Tristessa (5 page)

So
I
can sleep. But no. Immediately he wants another jolt of some kind, he ups and opes his drawer and pulls out a tube of codeine pills and counts out ten and pops that in with a slug of cold coffee from his old cup that sits on the chair by the bed—and he endures in the night, with the light on, and lights further cigarettes—At some time or other, around dawn, he falls asleep—I get up after some reflections at 9 or 8, or 7, and quickly put my wet clothes on to rush upstairs to my warm bed and dry clothes—Old Bull is sleeping, he finally made it, Nirvana, he's snoring and he's out, I hate to wake him up but he'll have to lock himself in, with his bolt and slider—It's gray outside, rain has finally stopped after heaviest surge at dawn. 40,000 families were flooded out in the Northwestern part of Mexico City that storm. Old Bull, far from floods and storms with his needles and his powders beside the bed and cottons and eyedroppers and paraphernalias—“When you got morphine, you dont need anything else, me boy,” he says to me in the daytime all combed and high sitting in his easy chair with papers the picture of glad health—“Madame Poppy, I call her. When you've got Opium you've got all you need.—All that good
O
goes down in your veins and you feel like singing Hallelujah!” And he laughs. “Bring me Grace Kelly on this chair, Morphine on that chair, I'll take Morphine.”

“Ava Gardner
too
?”

“Ava GVavna and all the bazotzkas in all the countries so far—if I can have my M in the morning and my M in the afternoon and my M in the evening before going to bed, I dont even need to know what time it is on the City Hall Clock—” He tells me all this and more nodding vigorously and sincerely. His jaw quivers with emotion. “Why for krissakes if I had no junk I'd be bored to death, I'd die of
boredom
” he complains, almost crying—“I read Rimbaud and Verlaine, I know what I'm talking about—Junk is the only thing I want—You've never been junksick, you don't know what it's like—Boy when you wake up in the morning sick and take a good bang, boy, that feels good.” I can picture myself and Tristessa waking up in our nuptial madbed of blankets and dogs and cats and canaries and dots of whoreplant in the coverlet and naked shoulder to shoulder (under the gentle eyes of the Dove) she shoots me in or I shoot myself in a big bang of waterycolored poison straight into the flesh of your arm and into your system which it instantly proclaims
its
—you feel the weak fall of your body to the disease in the solution—but never having been junksick, I don't know the horror of the disease—A story Old Bull could tell much better than I—

HE LETS ME out, but not until he's muttered and sputtered out of bed—holding his pajamas and bathrobe, pushing in his belly where it hurts, where some kind of hernia cave-in annoys him,—poor sick fella, almost 60 years old and hanging on to his diseases without bothering anybody—Born in Cincinnati, brought up in the Red River Steamboats. (redlegged? his legs as white as snow)—

I see that it's stopped raining and I'm thirsty and have drunk Old Bull's two cups of water (boiled, and kept in a jar)—I go across the street in my damp sopping shoes and buy an ice-cold Spur Cola and gobble it down on my way to my room—The skies are opening up, there might be sunshine in afternoon, the day is almost wild and Atlantican, like a day at sea off the coast of the Firth of Scotland—I yell imperial flags in my thoughts and rush up the two flights to my room, the final flight a ricket of iron tin-spans creaking and cracking on nails and full of sand, I get on the hard adobe floor of the roof, the Tejado, and walk on slippery little puddles around the air of the courtyard rail only two foot high so you can just easily fall down three flights and crack your skull on tile Espaniala floors where Americans gnash and fight sometimes in raucous parties early in the twilight of the morning,—I could fall, Old Bull almost fell over when he lived on the roof a month, the children sit on the soft stone of the 2 foot rail and goof and talk, all day running around the thing and skidding and I never like to watch—I come to my room around two curves of the Hole and unlock my padlock which is hooked to decaying halfout nails (one time left the room open and unattended all day)—I go in and jam the door in the rain damp wood and rain has swollen the wood and the door barely tightens at the top—I get in my dry hobo pants and two big hobo shirts and go to bed with thick socks on and finish the Spur and lay it on the table and say “Ah” and wipe the back of my mouth and look awhile at holes in my door showing the outside Sunday morning sky and I hear churchbells down Orizaba lane and people are going to church and I'm going to sleep and I'll make up for it later, goodnight.

