Crazy Cock (5 page)

Tony Bring, occupied with his own thoughts, paid no attention to the conversation going on, but there were others who were listening amusedly. His thoughts dribbled away into the gloom, taking neither form nor content.

As he sat there musing, Hildred fluttered in. Glued to her side was a tall, silent creature whose raven hair, parted in the middle, fell in a copious sweep to her shoulders. She was like a piece of marble not completely detached from the block.

“Hey, there!” came a big, booming voice. Hildred wheeled around instantly. The soft, waning light of the street suffused her face with a dull glow; about her lips there played an eager trembling, delicate, sensitive, a movement scarcely perceptible. As she moved toward him, buoyant and seraphic, he remarked the glow which radiated from her and transfigured her. So compelling was the vision that when a ponderous, apelike figure rose up between them and intercepted her it seemed as if a meaningless cloud had for a moment obscured his sight. He waited a moment, in that state of suspense which precedes disillusionment, and then, inexplicable and unbelievable though it appeared, Hildred sat down, sat down beside the ape and commenced talking to it.

A gesture of politeness, he assured himself, observing her quietly as she leaned forward, her face uplifted, her eyes flashing, when she laughed revealing her milk-white teeth, so smooth, so even. The hand which she had extended in greeting remained in the big, hairy paw which had closed over it. It was clamped there, as in a vise. And then he noticed that she was making an effort to free herself, but the other still held her hand. Suddenly, with her free hand, she struck out. The man's hand opened instinctively. The blood leaped to his face.

Now, he thought, she will surely get up and come over. At the same time he asked himself how often a scene like this took place. Was it really a reproof, that slap in the face? He waited. Waited for some sign of recognition. But her glance never once rested upon him. Not by the subtlest sign did she communicate to him an awareness of his presence. “Good God!” he muttered. “Could she have failed to see me?” Impossible! Why, she had looked straight at him, she had started toward him, and then this big ape had moved in and intercepted her. And the way she had looked at him! Such a look! Suddenly a black, damnable suspicion entered his mind. No, it was too preposterous—he dismissed it at once. She had seen him, all right, he was certain of it. Back of this malingering there was some deep reason, some purpose whose meaning would be made clear later on. Only too well did he understand the deceptions she was obliged to practice. What roles they had played, the two of them! Sometimes, when these fantastic situations passed through his head, he found it difficult to draw the line between pretense and actuality. So far, and this appeared as a comforting reflection, they had always played together, opposite each
other, as it were. He studied her now, as one would study an actress from the wings, while she sat talking to this idiot, enveloping him most likely in her clever net of deceit and falsehood. What was she saying to him? What sort of lies was she handing out? How candid and ingenuous was her smile—and yet it was no deeper than her lips. She was an actress, that wife of his, if ever there was one. A veritable honeycomb of dissimulation. . . . The more he watched her the more pleased he became. His pleasure was that of a child taking apart a complicated toy.

She was more beautiful than ever now. Like a mask long withheld. Mask or mask of a mask? Fragments that raced through his mind while he arranged harmoniously the inharmony of her being. Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him, peering at him from behind the mask. A rapport such as the living establish with the dying. She rose, and like a queen advancing to her throne, she approached him. His limbs were quaking, he was engulfed by a wave of gratitude and abasement. He wanted to fling himself on his knees and thank her blabberingly for deigning to notice him.

Her breath, warm and fragrant, filled him with terror and joy. Her low eager voice, throbbing and vibrant, smote him like a wilderness of stifled chords. While she excused herself hysterically he lowered his eyes as if to erase the confusion that had gathered there.

“You saw me, then, when you came in?” he asked, still somewhat abashed. His manner was like that of a lover keeping a clandestine engagement.

“Saw you?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“You didn't see me . . . ?”

“Didn't see you?”

Her perplexity was perplexing. Mask of a mask. Sphinx and Chimera joined in a protean act. The riddle remained a riddle, the riddle became a gladiator massacring the table, a stone-faced automaton with the lungs of a gorilla and bellows in his entrails. “Hildred!” he yelled. “Hildred!” Voice like a lion's yawn, deep, red mouth choked with rhododendrons.

