John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“It certainly tastes brackish.”

“I thought it was very good,” Patrolman Mancuso said. “Just as good as they serve at the French Market. I’m making some more now. You want a cup?”

“Pardon me,” Ignatius said. “Mother, are you going to entertain this gentleman all afternoon? I would like to remind you that I am going to the movies tonight and that I am due at the theater promptly at seven so that I can see the cartoon. I would suggest that you begin preparing something to eat.”

“I better go,” Patrolman Mancuso said.

“Ignatius, you oughta be ashamed,” Mrs. Reilly said in an angry voice. “Me and Mr. Mancuso here just having some coffee. You been nasty all afternoon. You don’t care where I raise that money. You don’t care if they lock me up. You don’t care about nothing.”

“Am I going to be attacked in my own home before a stranger with a false beard?”

“My heart’s broke.”

“Oh, really.” Ignatius turned on Patrolman Mancuso. “Will you kindly leave? You are inciting my mother.”

“Mr. Mancuso’s not doing nothing but being nice.”

“I better go,” Patrolman Mancuso said apologetically.

“I’ll get that money,” Mrs. Reilly screamed. “I’ll sell this house. I’ll sell it out from under you, boy. I’ll go stay by a old folks’ home.”

She grabbed an end of the oilcloth and wiped her eyes.

“If you do not leave,” Ignatius said to Patrolman Mancuso, who was hooking on his beard, “I shall call the police.”

“He is the police, stupid.”

“This is totally absurd,” Ignatius said and flapped away. “I am going to my room.”

He slammed his door and snatched a Big Chief tablet from the floor. Throwing himself back among the pillows on the bed, he began doodling on a yellowed page. After almost thirty minutes of pulling at his hair and chewing on the pencil, he began to compose a paragraph.

Were Hroswitha with us today, we would all look to her for counsel and guidance. From the austerity and tranquility of her medieval world, the penetrating gaze of this legendary Sybil of a holy nun would exorcise the horrors which materialize before our eyes in the name of television. If we could only juxtapose one eyeball of this sanctified woman and a television tube, both being roughly of the same shape and design, what a phantasmagoria of exploding electrodes would occur. The images of those lasciviously gyrating children would disintegrate into so many ions and molecules, thereby effecting the catharsis which the tragedy of the debauching of the innocent necessarily demands.

Mrs. Reilly stood in the hall looking at the DO NOT DISTURB sign printed on a sheet of Big Chief paper and stuck to the door by an old flesh-colored Band-aid.

“Ignatius, let me in there, boy,” she screamed.

“Let you in here?” Ignatius said through the door. “Of course I won’t. I am occupied at the moment with an especially succinct passage.”

“You let me in.”

“You know that you are never allowed in here.”

Mrs. Reilly pounded at the door.

“I don’t know what is happening to you, Mother, but I suspect that you are momentarily deranged. Now that I think of it, I am too frightened to open the door. You may have a knife or a broken wine bottle.”

“Open up this door, Ignatius.”

“Oh, my valve! It’s closing!” Ignatius groaned loudly. “Are you satisfied now that you have ruined me for the rest of the evening?”

Mrs. Reilly threw herself against the unpainted wood.

“Well, don’t break the door,” he said finally and, after a few moments, the bolt slid open.

“Ignatius, what’s all this trash on the floor?”

“That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step.”

“And all the shutters closed. Ignatius! It’s still light outside.”

“My being is not without its Proustian elements,” Ignatius said from the bed, to which he had quickly returned. “Oh, my stomach.”

“It smells terrible in here.”

“Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

“If I know it was like this, I’d been in here long ago.”

“I do not know why you are in here now, as a matter of fact, or why you have this sudden compulsion to invade my sanctuary. I doubt whether it will ever be the same after the trauma of this intrusion by an alien spirit.”

“I came to talk to you, boy. Get your face out them pillows.”

“This must be the influence of that ludicrous representative of the law. He seems to have turned you against your own child. By the way, he has left, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, and I apologized to him over the way you acted.”

“Mother, you are standing on my tablets. Will you please move a little? Isn’t it enough that you have destroyed my digestion without destroying the fruits of my brain also?”

“Well, where I’m gonna stand, Ignatius? You want me to get in bed with you?” Mrs. Reilly asked angrily.

“Watch out where you’re stepping, please!” Ignatius thundered. “My God, never has anyone been so totally and so literally stormed and besieged. What is it anyway that has driven you in here in this state of complete mania? Could it be the stench of cheap muscatel that is assaulting my nostrils?”

“I made up my mind. You gonna go out and get you a job.”

Oh, what low joke was Fortuna playing on him now? Arrest, accident, job. Where would this dreadful cycle ever end?

“I see,” Ignatius said calmly. “Knowing that you are congenitally incapable of arriving at a decision of this importance, I imagine that that mongoloid law officer put this idea into your head.”

“Me and Mr. Mancuso talked like I used to talk to your poppa. You poppa used to tell me what to do. I wish he was alive today.”

“Mancuso and my father are alike only in that they both give the impression of being rather inconsequential humans. However, your current mentor is apparently the type of person who thinks that everything will be all right if everyone works continually.”

“Mr. Mancuso works hard. He’s got a hard road at the precinct.”

“I am certain that he supports several unwanted children who all hope to grow up to be policemen, the girls included.”

“He’s got three sweet chirren.”

“I can imagine.” Ignatius began to bounce slowly. “Oh!”

“What are you doing? Are you fooling with that valve again? Nobody else got him a valve but you. I ain’t got no valve.”

“Everyone has a valve!” Ignatius screamed. “Mine is simply more developed. I am trying to open a passage which you have succeeded in blocking. It may be permanently closed now for all I know.”

“Mr. Mancuso says if you work you can help me pay off the man. He says he thinks the man might take the money in installments.”

“Your friend the patrolman says a great deal. You certainly bring people out, as they say. I never suspected that he could be so loquacious or that he was capable of such perceptive comment. Do you realize that he is trying to destroy our home? It began the moment that he attempted that brutal arrest in front of D. H. Holmes. Although you are too limited to comprehend it all, Mother, this man is our nemesis. He’s spun our wheel downward.”