Nightwood (3 page)

Nadja had sat back to Felix, as certain of the justice of his eye as she would have been of the linear justice of a Rops, knowing that Felix tabulated precisely the tense capability of her spine with its lashing curve swinging into the hard compact cleft of her rump, as angrily and as beautifully as the more obvious tail of her lion.

The emotional spiral of the circus, taking its flight from the immense disqualification of the public, rebounding from its illimitable hope, produced in Felix longing and disquiet. The circus was a loved thing that he could never touch, therefore never know. The people of the theatre and the ring were for him as dramatic and as monstrous as a consignment on which he could never bid. That he haunted them as persistently as he did, was evidence of something in his nature that was turning Christian.

He was, in like manner, amazed to find himself drawn to the church, though this tension he could handle with greater ease; its arena he found was circumscribed to the individual heart.

It was to the Duchess of Broadback (Frau Mann) that Felix owed his first audience with a 'gentleman of quality'. Frau Mann, then in Berlin, explained that this person had been 'somewhat mixed up with her in the past'. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could imagine her 'mixed up' with anyone, her coquetries were muscular and localized. Her trade—the trapeze—seemed to have preserved her. It gave her, in a way, a certain charm. Her legs had the specialized tension common to aerial workers; something of the bar was in her wrists, the tan bark in her walk, as if the air, by its very lightness, by its very non-resistance, were an almost insurmountable problem, making her body, though slight and compact, seem much heavier than that of women who stay upon the ground. In her face was the tense expression of an organism surviving in an alien element. She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots—one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies, and the bulge in the groin where she took the bar, one foot caught in the flex of the calf, was as solid, specialized and as polished as oak. The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly-stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll. The needle that had made one the property of the child made the other the property of no man.

'Tonight,' Frau Mann said turning to Felix, 'we are going to be amused. Berlin is sometimes very nice at night,
nicht wahr
? And the Count is something that must be seen. The place is very handsome, red and blue, he's fond of blue, God knows why, and he is fond of impossible people, so we are invited—' The Baron moved his foot in. 'He might even have the statues on.'

'Statues?' said Felix.

'The living statues,' she said, 'he simply adores them.' Felix dropped his hat; it rolled and stopped.

'Is he German?' he said.

'Oh no, Italian, but it does not matter, he speaks anything, I think he comes to Germany to change money—he comes, he goes away, and everything goes on the same, except that people have something to talk about.'

'What did you say his name was?'

'I didn't, but he calls himself Count Onatorio Altamonte, I'm sure it's quite ridiculous, he says he is related to every nation—that should please you. We will have dinner, we will have champagne.' The way she said 'dinner' and the way she said 'champagne' gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others.

'Does one enjoy herself?' he asked.

'Oh, absolutely.'

She leaned forward, she began removing the paint with the hurried technical felicity of an artist cleaning a palette. She looked at the Baron derisively.
'Wir setzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss
—' she said.

Standing about a table at the end of the immense room, looking as if they were deciding the fate of a nation, were grouped ten men, all in parliamentary attitudes, and one young woman. They were listening, at the moment of the entrance of Felix and the Duchess of Broadback, to a middle-aged 'medical student' with shaggy eyebrows, terrific widow's peak, over-large dark eyes, and a heavy way of standing that was also apologetic. The man was Dr. Matthew O'Connor, an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world. He was taking the part of host, the Count not yet having made his appearance, and was telling of himself, for he considered himself the most amusing predicament.

'We may all be nature's noblemen,' he was saying, and the mention of a nobleman made Felix feel happier the instant he caught the word, though what followed left him in some doubt, 'but think of the stories that do not amount to much! That is, that are forgotten in spite of all man remembers (unless he remembers himself) merely because they befell him without distinction of office or title—that's what we call legend and its the best a poor man may do with his fate; the other', he waved an arm, 'we call history, the best the high and mighty can do with theirs. Legend is unexpurgated, but history, because of its actors, is deflowered—every nation with a sense of humour is a lost nation, and every woman with a sense of humour is a lost woman. The Jews are the only people who have sense enough to keep humour in the family; a Christian scatters it all over the world.'

