The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (13 page)

It would be

difficult indeed;—
wrenched from a tattered womb

in a single lifetime (
a solitary hazy green instant
)

to compose blunders so many

as Pietro carried out

in those v short months;—
dull sorrow and pressed on

course
.

creating, on that xviii day of September, xii fresh cardinals, vii of whom dined regularly on the legs of frogs;—setting the stage for the schism; Avignon. Then: angering swishing cardinals;—reinstating the laws of Gregory X;—suspending the suspensions of Adrian V;—giving privileges ubiquitously;—bestowing the same privileges twice; thrice; iiii times, to completely contrary parties. —While the entire world of Catholic officials shuddered at his gross mis-management of affairs, the old man had a small hermit’s cell (slightly larger than a coffin; a living tomb), built in the Castel Nuovo.

“
Oh, the peace of a cell,” he smiled simply, believing
subdue fearful drops keep it cool I am fig a latter-day fig a conclusive desert bloom and the successor of St. Peter Patriarch of the Western Church I am a little pine tree.

One thing was certain: He was an easy fellow to manipulate, and Cardinal Gaetani (the future Bonifice VIII) convinced him to resign
ad perpetuam rei memoriam
.

King Charles prepared an opposition. A huge procession of clerics and monks surrounded the castle. They cried tears by the spoonful, prayed, and besought the pope not to let the triple crown tumble, not to abdicate. The
Te Deum
was chanted, with appropriate gusto. But, though he wavered, Pietro was decided[ly uncertain; thoroughly twistable].

Primo
: He removed the papal ornaments and clothes.

Secondo
: He put on his old suit of knotted goat hair, wrapping the chain around his waist.

“
Ah, finally,” he murmured happily as he nestled into the garment. “That silk was much too soft and clean.”

Nine days later Benedetto Gaetani was proclaimed Pope as Boniface VIII. He cancelled all his predecessor’s official acts and took him to Rome. Pietro escaped. He longed for his hermit’s cell and made his way back to the Abruzzi.

He had often dreamed
stop

[
That abstemiousness, from relative youth to the state of old age, undoubtedly was the cause of some nervous disorder, due to no healthy outlet for fully enacting those higher erotic ends—the real world;—though what filth he laid up in heaven, an angelic auto-erotic dreamland, a firmament of introversion, can only be guessed. For immature childish sexuality (a supremely enticing BVM) often persists into an adult stage of development and results in anxiety-neurosis presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual shape of a supremely mischievous nature: the doubting St. Thomas sticking his hand into the wound crucifixion. spires. baptismal fluid hands pressed in prayer.
]

He had often dreamed, in previous times, of a tunnel leading
stop

naked. meat & rarest of saints

in early life a

stage of bursting

organic expansion

all the natural impulses

had full play
, temptation not leaking out the slightest (those pearly and fearful drops, wicked emission of the human body) well over L years continence must be beneficial I would think, harmlessly keeping it cool what have I improve my own breed—and me (a spineless old fellow certainly) making the great refusal Vicar of Christ upon earth I was was am fig now am flower in desert withering those withering

sexual glands

(retained)

excretions [of primary reproductive importance]

[internal] secretions,—glandular

[organism] brain. throat. abdomen

haircloth. chain [thyroid and adrenals]

stimulate. inhibit. rocks. knots

fermentative secretions

no temptation is so potent then, so ever devilishly doing that solitary sexual indulgence

but.

cowardice, which he did often wonder about, while, scampering through woods and over mountains, dexterously avoiding Bonifice’s henchmen. He slept in bushes and caves and prowled up to cottages to ask for bread, though he lived for the most part off bruised herbs. While walking through the countryside, he spotted a dove alight on the branch of a somewhat distant tree. He sighed; a sound (indicative of longing) that could be heard. The dove fell to the earth. He approached, but found a boy there first, ripping out the breasts of the bird to roast upon a fire. The boy offered to share his meal. The old man ranted and then lit off into the forest. He determined to go to Greece, so he made his way to the coast, just above Venice. He stole into a fishing boat, and pushed himself out to sea, the Adriatic. A storm blew him back; he was arrested at the base of Mt. Gargano and imprisoned near Anagni, in a cell stop.

Pietro, Pietro stop. he had often dreamed stop. a tunnel leading to the nunnery stop. arrested at the base of Mt. Gargano and imprisoned near Anagni, in the tower of the Fumone Castle stop.

fire

stop. in a cell. stop. he told himself stop.

“
Pietro, Pietro,” he told himself. “So, you wanted a cell, Pietro; and a cell you have.” In the Fumone Castle stop. in the Fumone Castle. had often dreamed, in previous times, of a tunnel leading to the nunnery. He had often dreamed of a tunnel leading from his cell to a nunnery. The stocks would be blended and the produce disposed of in the garden. (Removing some stones, the tunnel led down and under; out of his cell; and he went through it—the walls were damp and sordid; a sweating unhealthy tunnel.

