Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read Online Free PDF Page A

hyphen, a wink: Harry Lime vanishing in the Viennese fog. Missing man formation. Paradise alone of M walled in on
herself, Murder on the Orient Express ,
Paris to Istanbul, open the first-class compartment: the lady vanishes. The new
reader follows mean streets to the city’s edge ( My
Business Is Circumference ) where a desert opens in
front of her like a map of blankness. Meeting the man, landscape of a man’s
face half-obscured by sunglasses, confronted like an object of increasingly
durable celebrity: Gabriele Ferzetti, David Hemmings, Richard Harris, Jack Nicholson. Navigating the face to a lonely place, a
precipice with a view of the vast conspiracy that includes her, us, the secret
to which she herself is the key ( I’m not in the business; I am
the business ). In the heart of the mountain reclines M
languid with the old world pages, inside the locked room with the Colonel and
the Countess and the Doctor and the Housekeeper and the Scion and the Mistress
and the Dowager and the Lame Footman and the Reformed Burglar and the Lusty
Squire and the Poetess and the Inspector with his pipe and his precarious
infallible chain of clews: “I knew it all along,” sniffs the Countess. We knew
all along that it had to end this way: in this drawing room this hunting lodge
this tramp steamer this prop plane this stable this abandoned warehouse this
by-the-hour motel this funicular this fishing shack this philosopher’s forest
hut this fire lookout this Duesenberg this nightclub this country road this
burning barn this suburban ranch this first-class stateroom this hospital ward
this churchyard this cattle car this lonesome prairie this dilapidated
greenhouse this twilit empire this retreat from Moscow this siege of Leningrad
this Sarajevo motorcade this occupation of Paris this Ukrainian nuclear
facility this march to the sea this grave of narrative that demands only death
to start its dominos and only death, perhaps a symbolic death, perhaps a birth
in disguise, to restore the uncontradictable order that rescues us, that
decrees What Was and Shall Be, that foils novelty and sells novels, that denies
all possibility of aerial views, from the precipice the locked room the womb.
The new reader in sleep reading on, effortlessly converting text to moving
images, restoring words to the purity of their referents, the things, as the
novel gives birth to cinema, to a narrative launched by the immobile visible
inspecting face of a man who has made his deal with the devil, the man who
never compromises, the man who is well paid to navigate and pull taut the
disparate threads, to shuttle in black and white, among the multitudinous
cities incarnadine of Europe the only colorless thing, cutting like a slender
blade to the essence between frames. Riding for days on a train, on a horse, on
a camel, walking blind, bound for the locked room, to the desert, to the
pyramid of skulls, to find her standing there on her naked native ground, heart
stripped bare of secrets, and the man, guided by a love he himself will never
feel: a speaking knife, a spear, a plunging tongue.
    The
camera clings to him, practically hanging on his shoulder, as he turns onto an
avenue. There are cars now, there is traffic. He passes a group of schoolgirls
in blazers and skirts, chattering to themselves in a language without
subtitles; we understand that these are schoolgirls on the near side of
puberty, talking about what schoolgirls talk about: boys, or rather not boys
but those other schoolgirls not present, schoolgirls who are with or have been
with those boys and what they’ve done or might be willing to do with those
boys. Lamb lowers his head and pushes through them without looking back, and
the camera doesn’t linger either, but maybe he swivels his head a quarter-turn
to the right, a little twist; blink and you’ll miss that infinitely complex
appraisable line or fractal territory suggesting a nose’s wing, a heavy black
eyebrow. A little farther and he pauses