THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free PDF Page A

town stood below, cold with the church spire pointing up to heaven, dingy, yellowish, half-deserted under the steel-gray moss of autumn clouds, and then she said Yes and took him to her room andnow he was telling me about it “… she said the light was too bright, that she was embarrassed, but all she had was a lightbulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling, no lampshade, nothing, so I pulled the panties off her, blue jersey flimsies they were, and hung ’em over the lightbulb, and right away it was like it used to be in the streetcars during the war, in the blackouts, and then I did it to her.…” He was a man entirely in the sway of death, and I swayed under the bleakness of that life of his, more desolate than the life of a mouse or a sparrow, or the caged armadillo at the zoo that just stamps its feet on the steel floor and snorts greedily and rhythmically and then eats and then copulates and snorts and stamps and runs around and sleeps because it’s an armadillo, a comical beast that lives an optimum life according to armadillo law; but he was a human being, until recently principal of a five-grade school and member of the local National Committee although he had now been downgraded to the two-room school on the frontier (“The inspector had it in for me, a Party man, you know, he was jealous because he couldn’t make time with a young teacher like I could”), heir to that ancient tradition of schoolmasters who in days of old brought books and music and beauty and philosophy into mountain cottages and to little villages like that village, husband to a wife who had to stay behind alone and was receiving a bonus for havingto maintain a separate household, father by this time to three children, and here he was, living according to the laws of white mice and armadillos.
    The girl (not the young teacher, but the one that sat next to us that first evening in the dining room listening to the social director, who called himself our Cultural Guide, unfolding an extensive and substantial program of organized activity for our group) was built like a dancer, slender as a street lantern, with boyish hips and delicate sloping shoulders, and breasts like the breasts of stylized statues, that did not disturb the slender young symmetry of the jersey-clad body. And almond eyes, gazelle’s eyes, dark as the charred core of a charcoal pile, and hair like a Gypsy’s but brushed to the flat sheen of black marble. We had walked beside her the whole day on an excursion to Mariatal, a place of pilgrimage to which believers used to come from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and perhaps from all over Europe (now it was a deserted and desolate forest valley) and I felt timid by her side, and most conversation topics seemed trivial and irrelevant. It was impossible to talk with her about the usual things, to have the sort of conversation where the words mean nothing or no more than the crowing of a rooster or the hooting of an owl calling to his mate from the crown of a pine tree. It seemed to me that with her one could only talk about ideas. She wasn’t the kind of girl you approach at a danceand say, May I have this dance, miss? and then something about how good the band is and that’s a pretty dress she has on and what’s her phone number, and then you call that number and she either comes or she doesn’t, and if she comes you go dancing again, and then you don’t have to say much of anything any more, it’s just a matter of whether you have an apartment or a studio or even just a furnished room with a close-mouthed landlady, or if you have none of these, at least enough money for two rooms in a hotel. No, this girl was profound, a philosophy of life rested somewhere in the depth of her soul, and you had to talk about that philosophy — it was the only way you could get to her, there was no other way. Of course, the schoolteacher didn’t see that and he persisted with his noises, his vulgar expressions, crude conversational