The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (2 page)

The rectangle of light is only a refracted continuation of the oblong thrown on the red stone floor between the doorway and the table. The beads ripple the light of this oblong also, turning the red stone floor into a red river. Sometimes it is sufficient to envisage a change for the change to occur. The hanging beads are still, however, and the red river is only a stone floor.

– Take one or more tins of Frankfurt sausages allowing two per person gently split each sausage down the middle and insert one pineapple finger into each split simmer in pineapple juice for two to three minutes meanwhile open a tin of either spinach or garden peas and warm up but do not boil in thick bottomed saucepan serve the pineapple sausages piping hot on a bed of spinach or garden peas. That sounds very good. Would you like some more gruel?

The circle of gruel in the bowl is greyish white and pimply. It steams less, and appears quite flaccid. In the rectangle of rippling light a fly moves jerkily.

The squint is not so blue, or so wide, in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor and the rectangle of rippling light on the wooden table. It is good that the gruel was not brought but come to, arrived at. Sooner or later movement, which is necessary but not
inevitable
, will lead to attainment. Yet, frequently, the gruel is brought.

– Mrs. Ned’s tub was broken, you see, and I helped her mend it. So naturally I arrived too late this morning to catch Mrs. Jim. Mr. Marburg the butler said she waited as long as possible, but then she had to go or she’d get the worst of the market. Because of course she knew from yesterday that I would have a message for her to give to Mrs. Tom, but she didn’t know that Mrs. Ned would delay me with her tub. So then when she got back I hadn’t been able to give her the message. Well in the end it didn’t matter because Mr. Marburg the butler was most obliging and said he would contact Mrs. Tom and himself give her the message, but he charged me for the call, pocketing the money no doubt because I can’t see that Mrs. Mgulu would know one way or the other, but he said she keeps a careful check on such things.

Some of the gruel’s globules remain attached to the rounded white sides of the bowl, which looks like the inside of the moon. Nobody has ever photographed the inside of the moon. To see inside a bladder the instrument is called a cystoscope. The inside of a bladder is framed in pink.

Yet frequently, the gruel is brought. It has then been sufficient merely to imagine movement for the movement to occur. Or not, as the case might be.

The skin around the eyes, both the mobile eye and the fixed eye, is waxy. But the eyelids are the right colour. More so, at any rate, than usual, at least in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor.

– Yes, I am pale, but look at my eyelids, they are the right colour, for the time of year, I mean.

– So they are. It is a pity, of course, that the colour has gone out of fashion.

– Very witty. But you are talking to yourself. This dialogue does not necessarily occur.

The waxiness is due to a deficiency in the liver.

In the rectangle of rippling light on the wrinkled wood of the kitchen table there is no fly.

– Did you bring the
Duodenica
?
It said during or after meals, or was it before? What does it say?

The formula printed on the bottle marked
Duodenica
is Aluminium glycinate (dihydroxy aluminium aminoacetate) 850 mg. light magnesium carbonate B.P. 150 mg.

– I think you ought to take this, not me.

– Oh thank you, I was hoping you’d say that. Then you can have this heart extract, o point two grammes of heart extract, corresponding to o point eight o six grammes of fresh organs. Or this one. It’s for the bladder. Hexamethylene tetramine crystallised and chemically pure both preventive and curative diuretic it constitutes an active dissolvant of uric acid especially for all infections of bilious and urinary ducts colitis angiocholitis pyelitis pyelonephritis etcetera its antiseptic powers are reinforced by a minimal addition of potassium citrate to the hexamethylene tetramine. By the way did you go to the Labour Exchange this morning?

The waxiness could even be due to cancer.

