It was appalling, continued the Swiss gentleman, using an expression Armande had got from Julia (now Lady X), really appalling how crime was pampered nowadays. Only today a temperamental waiter who had been accused of stealing a case of the hotel's Dole (which Monsieur Wilde did not recommend, between parentheses) punched the maОtre d'hФtel in the eye, black-buttering it gravely. Did – his interlocutor suppose that the hotel called the police? No, mister, they did not. Eh bien, on a higher (or lower) level the situation is similar. Had the bilinguist ever considered the problem of prisons?
Oh, he had. He himself had been jailed, hospitalized, jailed again, tried twice for throttling an American girl (now Lady X): "At one stage I had a monstrous cellmate – during a whole year. If I were a poet (but I'm only a proofreader) I would describe to you the celestial nature . of solitary confinement, the bliss of an immaculate toilet, the liberty of thought in the ideal jail. The purpose of prisons" (smiling at Monsieur Wilde who was looking at his watch and not seeing much anyway) "is certainly not to cure a killer, nor is it only to punish him (how can one punish a man who has everything with him, within 'him, around him?). Their only purpose, a pedestrian purpose but the only logical one, is to prevent a killer from killing again. Rehabilitation? Parole? A myth, a joke. Brutes cannot be corrected. Petty thieves are not worth correcting (in their case punishment suffices). Nowadays, certain deplorable trends are current in soi-disant liberal circles. To put it concisely a killer who sees himself as a victim is not only a murderer but a moron." .
"I think I must go," said poor stolid Wilde.
"Mental hospitals, wards, asylums, all that is also familiar to me. To live in a ward in a heap with thirty or so incoherent idiots is hell. I faked violence in order to get a solitary cell or to be locked up in the damned hospital's security wing, ineffable paradise for this kind of patient. My only chance to remain sane was by appearing subnormal. The way was thorny. A handsome and hefty nurse liked to hit me one forehand slap sandwiched between two backhand ones – and I returned to blessed solitude. I should add that every time my case came up, the prison psychiatrist testified that I refused to discuss what he called in his professional jargon 'conjugal sex.' I am sadly happy to say, sadly proud, too, that neither the guards (some of them humane and witty) nor the Freudian inquisitors (all of them fools or frauds) broke or otherwise changed the sad person I am."
Monsieur Wilde, taking him for a drunk or madman, had lumbered away. The pretty receptionist (flesh is flesh, the red sting is l'aiguillon rouge, and my love would not mind) had begun to signal again. He got up and walked to her desk. The Stresa hotel was undergoing repairs after a fire. Mais (pretty index erect) -
All his life, we are glad to note, our Person had experienced the curious sensation (known to three famous theologians and two minor poets) of there existing behind him – at his shoulder, as it were – a larger, incredibly wiser, calmer and stronger stranger, morally better than he. This was, in fact, his main "umbral companion" (a clownish critic had taken R. to task for that epithet) and had he been without that transparent shadow, we would not have bothered to speak about our dear Person. During the short stretch between his chair in the lounge and the girl's adorable neck, plump lips, long eyelashes, veiled charms. Person was conscious of something or somebody warning him that he should leave Witt there and then for Verona, Florence, Rome, Taormina, if Stresa was out. He did not heed his shadow, and fundamentally he may have been right. We thought that he had in him a few years of animal pleasure; we were ready to waft that girl into his bed, but after all it was for him to decide, for him to die, if he wished.
Mais! (a jot stronger than "but" or even "however") she had some good news for him. He had wanted to move to Floor Three, hadn't he? He could do so tonight. The lady with the little dog was leaving before dinner. It was a history rather amusing. It appeared that her husband looked after dogs when their masters had to absent themselves. The lady, when she voyaged herself, generally took with her a small animal, choosing from among those that were most melancholic. This morning her husband telephoned that the owner had returned earlier from his trip and was reclaiming his pet with great cries.
