Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘Now to move the limbs of the body’ said Belacqua, ‘now not; now to divide, multiply, contract, enlarge, order, disarrange, or in any other way image in the mind by thinking, now not – these are mysteries that I do not care to pry into. Neither Mary nor Martha can bubble me out of my deference, nor is it for me to say why Kant was not a cow. In fine, my Lord, I can do no more than thank you repeatedly, beseech you to put me back where you found me, or, if that is not convenient, at least on the right road, and ever remain your most humblecumdumble.’

  Death does not seem to have improved Belacqua. Or are there perhaps signs of improvement? Yes and no.

  ‘It is not a question’ said Lord Gall ‘of what you can or of what you can not do. That point is one that will doubtless arise later. For the moment it will be quite enough for you to do as you are told. Prepare therefore to receive your instructions.’

  Belacqua lay aside the cigar and smartened himself up in the cauldron.

  ‘I may mention’ said Lord Gall ‘that it was in my contemplation, until your latest flux of bilge abolished it, to make you a more than liberal offer on account of your services.’

  ‘I am no longer for sale’ said Belacqua, ‘being now incorruptible, not to mention uninjurable, while my margin of changeability is of the narrowest.’

  ‘That is perfect’ said Lord Gall, ‘because this night, after the manner of all the earth, in you go unto my lady, who shall toe the scratch I don’t doubt for a moment and call his name Haemo.’

  ‘Oh’ said Belacqua, ‘you puddle of iniquity! Would you have me made a father? Shameful spewing on your glory!’

  Lord Gall, whose movements could not be forecast from one moment to another, now began to stab back and forth with his clubbed index, speaking almost pidgin:

  ‘You’ (stab) ‘makee me’ (stab) ‘father.’

  ‘And Lady Gall?’ said Belacqua, who was a modest fellow and thought that every lady was entitled to select her own vestryman.

  ‘Leave Moll to me’ said Lord Gall, ‘leave the whole timetable to me.’

  ‘And if I decline’ said Belacqua, ‘which you are bound to admit would be only human flesh and blood, after the details you have given me?’

  ‘Then’ said Lord Gall, very Olympian (or perhaps better Olympic) all of a sudden, ‘then I shall never speak to you again, but rather drop all my games, take to the bottle and die in the rats intestate.’

  ‘Picking at the bed-clothes’ said Belacqua, ‘what?’

  Lord Gall sulked.

  ‘Bless you’ said Belacqua, ‘don’t despair. Hungry dogs eat dirty puddings.’

  Lord Gall brightened up considerably.

  ‘My experience too’ he said. ‘Very prettily put I should think.’

  ‘Shall we chafe’ inquired Belacqua ‘that our age is that of a fly? Or a cock? Is there more God in an elephant than in an oyster?’

  ‘Exactly the same amount’ said Lord Gall, ‘I should have thought.’

  ‘The same quota exactly’ said Belacqua. ‘Then why worry?’

  At this point they joined in singing Oh les femmes et les framboises, they felt they simply had to, to the glory of the non-spatial divinity.

  ‘You sing beautifully’ panted Belacqua. ‘I declare to God you centre your notes like a lepidopterist.’

  ‘Say rather an invisible seamstress’ said Lord Gall. (A very poor effort by the way.) ‘What will you take?’

  ‘Pernod’ said Belacqua, ‘now that we’re in Paris, Père, Fils and Saint Esprit.’

  ‘I’m out of Pernod’ said Lord Gall, ‘but the Fernet Branca is in nice order.’

  ‘I’ll try half a pint’ said Belacqua. ‘Pour it high.’

  When they had quite drunk to the perdition of Extravas (Belacqua: ‘Why has the Lord not put it across him?’ Lord Gall: ‘Ask me an easier one.’) and to a happy issue (Both: ‘Ach Kinder!’) out of their manifold afflictions (Lord Gall: ‘You are sure that this will not prove too much for you? You are sure you would not care for a few oysters?’ Belacqua: ‘No, thank you. I find them rather, indeed altogether, too succulent.’), and almost before the liquor had had time to decide in which direction, up or down, it was going, Lord Gall burst his banks as follows:

  ‘But by God I am sick and tired of this endless conversation’, set to and swept and garnished the aerie, seized Belacqua in his arms, opened a trap-door in the flooring, went through it, prehended the bole beneath with magnificent thighs, let his trunk fall back parallel to what Belacqua could only think of as the celestial horizon, whistled and sped earthwards, in a cataclasm of boughs and a moonlit pandemonium of autumn tints. When he got there he opened his cupboard and took out a tin.

