Stanley Elkin - Boswell

As he talked people took up casual positions around the room. Most of us continued to drink and two or three couples danced, though one of the dancers had turned down the phonograph. A few people maintained their own private conversations, but these were pitched almost subliminally beneath the level of Morty’s. The result was a comfortable, almost soporific buzz which gave us all, I think, a peculiarly distant sense of toleration. It was as if interest persisted while wonder slowly died. I had the sense, too, that at last we had come to terms with ourselves and with each other, as though we were sitting there in the room naked, as indifferent to each other’s nakedness as to our own. There was something only vaguely sexual in all this, a sense of infinite availability, as though each of us had been given a kind of promissory note. It was like bountifulness in dreams. There was so much and all time to contemplate it. Perhaps this is what Morty means when he says he likes young people, for it is chiefly among young people, I think, that this illusion of plenty is generated.

“When I was a young instructor,” Morty was saying, “before I got my degree, I went out to the Midwest. Maybe you saw my book, The Flatlands. The title is a pun. What did I know, a punk kid from the big city? Well, I wasn’t trusted. I had been hired by the University of Nebraska for a turn in summer school — I’ve been a teacher in fourteen state universities and seventeen private institutions, five of them abroad, where my reputation, let’s face it, is greater than in this country, and I’ve never stayed any place more than three semesters running in my whole career — which, incidentally, is the secret of how I manage to produce so much. Stay in the night schools and the summer sessions, you young teachers, and compete for the temporary chairs here and abroad. At that time I had no record, a very scanty bibliography — I was a kid. Probably the only reason they took me on at all was that in May — it was 1933—I had come back from the Pizwall camp in Tespapas on the Upper Amazon and I had these pictures — phonies, incidentally, which I bought in Hollywood one time, stills from some Tarzan picture. In one shot you could barely see Elmo Lincoln’s leg. Well, who needs pictures? To tell you the truth, I don’t even bother with a camera any more. A tribesman, I don’t care where he’s from, is the craziest son of a bitch in the world if he thinks you want pictures of him. He’s always got to gild. Explain to him all you want is an ordinary picture and he turns into a silly whore — pardon my French. He puts flowers where he’s never put flowers in his life, or beads in his nose, or he climbs into skins or something. These pictures in the magazines give me a laugh.

“But Nebraska could get me cheap, and after all I had been with Pizwall — though frankly, at the risk of talking disrespectfully of the dead, I never cared much for his system of collecting data. Anyway, even if I was cheap, and even if I had been at the Tespapas digs, I was an unknown quantity and Nebraska didn’t feel it could trust me. Not only was I Jewish but I was an easterner, and in those days — it’s no secret — I was a Communist, too. I would be again. I was no damned nineteen-thirties liberal. I would be again if conditions changed, but what’s the sense of revolution if you’re not revolting against intolerable conditions? I’ve seen intolerable conditions, and these aren’t intolerable conditions. Anyway, the kind of conditions I’m talking about have almost nothing to do with economics and never did. They have more to do with the culture itself, with national attitudes. I was in Rome once — this will illustrate what I mean, I think — and I was having lunch and wine in a sidewalk cafe—”

“I’m getting out of here,” I heard someone say. “This is just the way he teaches, too.”

“—in the Piazza del Popolo and suddenly I became conscious of this woman. A big woman carrying some sort of a bundle. At first I thought she was carrying laundry. She had the thick forearms of a laundress, broad powerful shoulders, colossal legs, but when she came close I could see she was carrying a baby all wrapped up in a kind of sheet. She was young — it’s hard to tell a gypsy’s age, but she looked about twenty-five and was probably closer to nineteen. In the same hand that she held the baby she had a beer bottle. She had this wide rent in her dress, no underwear on at all — I could see her strong ass. I couldn’t figure out the beer bottle — for a beggar, that’s lousy publicity — until I saw there was a little milk in it. Now why a strapping thing like that wouldn’t breast feed I don’t know, unless it was the poor woman’s concession to the rest of us, not to make a brutta figura by showing a tit in public. I remember it was a nice day; it had rained earlier, but now the sun was very bright and all the streets were dry. Rome and Lago Torvu in the Pacific are the only two places I know where absolutely brilliant afternoons follow cold, dreary mornings. Well, as I say, she was a beggar. The kid was a prop, of course, and could just as well have stayed home with the beer bottle and the mama’s pregnant little sister, but probably the woman felt she needed it for her begging. She came up to all of us. She didn’t miss a table. She’d go up to each of these fine diners sitting in the sun in the café and she’d hold out her hand. Well, they didn’t even look at her. I mean, it was as if this woman and her baby were invisible. They looked everywhere else — out of the corner of your eye you could see them sizing up all the other people in the café—but they ignored her. I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think they saw her. It was as if I, the only person watching her, were having some sort of a private vision. She stood there with the baby and the cruddy milk and asked for money. I mean she begged— she really begged, if you understand me. ‘For the sake of the baby, signore and signori, five lire. Five lire.’ A penny is six lire, you know. Well, it was amazing. They didn’t even refuse. It was as if not only hadn’t they seen her but they couldn’t hear her, either. Finally she’d get tired and go to the next table. She didn’t seem mad. No expression. It was as if she couldn’t see them, either. It took her ten minutes before she got to me. I gave her all my money. About fifteen dollars, I think. That’s shit about how they’ll take it and just buy drink for the lazy gypsy fucker that lives with them. What the hell. Milk, booze — need is need. After the way those others treated her I couldn’t do enough for this woman. I asked her to sit down with me and share my lunch. I couldn’t eat after that anyway. She misunderstood. She thought I was trying to buy her when I gave her the money.

“ ‘Prego, signor,’ she tells me, ’there is the child Here, under the table, touch my organs.’

“Look, it’s no secret. I’m oversexed. And I particularly like big women. My third wife was an African princess six feet two inches tall, two hundred pounds and strong as an ox. But I didn’t want a thing from this woman, you understand — for me it was just another futile gesture against an endless regime of human misery. But she couldn’t understand this. She sat beside me and ate my lunch with one hand and squeezed my prick with the other. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t move. I had a hard-on that big. ‘Please, signora, that isn’t necessary.’ She wouldn’t stop. That hard gypsy hand was all over me. Well, it happened. I’m a man — jerk me and I come. She finished me and my lunch at the same time.

“What are you laughing at? Do you think this is a funny story? What are you laughing at?