The bedroom door is framed by the kitchen door. In the short passage, almost cubic in its brevity, the lavatory door to the left is certainly another possibility. To the right of the kitchen door, facing the lavatory door, the door to the front verandah room, where the lodgers live, is not a possibility. If the waxiness were due to cancer then the eyelids would not be the right colour, but of course the colour of the eyelids might have reflected the luminosity from the rectangle of rippling light. On the other hand, the luminosity thrown by the rectangle of light would also have affected the waxiness of the skin elsewhere around the eyes. A microscope might perhaps reveal, a teinoscope might perhaps reveal, from this position between the small high window and the mattress on the floor, through the cubic passage and the angular
framework
of the kitchen door, that the squint is less wide and less blue, less noticeable in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor. A telescope might perhaps reveal a planet off course, a satellite out of orbit.

The transverse bar of the window is dark and flaking with age. At eye-level it is empty of flies. The old wood has cracked considerably, as if the flies had caused much
commotion
in their wintry love-making. Flies do not make love, they have sexual intercourse. Only human beings make love. The transverse bar at eye-level is quite empty. The vertical bar is empty too, and the window-sill, and the window-panes, and the vertical wall around the window, and the other three walls, and the low cracked ceiling, all are empty of flies in their wintry occupation.

– Occupation?

– I am a builder.

Behind the trellis the bland black face looks patched like wet asphalt with curved oblongs and blobs of white light.

– A builder? But your hands. They look such sensitive hands.

– Ah, but have you seen my eyelids, they are the right colour.

– You know very well this dialogue cannot occur. Start again. Occupation?

– I am a builder.

– The truth is after all unimportant in a case like this.

– I haven’t actually built for a long time, you see. I am as you might say a master builder, a man of ideas, which others carry out. No, well, they haven’t for a long time, it’s true. In my country they did, before the displacement of course. I had many people under me. I built many houses, in many different styles, as for example the miniature stately home style. That used to be very fashionable you know. I lived in a miniature stately home style house I built myself. I also built office blocks. The old glass house style, you seem to like it here. I was very successful –

– Look, since you’re inventing this dialogue you ought to give something to the other chap to say.

– But I must get all those facts in.

– He won’t let you, he exists too, you know.

– I suppose so, with his beautiful bland black face patched like wet asphalt in curved oblongs and blobs of light. And the facts, anyway, are not true.

– I know. You must be more realistic. Say for instance that you were trained at a Resettlement Camp.

– I built the tower of Pisa and it leant.

– Inside it spirals. A bronchoscope might perhaps reveal –

– Oh shut up.

At eye-level through the window, about three metres away, and to the left of the fig-tree which overlooks the road, there is Mrs. Ned’s bungalow. Some people would call it a shack. The windowless clapboard wall immediately opposite is dark with age and the cunonia at the corner of it is dead, its dark red spike dried up. To the right, at the front of the bungalow, the verandah looks dilapidated and at the back the straw shed over the wash-tub is crumbling down. The wash-tub has a bar of new pale wood nailed along its top edge. The shack is exactly similar to this bungalow and exactly in line with it, but too close, for it blocks the view. Some people would call the verandah a porch.

– Well, you started it, your dialogue gets out of hand.

A telemetre might perhaps reveal the distance to be three and a half metres, or even four. The view to the right, if it were visible from this position at the right of the window, would be the fig-tree. The view obliquely to the left is of the corner of the porch belonging to the shack next to Mrs. Ned’s. The view ahead, if a view were available, would consist of innumerable bungalows in small bare gardens where nothing grows very tall. Some people would call them shacks. The shacks would be low and spare with slightly sloping
corrugated
iron roofs that straddle the smaller roofs of the entrance verandahs. The insulating paint on most of the roofs would have flaked away leaving brown patches of rusting ripple. The gardens would be small and flat.

– You’re incapable of preparing any episode in advance. You can’t even think.

At least that is the view from the kitchen window over the sink, which faces the South East side of the Settlement, unblocked by Mrs. Ned’s shack. If Mrs. Ned’s shack were not in the way, all the innumerable other shacks to the South West would be visible from this window also, unless all the shacks save this one had been removed, or destroyed, in the walking interval between the kitchen window and this
window
. It is sometimes sufficient merely to imagine an episode for the episode to occur. A periscope might perhaps reveal a scene of pastoral non-habitation. It would be sufficient merely to move two steps to the left for the window to be filled, in an oblique way, only with the fig-tree.

