The Colossus of Maroussi Read online

  Next morning I remembered that I had forgotten to call at the vice consul’s office for the book he had promised me. I went to his office and waited for him to make his appearance. He arrived beaming with pleasure. He had already written an inscription in the book; he wanted me to be sure to let him know, immediately I had read the book, what I thought of it. I brought up the rice problem as delicately as I could, after he had tried to sell me the idea of visiting the leper colony somewhere on the island. Boiled rice? Nothing could be easier. His wife would fix it for me every day—it would be a pleasure. Somehow I was touched by his alacrity in aiding me. I tried to imagine a French functionary speaking this way—it was just impossible. On the contrary, the image that came to mind was that of the Frenchwoman who ran the tabac in a certain neighborhood where I had lived for several years and how one day, when I was short two sous, she had snatched the cigarettes from my hand and shouted to me in a panicky voice that they couldn’t possibly give credit to anyone, it would ruin them, and so forth. I thought of a scene in another bistro, where I was also a good customer, and how they had refused to lend me the two francs I needed to make the admission to a movie. I remembered how enraged I became when the woman pretended to me that she was not the proprietress but the cashier and how I had taken the change out of my pocket, just to prove to her that I had some money on me, and flinging it into the street I said—“There, that’s what I think of your lousy francs!” And the waiter had immediately run out into the street and begun searching for the dirty little coins.

  A little later, strolling about the town, I stopped into a shop near the museum where they sold souvenirs and postcards. I looked over the cards leisurely; the ones I liked best were soiled and wrinkled. The man, who spoke French fluently, offered to make the cards presentable. He asked me to wait a few minutes while he ran over to the house and cleaned and ironed them. He said he would make them look like new. I was so dumbfounded that before I could say anything he had disappeared, leaving me in charge of the shop. After a few minutes his wife came in. I thought she looked strange for a Greek woman. After a few words had passed I realized that she was French and she, when she learned that I hailed from Paris, was overjoyed to speak with me. We got along beautifully until she began talking about Greece. She hated Crete, she said. It was too dry, too dusty, too hot, too bare. She missed the beautiful trees of Normandy, the gardens with the high walls, the orchards, and so on. Didn’t I agree with her? I said NO, flatly. “Monsieur!” she said, rising up in her pride and dignity, as if I had slapped her in the face.

  “I don’t miss anything,” I said, pressing the point home. “I think this is marvelous. I don’t like your gardens with their high walls; I don’t like your pretty little orchards and your well-cultivated fields. I like this…” and I pointed outdoors to the dusty road on which a sorely-laden donkey was plodding along dejectedly. “But it’s not civilized,” she said, in a sharp, shrill voice which reminded me of the miserly tobacconiste in the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

  “Je m’en fous de la civilisation européenne!” I blurted out.

  “Monsieur!” she said again, her feathers ruffled and her nose turning blue with malice.

  Fortunately her husband reappeared at this point with the postcards which he had given a dry-cleaning. I thanked him warmly and bought another batch of cards which I selected at random. I stood a moment looking about, wondering what I might buy to show my appreciation. The woman had overlooked my remarks in her zeal to sell me some trifle. She was holding up a hand-woven scarf and patting it affectionately. “Thank you,” I said, “I never wear them.” “But it would make a beautiful gift,” she said—“from Crete, which you are so enamored of.” At this her husband pricked up his ears.

  “You like it here?” he asked, looking at me approvingly.

  “It’s a wonderful place,” I said. “It’s the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen. I wish I could live here all my life.”

  The woman dropped the scarf in disgust. “Come back again,” begged the man. “We will have a drink together, yes?” I shook hands with him and gave a cold nod to his wife.

  That dried-up prune, I thought to myself. How could a full-blooded Greek live with a thing like that? She was probably berating him already for the trouble he had put himself to to please an ignorant foreigner. I could hear her saying in that squeaky, shoe-stringed voice: “Les Américains, ils sont tous les mêmes; ils ne savent pas ce que c’est la vie. Des barbares, quoi!”

