The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (86 page)

But you wouldn’t be cut off you’d be with me.

Stavro stop fantasising, what about your children you must be near them they need you. You must stop rushing off, always putting the desire of the moment first.

It’s not a desire of the moment I love you. And we’d take them with us. But you’re right, as usual, she won’t let them go. Oh what would I do without you. Of course I must stay in Europe. How about Strasburg I’ve applied there will you come to Strasburg with me?

I can’t, Stavro.

What did he do to you?

Nothing. I’m just very tired, very very tired.

I know my love, it’s my fault, forgive me. We shall have abstinence tonight and you shall rest. I once saw a poster in Wales which said Abstinence is good for you. Oh Larina I want what you want.

Do you?

It’s only a moment of discouragement. But you must understand I can’t take nothing but discouragement from you and remain unaffected. You mustn’t try and see how much I can take.

(I’ll pursue you and pursue you if that’s what you want) No, I’m sorry, You can’t take much can you?

I suppose not. But you’re not very tough either and why should you be, except because both he and I like you that way. It isn’t true after all that women are stronger. They love to cuddle their babies but aren’t they just consoling themselves? Father is more important, he can speak and teach. Mother feeds you and teaches you to love but it’s Father who teaches you how to survive. Oh I wish I could do something about my mistakes, I see them so clearly now. Oh my love, I seem to be doing again what I’ve done so often, having problems I can’t cope with and rushing to a mummy or a nanny or a home or refuge. I hate seeing that I’m doing this to you. I feel lonely and abandoned, but my behaviour makes you lonely too. Please forgive your awful errant Childe Stavro.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry you’re so absurd yet touching.

It’s good to see you smile again. My Larina, I know, as you know, that it’s peace and beauty when we’re together, and I’m convinced that if we could live together for a year all our problems would disappear and we’d never leave each other.

So you’ve said. But I don’t have any problems except the one you’ve thrust upon me. Don’t you see that you’re trying to force me into living a cliché, the cliché of the older woman and the younger man?

I just don’t understand your concern with your age and cliché-mongers. Why can’t you trust me? Will you please explain to me what I can do to earn your trust? Aren’t you even now sending me out to Peru more or less to prove myself already, to see what distance and separation can do to our love?

I’m not sending you out to Peru, you’re going anyway.

Lara hear me hear me.

You sound like an oracle. I’m listening.

Please, try to believe in me. I love you. Trust me. Come with me to Lima, I know you’re frightened, I’m asking you to take a risk, but I’m taking a risk too and you said you wanted adventure.

You must go alone, Stavro, and meet other girls, you’ve only just left your wife she’s not my wife well the mother of your children and I happened along. Marry one of your students in Lima, a nice young fleshy one, not thin and finished like me, someone who will combine motherly qualities with youth and looking up to you.

But it’s you I love. Don’t you look up to me?

Well, of course. But you seem crushed by me and I’m sorry. Look, go to Lima and if you still love me next year I’ll come.

But, but, we’ll be a whole year older then! How can I wait a year?

Yes, it’s a ridiculous test of the knight by the lady. All right, I’ll come as planned for the rest of the summer and then we’ll see.

Oh my love, thank you. But you’ll stay, I know you will.

Stavro you must understand, I can’t give up my job, I’m alone in the world you know, I have to support myself.

But you’re not done now you’re with me. And you’d get a job wherever I am, easily, more easily than me I have nothing only a silly Italian degree. But I’m a good teacher I know and I have wonderful references. And you’ll want to stay, I know it, promise me you’ll stay if you really want to and not pretend you don’t out of fear or mistrust? I’ll light the way for you.

All right, I promise.

Come, let’s make love.

Not now Stavro I’m very tired I told you. Why don’t we hear some music, or you read me some Dante.

Yes of course, where is he?

Top shelf right.

God, all these books. And all these publications of yours, there’s a whole shelf, why’d you bring them?

As give-aways, one has to. Anyway you have your list of women, children and languages, I have my list of publications.

