A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (13 page)

The opposite god, the god of metamorphoses and hopeless strife and vain labor, the opposite of animality and orgy—manifest in all my laborious attempt to understand my little man’s odd, infinitely equivocal, perhaps meaningless character, and in the prospect of worse further difficulty if I should try to write an account of him and of our relationship—perhaps just to tire me out, wear me down; and to disgust me with the way I have been trying to live, trying to work and play at the same time, trying to love and not love at the same time. And to warn me of the terrible virtuosity and versatility and malleability of my imagination: my ability of disillusion with myself about no matter what in an instant, by one flourish of my hot spirit, one ejaculation of my sour wit; and my ability to embellish and dignify and even deify no matter who, for a while …

So I sat there more quietly gazing at my more or less deified fellow, Maine Priapus, Maine Proteus, over our two foamy beakers of ice cream, across the sticky little drugstore table of imitation onyx. And I felt sure that in any case our twenty-four hour intimacy had been somehow a terminal rather than an initiatory or inaugurative experience. It marked the end, not the beginning of a bizarre chapter of myself; the signal to give up as a bad job one of my methods of managing my wretched temperament. No doubt I should not have been thinking of a written account of it, if it were not so. There probably would not be many more such fellows in my life; anyway my approach to them, my hail and farewell to them, would never be the same. And the expression on my face as I thought of this must have been terrible. For at last my poor Hawthorn seemed really respectful of me; he shut up, and ceased winking and grinning at me. He looked not at all extraordinary, not superhuman or subhuman; he was just an ordinary lonesome small town New Englander like his friend at the soda fountain or like his ex-darling with too few teeth.

Finally one of the thunderstorms hanging all around struck Clamariscassett, softly flashing, rumbling, and with thick tepid drops; and with it the bus arrived; and I clambered up into it. As I sat there waving goodbye to Hawthorn through the drenched window I observed that—so long and laborious had our night together been, our sensational and enjoyable but not joyous intercourse—one of my elbows had been chafed by the sheet under us until it had drawn blood. How extraordinary! And so I departed, somewhat smiling at this silly indecent valedictory idea; how much tougher his sex had proved than my elbow! Also I sillily wondered if in the figurative and spiritual sense I could call myself thin-skinned; and in spite of my various excitability, I thought not. In any case, I mend, I mend, I mend!—as fast as any young warrior or any incorrigible old tomcat.

Violent showers overtook us every few miles all the way to Ellsworth. At one point for half an hour we rode under a canopy of ashen and bluish cloud, trimmed with long funereal ostrich. Behind us in the west this rich drapery swung apart, constituting a great oblong window, through which we looked miles away to a very different skyscape, all summery azure, upon which rested a flock of diminutive cirrocumulus, lamblike. And diagonally across the window, in front of the idyllic distance, there hung the voile of the rain in perfect little pleats.

Western skies are shinier, Mediterranean skies bluer; the characteristic thing about the Maine sky is its brilliance in a modest or intermediary or composite color:
grisaille.
Holland’s in summer is like it, but less brilliant. The landscape also lends itself remarkably to strange light-effects. For there are almost no altitudes important enough or abrupt enough to wall one in; therefore the vistas are great, and as the road twines along the shore like a vine, they keep changing. Rock somewhat like alabaster and burnished hayfields and white architecture bend all along and baroquely frame the various bays and estuaries: ancient valleys submerged as the continent has tilted eastward; riverbeds flooded at whatever hour the moon has charmed the ocean. From these waters embedded in the countryside like looking-glass, an extraordinary cold refraction is always added to the sunlight; and a luxurious grayness like moonlight, ten times as strong, arises wherever the sun goes under a cloud.

Preoccupied with all this and the like, thus I returned from my escapade, to all intents and purposes delighted. I tried to make a few notes, to devise a few exact images, with my notebook on my jolted knees, my pencil jumping in my fingers. For the bus was traveling as fast as ever; the narrow highway was slippery; wind and showers kept rapidly and dimly enwrapping everything; now and then a little lightning snapped at us: it was fearful. The bus driver had struck up acquaintance with a pretty trained nurse in the seat next to his, somewhat behind him; so there was a good deal of turning of his head and rolling of his eyes away from the road, with modestly concupiscent small-talk. I could see that it was all a kind of playacting, foolishness; she would not see him again, and he knew it. It might have been the death of us nevertheless.