  And out on the hot, dusty road, the flies biting like mad, the sun blistering the warts off my chin, the land of Ur reeling in its auto-intoxicated emptiness, I answer her blithely: “Oui, tu as raison, salope que tu es. Mais moi je n’aime pas les jardins, les pots de fleurs, la petite vie adoucie. Je n’aime pas la Normandie. J’aime le soleil, la nudité, la lumiére….”

  With that off my chest I let a song go out of my heart, praising God that the great Negro race which alone keeps America from falling apart had never known the vice of husbandry. I let a song go out of my heart to Duke Ellington, that suave, super-civilized, double-jointed cobra with the steel-flanged wrists—and to Count Basie (sent for you yesterday here you come to-day), long lost brother of Isidore Ducasse and last direct lineal descendant of the great and only Rimbaud.

  Madame, since you were speaking of gardens, let me tell you once and for all how the Dipsy-Doodle works. Here’s a passacaglia to embroider tonight when you’re doing the drop stitch. As Joe Dudley of Des Moines says, the drums give a feeling of something present. I’ll begin with a one o’clock jump, a maxixe à la Huysmans.

  Madame, it’s like this…. Once there was a land. And there were no walls and there were no orchards. There was just a Boogie Woogie man whose name was Agamemnon. After a time he gave birth to two sons—Epaminondas and Louis the Armstrong. Epaminondas was for war and civilization and, in his treacherous way (which made even the angels weep), he fulfilled himself, thereby bringing on the white plague which ended in the basement of Clytemnestra’s palace where the cesspool now stands. Louis was for peace and joy. “Peace, it’s wonderful!” he shouted all day long.

  Agamemnon, seeing that one of his sons had wisdom, bought him a golden torque, saying unto him: “Go forth now and trumpet peace and joy everywhere!” He said nothing about walls or gardens or orchards. He said nothing about building cathedrals. He said: “Go, my son, and riff it through the land!” And Louis went out into the world, which had already fallen into a state of sadness, and he took with him nothing save the golden torque.

  Louis soon found that the world was divided into black and white, very sharp and very bitterly. Louis wanted to make everything golden, not like coins or ikons but like ripe ears of corn, gold like the goldenrod, gold that everybody could look at and feel and roll around in.

  When he had walked as far as Monemvasia, which is at the lower end of the Peloponnesus, Louis boarded the gin mill special for Memphis The train was full of white people whom his brother Epaminondas had driven mad with misery. Louis had a great desire to leave the train and run his sore, aching feet through the river Jordan. He wanted to take a riff in the blue, blow his top.

  Now it happened that the train came to a stop at Tuxedo Junction, not far from the corner of Munson Street. It was high time because Louis felt a breakdown coming on. And then he remembered what his father, the illustrious Agamemnon, had told him once—to first get tight and quiet as a fiend, and then blow! Louis put his thick loving lips to the golden torque and blew. He blew one great big sour note like a rat bustin’ open and the tears came to his eyes and the sweat rolled down his neck. Louis felt that he was bringing peace and joy to all the world. He filled his lungs again and blew a molten note that reached so far into the blue it froze and hung in the sky like a diamond-pointed star. Louis stood up and twisted the torque until it became a great shining bulge of ecstasy. The sweat was pouring down him like a river. Louis was so happy that his eyes began to sweat too and they made two golden pools of joy one of which he name
d the King of Thebes in honor of Oedipus, his nearest of kin, who had lived to meet the Sphinx.

  On a certain day it became the Fourth of July, which is Dipsy-Doodle day in Walla Walla. Louis had by this time made a few friends as he went riffin’ his way through the new land. One was a Count and another was a Duke. They carried little white rats on their fingertips and when they couldn’t stand it any longer, the sad, white gut bucket of a world, they bit with the ends of their fingers and where they bit it was like a laboratory of guinea pigs going crazy with experimentation. The Count was a two-fingered specialist, built small and round like a rotunda, with a little moustache. He always began—bink-bink! Bink for poison, bink for arson. He was quiet and steady like, a sort of introverted gorilla who, when he got bogged in the depths of the gerundive, would speak French like a marquis or babble in Polish or Lithuanian. He never started twice the same way. And when he came to the end, unlike other poison and arson men, he always stopped. He stopped sudden like, and the piano sank with him and the little white rats too. Until the next time.

