Tropic of Cancer (5 page)

In other respects it has been a fine day for Moldorf. A letter arrived from America. Moe is getting A’s in everything. Murray is learning to ride the bicycle. The victrola was repaired. You can see from the expression on his face that there were other things in the letter besides report cards and velocipedes. You can be sure of it because this afternoon he bought 325 francs worth of jewelry for his Fanny. In addition he wrote her a twenty-page letter. The
garçon
brought him page after page, filled his fountain pen, served his coffee and cigars, fanned him a little when he perspired, brushed the crumbs from the table, lit his cigar when it went out, bought stamps for him, danced on him, pirouetted, salaamed … broke his spine damned near. The tip was fat. Bigger and fatter than a Corona Corona. Moldorf probably mentioned it in his diary. It was for Fanny’s sake. The bracelet and the earrings, they were worth every son he spent. Better to spend it on Fanny than waste it on little strumpets like Germaine and Odette. Yes, he told Tania so. He showed her his trunk. It is crammed with gifts—for Fanny, and for Moe and Murray.

“My Fanny is the most intelligent woman in the world. I have been searching and searching to find a flaw in her—but there’s not one.

“She’s perfect I’ll tell you what Fanny can do. She plays bridge like a shark; she’s interested in Zionism; you give her an old hat, for instance, and see what she can do with it. A little twist here, a ribbon there, and
voilà que1que chose de beau!
Do you know what is perfect bliss? To sit beside Fanny, when Moe and Murray have gone to bed, and listen to the radio. She sits there so peacefully. I am rewarded for all my struggles and heartaches in just watching her. She listens intelligently. When I think of your stinking Montparnasse and then of my evenings in Bay Ridge with Fanny after a big meal, I tell you there is no comparison. A simple thing like food, the children, the soft lamps, and Fanny sitting there, a little tired, but cheerful, contented, heavy with bread … we just sit there for hours without saying a word. That’s bliss!

“Today she writes me a letter—not one of those dull stock-report letters. She writes me from the heart, in language that even my little Murray could understand. She’s delicate about everything, Fanny. She says that the children must continue their education but the expense worries her. It will cost a thousand bucks to send little Murray to school. Moe, of course, will get a scholarship. But little Murray, that little genius, Murray, what are we going to do about him? I wrote Fanny not to worry. Send Murray to school, I said. What’s another thousand dollars? I’ll make more money this year than ever before. I’ll do it for little Murray—because he’s a genius, that kid.”

I should like to be there when Fanny opens the trunk. “See, Fanny, this is what I bought in Budapest from an old Jew… This is what they wear in Bulgaria—it’s pure wool… This belonged to the Duke of something or other—no, you don’t wind it, you put it in the sun… This I want you to wear, Fanny, when we go to the Opera … wear it with that comb I showed you… And this, Fanny, is something Tania picked up for me … she’s a little bit on your type…”

And Fanny is sitting there on the settee, just as she was in the oleograph, with Moe on one side of her and little Murray, Murray the genius, on the other. Her fat legs are a little too short to reach the floor. Her eyes have a dull permanganate glow. Breasts like ripe red cabbage; they bobble a little when she leans forward. But the sad thing about her is that the juice has been cut off. She sits there like a dead storage battery; her face is out of plumb—it needs a little animation, a sudden spurt of juice to bring it back into focus. Moldorf is jumping around in front of her like a fat toad. His flesh quivers. He slips and it is difficult for him to roll over again on his belly. She prods him with her thick toes. His eyes protrude a little further. “Kick me again, Fanny, that was good.” She gives him a good prod this time—it leaves a permanent dent in his paunch. His face is close to the carpet; the wattles are joggling in the nap of the rug. He livens up a bit, flips around, springs from furniture to furniture. “Fanny, you are marvelous!” He is sitting now on her shoulder. He bites a little piece from her ear, just a little tip from the lobe where it doesn’t hurt. But she’s still dead—all storage battery and no juice. He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache. He is all warm now and helpless. His belly glistens like a patent-leather shoe. In the sockets of his eyes a pair of fancy vest buttons. “Unbutton my eyes, Fanny, I want to see you better!” Fanny carries him to bed and drops a little hot wax over his eyes. She puts rings around his navel and a thermometer up his ass. She places him and he quivers again. Suddenly he’s dwindled, shrunk completely out of sight. She searches all over for him, in her intestines, everywhere. Something is tickling her—she doesn’t know where exactly. The bed is full of toads and fancy vest buttons. “Fanny, where are you?” Something is tickling her—she can’t say where. The buttons are dropping off the bed. The toads are climbing the walls. A tickling and a tickling. “Fanny, take the wax out of my eyes! I want to look at you!” But Fanny is laughing, squirming with laughter. There is something inside her, tickling and tickling. She’ll die laughing if she doesn’t find it. “Fanny, the trunk is full of beautiful things. Fanny, do you hear me?” Fanny is laughing, laughing like a fat worm. Her belly is swollen with laughter. Her legs are getting blue. “O God, Morris, there is something tickling me… I can’t help it!.”

S
unday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as Boris was getting ready to sit down to lunch. I left out of a sense of delicacy, because it really pains Boris to see me sitting there in the studio with an empty belly. Why he doesn’t invite me to lunch with him I don’t know. He says he can’t afford it, but that’s no excuse. Anyway, I’m delicate about it. If it pains him to eat alone in my presence it would probably pain him more to share his meal with me. It’s not my place to pry into his secret affairs.

