Clarence Major - My Amputations

He was in the bank when everything went out of focus. Next in line, he never got his American Express Travellers Cheques cashed. The floor turned slightly. Pictures reproduced from works by Raphael and Pinturicchio in silver frames behind the counter slid sideways. Mason felt as transparent as a metalpoint on blue handmade paper. His panic was reflected in the eyes of the clerks and other customers. The guard was the first to cry out. He was an old man who fished in his holster for his pistol without luck. The tilt continued for… who could tell how long. Time itself left the space. The ceiling cracked, slightly. “Che cos'è?” “ Oh no!” “Oh no! ” Was the ancient city of Florence being bombed? Mason found himself huddled in a corner with the others. A man who was probably the bank manager started shouting for everybody to go to the basement but nobody made it. Why? Six men with ski masks came in with submachine guns. They shot the guard then told everybody else to make like they were praying to Dante or God or David or Michelangelo himself. They all got their hands up. Although Mason was funny at times, this time he wasn't shaking like Willy Best as he held his hands above his head. His eyes didn't buck. His teeth didn't chatter. The floor beneath them continued to rumble. Five gunmen aimed their guns on the clerks and the manager. One took care of Mason and the other customers and potential customers. He kept talking to them in a Bogart voice, which sounded pretty funny in Italian. An old woman among them fell to her knees and started praying to Lazarus and a fifteenth century Tuscan pilgrim Mason had never heard of. The floor cracked as the clerks filled two canvas sacks with lire at gunpoint. When they finished, the plate-glass window facing the via D. Corso flew to smithereens! Mason couldn't help wondering if some nasty streak of bad luck was following him. He sort of wished he was sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying a glass of wine with Italo Calvino… When the police arrived, minutes after the robbers fled in their oxydized gray Fiat, the bank — as all of Florence — was still shaking like a drunk the-morning-after.

The bed in his room at the Argentina was lumpy. Sleep difficult. He was beginning to fear sleep anyway: it held too much danger. Yet he had no choice: the asymmetrical shot of a runner — himself? — (no longer a swimmer)… What mocking sound out there? Bats in the…? Nightmare alley… Hay, w-wait!… wasn't that an old Bogart-Eddie… No, you're thinking of The Wagons Roll at Night . Go to sleep, tough guy. You've made your own bed of nails. He who lurks in the company of hyped-up cons, charmed thieves, rejected marks, the damned in flight from search warrants, outlaws with golden arms, carpetbaggers, elastic molls, addicts who wheeze, killers in Little Caesar-shoes, forbearers in search of big money, Cagney-dudes turned Camus-sharp, Studs Lonigan dupes, wild-side-walkers, dudes in Houdini-getups whispering farewell my lovely, and ex-skateboard freaks with butterflies tattooed on their proletarian buttocks, cannot expect to soar in unsentenced clean flight with restful sober falcons. Maltese? No, no… sleep. Your days will become indistinguishable. You thought you were like a gray boy, could grow up and marry a Vassar girl, settle down on Moby-Dick, your yacht, out there…? Pull— pull harder: conflict is connecting with yang and exchange is tangled into yin. Thought you smarter than Invisible Man, joker! You pastoral cowboy on the run! Will you run to faith or with facts? The priest will hand you over to cops. Vice versa: if Gary Cooper or Wayne don't get you first at gunpoint, gunslinger. What was that noise — out there… in, i-in, uh, the hall… Public Enemy ain't here now, bud, to spoon feed ya. For crysake! Clean up your act — grow up! Pity: you can't turn to anything ’cause you don't believe: oh, you remember hearing about the Black Madonna in Poland? if you were a God-fearing Christian you'd be able to trot with your guitar or harmonica up the Jazna Gora at Pauline and sink to your holy knees before the icon and beg forgiveness or go to the Holy Grail or… oh, hell, forget it. You think Mexico or South America the answer. How can you be sure you're not being observed right now, that Schnitzler and Signard and Armegurn are not all connected? Maybe you should've never left the ghetto, swindler: might've been better to marry your secret design or, yeah, how about the first grownup woman to take your skinny butt to bed: remember Mabel Study? Presser with thick arms, fried hair, red eyes with yellow rims: rusty feet, huge sagging mammary glands: and when those hard black thighs opened on that two-bit hotel bedroom you smelled her machine's steam lift to befuddle your face. Yet your youth and inexperience and, bygolly, your teenage hardon, led the way. Mentally maybe you never left that plateau! Did you leave that episode baptized in her steam? You humped away at her hardness till you couldn't hump anymore. Then you knew she went home to her dingy house full of ill-conceived hungry children. You on the other hand threw your “proud” head back and went in search of… of what?… to have married her: a sturdy life of brainrot to protect you from this gruesome plight. Nobody knew your name then. Nobody knows it now. Native son? Naw. You remember Defoe — ha! “My true name is so well known… that it is not to be expected I should set my name on the account of my family to this work… It is enough to tell you… the name Moll Flanders so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am… ” You're now on a roller-coaster to the… May as well: O picaro! You devilish old Lazarillo de Tormes! Huh? God protects the victims…?

… Cooler up here — after a good two hundred and fifty tunnels: Hem at seventeen was abed here back when the Universite Degli Studi di Milano was a hospital. As in Catania, the school was right in the city — Old Town, actually. His hotel: seven minutes' walk away. Professor Ina Bulletti, who'd just had a cancer operation, emitted a sense of vast humility. Her handshake was like walking in rain on a sunny day. She must have been sixty. “I met you once in the states but that was years ago. You wouldn't remember… ” Her smile was self-effacing. “Your work will be the subject of a whole chapter in a book I'm writing.” They finished their coffee and went across the street with its old street-car tracks toward the university. It was midafternoon and people were going back to work. She led him into the courtyard then along the walkway to the Instituto di Lingua and Litteratura Inglese e Letturatura. She was chairman of that outfit. As she rapped about the author he felt a strange twitch: wanted to turn himself by voodoo or hype or hip or volcanic faith into a snail safely housed inside a Prince Albert tin at the bottom of the last ditch on the outskirts of the last cockfight with wagerers screaming, shouting, calling through cocaine-thick voices for more blood. Keep close to the action. She gave him an upbeat introduction. Mason started off talking about his early influences — mentioned Vittorini, bridged this with the French thing, connected to Toomer's magical rendering of soft, lingering shadows, the dew and dusk, morning mist and mulattoes, sweetness of a land without Spring snow. His language was like stepping nervously in fine grained cowboy boots made by Santa Rosa 1906. He hooked this whole romantic mood to Claude's hectic, joyful exploration of nightlife in Harlem and gave them the wonderful details of that ol' banjo strummer rambling mentally and physically about Marseilles. The whole so-called lecture was a merry-go-round of egocentric, brash jive with references that some of them caught only because they were students of Bulletti. This stuff was sculptured language; cryptic skip-system junk; pretzels; jigsaw hunks. After the show the “champ” got a big hand then went to the toilet where he did not find a message from headquarters scrawled on the booth wall. A Nazi symbol, yes, but no word from Control. Although Professor Bulletti took him to Santa Maria delle Grazie to see those cracked and faded figures, it made him feel like a bleeding tunnel through a stone mountain.