_Rondo_
1
Paul's "hour" of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of
the morning.
I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt
and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips
nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of
concentration--and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating
like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and
his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As
I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair
came out of the poor guy--a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for
there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises.
Ridiculous--but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.
I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some
step on Paul's behalf--or even that I sat down at my table with grim
and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account
by knifing further excess from my serial.
Such was not the case.
I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces
for both efforts--but I met with failure.
My head ached. Vague pains beset my body--squirting about mysteriously
from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and
teeth. My tongue burned--dry and yet sticky--inflamed and evil-tasting
to itself--the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette
advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I
thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession,
compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy
coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my
pores.
I stared at my body--the wens and scars and indurations and red
blots--the warts and excrescences and moles--the minor tumors that are
our common response to age and attrition--the crinkling paper of my
skin--the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but
that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and
counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed
the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when
I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed
the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now,
and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity--the
time-shrunk backs of my hands--my toes, warped out of alignment, marked
and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear--their
nails, turned in, split, chitinous--small, magenta lace of erupted
capillaries--shine and scale on my shins--myself: waxwork--worn
battlefield--warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.