But surely you’ve had a lot of lovers too?

I don’t keep lists as conversational gambits.

That’s very unkind. It’s the first time you’re being really unkind to me.

It was a joke. Don’t be depressed again my love or you’ll depress me, I’d just got out of it. Anyway most of the books on those shelves, which are my corner, are in your field aren’t they, all the disciplines have come together through linguistics now it’s very exciting every system is being thought out again from top to bottom, even psychoanalysis has taken up from de Saussure.

Who’s de Saussure?

But. Stavro! I thought you said you taught Linguistics? He’s the father of it all.

Well, I don’t know, it’s Applied Linguistics I do.

Oh–I see. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, but why did you come to the Semiotics Congress then?

Oh just to see and learn.

And did you?

Not really, it all struck me as very pretentious.

Some of it yes. But that’s the funny side, even semioticians don’t communicate. Well, you can teach me Applied Linguistics and I’ll teach you Theoretical.

That’s lovely, yes I’d like that. And I’ll teach you Albanian if you like and Macedonian. Or Russian or Georgian. Or Old Church Slavonic, that’s Old Bulgarian, you should know the language of the church we’ll get married in.

Well let’s stick to Dante for the moment.

Where would you like?

Anywhere. Or the beginning first, then Purgatorio XXVI.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra

What’s wrong?

I’ve just remembered a dream I must tell you.

For these things do matter in a text like love or revolution of those who talk like books idyllic epistolary farcical that inevitably produce a double of the thing re-presented, the double being nothing, a non-being which nevertheless is added to the thing and therefore not totally devoid of value despite the negative portrait of the object instituted by itself as valueless which, however resembling, is never absolutely true, and in any case singular so replaceable. He should have given you a sense of trust so that you could feel he knows what he is doing and you could abandon yourself to his wiles. For, if mimesis exists, non-being is, opening out like mouths into mouths that rehandle the signifiers into a delicious discourse as the summer forms bluish slit-shaped holes like blue lacunae into which you plunge towards the final crumbling of yet another babel.

You don’t have the floor.

On a point of information

as object of exchange and from the start an object of central loss because stolen, like citrus fruits or a nose here and a dream there or kernel sentences out of faculty clashes books letters and symposiums to provoke the word by the word lighting up the commonplaces from the other place to generate a text.

So then I was being interviewed for a job by a woman professor who gave the job to a woman and I felt treated unfairly. Then as consolation she sent me out to play ball with her dogs saying a bit of fresh air will do you good and my dog will be kind don’t be afraid. I went out it was sunny, it was the university playing ground with a huge green field for rugby and a sandpit for pole-jumping. I had a red ball with black stripes and I threw it over the sandpit. All the dogs ran and jumped for it one of them was mine, they were all boxers and labradors but mine was a mongrel and he jumped the highest and caught the ball and brought it back to me. I think it means the general worry and anxiety over my career and my life obviously at a crossroads. The sun and the green space represent South America or possibly Africa. The pole jumping is the risk I have to take, the red and black ball is life which I throw and gamble, the dogs represent my problems but in the end life comes back to me and I feel that I win do you agree?

Hmmmm yes, at the manifest level. You shouldn’t tell me all these dreams, Stavro, I’m not an analyst and one needs the transfer.

Oh but you know so much about it you’ve read everything. And then I had another one I was in Ethiopia with you and going to visit a Russian church there and telling you all about it. It was Russian baroque, a small church with a huge tower over it and I kept telling you what a good imitation it was even though modern. Inside there was no iconostasis. The altar was like in St Peter’s almost in the middle and the columns, altar and walls were covered with mosaics and frescoes, some Russian some Ethiopian and I went on saying how everything was bogus but of good quality and at the same time I was feeling afraid that the whole thing might collapse on us and I was anxious to get outside. And I took you out in the end without showing my anxiety and then I noticed that the bell-tower was no longer solid stone as when we entered but coloured glass and even more impressive than before and taller and I felt safe and that it wasn’t going to collapse any more so I took your hand and the dream ended. Can you make anything of it?

