“There, there, Eustachius the Good.” Ugo was smiling, too, with his black fillings. “No need to shout: War! on account of my wee bit of courtship. Let the war go on percolating over there across the Channel. Our uncles will give it a smack or two across the snout for frightening us. We’re good little children.” Ugo was glad of Melkior’s smiling face. “What’s the time? I’m off, bound for the electric chair, brrr …” he shuddered and took on an ingratiating look. “Mercy, Eustachius the Cruel. Let me have at least that tired gait of yours, you read it out to me only the other day. Here I come, the dark hermit … How does it go? Do let me have it, I cannot go like this.”
He spread his empty hands helplessly.
“Stop being a bore, Parampion!” Melkior was morose again. Down at ATMAN’S this afternoon, fine. Had she wanted to meet me? Ask ATMAN. “What makes you think she likes verse, anyway? Why don’t you treat her to a beef goulash instead? At least she’ll know what that is.” At “beef goulash” his stomach gave a martyred howl. He’d love some goulash.
“You know her, then?” Ugo’s eyebrows merged with his hairline in astonishment.
“To some extent,” replied Melkior, being purposely casual. “She’s shallow.”
“Ah, that would be the hooves of the Mandrake downstairs!” Ugo stamped hard on the floor. “She told me he was keen on introducing her to you. So: she’s shallow?”
Melkior did not reply. She hadn’t wanted to meet me? Good thing I went off as I did then. Very good thing indeed.
“And what would you think,” said Ugo out of the blue, “if I told you that what she wants from me is, how shall I put it … well, support — that is, intellectual companionship at the loftiest spiritual level?” His face was inflating, an outburst of laughter was only moments away. Ugo was relishing this. “Beef goulash, eh?” and the laughter did indeed erupt.
Melkior laughed, too, sourly, with a moral revulsion. She thinks she’s netted him “at the loftiest level,” he mocks her. She’s building her sticky-sweet relationship with him on a “soulful” foundation, he’s keeping her in that confiture to make her taste sweeter. But they love his kind, they love precisely the rascals like him who tease them. They’ll all let him have his way, all the way, right away. I know you’re only trifling with me, you bad boy. Yet I do love you. And tear slides down cheeks out of genuine yet spurned love. My love for you was deep and true. First you took me, then forsook me, now you’re off to pastures new. Please do not do it, soon you will rue it, no other girl will be so true. — You did love me and adore me, but you’ve rather come to bore me.
Other Women or Don Juan on Horseback, a handy novel for artless girls who, being gentle by nature and shy through family upbringing, find it difficult in liaisons of the heart to withstand men’s shamelessly rough ways but nevertheless come to believe their false declarations of love. Hence they experience wrenching disappointments which haunt them later in life in the form of soul-destroying memories. When they marry they do not reveal even to their husband, their Savior and Redeemer from all evils, all the painful sorrow over their youth. They were so inexperienced that they were deceived countless times by countless men who smothered their virginal sobs under bearlike chests and forced them to do things so abominable and horrible that they still have dreadful nightmares and while sleeping in the sanctified marital bed call to their kind and patient spouse for a man’s help so that they can find at least temporary respite from their troublesome past and exorcise their unmentionable desires and achieve true feminine purity and live out their lives in marital harmony and love until the day of their death. Amen.
Ugo was grinning in the middle of the room, watching Melkior with a kind of anticipation. He had become impatient: he was wasting his precious time waiting for this fellow here to sort out his Deep Thoughts.
“All right, have you worked out how far it is to eternity and back? You’ve left me waiting like a coach horse outside a temple until you’ve performed your intellectual rite inside.”
“Well, what’s keeping you if you’re in such a rush?” Melkior snapped with impatience. He wished to be left alone to lick his singed paw in solitude. I walked into it today like a tomcat after a goldfish. ATMAN the Demiurge. Is he really “speeding up history” using me? A weird sister out of Macbeth. Thou shalt be King of Viviana, Melkior! Thou shalt be king, Melkior, thou shalt be king! And thou shalt never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against thee. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements! Good! I shall be King of Viviana, Thane of Thanatos, Thane of Methane, Thane of Drum-and-Fife, Cadaver of the Balkans. Huzza!
“Hail to thee, Thane of Give’nTake!” he spoke to Ugo with a low bow and a manic laugh. “And farewell. We shall meet again to-night upon the heath of Give’nTake. Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again, to make up nine. Farewell!” and he turned away from Ugo, lay down on his stomach, buried his face in the pillow and said not a word more.
The wounded tomcat purrs away. Having been left alone (Ugo had tiptoed out, terrified. And crossed himself at the door: he had this from his mother), he is busy spinning wounded thoughts. Such as: a town built of empty bottles. A crowd of drunkards have guzzled the bottles empty and built the town. A transparent town, chock-a-block with bottles. Glasstown. Soundville. Wind has strayed inside making the glass throats sing to the townspeople, asleep in their drunken stupor. And in each bottle, each transparent dwelling, there is either a wide-awake Lar or an angry Penate. Are you asleep, Lar? asks the angry Penate. How can I sleep when I am duty-bound to watch over the slumbering home? Call this a home? says the angry Penate angrily. There was a time when we stood in patrician atria on pedestals of marble, side by side with Jupiter and beauteous Venus. Look at us now. Here I choke with Bacchus’s sour smell. That rancid reek, that sour stench! To live in a glass bottle, Oh almighty Jupiter, and to be called a Penate! This is habitation for dead lizards and frogs, for porcine embryos and fetuses and premature aborted babies in university collections and Institutes of Pathology, not an abode for what is, after all, a god. For God’s sake, Penate, retorts in anger the patient Lar. We are not drenched by rain or stricken by frost; we are bathed in light and warmed by the sun and comforted by the wind’s sweet strains that are like music issuing from the sublime lyre of Orpheus. I think it was a very good idea these people had to build Glasstown. Oh kindly Lar, those drunkards are now steeped in foul dreams, but when they wake they will fall to barking at each other like dogs and fighting like wild elephants and will smash and break this laughable, transparent Bottle-town of theirs for it has the wild spirit of Bacchus dwelling herein.
The patient Lar is unconvinced. But one fine day, just as Glass-town is glittering prettily in the sun, white and green and greenish-blue, the accursed drunkards wake and stretch their limbs and rub their eyes and by dint of loud dumb yawns break into a fight and go after each other in a most savagely cruel manner and raze to the very foundations their greenish-blue Glasstown that had glittered so prettily in the sun. Not a bottle is left intact.