He went through it to the bevy of them which he undressed; him mad for that he had so longed for:

let the children be buried in the garden: let the children be buried in the garden

taste the white f.t

the white f.t fl.sh

the wh.t. fl.sh .f n.ns

mad and glorious without end be done the rutting done. as long as could rut. as long as could rut

sweating deeper. He probed deeper into the tunnel, its walls sweating fire and
tore their garb threw me upon f.t wh.t. n.ked
n.ked. forms filled them time and again a mad skinny filled them time and again a mad skinny, rutting skinny filled them little beast

buried in the garden: let the children be buried buried in the garden and their bodies be

bit stop. the blue bottles bit, that naked being (slab of sensation), wounded his face to raw sores, pus and blood mixing with tears, which streamed, striped down, forming pools at his feet, attracting schools of repulsive, hungry worms; the punishment (striking vendetta) for those enemies, the cowards, who repulsed responsibility, a narrow breed of gross selfishness

buried in the garden and their bodies be food for worms.)

He fasted and prayed for nine months in this prison, and then died. He was the first pontiff to abdicate.

He was buried in the church of St. Agatha, at Ferentino, but, several years later, his relics were purloined and brought to the city of L’Aquila. His bones currently lie in the Church of St. Maria di Collemaggio.

Dante, in his
Inferno
, situated Pietro di Marone at the gates of hell.

fire

Maledict Michela

I.

A bloated flap of yellow fat hung beneath her jaw; nose: sharp as a cutlass; her eyes were like two shards of shattered sky; she had magnificent ankles. The music blew against her face. She felt the claws of the violins, as they scratched at her old cheeks and thighs, the former pale, powdered, the latter: enormous: like those of a thick-skinned, perissodactyl mammal.

It was on the Piazza Santo Spirito, in Florence, and the Chiesa di Santo Spirito, that final creation of Brunelleschi, rose up behind the scene, a simple geometric façade, of a yellowish-brown colour, like the hide of a sheep exposed to sun and open air.

She, Michela Spadavecchia, gazed directly at the two-toned musicians on the stage. She did not look to her right or left, because she did not need to;—it was certain the people were melting away around her, as they always did, as if her person were some great mass of reeking filth. But she smelled penetratingly of patchouli (sweet as a blossom);—and her looks were not really so much more grotesque than others on the piazza (papier-mâché faces, landscape of fleshy physical structures): young men with untidy hair and endowed with the hips of women, themselves looking as sickly as the pigeons that perched on the fountain; a French female with the countenance of an Eskimo dog; lascivious Italian men, small as crickets; other women, with noses like potatoes, or nests of appalling false carrot-coloured hair resting atop tiny, deficient heads . . .

The G string on one of the violas broke. The conductor clasped his baton,—clasping his baton, he took a step back, lost his footing and dropped his baton. Looks of embarrassment.

She rose up and, with short, slow steps, clicking of two-inch stacked heels, walked over the grease-stained stones towards the statue of Cosimo Ridolfi, to the Via Sant’Agostino, and there turned left.

II.

When young, she had been beautiful; and had been the destruction of many men. Under her care their wells had run dry.

At nineteen she looked like Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi: a long white neck, a sweet-proud chin and reddish-golden-brown hair. She had known a young man; ignorant, had treated him like a god while he smiled pigs at her, handed her bouquets; she giving to him her flower,—madly in love with him, constantly repeating words of endearment, sweet whispers and bubbling phrases. Then: even when not in his presence she began to repeat his name to herself silently, as if it were some sort of sacred formula. She was obsessed; while he regarded her quite casually;—yet her fire fed on his indifference as if it were fuel; she constantly visualised his face and, unreasonably, feared for his safety. . . . And this caused a strange reaction, even a variety of supernatural reaction formation. . . . As when a plum, left by itself, will dry into a sweet prune, but when a pile of plums are set together for a time, will rot and produce mould and awful smells. . . . In her mind’s eye she saw him: drop from ladders, drown in rivers, receive mortal knife wounds.

“
I love him, I love him,” she would murmur: “Hurt him, hurt him!”

So was her love strangely turned into a negative force; and her eyes, which were the portal for her feelings of affection, cast on him their blight:

The breasts of mothers, under her admiring gaze, sputtered out only the feeblest drops of milk; and fruit trees became barren.

III.

She took the Via del Monte alle Croci, slowly ascended the steps to San Salvatore, where she sat for thirty minutes in silent meditation. She then rose, issued out the door near the Chapel of the Neri Family, and made her way to San Miniato al Monte. She looked out over the city: the great Duomo, the Campanile of Giotto, and the tower of the Castello Vecchio, as well as the domes of all the minor churches, all this set against a strip of grey, and she felt as if placed in the heights of Domenico di Michelino’s famous painting, a mixture of beauty and hell beneath her.

She looked to her right and saw a fragile male figure; the man’s gaze however not resting on the view, but on herself, cap-à-pie, feet encased in camel-coloured whipstitched lace-up pumps, vaguely evocative of: desert seductions, woman as captive, love hot and juicy as lamb roasting on a spit: and on such fantasy his mind pitched its tent, her a golden bezel in which he would lodge his over-ripe red heart, the primal predatory instinct to seek out the lame and weakened invoked by her heels.

The next time she saw him, it was from her own balcony. He stood in the window of the hotel across the street and bowed his head. She responded with a smile and returned inside. For two days in a row the same act was repeated. On the third day she received a letter: