Dream of Fair to Middling Women

by Samuel Beckett

  Up to time then after this little railway-station rectification here she comes advancing up the railway-platform like a Gozzi-Epstein, careful not to lose the platform ticket that yet ten Pfenige cost had, insisting on the Garden of Eden in Mammy's furcoat, scarcely suggestive within the mild aphrodisiac of cheap loose black cardboard Russian buskins legs and limbs that even flexed nervously in black hose stretched to breaking point and viewed from a carefully selected Blickpunkt against a very special quality of hard light during œstrum were not alas even reasonably exciting. The truly tremendous bowel of the hips (frequent and easy) breaking out and away from the waistroot (Lupercus a liability) like a burdocked bulb of Ruffino and the two hoops of the buttocks received an almost Rhineline from the dark peltsheath. Sheath within sheath and the missing sword. Not forgetting for a moment this was the suit he had bought for next to nothing from a lefthanded indivisible individual, with a charitable desire to justify his fatigue, he forced his right hand down past the craggy coxa (almost a woman's basin in these trousers) into the glairy gallant depths and fished up a fifty. A cigarette quick for maxillas and malas and the ticket handy there in the breast of my reefer and the heavy valise to snatch him down skilfully detached and meagre into the loveglue and a smoke after that was nearly as good as in the Maison du Café.

  “At last!”

  “Beloved!”

  “Taxi!”

  Vie de taxi. Je t'adore ä l'égal.

  Carry your coffin my lord. Männer. Moving east to the segregation of the sexes. Ausgang on the right. Rule of the road. Lady on right arm. Nonsens unique. Astuce. But sleep on the right side. Gentle reader don't overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the Armistice with a pubic lanugo and

  BELACQUA

  we had to call him and no indolent virgin is his sister (indolent virgin!) and he does not much care whether he plays the tinkle-tinkle of a fourhander or not but he won't facing the keyboard observe the rule of the road (a megalomaniac you see with his head in his thighs as a general rule) so we ask you to humour now what naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation, pray that he will let a few good sighs out of him ere it be too late and speedy promotion from the Godbirds.

  And the lady that even in this very short and public space of time and notwithstanding that fur has no conductive properties of the appropriate kind worth speaking of has succeeded in transmitting certain unexpectedly stimulating sensations to her young visitor, were we not obliged to dub her the

  SMERALDINA-RIMA

  though most anything else would have done as well and notably Hesper we fancy would have been better and anything that comes in handy for short. He handed her into the cab of the Wagen with its charming deep Bluepoint zoster and spoke the address confidently to the chauffeur who but a moment previously had thought to light a cigarette and now naturally was in no kind of humour to start his engine and set off but was not slow to yield to the promising accent of the callow tourist whose heavy fibre case he hoisted vigorously on board on his left beside him and clipping the yet intact Ova between a rubbery helix and hypertrophied mastoid process gratified in his dialogue doubtless his nearest colleagues with what no doubt was a passionate Hessian epigram, set his machine angrily in motion, suffering with a kind of hopeless interest the refracted deportment of his clients.

  Down the cobbled alley then of bitter Xmas trees, trembling in many and many an umbral stasis twixt tram and trottoir, the superb Wagen flew towards the spire that eliminates in impeccable imperial alignment the now dim height of Hercules and the mean cascade sullen and abandoned dropping, the little there was of it and because it bloody well had to, down the choked channel of Hohen-zollern rocaille, snowclad, upon the castle.

  “Where did you get the hat?” Another glaucous helmet.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Very nice do you?”

  “Oh I don't know do you?”

  Snotgasp of reliefhilarity in honour of private joke.

  “It goes with the ring.”

  He turned over the hand and looked at the warts. Two dwindling warts in the shadow of the Mount Venerean. Warts in the valley of the shadow of.

  “Your warts are better.”

