Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

“Forgive me,” I begged her with much solicitude, “is it possible I have failed you, that I have not rightly divined your tastes? Tell me, my dearest, how many ways of making love have I taught you?”

“There is,” murmured Pazzarella, counting on her fingers, “the one of the first time — that of the sacred Tuesday then yours, then mine and then the other ones.”

“And which do you prefer?”

“All of them,” she replied without hesitation. “That is to say,” her eyes catching mine fixed on her hypnotically, “All, up to a certain point. But there is a spiritual aspect of love; woman was not created uniquely to serve as man’s —” I was looking at her still more intently, “created uniquely to enjoy herself,” she caught herself up breathlessly. “We have a higher mission. I feel an absolute necessity to save you.”

“Woman,” I said, “Can you possibly suffer under the delusion that having followed the profession of literature for so many years, I had run into no female saviours? At least until now you had not exhibited the doubtful taste of echoing too often my other lady-loves.”

“You must have patience. We have also, we others, our traditions — classical traditions. There are the women you pay and the women who save you. Every decent woman tries to save at least a couple. Up to now, none of the men I met seemed worth the trouble — they needed saving — so I was not interested. Men who require help, you will agree with me, had better be left alone. Whereas you who do not require any, are just my affair.”

“Exactly. You want to ‘save’ me to save you.”

“Oh,” she reproved me, “Why won’t you follow the rules of the game — leave things to me.”

“Little one,” I condoned with her, “You are pale, you are under the influence of a physical reaction. Evidently it is for the first time I observe with a certain amount of pride or you would not take it so hard — you’re tired. If it relieves your body to weigh upon my spirit, I am only too willing.”

“No,” she insisted, “You may laugh at me, spit upon me — nothing will make any difference — I am determined to save you. Answer me. Do you not feel by any chance that your soul is become clouded, smirched with the pettiness of daily life? Have you arrived perhaps at the turning point where it is difficult to distinguish clearly which path to follow? Do you not long to feel a confident little hand in yours, to guide you?”

“Why such theatrical gestures when you’re turning your back on me?”

“I am invoking the ideal.”

“Oh, I thought this harangue was addressed to me.”

“There’s nothing to prevent you listening if you feel like it — but how satisfied actresses must feel before a whole audience. You, who have read all there is to read, wasn’t there anything you could not discover in that universe of volumes? Even in your own colossal intellect, is there not lacking perhaps some other trifle?

“Trust in me — I am your redemptress. In all humility—”

“Murderess!”

“When one has exhausted everything else, one must turn to the simpletons of this world. When the great man soils his soul, even a prostitute may serve to cleanse it — and this simpleton,” her voice trembling with emotion, “this prostitute, is perhaps myself! I feel really moved,” then, her eyes imploring me, “Self-abnegation softens the hardest heart.”

I flicked the ash off my cigarette.

“You are really opposed to being saved?” asked Pazzarella, subsiding onto my knees.

“Try by all means, perhaps I can even assist you,” said I, declaiming as she had done. “Being unable to justify myself before my superiors to give any reason for my existence. Having no intellect I will save an intellect, to free myself of my annihilating sensation of emptiness and inutility.”

“Nonsense,” she rejoined, “it’s ever so much simpler than that. Can’t you imagine the vicious pleasure in being impertinent, for one who is frightening herself out of her wits?”

It was a long long time before I saw her again. When I did, it was evident my task was drawing to an end.

Pazzarella lay in a great bed where, among incredible flowering on the coverlid, a printed monkey climbed towards her heart, while the grey mist of empire mirrors reflected her waning life.

She was reading a little evangile of Saint John — too preciously bound.

“If only you could look at me once with the passionate glance you cast on books—” and no sooner had she said this than she spread her book open on her face under her eyes, and lay watching me. “There, you see, I have caught a look of adoration.” Then she opened her mouth to speak again. “Listen—” And the word crept round the room like a dumb crowd.

How often before she had clutched her hand to her heart trying to tear out of it the confidences of her eternal non-impartation — as if she suffered from something incommunicable, rent by a secret she imagined she had been called to life to share with me.

“In the long, long, lonely night I call to you; we make the supreme discovery together — only your bodily presence makes me mute. Nevertheless, my secret is so vital to the world’s destiny, it almost seems that the world would come to an end should I fail to confide it to you. It is so simple, a moment would suffice for the telling. So obvious— Quick, I am losing it again. Look in my eyes, perhaps you will discover it — feel the beat of my heart, that may convey it to you—”

As a matter of fact the heart was irregular.

“There it is, I see it again. Can’t you come over on my side to look at it? Geronimo, I could describe it to you only you are over there on the opposite side. You can see nothing of how it appears from over here. I am in possession of a secret truth. Fate commands me to reveal it to you. I will tell you. LISTEN! Geronimo— Woman—”

“The riddle is solved, my poor child,” I said, pressing her down by her shoulder. “I am your secret. Now lie in peace.”

She let her heavy head drop on the pillow. A shadow spread across her face, enhancing in beauty the last spark of a life I had extinguished with my negations. Of every instinct that flowered towards me I had snapped off the stem. Every fire that warmed her I had put out. What a facile success!

Needing to stretch my legs after sitting so long by that inarticulate deathbed, I took up a candle and moved about the room. Some unaccountable impulse stopped me before the mirror and I found myself staring, this time, into my own eyes. How queer, they returned my gaze without recognition. Those steely discs might have looked out of a stranger.

Wondering what had happened to them, I peered into their brightness for some time. At first I could make out nothing, but gradually I became aware of a putrefying mass, a turbid residuum lying at the bottom of their wells. Luminous sepulchres of vanquished emotions, of petrified humanity, such had been my eyes. But now, beneath their inflexible logic, the effrontery of their wile, lay the decaying remains of an embryonic spirit, an almost imperceptible reflection of Pazzarella’s dying. Had this wretched creature contaminated my very soul, insinuated her tenacious interrogation to the very stronghold of my wisdom?

Fuming, I returned to the bedside. “Creature! Are you not dead yet?”

“I don’t know—”

“What a way to answer a straight question. Even a lie would be too direct for you.”

“Very likely — for I who have been so confused in life, am not very clear about death.”

“Darling,” I exploded, “have you not often declared you loved me?”

“Yes.”

“More than your own self?”