The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (55 page)

The hands lie quite still on the red and white checked tablecloth in the kitchen above the rue du Four where no children play but women step out of the hairdresser opposite with puffed-up coiffures blue orange yellow pink black beige, and walk along the shops looking at lizard bags crocodile-shoes nouveautés and of course men also andron Bărbaţi messieurs who have their exits and their entrances. The hands hold the letter from Dear madam. The Vicariatus Urbis has decided the case against you at the Second Hearing on May 19 when the Defensor Vinculi had to make his appeal as explained to you in my earlier letters and here in Rome orally. You will appreciate that you may now challenge this decision at a Third Hearing final and decisive. I shall with pleasure
continue
to represent you with my abilities and profound studies when I hear from you with a remittance together with the card showing the Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal backed by the words 6 via Barberini, Santa Maria di Salute, Venise 9/6. J’espère que vous allez bien. Donnez-moi je vous prie de vos nouvelles car je ne cesse de penser à vous. Amors de terra lonhdana, Per vos totz lo cors mi dol. Signed B.C. Quite legibly and even bold unless perhaps H.C.? It all depends on the habit of the eye.

— Just like a tennis-match mein Liebes. Six Love—Love Six. Game to Defensor Vinculi God bless him. Defensor Vinc leads by three games to two in the third set. No wonder I couldn’t wait and I can’t think why you bother.

— Oh well now it hardly matters. A question of curiosity merely.

— Expensive curiosity. Where will you find all that money? Oh I know you earn reasonably well, and you don’t eat. Boiled rice du lieber Gott. You look so thin you’ll vanish altogether.

— One has to give the stomach a pause after endless restaurant and airline meals and congressional banquets. Anyway more than a third of the world population lives on rice or doesn’t live at all.

— Het Mineraal Spuitwater. Ugh. Though I grant you the Dutch serve no liquid at all with meals, absolutely nothing but a cup of tepid coffee at the end unless one likes beer which oddly enough I don’t. Spoilt by too much travel. Still, you could save your money in other ways than lining your stomach with boiled rice and the Vatican Treasury with 800,000 lire per match per decade. What difference does it make, you haven’t remarried you can even
communicate
.

— Well—

— Do you communicate now mein Liebes? With whom?

— Du Witzling.

— Do you?

— No.

— Well then, why spend all that money? You could invest it for your old age it’ll come before you realise believe you me. Between the zest of youth and the wisdom of age a not-
so-vast
period called The Middle Ages shoots by. Oh well, you know that one you have plenty of money and il piccolo chalet in Wiltshire settled on you by a generous husband. Oh, no I beg your pardon, you bought it yourself for
£
500 in the days when one could buy piccoli chalets in Wiltshire for
£
500. Of course you could sell it, it would fetch at least three times that now or more.

— No.

— No? Ah yes, your box, your refuge. But seriously Liebes was drückt dich? Not still the old adolescent urge to belong?

— No.

— Or a wish to get it declared null and void by some authority that pretends to speak for a higher perhaps in whom or which you no longer believe. In other words
something
other than yourself, your own annihilation having no validity at least for you?

— Annihilation?

— Well let’s face it you destroy. You know like Helen destroyer of men destroyer of ships und so weiter.

Troy I, Troy II, Troy VIIa. How very disappointing.

— What rubbish, who believes in that femme fatale stuff these days, not men certainly. Everybody destroys to some extent. One has to reject some things if they don’t belong. Or if they destroy.

— Unless perhaps, ah! Yes. No, surely not. You don’t want to marry again do you? Or do you? Pining away all these years for some virtuous Catholic who has reawakened your deep buried faith so that you can’t have each other except set and sealed by the finger of God before the altar in the bosom of Mother Church? Tell Uncle Siegfried.

— Nnno.

— Hmm? But you might. Well, well, surprise surprise.

— Thank you for the charming compliment.

— Now now you know I didn’t mean it like that. Aber natürlich you don’t look a day older mein Lieb and you might pretend the same about me for old time’s sake.

— Pretend?

— As a matter of fact I don’t feel too happy about meeting in Amsterdam. Anywhere else, but here I know too many of my wife’s kith and kin and this restaurant particularly—

— Oh really Siegfried. Old colleagues?

— But you know what they’ll immediately think.

— Let them. Who cares? Let them follow us even and see that we do nothing they would like to imagine.

— Ah but they wouldn’t follow us to see, they would merely imagine. Besides, I would like to do more than imagine. Wouldn’t you? Again, Viellieb, ancora?