'Ja! das ist ganz, richtig
—' said the Duchess in a loud voice, but the interruption was quite useless. Once the doctor had his audience—and he got his audience by the simple device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and possessive as a maddened woman's) some of the more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs—nothing could stop him. He merely turned his large eyes upon her and having done so noticed her and her attire for the first time, which, bringing suddenly to his mind something forgotten but comparable, sent him into a burst of laughter, exclaiming: 'Well but God works in mysterious ways to bring things up in my mind! Now I am thinking of Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the
Cirque de Paris.
There he was, crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin cloth all abulge as if with a deep sea catch, tattooed from head to heel with all the
ameublement
of depravity! Garlanded with rosebuds and hack-work of the devil—was he a sight to see! Though he couldn't have done a thing (and I know what I am talking about in spite of all that has been said about the black boys) if you had stood him in a gig-mill for a week, though (it's said) at a stretch it spelled Desdemona. Well then, over his belly was an angel from Chartres, on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I'm sorry to say and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you my word, "I" on one and on the other, "can", put those together! Across his chest, beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace. On each bosom an arrow-speared heart, each with different initials but with equal drops of blood; and running into the arm-pit, all down one side, the word said by Prince Arthur Tudor, son of King Henry the Seventh, when on his bridal night he called for a goblet of water (or was it water?). His Chamberlain, wondering at the cause of such drought, remarked on it and was answered in one word so wholly epigrammatic and in no way befitting the great and noble British Empire that he was brought up with a start, and that is all we will ever know of it, unless', said the doctor, striking his hand on his hip, 'you are as good at guessing as Tiny M'Caffery.'

'And the legs?' Felix asked uncomfortably.

'The legs', said Dr. O'Connor, 'were devoted entirely to vine work, topped by the swart rambler rose copied from the coping of the Hamburg house of Rothschild. Over his
dos,
believe it or not and I shouldn't, a terse account in early monkish script—called by some people indecent, by others Gothic—of the really deplorable condition of Paris before hygiene was introduced, and nature had its way up to the knees. And just above what you mustn't mention, a bird flew carrying a streamer on which was incised, "Garde tout!" I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered he loved beauty and would have it about him.'

'Are you acquainted with Vienna?' Felix inquired.

'Vienna,' said the doctor, 'the bed into which the common people climb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves, ferocious with dignity—I do, but not so well but that I remember some of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going to school, flocks of quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths, smelling of the herd childhood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight, soon to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.'

'I was not thinking of its young boys, but of its military superiority, its great names,' Felix said, feeling that the evening was already lost, seeing that as yet the host had not made his appearance and that no one seemed to know it or to care and that the whole affair was to be given over to this volatile person who called himself a doctor.

'The army, the celibate's family!' grinned the doctor. 'His one safety.'

The young woman, who was in her late twenties, turned from the group, coming closer to Felix and the doctor. She rested her hands behind her against the table. She seemed embarrassed. 'Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just talking?' Having spoken, her face flushed, she added hurriedly, 'I am doing advance publicity for the circus, I'm Nora Flood.'

The doctor swung around, looking pleased. 'Ah!' he said, 'Nora suspects the cold incautious melody of time crawling, but,' he added, 'I've only just started.' Suddenly he struck his thigh with his open hand. 'Flood, Nora, why sweet God, my girl, I helped to bring you into the world!'

Felix, as disquieted as if he were expected to 'do something' to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady's lap), on the phrase 'time crawling' broke into uncontrollable laughter, and though this occurrence troubled him the rest of his life he was never able to explain it to himself. The company, instead of being silenced, went on as if nothing had happened, two or three of the younger men were talking about something scandalous, and the 'Duchess' in her loud empty voice was telling a very stout man something about the living statues. This only added to the Baron's torment. He began waving his hands, saying, 'Oh, please! please!' and suddenly he had a notion that he was doing something that wasn't laughing at all, but something much worse, though he kept saying to himself, 'I am laughing, really laughing, nothing else whatsoever! ' He kept waving his arms in distress and saying, 'Please, please!' staring at the floor, deeply embarrassed to find himself doing so.

As abruptly he sat straight up, his hands on the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the doctor who was leaning forward as he drew a chair up exactly facing him. 'Yes,' said the doctor, and he was smiling, 'you will be disappointed!
In questa tomba oscura
—oh, unfaithful one! I am no herbalist, I am no Rutebeuf, I have no panacea, I am not a mountebank—that is, I cannot or will not stand on my head. I'm no tumbler, neither a friar, nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse up on a pair of Toledo blades—try to get any lovesick girl, male or female, to do that to-day! If you don't believe such things happened in the long back of yesterday look up the manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, it's all one to me; become as the rich Mussulmans of Tunis who hire silly women to reduce the hour to its minimum of sense, still it will not be a cure, for there is none that takes place all at once in any man. You know what man really desires?' inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. 'One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.'

'I was not thinking of women at all,' the Baron said, and he tried to stand up.

'Neither was I,' said the doctor, 'sit down.' He refilled his glass. 'The
fine
is very good,' he said.

Felix answered, 'No, thank you, I never drink.'

'You will,' the doctor said. 'Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don't mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people's 'remissions' of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way. So, of course, after that, he went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start (or so the writing on his side of the breakfast table would seem to confirm), an obscene megalomania—and wild and wanton stranger that
that
is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence—and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum's rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.

'But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment—what do you walk in upon? Something that's already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that
pecca fortiter
among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God's child from the start—it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations
and
a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous—one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!'