The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

by Samuel Beckett

  Let me off the tutti chords now and tell me frankly shutting your eyes like Rouletabille what you think of my erotic so-stenutino. Crémieux hold your saliva and you Curtius, I have a note somewhere on Anteros I believe, in fact I seem to remember I once wrote a poem (Nth. Gt. George’s St. diphthong Captain Duncan if you please) on him or to him cogged from the lecherous laypriest’s Magic Ode and if I don’t forget I’ll have the good taste to use the little duckydiver as a kind of contrapuntal compensation do you comprehend me 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 might possibly be left over she was the living spit he thought of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. Ne suis-je point pale? Suis-je belle? Certainly pale and belle my pale belle Braut with a winter skin like an old sail in the wind. The root and the source between and behind the little athletic or esthetic bit of a birdnose was indeed I assure you a constant source of delight and astonishment, when his solitude was not peopled and justified and beautified and even his sociability by a cold in the head, to his forefinger pad and nail, rubbing and plumbing and boring it just as for many years he polished his glasses (ecstasy of attrition!) or suffered the shakes and gracenote strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as my name is Fred, dying all his life (thank you Mr. Auber) on a sickroom talent (thank you Mr. Field) and a Kleinmeister’s Leidenschaftsucherei (thank you Mr. Beckett), or crossed the Seine or the Tolka or the Pegnitz or the Fulda as the case might be and it never for one single solitary instant occurring to me that he was on all such and similar occasions (which we are sorry to say lack of space obliges us regretfully to exclude from this chronicle) indulging in and pandering to the vilest and basest excesses of sublimation of a certain kind. The wretched little wet rag of an upperlip, pugnozzling up and back in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils, was happily to some extent mollified and compensated by the full firm undershot priapism of underlip and chin, a signal recovery to say the least and a reaffirmation of the promise of sentimental vehemence already so gothically declamatory in the wedgehead of the strapping girl. From time to time she literally only had to lift off her casco to be a birdface and to have put Mr. John Kiss-mearse and Orchids in mind of his Perpetually Succourful Lady as she positively must have appeared on two probationary occasions: primo, pinned, there’s no other word for it, to her loggia by the shining sage-femme: 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 I must say and no offence intended, that class of egoterminal immaculate quackery and dupery gives me the sick properly. No, whatever she was she wasn’t that kind. I suppose I’m entitled to say she looked like a parrot in a Pieta, a pietra serena parrot. On occasions that is. Not in the helmet of salvation I need hardly point out. By Jove when I look back and think how chaste was the passion of mutual attraction that juxtaposed those two young people in the first instance. It’s out of the question to give you any idea of the reverence with which they—how shall I say?—clave the one to the other in an ecstasy and an agony of mystical adhesion. Yessir! An ecstasy and an agony! A sentimental coagulum, sir, that biggers descruption. Don’t I know for a positive fact that the unhappy Belacqua (Bollocky, though it’s hardly the time or the place for that, to his friends) separated from his sweet Vega by two channels and 29 hours third-class if he went over Ostend, tossing and turning and tightening the slender white cords of his nervi nervorum with the frogs’ and the corncrakes’ Chinese chromatism, muting the long fever of the midos and the dolas in a scorching a piacere, 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. For example:

  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 strange exalted death and he entire,

  Like two merged stars, intolerably bright,

  Conjoined in One and in the Infinite!

  Lilly Neary has a lovely Gee and her poor 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. What does she want for her thighbeauty? A bitch-melba and a long long come before breakfast, toast and. Keycold Lucrece the chaste and the castaway in the cruel tights and Christ the useful culmination, footpounds through the fingers. No, more—more?—other than that to my bright agenesia. No no don’t admire that. No but 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 look 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 the others do the streets but I go and dien in the, 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?, aufwiedersehen, 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, you slip in and dien, your room stinks of spunksweat, I won’t kiss your playful hand, dass heisst spielen, my dolorific nymphae and a tic douleureux in my imperforate hymen, what’s the Deutsch for randy, my dirty little hungry bony vulture of a whorchen away up first floor Burgwards over the stream, I’ll send you a Schein when I have a Schwips. No f——smoking in the f———Folterzimmer. I had to ask her 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 when he’d picked his nose for a little bit and the thighs there Gott sei dank up he rose didn’t he 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 was, eat my little Augen Celeryice, didn’t he, and wandered uphill and downdale like the cat and the mouse in business together or the Marienkind. No no I won’t say everything, I wont tell you everything. No but surely now you see what he am? See! Heiliger Brahmaputra! A hedgecreeper! A peeping Tom in bicycle clips! I once said that otherwise. Well then up he rose and apprehended without passion round and about the weekend brushwood foothill copulations. Yes indeed of course you’re right it’d be hard for you to understand my meaning, you see he led a fairly small fleshy maiden I might have said Jungfrau into the wood I might have said Wald and creeped and peeped at the Sabbath fornications instead of. Oh did I do right to leave my notes at home! So then after another little bit he came back through the leaves and stood looking with his tongue in his cheek instead of.