Dropped in at the Cronstadts’ and they were eating too. A young chicken with wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten already, but I could have torn the chicken from the baby’s hands. This is not just false modesty—it’s a kind of perversion, I’m thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn’t join them. No! No! Wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee after the meal. I’m
delicat
, I am! On the way out I cast a lingering glance at the bones lying on the baby’s plate—there was still meat on them.

Prowling around aimlessly. A beautiful day—so far. The Rue de Buci is alive, crawling. The bars wide open and the curbs lined with bicycles. All the meat and vegetable markets are in full swing. Arms loaded with truck bandaged in newspapers. A fine Catholic Sunday—in the morning, at least.

High noon and here I am standing on an empty belly at the confluence of all these crooked lanes that reek with the odor of food. Opposite me is the Hôtel de Louisiane. A grim old hostelry known to the bad boys of the Rue de Bud in the good old days. Hotels and food, and I’m walking about like a leper with crabs gnawing at my entrails. On Sunday mornings there’s a fever in the streets. Nothing like it anywhere, except perhaps on the East Side, or down around Chatham Square. The Rue de l’Echaudé is seething. The streets twist and turn, at every angle a fresh hive of activity. Long queues of people with vegetables under their arms, turning in here and there with crisp, sparkling appetites. Nothing but food, food, food. Makes one delirious.

Pass the Square de Furstenberg. Looks different now, at high noon. The other night when I passed by it was deserted, bleak, spectral. In the middle of the square four black trees that have not yet begun to blossom. Intellectual trees, nourished by the paving stones. Like T. S. Eliot’s verse. Here, by God, if Marie Laurencin ever brought her Lesbians out into the open, would be the place for them to commune.
Très lesbienne ici
. Sterile, hybrid, dry as Boris’ heart.

In the little garden adjoining the Eglise St. Germain are a few dismounted gargoyles. Monsters that jut forward with a terrifying plunge. On the benches other monsters—old people, idiots, cripples, epileptics. Snoozing there quietly, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. At the Galerie Zak across the way some imbecile has made a picture of the cosmos—
on the flat
. A painter’s cosmos! Full of odds and ends, bric-a-brac. In the lower left-hand corner, however, there’s an anchor—and a dinner bell. Salute! Salute! O Cosmos!

Still prowling around. Mid afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomblike from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace façade. They hang there like an
idée fixe
in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud. Bookstore with some of Raoul Dufy’s drawings in the window. Drawings of charwomen with rosebushes between their legs. A treatise on the philosophy of Joan Miró. The
philosophy,
mind you!

In the same window:
A Man Cut in Slices!
Chapter one: the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress. Chapter three:—No chapter three. Have to come back tomorrow for chapters three and four. Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page.
A man cut in slices
… You can’t imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress … the same in the eyes of… the same …?” Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to think of a title like that—instead of
Crazy Cock
and the other fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him just the same.

I wish him luck with his fine title. Here’s another slice for you—for your next book! Ring me up some day. I’m living at the Villa Borghese. We’re all dead, or dying, or about to die. We need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of meat—juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys, mountain oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I’m standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, I’m going to remember this title and I’m going to put down everything that goes on in my noodle—caviar, rain drops, axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst—slices and slices of it. And I’ll tell no one why, after I had put everything down, I suddenly went home and chopped the baby to pieces.
Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en tranches!

How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly, and even get an erection once in a while, is one of those mysteries which are too easily explained by the “anatomists of the soul.” On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open longitudinally. And it is just these highways, the Rue St. Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple—which attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal diseases. The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less repulsive because they have been drained of their pus.

At the City Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat, I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the scene. It is a rectangular court like many another which one glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele
Metropolis.

Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while the
danse macabre
whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries…” Paris during the days of Charles the Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still enchanted by it. About the patrons and prodromes of the Renaissance I know little, but Madam Pimpernel,
la belle boulangère,
and Maître Jehan Crapotte, l’
orfèvre,
these occupy my spare thoughts still. Not forgetting Rodin, the evil genius of
The Wandering Jew,
who practised his nefarious ways “until the day when he was enflamed and outwitted by the octoroon Cecily.” Sitting in the Square du Temple, musing over the doings of the horse knackers led by Jean Caboche, I have thought long and ruefully over the sad fate of Charles the Silly. A half-wit, who prowled about the halls of his Hôtel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten away by ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him one, like a mangy dog. At the Rue des Lions I looked for the stones of the old menagerie where he once fed his pets. His only diversion, poor dolt, aside from those card games with his “low-born companion,” Odette de Champdivers.

It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met Germaine. I was strolling along the Boulevard Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so which my wife had frantically cabled from America. There was a touch of spring in the sir, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to burst from the manholes. Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to take up their posts. The Rue du Pasteur-Wagner is one I recall in particular, corner of the Rue Amelot which hides behind the boulevard like a slumbering lizard. Here, at the neck of the bottle, so to speak, there was always a cluster of vultures who croaked and flapped their dirty wings, who reached out with sharp talons and plucked you into a doorway. Jolly, rapacious devils who didn’t even give you time to button your pants when it was over. Led you into a little room off the street, a room without a window usually, and, sitting on the edge of the bed with skirts tucked up gave you a quick inspection, spat on your cock, and placed it for you. While you washed yourself another one stood at the door and, holding her victim by the hand, watched nonchalantly as you gave the finishing touches to your toilet.