  Ostentatiously he clapped his mouth upon the place. She squeezed the Giudecca of her palm against the centre of distribution, nailing his malas with thumb and index. That was lovely. In the rue Delambre with a silk handkerchief did he not stem and staunch the vomitdribble of littérateur deaddrunk and cornuted what's more into the bargain on Pernod Fils and Pick-me-up? How often had he not denied all knowledge of Hernani? Poor Hamlet rolling his belly waxes and tapers the spike of his navelthread for the red waistcoat. The beadlust. By no thinking shall he consume that enterprise, by no new thoughts shall he altogether be released from the postulate of his undertaking. Fast in the black sand.

  Let us off the tutti chords now and tell us frankly shutting your eyes like Rouletabille what you think of our erotic sostenutino. Crémieux hold your saliva and you Curtius, we have a little note somewhere on Anteros we do believe, in fact we seem to remember we once wrote a poem (Nth. Gt. George's St. triphthong Corporal Banquo, if you please) on him or to him cogged from the liquorish laypriest's Magic Ode and if we don't forget we'll have the good taste to shove in the little ducky-diver as a kind of contrapuntal compensation do you comprehend us and in deference to your Pisan penchants for literary stress and strain.

  Well really you know and in spite of the haricot skull and a tendency to use up any odds and ends of pigment that happened to be left over she was the living spit he thought of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. Ne suis-je point pâle? Suis-je belle? But certainly pale and belle my pale belle Braut with a winter skin like any old sail in the wind. The root and the source betwixt and between the little athletic or aesthetic bit of a birdneb was indeed we assure you a constant source of delight and astonishment, when his solitude was not peopled and justified and beautified and even his sociabilities by a constipated coryza, to his forefinger pad and nail, rubbing and plumbing and palping and boring it just as for many years he polished (ecstasy of attrition!) his glasses or suffered the shakes and gracenote strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whosoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thanks Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thanks Mr Field) and a Kleinmeister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thanks Mr Beckett), or crossed the Seine or the Pegnitz or the Tolka or the Fulda as the case might be and it never by any possible chance on one single solitary occasion occurring to him that he was on all such and similar occasions (which we regret to say lack of space obliges us regretfully to exclude from this chronicle) not merely indulging in but pandering to the vilest and basest excesses of sublimation of a certain kind. The wretched little wet plug of an upperlip, pugnozzling up and back in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils was happily to some small extent mollified and compensated by the fine full firm undershot priapism of under-lip and chin, a signal recovery to say the least and a reaffirmation of the promise of sentimentic vehemence already so gothly declamatory in the wedgehead of the strapping fizgig. From time to time she positively only had to snatch off her amice to be a birdface and to have put Pope John Kissmine and Orchids in mind of his Puerpetually Suc-courbusting Lady as she positively must have appeared on at least two probabionary occasions: primo, skewered, there's no other word for it, to her loggia by the shining gynaecologist; secundo, confined, by Thermidor, in the interests of her armpits, to her bathroom, shamed in mind, yes, and yet—grieving for the doomed olives. Well we must say and no offence meant, that class of egoterminal immaculate quackery and dupery gives us the sick if anything does. Whatever she was she was not that kind. We suppose we can say she looked like an ulula in pietra serena, a parrot in a Pietà. On occasions that is. Not we need scarcely point out in the helmet of salvation.

 
By Jove when we look back and think how chaste was the passion of mutual attraction that juxtaposed those two young people in the first instance! It is out of the questions, it is beyond our poor powers, to give you any idea of the reverence with which they—how shall we say?—clave the one to the other in an ecstasy and an agony of mystical adhesion. Yessir! An ecstasy and an agony! A sentimentical coagulum, sir, that biggers descruption. Don't we know for a positive fact that th'unhappy Belacqua, separated from his douce Vega by two channels and 29 hours third if he went over Ostend, tossing and turning and tightening the tender white worms of his nervi nervorum with the frogs’ and the corncrakes’ Chinese chromatisms, inscribed to his darling blue flower some of the finest Night of May hiccupsobs that ever left a fox's paw sneering and rotting in a snaptrap. E.g.

