Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

Eliza abetted this innovation of compromise with her middle-class maxims. So Piero washed his face and wore tweeds which she chose for him.

Theirs was now a delightful life, Piero placed “Beauty” precisely in the palazzo; together they collected its antique forms, and together they would stand off and admire them in those nooks to which they had been appointed — and always Piero found everything “too exquisite.”

Eliza was not neglected, Piero and an intimate artist designed costumes for her; they would stand her in the centre of the music room, and trip around her entranced with draping striped crêpe and monkey fur upon her; the attendant dressmaker bowed her head and said “sicuro,” while Piero’s manicured fingers depicted perfection.

There she stood, like a mummy resuscitated with a fictitious breath of flattery. The fearful tension of her eyes was bordered with very black fringes, and over the quivering tendons of her insteps was stretched expensive silken hose. Piero twisted her around and about — like some marionette; while the dressmaker nodded again, “sicuro.”

Eliza took her headaches to lie for a nap of an afternoon, to stare through the pastel surface of the wall and the dim colour of the flower of love in the mist of the tapestry.

Of those rooms which she entered alone the planes of the walls seemed to turn inside out to withhold the fulfilment of life from her ——— she could overhear the muted voices of the bachelors seeking the secluded study and the loggias.

When they returned to her table they stole into the atmosphere with their recollections, like soft cats, heavy with satisfaction.

After dinner they purred over ephemeral scandals in which the gentler sex is so inevitably involved.

There was no gusto in their laughter, no resentment of the frailty of woman, their comments on her charms were never warm.

For their eyes were preoccupied, as with the inner realisation of the wearer of a mask; while a bachelor would steal upon the insinuate silence with an anecdote.

“—— —— she invited the young attachés to dinner

——— a shaft leading from a trap door in the ceiling to the roses banked in the centre of the dinner table ———— and down slid Lady Pink ——— but only Lady Pink ——.” The bachelor wafted his hands from his flanks, invoking Eve — but his gestures displayed the anomaly of an allusion to his own graces rather than hers. As of life so of art, they spoke with an unintentional aloofness, as those who speak in the language of signs to the deaf and dumb.

Despite the spiritual obligations, the soul of Piero flowed beyond Eliza’s imagining. Flowed with the tropical mystery of an unnavigable Amazon, overhung by an exotic tangle of his smiles and hints.

Through all her comradely and inspiring traffic with them, Piero and the bachelors impressed Eliza as the incognito guardians of some holy bread. When they spoke they swallowed preparedly as if to rid speech of something incommunicably sweet and secret, which their mouths must never surrender.

Eliza’s question of the bachelors’ significance — her curiosity, materialized to an almost palpable entity passing from Eliza to move among them, stroking their consciousness beseechingly ————— they condescended to answer with conundrums of discretion.

Eliza had been reared by a great aunt who, steeped in melancholia, warned her of hell, and lauded the unconditional surrender of being “sincere.”

From this rudimentary religious influence she had graduated to spiritualism and the popular occult.

She cultivated her aura like a garden of unscented flowers.

But Eliza by dint of horoscopes and séances was reaching a higher plane —— some plane on which psychic phenomena, like orgasms, so tantalisingly suggest themselves.

Her body became hollow —— she could feel the wind of the spirit blowing about in it, stemming her blood and parching her skin.

The fearful tension of her eyes ——

There are crises in the life of the chaste woman, when the fetishes of savage ancestry and the Christian devil, together with all the weird personifications into which the unappropriated sex force transforms itself, fall upon her taut nerves to rend them in the stillness of the night.

After one such battle she had distinctly felt a hand and forearm “materialize” from out her abdomen.

Now she could throw in the ballast of her mediumship against the loaded mystery of Piero and his bachelors.

She had long believed that Piero must have reached a higher plane having eschewed the devil in woman’s flesh — and now she, herself had also reached a “higher plane”.

The clock of San Marco strikes one. Waiting on the remotest of Eliza’s loggias for the poet who has written of “The Immaculate Vermin Of The Sugar Dove.”

“— — he should have come long ago — what keeps him?”

Piero, the inner muscles of his thighs twitching — — paces the loggia.

THE STOMACH

There sat the mother.

Where the flesh should have been there was shawl — the wits of the aged go wool-gathering, dutiful relatives knit them into a frowsty comfort for the blinking, twitching, wheezing forgetter of many delights.

Her blind eye floated like a decaying fish in the dregs of her lucidity. There must have been parts of her even more terrifying than those that were exposed —— in “out of use” there is ugliness.

Delicate and decent however were the appointments of the sitting-room, the cleared and garnished tabernacle for this bundle of human garbage.

Ladies of some culture — and some titled, asked the daughter little questions about mother, as if taking a dig at her flesh to see if she were still alive.

Virginia devotedly cosseted her mother, giving evidence that she had found no time for marriage. Every day a fostering coachman drove her with the aged gentlewoman slowly through the more fashionable streets.

Every desirable visitor she could muster into the half-conscious maternal presence would remember the even temperature of her sitting-room, the southern aspect, the cheerful flowers, the particular fleeciness of the wool which enwrapped her.

Virginia Cosway employed her leisure with the Arts.

Years ago a sculptor had chosen Virginia Cosway as model for La Tarantella, had taken her fingers between two of his own and slid them further down and apart upon her hip; then with accurate gesticulations he had inspired her with “the pose.”

The famous statue had been standing for a quarter of a century in the public gallery visited by the processional tourists. Wrinkling a nostril and an under eye-lid, thousands of noses had lifted to it over catalogues.

The figure was over-lengthy on its pedestal, and the small head with its arched eye-brows sneered with a simultaneous invitation and repulse.

But because of the elevation of the statue, its significance for the spectator seemed rather to centre in the region of the hips, and also on account of the “pose” inspired by the Master, the outswung allurement, the momentary momentous projection of the stomach in the danza española.