Such a one dives into the shit as others dive into the sea: throwing the switch marked blow on his appliance, he goes on full throttle until he has totally emptied his dustbag.
2
LATER SHE CALLS FOR her son. Though not so long ago she felt replete with the dear image of her child, her one protective casing to guard against the groping Man, who holds her tighter than a customer holds the drink of his choice. He needs no protection for his sex, and his torrent pours down the nearest channel. The child knows a good deal about all this. The boy peeps grinning through the keyholes, spying out the joys of the home. The boy cops a sly, audacious eyeful of Mother's body, having come in from the wilderness out there, the wilderness his comics call the Wonderland of Childhood. Is that smile on Mother's face adrift like a boat? Or has it been carved into her features? The child can't tell when he snuggles into the nest that Father built. They belong to each other, for the meat inspectors who crowd outside the fence. They even seek each other out, undirected as the potpourri of clouds up there in the purple sky. Not knowing why. Though perhaps they do know: the child has a hungry mouthful of dirty talk to be stopped, talk concerning his mother and the blood that frequently stains her panties. The child knows everything. He is white and his face is brown from the sun. In the evening he will be bathed. He will have prayed. He will have done his work. And he will cling to the woman, graze upon her, bite her nipples to punish her for allowing Father to explore her tunnels and piping. Are you listening? This is language itself, wanting to get a word in.
The miracle of travel is that one encounters an unfamiliar place and then flees it with a shudder. But if one has to remain together, a four-colour poor-quality reproduction of Nature, each belonging entirely to the other, a family, then you will find only the Pope, the kitchen and the Austrian People's Party to honour your work and to grant an indulgence for all the sins it has committed. The family, this vulture, keeps itself as a pet. The child never listens. There he sits with his secret playthings, which partly consist of disgusting pictures and partly of the original material for those pictures. Son contemplates his little tail. Often his gun is jammed. There the selfish kid squats with his private collection, almost human in his blabbering greed. The Pope has whole libraries of the stuff. Mealtime. As it enters his insensate maw, the Man praises the food his wife has prepared. Today she did the cooking herself! What happens on the plate reaches his place of residence, his address deep down in his gut, where it is tossed to and fro like an eaglet in the spinning air. This is the responsibility of the woman. Of women. The Man questions his wife with mute glances: time to bang the daylights out of her again? But the boy might hear if Father gets into the woman's yawning emptiness now, she tells him, hoping to get away with this excuse. But no: off she is promptly led, in obeisance to the Man's ludic lust. She clings on tight to the bedroom door, but the boundary line is the bathroom, one door further, where the limits have already been tested and exceeded today.
It all happens very quietly. Today, unusually, the Man has come home for lunch. Man takes his animal food from the pastures out there, and yet he does not recognize his four-legged friends when he finds them in the serving dish. At the last, the woman is required to undress. Now we've got more time. The child has been stuffed; it has to sit still at school. But for the woman to be preserved, she first has to plunge into the Man's foaming waves. The Man sees himself as a Noble Savage. Buying his meat at the woman's counter. The family is like a small business, a snack bar in the station. Quite alone, a manikin on one leg, for you can't rely on the second leg, the woman. The Man's claims to his own territory, the divine mountain paths where only he may go a-wandering, have already been registered with the Austrian Women's Disaster Relief Group. A-frolicking he will go, aloft on the wondrous paths. But every evening at seven on the dot the mountains toss him back down to the eyrie of twigs he collected himself. His wife (he tells Nature with a smile, lying) is waiting. He has to go to lasso her in. He and she together constitute an association for life. A space tiny and bare as memory contains the whole of him. The woman does not die, verily she is created by the sex of the Man. Who has reconstructed a complete original scale model of her lower abdomen in his lab. How the Man loves making his appearances, a body straight from the freezer, thawing as fast as he can!
While his parents, Father burning high as a turned-up flame, Mother a mere breath on a window pane, are at each other, the child is clacking the flap of the letter-box, bored. This winter the school bus occasionally gets stuck in the deep snow. The children, who have cosy homes waiting for them, go hungry. That old knacker Nature forces them to capitulate (marvellous, really, that scourged, purged Nature can still make demands of us). They are put up for the night and read Mickey Mouse comics or other things their fathers haven't approved. They will get sausage in their sleeping bags and feel ill-accommodated. Even cars sometimes crack up in this cold. But we are warm, we are in safety, we are ready for the consecration, at last we are ready to be disillusioned, by our partners. How glad we shall be! Till the manuals on life skills come to offer advice to us, in whom no one can live, telling us not to remain single and peaceful at any cost.
Father falls upon Mother's piggy bank, where she keeps her secrets hidden away from him. All of the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night, he is the only one who pays in. He is beside himself. Already his sex is almost too heavy to lift. His wife can carry it for a while. In the half sleep of the mornings, he's already fumbling at the furrow in her rear while she is still sleeping, from behind he gropes at her soft hillocks, light, where are you, the heart is already wide awake. The tennis match at his club can wait. It's antiseptic there. First, obedient as children, in go two fingers, into the woman, and then the compact firelighter package is stuffed in to follow. The whole music box where our wishes are stored in the memory of the Supreme Being starts playing music into the ethereal realms. All things will be fulfilled. We have a right to expect it will be so. Take a deep breath! We well know what is best, it's back home on the sideboard. The Man takes hold of his wooden ding-a-ling and batters at the woman's astounded rear entry. She can hear the engine of his loins roaring closer from afar. She's beginning to banish all feeling from within her. But there's still room in the boot! And into the boot goes the heavy genital load, don't worry about the smell. The seats can't be kept clean anyway. Blindly the woman cashes in her security from the Man's spitting dispenser. He is milking her breasts. Let us be at home now. The trees have cast down the leafage of the mountains. The evergreen Man, he does not need to seek the woman's protection, he is mantled in goodwill, not a cloud in the sky. How happy property is to dwell with us. There is no better place for it to occupy than our genitals, which gape wide above it like crags above a torrent. In return this woman gets her life paid out in cash, smack on the table every month, for her everyday oven. Tomorrow once more for the child she will open the door from school into life, this too has been purchased by the Man, and he roasts his hefty sausage in her oven, in its flaky pastry case of hair and skin. But the school bus is stuck fast.