The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (84 page)

But we must not confuse the levels of discourse YOU ARE HERE and the paradiso terrestre is a paradiso corporel which must last a little longer so that you follow the principle not to follow the principle but remain good lovers or maybe call his bluff and accept I promessi sposi? We love each other now, we have loved each other for six weeks, isn’t that enough?

No. If it’s not just tact and diplomacy you’re trying to use, if you really love me as you say, please don’t give up. Of course there are problems, of course there may be difficult adjustments for both of us, there always are. But I know, I know, deep down, I feel we’ve had too little time. If we can only give ourselves a year, another summer, we’ll never want to leave each other, never. The gods can condemn us to life and death, but they can’t force us to be human in our lives.

Can’t they?

Ripeness is all and ripeness is far beyond calm and wisdom, è un astratto furore.

Stavro that’s beautiful. I’m not sure whether it’s true but it’s beautiful. Thank you. I must however go to Rome alone for three or four days.

What! Why, what for?

To meet my husband.

But, I thought you’d left him.

He wants me back. We’re going to talk it over.

But that’s absurd, how can he, you’re with me now, you must divorce and marry me, oh promise me you’ll ask for a divorce and won’t weaken, oh god, three days! What shall I do?

If you care as much as you say you can wait for me.

Three days! I’ll never get through them. I’m going to lose you, I know it I know it please don’t go who does he think he is after three years!

Not for sale as object of exchange of information.

But every structure presupposes a void, into which it is possible to fall into delirious discourse, the intelligence suspended helplessly as it watches the acting out of its own lunatic trajectory.

For within every idyll there opens out another idyll, as a vast mouth that never names the secret chiasmus in her, in him, the idyll of Armel and Larissa who once upon a spacetime is a poem not a couple, the idyll of Marco, Oscar, Stavro and Marika, Amanda, Maddy and the rest, Armel and Veronica, Veronica and perhaps even Christopher. And within each idyll opens out the idyll of the paradiso terrestre which is no longer Arcadia but the other scene.

Who speaks? The Other Author.

Chi parla?

Hi Lara!

Armel! Hi.

Hi. Are you alone?

Yes of course. Where are you?

Downstairs may I come up?

Ma certo caro.

In many languages from Phaedrus to Freud effortlessly displacing notions with several syndiachrumbilical chords.

You look terrific Armel. So brown and slim. Too slim in fact you’re positively thin.

You know I live on sun and yoghurt. I’ve been on the beach. Waiting for your arrival. What happened to you? I went to the semiotic castle as arranged and you’d gone.

Yes I’m sorry. Fear perhaps. I went off.

So they told me. Professor La Bocca I mean.

He’s nice.

Yes. But he wasn’t very discreet. So Italian. They not only boast of their own conquests they gossip about others.

That’s unlike you Armel why this anti-Italian generalising?

Well. Are you in love?

Allegra ma non troppo.

The happiness sequence?

Busting out of sequence. He’s not Italian anyway he’s Albanian. Perhaps Etruscan. Virgil was an Etruscan.

It’s an Italian name.

Laretino? I guess so I think his mother married an Italian, but Stavro is apparently Albanian. Keeping his t for two his object and his V for victory.

Oh Larissa are you still at it?

Not really. Though it acquires a curious importance when a man proposes insistantly and has nothing to offer but his body and his name. Which is why, I suppose, he offers them around with such tremendous pressure though heaven knows the second is no longer necessary for the purpose of the first. But in order not to seem too eager for just the body as a love-machine one starts thinking, or pretending to think, of the name.

You seem unusually allegra, even agitata, did you say ma non troppo?

Stavro Laretino. Yes of course it’s Italian, from Aretino, a district and a man. Do you know who l’Aretino was? A sort of scabrous precursor of Don Giovanni except that he was a mere writer like Casanova. Well there it is I shall miss my Subject in him, keeping it even if it gets mauled a bit and he will miss his victory and his it in me, keeping them as a small winner. He has ashthma however, sometimes in the middle of it all, and wouldn’t be able to sing the part.

You haven’t changed. Except that you’re gentler. And even more beautiful. Love becomes you.

