Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

We stopped outside a building about three streets from where I lived, a gaslamp guttered, spewing vitriol onto the pavement. The black, cast-iron, Art Nouveau balcony embellishing the entire tenement was like the paper trimming round a coffin. The maid of honour handed me a key.

“Open it quietly, Frank,” she said, “daddy’s such a light sleeper, see?”

“I do see, my Marylou,” says I, but my hands were shaking.

“Wait, Freddy,” she decided, taking the key from me, she braced her knee against the door, opening it and letting out a whiff of the hallway, which bulged out at us like a flag soggy with beer. The yellow light of the gaslamp alighted on the first step. I held up the little mirror and cast an unblinking eye of reflected light on the greenish wall.

“Jack,” she said tenderly, “you can keep this mirror to remember me by, it quite suits you, do you know that?”

“I do,” said I.

“You don’t know anything,” she whispered, “this mirror was the last thing my mum looked at before she died, see?”

“I do see,” I nodded.

She closed the door, but before she trapped the reflection from the little mirror on the wall in it, I had an apparition of Charles Baudelaire at the same spot: having missed his footing on a kerbstone, he was raising a hand to grab his halo, which, as he stumbled, was heading down into the mud. And the draught from the hallway was wafted by a pinion of imbecility.

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18 ADAGIO LAMENTOSO

In Memoriam Franz Kafka

I gaze at your lovely figure and and there is no need to call upon the imagination in order to trace a return to the beginnings, your morning attire is of a fine, oyster-coloured linen and you are a voucher for a peat spa, your blue eye stares at me with a lacteal tinkle, with a stiff forefinger you part the yellow branches of a weeping willow and you are fully aware that you can expect from me all the very worst.

At the finish emotive flashes of lightning and a golden one-0-eight open the way to a sewer, a sorry weekend in the life I’m now starting to live.

The clothes I dream of are woven from the laughter of Siberian cellulose, eight hundred girls’ green hands are the foundation of a sweet confession, contours of laughter solidify in a mask of politeness and the mini-crisps of your tiny porcelain ears are perfectly concealed in the eavesdropping thickets of your fine peroxide-infused hair.

The hands of timed things and events wind counter to the flow of clock hands back to zero hour, though a single day spent with a girl you love on a Norwegian glacier is the stock exchange of love of all good people. The friendship of a woman is pain for two, yesterday the foxes moved away and rewarded a brass band by clapping.

How I’d like to summon up the strength to rip off your face, with a single yank, how I’d like to lay bear all your thoughts with a single thwack, with a single brutal yank, like whipping off a bra, like whipping off undies!

Along a belt of pathways I return to the beginning of going, the revealing magnificence of animal experience wants thirsty cities to have lidos filled with children. Your forget-me-not eye, damaged by a fragment of Modra majolica, now understands my cool gaze, it is right that you watch the knife of my imagination carving its way back to the sources of things.

The last brook is sucked into a stream down to its last drop, the last river into the sea and the ocean evaporates up into the azure sky down to its last little bright cloud.

I can see you watching with me that rising fall, I can see that not one stage in this striptease has escaped you. I’m apparently pursuing the memory of your white silk, gold-embroidered dress, the sleeve furnished at the wrist with little slits for my desire, two hollow folds of cream-yellow cashmire, but I watch all the more closely as a pure spring and divine Ago go forward to meet the Spring, and you smile at me seeing me scoop up whole handfuls of creative clay, and I, sniffing the earth, am also sniffing you.

Thus enriched with a bowl of curly cuttings, I sip the hope of an hourglass and for a healthy diet I prefer sorrow, a bit of copper wire found near a petrol station links me to eternity, the cage-rearing of lake trout is my disrupted honeymoon.

Now I’m sitting on the bottom of a little inn at Krč, the window panes are the walls of a great aquarium, you are floating in slow motion up by the ceiling, like a bee that has fallen into the honeycomb of my brain, fluttering curtains are an incessant process of hope and my destiny’s dues are stored in a freezer.