Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  You know, my name is a kind of fart:

  FAAAAAAAASTOLFFFFFF.

  Bussard – who farted a moment ago and writes these words now at my dictation – is what you’d call a loyal student of the art. The art, I mean, of farting. He eats the right wrong foods, drinks the right wrong drinks, for the proper and manly production of blasts and breezes from the antipodean vent. That is to say, he eats peas and lentils and cucumbers with plenty of sunlight in them, and he drinks barley beer and pomegranate wine when he can get it. Turnips and crayfish help too. Also anchovies.

  None of your nice nellies here. If John Bussard feels like a fart, he farts. He doesn’t cross his knees or sit on it. I saw a priest attendant on Harry VI do that once. Sit on a fart. The air came out with such a sweet, unwholesome rush, despite him, that he took off three inches and hovered above the bench before plopping down again in pink confusion. A lot of levitation could be caused by farting. Do saints fart though? Yes, praise be, with an odour of violets, madam.

  Another I knew, a lady of the royal chamber, used to carry a little cork with her, which she would insert in her bum-hole when she felt the exhalations coming on. Bending once to retrieve the Queen’s thimble, she fired a nearly fatal shot at Archbishop Arundel, hitting him on the mitre where he blessed the King.

  Better to let Dame Nature have her way. She’ll have it anyhow. To contain or restrain a necessary fart does no good to the bowels, or to the innards, or to the breech. Of course there are occasions when a fart simply will not do. Sir Thomas Erpingham farted at the coronation of King Henry IV. ‘God save the King!’ cried the Archbishop of Canterbury. And before the assembled lords of England could reiterate and augment the sentiment, Erpingham farts like a pea in a drum. There was full three seconds of astonishment while that fart lasted. It was what you might call a stained-glass fart. I mean: not uproarious, but deep and rich and altering the colour of the light. It earned Erpingham a banishment. Bolingbroke was heard to say that that fart interpreted meant Erpingham’s support of King Richard. I suppose it represented Richard’s imprisonment in the Tower. If Erpingham had kept it in, Richard might have been allowed to stay there. But he let it out.

  Fancy rupturing your bum-gut to keep a lady’s favour! That’s what King James I of Scotland did on his wedding night. Like a fool, he ate a ton of haggis at the wedding feast. Now your haggis, like hedgehogs, is a mighty inspiriter of ventral storms. All night long, at work like a Turk on his bride Jane Beaufort, our Jamie wanted to fart. But he thought that if he did it would lessen his bride’s opinion of him, based on that poem of his The Kingis Quair, which he had written for her while in prison. So he had to keep his nether peace all night, to pass it in the privacy of the jakes.

  Stupid. A really fruity fart would have done no harm. I have known gentle ladies of high degree, who loved to hear it. I have been called in to fart farts for a college of them. Once I farted a spectral fart for the Countess of Salisbury which made a jelly change colour and a candle catch fire. She found that arousing in several ways.

  These chronicles. My memorials. What are they? Farts of the mind.

  I heard of a man once who was on a desert island, shipwrecked, without even a glass to remind him that he was himself. He fell back on farting to assure himself of his existence. I fart, therefore I am. His farts were his friends. There’s nothing like the sound of another human voice.

  Then there’s the smell, of course. Armies fart like fury in the field. Agincourt was all farts. Not just the men farted, but the horses and the hounds and the regimental goats farted too. Our archers volleyed farts. The ground farted. The sun – it came up with a fart on St Crispin’s Day. And it certainly went down with a belch of satisfaction.

  Most of your famous battles can be recalled by true veterans in terms of the specific juicy farts their nostrils noticed. A conqueror farts different to a victim.

  The dead don’t fart.

  The Dolphin of France, Lewis, the son of Charles VI of France, he had the stupidest, squeakiest, silliest, most apologetic namby-pamby piss-down-the-back-of-my-breeches fart you ever did hear. And it smelt like a pickled pansy.

  Hal, in his prime, on the other hand, had a fart like a pack of elephants. He was an emperor of farts.

  Objections to my story of my life are just a fart-long.

