Dream of Fair to Middling Women

by Samuel Beckett

  Still and all we love ‘em one and all, we can't be cross with ’em long, they are such charming and engaging creatures after all when all is said and done, when it is. Their very artlessness puts wrath to flight quite. How could anyone be angry with ‘em for any length of time? They have such winning little ways. It is utterly out of the question. Even the Syra-Cusa, though we think she might have sent him at least one of her eyes in a dish. Even Chas, that bit of a nit. Pets one and all.

  Now a most terrible and unexpected thing happens. Into the quiet pages of our cadenza bursts a nightmare harpy, Miss Dublin, a hell-cat. In she lands singing Have-lock Ellis in a deep voice, itching manifestly to work that which is not seemly. If only she could be bound and beaten and burnt, but not quick. Or, failing that, brayed gently in a mortar. Open upon her concave breast as on a lectern lies Portigliotti's Penumbre Claustrali bound in tawed caul. In her talons earnestly she clutches Sade's Hundred Days and the Anterotica of Aliosha G. Brignole-Sale, unopened, bound in shagreened caul. A septic pudding hoodwinks her, a stodgy turban of pain it laps her horse-face. The eye-hole is clogged with the bulbus and the round pale globe goggles exposed. Solitary meditation has furnished her with nostrils of generous bore. The mouth champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures. The crateriform brisket, lipped with sills of paunch, cowers ironically behind a maternity tunic. Keyholes have wrung the unfriendly withers, the osseous rump screams beneath the hobble-skirt. Wastes of woad worsted are gartered to the pasterns. Aïe!

  What shall we call it? Give it a name quick. Lilly, Jane or Caleken Frica? Or just plain Mary? Suppose we make it Caleken to please the theologasters and Frica to please ourself, and of course whatever comes in handy for short.

  The Frica had a mother, and thereby was partially explained: a bald caterwauling bedlam of a ma with more toes than teeth. As a young mare she had curvetted smartly, lifting the knees chin-high, and had enjoyed a certain measure of success in certain quarters. And if the dam trot, as the saying runs and we all know to our cost, shall the foal then amble? She shall not. Nor did. For did she not caper caparisoned in those nightmare housings and in her absinthe whinny notify Belacqua that her darling ma bade him to a party with back-stairs, claret-cup and the intelligentsia. Belacqua uncovered cautiously his face.

  “I couldn't” he said “I could not.”

  Now she was springing the garters. What did she want? That was what he could not understand.

  “I do wish” said Belacqua “that you would take a tip from Madame your noble mother and wear a respectable perforated rubber suspender-belt in place of those houghbands. Please do not flick them at me like that.”

  “But I must” she snuffled, setting the eyes in motion, “don't you see, Bel, that I simply must?”

  “No!” cried Belacqua “shall I be gehennate in my own chamber by a Blue-stocking?”

  “Oh Bel” she whinnied “do you really and truly mean to say you think I am?”

  Under the anger of the moon, Rubens embolus, Belacqua let fall his poor head.

  “If now” he found it in his fading breath to implore “you would please to go and say to Madame your mother that Belacqua regrets he is unable…”

  Belacqua regrets he is unable… That makes, he reflected, casting it up in great anguish of spirit, toads and vipers, three more of each, in their torture chamber. Without warning she loosed a high sexual neigh:

  “Chas is coming! Chas and the Polar Bear are coming!”

  Belacqua roared with laughter. Wot a sop!

  “Chas!” he coughed “Chas! Chas! But that is what Chasses are there for!”

  “The Alba” she bugled.

  But he waxed stiff, he heard no more that day. Suddenly there was no clot of moon there, no moon of any kind or description. It was the miracle, our old friend that whale of a miracle, taking him down from his pangs, sheathing him in the cerements of clarity. It was the descent and the enwombing, assumption upside down, tête-bêche, into the greyness, the dim press of disaffected angels. It was at last the hush and indolence of Limbo in his mind proddied and chivvied into taking thought, lounging against the will-pricks. It was the mercy of salve on the prurigo of living, dousing the cock-robin of living. In a word in fact he was suddenly up to the eyes in his dear slush.

