Tristessa Read Free Page B

Tathagata, leveled the ground for his feet, saw bumps everywhere and leveled the ground, he passed by and saw me and said “First level your own mind, and then the earth will be level, even unto Mount Sumeru” (the ancient name for Everest in Old Magadha) (India).
    I WANTA MAKE friends with the rooster too, by now I’m sitting in front of the bed in the other chair as El Indio has just gone out with a bunch of suspicious men with mustaches one of whom stared at me curiously and with pleased proud grin as I stood with cup in hand acting drunk before the ladies for his and his friends’ edification—Alone in the house with the two women I sit politely before them and we talk earnestly and eagerly about God. “My friends ees seek, I geev them shot,” beautiful Tristessa of Dolours is telling me with her long damp expressive fingers dancing little India-Tinkle dances before my haunted eyes. “—Eees when, cuando , my friend does not pays me back, don I dont care. Because” pointing up with a straight expression into my eyes, finger aloft, “my Lord pay me—and he pay me more —M-o-r-e”—she leans quickly emphasizing more, and I wish I could tell her in Spanish the illimitable and inestimable blessing she will get anyway in Nirvana. But I love her, I fall in love with her. She strokes my arm with thin finger. I love it. I’m trying to remember my place and my position in eternity. I have sworn off lust with women,—sworn off lust for lust’s sake,—sworn off sexuality and the inhibiting impulse—I want to enter the Holy Stream and be safe on my way to the other shore, but would as lief leave a kiss to Tristessa for her hark of my heart’s sake. She knows I admire and love her with all my heart and that I’m holding myself back. “You have you life,” she says to Old Bull (of whom in a minute) “and I haff mind , mine, and Jack has hees life” indicating me, she is giving me my life back and not claiming it for herself as so many of the women you love do claim.—I love her but I want to leave. She says: “I know it, a man and women iss dead,—” “when they want to be dead”—She nods, confirms within herself some dark Aztecan instinctual belief, wise—a wise woman, who would have graced the herds of Bhikshunis in very Yasodhara’s time and made a divine additional nun. With her lidded eyes and clasped hands, a Madonna. It makes me cry to realize Tristessa has never had a child and probably never will because of her morphine sickness (a sickness that goes on as long as the need and feeds off the need and fills in the need simultaneously, so that she moans from pain all day and the pain is real, like abcesses in the shoulder and neuralgia down the side of the head and in 1952 just before Christmas she was supposed to be dying), holy Tristessa will not be cause of further rebirth and will go straight to her God and He will recompense her multibillionfold in aeons and aeons of dead Karma time. She understands Karma, she says: “What I do, I reap ” she says in Spanish—“Men and women have errores —errors, faults, sins, faltas ,” humanbeings sow their own ground of trouble and stumble over the rocks of their own false erroring imagination, and life is hard. She knows, I know, you know.—“Bot—I weeling to haff jonk—morfina—and be no-seek any more.” And she hunches her elbows with peasant face, understanding herself in a way that I cannot and as I gaze at her the candlelight flickers on the high cheekbones of her face and she looks as beautiful as Ava Gardner and even better like a Black Ava Gardner, A Brown Ava with long face and long bones and long lowered lids—Only Tristessa hasnt got that expression of sex-smile, it has the expression of mawkfaced down-mouthed Indian disregard for what you think about its own pluperfect beauty. Not that