  The Duke, on the other hand, always slid down from above in a silver-lined bathrobe. The Duke had been educated in Heaven where at an early age he had learned to play the pearly harp and other vibrafoid instruments of the celestial realm. He was always suave, always composed. When he smiled wreaths of ectoplasm formed around his mouth. His favorite mood was indigo which is that of the angels when all the world is sound asleep.

  There were others too of course—Joe the chocolate cherub, Chick who was already sprouting wings, Big Sid, and Fats and Ella and sometimes Lionel the golden boy who carried everything in his hat. There was always Louis, of course, Louis just like he is, with that broad, million dollar smile like the Argive plain itself and smooth, polished nostrils that gleamed like the leaves of the magnolia tree.

  On Dipsy-Doodle day they gathered together round the golden torque and they made jam—missionary jam. That is, Chick, who was like peppered lightning, always flashing his teeth, always spitting out dice and doodle balls, Chick would web it to the jungle and back again like a breeze. What for? you say. Why to fetch a big greasy missionary, to boil him in oil, that’s what for. Joe, whose business it was to give that reassuring feeling of something present, Joe would keep to the background like a rubber pelvis.

  Boil ’em alive, feathers and all—that’s how the Dipsy-Doodle works. It’s barbarious, Madame, but that’s how it is. Ain’t no more orchards, ain’t no more walls. King Agamemnon say to his son: “Boy, bring that land!” And boy, he bring it back. He bring it back tootlin’ and buglin’. He bring back goldenrods and yellow sassafras; he bring back golden cockerels and spaniels red as tigers. No more missionary culturization, no more Pammy Pamondas. Might be Hannibal, M.O., might be Carthage, Illy-Illy. Might be the moon be low, might be a sort of funeralization. Might be nuthin’ neither, ’cause I ain’t thought to name it yet.

  Madame, I’m gonna blow you down so low you’re gonna quiver like a snake. I’m gonna take a fat rat-bustin’ note and blow you back to Kingdom Come. Hear that tappin’ and rappin’? Hear that chicken liver moanin’? That’s Boogie Woogie drawin’ his breath. That’s missionary man foamin’ like a stew. Hear that screamin’ high and shrill? That’s Meemy the Meemer. She’s little and low, sort of built up from the ground. Jam to-day, jam to-morrow. Nobody rare, nobody worry. Nobody die sad no more. ‘Cause the old glad land is full of torque. Blow wind! Blow dust in the eye! Blow hot and dry, blow brown and bare! Blow down them orchards, blow down them walls. Boogie Woogie’s here again. Boogie Woogie go bink-bink. Bink for poison, bink for arson. He ain’t got no feet, he ain’t got no hands. Boogie Woogie done swish it up and down the land. Boogie Woogie scream. Boogie Woogie scream again. Boogie Woogie scream again, again, again, again. No walls, no trees, no nuthin’. Tish and pish and pish and tish. Rats movin’. Three rats, four rats, ten rats. One cockerel, one rat. Locomotive make choo-choo. Sun out and the road is hot and dusty. Trees jell, leaves shell. No knees, no hands, no toes between his fingers. Makin’ hominy, that’s all. He’s comin’ down the road with a banjo on his knees. He’s atappin’ and a-slappin’. Tappin’ the Tappahanna, rappin’ the Rappa hanna. He’s got blood on his fingers and blood in his hair. He’s bogged down, kit and boodle, and the blood is on his knees.

  Louis’s back in the land with a horseshoe round his neck. He’s makin’ ready to blow a fat rat-bustin’ note that’ll knock the blue and the gray into a twisted torquemada. Why he wanna do that? To show he’s satisfied. All them wars and civilizations ain’t brought nobody no good. Just blood everywhere and people prayin’ for peace.

  In the tomb where they buried him alive lies his father Agamemnon. Agamemnon was a shining god-like man who was indeed a god. He gave birth to two sons who travelled far apart. One sowed misery throughout the world and the other sowed joy.