  Plane of white music, warpless music expunging the tempest of emblems, calm womb of dawn whelping no sun, no lichen of sun-rising on its candid parapets, still flat white music, alb of timeless light. It is a blade before me, it is a sail of bleached silk on a shore, impassive statement of itself drawn across the strata and symbols, lamina of peace for my eyes and my brain slave of my eyes, pressing and pouring itself whiteness and music through blindness into the limp mind. It is the dawn-foil and the gift of blindness and the mysteries of bulk banished and the mind swathed in the music and candour of the dawn-foil, facts of surface. The layers of Damask fused and drawn to the uttermost layer, silken blade. Blind and my mind blade of silk, blind and music and whiteness facts in the fact of my mind. Douceurs…

  It was shortly after this terrifying experience that the Twilight Herald inserted in its horrid latin a succinct paragraph to the effect that:

  “C.J. Nicholas Nemo saltabat sobrius and in amore sapebat and had in consequence in the prepuscular gloom of Good Friday's or was it Lady Day's autumnal octave been withdrawn more dead than alive from under the stairs of the Salmon Leap at Leixlip by Adam of St Victor that most notorious poacher who on being interrogated turned a little yellow as well he might and was understood to depose that Ireland was a Paradise for women and a Hell for hosses and that he had no doubt at all in his own mind that the Lord would have mercy on whom he would have mercy.

  The Cast-iron Virgin of Nürnberg having most furiously been administered personally by the pitiless News Editor, Adam of St Victor, of no fixed address or occupation, was coaxed into the following addendum: how that the poor young gentleman, before coughing up and commending in a vague general way his spirit in the well of the jaunting-car that was bearing them post-haste to the Stillorgan Sunshine Home or was it the Lucan Spa Hotel, had embraced him with a wild Spanish light in his duskèd eyes, how that he had called upon him (Adam of St Victor) weakly as the Bride of his Soul, how that he had harnessed his latest breath, positively its last audition, to one of those smart nut-shell turn-outs that it had not been his (Adam of St Victor's) good fortune to clap ears to since the dear partner of his porridge days (God rest her) had turned to Him with a pain in her chest and furled her skirts from the Sirens’ Isle and cast all over and moored in the millpond of curds that was Abraham's boosom, viz: te præsente nil impurum.

  A rod was plunged forthwith in pickle and with the first weals of dawn the miscreant's filthy trousers were plucked down and a positively superlative verberation inflicted by the Art Editor in the presence of his swooning staff of camera-mattoids, shots of which vicious mortification will shortly be copiously promulgated.

  A finding of Felo-de-se from Natural Causes was found. Et voici le temps qu'il fera demain…”

  Belacqua took cognisance of this corpulent reportage on his way home from the Fox and Geese over cheese and porter in the tabernacle of a wayfarers' public near the Island Bridge that has since been destroyed and consumed utterly by brimstone the bishops all say.

  Intolerably moved almost immediately he sinks down there and then in the sand and plumjuice on his hands and knees and with a good prayer truncates copiously the purgatorial villeggiatura. (We flatter ourself that from spits to plumjuice via sputa is a nice little bit of formal purification.) For from what he knew of Nemo, having now for some little time past conferred almost daily with that soured citizen and even more frequently of late in the intermittences of ague consulted him, no doubt could subsist in his mind that the late man, far from having done away with himself, had but by misadventure fallen in. In the life of such a gauche and burly body, habitually stooped over, and absorbed in the contemplation of, water, such a mishap, the loss of balance and then
the splash and despairing cry, was bound sooner or later to supervene. And, no doubt, the sooner the better. But that he had despaired of God's mercy to the point of consigning himself, irremissible fortes peccatorum, to the pretty reaches developed by the Liffey at the locus delicti was altogether on the sandy side for a working hypothesis. The most valued possession of this man, indeed a most precious margarita, possibly his unique possession, certainly the only one in which he had ever been surprised into evincing the least proprietary interest, was a superb aboulia of the very first water. And where is the felo-de-se thus wonderfully gelt of will? Bah! He fell in and could not get out. Or he fell in and could not be bothered getting out. But he fell in. Ergo it was death by drowning by misadventure. The official finding was very fine. But it was erroneous.