A prepared oedipiano with a treble sound.

A foot man saying O in the mountains but O

Another one who grabbed a balloon and then let go.

You are the sentence I write I am the paragraph, generating each other cutting off each other’s word not following the principle but separating from it piecemeal fragmented though generating now and again a kernel sentence eaten or falling into an earful of sirensong or wax upon which bees dance their honeyvorous messages, which comes to the same thing for we cannot eat each other without becoming each other neither can we refuse the gods in us without crabs in our ears.

For the gods in us are organic they do not have livers kidneys and complexes did Christ have a Oedipus complex? They are the complexes narrative and generated they are the liverish kidneys. They are the eagle strangled in the sea the mouth removed for naming things the revolution long preparing out of archaic flaws bouleversing the boulevards back into bulwarks, they are the transfer utterance which can be interpreted at all levels as privation disjunction attribution conjunction thus representing the circulation of value-objects as an identification of the deictic transfers. And they do not exist except at your awakening touch. It has all been dreamt up by the lover of the moment but displaced, condensed, metonymised. Such a man would not fight the eagle for one thing or another or wring its neck. Nor would he have four eyes or see luminous hoops dancing through and through each other. It doesn’t work for him who will have to be dropped with an organised chiasmus since the lack of imagination cannot after all be imagined, only stolen, like citrus fruits out of stories and purloined letters to provoke the commonplaces out of the other place, the text within the text.

Qui parle avec un noyau dans la bouche?

You’re taking a long time have I given you food for thought?

There’s a well-known case, Stavro, of a man who used to write down all his dreams in a beautifully calligraphed hand, filling volume after volume which he brought to his analyst. And when he broke it off he asked for his dreambooks back but the analyst couldn’t lay hands on them, whereupon the patient went into a rage, accusing him of stealing his dreams, calling him the violator of his unconscious and saying that what is given must be returnable. But it isn’t you know.

I don’t understand, are you mistrusting me again? I’d never do that to you, I’m not a case and I love you.

No, well. Never let yourself be fully known.

   You never tell me your dreams.

If I ever do it will be total reversal.

What do you mean?

Which I see already, from yours.

For the information-content of a particular unit is defined as a function of its probability. There are however many possible exits. In general the more probable a unit is the greater its degree of redundancy which, at night, at the flick of a switch, can turn smoky grey to dim the glare of a floodlight from the other eyes, exact replicas higher up the brow, and the dimming is preferable to the sudden isolation of seeing too much by the glare of floodlight you must dip, gently dip but not too deep.

Now droops the faun head underneath the changed modalities into a desperate love, discouraged and afraid you see, I’m boring you with my dreams, my problems, saying in effect the world is too much for me nanny please protect me. But it would be so much better to be able to accept this protection when I’m capable of giving it. I’ll find something, and even if it means separation for a while I want to come back a man. I don’t want to enter into a relationship in which I’m just your appendage.

Out of the mouths of babes.

But Stavro you have entered into such a relationship, insistently, though I kept trying to tell you. Any relationship between youth and age is by its very nature unequal, and on both sides, whichever way you look at it, though youth is bound to win, if only because it is youth.

You keep calling me young I feel so old.

Retaining a trace of hierarchy however despite youthful demand although the horizontal coordination degenerates, according to the narrator, into useless chatter between I promessi sposi who will go on as if.

Veronica!

Armel!

You look more beautiful than ever.

Because I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you I’ve missed you terribly.

On a point of information may we interrupt.

Oh go away with your politics we want to hear this course.

What is this reactionary culture you’re dishing out comrade the bourgeois idyll is over you can’t perpetuate it for ever. The revolution is upon us which has been long preparing out of archaic flaws, bouleversing the boulevards back into bulwarks as the city opens up its legs to receive the flood of the vox populi. In the beginning was the parting shot.