– I am a builder. I received Vocational Training at a Resettlement Camp after the displacement. Since then,
however
, I have only been spasmodically in labour. Since then, however, I have only been employed intermittently.

Frequently, after all, the gruel is brought. It is sometimes sufficient merely to imagine movement, in the walking interval between the kitchen window and this window, for the
movement
to occur, though not necessarily in that precise form. The gardens, when visible, are too small and the shacks too close for health. Every shack, climbing over its own verandah, might be a fly straddling another fly. It is sometimes sufficient to imagine a change, but in this case the shacks, if visible, would merely be shacks. Some people like to call them bungalows.

Beyond the closed wrought-iron gates the mimosas up at the big house are in bloom, gracefully draping the top of the white pillars on either side of the gate. Single branches also droop over the white; wall that separates the property from the road. Beyond the tall wrought-iron gates and beyond the mimosa on either side the plane-trees line the drive, casting a welcome shade. One half of the tall wrought-iron gates may be ajar, might perhaps be pushed open with an effort of the will. It is sometimes sufficient.

Here however the fig-tree’s thick grey twigs poke upwards into the sky. The branches bearing them are contorted, like the convolutions of the brain. The darker grey trunk leans along the edge of the bank at an angle of forty degrees, inside which, from a standing position, the road may be seen. One of the branches sweeps downwards out of the trunk, away from the road, forming with the trunk an arch that frames the piece of road within it. The thick and long grey twigs on this down sweeping branch grow first downward also, then curve up like large U-letters.

In summer, from ground-level, nearer to the fig-tree, the arch formed by the leaning trunk and the down-sweeping branch frames a whole landscape of descending olive-groves beyond the road, which itself disappears behind the bank. In summer the grey framework of trunk and branch is further framed by a mass of deep green foliage.

At the moment, from a standing position, it is only a piece of road which is framed. At the moment the fig-tree looks blasted.

If the fig-tree here looks blasted then the mimosas up at the big house cannot be in bloom. The two events do not occur simultaneously. It is sometimes sufficient to imagine but only within nature’s possibilities.

Beyond the closed wrought-iron gates the plane-trees line the drive, forming with their bare and upward branches a series of networks that become finer and finer as the drive recedes towards the big house, made now discernible by the leaflessness. First there are the vertical bars of the tall wrought-iron gates, flanked, behind the two white pillars and white walls, by the feathery green mimosa trees which are not in bloom. Beyond the vertical bars of the closed wrought-iron gates there is the thick network of the first plane-trees on either side of the drive. Beyond the thick
network
of bare branches there is a finer network, closing in a little over the drive, and beyond that a finer network still. The network of bare branches functions in depth, a corridor of cobwebs full of traps for flies, woven by a giant spider
behind
huge prison bars.

It is not true that the mimosas cannot blossom while the fig-tree looks blasted. The small nodules just visible on the straight long twigs of the fig-tree may already represent the first, January round of buds, the edible ones which do not produce leaves and fruit. Therefore the mimosas could just be in bloom. Unless of course the fig-tree does not look as blasted as all that. The nodules could already be the buds that produce leaves and fruit, in which case the problem does not arise.

– Oh anyworrourr slishy ming nang pactergoo worror worrerer-er-er-er whinnyman shoo. Oh no. Fang hang norryman, go many wolloshor-or-or nang – Oh, how silly of me, tharrawarrapack hang norryman.

– Is it you or me you’re talking to? Because I haven’t heard a word.

– I was talking to myself. I was just saying that I forgot to ask Mrs. Jim to buy me a packet of gruel when she went to the market this morning. I couldn’t go myself because Mrs. Mgulu wanted the sheets changed in three of the guest-rooms, her friends from Kenya are leaving you see and others are arriving. She didn’t say where from. And then I remembered that I had an extra packet stored away behind the tins for just such an emergency.