*
Mens agitat molem. .
Do you recall, Billy Wiseass, the cry:
— O ubi campi!
And that wise teaching we did not wish to follow:
— Primum vivere, deinde philosophari!
And this example of arrogance:
— Hic tandem stetimus nobis ubi defuit orbis.
(Here we finally stand, a place that has fled our earth.)
Oh, that attic!
On the floor there was grimy straw that had been strewn about and trampled; it was teeming with roaches, so that in the middle of the gray day (the window was plugged up with rags and faded old newspapers) you could hear the straw rustling beneath their tiny feet. We had placed our books on the bed and wrapped them in diapers of cellophane, but even there the rats found them and so we had to keep the most important copies under a bell jar weighted down with a rock. Billy Wiseass had swiped the glass cover from The Three Elephants for this purpose; he had simply clapped it down over his head and announced to all the folks there: “With this I shall travel to the stars.” Everybody (including the waiter) laughed at this joke, so witty, and given his age, so ambitious. Under this bell jar we stored the following books: Spinoza’s Ethics in Latin, the Holy Scriptures in Hebrew, Don Quixote, the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, Breton’s Second Manifesto, a Handbook of Diet Foods, Pensées d’un biologiste by Jean Rostand, Yoga for Everyone, Jeans’s book on the stars, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Stendhal’s On Love, Weininger’s Sex and Character, reproductions of Van Gogh prints in a pocket edition, and an international train timetable.
Our clothes were hung on hooks in the ceiling, exactly in the middle, where Venus’s vagina was to be found, having been sketched in there, in the shape of a shell and seaweed, by the marvelous imagination of the dampness. On these hooks protruding from Venus’s flesh were suspended Billy’s black velvet pants and my black ties, of which I had in those days approximately two hundred. On another peg hung a nylon bag in which we kept our toothbrushes, shoe polish, pomade, and shaving supplies. In one corner or in the middle of the room (it actually had no definite location) there was an old-fashioned rocking chair, with an already unraveling wicker seat, which stood us in good stead for philosophical conversations and daydreams. Whichever one of us was running amok at the moment used to rock in that creaking chair and utter Pythian prophecies and visions. A dull, cracked mirror hung a bit crookedly above the washbasin, which was made of the most diaphanous Chinese porcelain and reverberated with every word like a seashell.
“It isn’t actually a guitar,” I said.
“It’s not a guitar?”
“It’s a Renaissance lute,” I said. “You’re probably wondering. .”
“Oh!” she said, alarmed. “Something is crawling up my leg.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “A mouse, for sure.”
“A mouse?!”
“Well, what else could it be? The snake’s already asleep.”
“Oh, God!”
“It’s over there, under the bell-jar by the books. We extracted all the poison from it. I brought it back from Ceylon,” I noted with pride.
“And what do you want with a snake?” she asked.
“Are you familiar with the legend of Orpheus? Of course you must know it.”
“He tamed wild animals with his songs,” she said, trembling.
I continued:
The boulders opened their portals before him, and the
Andes and Cordilleras bent their ears to hear.
“So where is this thing of yours, this. . Renaissance guitar?”
“Lute,” I corrected her.
“Okay, then. Lute.”
Then I opened the rusty little door for cleaning soot out of the stove, and a swarm of squeaking mice and rats came hurtling out.
She leapt onto the bed.
“Now, Eurydice, you are going to hear the song of Orpheus,” I said and struck up a tender arpeggio in a minor key.
I sang softly:
A rose petal your pillow will be,
and tulips your footsteps will mourn.
She sat with her legs folded beneath her and watched me — with fright or with amazement, I don’t know.
Then she said: “Look! Look!”
“Eurydice,” I said with pathos in my voice. “You can stretch out your legs.”
She was staring, dumbfounded, at the little iron door. With the dignity and discipline of ants or worker bees, a column of cockroaches was climbing up the wall toward the opening. They waited for the last mouse tail to be yanked in before continuing.
When the final bug had made its way up the wall, I clapped the iron door shut with my foot and started singing:
A rose petal your pillow will be,
and tulips your footsteps will mourn.
“Not now,” she said. “Not now, please.”
(That must have been later. At least one light-year later. I believe that the light from the star named Eurydice — which I caught sight of at that moment — set out on its journey on the day that I first beheld Eurydice, and I believe that her “no” at this moment meant that we needed to wait until the light of that encounter had reached us.)
“Fine,” I said. “The light has to ripen.”
“What kind of light?” she asked.
I explained it to her.
“How will we recognize it?” she asked.
“The summer declination will show up in your eyes. Can you imagine? Like when olives ripen overnight. It will be beautiful,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
Suddenly her eyes grew dim, and dark pollen covered her lashes. The lute fell with a bang into the thin straw. It emitted a mellow chord of a type no one had ever heard. As though the fingers of twilight had strummed the strings.
Nothing could be further removed from my immediate ambitions than to write a romance novel. Although I feel that the whole business starts somewhere around there, after the caresses. I don’t want to make a tea set. I want to make crystal, as the wonderful Billy Wiseass would put it. That poor bastard has it good: he’s never experienced love. It’ll be easy for him to write a romance novel. If only he would give up stargazing. Nonetheless, Billy Wiseass, you will admit: it’s too cold out there amid the galaxies.
Or do you disagree?
When I sensed that I had pushed things too far, I said to her: “I have to go away. To Uganda. To Tanganyika. To Equatorial Africa. It doesn’t matter where. Far away.”
“Take me with you,” she said.
“What are you thinking. Dearest. My one and only.”
“Why are you lying?” she asked reproachfully.
“I swear!” I said. “Do you want me to prove it to you?”
“How?” she asked. “How?”
“I won’t leave.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“I’ll kill myself,” I continued.
She looked into my eyes. “If those are your only choices, then go. You must leave on your journey.”
So, my dear Billy Wiseass, for several light-years I was absent, ailing. I hope you won’t have changed so much since we last saw each other that you will be capable of asking me why I left, why I fled.
But you see, I have changed. I’ve become feeble-minded and several light-years older (I didn’t say wiser). And, as you can see, I’m posing this question to myself: Why? Why?