I become love. Why are you inquisitioning me you never liked my inquisitions even in marriage or rather you complained that I wasn’t jealous and asked no questions, then complained when I was and did. Am I not allowed an affair even in separation?

I said gentler. Don’t get arch and aggressive. I’m prepared to wait. I asked you for the same patience once but you ran away.

Because I was on the spot and you did it so clumsily, and we were together. Now we’re not, I’m here, you’re there.

I’m here now.

Yes. I’m glad. I think I need your help Armel.

Is it serious?

No, it’s too absurd, a carnival misalliance. But unexpectedly it’s hitting me in the other place. Oh it’s all under control, in fact his sheer cheek in taking it for granted that marriage is the greatest boon any man can confer on a woman exasperates me though I try not to show it. But I may find, when I’ve done everything to make him run away, that I can’t cope.

Stop now.

I can’t. Oh it’s not just that he won’t hear of it that would be easy. It’s me, it’s the idyll, and the way your own idyll opened up such a terrible nostalgia for what we had, you and me.

Why don’t you do the running away?

Oh, the chiasmus. He’s weak and couldn’t stand it whereas I in theory can. So that he must himself want to run away and I must bring him to it by awakening his fear.

Isn’t that just a grandiose pseudo-generous way of
proepigramming
your sense of loss?

Oh I know. Maybe that is not what I meant at all. I plunge into the dimension of his stupidity, more a sort of literalness, as opposed to literality, his belief in his own words, which is infectious in the end so that I find myself wanting to lay aside my other eyes my overhead projector and cultivate my garden or rather, help him bring up his children, look after a man, do something useful for a change. It’s a fantasy of course.

Well. Let me know. I’ll have to change my will.

Your what?

I don’t want to leave whatever I have to someone else’s children.

Oh Armel don’t be so stuffy. As if I were thinking of money! I told you anyway, it’s a fantasy.

Yes well it does smack of the society lady rushing to Africa to look after lepers.

That’s unkind. And it’s more than that Armel. In purely practical physiological terms I can’t take the amount he needs, any more than I could take yours, I’m already in considerable pain. We’re playing at gods but for all their ludicrous love life they don’t have nephrectomies and other ectomies except maybe castration. You’d think that after the removal of so much there’d be plenty of room down there but no, it knocks and knocks and he will damage me, for life probably. I keep begging for nights off but what he means by a night off is twice in the afternoon before and twice in the small hours the moment of truth remember.

Stop now Larissa, come back with me.

Stop at a stop sign and what if the chap behind you doesn’t? The dialogue proceeds, and a smarrimento. He wants this happiness so much I’m even tempted to give it, for a year or so, a pig-male eon, I doubt his love will last more than that, and then to die, so that he won’t have the burden and embarrassment of an older woman on his hands. It’s, it’s the closest I’ve come to, well, a mystical experience.

This is pure romanticism, Larissa, dramatization and self-pity.

That from you? And what about your own mystical experience of love?

Please Lara don’t rake up all that. Listen to me. His love won’t last two months. If you can’t shake him off the normal way call his bluff remember?

Well you didn’t get cold feet why should he?

He is not me but a motherless doorhandle crying order order, a toy he will discard as soon as given. Larissa we had fifteen years. You can’t throw that away.

Why not? That may be their meaning. And what do you want me back for? As the femme légitime? A hostess? To show I’ve come back? Che vuoi?

I want to save you.

Oh Armel.

I know.

Stavro also said I want to take you over. I half waited for I want to save you he’s certainly the type, always proposing to women not in fact available. He calls his wife Maddy.

Larissa why go through with this, giving out, as usual, to the mediocre, you’ll only get hurt, as usual, precisely because it’s mediocre.

I know. J’attire les cons et les fous.

Thank you.

Nonsense Armel you were always the exception.

Was I? And why make an exception of him now? He’ll even do you out of your private suicide pact. There are easier ways.

Because I am writing this libretto Armel, I can play all the parts, including Donna Elvira who talks like a book, remember, though in Molière it’s Don Juan who talks like a book you see how the semes of portraits travel. I can identify with them all, even Donna Anna who mourns her dead father the Commandatore the law-bearer. The only one I can’t identify with is that fool Don Ottavio who offers himself as father and husband. Unless I can turn him into Don Giovanni, then I can imagine him.

