Tropic of Cancer Read Online Free PDF Page A

songs. Coming down the stairs this moming, with the fresh coffee in my nostrils, I was humming softly… “ Es wär’ so schön gewesen .” For breakfast, that. And in a little while the English boy upstairs with his Bach. As Elsa says—”he needs a woman.” And Elsa needs something too. I can feel it. I didn’t say anything to Boris about it, but while he was cleaning his teeth this morning Elsa was giving me an earful about Berlin, about the women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turn round— wow, syphilis!
    It seems to me that Elsa looks at me rather wistfully. Something left over from the breakfast table. This afternoon we were writing, back to back, in the studio. She had begun a letter to her lover who is in Italy. The machine got jammed. Boris had gone to look at a cheap room he will take as soon as the apartment is rented. There was nothing for it but to make love to Elsa. She wanted it. And yet I felt a little sorry for her. She had only written the first line to her lover—I read it out of the corner of my eye as I bent over her. But it couldn’t be helped. That damned German music, so melancholy, so sentimental. It undermined me. And then her beady little eyes, so hot and sorrowful at the same time.
    After it was over I asked her to play something for me. She’s a musician, Elsa, even though it sounded like broken pots and skulls clanking. She was weeping, too, as she played. I don’t blame her. Everywhere the same thing, she says. Everywhere a man, and then she has to leave, and then there’s an abortion and then a new job and then another man and nobody gives a fuck about her except to use her. All this after she’s played Schumann for me—Schumann, that slobbery, sentimental German bastard! Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a damn. A cunt who can play as she does ought to have better sense than be tripped up by every guy with a big putz who happens to come along. But that Schumann gets into my blood. She’s still sniffling, Elsa; but my mind is far away. I’m thinking of Tania and how she claws away at her adagio. I’m thinking of lots of things that are gone and buried. Thinking of a summer afternoon in Greenpoint when the Germans were romping over Belgium and we had not yet lost enough money to be concerned over the rape of a neutral country. A time when we were still innocent enough to listen to poets and to sit around a table in the twilight rapping for departed spirits. All that afternoon and evening the atmosphere is saturated with German music; the whole neighborhood is German, more German even than Germany. We were brought up on Schumann and Hugo Wolf and sauerkraut and kümmel and potato dumplings. Toward evening we’re sitting around a big table with the curtains drawn and some fool two-headed wench is rapping for Jesus Christ. We’re holding hands under the table and the dame next to me has two fingers in my fly. And finally we lie on the floor, behind the piano, while someone sings a dreary song. The air is stifling and her breath is boozy. The pedal is moving up and down, stiffly, automatically, a crazy, futile movement, like a tower of dung that takes twenty-seven years to build but keeps perfect time. I pull her over me with the sounding board in my ears; the room is dark and the carpet is sticky with the kümmel that has been spilled about. Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelope, golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber jack leaping over the Arctic rim…
    Elsa is sitting in my lap. Her eyes are like little belly-buttons. I look at her large mouth, so wet and glistening, and I cover it. She is humming now… “ Es wär’ so schön gewesen …” Ah, Elsa, you don’t know yet what that means to me, your Trompeter von Säckingen. German Singing Societies, Schwaben Hall, the Turnverein …