  The meditation thus concluded was as rapid as a zebra's thought, as thoughts of love, as peninstantaneous as the snap of the shutter for a snapshot. (The multiplication of figure to detriment of style is forced upon us by our most earnest desire to give satisfaction to all customers. We trust we give satisfaction.) And when Belacqua, on a ringing Amen in the male soprano register, extracted himself painfully from the spit-pitted arena of sawdust or sand or whatever we said it was, he felt himself heavenly enflamed as the Cherubim and Seraphim for all the world as though his mouth had been tapping the bung of the heavenly pipe of the fountain of sweetness instead of just coming from clipping the rim of a pint pot of half-and-half. For about two minutes he floated about the snug as Gottesfreund and disembodied as you please. This sudden strange sensation was of a piece with the ancient volatilisation of his first communion, long forgot and never brought to mind in all the long years that had run out with him since and rolled over that delicious event. Alas! it was a short knock and went as it had come, like that, it vacated him like that, leaving him bereft and in his breast a void place and a spacious nothing.

  Years later, when in the course of a stroll in the Prater (yes, it was in the Prater, we were strolling in the Prater, we were strolling to the horse-races) he furnished us with the details of this visitation, he affirmed that never on any previous or subsequent occasion did he suffer such a hateful sensation of emptiness, of being integrally turned out.

  On this emotion recollected in the tranquillity of those celebrated bowers he scaffolded a theory of the mystical experience as being geared, that was his participle, to the vision of an hypostatical clysterpipe, the apex of ecstasy being furnished by the peroration of administration and of course the Dark Night of the Soul (and here we were scandalised by slight consonantal adjustments) and the Great Dereliction coinciding with the period of post-evacuative depression. When we protested that we did not think this would hold water he replied angrily that it was not meant to hold water.

  Strictly speaking this Belacqua of later days stands outside the enceinte of our romaunt. The blame of this sally we lay therefore, since it is always a question here below of laying blame somewhere, on a phrase that he let fall on the way back to the city after a disastrous day on the course, a phrase that we propose now to the reader as a red-letter term in the statement of Belacqua and a notable arc of his botched circumscription.

  “Behold, Mr Beckett” he said, whitely, “a dud mystic.”

  He meant mystique raté, but shrank always from the mot juste.

  Guardedly, reservedly, we beheld him. He was hatless, he whistled a scrap of an Irish air, his port and mien were jaunty resignation.

  “John” he said “of the Crossroads, Mr Beckett. A borderman.”

  And to be sure he did at that moment suggest something of the ascetic about town. But from that, from the live-and-let-live anchorite on leave, to dud mystic was a longer call than we cared immediately to undertake.

  “Give me chastity” he mentioned “and continence, only not yet.”

  Nevertheless in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night, after music, with the wine of music, Rhine wine, it was given to us to cotton on, to behold him as he was, face to face, even as he sometimes contrived to behold himself.

  Thus through Nemo came Belacqua to a little knowledge of himself and we (though too late for insertion) to a little knowledge of Belacqua, and by the end of Nemo were forewarned.

  * * *

  Now we are anew in the muck, two channels and 29 hours if we went over Ostend from the pleasant Prater. Nor merely in the muck, but in that particular annex of the muck reserved for our two young people, their muck, the Holy of Holies, so to speak, of the muck, the slough where in the reeds and rushes of their relation the Alba and Bel-acqua loll. Ark and mercy-seat have sunk, the Shekinah has fizzled out, the Cherubim are drowning.

  Side by side, touching, they recline in the shadow of a great rock, chosen by him for the shadow it gave, on the Silver Strand. She has rummaged in her fathomless bag, she has taken out from it scissors and file, she is beautifying his fingers, hurting him slightly in her determination to leave not one lunula undiscovered, pleasantly aware that she is causing him a little pain, grousing Avalon this time, the refrain over and over again, swallowing from time to time little flaws of saliva, born of her absorption. They are entrenched behind a low palissade of bottles driven into the pale sand. Beyond the palissade two gulls skirmishing for a sandwich fascinate the wincing lover.

