Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

After one such battle she had distinctly felt a hand and forearm “materialize” from out her abdomen.

Now she could throw in the ballast of her mediumship against the loaded mystery of Piero and his bachelors.

She had long believed that Piero must have reached a higher plane having eschewed the devil in woman’s flesh — and now she, herself had also reached a “higher plane”.

The clock of San Marco strikes one. Waiting on the remotest of Eliza’s loggias for the poet who has written of “The Immaculate Vermin Of The Sugar Dove.”

“— — he should have come long ago — what keeps him?”

Piero, the inner muscles of his thighs twitching — — paces the loggia.

There sat the mother.

Where the flesh should have been there was shawl — the wits of the aged go wool-gathering, dutiful relatives knit them into a frowsty comfort for the blinking, twitching, wheezing forgetter of many delights.

Her blind eye floated like a decaying fish in the dregs of her lucidity. There must have been parts of her even more terrifying than those that were exposed ——in “out of use” there is ugliness.

Delicate and decent however were the appointments of the sitting-room, the cleared and garnished tabernacle for this bundle of human garbage.

Ladies of some culture — and some titled, asked the daughter little questions about mother, as if taking a dig at her flesh to see if she were still alive.

Virginia devotedly cosseted her mother, giving evidence that she had found no time for marriage. Every day a fostering coachman drove her with the aged gentlewoman slowly through the more fashionable streets.

Every desirable visitor she could muster into the half-conscious maternal presence would remember the even temperature of her sitting-room, the southern aspect, the cheerful flowers, the particular fleeciness of the wool which enwrapped her.

Virginia Cosway employed her leisure with the Arts.

Years ago a sculptor had chosen Virginia Cosway as model for La Tarantella , had taken her fingers between two of his own and slid them further down and apart upon her hip; then with accurate gesticulations he had inspired her with “the pose.”

The famous statue had been standing for a quarter of a century in the public gallery visited by the processional tourists. Wrinkling a nostril and an under eye-lid, thousands of noses had lifted to it over catalogues.

The figure was over-lengthy on its pedestal, and the small head with its arched eye-brows sneered with a simultaneous invitation and repulse.

But because of the elevation of the statue, its significance for the spectator seemed rather to centre in the region of the hips, and also on account of the “pose” inspired by the Master, the outswung allurement, the momentary momentous projection of the stomach in the danza española .

The tourists stared at La Tarantella and supposed that she implied that there was a transcendental anatomy to be studied in the land of the Alhambra. The tourists were not allured by the tilted pelvis, each one dismissed it as being the concern of the next one. The tourists kept their mouths open to air their house of limitation in which they abode.

For a quarter of a century, the permanent physical adoption of that Spanish pose had defined the daughter’s status — the authorised edition of Virginia Cosway issued by the Master for the international society of the élite parasites of the Arts.

She wore it as a tag of identification in the grand monde , where one must let off a rocket, to be rescued from the masses.

She performed her Hispano-abdominal ceremony at les vernissages , the private views, auctions of the Hôtel Drouot and the birthdays of new movements; it served her as a bass accompaniment to her spoken verdicts. It became familiar to the whole of Europe, and by middle age had brought an utter reverence upon her.

She had also accumulated her mythology; women who often wore mourning whispered how the heart of the Master had been broken. Callous women deprecated her shortsightedness on the occasion of his proposal. Elderly bachelors pointed her out as the great man’s guiding star.

Only too early after she had refused him the sculptor had leapt to a rare and official celebrity, and Virginia found herself powerless to cap him with a husband of greater distinction.

So she clung to that trifle of her destiny she had restricted herself to accepting from him — the pose.

Important people would be enticed at receptions into the shadows of Spanish leather or Chinese lacquer screens, for a significant talk with Virginia Cosway the lifelong friend of the Master. There under the arc of the handshake, with a brief undulation of the hip, and the adjustment of the forefinger, the stomach outswung to its notable attitude, as if enticing aesthetic culture into her womb to be reborn for her audience.

This authoritative and challenging gesture became the formative process of her critique; this continuous resumption of her primal creation by the Master, who had, with his studio directions, hammered her into a posture in which she was to become fixed for life.

Her erstwhile suitor with due realisation that marriage is not the unique entanglement for the mighty, became grosser of feature and of cigar and continued to devote a cup of tea to her, whenever he was in the neighbourhood; for she not only was intimate with some of his wealthiest clients, but added very voicefully to that chorus without sound of which, the approach to our celebrities might not so easily be located.

Where Virginia went, always companioned by women of greater age and hereditary prestige than herself — as reinforcement — she expounded the gesture that had gradually attained to insolence, while conducting her well-attended inquisition of the muses.

The stomach had become an arbiter of aesthetics.

The mother grew daily colder in her woollens. ——

“Lady Beatrice, I should have delighted to spend Easter with you — but you see? My mother cannot spare me — I am a prisoner to my affections. A daughter has a sacred duty” —Virginia did something appealing with her eye-lids —and there it was again! Hand to hip ——

The old woman rolled her surviving eye on the stomach of her attendant daughter and only one of all the visitors distinguished among the wheezing and the rumbling these words like exhausted thunder.

“If only she would take it out of my way —even for a day. If only I could be left alone.”

The daughter remained at her post. Artistic polemics prowled beyond the mother’s doors.

Until of the mother, her soul and her lucidity, together with her eye swum into infinity.

After the funeral her friends said, “Do not grieve.”

“I do not wish,” the daughter answered, “to bury my dead.”

Virginia Cosway bereft of her excuse, was left with Time as her consort. She gave forth sighs for her past sacrifice, which floated among her cultured acquaintances like whiffs from that protracted maternity of outre-tombe .

The stomach in its age was become fibrous and rigid.

And as it proceeded towards me, I would have sworn I could see, set in the wrinkled lids of its navel —————a calculating eye.

The babies were all born in the same quarter of the same city — two of them in the back streets—