‘Do you really have to?’
And she drank the whisky, straight.
‘Come along, Max, I don’t love you.’
Young Lilstein would very much like to know what happened forty years ago, to make love to the memory of Lena through the memories of his friend Max Goffard, if I told him he was lucky that night, the poor muddlehead would never believe me.
That night Max behaved like an idiot, he even told Lena:
‘The wives of my friends are sexless.’
To which she replied:
‘You have much too conventional an idea of sex.’
Lena was twice as strong as Max, let that be part of the detail which our blundering German friend certainly does not need to know, twice as strong as a Max Goffard who is no longer sure of anything, it was wonderful and at the same time I was like the goat who sees a very determined lady coming towards him, several ladies in that lady, or the same one in various guises, several rather determined ladies, and the goat wonders why they have started dancing, I’d drunk a lot of whisky that evening but I’ve never known what it’s like to be drunk, Lena wasn’t drunk, the pretty ladies dance and suddenly they toss the goat up in air, and the goat thinks this is strange, they catch him neatly and throw him up again even higher, and he doesn’t know what’s happening, he’s falling and at the very last moment they catch him, they throw up him again, a game, no way of stopping it, he’s airborne, he doesn’t dislike it, down he falls, up he goes again, getting into the swing of it, he falls, they catch him with their teeth, women dancing, throwing wine in each other’s faces, they toss the goat up in the air again, compare what happened with Monsieur Seguin and the wolf and it’s small beer.
Women who dance, who perspire, who glow, they shout, the goat panics, doesn’t know which way to turn, understands that it’s also a very bad time, they’re mad, they’re doing themselves harm, don’t even realise, a moonless carnival, the next person who talks to me about gentleness, intuition, affection, caring natures, I will knock his block off, frenzy, the goat has got it at last, one of the women has a scrap of goat flesh in her mouth, she’s laughing.
She holds a torch of burning pine, shakes her hair, shakes the brand like a madwoman, when you say goat it’s to get people used to the idea from the word go, but these crazy women have now begun attacking lots of other beasties, even bears, one swipe of a bear’s paw can do a crazy woman serious damage but they don’t care, these women didn’t come here to bandage anybody’s wounds, they scream, they sing, they run, stop, die, come back to life, a place where forces collide, they throw the goat up in the air once more, life at its most intense, the screams quicken the race which quickens the screams.
They do not feel the limb twist nor the claw strike, to feel that would require a bearing, they have lost their bearings, they are far away, they come back, they shake their hair, scream, throw their loins to the flames, tearing themselves open with their hands, subside, eyes wild open, splash their faces with water, vine and wine, death looms up in their midst, by way of a greeting they grab their ration of raw flesh as they pass by, wound themselves, feed themselves, plead, run away, they hurt, madness in their eyes, hands, mouth, they call, death watches them, joy of living, joy of dying, they curl up, seethe, tear themselves to pieces, fingers white from being clenched, the madness which tears itself apart, which engulfs.
They depart in a whirling cloud, roll, crash to the ground, throw down the torch, pick it up, take revenge like wounded creatures with nothing to lose, death claims his wages, the goat in a coffin of sensations, a force which persists as long as their sharp piercing cries and then tears to tatters, then it begins again, scraps of goat, a flower muscle, murmurs of chaos.
Escaped by the skin of his teeth, lucky sod.
Next morning Lena was so sweet, she sat down in front of her pier-glass, slow expansive movements, she was combing her hair, she looked in the mirror, her life she says is giving recitals or appearing in opera, the day before you mustn’t, on the day it makes the voice dull, the day after she doesn’t feel like it, she sings often.
‘Tot up what’s left, Max, and to make my condition worse I forbid you to go elsewhere, I can be an utterly demonic Carmen, jealousy is physically so demanding, I don’t allow anyone to walk over me, I stay ahead of the game, sometimes I get it wrong but at least no one laughs at me, I’m a very jealous person, didn’t used to be, but the older I get the more jealous I become.
‘Sometimes I never say anything to the man I’m with, I stay nice, and loving, and I go straight for the other woman, no altercations, I leave that to shop girls, what I do is jump in my car, then I ram her car, I yank her out by the hair, I once did that in the middle of a crossroads, in Duluth, and I swotted her with the starting handle, you don’t know Duluth, you need to if you want an idea of what sort of scandal it made, a large De Soto starting handle, a huge scandal, they didn’t dare charge me, it’s possible the judge had slept with the woman, she slept with everybody, he didn’t dare do a thing, and my lover at the time didn’t say anything either, a free action that looks free, not very subtle but effective, men are cowards.
‘I could do even better than that, Max, know what a woman can do to keep her lover? To get him to marry her? You’re jealous of the wife, you want marriage, you corner your lover in the kitchen, a good talk, you feel he wants to break it off, go home, you’re not going to let him get away with it, it starts in the kitchen and it stays in the kitchen, the man has qualified as a pharmacist, he tries to speak calmly, he’s about to set himself up, buy a dispensary, in Linz, the town’s leading pharmacy, he starts building his case, a turning point in his life, he has children, twins, just starting school, they’re going to need him home every evening, so you don’t mess with the children’s education, but you can mess with a mistress? The man is making the most tactless case imaginable.
‘In any case, a man who is ending a relationship and insists on talking is always tactless, there’s an explosion, one word is all it takes, he actually dared to say I don’t deserve you, that’s the point when you explode, a bastard, a man who wants to end an affair is essentially a bastard, the storm breaks very quickly, in a kitchen it’s very bad, table suddenly cleared with a backhand swipe from the woman, tears in her voice, in her eyes, on her cheeks, the woman’s hands held out in front of her, ready for battle, out of control, though not really, not really out of control those hands, one hand which opens the top of the stove, the ceramic stove, one hot plate open, the biggest.
‘The crazy woman is about to do something stupid, hurt herself, put her right hand in, she’s yelling, the man keeps a close eye on her right hand, the roar of the fire in the stove, how hot can it get inside a ceramic stove? the intake of air, how do you treat burns? the flames burn higher, a thousand degrees? If the wood’s really dry, eight hundred, eleven hundred degrees? The fire roars, burning hotter and hotter, her hand, not the right hand, the left, she holds her left hand over the hole in the top of the stove.
‘What is the man’s academic and professional file doing in that left hand? The originals of the documents in his file, the woman screams, on your knees! It’s an order, the kind of order that can be given by a woman in a rage who knows that without the originals of his diplomas the man might just about be able to open a grocery but not a pharmacy, especially not in Linz, and it’s not only his file, there are bearer bonds, half the capital he needs is being dangled over the flames, in the hand of this mad woman, the woman is not threatening to throw his papers into a fire in a fireplace, they should have stayed in the living room, papers thrown into a fire in a fireplace can be rescued, here, the central hole of the stove, a thousand degrees, final, vocal cords ready to snap, the woman screeches, you’ll swear on the heads of your children, you swear on the Bible!