But now I felt no fear: to that extent at least love had had an improving effect upon me. Properly speaking, of course, there had not been the least love about it. Love had nothing to do with it. I did not care to see that poor Hawthorn again; I hoped and prayed that I might never need to see him: to that extent the present need had been attended to. Month after month I appear to be living under an evil spell of chastity cast by Monroe and George, those two who need me most and whom I love best. Last night’s exercise had enabled me to feel that it was not necessarily so. It had cured me for a while of being sorry for myself. It had cleared my imagination of the temptations like a sideshow, the nightmare as sad as Saint Anthony’s, by which for lack of love it gets naturally inhabited. Now in my early middle age, these three little changes of state of mind constitute what I am willing to call happiness: which is the best excuse I can give for bad sexy behavior. I know that my life is a wonderfully fortunate one, but I cannot always be glad of it. Often, when I am chaste, I cannot be glad of it. I know that my maker, so to speak, made me wonderfully well; but I am often unable to feel any gratitude. I am ashamed of this; and in the vagueness and hypochondria of shame everything goes wrong or seems to go wrong or seems very like to go wrong. But now, as a result of just a little bout of disgraceful fornication, for the time being I felt willing to call myself happy, willing to be myself, glad to be myself, able to face my maker without grimacing—that is, in a fit state to die. How fantastic and wonderful! And readiness to die is equivalent to courage: therefore I did not mind how foolishly the bus driver flirted, how damnably he drove, all the way to Sorrento.

I live in an earthly paradise. The moodiest heat, and the duskiest rain, descending from soft blackish clouds hanging all along the eastern horizon. Flora of all sorts very noticeably, between one glance and the next, swelling and opening. In the hedgerow an old stub of peach tree that, to my knowledge, has never blossomed, blossoming. Over the outspoken brook, forsythia casting its harsh light, chemical yellow. The large petals of the magnolia standing up stiff against the cloudy horizon; flesh-pink, no, flesh-ruddy, against the vaporous black.

It happened that I had never seen the intercourse of mare and stallion. Horses are said to be nobler in their excitement than other animals, and less incomprehensible, that is to say less inhuman. I spoke of this to my brother a week or ten days ago, who laughed in his agreeable rustic tone and gazed at me fondly and expressed his surprise and regret. “But what a pity!” he said, “most of our mares are now in foal.” Nevertheless, there was only a short wait before I could see two pairs of horses mate.

First there was the Suffolk stallion, Beauboy. One Saturday in the afternoon, while I sat beside Mother and Alexandra under a tree where a breeze was drawn, Saltmer the groom rode up on Beauboy—tiny Mediaeval-looking fellow with his legs split across the wide sleek back, barbet on charger. Alex went to consult him about blacksmiths and veterinarians. I followed her and stood admiring the stallion: a ton of championship, a ton of potency, otherwise good for nothing. Tousled mane and forelock like a Louis-Quatorze wig; great scrotum of featherweight velvet; very dark wrinkles up and down his neck forming a great fan or shell whenever he looked over his shoulder.

I suppose the horse, as a symbol or ideal, in whatever connection, is always as foolish as this image of mine: supernal, impracticable. (Perhaps other
chefs-d’oeuvres
of nature likewise …) For a horse is always in a way, to a certain extent, insane. Its passions—like libido or gluttony or fright—possess it. For example, it is afraid of its rider, although at any moment it could kill him. On the other hand its love of its rider is not to be depended on, for it may kill him in a panic or by mistake. It fears fire terribly, but therefore does not flee from but remains amid the flames. It never knows enough not to eat itself to death, which, I have heard, is why it is not found as a wild animal in lands where the primeval pasture is rich. It learns almost nothing, that is, what it can be taught is nothing compared with what it is born knowing, born to do. How ludicrous and sad, its performance to music in fact; the quadruped Isadora, Nijinski of nature, keeps time less well than any rheumatic old person, tight, in a night club.

Then I heard either Alex or the groom say that Father had gone after Sapphire, the youngest imported mare.

Beauboy gazed with melancholy fondness afar across the meadow, where indeed there were mares, half a dozen as brilliant as a basketful of oranges overturned on the hot grass; and he called to them mistakenly. But now there came Father with the one in heat.