26
The hotel restaurant, a rather dismal place furnished in a rustic style, was far from full, but one expected two large families on the next day, and there was to be, or would have been (the folds of tenses are badly disarranged in regard to the building under examination) quite a nice little stream of Germans in the second, and cheaper, half of August. A new homely girl in a folklore costume revealing a lot of creamy bosom had replaced the younger of the two waiters, and a black patch masked the grim captain's left eye. Our Person was to be moved to room 313 right after dinner; he celebrated the coming event by drinking his sensible fill – a Bloody Ivan (vodka and tomato juice) before the pea soup, a bottle of Rhine with the pork (disguised as "veal cutlets") and a double marc with his coffee. Monsieur Wilde looked the other way as the dotty, or drugged, American passed by his table.
The room was exactly as he wanted it or had wanted it (tangled tenses again!) for her visit. The bed in its southwestern corner stood neatly caparisoned, and the maid who would or might knock in a little while to open it was not or would not be let in – if ins and outs, doors and beds still endured. On the bedside table a new package of cigarettes and a traveling clock had for neighbor a nicely wrapped box containing the green figurine of a girl skier which shone through the double kix. The little bedside rug, a glorified towel of the same pale blue as the bedspread, was still tucked under the night table, but since she refused in advance (capricious! prim!) to stay until dawn, she would not see, she would never see, the little rug doing its duty to receive the first square of sun and the first touch of Hugh's sticking-plastered toes. A bunch of bellflowers and bluebonnets (their different shades having a lovers' quarrel) had been placed, either by the assistant manager, who respected sentiment, or by Person himself, in a vase on the commode next to Person's shed tie, which was of a third shade of blue but of another material (sericanette). A mess of sprouts and mashed potatoes, colorfully mixed with pinkish meat, could be discerned, if properly focused, performing hand-over-fist evolutions in Person's entrails, and one could also make out in that landscape of serpents and caves two or three apple seeds, humble travelers from an earlier meal. His heart was tear-shaped, and undersized for such a big chap.
Returning to the correct level, we see Person's black raincoat on a hook and his charcoal-gray suitcoat over the back of a chair. Under the dwarf writing desk, full of useless drawers, in the northeastern corner of the lamplit room, the bottom of the wastepaper basket, recently emptied by the valet, retains a smudge of grease and a shred of paper napkin. The little spitz dog is asleep on the back seat of an Amilcar driven by the kennelman's wife back to Trux.
Person visited the bathroom, emptied his bladder, and thought of taking a shower, but she could come any moment now – if she came at all! He pulled on his smart turtleneck, and found a last antacid tablet in a remembered but not immediately located coat pocket (it is curious what difficulty some people have in distinguishing at one glance the right side from the left in a chaired jacket). She always said that real men had to be impeccably dressed, yet ought not to bathe too often. A male whiff from the gousset could, she said, be most attractive in certain confrontations, and only ladies and chambermaids should use deodorants. Never in his life had he waited for anybody or anything with such excitement. His brow was moist, he had the shakes, the corridor was long and silent, the few occupants of the hotel were mostly downstairs, in the lounge, chatting or playing cards, or just happily balancing on the soft brink of sleep. He bared the bed and rested his head on the pillow while the heels of his shoes were still in communication with the floor. Novices love to watch such fascinating trifles as the shallow hollow in a pillow as seen through a person's forehead, frontal bone, rippling brain, occipital bone, the back of the head, and its black hair. In the beginning of our always entrancing, sometimes terrifying, new being that kind of innocent curiosity (a child playing with wriggly refractions in brook water, an African nun in an arctic convent touching with delight the fragile clock of her first dandelion) is not unusual, especially if a person and the shadows of related matter are being followed from youth to death. Person, this person, was on the imagined brink of imagined bliss when Armande's footfalls approached – striking out both "imagined" in the proof's margin (never too wide for corrections and queries!). This is where the orgasm of art courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic.