Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

“Love I have pondered for three full days — I adore you and feel all too empty of you. I couldn’t care less about Futurism. The child the future needs is the child of the two of us — you won’t think I’m right but I am. If you can spare half an hour of your intoxicating inner life for this important work, I will come to you wherever you may be—”

Certainly she is forced to defy the thing she is most afraid of — otherwise she would wilt with discouragement—

– — “If you will lend me the money for the journey — we are all penniless for the moment if you are too I will scrounge it somewhere. Tell me if or not — if not it matters little — I can also do without being benefactress to all humanity.

“You needn’t discuss this with your fancy companions — it’s something I take very seriously .”

Geronimo,

You are the only man who is man enough to dominate me absolutely the only one strong enough to keep me all for himself — the only one Alas — who is hard enough to crush me—

Your Pazzarella

In memory of an absent lover — of the freshness of your spit.

Good-bye.

She had right on her side — but no money. That incubus of desire who attaches herself to the male with all her impertinent passion for reproduction, unable to attain her ends unaided, could not do otherwise than take the affair seriously, even to the length of begging for a subsidy.

There was also a mosquito humming around my face, most likely another female who had no doubt some portentous plan for the future to further, in inspiring an infinitesimal drop of my life.

But to Pazzarella’s request I must reply. To ignore it would be too simple. Pazzarella herself would not be surprised if I took no notice. War is all very well up to a certain point, but tradition has after all lent a certain glamour to motherhood.

This was an occasion requiring an answer, in the negative, that goes without saying, were it only for the question of economy. A decisive reply was imperative, only it must be tender — very tender. Nor could it be confided to the postman. It would be more considerate to present my answer in person. However, the air was cool up in the mountains, and it was late autumn when I eventually decided to go to her.

This time Pazzarella looked a trifle faded, laid out on a sofa lapped in her silken gown and propped with cushions, occupying herself as usual with her tea things which were set on a low table. This body gradually desiccating for want of caresses, this potential mother empty of fruit, must necessarily continue throughout her steady undoing to distribute her circles of amber and sugar gewgaws. A woman resigned, who, while her life was ebbing from her, seemed ceaselessly to be pouring it out from a silver pot for casual callers with hands that were livid with calm. What else was she likely to offer to Death when it should come but a cup of tea?

I kissed her reverently, assured that, in spite of the cataclysm of my presence and the wounds with which I should lacerate her, in the conventional breeding she would merely reply—“Have another biscuit, caro ?”

Certainly this was a day on which conversation was not in order. Rather must I sustain a tacit expectancy of imminent collaboration between us — expression of eyes and inflection of voice stressing the entente of accomplices.

Pazzarella relaxed in the security of anticipation, while I laid my head in her lap where my undisciplined hair incubated that rapacious womb in a promising warmth.

A mushy autumnal temperature of vegetation dropping its seed invaded us from the garden. It impinged on every nerve in her sensitive body, become one with the earth, the air, the season. Her breathing languished and was wafted away to the most distant podere . The richest of harvests ripened within her. I could feel the long prepared impassioned nest palpitate beneath my ear.

Tenderly I related my infancy. I had brought a photo of myself, still wearing a little skirt, in my pocketbook — and before the rites of my showing it to her she sat with receptive eyes and folded hands. But when I told her of my mother’s saintly consecrated gestures, sweetened by anachronistic jealousy, she could not resist, and interrupted me—“But don’t you know, Geronimo, that I am your mother?”

“Now we come to it,” I cried, leaping to my feet, “A lot you care about the future! For you the child is a makeshift for the tame man.”

Sexual emotion in woman is of familial extent, the impulse of three generations — mother, wife, daughter — and as there is no relationship among women, the daughter responds to the maternal embrace only in the arms of a father, but a father who has not committed incest with her mother, therefore the lover, in whom woman takes root, flowers and finally disappears.

As I had not yet finished with her, I took her in my arms again and, rocking her, felt the entire abandonment of a being who has such radical aversion to reliance on herself.

Now in this atmosphere I had spread about us a receptive somnolence closed in upon her breath, and the Eucharistic eyes of Pazzarella glowed in the twilight. Probably she would still be waiting, if the cry of a newborn child from a house across the way, a shrill surprise, had not split up my promising silence, even dispersing the indolent pulsation of the falling dew.

My burden started with a shuddering ecstasy.

“Vampire!” I hissed, “In your terrified enjoyment of the first cry of that dolent life, you are so intent on drawing from one man to impose it upon another.”

But still she clung to me, not able to withdraw herself at once from her hallucination that a mystery was about to be conceived.

“It is the hour,” I concluded, liberating myself to bow to her ceremoniously, “for me to take leave of you Signora ,” and I parted from all those empty circles — the tea cups — the woman.

Six months later I passed Pazzarella on the street. Without a greeting we both stopped for a while to observe each other reciprocally, and then pursued our ways without exchanging our impressions.

“ Caro —don’t be discouraged if I don’t seem to have died. I have, really. Only the business of daily life necessitates the continued functioning of the mere machine— Excuse me!”

Such was the message I received the morning after our meeting. Another interview was imminent.

I entered. She had aged. Her eyes had grown dull, and her taut nerves distorted her face in a rigid resignation. She moved as she walked towards me with an angularity that must have irked her limbs. She looked so funny that I hugged her close to me, to stifle my titters while covering her with sarcastic little kisses, until I felt her tension relax.

“Oho,” I said, seeing her revive among the roses I had planted. “How goes love?”

“Not so badly, thanks to your having employed the wrong tactics.”

“— — — ?”

“All is clear to me— Because I irritate you, you wish to do away with me. That is natural — quite understandable. In your place I should feel the same. But you tried to destroy me through my pride, whereas I really loved you, and into love pride does not enter. If you are determined to succeed, there is only one way — you must make me die of love. Do you get me?” she enquired with a flicker of hope.

“Your game is pretty strong,” she continued. “The first stroke a whiz — and so on, increasingly. But entirely miscalculated. You should have duped me long enough to inspire my confidence, and then, after some days of intimacy, when my love should feel secure — ah, if you had left me then, who knows but that I really should have succumbed.

“Oh Geronimo,” she pleaded, enlacing my torso with the constriction of a serpent round a tree. “Try a little intimacy, I am practically certain you will succeed.”