The hands lie quite still on the white table-cloth in this restaurant particularly, where middle-aged couples or men alone come to eat vast plates of piled up food with tall glasses of beer or no liquid at all, or sit in fondo a sinistra transfixed by the flickering local variation in the presentation of
opposite
viewpoints on every aspect of an instant world through faceless men who no doubt have acquired faces for them in Dutch although not to the pale bearded young man in fondo a destra at the long low-lit desk who works with a notebook next to the newspapers cast aside and a large legal tome. Unless a book of physics or a dictionary perhaps looking up semantics enthusiasm crisis with a small cup of coffee. The thumbs press each other towards the body forming a squat diamond space with the other fingers touching like a
cathedral
roof, the ankles crossed under the tablecloth to close the circuit and who do you suppose wants to get at you mein Lieb? Apart from me I mean? No-one? That shaking of the head does it mean yes as in Turkey Bulgaria Greece? Or no as in the more dialectical West that has turned civilisation upside down?

Let’s face it you destroy. Troy I, Troy II. Ephesos early became an important centre for Christianity. On the city mount of modern Selçuk the Ajasoluk (a bowdlerizing of the Greek “Hagios Theologos”) the grave of St. John remained and between the 4th and 5th centuries the people of Ephesos built churches over this grave. Between the theatre and the
public
baths stands the notice BROTHEL. FREUDENHAUS. ASK EVI. Yes well ask her why not as God said to the
serpent
. In 263 the Goths destroyed the temple of Artemis. At the end of the 4th century the people destroyed or readapted most non-Christian temples on imperial order. But Justinian took the famous green marble columns from the ruined temple of Artemis for Santa Sophia in Constantinople. As the Islamic religion began its victorious conquest of Asia Minor a long period of peace for Ephesos came to an end. Probably during this period wherever particular people congregated you wanted them to commit themselves to your latest enthusiasm whereas nothing, rien, niente deserves a flow of rash desire love loyalty ambition marriage of tradition and progress. In the early nineteenth century the German poet Clemens Brentano took down the visions of the stigmatic nun Katharina Emmerich poor alleinstehende Frau who dreamt of the exact spot near Ephesos where the Virgin Mary lived her last years and archeologists found the remains of a 4th century chapel built on an earlier rubbish of course though fitting that Stella Maris the moon-mother-earth-water goddess on her silver crescent should continue to have a cult there. What enthusiasm? Surely one can expect a little interest and less disparagement of the sort of things which your Church for instance. All truths get institutionalised sooner or later and die, it happened to the Greek gods the Roman gods the Hebrew god, even Christ got angry about that and probably looks on now in desolation at his dead desiccated bride my sweet. How dare you talk like that? You know very well that it means something quite other, to do with
childhood
and that my sweet the people have destroyed or readapted most temples to their vulgar need for dogmas and static images, banalising the great and ancient myths of fall, descent, and rise into innumerable instructions that translate time space death rebirth into a narrow channel of salvation according to those instructions only, no better or worse, as instructions for living, than say, your Zodiac language, which has the same ill-worded beautiful irrelevance but at least it amuses. One must laugh, what else can one do? Yes well thanks to you all that aspect has gone anyway let us not talk about it. Not that we ever talk about anything these days without quarrelling. You quarrel my ernst German Mädel you quibble everything I say, you destroy. Because you turn everything into a joke, a poor joke usually or dirty so that now we never discuss anything at all even the places you go to the conferences the conventions broken the congresses where the Greek lady says she has no need to look up the word semantics in the dictionary because semantikos in Greek simply means humanity, fraternity, tutungerie, a bowdlerising of Saint Theology for the building of which Justinian took the famous green marble columns from Ephesos, biding his time to pick up the broken bits didn’t I Liebes, his hand having drawn electricity unfelt and battericamente pura from the pulsing wrist-base of the cathedral roof
mistaking
the long silence for what, where when to whose heart did one do that?

— Oh, what difference does it make let us not discuss it.

— All right we’ll change the subject. Hmm. You change the subject my mind has got stuck on the one and only, and when I say my mind I mean three channels at least and more than my five senses.

— Do you know anyone with the initials B.C.?

— B.C.?

— Someone who seems to know about the racket, can find out where one goes or will go, though too late.

— Me of course. Incognito.

— Du Witzling.

— True I’d turn up on time. Unlike you mein Liebes do you still not wear a watch? I really must give you one, or a travelling clock.

— No please don’t. They get lost or broken.

— So you still live anticlockwise?

— Of course not. Clocks hang everywhere.

— They never agree however. Hence your unpunctuality.

— Never at work though.

— Only at play, ah well. Er, man or woman?

— Bărbat.

— So you know he has a beard?

— Witzling. No. Just a Man.

— Merely a man. Well, let’s see. Some cher collègue
pursuing
you eh? How romantic. I thought they had replaced us almost entirely with gorgeous young computers. Forgive me. And does he keep finding himself on another plane?

