‘No crows where I come from’ he said, ‘God be praised.’
‘Ah’ said Zaborovna. ‘Then there is a God after all?’
‘Presumably’ said Belacqua. ‘I know no more than I did.’
He seemed to have recovered from his sense of bereavement. Nevertheless she was right, there was more in it, as the sequel may well show, than he thought.
‘I should be happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.
A long black cylindrical Galloway cow, in her heyday a kind and quick feeder, now obviously seriously ill with rinderpest, red-water and contagious abortion, staggered out of the ground fog, collapsed and slipped calf. It was all over in a flash.
‘Happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.
‘When you say “put me up”’ said Belacqua, ‘what do you mean exactly?’
Not having properly sized up her man she kept the wrong things back.
‘You are far too hospitable’ said Belacqua, ‘I couldn’t dream of it.’
The cow, greatly eased, on her back, her four legs indicting the firmament, was in the article of death. Belacqua knew what that was.
‘And you don’t utter all your mind’ he said, ‘unless I am greatly mistaken.’
‘Well then’ she said, ‘fried garlic and Cuban rum, what do you say to that?’
‘Human rum!’ exclaimed Belacqua.
‘Cuban’ she said, ‘a guinea a bottle.’
Something simply had to happen, the ground-fog lifted, the sky was mare’s-tail and shed a livid light, ghastly in the puddles that pitted the land, but beautiful also, like the complexion in Addison’s disease. A child, radiant in scarlet diaper and pale blue pilch, skipped down off the road and began to sail a boat.
‘Though you hedge’ said Belacqua, ‘Miss Privet, yet do you win, and my shame be my glory.’
‘That’s a sensible cadaver’ said Zaborovna. She began to back away most gracefully.
‘Let the deadbeats get on’ said Belacqua, ‘I can’t bear a crowd.’
The faithful, seeded with demons, a dim rabble, cringing home after Vespers, regrettably not Sicilian. In the van an Editor, of a Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly, his po hat cockaded fore and aft with a title-page and a poem of pleasure, a tailor of John Jameson o’Lantern dancing before him; next, a friend’s wife, splendid specimen of exophthalmic goitre, storming along, her nipples up her nose; next, a Gipsy Rondo, glabrous but fecund, by-blow of a long line of aguas and iluminaciones; next, Hairy, leaning back, moving very stiff and open; next, in a covered Baby Austen, the Count of Parabimbi and his lady; next, trained to a hair, a nest of rank outsiders, mending in perfect amity a hard place in Eliot, relaxing from time to time to quire their manifesto: ‘Boycott Poulter’s Measure!’; next, as usual in the thick of the mischief, a caput of highly liberally educated ex-eunuchs, rotating slowly as they tottered forward, their worn buttocks gleaming through the slits in their robes; next, Caleken Frica, stark staring naked, jotting notes for period dialogue with a cauter dipped in cocoa round the riddle of her navel minnehaha minnehaha; next, a honeymoon unicorn, brow-beating his half-hunter; next, a Yogi milkman, singeing his beard with a standard candle, a contortionist leprechaun riding in his brain (abdominal); next, the sisters, Debauch and Death, holding their noses. So they passed by and passed away, those mentioned and one or two more, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last – a fully grown androgyne of tempestuous loveliness – after the rest, and after the last a spacious nothing.
‘Bad one by one’ said Belacqua, ‘very bad all together.’
A frightful sound as of rent silk put the heart across him.
‘There never was such a season for mandrakes’ said Zaborovna.
‘Alas’ said Belacqua, ‘Gnaeni, the pranic bleb, is far from being a mandrake. His leprechaun lets him out about this time every Sunday. They have no conduction.’
The dead cow would soon be a source of embarrassment.
‘You remember the wonderful lines’ said Belacqua:
‘A dog, a parrot or an ape . . .
Engross the fancies of the fair.’
Zaborovna let a ringing guffaw.
‘Did you see the Parabimbi’ she said. ‘Where did she get her crucified smile, the little immaculate conception?’
Belacqua descended resolutely from the fence, took up a hole in his belt, plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a Partagas, the sweetest contingency by a long chalk to come his way for many a day, lit it, thought, Now if there should turn out to be a Voltigeur in this assortment . . . !, and said:
‘Whenever you are ready Miss.’
She tossed back the hissing vipers of her hair, her entire body coquetted and writhed like a rope, foamed into a bawdy akimbo that treed, cigar and all, her interlocutor. Poor fellow, there he was, petrified, back on the fence. And Zaborovna, one minute the picture of exuberant continence, the next this Gorgon! Truly there is no accounting for some people. Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities. So at least it seemed to Belacqua, not for the first time, numbed now on the fence. He himself varied by all means, but as something, some rhythmic principle whose seat he rather thought was in the pit of his stomach. An almanac of his inconstancies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages than they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods. Exaggeration or not, that was how it struck Belacqua, more forcibly now, as he adhered firmly to the fence and heard with great thankfulness the floes of shock crack in his heart-box, than perhaps ever before.
A quantity of phrases presented themselves to Zaborovna, who thus to her annoyance found herself faced with the alternative of saying nothing or preferring one.
‘The garlic won’t be worth eating’ she said and at once repented her choice, as though she had had the least part in it, the pretty creature. So astute in some matters, so crass in others, so crass-astute in as many again, intruding like a flea her loose familiarities into the most retired places, how can she ever expect, as she does, to excel?
But now for it and like a lamb he followed her steps, up hill and down dale, to her lodging, where having arrived in the core of the darkest hour he at once devoured the garlic, tossed off the white rum, threw them thus mingled, after the manner of Ninus the Assyrian, higgledy-piggledy on the stones, mentioned that he was bemired with sins, naked of good deeds and the meat of worms, and then to his astonishment was ravished, but ravished out of the horrid jaws agape for the love-feast, the wrinkled gums and the Hutchinson fangs, which bit into nothing more fruity than what she afterwards described to a bosom pal as the dream of the shadow of the smoke of a rotten cigar, (3) just as the first sun opened a little eye in the heaven of blue Monday and gave light to a cock, ravished in the sense of reassumed, the first dose of resurgence having acted, into the lush plush of womby-tomby.
3. The Voltigeur!
To proceed, after what seemed to Belacqua countless as it were eructations into the Bayswater of Elysium, brash after brash of atonement for the wet impudence of an earthly state – the idea being of course that his heart, not his soul but his heart, drained and dried in this racking guttatim, should qualify at last as a plenum of fire for bliss immovable – he appears to us again and more or less in the familiar attitude all set for his extraordinary affair with the spado in tail, if such a curious