  ‘Vaseline’ he said, ‘omnia vincit.’

  He lashed it on in great style.

  ‘Inunction’ he said ‘for my exanthem, and – handy-dandy! – I feel as fit as a flea.’

  Belacqua recovered consciousness.

  ‘Windfalls of sound timber’ he heard Lord Gall, in apostrophe of the gross waste he had committed, cry from afar off, ‘I weep to see, and so will the reversioner in all likelihood.’

  Lord Gall had the reversioner on the brain.

  Belacqua spewed. Dimly he seemed to discern the tree trunk yawn and disclose an extensive mew, from the depths of which, where it had been lurking, a rogue ostrich, of all unexpected objects, came forward at the bidding of Lord Gall.

  ‘Meet Strauss’ said Lord Gall. ‘He simply waltzes along, never hesitates. Oopsadaisy.’

  If this injunction applied to Strauss, who had begun to bury his head in the ground, it applied doubly to Belacqua, for he lay there as one dead. Complying in any case promptly together they came into contact, the crutch and thighs of the man, or rather ghost, with the priceless boa of the bird, upon whose scarcely less valuable rump Lord Gall distributed himself, in the happy position of being able to brake with his feet on the ground their flight should it wax too headlong. Strauss sagged and murmured something that sounded remarkably like ‘Struth!’

  ‘Silence!’ cried Lord Gall. ‘Silence at once! Forward.’

  ‘Before we start’ said Belacqua, ‘there is just one thing.’

  Lord G. pawed the ground.

  ‘For one who does not care to pry into mysteries’ he said, ‘you show great enterprise I must say.’

  Such a speech! Really Lord Gall . . . !

  ‘Lady Gall’ began Belacqua.

  ‘Call her Moll’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘Is she —’ stammered Belacqua, ‘would she —’

  ‘Damme she DOES’ roared Lord G. ‘The whole success of our enterprise turns about her doing so.’

  ‘You take me up too fast’ said Belacqua, ‘wait for the question.’

  Lord G. leaned forward and mollified his mount.

  ‘Strauss’ he said, ‘I must beg of you to wait. Something is galling the weight on your neck.’

  ‘Would she sink or swim in Diana’s well?’ said Belacqua. ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Sink’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘Oh’ said Belacqua, ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.’

  ‘I think’ said Lord Gall, ‘sink I think. Wait for the answer. Forward.’

  In less time than it takes to decide how this tedious episode may best be liquified they reached the castle, poor Strauss very bedraggled and inclined to mope. Lord Gall took charge of everything, Belacqua had merely to go in unto. Moll turned out to be the most filthy little bromide of a half-baked puella that you could possibly imagine, face like a section of spanked bottom, simple duple specks, giggle, clitoridian croon, warts and a cacoethes of hoisting all propositions addressed to her, or such passages from them as she did not find obscure, and a large number of those that were not, a couple of pegs with great enthusiasm and conviction. (4) Anyhow in he went, executed himself with a kind of wild civility and then, before she had nearly exhausted her Leaving Certificate ta-ta! for his super, simply ripping, perfectly topping attentions, was lapped in the Lethe of another tru
ce, restored in a twinkling to the fence of integrity and thence without pause to his base, the uterotaph.

  4. E.g.: lady gall: Diddleumdumdum diddlediddleumdum diddlediddle —

  belacqua: It is now three o’clock in the morning.

  lady gall: (vehemently) Rather! Absolutely! Jolly good! Diddlediddleum dumdiddleum etc.

  That seems to be about the end of the adventure of the impotent tenant in tail male special, unless it might tickle the reader, as it did the Baron greatly, to learn that Moll Gall turned up trumps and was brought to bed amidst scenes of the wildest enthusiasm, and that on the tick of the fulness of time a life was dropped. Lord Gall was downstairs at the time, counting his golfballs. His medical advisers filed in. It was a dramatic moment.

  ‘May it please your lordship’ said the foreman, ‘it is essentially a girl.’

