Then he fell backward, an arc of urine following him down. Everyone backed away. When I peeped around the first corner I had turned, I saw the policeman wetting a pencil with his tongue while opening a notebook, and a dog dragging away the old party’s trousers, and another throwing his drawers into the air and barking.
MANET’S OLYMPIA, thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, told me about the world’s first painting executed en plein air. This was the work of her creator’s Doppelgänger Monet, Manet with an omega.
— I am confused already, said I. But talk on, for it adds purpose to my staring at you, at your complacent Parisian eyes, your dangling mule, your hand so decorously audacious.
— Étes-vous phallocrate?
— L’homme est un miroir omnigénérique, tantôt plan, tantôt convexe, tantôt concave ou cylindrique, donnant à l’objet réfléchi des dimensions variées.
— Vous êtes phallocrate.
— Suis-je donc?
— Ce ne fait rien.
Her Ionic shoulders rose an ironic trifle. There was the wisp of a smile in the corners of her mouth, the merest hint of laughter in her eyes.
— When, she said, in the pellucid green air of Fontainebleau, Claude Monet had posed his model and touched his brush to the world’s first plein air canvas, he was hit on the back of the head by a discus and knocked senseless.
Her expression did not change as she made this statement.
— A discus?
— Un disque.
— The discobolus, she continued, who presently appeared on the anxious trot to ask the bloody impressionist and the screaming Madame Monet if they had seen his quoit was a bassetted and spatted Englishman whose carp’s mouth and plaid knickerbockers sprang from the pages of Jerome K. Jerome.
Count Rufzeichen, anglophile and sportsman, dressed so. It was his sedulous imitation of the English that had driven him to hire a butler, and thus I came to tread his soft carpets, never tiring of their luxurious silence, or of the rose fragrance of English tea, or of making Herr Rufzeichen shake his wattles.
One way was to be deaf to his summons, letting the butler’s bell jangle in vain. After awhile, the old apteryx would come puffing and snuffling along, looking into rooms. Finding me in the greenhouse, he would splay his fingers and shout.
— What in the name of God are you doing?
— Sir, I am observing nature, I would reply. I see, however, that in lending my attention to the limpidity of the air, the melodiousness of the cuckoo and the lowing of the horned cattle I have fallen into negligence.
— Into sloth, said Herr Rufzeichen.
— The cows made a kind of bass for the treble of the cuckoo.
— Into impudence.
— Your worship rang?
— To little purpose, to no purpose, Monsieur Robert. Whatever I wanted you for before, it’s a liver attack I’m having at the moment.
The Count trembled into a chair.
— Would you wish a glass of Perrier, Sir?
— Doppelkohlensaures Natron.
The Count pulled a pocket handkerchief big as a map of Europe from his sleeve, wadded it with both hands, and wiped away the sweat that had beaded on his forehead.
I held the soda on a silver salver under his nose. The draught drunk, hiccups set in. After the third hiccup, a belch baritone and froggy.
OUTSIDE the asylum gates a brass band huffed and thumped with brazen sneezes, silver whiffets, thundering sonorities and a detonating drum, the descant hitched together by a fat woman in a Tyrolese hat and the Erlkönig’s longcoat that flocked upon her hips as she squeezed and pulled a Polish accordion as big as a sheep, dipping her knees on the saltarelli and rolling her eyes in a clown’s gloat.
The man Fomich danced around his pleased sister, seesawing his shoulders in a backward monkeyshine of steps, and as he shot into the air right over his sister’s head, pausing there awhile as if all the clocks in the world had stopped, a lunatic shouted that Hitler is the seventh disaster in Nostradamus and invited all within hearing to join the Brotherhood of the Illuminati without further delay.
— Quite gay, is it not? I said to the attendant, tears in my eyes.
The band was charging with piston gallop through something rhapsodic, Hungarian, and tacky.
Who was this franion? There was a grivoiserie about him that smacked of Berlin, and of things brooded on in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Apollinaire.
— Literature, I said to the listless woman beside me on the bench, has become a branch of psychology, of politics, of power, of persuasion, of housekeeping. In ancient times . . .
— When Jesu was a little boy, she said, taking interest and joining her hands on her knees.
— In ancient times literature was a story for people to hear. And the person who heard it could tell it to another. Now everything is on paper, too complex to remember.
— Do you love Jesu? she asked.
— One does not write in this terrible age. We do not make chairs, we make money. We do not make shoes, we make money. They sniff it, banker and shopkeeper alike, as gallants used to inhale the perfume of a mistress’s handkerchief. They goggle when they see it, they are willing and eager to throw boys into the spew of machine guns and fogs of cyanide gas, they are abustle to marry their daughters to toothless bankers, to halitosic financiers with hernias the size of a baby’s head. Francs, yen, shillings, pesos, kronen, dollars, lire, money is the beauty of the world. They suck shekels and play with themselves.
— Jesu would not like that, she said mournfully.
— After all, I said, what a beautiful thing it is, not to be, but to have been a genius.
The dancer had collapsed across the way, was weeping and was being consoled by his sister.
— Does God come to you in the night, she asked, with a lamp and a puppy for you to hold?
— God, I said, is the opposite of Rodin.
—