  My secretaries can be defined in terms of their farting. Bussard farts best. His is a hard and manly fart, short, squat, but equable. It is the fart of a reliable fellow. I say so.

  Worcester scarcely farts at all. He smiles and his nostrils quiver delicately and his left eyebrow goes up and a melancholy wistfulness comes into his eye. You know he wants to fart, but he won’t. He would despise himself if a snort escaped him. He has an arse like two priest’s fingers pressed prim together. It’s a wonder he doesn’t shit little silver rings, when you come to think of it. He has too much sensibility for farting, my over-educated secretary William Worcester.

  My stepson Stephen Scrope is a mean little farter. He’ll go and stick his bum in the arras and let it off there. Oval farts. Mere scrupulous fetterings of wind. Posterior comments. Like talking behind your hand. As though that made him a gentleman. If he could get interest on them, no doubt he would save his farts in a bag and deposit them in a fart-bank.

  Hanson and Nanton fart in duet. They’re a pretty pair, those two shit-the-bed scoundrels, and many an amusing tune and descant they provide us. They had this competition once to see who could fart the highest. Nanton won. Though some of Hanson’s farts were like birdcalls. There was one in particular. I can hear and smell it still. Like a nightingale with the toothache.

  I had a man in France, Peter Basset, who could put the fear of God in the enemy just by turning and giving them a flash of his mighty arse. He had a fart like a roar of cannons. Once, on the wall above Orleans, he repulsed a party of Joan the Puzzle’s commandoes by letting down his trousers and giving them a percussion of fartings as they ascended. French soldiers always run away well – but I’ve never seen any run faster than that lot. They thought it was a new secret weapon, or the voice of the Devil. Basset killed a man in single combat once, in sight of both armies. He didn’t do it absolutely by farting at him, but I promise you that the peculiar and pervasive stink of attack which he did preserve from start to finish helped his victory no end.

  Friar Brackley farts in the confessional. ‘Bless me, father,’ you say – and he farts once through the grille. ‘For I have sinned,’ you add, following the usual formula. He farts again. A highly disapproving and ecclesiastical fart. A lenten offering. There are certain sins, too, I have noticed, which bring him out in little farts and belches. Whether this is a sign of his anguish in the face of human nature revealed, I could not say. It is not exactly pleasant, sharing the smell of your sins with the smell of your confessor’s farting as he listens. There is altogether too much human nature involved in that, you might think. Though for myself, as a principle, I could never get enough of human nature.

  Bussard writes this. Bussard has stopped farting now. Good boy, Bussard. You thing!

  Of all my secretaries, this John Bussard is the one to whom I can say things which otherwise I would reserve for my own hand’s writing. He never blushes, my clerk Bussard, and he never turns pale. For this his reward in heaven will be a suit with flies.

  Is there farting in heaven? Since heaven is our earthly bliss prolonged, but even more so, then I think there must be. For farting can be bliss. Heaven may be one long perfect fart stretched out to meet eternity. Angels may fart. (I hope that’s not heretical.)

  On earth, anyway, John Bussard’s reward is to hear my more peculiar adventures direct. I can dictate anything to him and he writes it down. He is a bloody fool. There, I told you, he wrote that without batting an eyelid, and without asking me if he was to set it down – which is Wm Worcester’s doubtful trick, he’s forever wanting to know shouldn’t he leave that out or modify or censor this.

  God looks after those who fart well. God stand
s up for honest farters. Bussard is my secretary and a man after my own fart.

  Bless you. Bum. Balls. Petrum! Partrum! There he goes again.

  Quick, catch it. Draw it. Write it down. Describe it. Analyse and transpose and explicate and evaluate it. It started high and finished low. Like this:

  Now, if Worcester farted, it would be more like this:

  Very neat and erudite, translated from the Latin don’t you know. Holy Mary, Worcester farts in Latin and his breeches have to English it for our understanding.

  Then Scrope, my stepson, thus:

  (He’d be trying to save them to sell later, the mean little bleeder.)

