The tourists stared at La Tarantella and supposed that she implied that there was a transcendental anatomy to be studied in the land of the Alhambra. The tourists were not allured by the tilted pelvis, each one dismissed it as being the concern of the next one. The tourists kept their mouths open to air their house of limitation in which they abode.
For a quarter of a century, the permanent physical adoption of that Spanish pose had defined the daughter’s status — the authorised edition of Virginia Cosway issued by the Master for the international society of the élite parasites of the Arts.
She wore it as a tag of identification in the grand monde, where one must let off a rocket, to be rescued from the masses.
She performed her Hispano-abdominal ceremony at les vernissages, the private views, auctions of the Hôtel Drouot and the birthdays of new movements; it served her as a bass accompaniment to her spoken verdicts. It became familiar to the whole of Europe, and by middle age had brought an utter reverence upon her.
She had also accumulated her mythology; women who often wore mourning whispered how the heart of the Master had been broken. Callous women deprecated her shortsightedness on the occasion of his proposal. Elderly bachelors pointed her out as the great man’s guiding star.
Only too early after she had refused him the sculptor had leapt to a rare and official celebrity, and Virginia found herself powerless to cap him with a husband of greater distinction.
So she clung to that trifle of her destiny she had restricted herself to accepting from him — the pose.
Important people would be enticed at receptions into the shadows of Spanish leather or Chinese lacquer screens, for a significant talk with Virginia Cosway the lifelong friend of the Master. There under the arc of the handshake, with a brief undulation of the hip, and the adjustment of the forefinger, the stomach outswung to its notable attitude, as if enticing aesthetic culture into her womb to be reborn for her audience.
This authoritative and challenging gesture became the formative process of her critique; this continuous resumption of her primal creation by the Master, who had, with his studio directions, hammered her into a posture in which she was to become fixed for life.
Her erstwhile suitor with due realisation that marriage is not the unique entanglement for the mighty, became grosser of feature and of cigar and continued to devote a cup of tea to her, whenever he was in the neighbourhood; for she not only was intimate with some of his wealthiest clients, but added very voicefully to that chorus without sound of which, the approach to our celebrities might not so easily be located.
Where Virginia went, always companioned by women of greater age and hereditary prestige than herself — as reinforcement — she expounded the gesture that had gradually attained to insolence, while conducting her well-attended inquisition of the muses.
The stomach had become an arbiter of aesthetics.
The mother grew daily colder in her woollens.
“Lady Beatrice, I should have delighted to spend Easter with you — but you see? My mother cannot spare me — I am a prisoner to my affections. A daughter has a sacred duty”
The old woman rolled her surviving eye on the stomach of her attendant daughter and only one of all the visitors distinguished among the wheezing and the rumbling these words like exhausted thunder.
“If only she would take it out of my way
The daughter remained at her post. Artistic polemics prowled beyond the mother’s doors.
Until of the mother, her soul and her lucidity, together with her eye swum into infinity.
After the funeral her friends said, “Do not grieve.”
“I do not wish,” the daughter answered, “to bury my dead.”
Virginia Cosway bereft of her excuse, was left with Time as her consort. She gave forth sighs for her past sacrifice, which floated among her cultured acquaintances like whiffs from that protracted maternity of outre-tombe.
The stomach in its age was become fibrous and rigid.
And as it proceeded towards me, I would have sworn I could see, set in the wrinkled lids of its navel
THE THREE WISHES
The babies were all born in the same quarter of the same city — two of them in the back streets—
Three boys.
The first looked up above him and stared, that first stare, without focus, without enquiry, without comment, into a pale silk penthouse with vapoury wavy white frills.
Beside him a young woman with serenely braided hair was winding white and pink and blue wool round the radius of a cardboard circle with a hole cut in its center.
Presently a fluffed and vari-coloured ball hung above the horizontal eyes.
About the time he was lifted from the scarcely perceptible soapiness of his bath, to the fleeciness of a towel, warm from the fire-guard, a brisk and scarcely middle-aged man would hurry into the room.
He would shut the door cautiously, not letting go of the handle until he had turned it, and patting the pudgy thorax the baby was arching forwards with his tiny fists clenched to it; cried jovially
“How’s the king of the castle?”
Whereafter the shining solstice on the boat-like curves of the warm milk-bottle would fade comfortably into the irresistible hiatus of sleep.
+
The second looked up above him with the exact degree of detachment of the first, into a shadowy, dusty irregular bulgy fringe of battered kitchen utensils and worn-out lamps.
His pillow, under his left ear, was dimpled with a drying pool of yellow curd, to which flies mustered, from which they dispersed to scrape their legs and pattern the inedible surfaces of his linen with minute specks.
An old-young woman with dusty curls and a spot of grease on her gaudy bosom, was throwing bunches of old boots out of the case on which the basket-cradle lay, for the inspection of a couple of wandering workmen.
The boots of these men had worn down to their arrival, and they had come to look for work.
Boots are the civilized man’s last foothold in society, without boots — —!
They were thus one of the stable sources of income to the parents of this second infant, who throve on the whole honestly.
If sometimes there might be a doubt as to the origin of any of their much behaggled purchases, the ragman breathed excusingly to himself
“Thou my God seest him.”
And would always spit on the coin he received for them.
Under the scrap of burgundy coloured carpet for a cradle-cover, the ragman’s infant rehearsed the battle of life with his feeding bottle, to which was attached an India-rubber tube aged to the colour of seaweed.
The tube had a nasty habit of flattening together and clinging to its own inside, when the mightiest spasms of insuction became powerless to imbibe the cold mixture of water and condensed milk.
Often the bottle would slip down the side-long niches of the cradle, head-up with its sustenance lying idle in the bottom.
A dish of yellow bone, worn like a Pierrot’s frill by the teat, provided to flatten against the lips and prevent the swallowing of the tube, would keel over whenever the tube played serpent and sidle into the baby’s mouth.
But it was this child’s destiny that he should live. So nothing could choke him. And every once in a while the opposed and unguided gymnastics of the baby and the bottle would free some current of air and the tube sprang back to rotundity.