“Will you answer one question frankly?”
“As far as frankness is concerned, I’m a fellow who easily gets involved.”
“Do try just this once.”
“Well?”
“This sentiment of yours in regard to myself — is it inspired by a personal antipathy, or a theoretical ethic?”
“There are cases in which Futurist ethics come in very handy.”
“Are you a Futurist?”
“For the present, and the present you may have noticed is the time for accomplishment — while the future — keeps you waiting.”
“Bah — you show as much contempt for men as you do for women — with your system of postponement.”
“Men are more easily satisfied the longer they have been kept waiting—”
“And woman who has always waited?”
“I’ll make her a present of the future when I have finished with it.”
“Mafarka having meanwhile snatched it from her womb.”
“I having meanwhile desecrated her—”
“Yes — in that article you were really too bawdy—”
“My bawdiness was more favourable to woman than anything that has ever been written.”
“So much so, that she blushed?”
“Because I have gagged the other men, or rather that not being able to go any further in that direction one will have to turn back—”
“To me?” enquired Pazzarella hopefully.
“For you,” I snapped, “if you don’t stop fiddling with my eyelashes — there is instant castration.”
“And yet,” she reflected, measuring my nose with my forelock, “I should so much like to have a son of yours.”
“Not for anything.”
“Oh why?”
“Firstly, because that ‘son’ might be born a woman.”
“While I,” she sighed, “am hardly even a woman. I am only the scapegoat to carry the load of your spleen induced by those tasteless females who won’t admire your funny nose — while I dote upon it,” said she kissing it on the tip
I slapped her face and let myself out of the house.
When the European War broke out I received the following hysterical explosion:
Incomparable man,
You will go to war, as of now I am out of your life — reduced to the primal elements of offence and attack. And if at night under the stars on the hard ground, you everrecall a few hours of divine pleasure in Florence, you will only reproach yourself for this weakness. Woman woman has nothing to do with war — and yet there might have been something for me to do, I might have, now that half the male population is to be wiped out, I might have had your son, but Mafarka forbade it.
The learned’s cries are in vain.
I send you my love in a kiss because to understand allis to forgive all. Perfect lover, will they remove your — not my “riccioli”?
Your
Pazzarella—
If war sweeps a considerable number of men off the earth, it has this advantage: it effaces the current value of his parasite completely. But how promptly she reappears in the starched costume of devotion, wearing the new and lighter cross dyed in the colour of blood upon her breast, and bustles about as if nothing had gone wrong. With what courageous self-discipline she attends to the soldiers’ splintered bodies. With what passion of inhibited caresses she massages their inoperative limbs, fixing her cheated eyes on chimerical Duty.
I gloated over the desperate impotence of Pazzarella that forced her to the extremity of imagining she could substitute a newborn infant for the “missing man” of her own generation.
She didn’t give up the attack. Some days later, hedged in with piles of newspapers, letters, manuscripts, I was sipping my coffee when here we are again—!
“Love I have pondered for three full days — I adore you and feel all too empty of you. I couldn’t care less about Futurism. The child the future needs is the child of the two of us — you won’t think I’m right but I am. If you can spare half an hour of your intoxicating inner life for this important work, I will come to you wherever you may be—”
Certainly she is forced to defy the thing she is most afraid of — otherwise she would wilt with discouragement—
– — “If you will lend me the money for the journey — we are all penniless for the moment if you are too I will scrounge it somewhere. Tell me if or not — if not it matters little — I can also do without being benefactress to all humanity.
“You needn’t discuss this with your fancy companions — it’s something I take very seriously.”
Geronimo,
You are the only man who is man enough to dominate me absolutely the only one strong enough to keep me all for himself — the only one Alas — who is hard enough to crush me—
Your Pazzarella
In memory of an absent lover — of the freshness of your spit.
Good-bye.
She had right on her side — but no money. That incubus of desire who attaches herself to the male with all her impertinent passion for reproduction, unable to attain her ends unaided, could not do otherwise than take the affair seriously, even to the length of begging for a subsidy.
There was also a mosquito humming around my face, most likely another female who had no doubt some portentous plan for the future to further, in inspiring an infinitesimal drop of my life.
But to Pazzarella’s request I must reply. To ignore it would be too simple. Pazzarella herself would not be surprised if I took no notice. War is all very well up to a certain point, but tradition has after all lent a certain glamour to motherhood.
This was an occasion requiring an answer, in the negative, that goes without saying, were it only for the question of economy. A decisive reply was imperative, only it must be tender — very tender. Nor could it be confided to the postman. It would be more considerate to present my answer in person. However, the air was cool up in the mountains, and it was late autumn when I eventually decided to go to her.
This time Pazzarella looked a trifle faded, laid out on a sofa lapped in her silken gown and propped with cushions, occupying herself as usual with her tea things which were set on a low table. This body gradually desiccating for want of caresses, this potential mother empty of fruit, must necessarily continue throughout her steady undoing to distribute her circles of amber and sugar gewgaws. A woman resigned, who, while her life was ebbing from her, seemed ceaselessly to be pouring it out from a silver pot for casual callers with hands that were livid with calm. What else was she likely to offer to Death when it should come but a cup of tea?
I kissed her reverently, assured that, in spite of the cataclysm of my presence and the wounds with which I should lacerate her, in the conventional breeding she would merely reply—“Have another biscuit, caro?”
Certainly this was a day on which conversation was not in order. Rather must I sustain a tacit expectancy of imminent collaboration between us — expression of eyes and inflection of voice stressing the entente of accomplices.
Pazzarella relaxed in the security of anticipation, while I laid my head in her lap where my undisciplined hair incubated that rapacious womb in a promising warmth.
A mushy autumnal temperature of vegetation dropping its seed invaded us from the garden. It impinged on every nerve in her sensitive body, become one with the earth, the air, the season. Her breathing languished and was wafted away to the most distant podere. The richest of harvests ripened within her. I could feel the long prepared impassioned nest palpitate beneath my ear.
Tenderly I related my infancy. I had brought a photo of myself, still wearing a little skirt, in my pocketbook — and before the rites of my showing it to her she sat with receptive eyes and folded hands. But when I told her of my mother’s saintly consecrated gestures, sweetened by anachronistic jealousy, she could not resist, and interrupted me—“But don’t you know, Geronimo, that I am your mother?”