“I'll fix him,” said Hildred, rising quickly with white-surging anger. Her fingers twitched, as if they were already tearing the red mouth back to the ears.

He was still pounding the table when she approached.

“What is it,
stupe?”
she bawled out.

He recoiled—the gesture of a man trying to push a megaphone from his ear.

“What is it you want? Say something!”

“I want some attention, that's what!” he wheezed. “What's the matter, don't I give you a big enough tip?” Silence. “Listen,” he chirped, and a roguish twinkle crept into his eyes, “who is that guy back there? Do you want me to bend him in half for you?”

“Idiot!” she cried, raising her voice. “Your brain is turning to muscle. Look at you . . . a wagonload of meat! Do you expect me to fall on your neck because you won on a foul last night? If you ever had a real tussle you'd fall apart. . . .”

There followed a few more gibes, galling, vicious, all of them directed below the belt. Big bruiser that he was, he wilted; there were tears in his eyes. He was silent as a clam; he put his head down, as though defending himself from a strangle thrust. Droll! The man of a thousand holds, giant with the body of a god, sinews of steel, flashing muscles, sitting there with his head drawn in like a turtle. Tame as a
piece of putty. That's what it amounted to—a piece of putty in her hands. Everyone could see it.

Tony Bring looked on with embarrassment. And yet, as one of the clients was remarking in smothered whispers, it was comical to see how the man returned every day for his punishment. He seemed to thrive on it. Big, blustering, good-natured brute that he was, he would doubtless stagger in on the morrow, look the crowd over with that stony eye of his, and blurt out a hearty greeting in a voice to make the room tremble. He had a notion, moreover, that he could sing. Seeing Hildred, he would go to the piano and, resting his heavy paws on the keys, empty his bowels of a soupy love lyric. “Song of India” was his favorite air. Desperately he strove to lard the words with tenderness. But they fell out of his mouth like loosened teeth.

“Look at him!” said Hildred, after the excitement had blown over and she had returned to her place in the corner by the window. “Look at him! He's doubled up with grief and anguish. Good Lord, he's not blubbering, is he?”

“Please, Hildred, that's enough! Don't gloat over it.”

“Don't tell me you're sorry for him,” she said, her eyes flashing.

“I don't know. It makes me feel sick, like seeing a dog kicked in the stomach.”

“Ridiculous!” said Hildred. “You haven't any idea what it's like dealing with these idiots.”

“Perhaps. . . . But then I should think there were other ways. . . .”

A short, scornful laugh interrupted this. “You're a chump!” she said. “The idea, slobbering over a dope like that!

“The way you defend people,” she added, “especially
people whom you have no right to defend, makes me ugly.” Her voice had grown irritable and raspy. She turned abruptly and nodded her head. “See that woman over there with the white hair? If there's anything in the world I detest it's a prudish, sugar-coated bitch like her. She finds nothing but good everywhere. If you act nasty to her, if you insult her, she excuses you . . . tells you that you don't mean what you say. The old pfoof, she just pees over me with her sloppy gush. I hate people like that. I hate you when you defend people you don't know anything about. . . .”

Tony Bring made his usual efforts to control himself. She always talked this way when she got riled. The old woman was right—she didn't mean what she said. She was good, Hildred. She was an angel, but she was more comfortable when people regarded her as a demon. She was perverse, that's what it was.

“I don't think you should come here anymore.” Hildred was talking again, more calmly now. “Really, Tony, I don't think you should. I don't.”

He stiffened.

“Oh, I know it sounds strange,” she continued, “but you mustn't try to invent reasons for what I say. Trust me, I know what I'm doing.”

An anxious look stole into his eyes. Hildred was annoyed. He took everything so seriously. She softened immediately, however, and her voice grew even more suasive.

“This is all so stupid,” she said. “I don't like to see you coming here, Tony. You don't belong here. Anyway, it won't be for long. You'll see. . . . I have a scheme up my sleeve. . . .” She looked at him sharply. “Aren't you listening?”

