The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (46 page)

— Va bene.

Un piccolo chalet in Wiltshire where stones talk walk make love until they come to a standstill. Welcome back Liebes to the freedom of the air and the precision of the mouthpiece in your nineteenth year and plus as he picks up the broken bits, working with eyes and hands as well as with his ears and voice. He lipreads the speaker and in the next split second utters the same syllables of half-love and bantering allusion that need no simultaneous interpreting by the code of zones flown over descended into half-visited on swift conducted tours with groups from Agricultural Aid Commissions,
Conferences
of Irrigation Engineers and even Congresses of Semiologists for example in palaces castles university buildings town halls, together sometimes or with say Signor Ingegnere Giovanni-Battista di Qualcosa or Comrade Pan Bogumil Somethingski, according to the requirements of language topic time available since the return to the precision of the mouthpiece at nineteen or twenty-nine even.

In fondo a sinistra the men in the café sit transfixed by the flickering local variation in the presentation of opposite viewpoints on every aspect of an instant world through
faceless
men who have no doubt acquired faces for them as their arch-priests of actualitá that zooms flashcuts explodes to OMO! Da oggi con Perboral! Lava ancora più bianco!
Gut-gut,
Più bianco than what? We live in an age of transition, perpetually between white and whiter than white. Very tiring. Zoom. Applicate il numero di codice. The matchbox on the table shows a small postman in green with a large orange postbag on a blue background. The postman holds a letter with 00147 Roma written on it. Two orange arrows say il numero di codice and point to 00147 Roma. The orange bag twice as large as the postman says Applicate il numero di codice as Siegfried lights up with do you know the number of your zone and which represents reality the old towns like museums visited on conducted tours or the modern hotels we stay in all alike?

Sometimes however the bathroom door faces the built-in cupboard in the entrance passage to the room so that the bathroom has no window, only a ventilation shaft. Sometimes it faces the door of the room, occupying more generously a space in width not length with its own window on the street the sea the mountain the roof on which a wizened woman washes in eight cataracts affording a glimpse of something real surely below the sex-mime of a blear-aged man with tongue and mouthpiece or a car revving up in Danish.
Sometimes
the blear-aged man tries the locked door in drunken stupor with his key that doesn’t fit and slinks away at the Was suchen Sie in fury and the change in the expected person. Sometimes the number on the key remains several weeks running in the four hundreds or three then suddenly drops to 5, 2, 4, 12, so that the smattering of the mouthpiece can proudly ask the the receptionist for beş, iki, dört unless dwanaście, depending on the size the time the place and whether canyons or rocks create great holes of air into which the heart sinks. Sometimes a chambermaid serves Frühstück or Micul Dejun in camere. Or a smooth floor-steward in white unless a waking call with collazione down below in a black plastic bar. Sometimes the bathroom flanks the
cupboard
facing the bed or beds themselves together or separate or longwise foot to foot along the left wall or even the right. Few hotels have single rooms these days it doesn’t pay and single rooms seldom have a shower or bath or private loo, only a biddy and a wash-stand on one leg blue green white pink yellow or fixed to the wall with a thick metal tube lewdly protruding underneath but curving up again not always visibly however so that the empty bed lies empty and tightly made unless the puffed up eiderdown buttoned up in sheeting looks virgin-bellied untumbled or the bright orange blanket folds back within the sheet in two parallel white runways from which memories take off and disappear into the blue the cloud the fog.

Ausgang. Exit. Push. Tirez. Drücken. Déclarez s’il vous plaît si vous avez des plantes ou parties de plantes avec vous, loyalty for example or a simple enthusiasm for warming slippers on a late return from the club the office the journeys the philandering with the precision of the mouthpiece at conventions, conferences, commissions, congresses. Or else inside the whale, who knows, in the foetus position with diagrams of a fish thrown upside down for three days, three lives of maybe hell. Between loving and not loving the body floats.

On one side of the broad yellow arrow diagonal from corner to corner of the square card the razor-blade, printed in green, has a white narrow bar representing the slit, crossed at one end with a short vertical bar then a small diamond shape and another short bar, a space, a circle in the centre then a space, a bar a diamond and a bar. On the other side of the broad yellow arrow two pink lips slightly separated echo the white slit in the green razor blade. The yellow arrow points downwards across the cardboard square pinned up in diamond shape to cover the squares of paper and bears the lettering Pentru ştergerea lamei de ras şi a rujului. Pour le demaquiage spelt wrong et pour les lames de rasoir. For remove the make-up and for something in Russian then German last. Sometimes German comes first then English then French in endless permutations with the language of the country always at the head however such as Toaleta Femei unless TOAΛETHA with care not to enter Bărbaţi when the door bears no skirted figurine or high-heeled shoe in the imprecision of a mere smattering acquired with the descent into new matter. Or just enough to say muchas gracias dowidzenia dove? In fondo a sinistra.

So that Siegfried picks up the broken bits working with his hands voice mouth eyes ears and more than his five senses into the vessel of conception CV 52 lipreading and in the next split second uttering the same syllables of half-love bantering allusion to the medal of St. Christopher between the breasts and other circumstances that need no simultaneous
interpreting
by the code of zones flown over descended into half visited on swift conducted tours together sometimes or separately and alone according to the requirements of
conventions
conferences congresses in castles palaces public buildings university halls where no communication of course ever occurs. Ever? You exaggerate. Something gets across.

— Criss-cross.

— Crease-crasse? God, verr god. The short gentleman with straight black hair in a black suit labelled Laos says god, verr god indeed. The Gairmans they applause their speakers. The English they applause their speakers. The French they say alone the French make intellectual contribution. Only Laos delegation praise all.

