Black Spring Read Free Page B

black belt, over the Turkish baths, through the house of the winds, over the sky-blue waters, between the clay pipes and the silver balls dancing on liquid jets: the infra-human world of fedoras and banjos, of bandannas and black cigars; butterscotch stretching from peg to Winnipeg, beer bottles bursting, spun-glass molasses and hot tamales, surf-roar and griddle sizzle, foam and eucalyptus, dirt, chalk, confetti, a woman’s white thigh, a broken oar; the razzle-dazzle of wooden slats, the meccano puzzle, the smile that never comes off, the wild Arabian smile with spits of fire, the red gulch and the green intestines….
    0 world, strangled and collapsed, where are the strong white teeth? 0 world, sinking with the silver balls and the corks and the life-preservers, where are the rosy scalps? 0 glab and glairy, 0 glabrous world now chewed to a frazzle, under what dead moon do you lie cold and gleaming?
    Third or Fourth Day of Spring
    To piss warm and drink cold, as Trimalchio says, because our mother the earth is in the middle, made round like an egg, and has all good things in herself, like a honeycomb.
    The house wherein I passed the most important years of my life had only three rooms. One was the room in which my grandfather died. At the funeral my mother’s grief was so violent that she almost yanked my grandfather out of the coffin. He looked ridiculous, my dead grandfather, weeping with his daughter’s tears. As if he were weeping over his own funeral.
    In another room my aunt gave birth to twins. When I heard twins, she being so thin and barren, I said to myself-why twins? why not triplets? why not quadruplets? why stop? So thin and scraggly she was, and the room so small-with green walls and a dirty iron sink in the corner. Yet it was the only room in the house which could produce twins-or triplets, or Jackasses.
    The third room was an alcove where I contracted the measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, et cetera: all the lovely diseases of childhood which make time stretch out in everlasting bliss and agony, especially when Providence has provided a window over the bed with bars and ogres to claw at them and sweat as thick as carbuncles, rapid as a river and sprouting, sprouting as if it were always spring and tropics, with thick tenderloin steaks for hands and feet heavier than lead or light as snow, feet and hands separated by oceans of time or incalculable latitudes of light, the little knob of the brain hidden away like a grain of sand and the toenails rotting blissfully under the ruins of Athens. In this room I heard nothing but inanities. With each fresh, lovely disease my parents became more addlepated. (“Just think, when you were a little baby I took you to the sink and I said baby you don’t want to drink from the bottle any more do you and you said No and I smashed the bottle in the sink.”) Into this room softly treading (“treading softly,” said General Smerdiakov) came Miss Sonowska, spinster of dubious age with a green-black dress. And with her came the smell of old cheese-her sex had turned rancid under the dress. But Miss Sonowska also brought with her the sack of Jerusalem and the nails that so pierced the hands of Jesus that the holes have never disappeared. After the Crusades the Black Death; after Columbus syphilis; after Miss Sonowska schizophrenia.
    Schizophrenia! Nobody thinks any more how marvelous it is that the whole world is diseased. No point of reference, no frame of health. God might just as well be typhoid fever. No absolutes. Only light years of deferred progress. When I think of those centuries in which all Europe grappled with the Black Death I realize how radiant life can be if only we are bitten in the right place! The dance and fever in the midst of that corruption! Europe may never again dance so ecstatically. And syphilis! The advent of syphilis! There it was, like a morning star hanging over the rim of the world.
    In 1927 I sat in the Bronx listening to a man