Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read Online Free PDF

the papas and mammas and paramours and cicisbei and the morals of Nanny and the nursery wallpapers and the third and fourth generation snuffles… That tires us. As though the gentle reader could be nothing but an insurance broker or a professional punter. The background pushed up as a guarantee… that tires us. The only perspective worth stating is the site of the unknotting that could be, landscape of a dream of integration, prospective, that of Franciabigio's young Florentine in the Louvre, into which it is pleasant to believe he may, gladly or sadly, no matter, recede, from which he has not necessarily emerged. We never set any store by the creased pants of the confidence trickster. The Smeraldina-Rima is not demonstrable. She has to be taken or left. Belacqua did a little of both. She obliged him to.
    She had an idea she was studying music and eurhythmies in the very vanguardful Schule Dunkelbrau, ten miles out of town, on the fringe of the wild old grand old park of Modelberg. This park was more beautiful and tangled far than the Bois de Boulogne or any other multis latebra opportuna that it is possible to imagine, quieter and fresher, except on Sundays when the swells used to drive out from town to take the air and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the Evites. The Dunkelbrau gals were very Evite and nudist and shocked even the Modelbergers when they went in their Harlequin pantalettes, or just culotte and sweater and uncontrollable cloak, to the local Kino. All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygienic and promotive of great strength and beauty. In the summer they lay on the roof and bronzed their bottoms and impudenda. And all day it was dancing and singing and music and douches andfrictions and bending and stretching and classes—Har-monie, Anatomie, Psychologie, Improvisation, with a powerful ictus on the last syllable in each case.
Friendly
intercourse between teacher and student was encouraged and Apfelmus was the staple of diet and sometimes a group would dart up to town for a concert or an Abknutschen. In the middle, the thick and the heat and the stress, of all this, the Smeraldina-Rima was everybody's darling, she was so young and had such a lovely face and amused the gals with foul stories and improvised so well. Behold Herr Arschlochweh, Swiss and melancholy and highbrow and the Improvisationslehrer. The Smeraldina-Rima stimulated this gentleman to certain velleities of desire, or so at least she allowed it to be understood, and sure enough that was Belacqua's own impression when he saw them together, which, let it be said forthwith, was not often. The Smeraldina never looked like being able to play the piano, but she had a curious talent for improvisation, which came up in her conversation. When she was in form, launched, she could be extremely amusing, with a strange feverish eloquence, the words flooding and streaming out like a conjuror's coloured paper. She could keep a whole group, even her family, convulsed with the ropes and ropes of logorrhœa streaming out in a gush. Her own Mammy used to foam at the mouth and the Mandarin was forgotten.
    â€œOh” coughed Mammy on these occasions “she ought to be on the halls” and the Smeraldina would broach another bobbin.
    She liked Arschlochweh and adored Improvisation; but the Anatomiestunde and the bending and stretching she did not like. “Pfui!” she was disgusted, lifting her shoulders and spreading her hands like the Mandarin, “pfui! the old body!”; and that raised the hopes of Belacqua until shemade it clear, which she did in many ways, that she did not mean at all what he had hoped rather she might.
    Because her body was all wrong, the peacock's claws. Yes, even at that early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbub-bubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched aloft on top of this porpoise prism,