Look at the Harlequins! Read Online Free PDF

crowd.” I said those were abominable clichés used only by Philistines. In my set, in my world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stoodso far above any concept of “class” that we only laughed or yawned when reading about “Japanese Barons” or “New England Patricians.” Yet strangely enough Ivor stopped clowning and became a normal serious individual only when he straddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English “upper classes”—especially their pronunciation. It was, I remonstrated, a speech superior in quality to the best Parisian French, and even to a Petersburgan’s Russian; a delightfully modulated whinny, which both he and Iris were rather successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating in their everyday intercourse, when not making protracted fun of a harmless foreigner’s stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationality of the bronzed old man with the hoary chest hair who was wading out of the low surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog—I thought I knew his face.
    It was, she said, Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, his face and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for at least two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shaking itself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in June when the place was practically empty, and cut Ivor, though he knew young L.P. at Trinity. They’d now moved down there. Even more select. See that orange dot? That’s their cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew young P. and disliked him.
    Same day. Ran into him in the Mirana Men’s Room. Was effusively welcomed. Would I care to meet his sister, tomorrow is what? Saturday. Suggested they stroll over tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria. Sort of cove to your right. I’m there with friends. Of course you know Ivor Black. Young P. duly turned up, with lovely, long-limbed sister. Ivor—frightfully rude. Rise, Iris, you forget we are having tea with Rapallovich and Chicherini. That sort of stuff. Idiotic feuds. Lydia P. screamed with laughter.
    Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobster stage, I switched from a conservative
caleçon de bain
to a briefer variety (still banned at the time in stricter paradises). The delayed change resulted in a bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking into Iris’s room to contemplate myself in a full-length looking glass—the only one in the house—on a morning she had chosen for a visit to a beauty salon, which I called up to make sure she was there and not in the arms of a lover. Except for a Provençal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around, thus allowing me to indulge in one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures: circulating stark naked all over a strange house.
    The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rather contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures of exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmine equatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or less triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both sides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my face. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frightening
repoussé
, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man’s portable zoo, a symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin sea urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to the public.
    A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of my incurable ailment, “flayed consciousness,” were shoving aside my harlequins. I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love’s lavender-scented bedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (
Du côté de chez Swann
) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen in a Moïse basket, a