Rondo
1
Paul's "hour" of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of the morning.
I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of concentration—and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair came out of the poor guy—a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises. Ridiculous—but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.
I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some step on Paul's behalf—or even that I sat down at my table with grim and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account by knifing further excess from my serial.
Such was not the case.
I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces for both efforts—but I met with failure.
My head ached. Vague pains beset my body—squirting about mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned—dry and yet sticky—inflamed and evil-tasting to itself—the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores.
I stared at my body—the wens and scars and indurations and red blots—the warts and excrescences and moles—the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition—the crinkling paper of my skin—the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity—the time-shrunk backs of my hands—my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear—their nails, turned in, split, chitinous—small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries—shine and scale on my shins—myself: waxwork—worn battlefield—warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.