  Madame, I am thinking of you now, of that sweet and fetid stench of the past which you throw off. You are Madame Nostalgia rotting in the cemetery of inverted dreams. You are the black satin ghost of everything which refuses to die a natural death. You are the cheap paper flower carnation of weak and useless womanhood. I repudiate you, your country, your walls, your orchards, your tempered, hand-laundered climate. I call up the malevolent spirits of the jungle to assassinate you in your sleep. I turn the golden torque on you to harass you in your last agonies. You are the white of a rotten egg. You stink.

  Madame, there are always two paths to take: one back towards the comfort and security of death, the other forward to nowhere. You would like to fall back amongst your quaint tombstones and familiar cemetery walls. Fall back, then, fall deep and fathomless into the ocean of annihilation. Fall back into that bloody torpor which permits idiots to be crowned as kings. Fall back and writhe in torment with the evolutionary worms. I am going on, on past the last black and white squares. The game is played out, the figures have melted away, the lines are frazzled, the board is mildewed. Everything has become barbarious again.

  What makes it so lovely and barbarious? The thought of annihilation. Boogie Woogie came back with blood on his knees. He made a one o’clock jump into the land of Jehoshaphat. They took him for a buggy ride. They poured kerosene on his kinky hair and fried him upside down. Sometimes, when the Count goes bink-bink, when he says to himself—what kind of sorrowful tune will I play now?—you can hear the flesh sizzlin’ and stretchin’. When he was little and low they bashed him flat with a potato masher. When he was bigger and higher they caught him in the gut with a pitchfork.

  Epaminondas sure did a swell job civilizationing everybody with murder and hatred. The whole world has become one great big organism dying of ptomaine poison. It got poisoned just when everything was beautifully organized. It became a gut bucket, the white and wormy gut of a rotten egg that died in the shell. It brought on rats and lice, it brought on trench feet and trench teeth, it brought on declarations and preambles and protocols, it brought on bandy-legged twins and bald-headed eunuchs, it brought on Christian Science and poison gases and plastic underwear and glass shoes and platinum teeth.

  Madame, as I understand it, you want to preserve this Ersatz which is sadness and propinquity and status quo all rolled into a fat meat ball. You want to put it in the frying pan and fry it when you’re hungry, is that it? It comforts you, even though there is no nourishment in it, to call it civilization, isn’t that how it is? Madame, you are horribly, miserably, woefully, irrefragably mistaken. You were taught to spell a word which makes no sense. There ain’t no such thing as civilization. There’s one big barbarious world and the name of the rat-catcher is Boogie Woogie. He had two sons and one of them got caught in a wringer and died all mangled and twisted, his left hand thumpin’ like a crazy fluke. The other is alive and procreating like a shad roe. He lives in joy barbariously with nothing but the golden torque. He took the gin mill special at Monemvasia one day and when he got to Memphis he rose up and blew a fat rat-bustin’ note that knocked the meat ball out of the frying pan.
/>   I’m going to leave you now, Madame, to wither in your own trimmed lard. I leave you to fade away to a grease spot. I leave you to let a song go out of my heart. I’m on my way to Phaestos, the last Paradise on earth. This is just a barbarious passacaglia to keep your fingers busy when you fall back on the drop stitch. Should you wish to buy a second-hand sewing machine get in touch with Murder, Death & Blight, Inc. of Oswego, Saskatchewan, as I am the sole, authorized, living agent this side of the ocean and have no permanent headquarters. As of this day forth, in witness whereof, heretofore solemnly sealed and affixed, I do faithfully demit, abdicate, abrogate, evaginate and fornicate all powers, signatories, seals and offices in favor of peace and joy, dust and heat, sea and sky, God and angel, having to the best of my ability performed the duties of dealer, slayer, blighter, bludgeoner and betrayer of the Soiled & Civilized Sewing Machine manufactured by Murder, Death & Blight, Inc. of the Dominions of Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Yucatan, Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and other allied, subjugated provinces registered under the Death and Destruction Act of the planet Earth during the whilomst hegemony of the Homo sapiens family this last twenty-five thousand years.