“BLESSED LORD, THOU lovedest all sentient life.” Why do I have to sin and do the sign of the Cross? “Not one of the vast accumulation of conceptions from beginningless time, through the present and into the never ending future, not one of them is graspable.”

It's the old question of “Yes life's not real” but you see a beautiful woman or something you can't get away from wanting because it is there in front of you—This beautiful woman of 28 standing in front of me with her fragile body (“I put thees in my neck [a dicky] so nobody look and see my beautiful body,” she thinks she jokes, not regarding herself as beautiful) and that face so expressive of the pain and loveliness that went no doubt into the making of this fatal world,—a beautiful sunrise, that makes you stop on the sands and gaze out to sea hearing Wagner's Magic Fire Music in your thoughts—the fragile and holy countenance of poor Tristessa, the tremulous bravery of her little junk-racked body that a man could throw up in the air ten feet—the bundle of death and beauty—all pure Form standing in front of me, all the racks and tortures of sexual beauty, the breast, the limb of the middle body, the whole huggable mess of a woman some of them even though 6 feet high you can slumber on their bellies in the night like a nap on a dreaming bankside of a woman—Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug—You shrug away the warm kiss, the tongue and lips, the tug at the thin waist, the whole warm floating thing against you held tight—the little woman—for which rivers flow and men fall down stepladders—The thin cold long brown fingers of Tristessa, slow, and casual and lazy, like the meeting of lips—The Tristessa Spanish Night of her deep love hole, the bullfights in her dreams of you, the lazy rainy rose against the idle cheek—And all the concomitant lovelinesses of a lovely woman a young man in a far-off country should yearn to stay for—I was traveling around in circles in North America in many a gray tragedy.

I STAND LOOKING at Tristessa, she's come to visit me in my room, she won't sit down, she stands and talks—in the candle light she is excited and eager and beautiful and radiant—I sit down on the bed, looking down on the stony floor, while she talks—I don't even listen to what she's saying, about junk, Old Bull, how she's tired—“I go to the do it to-
morra
—TO-MORRAR—” she taps to emphasize me with her hand, so I have to say “Yeh Yeh go ahead” and she goes on with her story, which I don't understand—I just can't look at her for fear of thoughts I'll get—But she takes care of all of that for me, she says “Yes, we are in pain—” I say “La Vida es dolor” (life is pain), she agrees, she says life is love too. “When you got one million pesos I dont care how many, they dont move”—she says, indicating my paraphernalia of leather-covered scriptures and Sears Roebuck envelopes with stamps and airmail envelopes inside—as though I had a million pesos hiding in time in my floor—“A million pesos does not move—but when you got the friend, the friend give it to you in the bed” she says, legs spread a little, pumping with her loins at the air in the direction of my bed to indicate how much better a human being is than a million paper pesos—I think of the inexpressible tenderness of receiving this holy friendship from the sacrificial sick body of Tristessa and I almost feel crying or grabbing her and kissing her—A wave of loneliness passes over me, remembering past loves and bodies in beds and the unbeatable surge when you go into your beloved deep and the whole world goes with you—Though we know that Mara the Tempter is evil, his fields of temptation are innocent—How could Tristessa, rousing passion in me, have anything to do, except as a field of merit or a dupe of innocence or a material witness to my murderous lust, how could she be blamed and how could she be sweeter than standing there explaining my love directly with her pantomiming thighs. She's high, she keeps trying at the lapel of her kimono (underneath's a slip that shows) and trying to attach it unattachably to an inexistent button of the coat. I look into her eyes deep, meaning “Would you be my friend like that?” and she looks straight at me pools of neither this or that, her combination of reluctance to break her personal disgust covenant moreover lodged in the Virgin Mary, and her love of wish-for-me, makes her as mysterious as the Tathagata whose form is described as being as inexistent, rather as inscrutable as the direction in which a put-out fire has gone. I can't get a yes or no out of her eyes for the time I allot to them. Very nervous, I sit, stand, sit, she stands explaining further things. I am amazed by the way her skin wrinkles O so sensitively down the bridge of her nose in even clean lines, and her little laugh of delight that comes so rarely and so's littlegirlish, child of glee,—It's all my own sin if I make a play for her.

