brown rat. Chills snarled the nerves along my vertebrae. I looked back at the water: six flowers—roses—floated from beneath the bridge, crawling over the oil. I watched them till a motorboat puttering on some larger waterway nearby sent water slapping the foundations. I made my way over the small bridges to the Grand Canal and caught the Vaporetto back to Ferovia. It turned windy as we floated beneath the black wood arch of the Ponte Academia; I was trying to assimilate the flowers, the vicious animals, with Lobey’s adventure—each applies, but as yet I don’t quite know how. Orion straddled the water. Lights from the shore shook in the canal as we passed beneath the dripping stones of the Rialto.

Writer’s Journal, Venice, October 1965

In a few lines I shall establish how Maldoror was virtuous during his first years, virtuous and happy. Later he became aware he was born evil. Strange fatality!

Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont),

The Songs of Maldoror

All prologue to why Lo Easy, Lo Little John, and Lo me don’t herd goats no more.

Friza started tagging along, dark and ambiguous, running and jumping with Little Jon in a double dance to his single song and my music, play-wrestling with Easy, and walking with me up the brambly meadow holding my hand—whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you’re herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with. All of which I did with Friza. She would turn on a rock to stare at me with leaves shaking beside her face. Or come tearing towards me through the stones; between her graceful gait and her shadow in the rocks all suspended and real motion was. And was released when she was in my arms laughing—the one sound she did make, loving it in her mouth.

She brought me beautiful things. And kept the dangerous away. I think she did it the same way she threw the pebble. One day I noticed that ugly and harmful things just weren’t happening: no lions, no condor bats. The goats stayed together; the kids didn’t get lost and kept from cliffs.

“Little Jon, you don’t have to come up this morning.”

“Well, Lobey, if you don’t think—”

“Go on, stay home.”

So Easy, Friza, and me went out with the goats.

The beautiful things were like the flock of albino hawks that moved to the meadow. Or the mother woodchuck who brought her babies for us to see.

“Easy, there isn’t enough work for all of us here. Why don’t you find something else to do?”

“But I like coming up here, Lobey.”

“Friza and me can take care of the herd.”

“But I don’t mi—”

“Get lost, Easy.”

He said something else and I picked up a stone in my foot and hefted it. He looked confused, then lumbered away. Imagine, coming on like that with Easy.

Friza and I had the field and the herd to ourselves alone. It stayed good and beautiful with unremembered flowers beyond rises when we ran. If there were poisonous snakes, they turned off in lengths of scarlet, never coiling. And, ah! did I make music.

Something killed her.

She was hiding under a grove of lazy willows, the trees that droop lower than weeping, and I was searching and calling and grinning—she shrieked. That’s the only sound I ever heard her make other than laughter. The goats began to bleat.

I found her under the tree, face in the dirt.

As the goats bleated, the meadow went to pieces on their rasping noise. I was silent, confused, amazed by my despair.

I carried her back to the village. I remember La Dire’s face as I walked into the village square with the limber body in my arms.

“Lobey, what in the world . . . How did she . . . Oh, no! Lobey, no!”

So Easy and Little Jon took the herd again. I went and sat at the entrance to the source-cave, sharpened my blade, gnawed my nails, slept and thought alone on the flat rock. Which is where we began.

Once Easy came to talk to me.

“Hey, Lobey, help us with the goats. The lions are back. Not a lot of them, but we could still use you.” He squatted, still towering me by a foot, shook his head. “Poor Lobey.” He ran his hairy fingers over my neck. “We need you. You need us. Help us hunt for the two missing kids?”

“Go away.”

“Poor Lobey.” But he went.

Later Little Jon came. He stood around for a minute thinking of something to say. But by the time he did, he had to go behind a bush, got embarrassed, and didn’t come back.

Lo Hawk came too. “Come hunting, Lo Lobey. There’s a bull been seen a mile south. Horns as long as your arm, they say.”

“I feel rather non-functional today,” I said. Which is not the sort of thing to joke about with Lo Hawk. He retired, humphing. But I just wasn’t up to his archaic manner.

When La Dire came, though, it was different. As I said, she has great wit and learning. She came and sat with a book on the other side of the flat rock, and ignored me for an hour. Till I got mad. “What are you doing here?” I asked at last.

“Probably the same thing you are.”

“What’s that?”

She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”

“I’m sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”

“Huh?”

“Is that an inarticulate way of asking what it is?”

“Huh?” I said again. “Yeah. What is it?”

“To kill whatever killed Friza.” She closed her book. “Will you help?”

I leaned forward, feet and hands knotting, opened my mouth—then La Dire wavered behind tears. I cried. After all that time it surprised me. I put my forehead on the rock and bawled.

“Lo Lobey,” she said, the way Lo Hawk had, only it was different. Then she stroked my hair, like Easy. Only different. As I gained control again I sensed both her compassion and embarrassment. Like Little Jon’s; different.

I lay on my side, feet and hands clutching each other, sobbing towards the cavity of me. La Dire rubbed my shoulder, my bunched, distended hip, opening me with gentleness and words:

“Let’s talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let’s you listen. We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love Maureen even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.” I put my head in La Dire’s lap. She went on. “Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45’s or 33’s from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love—in this version Eurydice—and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”

I said, “How could he go into the great rock and the great roll? That’s all death and all life.”

“He did.”

“Did he bring her back?”

“No.”

I looked from La Dire’s old face and turned my head in her lap to the trees. “He lied, then. He didn’t really go. He probably went off into the woods for a while and just made up some story when he came back.”

“Perhaps,” La Dire said.

I looked up again. “He wanted her back,” I said. “I know he wanted her back. But if he had gone any place where there was even a chance of getting her, he wouldn’t have come back unless she was with him. That’s how I know he must have been lying. About going to the great rock and the great roll, I mean.”

“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.” She picked up my machete. “Play something.” She held the handle out. “Make music.”

I put the blade to my mouth, rolled over on my back, curled around the bright, dangerous length, and licked the sounds. I didn’t want to but it formed in the hollow of my tongue, and breathing carried it into the knife.

Low; first slow; I closed my eyes, feeling each note in the quadrangle of shoulder blades and buttocks pressed on the rock. Notes came with only the meter of my own breathing, and from beneath that, there was the quickening of the muscles of my fingers and toes that began to cramp for the faster, closer dance of the heart’s time. The mourning hymn began to quake.

“Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum. Drum, Lobey!”

I let the melody speed, then flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers.

“Drum, Lobey!”

I rocked to my feet and began to slap my soles against the stone.

“Drum!”

I opened my eyes long enough to see the blood spider scurry. The music laughed. Pound and pound, trill and warble, and La Dire laughed for me too, to play, hunched down while sweat quivered on my nape, threw up my head and it dribbled into the small of my back, while I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips, beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up to prick the sun, new sweat trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck.

“Drum, my Lo Ringo; play, my Lo Orpheus,” La Dire cried. “Oh, Lobey!” She clapped and clapped.

Then, when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves, and the stream, she nodded, smiling. “Now you’ve mourned properly.”

I looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled. Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.

“Now you’re almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you.”

All sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a syncopation before the rhythm resumed. “Le Dorik?”

“Go. Enjoy yourself before you begin your journey.”

Frightened, I shook my head, turned, fled from the cave mouth.

Le—