— And the Japanese. Don’t forget the Japanese.

— They praise, yes mademoiselle, also.

— Presumably everyone comes for that. They certainly can’t come for information since it all gets published anyway and they could simply read it.

— Information? My dear good girl unless perhaps du ernst German Mädel or my sweet more likely how naïve can you get? After what three, four years on congresses and commissions you should know better than that.

— Yes, well they might at least make a show of listening. Each speaker waits impatiently for his turn to read an
interminable
paper that has nothing to do with anything said before, you know, each one more concerned with output than intake.

— Ah, output, intake, god, verr god mademoiselle. May I use that in article? My card. Buan Ching cultural
correspondent
please.

— So you call this culture?

Of course of course natürlich selbstverständlich und so weiter weiter gehen through the freedom of the air and the imprecision of the mouthpiece at thirty-five and plus madame not mademoiselle despite the fact that on a day he leans against a column in a Renaissance palazzo, his grey hair surmounted by a cherub talking to the dark lady of not a single sonnet but smooth words allusive with his eyes on her low décolletage or maybe on the smoke blown down over it from her delicate olive nostrils. Have you anything to declare such as love desire ambition or a glimpse that in this
air-conditioning
and other circumstantial emptiness freedom has its sudden attractions as the body floats in willing suspension of responsibility to anyone, stretching interminably
between
the enormous wings towards the distant brain beyond the orange curtain and behind, no doubt, the little door.

The concrete corridor encased in cedar-wood slopes up from the tarmac where the blue bus has stopped and up into the lounge where yellow messages wait on a turntable of boards covered with criss-cross lattice-work in alphabetical order. No one calls out no name unanswered at one level, no one comes in offering anything. The airport hall makes up an abstract study of glass galleries hot air continuous murmuring and teakwood stairways with space between the steps to fall into down by the gleaming weight-machines in rows like robots for the queueing plastic luggage of those about to leave, to vanish past the booths containing the half-hidden men who consult secret lists with a quick shift of the eye. One day even airports will have no frontiers and no passports per assistere anche una persona priva de conoscenza. Aber natürlich. He stands by his pigskin hold-all his thick black briefcase in his left hand, shaking the right with the president of the congress the secretary the most important delegates male elderly female and doesn’t introduce his team of three interpreters English-German French-German English-French besides himself French into English and they simultaneously stand about and smile in English German French.

They praise, yes mademoiselle, also.

Soon some dark waiter will enter with a breakfast-tray and the rest of the story will have to come out. What story? Oh you know as the Holy Ghost said that scandal spread by St. Peter about me and the Virgin Mary. He likes ready-made stories the schmutziger the witziger with a burst of crude laughter tout de suite and the tooter the sweeter. Was suchen Sie, die Toilette, nein den Aufzug, so, immer geradeaus dann links Ascenseur Lift or else a change in the expected person
for sous-sol and the one about the Auvergnat who pronounces S as sh and when asked the whereabouts of l’évéché says au shou-shol. Oh, you ernst German Mädel don’t you see, les W.C., l’évéché do you have to have everything explained?

The light pours through the slatted shutters making a slatted pattern on the left pale green wall. San Pellegrino, Acqua litinica alcalina antiurica anticatarrale.
Battericamente
pura. Trams clang through the asthmatic gasps of an engine that won’t fire in Italian not very far down among the poop-pip-hoot of cars below the several floors of waking dreams. The face reflected in the bathroom mirror neon-lit looks what thirty-four, forty-three below the greying strand broader sandier than the rest that tumbles on the shoulders needing nevertheless that Glint with a Hint of a Tint above the small medallion of St. Christopher almost in the cleft between the breasts and the neon light floods OMO on the glass shelf. Da oggi con PERBORAL. Lava ancora più bianco. Or else che cerca, signora, ah, l’ascensore. In fondo a sinistra. And the divine principle descending into matter through the earphones and out into the mouthpiece at the Congress of Gnostics in Brussels, Bonn, Beirut, wherever angels and ministers of grace and meaning come down to land upon a pinpoint unless at the Conference on Teilhard de Chardin where the flaxen-haired young lady in the
audience
holds a flaxen spool like a second oblong head and spins, manually spins as she listens without earphones to ideas all having equality before God no rising en masse of noussphere to point omega comme nous répète ce grand génie as she spins, spins a circle round him thrice so that he falters in the booth, loses the thread in the spun rhetoric and old Bertrand takes over on his microphone in his accented English.

Manhattan’s lit-up post-war fairyland recedes below into the night. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard this minister of grace floating upon a pinpoint rising to a height of fifteen thousand feet speed two hundred and fifty miles an hour. You may smoke now and give me a drink before announcing things like that. Like what? Like that you love me. Oh, did I say that?

I should like to remind the delegates that the Economic and Social Council has not asked the Committee to discuss the report of the Commission on Human Rights in detail but merely to formulate the principles which should guide the Commission’s work in the future. May I suggest therefore that the Commission reexamine the question at some later stage. Or else in the Dakota on the long metal bench fixed to the curved metallic wall inside the fuselage, the round ribs all exposed as if inside the skeleton of a giant centipede. No. He says marry me my sweet and take me as you find me we’ll have fun.

— Not that you followed him in all things mein Lieb.

— Well, the descent into matter.

Helsinki, London, Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw.

And language. Allo?—er, dígame? Muchas gracias.

— Wejście. Wyjście. Just one letter’s difference. Which do you suppose means exit?

— Or gentlemen.

— Pas ici my sweet. Immer geradeaus up the corridor turn left and take me as you find me. Or irgendsowas Witziges unless perhaps gents have their exits and their entrances and please adjust your dress before leaving. Or even have you the time please yes but not the inclination.