  At last I find in my confusèd soul,

  Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses,

  The certitude that I cannot be whole,

  Consummate, finally achieved, unless

  I be consumed and fused in the white heat

  Of her sad finite essence, so that none

  Shall sever us who are at last complete

  Eternally, irrevocably one,

  One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies,

  One with the bright purity of the fire

  Of which we are and for which we must die

  A rapturous strange death and be entire,

  Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright,

  Conjoined in the One and in the Infinite!

  Lilly Neary has a lovely gee and her pore Paddy got his B.A. and by the holy fly I wouldn't recommend you to ask me what class of a tree they were under when he put his hand on her and enjoyed that. The thighjoy through the fingers and what do you suppose she wants for her thigh-beauty? A bitch-melba and a long long come and go before breakfast, toast and. Keycold Lucrece the chaste and the castaway in the cruel tights and Christ the useful culmination, fouterpounds through the fingers. No, more—more?—other, than that to my bright agenesia. No no don't admire that. No but I thought I thought perhaps honeysuckle round the cradle, custard and nutmeg on my grave, and the Eingang? Then he reddied his nose with the hand that came off her. Christ that was fine too. I wouldn't be seen looking at your Haus Albrecht Dürer, Adam Kraft my iron buck virgin. No smoking in the torture chamber. Not really you don't mean to tell me well well! Now the thin little sandy bony with the fine little stout son in Hanover, furchtbar all of a sudden with tears, now I must go and dien in the, the others do the streets but I go and dien in the, furchtbar, find a hotel, take a Wagen, no?, write, to hell with you, strive for your stout little hoffentlich ballbearing bastardpimp, I'll spend the night in the station, without the Benedictina, my old bald darling, your garret stinks of, I won't kiss your playful hand, daß heißt spielen, my dolorific nymphae and a tic doulheureux in th'imperforate hymen, what's the Dutch for randy, my dirty little hungry little bony vulture of a whorchen away up first-floor Burg-ward over the stream, I'll send you a Schein when I have a Schwips. No effing smoking do you hear me in the effing Folterzimmer. I had to ask her little sister and she closed me the vowel. I wonder did I do well to leave my notes at home, in 39 under the east wind, weind please. Well then to get back to what we were saying when he'd picked his nose for a little bit and the thighs there Gott sei dank he rose did he not and left her playing there against the oak before the ash, oh don't infuriate me don't bother me, let me pay let me buy you etwas, eat my little Au gen Celery-ice Celeryice, did he not, and wandered up hill and down dale like the cat and the mouse in business together or the Marientotenkind. No no I won't say everything, I won't tell you everything. No but surely you see now what he am? See! Heiliger Brahmaputra! A hedgecreeper! A peeping Tom in bicycle-clips, the ones that go round! Well then up he rose and apprehended without passion round and about the Sabbath brushwood foothill couples. Yes to be sure of course you are right, it would be hard for you to understand my meaning, you see he led a fairly small fleshy lipped maiden I might have said Jungfrau into the wood I might have said Wald and creeped and peeped instead of. Oh did I do well to leave my notes at home. So then after another little bit he came back and stood looking with his tongue in his cheek instead of.

  J'aime et je veux pââââlir. Livid rapture of the Zurbaran Saint-Onan. Schwindsucht and pollution in the umbra in the tunnel in the Thebaid. Rapturous strange death! Plus précieuse que la vie, the dirty dog. But right enough all the same what more miserable than the miserable man that commiserates not himself, cæsura, with new grief grieves not for his grief, is not worn by a double sorrow, drowns not in ken of shore? Who said all that? Turned he hath the audacious soul, turned he hath and turned again, on back, sides and belly, like little Miss Florence on the tick while Virgil and Sordello—yet all was very sore. As an herpetic taratantaratarantula (have you spotted the style?) hath he consumèd away. He dared to go off the deep end with his shadowy love and he daily watered by daily littles the ground under his face and beerbibbing did not lay siege to his spirit and he was continent though not in the least sustenant and many of his months have since run out with him the pestilent person to take him from behind his crooked back and set him before his ulcerous gob in the boiling over of his neckings and in chambering and wantonness and in bitter and blind bawling against the honey what honey bloody well you know the honey and in canvassing and getting and weltering in filth and scratching off the scabs of lust. All on a mild scale, of course, don't be misled, Paterson's Camp Coffee is the Best with Sanka. Perhaps the pen ran away, don't for a moment imagine Belacqua is down the drain, of course he has got a bit wasted that was bound to happen and his bitch of a heart knocks hell out of his bosom three or four nights in the week and to make a long story short Lucy and Jude are kept going pretty well from dawn to dark with his shingles and graphospasmus and weeping eczema and general condition, but for all that we will all agree that it's a long call from feeling a bit slack and run down to lying senseless in a deathsweat.

