Christine Brooke-Rose - The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

I do Stavro, I need your terrible love as you call it, but I don’t think I can have it, Stavro non avrò.

Oh please don’t start again.

I’m not coming with you, I’m staying here. I have work to do.

You can’t be serious. But it’s all booked, you promised.

Then unbook me. I’m sorry.

I know, I can’t offer you much, only problems, and I haven’t even got a job. But I’ll get one, at least for next year, and I’m applying everywhere, Rhodesia even, and you could get one easily, wouldn’t you like to come to Rhodesia with me it’s a beautiful climate like here, we’d live this paradise for ever.

Rhodesia! It’s a fascist country.

No more than America if you mean the colour thing and you live in America.

Don’t be silly Stavro. There’s plenty wrong there but at least we pay lip-service to equality and a good deal more than people who read only Black Literature are aware. I couldn’t live with, and therefore condone, official Apartheid, it’s another kind of cutting off.

But you wouldn’t be cut off you’d be with me.

Stavro stop fantasising, what about your children you must be near them they need you. You must stop rushing off, always putting the desire of the moment first.

It’s not a desire of the moment I love you. And we’d take them with us. But you’re right, as usual, she won’t let them go. Oh what would I do without you. Of course I must stay in Europe. How about Strasburg I’ve applied there will you come to Strasburg with me?

I can’t, Stavro.

What did he do to you?

Nothing. I’m just very tired, very very tired.

I know my love, it’s my fault, forgive me. We shall have abstinence tonight and you shall rest. I once saw a poster in Wales which said Abstinence is good for you. Oh Larina I want what you want.

Do you?

It’s only a moment of discouragement. But you must understand I can’t take nothing but discouragement from you and remain unaffected. You mustn’t try and see how much I can take.

(I’ll pursue you and pursue you if that’s what you want) No, I’m sorry, You can’t take much can you?

I suppose not. But you’re not very tough either and why should you be, except because both he and I like you that way. It isn’t true after all that women are stronger. They love to cuddle their babies but aren’t they just consoling themselves? Father is more important, he can speak and teach. Mother feeds you and teaches you to love but it’s Father who teaches you how to survive. Oh I wish I could do something about my mistakes, I see them so clearly now. Oh my love, I seem to be doing again what I’ve done so often, having problems I can’t cope with and rushing to a mummy or a nanny or a home or refuge. I hate seeing that I’m doing this to you. I feel lonely and abandoned, but my behaviour makes you lonely too. Please forgive your awful errant Childe Stavro.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry you’re so absurd yet touching.

It’s good to see you smile again. My Larina, I know, as you know, that it’s peace and beauty when we’re together, and I’m convinced that if we could live together for a year all our problems would disappear and we’d never leave each other.

So you’ve said. But I don’t have any problems except the one you’ve thrust upon me. Don’t you see that you’re trying to force me into living a cliché, the cliché of the older woman and the younger man?

I just don’t understand your concern with your age and cliché-mongers. Why can’t you trust me? Will you please explain to me what I can do to earn your trust? Aren’t you even now sending me out to Peru more or less to prove myself already, to see what distance and separation can do to our love?

I’m not sending you out to Peru, you’re going anyway.

Lara hear me hear me.

You sound like an oracle. I’m listening.

Please, try to believe in me. I love you. Trust me. Come with me to Lima, I know you’re frightened, I’m asking you to take a risk, but I’m taking a risk too and you said you wanted adventure.

You must go alone, Stavro, and meet other girls, you’ve only just left your wife she’s not my wife well the mother of your children and I happened along. Marry one of your students in Lima, a nice young fleshy one, not thin and finished like me, someone who will combine motherly qualities with youth and looking up to you.

But it’s you I love. Don’t you look up to me?

Well, of course. But you seem crushed by me and I’m sorry. Look, go to Lima and if you still love me next year I’ll come.

But, but, we’ll be a whole year older then! How can I wait a year?

Yes, it’s a ridiculous test of the knight by the lady. All right, I’ll come as planned for the rest of the summer and then we’ll see.

Oh my love, thank you. But you’ll stay, I know you will.

Stavro you must understand, I can’t give up my job, I’m alone in the world you know, I have to support myself.

But you’re not done now you’re with me. And you’d get a job wherever I am, easily, more easily than me I have nothing only a silly Italian degree. But I’m a good teacher I know and I have wonderful references. And you’ll want to stay, I know it, promise me you’ll stay if you really want to and not pretend you don’t out of fear or mistrust? I’ll light the way for you.

All right, I promise.

Come, let’s make love.

Not now Stavro I’m very tired I told you. Why don’t we hear some music, or you read me some Dante.

Yes of course, where is he?

Top shelf right.

God, all these books. And all these publications of yours, there’s a whole shelf, why’d you bring them?

As give-aways, one has to. Anyway you have your list of women, children and languages, I have my list of publications.

But surely you’ve had a lot of lovers too?

I don’t keep lists as conversational gambits.

That’s very unkind. It’s the first time you’re being really unkind to me.

It was a joke. Don’t be depressed again my love or you’ll depress me, I’d just got out of it. Anyway most of the books on those shelves, which are my corner, are in your field aren’t they, all the disciplines have come together through linguistics now it’s very exciting every system is being thought out again from top to bottom, even psychoanalysis has taken up from de Saussure.

Who’s de Saussure?

But. Stavro! I thought you said you taught Linguistics? He’s the father of it all.

Well, I don’t know, it’s Applied Linguistics I do.

Oh — I see. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, but why did you come to the Semiotics Congress then?

Oh just to see and learn.

And did you?

Not really, it all struck me as very pretentious.

Some of it yes. But that’s the funny side, even semioticians don’t communicate. Well, you can teach me Applied Linguistics and I’ll teach you Theoretical.

That’s lovely, yes I’d like that. And I’ll teach you Albanian if you like and Macedonian. Or Russian or Georgian. Or Old Church Slavonic, that’s Old Bulgarian, you should know the language of the church we’ll get married in.

Well let’s stick to Dante for the moment.

Where would you like?

Anywhere. Or the beginning first, then Purgatorio XXVI.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra

What’s wrong?

I’ve just remembered a dream I must tell you.

For these things do matter in a text like love or revolution of those who talk like books idyllic epistolary farcical that inevitably produce a double of the thing re-presented, the double being nothing, a non-being which nevertheless is added to the thing and therefore not totally devoid of value despite the negative portrait of the object instituted by itself as valueless which, however resembling, is never absolutely true, and in any case singular so replaceable. He should have given you a sense of trust so that you could feel he knows what he is doing and you could abandon yourself to his wiles. For, if mimesis exists, non-being is, opening out like mouths into mouths that rehandle the signifiers into a delicious discourse as the summer forms bluish slit-shaped holes like blue lacunae into which you plunge towards the final crumbling of yet another babel.