  So it goes in the world.

  To proceed then again more or less as see above, page 7, paragraph 2, Belacqua, at last on the threshold of total extinction as a free corpse, sat on his own headstone, drumming his heels irritably against the R.I.P. What with the moon shining, the sea tossing in her sleep and sighing, and the mountains observing their Attic vigil in the background, he found it difficult to decide offhand whether the scene was of the kind that is called romantic or whether it should not with more justice be termed classical. Both elements were present, of that there could be no question. Perhaps classico-romantic would be the fairest diagnosis. A classico-romantic scene.

  Personally, he felt calm and wistful. A classico-romantic corpse.

  He brought up duly the words of the rose to the rose: ‘No gardener has died, within rosaceous memory.’

  He sang a little song, he could not help and that was all about it, nor can we refrain from setting it down, however ill it suit with this deep witty story.

  Ich liebe Dich, Titine,

  Ich muss Dich ewig lieben,

  Denn Du bist die Rosine

  In meines Lebens Kuchen.

  He sighted a submarine of souls on the sea, hove to, casting – no, drawing up a net. He counted the fish as the Alba, coiled up on the conning tower, sporting the old flamingo, gaffed them and brought them on board, one by one. One hundred and fiftythree iridiscent fish, the sum of the squares of Apostles and Trinity, thrashing and foaming on the gaff. He closed his eyes, intending to have a vision, but felt so marooned when he did so that he opened them again quick. The boat was gone.

  The significance of this apparition was what he could not fathom. No, nor anyone else either.

  Cats came and sat down. In their faces, wreathed in tolerance, he blew the smoke of his last cigar, hoping thus to shift them. But they continued to come and sit down and surrounded him on all sides finally. He supposed he was all right so long as he stayed where he was. But woe betide him presumably if he tried to sneak away.

  The next item on the programme turned out to be our old friend the groundsman, whom we did not bother to name in Draff, but now must: Doyle was his name.

  Belacqua was glad to see him.

  ‘My old friend Mick’ he said.

  This man Doyle was naked save for his truss and a pair of boots which sparkled and crackled in the moonlight. He wore tatooed in block capitals of fire, a flaming zoster across his tumtum, the words: Stultum Propter Christum. He carried a clothes-basket, a dark lantern, a mattock, an axe, a shovel, a spade and a hamper. With a shoulder-elbow-palm-and-eyebrow ikey most pleasing to see he washed as it were his hands of all this baggage which consequently clattered to the ground, floundered around in a wild romp or perhaps better flurry and lay still. The cats faded away.

  ‘Mick doesn’t know Bel’ said Belacqua, ‘what a shame.’

  Doyle went away and came back, sorted his tools, raised the mattock on high and observed merely, in a Dublin accent of great sweetness:

  ‘Don’t you imagine that you, who are a patent figment, can put the wind up me, who am fortified with alcohol.’

  Down came the mattock on the hallowed mould like the pile-driver in the story, such a blow can seldom have been delivered, the headstone rocked, Belacqua’s last resting-place spouted up into his eye.

  ‘Easy on there’ said Belacqua, ‘what’s the big idea?’

  ‘The idea’ said Doyle, developing his vile work with the energy, skill and despatch of a model machine-moujik, ‘– is – in a word – to snatch.’

  ‘Fool’ said Belacqua.

  ‘And grab’ said Doyle.

  ‘Fool’ said Belacqua, ‘I am the body.’

  Doyle threw down the mattock and took up the spade.

  ‘There is a natural body’ he said ‘and there is a spiritual body.’

  He laid down the spade, went away and came back, he took up the shovel.

  ‘Reach hither with your shovel’ said Belacqua.

  But Doyle apparently had no interest in being convinced, for he went on with his work in a dogged and a sullen manner. He was a good worker, already he had quite a little cavity to his credit. He laid down the shovel and resumed the mattock. Belacqua spat in his eye, saying:

  ‘Is that also a figment?’

  This was indeed an impardonable piece of interference and yet Doyle took it as the vagabond in Walking Out the blue bitch’s affront, that is without visible rancour, plying his tool, a dunderhead, a sweet dolt on some Christ’s account.

  ‘I’ll lay you six to four’ said Belacqua ‘that you find nothing.’