  Here we are. Out we get. Step around. Thank you dear. You put on the light. Up we go. Out of step. Randygasp of ruthilarity in honour of private joke. Here we are. There they are. Hello hello. Great to be here. Grand to be here. Same old Wohnung. Wunnerful to be here. Prosit. God bless. Lav on the left. Won't be a sec. Mind the bike. Mind the skis. Beschissenes Dasein beschissenes Dasein Augenblick bitte beschissenes Dasein Augenblickchen bitte beschissenes

  * * *

  All that sublimen of blatherskite just to give some idea of the state the poor fellow was in on arrival. We would not wish our young hero to be misjudged, or hastily judged, by the reader, for the want of a few facts. We strive to give the capital facts of his case. Facts, we cannot repeat it too often, let us have facts, plenty of facts.

  Now there is a lull, now the Madonna's Mammy, the eternal grandmother if all worked out according to plan, dared be the very bowels of compassion. She put him lying down on the settee.

  “Poor Bel” she said “look Smerry, he is ill.”

  Smerry, biding her time in a corner, casting up the pubic content of this lover haggard before the fact, had a great look of the B.V. before the tidings.

  “Drink this” said the Mandarin.

  “Domine” responded Belacqua, sitting up and dipping the glass of fiery liquor at parents and child “non sum dignus.”

  “Don't you think” said Mammy “that Smerry looks rather a pet in that frock?”

  Belacqua, the brandy drunk, was well able to do the false and the suave and the bland demon.

  “Your third or fourth daughter” he said “looks to me more beautiful if possible than ever before. Would” he sucked in his cheeks and launched a heavy sigh “that the same could be said of me.”

  “Poor Bel” said Mammy. “But we'll look after you, won't we, Smerry?”

  “A chaser” insinuated the Mandarin “a cognate chaser.” The Smeraldina-Rima had worked it out and felt very cross.

  “What's wrong with him anyhow?” she demanded.


  Belacqua unleashed the chaser and exchanged a leer of intelligence with Mammy.

  “Collywobbles” he said slyly.

  The Smeraldina, very touchy as we know already on the subject of her small vocabulary, had no patience with this kind of thing.

  “What's that?” she moaned “something to eat?”

  The Mandarin took a fleet pace to the rere, clapped a long yellow finger to the wing of his nose, and, poised with flexed knee on one tiptoe like a ballerina, dangling the bottle, announced in a general way:

  “Der Mench ist ein Gewohnheitstier!”

  “Something you've et, dear” said Mammy facetiously. The Smeraldina-Rima held aloof from the salvo of merriment that greeted this little effort of Mammy's.

  “Don't be so horrid” she cried “making jokes that I can't understand. How am I to know what are cobble-wobbles…”

  ”Colly” corrected Mammy “wobbles.”

  “Egal!” exploded the Smeraldina “how am I to know anything when you never sent me to school?”

  “My dear young lady” said the Mandarin gravely “your education has cost us thousands. Nothing short” he said “of thousands of pounds.”

  “Cheer up Smerry” exhorted the multipara “if I was young and beautiful and had a nice young man” holding up the apodasis to ogle the hope of her grandmaternity “to take me out, I wouldn't care whether I knew what collywobbles were or not. You'll know soon enough. Wait till you're my age” she exclaimed, as though that were hardly to be expected, “and you'll know.”

  The Smeraldina-Rima surveyed the nice young man who was going to take her out. He was stretched on the settee.