Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

But the Princess did not look up or react to this. She insisted, rather, in dwelling upon the history of each of her scars, from her Roman nose (a piano top had collapsed) to her petite cicatrized feet (the bones were growing in the wrong direction, she had been told.) She had also apparently been convinced by a certain Dr. Halban of Monstifita to move that peculiar female member of wondrous nerves, her sucre d’orange as she put it, closer to the urethral passage, a two-step procedure which would allow her to mount more easily ocean’s orgiastic wave.

Ainoha stared at Princess Zanäia for some time, watching as she traced her scars with her forefinger, adumbrating their causes and consequences. Then she threw herself into the river. Staying under for an anxiously long interval, she emerged some fifty yards away with a collar of water lilies, and shouted back to shore, “Surely there are worse things than monogamy!” Then she paddled aimlessly about, trying a number of different strokes, none of which relaxed her, until finally she realized she had no choice but to return to the tiny beach. But no sooner had she dried off than her royal confidant asked her if she could be of assistance in gaining entrance to the Silbürsmerze morgue, so that the Princess might make certain measurements of any female corpses there, as it was common knowledge that the Astingi women’s apparat was the least complicated in the world, and also rumored to run horizontally.

Mother replied that this was certainly a myth, though no doubt a useful one. But she was neither used to exercising self-control nor to asking someone to stop speaking in her presence. And she was also surprised to realize that indignity was as difficult to come by in this situation as compassion.

“Oh, I know you ardent women detest frigid women,” the Princess wailed.

Mother replied somewhat helplessly, “But I know no one at the morgue.”

The Princess was downcast. All her scars seemed to raise slightly. Tilting her head to one side, lips pursed, her nervous glance finally solidified, it was clear she was contemplating a measurement upon the most prominent live specimen of Astingi-related womanhood.

“You are quite the iconoclast,” Mother offered icily.

“Actually, no,” the Princess moaned, “just a misfit,” and burst into tears.

Ainoha had soiled her chemise.

Searching for the perfect non sequitur, Ainoha was mercifully interrupted by Catspaw, who had sensed his Mistress’s distress. He tottered down the steep path in a Russian blouse and white spats, precariously balancing a silver tray with several fruit spritzers and what appeared to be a skull from Father’s collections. He was extemporizing even before he stopped before the Princess.

“Here lies the water; good; here stands the man; good: if the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes — mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself: argal , he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”

“Bravi.” The Princess clapped her translucent hands.

“Goodness gracious,” the Naiad groaned. “Later, dear Catspaw, argal , not now.”

Pain crossed his face as he turned on his heel and began to trudge back up the path. At one point, he turned to recite the breathless messenger’s speech from Macbeth , but Ainoha, drawing her hand across her throat, cut him off.

Topsy was flagging and kept looking longingly across the river.

“In order to compensate for the mind’s imperfections,” Father was saying, “all the other senses must be put into compensatory concert. Now that we have run out of session , we must be quiet.”

They stood stock-still for some minutes.

“Do you feel it?” Father queried.

“Yes, indeed, a kind of energy. .”

“A displaceable energy, in itself neutral, but able to join forces with another impulse. An immanent movement?”

“Blast, now I’ve lost it!” The Professor snapped his fingers and groaned.

“No matter. The patient takes what she needs. You don’t know what it is, but she takes what she needs and leaves the rest. Semplice ma mysterioso .”

The Professor gesticulated sardonically to the heavens. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever be permitted to play my own cadenzas in this concert?”

“Sir, speak sequentially, without ungainly pauses. Where you choose to breathe is where her character is defined.”

The Professor sullenly took up the cord and dog, and with quick strides headed for the rope bridge, gradually lengthening the distance between the two men. Father followed, correcting the Professor’s various postures and gaits, a repertoire which, to his credit, was expanding:

“Much too correct, nicht blutwallungen, brutalmente . . Now, there we go, that’s better. . There. . Allegro maestoso . . No, no — fast but not all that fast. There, easy, but not too easy. Adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio !”

The Professor’s Trabuko had fallen from his mouth, leaving a trail of embers and ash down his sweat-stained shirtfront. His gaze was locked on a grove of trees on the far side of the river, and Felix himself was taken aback when he saw the winding file of naked girls, their hair undone, jars on their shoulders, bells on their anklets, garlanded with coins, gold chains, and shards of glass. The Peraperduga had been set in motion, one hundred paranymphs dancing in the wilderness in search of purling streams as yet unknown, praying for rain in three languages on the back road to Silbürsmerze, and shivering for joy. A dry muddy-colored rainbow arched over their wild hymns like a faded provincial opera set.

“What can it mean?” the Professor whispered hoarsely, and Felix intoned sadly:

“For us, it is only the definitive sign of drought. Or worse.”

The sun had been cut off quite suddenly by the bluff, as the ladies were startled by a horrific sucking sound.

“Strangely enough,” Mother observed evenly, “the river is often ugliest at dusk.”

The sucking continued and the Princess gazed out nervously at the Mze, which was busily regurgitating a new island: an ovoid slab of primordial mud flecked with quartz.

“Receiving semen is my greatest ecstasy,” pronounced the Princess apropos of nothing.

They returned to the house in a nude monotonous march.

At the peak of floodtime there is absolute silence, as every discord has been harmonized. But now with its strange resorbent sound, the river seemed to be looking to acquire a language at the very moment it had lost its power of metaphor. It was as if the Mze had lost its primal force, had tired of making limpid aesthetic statements and become self-conscious, yearning to be expressed. Its gurgle was rather like actors in a play whose lines are so densely poetic you cannot grasp them or the action; just the opposite of Father reading to me, that tumultuous cataract, those enfilades of dirty soldiers marching through the night. If this were a language its waterfall was now played out, its once curved body flat and meager, the pother as its base, vanished. The surface rapids were no longer visible, curving backward in sulfurous currents. There was no osmosis, no flowing — just a series of little scum-covered puddles, half-suffocated with water lilies and spiked rushes, into which ivory scavenger gulls, no longer able to plunge for fish, gingerly stepped, dreary, sad, and invested with an air of desperate deprivation. Poorly equipped, they carried away mysterious and far-from-appetizing fragments of this language, which in no time at all reappeared on the newly exposed rocks as a squirming white cape of excrement.

As an unwanted encore, Waterlily had launched into a conclusion of Astingi frontier songs, snatches from the decasyllabic “Ballads of Heroes” ( Kange Krajiŝnice ) of which every Astingi girl had a repertoire of hundreds — short song-cycles formulated in the fifteenth century to conquer the boredom of the men’s endless recited epics. I had always thought their artistic value slight, but as she refashioned them in voix mixte , her uvula flickering, ad lib with variations as the player pleases, she emptied the landscape of everything save the text, and Semper Vero consisted of only the solitary singer and her page.