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Authors: Alan Isler
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the bottom edge of which the few straggly white hairs of her pudenda sought not very successfully to assert themselves. Her every natural part yearned toward the ground as if exhausted from the struggle with gravity.
But it is unfair to go on in this way, unseemly. Poor soul, she is not to be blamed for time's wintry attack upon the summer bloom of her lost youth. Do not for a moment suppose that I am proud of what I am writing here. The Contessa, I insist, was a decent, loving woman, a good wife. Nor, to go further, was I such a bargain in the Adonis department. At age 65, a natural decrepitude had made its depressing and relentless advances. We were well matched, I assure you. But before the Contessa, my last personal experience of woman had been of my first wife, Meta, still young and achingly lovely. "Look first upon this picture, and on this." Ach, it is impossible to say just what I mean.
Had I grown old along with her, as had her saintly Meurice, such details might not have pricked the bubble of contentment. Disfigurements accumulated slowly over years might have proved invisible; after all, "Love sees not with the eyes." But to have these deplorable mysteries displayed before him of a sudden, swaying sickeningly above him—thrust upon him, so to speak, by an aging woman insistent upon her nuptial rights—this is for an aging man to suffer the hell of instant emasculation. I shall say nothing of the seductive maneuvers wherewith she tried to recall to life my shattered libido, the sights and the sounds, the desperate encouragements. For a full week she persisted in her efforts:
Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!
After the first week she gave up, sobbing pitifully by my side while I pretended sleep.
One learns in time to submit oneself to Purpose, not to question it. Yet would it not have been better all around if the Plan had called for Freddy Blum, not me, to meet her at the Alice in Wonderland statue?
My fingers grow cramped from grasping the pen. Of our life together and of her death, more anon.
The gap that stands in view rvvixt hip and tits Can soon be closed in rhyme by clever wits. How curious that a self-styled intellectual In following clues should prove so ineffectual!
How now to proceed? I sense that I am being manipulated for ends other than my own. Suppose I solved the riddles: what then? Am I to confront the person thus accused? And if he denies the charge? And if he sues me for defamation of character, for slander?
My thoughts turn more and more frequently to the author of the charades. These thoughts are becoming obsessive, a condition I must guard against. It seems to me my current persecutor should be easier to discover than the thief. He has, despite his cleverness, left certain clues behind. I know, for example, that he is a man, which fact eliminates at a stroke half the population of the Emma Lazarus. How do I know? No one but a man would have followed me into the mens downstairs cloakroom to drop the third charade into my jacket pocket! I know other details about the would-be mystifier. He is a man adept at word-games, scrabble, perhaps: we have an annual tournament; crossword puzzles surely, particularly of the English kind. He is probably, although not certainly, native-born: witness his ability to compress his thought into idiomatic cum formally "poetic" English. This last point suggests he knows of my early years, he has done his research: why else should he choose verse for his medium? I have told only the Komman-dant and (necessarily) the domestic staff of my loss. Of course, in a community as close as ours the news would soon circulate. Nevertheless, one must know something of the importance of Rilke for the letter itself to have any significance. This man must know.
To be honest, I have suspected Hamburger as the author of the charades. The word ordure in the first of them, for
example,
But it is unfair to go on in this way, unseemly. Poor soul, she is not to be blamed for time's wintry attack upon the summer bloom of her lost youth. Do not for a moment suppose that I am proud of what I am writing here. The Contessa, I insist, was a decent, loving woman, a good wife. Nor, to go further, was I such a bargain in the Adonis department. At age 65, a natural decrepitude had made its depressing and relentless advances. We were well matched, I assure you. But before the Contessa, my last personal experience of woman had been of my first wife, Meta, still young and achingly lovely. "Look first upon this picture, and on this." Ach, it is impossible to say just what I mean.
Had I grown old along with her, as had her saintly Meurice, such details might not have pricked the bubble of contentment. Disfigurements accumulated slowly over years might have proved invisible; after all, "Love sees not with the eyes." But to have these deplorable mysteries displayed before him of a sudden, swaying sickeningly above him—thrust upon him, so to speak, by an aging woman insistent upon her nuptial rights—this is for an aging man to suffer the hell of instant emasculation. I shall say nothing of the seductive maneuvers wherewith she tried to recall to life my shattered libido, the sights and the sounds, the desperate encouragements. For a full week she persisted in her efforts:
Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!
After the first week she gave up, sobbing pitifully by my side while I pretended sleep.
One learns in time to submit oneself to Purpose, not to question it. Yet would it not have been better all around if the Plan had called for Freddy Blum, not me, to meet her at the Alice in Wonderland statue?
My fingers grow cramped from grasping the pen. Of our life together and of her death, more anon.
The gap that stands in view rvvixt hip and tits Can soon be closed in rhyme by clever wits. How curious that a self-styled intellectual In following clues should prove so ineffectual!
How now to proceed? I sense that I am being manipulated for ends other than my own. Suppose I solved the riddles: what then? Am I to confront the person thus accused? And if he denies the charge? And if he sues me for defamation of character, for slander?
My thoughts turn more and more frequently to the author of the charades. These thoughts are becoming obsessive, a condition I must guard against. It seems to me my current persecutor should be easier to discover than the thief. He has, despite his cleverness, left certain clues behind. I know, for example, that he is a man, which fact eliminates at a stroke half the population of the Emma Lazarus. How do I know? No one but a man would have followed me into the mens downstairs cloakroom to drop the third charade into my jacket pocket! I know other details about the would-be mystifier. He is a man adept at word-games, scrabble, perhaps: we have an annual tournament; crossword puzzles surely, particularly of the English kind. He is probably, although not certainly, native-born: witness his ability to compress his thought into idiomatic cum formally "poetic" English. This last point suggests he knows of my early years, he has done his research: why else should he choose verse for his medium? I have told only the Komman-dant and (necessarily) the domestic staff of my loss. Of course, in a community as close as ours the news would soon circulate. Nevertheless, one must know something of the importance of Rilke for the letter itself to have any significance. This man must know.
To be honest, I have suspected Hamburger as the author of the charades. The word ordure in the first of them, for
example,
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