Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

“I am so fond of you,” she sighed.

“The worse for you.”

“My affection—”

“But are you mad?”

“I am a woman.”

I lifted up her face to take a good look at it. The prognostics of sorrow were effaced, the resuscitated roses of her lips bloomed in a contemptible beatitude — and God! how she chattered.

Evidently her impact with the male had shattered her silence. She flooded me with universal trivialities pouring from her cerebral confusion into an indefinite concept she reverently referred to as “love.”

I rose to depart. But Pazzarella entreated me to stay, drawing me after her by my two hands, with the air of leading me on in some portentous expedition which made me sufficiently curious to let her have her way.

Graciously she led me through her apartment where an intrinsic sense of void produced an impression of vastness, and solemnly she would stop before the door of each chamber, whose furniture seemed to haunt its pitiable emptiness, and on entering each one with me, embraced me ceremoniously as if she desired to obtain a “fixation” of our presence “together” in every desolate enclosure of her home.

This sort of procession intrigued me immensely. I could not catch its significance until all at once the Pascal Benediction recurred to my mind. The Parish Priest accompanied by his acolyte visiting the houses of the devout at Eastertide to asperse their rooms with holy water. Was my passing intended to bless those vacuous lairs of my guide? Their solitude seemed hardly prepared for a blessing — it must be for an exorcism that my services were required. An involuntary shudder ran through me — how fearful must be the blank expanses of Time shut into those charming rooms, that this living enigma had the pretension to be rid of in consecrating them to a man who had just raped her.

“I have waited so long — so long—”

“Why?”

“Just waiting,” she murmured.

“For what?” I insisted.

“Ah, if only I knew. Probably I shall never find out what I am waiting for, nevertheless I can make my choice.”

“Oh — then you believe in the Libre Arbitre ?”

“No — I merely choose. That is quite a different thing, for the confirmation of my choice is beyond my power.”

“And may I ask what it is you have chosen?”

“You,” she cooed quite contentedly, and her face fell onto my waistcoat.

“Evidently the Libre Arbitre doesn’t come in there.”

“It is several years since I began to love you.”

“But you didn’t know me.”

“I have never known you — I shall never know you — but I have seen you.”

“But—?”

“If you knew what countless numbers of my similars have never even seen the man they love.”

“You’re only raking up a platitude, ‘In love with love.’ Where does a man come in?”

“And yet I believe a man—”

“No — you trust in love.”

“One must believe — love IS .”

“And,” I smiled, “ L’amore come si fa — How is love made?”

“ L’amore si fa — One makes love.”

“Listen to me,” I said, “and take this advice. If you really want, not love, but to be loved, leave off choosing — let somebody choose you .”

“ You have chosen me!”

“Chosen! Pazzarella — try to understand me — You are the most irritating creature I have ever come across. You irritate me to my very marrow.”

“Your intimate irritant—”

“Intimate!!”

“And to think there are women, poor things, who do not even succeed in irritating the man they love.”

A certain ambiguity in the triumphant inflection of these last words, vaguely disturbed me. I looked sharply into those feminine eyes, but they told me nothing. They were beginning to wander again.

“So you have not chosen me after all—”

“Decidedly not.”

“Still, all the same — when you — isn’t that what is called possessing a woman?”

“Ah — yes!”

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing in it.”

In those intelligent eyes a reply began to twinkle, but her lips grimly closed upon it.

“Tell me,” I insisted.

“It is the coronation of masculinity,” she prevaricated, entirely taken up with interlacing her useless fingers with my unruly hair.

“Good-bye, Pazzarella.”

“Forever?”

“Let us hope so.”

“Who knows?” she mused.

“Pazzarella,” I burst out, “I am not a beast — I am MYSELF .”

“I know,” she acquiesced, kissing me tenderly.

“I only want what is best for you.”

“Then you give me a kiss.”

“That would be hardly relevant.”

“Good-bye,” I called out, “give yourself to the first man who chooses you. You’ll get your love.” With this I left Pazzarella safely behind the door and I could breathe in freedom again.

The same evening a note was brought to me by hand, and this is what was written in it— “Why must a lump of female flesh, separate me so completely from all that is dear to me in the world—”

On the morrow I left for Paris and the only news I received of the amorous experiment I had prescribed for her, were these two lines

“O Geronimo, save me from this man who has desire as a dog has thirst, who makes love with the address of an able surgeon.”

Never, have I been so offended, as by that spirited analysis. Not content with being unfaithful to me, she made light of her accomplice, and this attitude of hers so closely allied me with him, that I ceased to be clear as to whether it was my war or his I must henceforth wage upon her. Was he not my brother in arms? So obvious it was that a common enemy attacked the sacred and inalterable front of masculine solidarity.

I decided to pay her another visit on my return.

When I saw her again, she had greatly changed, having acquired in the short interval a certain audacity. Her eyes no longer sought for anything. Her clothes were extremely attractive, and she was even more beautiful than before, with that fixed and useless beauty some women assume out of mere contrariness when the longed-for fruits, rewards of beauty, have been withdrawn.

“But you,” I exclaimed ironically, “are getting on magnificently.”

“There is no denying it,” she laughed. “I have revived. I am exploiting my soul whereas formerly my soul exploited me.” Then with a profound moue , “Please, Geronimo, say—‘Woman has no soul.’ ”

“You are monstrous,” I cried. “A genuine cerebral masochist — does it give you such very great pleasure to have a man insult you?”

“We-ell, it does make it more difficult for him to impress me.”

The call to arms was sounding. Giving no sign that I was aware of it, I continued, “It is for that very reason that woman can so easily penetrate the soul of others.”

“You mean, that having none of her own, there is no obstacle,” she laughed once more.

“Yet nevertheless,” I said, my voice trembling with feigned emotion, “you were not able to penetrate mine. You could not understand that I in no way resemble other men, although it was for that you loved me, is it not so? You could not see that I loved you , nor understand that I, who am the man who overturns everything, must overturn even love itself.”

While I was saying this, I observed my prey with the utmost attention. Pazzarella’s face underwent an incredible evolution on my first sentimental inflection. The drama of a whole life took place in her eyes — birth, hope, happiness, disillusion, ire, shame, revenge, desperation, callousness, death — purification, and as I drew her slowly towards me, she attained, through this impassioned conflagration, to a virginity of spirit that in her ignorant maidenhood she could never have approached. A pitiful virginity offering its whitened pain to nothing.