I WANT TO take her in both hands by the waist and pull her slowly close with a few choice words of sudden endearment like “Mi gloria angela” or “Mi whichever it is” but I have no language to cover my embarrassment—Worst of all, would it be, to have her push me aside and say “No, no, no” like disappointed mustachio'd heroes in French movies being turned out by the little blonde who is the brakeman's wife, by a fence, in smoke, midnight, in the French railroad yards, and I turn away big pained loverface and apologize,—going away thence with the sensation that I have a beastly streak in me I didn't notice, conceptions common to all young lovers and old. I don't want to disgust Tristessa—It would horrify me to cause her ruinous fleshpetal tender secrets and have her wake up in the morning lodged against the back of some unwelcome man who loves by night and sleeps it off, and wakes up blearing to shave and by his very presence causes consternation where before there was absolute perfect purity of nobody.

But what I've missed when I don't get that friend lunge of the lover's body, coming right at me, all mine, but it was a slaughterhouse for meat and all you do is bend to wreak havocs in somethings-gotta-give of girlihood.—When Tristessa was 12 years old suitors twisted her arm in the sun outside the mother's cooking door—I've seen it a million times, in Mexico the young men want the young girls—Their birthrate is terrific—They turn em out wailing and dying by the golden tons in vats of semiwinery messaferies of oy Ole Tokyo birthcrib.—I lost track of my thought there,—

Yes, the thighs of Tristessa and the golden flesh all mine, what am I a Caveman? Am a Caveman.

Caveman buried deep under ground.

It would just be the coronna of her cheeks pulsing to mouth, and my rememberance of her splendid eyes, like sitting in a box the lovely latest in France enters the crashing orchestra and I turn to Monsieur next to me whispering “She is
splendide
, non?”—With Johnny Walker Scotch in my tuxedo coatpocket.

I stand up. I must see her.

POOR TRISTESSA IS swaying there explaining all her troubles, how she hasn't got enough money, she's sick, she'll be sick in the morning and in the look of her eye I caught perhaps the gesture of a shadow of acceptance of the idea of me as a lover—Only time I ever saw Tristessa cry, was when she was junk sick on the edge of Old Bull's bed, like a woman in the back pew of a church in daily novena she dabs at her eyes—She points to the sky again, “If my friend dont pay me back,” looking at me straight, “my Lord pay me back—
more
” and I can feel the spirit enter the room as she stands, waiting with her finger pointed up, on her spread legs, confidently, for her Lord to pay her back—“So I geev every-things I have to my friend, and eef he doan pay me back”—she shrugs—“my Lord pay me back”—standing alert again—“
More
” and as the spirit swims around the room I can tell the effective mournful horror of it (her reward is so thin) now I see radiating from the crown of her head innumerable hands that have come from all ten quarters of the Universe to bless her and pronounce her Bodhisat for saying and knowing that so well.

Her Enlightenment is perfect,—“And we are nothing, you and me”—she pokes at my chest, “Jew—Jew—” (Mexican saying “You”) “—and me”—pointing at herself—“We are
nothing
. Tomorrar we may be die, and so we are nothing—” I agree with her, I feel the strangeness of that truth, I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there,—She says “I know you want to sleep.”

“No no” I say, seeing she wants to leave—

“I go to it sleep, early in the mawnins I go get see for the mans and I get the morfina and com bock for Old Bool”—and since we are
nada
, nothing, I forget what she said about friends all lost in the beauty of her strange intelligent imagery, every bit true—“She's an Angel,” I think secretly, and escort her to the door with movement of arm as she leans to the door talking to go out—We are careful not to touch each other—I tremble, once I jumped a mile when her fingertip hit my knee in conversations, at chairs—the first afternoon I'd seen her, in dark glasses, in the sunny afternoon window, by a candle light lit for kicks, sick kicks of life, smoking, beautiful, like the Owner Damsel of Las Vegas, or the Revolutionary Heroine of Marlon Brando Zapata Mexico—with Culiacan heroes and all—That's when she got me—In afternoon space of gold the look, the sheer beauty, like silk, the children giggling, me blushing, at guy's house, where we first found Tristessa and started all this—Sympaticus Tristessa with her heart a gold gate, I'd first dug to be an evil enchantress—I'd run across a Saint in Modern Mexico and here I was fantasizing dreams away about foreordained orders for nothing and necessary betrayals—the betrayal of the old father when he entices by ruse the three little crazy kids screaming and playing in the burning house, “I'll give each one your favorite cart,” out they come running for the carts, he gives them the High Incomparable Great Cart of the Single Vehicle White Bullock which they're too young to appreciate—with that greatcart command, he'd made me an offer—I look at Tristessa's leg and decide to avoid the issue of fate and rest beyond heaven.