  “Look at the birds” he cried “just look at them.”

  “Yes” said the Alba.

  “Like man and wife.”

  They flew away together far out over the sea, leaving the sandwich mutilated on the shore. Then in the lofty slips they wheeled and hovered, like eyelids over grit they trembled, and starting fair, getting away to a good start, came flying down to the goal of bread. The next thing was that the bread was between them, it was at the centre of the line joining them. Stiffly then on their tender bare feet, polarised across the bread, they stepped the diameter round, they screwed themselves round the sandwich of contention. It was a game, a love-game. They were not hungry, they were man and wife.

  Alas cang of emblem…

  “Now” she said “the other.”

  The way people go on saying things .. ! Who shall silence them, at last?

  Let it be said now without further ado, they were just pleasantly drunk. That is, we think, being more, becoming and unbecoming less, than usual. Not so far gone as to be rapt in that disgraceful apotheosis of immediacy from which yesterday and to-morrow are banished and the off dawn into the mire of coma taken; and yet at the same time less buttoned up in their cohesion, more Seventh Symphony and contrapanic-stuck, than usual. Not, needless to say, melting in that shameless ecstasy of disintegration justly quenched in the mire and pain of reassemblage; no, it was not the glory of coming asunder in an apotheosis of immediacy, it was merely an innocent and agreeable awareness of being and that less clocklaboriously than was their habit. Pleasantly drunk.

  As near as no matter it was a year ago now that he had been inland in another land with another girl, a bigger, less bountiful one, in fact not in the same class at all, the Smeraldina (whom now of course, too late in the day, we wish we had called, say, Hesper) to be sure, that lady dog for ever proud. Inland with the withered leaves, and very handsome they were too in their own way, spurned by the agile sandals of the Evites or drowning slowly in the canals that watered to no other purpose that arch-dukes' disaffected plaisaunce, or simply pulped gently into mould by the punctual equinox.

  This, not the Springtime, was the season for the labours of love. And that, we feel, is a proposition holding specially good for the very last days of Autumn, Limbo, to drag in that old veteran once again of Winter. And Venice, where the waters wither and rot and pomegranates bleed their sperm and Dickens is forgotten, is nonpareil for that class of thing. The very place. Made for it.

  Not that the Silver Strand—looking back through our notes we are aghast to find that it was Jack's Hole; but we cannot use that, that would be quite out of place in what threatens to come down a love passage—not that it were (mood of Fall indispensable
) by any manner of means definitely hostile as atmosphere and scape to the Olympian romance that may break over it now at any moment. For oui, les premiers baisers, oui, les premiers serments it was as nice a site as any in the country. The rock was there, crumbling beyond a shadow of doubt, into dust; the wind was on the job, exfoliating the wrack; the inconstance of the sky was incontestable. And, over and above all these conditions, the fickle sea and sand. Lying there to a casual eye so calm between its headlands this little beach, without being the Bride of the Adriatic or anything of that kind and in spite of its leaving a few trees to be desired, furnished as neat a natural comment on the ephemeral sophism as any to be had in the Free State. Which is saying the hell of a lot.

  With a calmness that excluded interpretations she gave him back his hand, she put it definitely away from her, she had done with it. She wiped her instruments on her sleeve and put them away.

  “Your hands” she said, not having seen his feet in the nude, “are a disgrace.”

  “Ah” said Belacqua. Belacqua opened his mouth and said “ah” when he felt nothing, or when words could not convey what he felt.

  “Your hands” she said “are not bad. A little attention would improve them.”

  A little attention. He looked at them and saw that they were all bumps.

  “They are all lumps and bumbs” he gave voice to this simple sentiment, “there is nothing to be done.”

  “No” said the Alba “they have their quality. But the nails…”

  “Ah” he said “the nails.”

  “My child” she said “you have the nails of a body-snatcher.”

  He gave his preoccupation with his nose as a possible explanation.

  “Yes. And you bite them and polish your glasses.”

  “Please” he threw himself on her mercy “please do not apply anyone to me, do not apply any system at me.”