inspo/funny

It was in November, a bitterly cold night. I was wandering in search of a modest lodging, not so much for myself, accustomed to spend my nights in the open, on friendly terms with the bats and the stars, as for my portmanteau, which was my sole worldly possession, left behind in the railway cloakroom, when I happened to run into one of my friends from Sassari, of whom I had long lost sight: Simone Pau, a man of singular originality and freedom from prejudice. Hearing of my hapless plight, he proposed that I should come and sleep that night in his hotel. I accepted the invitation, and we set off on foot through the almost deserted streets. On our way, I told him of my many misadventures and of the frail hopes that had brought me to Rome. Every now and then Simone Pau raised his hat-less head, on which the long, sleek, grey hair was parted down the middle in flowing locks, but zigzag, the parting being made with his fingers, for want of a comb. These locks, drawn back behind his ears on either side, gave him a curious, scanty, irregular mane. He expelled a large mouthful of smoke, and stood for a while listening to me, with his huge swollen lips held apart, like those of an ancient comic mask. His crafty, mouselike eyes, sharp as needles, seemed to dart to and fro, as though trapped in his big, rugged, massive face, the face of a savage and unsophisticated peasant. I supposed him to have adopted this attitude, with his mouth open, to laugh at me, at my misfortunes and hopes. But, at a certain point in my recital, I saw him stop in the middle of the street lugubriously lighted by its gas lamps, and heard him say aloud in the silence of the night:

Nighttime was a different matter. By night he lay awake on mattresses that felt made of cardboard and catalogued the faults of humanity. It seemed as if, in every motel he stayed in, he had neighbors who fornicated like there was no tomorrow—men of ill-breeding and poor discipline, women who chuckled and screamed. At 1 a. m. in Erie, Pennsylvania, a girl in the next room ranted and panted like a strumpet. Some slick, worthless fellow having his way with her. Alfred blamed the girl for taking it easy. He blamed the man for his easygoing confidence. He blamed both of them for lacking the consideration to keep their voices down. How could they never once stop to think of their neighbor, lying awake in the next room? He blamed God for allowing such people to exist. He blamed democracy for inflicting them on him. He blamed the motel's architect for trusting a single layer of cinder block to preserve the repose of paying customers. He blamed the motel management for not keeping in reserve a room for guests who suffered. He blamed the frivolous, easygoing townspeople of Washington, Pennsylvania, who had driven 150 miles for a high-school football championship game and filled every motel room in northwest Pennsylvania. He blamed his fellow guests for their indifference to the fornication, he blamed all of humanity for its insensitivity, and it was so unfair. It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions ...

(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)

When we all sat around moaning and groaning about how expensive Paris was—and we did, it was one of our favorite conversations—he simply switched off. You could actually see it boring him. And the few times that we dined alone together, at the end of our meal there was none of the usual leaping up from the chair as though shot through with an arrow, yelling Wow! or similar Indian war whoops, which most of my friends felt de rigueur in heralding the arrival of the bill. I was grateful to him for that, and yet it was impossible to say just why, but it was always a relief to find out that he had the money to cover it. Did it mean he was going without breakfast next morning, or what? And it was crazy to feel like this, because sometimes you could see he was just rolling in the stuff.

“Are you a gambler?” I asked him finally.

“There isn’t anything you do in life that isn’t a gamble, Gorce,” he replied.

“But do you gamble?” I insisted.

“In a way. In a way.” He looked at me oddly.

It just defeated me. I could guess and guess and guess about Larry and still not get anywhere. It all led down a blind alley.

‘Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?’

Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he mutters.

He was impotent with her every other night and, at weekends, in the mornings too—when those boys of his gave him half a chance! (The patter of tiny feet; the stubborn and inexpert worrying of the doorknob; the hoarse command from the bedroom met by puzzled whispers, puzzled withdrawal; the mind-filling silence before the sickening impact or collision—the scream, the wail.) Sometimes, when the Tulls' schedules conspired, he would be lazily impotent with her in the afternoons. Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table. Once, after a party outside Oxford, he had been impotent with her right there on the backseat of the Maestro. Two nights later they got drunk, or rather Gina got drunk, because Richard was already drunk, and on their return from Pizza Express stole into the communal garden, using their key, and Richard was impotent with her in a sylvan setting. Impotent in a sylvan setting, under some dumb blonde of a willow, with Diana above them, her face half-averted, feeling wounded or betrayed, and higher, much higher, the winking starlets of the Milky Way.

I’ve been telling her for years about Dervla Murphy who rode through the Andes on a mule with her eight-year-old daughter. My father probably does that kind of thing the whole time for a living. The most we’ve ever done is hitchhike through France. My father might like the chance to spend some time with the son he never knew he had. We could go to the source of the Amazon by canoe, or trek overland to the Arctic Circle, or live six months with the Masai (my Masai is pretty good). I know 54 edible plants, 23 edible mushrooms and 8 insects that you can keep down if you don’t think about what you’re eating; I think I could live off the land in any continent. For the last two years I’ve been sleeping on the ground outside even in the winter, and I walk for an hour without shoes every day to toughen my feet, and I’ve practised climbing trees and buildings and telephone poles. If she would just tell me who he is I could stop wasting my time on things that might just happen to come in handy and concentrate on the things I actually need to know. I’ve had to learn five major trade languages and eight nomadic languages just in case. It’s insane.