  Doyle laid down the mattock, he went away and came back, he stood irresolute in the midst of clothes-basket, shovel, spade and hamper, mass of inertia in pentacle of delirium.

  ‘Two to one’ said Belacqua, ‘five to two, I lay five to two.’

  Doyle plumped for the spade, discovered his mistake, sought to retrieve it with the shovel, in vain, with the clothes-basket, too late the damage was done, stood helpless and disarmed, on the verge of a breakdown.

  ‘Hear me’ implored Belacqua.

  Doyle’s wild eye saw the hamper, he fell upon it, devoured the wing of a chicken, opened a bottle not of stout but of schnapps.

  ‘Oh Mick hear me!’

  Doyle, utterly dispirited by the hitch in his work, regretting the wing of the chicken already, acutely conscious that the schnapps was not going to the right place, the slow climb of flat themes like a bougie in his brain (some were of the opinion that Doyle was mad), realised that there was nothing further to be gained from withholding his attention. So he just said agreeably:

  ‘These amethyst bottles are a great mistake. They don’t give the drink a fair chance to my mind.’

  ‘In this world’ said Belacqua, ‘which, as you know, is all temptation and commercial travelling, I contrived, notwithstanding my numerous wives and admirers, to pass the greater share of my time in the privy, papered in ultraviolet anguish, of my psyche, projecting diggings so deep that their intrigues should never be discovered until a grandson’s natural monster had forgotten me, my peccadilloes of omission.’

  Doyle knew the class of thing exactly, the sense of inertness in leash, pent up sluggishness. It seemed to thrive, more was the pity, on his line of business.

  ‘Don’t I know’ he said. ‘You may pass on to the next section.’

  An icy wind, harbinger of the dawn, began to blow. Belacqua, observing how little by little Doyle was turning blue, resolved piously to be as brief as possible.

  ‘As amber attracts chaff’ he said, ‘so my psyche —’

  ‘If you would be so kind’ said Doyle ‘as to make use of the word mind, because the word psyche reminds me in the first place of the Irish Statesman and in the second place of a girl who used to know me.’ His voice came to pieces. ‘Long ago’ he sobbed.

  ‘Gladly’ said Belacqua. ‘. . . attracts chaff, so my mind all the stupefying dilemmas. Until, my anaesthesia becoming general, I was called home, to adopt the happy expression of Mr Quin whom you may have met, at last. To my last long home at long last. Since when the sty, saving your presence, which I in my childish way su
pposed would see me no more, has claimed so much of my time that I sometimes wonder whether death is not the greatest swindle of modern times.’

  Without the slightest hesitation Doyle made a mot of some note.

  ‘For the purposes of stinging’ he said ‘Death is no better equipped than a wasp.’

  Belacqua thought it very good but did not say so. He made a mental note of it however. He knew exactly on whom he could place it with most success. He went on with his own stuff.

  ‘Now is not the whole thing rather peculiar? I who was always as quiet as a mouse, doing nothing, saying nothing, my mind a Limbo of the most musical processes, to be treated now as though I had been on the committee.’

  Doyle went away. Belacqua, the phrases to come next piping hot in his mind, counted the moments until he should return. The submarine kept bobbing up and down, nearer to the shore at each emergence. To little Alba, waving from the conning tower and beckoning in a most unladylike manner, Belacqua vouchsafed no sign. Yet he bore the whole manoeuvre in mind, resolved to exploit it should occasion arise. After what seemed a lifetime Doyle came back, greatly eased to judge by his tranquil expression.

  ‘Is it not rather peculiar?’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Scarcely just’ said Doyle ‘let alone equitable.’

  ‘I find it difficult to imagine’ said Belacqua ‘any rightminded person failing to be shocked at such disparity between merit and requital.’

  His imagination is certainly not what it was.

  ‘How do you figure it out?’ said Doyle.

  ‘I dassay my life was a derogation and an impùdence’ said Belacqua ‘which it was my duty, nay should have been my pleasure, to nip in the wombbud. But —’

  ‘Half a mo’ said Doyle. ‘You say derogation. From what?’

  ‘Really’ said Belacqua, ‘consideration for your cyanosis forbids me to go into that. Also I have the feeling that time is short, a kind of aura if I may say so.’