— Not exactly. Though he lives on another plane all right look at these. Do you know that writing?

— No. Oh, but wait. Yes. The style. Aha. Natürlich selbstverständlich. Ma chère collègue but you have made a somewhat belated post-factum conquest of dear old Bertrand retired if I may say so several centuries ago.

— Bertrand! Good God.

The cloud has cleared. The jet exhausts invisible in their power save for a tremor on the blue or the propellers invisible in their speed save for a hinted halo che fa tremar dì claritate l’âre, no man-made object passing to show that the heart flies immobile at eight hundred and ninety kilometres and no man to come and bring you out of this or that zone of tickled fancy inside the distant brain way up with a tremendous force of a love lost or never gained lying forgotten under layers of civilisation thickening sensibilities such as for
instance
a language that actually means something in the light of that love or vice versa, but only a decrepit fond old man well sixty-five and plus whose surname you never remember do you Liebes but then no wonder in this case he always fell in love with young secretaries inaccessible, writing them flowery letters full of Provençal quotations about fin amor lonhtano and the princesse lointaine so that we used to call him Bertrand de Born.

— But didn’t Rudel write about the princesse lointaine?

— Oh, you know everything my pendantic Liebes. I travel in electronics now not simultaneous interpretation, remember me? Or have you closed the circuit?

Et au départ, n’oubliez pas qu’en roumain “la revedere” signifie “au revoir” et que le sourire avenant de la Roumanie signifie “à bientôt” in the lively rhythm of a prodigious development representing only some of the accents of the renovating present.

Whereas in modern Greek elios means sun and gyneka means woman. The meaning has remained. Logariasmo parakalo for that matter means the bill please according to the phrase-book in a mere smattering acquired with the Wolga Boatsman Hara-Kiri Roumanian Cocktail Bloody Merry Whyte Lady in low square black armchairs the bar lit up like a reredos vous prendrez quelque chose chère madame? Nothing at all, just personal effects like furry eyes and the fact that in this air-conditioning the body floats in willing suspension of loyalty to anyone inside the giant
centipede
where I want narrow trousers. Without folding-up. I prefer it double-breasted. With two buttons. When shall I come for the rehearsal? In six days I go away.

Or did you want to test by means of engagement?

And we saw yesterday afternoon mesdames messieurs, in the Byzantine Museum of Athens, a remarkable example of this inversion by double negation so typical of the
imaginative
function in its descending aspect of depth, night,
femininity
, container which becomes contained, swallower which becomes swallowed, as opposed to its upward masculine aspect. Je fais allusion au Saint Christophe cynocéphale, dating from the 17th century, and represented with a dog’s head. Two myths converge here, that of the man-eating giant with the head of a dog and that of the passer of souls, Cerberus, a transposition of the Egyptian Anubis. Here the Christ carried by death inverts the meaning of death, coming down through the neutralised transmitter in the brain behind the closed eyelids which open to catch a glimpse of Sandra working so young so fresh into simultaneous English with eyes ears voice and un amour de soutien-gorge no hands as she watches the speaker through the glass booth
accompanying
mortals in their perilous journey, et qui devient symbole de l’in-ti-mi-té dans le voyage, as well as protector and
talisman
against death itself, especially violent death. The
mythical
imagination invokes death against death in a
characteristic
double negation. Le Christo-phoros porte le Christ. And in a gulliverisation typical of giant myths, as for example the Gargantua legends, the swallowing mouth gets euphemised into a sack, a basket, une hotte, a container, which, like the mandala mentioned in Professor Strebbing’s excellent paper this morning, represents a sort of porte-manteau centre-
of-perfection
, prêt-à-porter si vous voulez, like the prayer-wheel or even the prayer-rug, a miniature temple, cavern, womb, stomach, belly, vessel, vehicle, ship, sepulchre or holy grail, with the same confusional sliding from active to passive, from swallower to swallowed, from container to contained that we find in all the myths of depth, night, descent and femininity. They come so young nowadays, doing the same work with ease and careless poise from the start who have known no war no national groups as when les grandes personnes talked of la Guerre l’Allemagne and yet not like that at all, a different species altogether who can learn from simply living simultaneously all channels alert at all levels unless they merely block off different ones, witness le
complexe
de Jonas with which I dealt briefly earlier on in the foetus position with diagrams of a fish thrown upside down on the screen the lantern-slide projector behaving like an antipodal eye telescoping time with an error, la pointe pressed home on the meridian of the heart C7 here on the wrist which stops hysteria at once and the vessel of conception CV 52 as a recommended alternative for relaxation and absolute calm.