Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

“How could you bring yourself,” implored my shaken voice, “to betray me as you did?”

Pazzarella, petrified, listened to the useless echoes of her aspiration in my reproaches.

“I do not reproach you,” I went on. “You have taken vengeance on yourself — outraging your true nature in extremis . Poor child,” I whispered, taking her in my arms and stirring her with over-sensitive caresses to which her subtle sensuality responded automatically. “The touch of any hand but mine must martyrize your flesh—” And from between her white teeth and her underlip broke a single bead of blood.

“Incredulous monster!” I murmured in that fainting ear, “Had it never occurred to you that love, which flowers in beauty among promises and ecstasy, dies unassuaged and bruised under the blow of desertion?

“What, then, could be more logical for illuminated lovers than to let love be born lamenting, without any illusions whatsoever in the callous hour of abandonment? What could be easier after that than for love to mature, insured against all deception for the paradisiacal spasm on arrival at its goal— I thought I had detected between us of that sort of spontaneous affinity—” Here Pazzarella embraced me convulsively.

“Do not kiss me,” I begged her courteously. “I feel the breath of the thirsty dog.

“Oh, you ordinary woman,” I taunted her, “who conceives the lover as being of that species of idiot who, arriving with a bunch of roses and a gold bangle, after playing his messy little tricks, takes nostalgic leave and, on getting home, writes three pages of eulogy to begin all over again on the following day. You, with your conventional infidelity, have ruined the most promising love affair that ever —you odalisque of an able surgeon!!”

“On your recommendation.”

“The humblest beggar,” I retorted, “refuses advice.”

“God forgives,” began Pazzarella.

“And, doesn’t exist—”

“Only think,” I meditated aloud. “Once past the period of growing antipathy, of reciprocal lies — the physical repugnance of satiety, which in our case would have become steadily less— Think what a lover I should have made—”

“I know. . I know,” she burbled, brushing the palm of my hand with her lips.

“—exactly that ‘something’ you so long — so long had waited for. Think, if it turns your head when I treat you badly, what under heaven might have happened to you when the time came for me to grow fond.

“Think — in the theatre of the flesh, how endless a romance would have been ours according to my program which eliminated any possible denouement.

“Imagine the role you would have played under my—”

“Geronimo!” screamed Pazzarella, “If you don’t clear out, I shall murder you.”

It was some time since I had given a thought to Pazzarella when I met her one evening out in the rain. The lamplight shone on her extinguished eyes under their perfect eyebrows. Once more, on beholding her pale passivity, that insupportable sense of irritation tore at me until impalpable filaments floated out from my body, meeting nothing to attach to and which I could not cast off.

I offered her the shelter of my umbrella and, without speaking to me, she drew my hand that was free into her enormous muff and went on walking.

At last—

“Yesterday,” she confided to me, dreamily, “I wandered — wandered far out of the creaking city into the indelicate night, where, finding myself alone with nature, I asked her—‘Why Geronimo?’ ”

“And what did nature answer?”

“ ‘It’s useless addressing yourself to me,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m such a brute—’ ”

“As far as you are concerned she has every right to be.”

We had reached her house. Pazzarella closed the front door and, all tremulous in the shadows, held up her face to mine. Ah, the pleasure it would give me to suck away her entire life through those questing lips. It would be too acceptable an end for her. I threw her off.

“Your kisses are too sensitive.”

We entered the warm brightly lit room. I sank into an armchair, and Pazzarella perched herself on the arm.

“Will you answer one question frankly?”

“As far as frankness is concerned, I’m a fellow who easily gets involved.”

“Do try just this once.”

“Well?”

“This sentiment of yours in regard to myself — is it inspired by a personal antipathy, or a theoretical ethic?”

“There are cases in which Futurist ethics come in very handy.”

“Are you a Futurist?”

“For the present, and the present you may have noticed is the time for accomplishment — while the future — keeps you waiting.”

“Bah — you show as much contempt for men as you do for women — with your system of postponement.”

“Men are more easily satisfied the longer they have been kept waiting—”

“And woman who has always waited?”

“I’ll make her a present of the future when I have finished with it.”

“Mafarka having meanwhile snatched it from her womb.”

“I having meanwhile desecrated her—”

“Yes — in that article you were really too bawdy—”

“My bawdiness was more favourable to woman than anything that has ever been written.”

“So much so, that she blushed?”

“Because I have gagged the other men, or rather that not being able to go any further in that direction one will have to turn back—”

“To me?” enquired Pazzarella hopefully.

“For you,” I snapped, “if you don’t stop fiddling with my eyelashes — there is instant castration.”

“And yet,” she reflected, measuring my nose with my forelock, “I should so much like to have a son of yours.”

“Not for anything.”

“Oh why?”

“Firstly, because that ‘son’ might be born a woman.”

“While I,” she sighed, “am hardly even a woman. I am only the scapegoat to carry the load of your spleen induced by those tasteless females who won’t admire your funny nose — while I dote upon it,” said she kissing it on the tip —

I slapped her face and let myself out of the house.

When the European War broke out I received the following hysterical explosion:

Incomparable man,

You will go to war, as of now I am out of your life — reduced to the primal elements of offence and attack. And if at night under the stars on the hard ground, you everrecall a few hours of divine pleasure in Florence, you will only reproach yourself for this weakness. Woman woman has nothing to do with war — and yet there might have been something for me to do, I might have, now that half the male population is to be wiped out, I might have had your son, but Mafarka forbade it.

The learned’s cries are in vain.

I send you my love in a kiss because to understand allis to forgive all. Perfect lover, will they remove your — not my “riccioli”?

Your —

Pazzarella—

If war sweeps a considerable number of men off the earth, it has this advantage: it effaces the current value of his parasite completely. But how promptly she reappears in the starched costume of devotion, wearing the new and lighter cross dyed in the colour of blood upon her breast, and bustles about as if nothing had gone wrong. With what courageous self-discipline she attends to the soldiers’ splintered bodies. With what passion of inhibited caresses she massages their inoperative limbs, fixing her cheated eyes on chimerical Duty.

I gloated over the desperate impotence of Pazzarella that forced her to the extremity of imagining she could substitute a newborn infant for the “missing man” of her own generation.

She didn’t give up the attack. Some days later, hedged in with piles of newspapers, letters, manuscripts, I was sipping my coffee when here we are again—!