  Hanson and Nanton would fart extra-special emasculated nightingale duets, as I’ve said already. That would look like this maybe:

  And Friar Brackley, so:

  As for John Fastolf, his fart, I will make the mark myself. Thus and thus, at a modest estimate:

  That’s enough for today, and enough for now on the art of farting. It is a subject to which I shall return, for my knowledge of it, and my management of the niceties of theory and performance, play no small part in the story of my success.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About King Brokenanus & his twenty-four sainted sons & daughters

  22nd April

  I am criticised. I am attacked. I am told that the tone and tenour and general temperature of these memorials is too low. I am advised that a man of my age should set his mind on higher things. In other words, Mr Secretary Worcester doesn’t like his master’s truth-telling about fucks and farts and what we had for dinner. For the benefit of the same Worcester, then – a moral tale.

  There was once upon a time in the darkest part of Wales a man who was a petty king in rank. (In those days, in those regions, they were two a penny.) His name was Brokenanus – from which we have the Welsh province called Breakneck, there to this day.

  Now this Brokenanus was married to a lady called Goneril, or as some say it, Gladys. Queen Goneril was a reluctant bride. On the first night of their married life, she denied her husband access to the marriage bed.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘I have my period.’

  The second night, the worthy Brokenanus looms up bedwards with hope in his heart, but Queen Goneril says:

  ‘Sorry, dear. I seem to be suffering from piles.’

  On the third night, a similar sad encounter:

  ‘My darling monarch, pray forgive me. I can’t stop pissing.’

  Wait. Wait, Worcester. The best is yet to be. On the fourth, and final night, yes, our King presented himself to his lady wearing woolly Welsh skins, gallygaskins, and big sewer boots, and bearing in his fist a flaming torch.

  Says his Welsh majesty: ‘Mud or blood, shit or flood, Brokenanus rides tonight!’

  Wait. Wait, Worcester. The truth. The moral tale. I’m coming to it. Part of the point is how high we can rise from such low beginnings. Dung and angels are not so far apart. Only the indefinite article separates the beast from the best. It’s your philosophy that’s at fault, my friend. Hang on. Don’t chew your pen. Unknot your eyebrows. Morality. I mean it. You earnest bloody bugger. Listen.

  From such inauspicious nuptials she grew into a lively piece, Queen Goneril, not at all reluctant, you’ll be sad to know, and our moral monarch feared that getting embedded in carnal attentions to her would deflect or distract him from that proper service which a man should give solely unto the Lord his God. So what did pious, anxious Brokenanus of the Sewer Boots do? He did what many a sensible sinner’s done before and since. He buggered off to Ireland.

  King Brokenanus stayed in Ireland for twenty-four years. He was extraordinarily busy in good works. He planted lots of Irish apricots and avoided druids. He did not drink or laugh. He spent all his spare time studying the three tragic stories of the Irish – that is, the death of the children of Touran, the death of the children of Lir, and the death of the children of Usnach. As for the Blarney Stone, he never even took off his hat in the vicinity of it.

  At the end of the twenty-four years, Brokenanus felt a wish to return to Wales (what a country! leeks and rain and wizards! God knows why); so, anyway, back he travels and finds his wife still alive, and eager to start kicking.

  Brokenanus found, in other words, Worcester, that Goneril was as lively as ever, if not livelier, and that he didn’t need to worry about his boots. In fact, so full of life was Goneril, that they set to and before he could come up for air King Brokenanus had fathered twenty-four children on her, pop pop pop moral married respectable monagamous pop. The names of these twenty-four sons and daughters of King Brokenanus and Queen Goneril were as follows:

  Nectar Yes

  John Morwenna

  Suddenly Wineup

  Manfred Whenhead

  Delight Cider

  Teddy Kerry

  Maybe Jonah

  Whensew Hellyou

  Whensent Lanark

  Marwenna Colander

  Cenna Adventhell

  Juliana Tantalise

  All these same sons and daughters were afterwards and eventually saints and martyrs or confessors, leading the life of hermits in Devon or Cornwall, for some reason I have never heard explained. The blessed Nectar was the firstborn, and so was greater than all the rest in the honour of his life, and showed himself more outstanding in the brilliance and ingenuity and extent of his miracles. Of him for instance I can tell you for a fact that he once turned a white loaf black by mildly excommunicating it, and then by absolution he turned it white again. Bully heigh ho and moral hurrah for Nectar. Benedicite! Set it down big, pig. Don’t miss a word, turd.