  J’aime et je veux pââlir. Livid rapture of a Zurbaran St. Onan. Schwindsucht and pollution in a tunnel in de Thebaid. Strange exalted death! Plus précieuse que la vie, the dirty dog! But right enough all the same what more miserable than the miserable being who commiserates not himself, caesura, with a new grief grieves not for his grief, is not worn by a double sorrow, drowns not in ken of shore. Who said that? Turned he hath the audacious soul, turned he hath and turned again upon back sides and belly, like Miss Florence on the mattress while Virgil and Sordello, yet all was painful. As an herpetic spider (do you recognise the style?) hath he consumed away. He dared to grow wild 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 and he was not 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 fornications and in chambering and wantonness and in deafness and death and 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 scabies of lust. All on a mild scale of course, don’t be misled, Paterson’s Camp Coffee is the Best, perhaps I let my pen run away with me, don’t for a moment imagine Bollocky’s down the drain, of course he’s got a bit wasted that was bound to happen and his feet have gone to bits and his bitch of a heart knocks hell out of his bosom three or four nights a week and to make a long story short Lucy and Jude are kept going pretty well from dawn to dark with his shingles and his graphospasmus and his weeping eczema and his general condition, but for all that we’ll all agree I feel sure that there’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. You put on the light. Up we go. Out of step. Ran-dygasp of ruthilarity in honour of private joke. Here we are. There they are. Hello. Great to be here. Grand to be here. Same old Wohnung. Wonderful 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.

  Text

  COME COME and cull me bonny bony doublebed cony swiftly my springal and my thin Kerry twingle-twangler comfort my days of roses days of beauty week of redness with mad shame to my lips of shame to my shamehill for the newest news the shemost of shenews is I’m lust-belepered and unwell oh I’d rather be a sparrow for my puckfisted coxcomb bird to bird and branch or a coalcave with goldy veins for my wicked doty’s potystick trimly to besom gone the hartshorn and the cowslip wine gone and the lettuce nibbled up nibbled up and gone nor the last beauty day of the red time opened its rose and struck with its thorn oh I’m all of a gallimaufry or a salady salmafundi singly and single to bed she said I’ll have no toadspit about this house and whose quab was I I’d like to know that from my cheerfully cornuted Dublin landloper and whose foal hackney mare toeing the line like a Viennese Taubchen take my tip and clap a padlock on your Greek galligaskins before I’m quick and living in hope and glad to go snacks with my twingle-twangler and grow grow into the earth mother of whom clapdish and foreshop.

  A Case in a Thousand

  SURGEON BOR OPERATED with the utmost success on a boy called Bray who had been brought to him suffering from tubercular glands in the neck, since when the boy showed an unfathomable tendency to sink, and did in fact begin to sink. Surgeon Bor shrugged his shoulders without rancour and called in his physician, Dr. Nye, young but most eminent.

  Dr. Nye belonged to the sad men, but not to the extent of accepting, in the blank way the most of them do, this condition as natural and proper. He looked upon it as a disorder. He stood still before the window of his consulting-room, his right hand opening and closing the jigger button of his jacket, his left: hand playing with the small change in his trouser pocket. He felt the afternoon light, glistening now between showers, like a high frequency shampoo on his face. Children throughout the locality had been waiting angrily for the rain to stop, so that they might go out to play. Without warning a proposition sprang up in his mind: Myself I cannot save. He sat down on the couch, still tossed from the last patient. After a while he lay down on it. The distant furious crying of a child, the light fading and then the rain again, his heart that knocked and misfired for no reason known to the medical profession, these and a compound of minor disturbances began to exhaust his mind and senses. In the absence of the feet of some other person, he thought, the meditative life has little to recommend it. His distress was interrupted by Surgeon Bor, on the telephone.

  Dr. Nye found a rightsided empyema. He stood with Surgeon Bor at the end window of the long ward and looked out. Canal, bridge, lock and bright hoarding composed the scene. Three groups had gathered, one on the bridge and one on either bank, to watch a barge pass through the lock. Detached from the far group, paying no heed to the manoeuvre, holding up an umbrella as though oblivious of the fine interval, a large woman stood looking up at the hospital.

  “Mrs. Bray,” said Surgeon Bor.

  Sister came up to tell Surgeon Bor he was wanted.

  “Tell Dr. Nye the Mother Bray saga,” he said and went away.