Is that what Stavro said?

Something like that. But he talks a lot of nonsense, like the greatest calamity for Europe and the world was the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He’s an amateur Don Giovanni he says so himself though he puts it differently, a recalcitrant and inhibited no-good-first-time Don Juan I think he said, and he pours out his short lists by way of curriculum vitae with a slightly different version each time, but longs to stop, this time it’s real and don’t forget I’m a gentleman.

Voglio far il gentil uomo. A gentleman, if the concept still exists, doesn’t need to say he is.

Don’t be snobbish and beastly, the revolution is with us.

Well he seems as archaic as I am, I didn’t know such people still hung around. Strange at his age.

Yes, he’s an anachronism. Or it’s a lost generation neither one thing nor the other. Even students are more sophisticated. There is however a curious pull about it, out of archaic flaws inherited from courtly love.

So you regard revolutionary students as sophisticated?

Oh I didn’t mean just politics, but yes.

Some of them are as reactionary and bourgeois as you’d call me.

Well of course. But they divide themselves neatly into those who work hard, marry young and take their responsibilities as citizens as conventionally as we did, and those who reject all the rules of society and have themselves a ball, even if the latter often become the former. It’s the mixture of the two sterotypes I find disorientating, the irresponsibility and evident lack of moral gumption, combined with the earnestness, the intellectual and emotional standards of suburbia.

People are individuals, his naivety may be personal. As for his politics don’t forget that as an Albanian exile he may have very good reasons to be against revolution.

Of course he’s an individual, I love him for what he is, it moves me, I want to help him grow up.

You want to save him.

Touchée.

So let him be. Oh Lara don’t you see what you’re doing, the same pattern, telescoping a lifetime into a few weeks, just as he’s no doubt repeating an even more obvious one. And you won’t be able to hide your strength in an idyll for long, you will crush him and he will run away, which is when you will start fantasising him, if you haven’t already, and suffer.

I know. He is the Faun. He looks like a faun, a foreshortened faun. And I am playing Miriam. But without the gothic structure or Donatello’s romantic fidelity. That’s why I transferred the whole narrative to Rome, the International Theme you know, as well as the psychosis.

But you’re not going to, coldly, use

Ma, devo raccontare qualcosa. I shall spell you into the sentence I write into the paragraph into which I insert you the sentence I write. But no, we’re going to Lima.

You’re mad. What about your job?

I’m here on a sabbatical you forget, starting September.

To be spent in a pastoral pastiche of marriage outside the walls? And he’s already a third person to you. You should dip into his own angle of vision not yours.

Oh don’t Booth me I do dip that’s the trouble but too deep I know it better than he does himself.

It will escape. You have no right to reify him into the voiceless object of an intellect that delimits him. A human being lives to the end on his lack of definition, he always has the last word.

Read Bakhtine! Of course he’ll have the last word which will be a cowardly silence. But Armel this is a conversation not a book, even if I talk like a book. How can I use the second person about him to you?

Of course, I am your second person singular why persecutest thou/me. But aren’t you composing a motet for a prepared Oedipiano with a falsetto sound? And what about the previous chapter?

I know, it’s a flop. As this one, and the next, redundant but necessary for qualcosa to continue. Narration is life and I am Scheherezade.

Incapable of a thousand and one nights. Or ten a day for a hundred days.

It will all get changed and transmuted,

How then does it get into the text?

cancelled even, for it does not exist, except in my own boundless need and fear that will alter the signifiers into a delirious discourse through swift-footed Hermes with terrible letters no doubt that we can skip as he will, for no recipient desires a message of enduring pain redundant and therefore without information content because not from the Emperor of China, all the less so if he has caused it so that I shall not transmit it many times and the unmany times I do I shall regret because I do not hope to turn again where the lack of imagination had itself to be imagined, unless I transmit it to you, but of course that’s useless since the recipient is the meaning of the message, even if he has an earful of sirensong or wax or crabs and can’t take any aspect of the truth gone wild.