  When Queen Goneril of Wales had given birth to the two dozen saints, martyrs and confessors (though they attained this status only in Cornwall, note, where it hardly counts, for temptations there are few), then our wise Brokenanus speechified and said:

  ‘Lo, now I see the power of God which no man may resist. Lo, now I know predestination’s true – that act of foreordaining by which from eternity God decrees whatever he will do in time. For, behold, he has punished me with offspring to the very tune of my dancing against him. Yea, he has punished in me what I in vain disposed against the intention of his will. For I buggered off unlawfully from my wife to Ireland for twenty-four years, lest I should have issue, and now he has given me for every year of that unlawful continence a child. And not just a child. O the laughter of God is endless. A saint. Every one a bloody saint. O bugger bugger bugger bugger.’

  And I believe he actually said bugger twenty-four times if you want to know, according to the historian Nennius and my tutor Ravenstone.

  Worcester, sir secretary, I tell you this story to show there is no escape from the pattern which God makes for us. More particularly, no escape from the pattern which is made for you. If God had meant you to have more money he would have made you a priest. I rather wish you were a priest. You would be no less use to me, and I could put some benefits your way. But no matter. Be content.

  Shut your mouth, ape. Set down this:

  The firstborn, the venerable Nectar, seeking through certain forest wastes appertaining to the land of his fathers –

  Certain Welsh waste lands, I say, desert places, Celtic bogs, fairy lands, was attacked by robbers in the spot which to the present day is called New Town, where a church is built in his honour, Nectar’s, and there on the 17th day of June anno Domini something or other, St Alban’s feast day if you say so, his blessed holy half-wit head was cut off, Worcester, and taking his head, this intellectual item, in his own hands, the same Nectar steadily carried it for the space of half a furlong to a well by which he stopped, and there he set it, rimmed round with bloody sweat, on a stone.

  Pay attention. You moral bugger, Worcester, you, I tell you there are permanent traces yet. Indelible traces of blood from this death and miracle remain on the stone to our day, now. Nectar’s signature.

  You believe me?

  You don’t believe me!

  Right, Mr Moralit
y. Away, Mr Earnestness. To New Town. On this day, 22nd April, the year of the Word made Flesh 1459, Sir John Fastolf, militis, directs his secretary William Worcester, alias Botoner, to journey to New Town, in darkest fairy Wales, to see for himself the truth of the signature of St Nectar’s blood in the stone of the holy well there.

  Why? Why? You fausty infidel. You scrupulous, figgy sceptic. Doubting Botoner. To teach you God’s disposition! What else? To advise you, like King Brokenanus, that there is no escape from the mind of your creator. I create you. You are my man. Go. I write you out of my book. You’re gone. You’re nothing. Tomorrow I may say that you never were. Tomorrow I may say, ‘Worcester – who’s he? Never heard of him.’

  Have a nice wild goose chase, Conscience.

  Goodbye, Morality.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About St George’s Day & flagellants & the earthly paradise

  St George’s Day

  I want to make it quite clear why I have packed off my secretary William Worcester to Wales to see for himself the truth of St Nectar’s bloody head.

  I sent him about that stupid itinerary to witness not just to Nectar’s head, but to mine. Fastolf’s brain and being. Fastolf’s will. The reader has seen and heard him go. By his absence we are true, being diminished. Nothing proves a thing better than less of it. Now we are six of us here in Caister Castle – my stepson Scrope, Hanson, Nanton, farter Bussard, and Fr Brackley. Not forgetting their author and yours: myself. In a minute – I mean, tomorrow – I shall resume these Acta of my days. By sending Worcester as it were out of the room, and by allowing the reader to see him go, I have imparted to my deliberations that air of reality, of precise and immediate verisimilitude, so necessary to belief.