  Already the barge was working clear of the dock. The group on the bridge had crossed over to the other parapet, with the result, most pleasing to Dr. Nye, that where formerly he had seen their faces, now he enjoyed a clear view of their buttocks, male and female. The groups on the banks had passed out of sight under the bridge. Mrs. Bray’s umbrella was still open, but reposing now on her hat and bosom, so that both her arms were free to dangle. Thus partially eclipsed she kept watch. Dr. Nye watched the long line of buttocks, sister watched Dr. Nye.

  “She would come first thing in the morning,” said sister, “and stay all day till she was put out last thing. Not saying anything, only watching the boy. The same when the doctor came, she wouldn’t say anything, only watch his face. Then the other patients began to complain and the nurses said she was upsetting the ward. So we had to tell her she could only have an hour in the morning and another in the evening. So there she stands now the best part of the day, watching the window and waiting for it to be time to come up.”

  Dr. Nye did not feel there was anything he wanted particularly to say in reply to all this.

  “God knows she was quiet enough,” said sister, “and no trouble, only she got on the nurses’ nerves some way.”

  Dr. Nye mumbled something smart about her no doubt being widowed and he her only child.

  “Well, then, she’s married,” said sister, “and has a family down in Tuam.”

  “Then it is as I feared,” said Dr. Nye. “The woman is my old nurse.”

  “Oh, doctor,” said sister, “what a coincident!”

  The barge had passed on its way, the fine interval was drawing to an end, the buttocks had dispersed, only Mrs. Bray had suffered no change. The handle of the umbrella, carved in bog-oak to represent a bird, rose and fell. Dr. Nye planted himself before her. Sister called out to the nurses to come and look. “It’s his old nanny,” she cried.

  Mrs. Bray, when she learned who he was and who he had been, lowered, as though in deference, her umbrella. He was troubled to find that of the woman whom as baby and small boy he had adored, nothing remained but the strawberry mottle of the nose and the breath smelling heavily of clove and peppermint. He took her arm and they walked up and down, to and fro between the bridge and her station. The conversation turned first on her son. “He has turned the corner,” said Dr. Nye, but did not make it clear in what direction. Then it passed to the good old days. “Yes,” said Mrs. Bray, “you were always in a great hurry to grow up so’s you could marry me,” but did not disclose the trauma at the root of this attachment. On the bridge they parted, Dr. Nye to visit an old schoolfellow professionally, Mrs. Bray to move over to the hospital steps, for it was nearly her time.

  A nurse let a loud giggle. “Did you see him kiss her?” she said. “Why wouldn’t he kiss her?” said sister, “and she his old nanny.”

  The boy developed an empyema on the left side, so now he had two, and they put a screen round his bed. One good result of this was that the mother could be with him all day. She neither spoke to him nor touched him; it was not even certain that she saw him, though she kept her face turned steadfastly in his direction. She made no attempt to draw Dr. Nye when he came, but was content to watch his face, and this not so much in order to learn what he was thinking as in the hope of recognising him as the creature she had once cared. There was always something he wanted to ask her with reference to the good old days, but he felt it was neither the
time nor the place, and this feeling grew steadily stronger. One day, when he had made an end of his examination, instead of departing without comment as he always had done, he sat down on the edge of the bed. The point had been reached when he must decide whether to operate at once or hold his hand a little longer. It was a decision that lay outside the scope of his science, because from the strictly pathological point of view there was as much to be urged on the one side as there was on the other. Nevertheless it had to be made, and at once, and by him. He took hold of the boy’s wrist, stretched himself all along the edge of the bed and entered the kind of therapeutic trance that he reserved for such happily rare dilemmas.

  Mrs. Bray, noting the expression, at once aghast and rapt, that overcame his face, was moved in a number of ways: to trouble, at such dissolution of feature; to gratification that at last she saw him as she could remember him; to shame, as the memory grew defined; to embarrassment, as though she were intruding on a privacy or a face asleep. She forced herself to look at her son instead. Then, very sensibly, she closed her eyes altogether.

  Sister peeped round the corner of the screen and surveyed the tableau. As soon as it began to show signs of coming to life she advanced with great heartiness, craving loudly to be of service. She received no encouragement, not the slightest. She went, having seen what she had seen.

  Little by little Dr. Nye reintegrated his pathological outlook. He sat up on the bed, without releasing the boy’s wrist however. He stood up and laid the hand gently on the breastbone. Exasperated by the inaptness of this arrangement he looked sharply at Mrs. Bray, whose mild and baffled gaze, as though she had seen nothing, had resumed operations. No doubt it was his duty to make known to her the decision that had been reached, but he really could not bear another moment of her presence. If only he had a box of peppermint creams to leave with her. Mrs. Bray again closed her eyes as she felt the imposition too pregnant for words of his hand on the crown of her hat (which nothing could ever induce her to leave off), the rapid flutter of his fingers down her cheek, the ineffable chuck to her dewlap. Feeling nothing further, she opened them. She was alone. She turned her face towards her son.