“I'm listening,” he said. Schemes up her sleeves . . .
traps . . . snares. Everything bitched up from the beginning. Climax upon climax. Meaningless . . . meaningless. Fragments pieced together in irrelevant sequence. Bad dreams. “Yes, I'm listening. . . .”

He began to dream more violently, her words beating in unison with his thoughts. Half-thoughts they were, issuing in a larval stream that circulated over all the earth and through the waters beneath the earth. Because he was blind and had only a man's wisdom, because he humbled himself with truth and had no faith in her wiles, because in tomorrow he saw only the sordid chaff of yesterday . . . because of so many things foreign to his masculine comprehension the words that she tore from her breast came to him weighted with pain and bitterness.

Finally, in a voice from which all his manhood seemed to be drained, he said: “But aren't you the least bit glad that I came?”

“We're not discussing that,” she said.

Like a blow her words struck him. As if he were standing at the head of a long flight of stairs and she had pushed him with all her might, left him stunned and helpless, the whir of bat wings ringing in his ears.

S
OMEONE WAS
standing beside them, at their elbows. It seemed to him as if the person had been standing there for an eternity.

“Oh, it's you!” Hildred exclaimed, looking up out of the corner of her eye. And immediately she grew flustered. “Tony,” she said, “this is my friend. . . . This is . . . Vanya.”

Later, when this incident had assumed its true proportions,
Tony Bring attempted again and again to reconstruct the details of this interview which was like a glimpse into a world hitherto unknown. But all that he could succeed in recapturing was the impression of a face—a face he would never forget—brought close to his, so close indeed that the features dissolved into a blur, the only thing standing out clearly in his memory being an image of himself squeezed into a space no bigger than a tear.

From now on it was Vanya this and Vanya that. Great swoops of volubility from Hildred, whose soul had departed the body to soar amid regions celestial and remote. From Vanya silence, deafening silence.

So this, he thought, is the Bruga woman, creator of that sunken-visaged, leering rake of a puppet which grinned at him night and day like a skulking lout. Well, he had a chance now to take a good look at her. . . . She was neither mad nor sane, neither old nor young. She had beauty, but it was rather the beauty of nature, not of a personality. She was like a calm sea at sunrise. She neither questioned nor answered. There were incongruities about her too. A da Vinci head stuck on the torso of a dragoon; steady, luminous eyes that burned behind torn veils. He gazed at her searchingly, as if to tear from her skull the cocoons constantly gathering in her eyes. A vital, hypnotic quietude. The stare of a medium, and the medium's voice. Her white neck was a little too long. It quivered when she spoke.

This meeting which, like an overture that threatened never to come to an end, left him hollowed out. His body was no longer an organism endowed with blood and muscle, with feelings and ideas, but a shell through which the wind whistled. Weird their language, like the flight of a whale at the
sting of a harpoon when, quivering with rage and pain, it dives below the froth of the sea, its watery trail stained with blood.

He abandoned all effort to follow their words. His glance settled on Vanya's long goosey neck that vibrated like a lyre. So soft and smooth, her neck. Soft as vicuña. If you were left at the foot of the stairs, stunned and helpless, with bats whirring in your ears and a neck like that to fasten on, to clutch, to pray to . . . if you suddenly got up with rhododendrons in your mouth, and your mouth torn back to the ears, if you had an organ in your entrails and the arms of a gorilla, arms that would crush blasphemously, ecstatically, if you had all darkness and night to roll in and curse and vomit and a neck beside you vibrating like a lyre, a neck so soft, so smooth, a neck sewn with eyes that pierced the veils of the future and spoke an unknown, an obscene language, if . . .

D
AY BY
day the shadows grew longer and the colors everywhere merged into golden browns and deep russets. Here and there objects stood out against the dull horizon with skeletal vigor: gaunt oaks twisting their licorice boughs in the gray pigment of sky, frail saplings drooping like scholars overloaded with wisdom.

As the days advanced a pall spread over the city; the wind roared through the deep gorges, whirling the dust and litter of the streets into choking spirals. The skyscrapers rose up with sepulchral gleam amid a haze of gray and rust. But in the cemeteries there was green, grass of resurrection, of life eternal. The rivers, too, were green, green as bile.