I must have been begotten with some such forceful flourish as Beauboy’s, in a similar dumbness and somber delight. However, as my father approached with the young mare from the stable I was rather struck and touched by the dissimilarity between stallion and man. One human shoulder was stooped, the other lifted in a shrug; one paternal eye looked almost absent-minded, and he took the oddest, softest steps—formal as a pallbearer but absurdly sad, sad as a clown.

Father led Sapphire at a very prompt but weak trot around the big corncrib, inside the trail-gate. Meanwhile the groom allowed Beauboy to cavort around, immensely, cheerfully, expressing his interest with ardent nods, giant dance-steps. Then he put his penis out, a clumsy, limber sort of lance; and now and then he shook it erect, that is, straightened it up along his belly.

Alex remarked that evidently he was happy to have this young Sapphire. They have had a little trouble with him. The ninth day after delivering is the surest time for impregnation; but he does not care for mares who have lately foaled, who perhaps smell of blood and milk as well as uterus.

Also, I must say, I instantly thought up and slightly entertained this and that impure fantasy about it; fragment of indecent dream hurrying dimly on in my head and in some impossible direction, which now half recurs as I write. But the reality went so hurriedly and was so beautiful that nothing of the fanciful order counted or could count much.

In my retrospect I find this odd impression, pure enough: it was like Uccello, the master of the field of San Romano, those fringed uplifted hoofs and even that blackish lance were like that! The visual department of my mind, eager to preserve every one of the eye’s snapshots, has done it repetitiously, criss-cross, like a battle scene, with difficult forms, attitudes overlapping, and many, many black lances. There too was the Florentine color: weedy green, woody red, and soiled shadow on the white wall of the corncrib. And Father’s face and the groom’s looked somehow dangerous and afraid at the same time; yes, it is a fact, they looked like condottieri, mercenary soldiers of old.

Now Saltmer the groom as well as Father was making a strange face, which reminded me of the mask of a clown, a clown of the sad sort, one of the Fratellinis as I remember them: abnormally calm, concentrating; no doubt it would have seemed to himself or anyone of his class a very proper, necessary face to make, in the way of the sorrowfulness of a remote relation at a funeral, complacent and a bit stylized. If he had been asked what he was feeling, no doubt he would have said that it was modesty, just modesty; he too was somewhat offended by his employer’s wife’s presence. But I am sure that it really amounted to more than that: it was the slightest instant of the greatest dizziness of instinct now and then, almost imperceptible, as it were a mote suddenly floating down across his attentive blue eye; it was the softest pang of the great pinch of pleasure. A delicate little fellow, in poor health; but he too is a very male man, with half a dozen children, one of them ill. Now and then he would take the stallion’s troublesome reins in one hand, and with the other just touch his shoulder or the back of his neck oddly, as if he were being tickled.

First the stallion must ask the mare’s permission which is almost invariably by biting. If she is not exactly ready for him, her womb not ripe, she will kick. The purpose of the trail-gate, behind which the mare waits, is to keep the stallion out of harm’s way. Certain young males, such as Guardian, Beauboy’s present coadjutor and rival—as if scarcely knowing how to distinguish between fornication and fighting—bite wickedly, no matter how or where, deserving to be kicked. Obviously old Beauboy knew better; he ran no risk, wasted no time. He stepped up slowly, not too close, stooping his heavy crest as elegantly as any swan, and he chose not Sapphire’s throat or withers but a place just in front of the stifle-joint—a place where eleven month’s hence the get of this intercourse (if it took effect) would rub its infant head as it groped her for milk—and a little of the lap of skin connecting the belly and the leg. And he very slowly disturbed these parts with his lips, with his hot nostrils, and then nipped: which was not much more severe than a man’s kiss. Ripe young Sapphire permitted herself only a faint shiver, stupid, ready.

Beauboy having done his biting successfully, Saltmer said to Father in an earnest tone, “Lead her up that way,” rapidly waving his little hand up that way; and Father did so. I had a moment of absurd anxiety, lest, where I stood, I should be unable to see the detail of the coupling, the wielding and hiding and showing of the male organ, and the receptivity of the female. It was all right; I could see.