Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Read Online Free Page A

very bent and shaken
l
, though you would never guess it now, the original is so overlaid with flourishes. The secret is to proceed by a series of gentle scratches, repeated often; never an impatient deep gouge, which the wood will surely put a crick in, but always the patiently light scratch. A painted surface is tricky. Oh, it’s easy enough to make pencil marks on a fine enamel, but that’s not the aim, you know. Get under the skin, that’s the idea. You must watch that the paint doesn’t flake or you will spoil the clarity and decision of your line. I’m not much interested in images myself. I always carve letters or abstract designs: five-pointed stars sometimes, the capital
L
, which in script curls its edges like a sheet of stamps, or
f
or
k
, or the word
Isabel
, or thickety black scrawls bunched like tumbleweeds, and mazes of dizzily turning lines like the spill and flow of hair, whole worlds really, the track deepening as you journey on, as if at any moment you might penetratesomething, find yourself inside the sacred wood, say, or simply, like Alice, land thump in another part of the soul where a voice is exclaiming, my, my, my, as you arrive, and there is a vague flash of white from something running or a pink glow from the lobe of an animal’s ear or the faint but steady ringing of a distant alarm. Then frequently: balloon.
    Traveling, I’ve returned to stations where I’ve stopped for gas and found my stars still there, sometimes even darkened, or deepened, by those who love, as I do, to slip into a path and feel the rhythm of another mind, a stranger’s, once sitting where you are, tracing some secret of his life on the wall or in the toilet seat, not always cheap or vulgar either, for after all it is form and not the content that matters, though there are those who scratch haphazardly, concerned to get their filthy message over (in art and life the same), but they aren’t everybody, thank god, for I’ve seen the masculine member drawn by a genius, and a vagina rendered strangely like a daisy, and once, as high as you could reach, like the bragging claw marks of a bear, exquisitely formed, the word
lemonade
, by a divinity.
    Three a.m. It’s begun to snow. Could I have the time where you are? Strange. It may be morning, hot already, sweat in all your creases. Whew. Your bare legs have stuck to your chair. That time of year. In me large flakes are sailing single file. Hear the hiss? Isn’t that the purply misssst?
    There is a small hotel in town. I remember the dirty marble floor, cold and noisy, the nails in my worn heels clicking. I skirt bucket rings and patches of drying mop water, one in the shape of Spain, to escape the remote lamps of the lounge and keep my shadow out of corners while I flee on strips of carpet to the stairs where bumping down sedately through the door marked WOMAN I say I beg your pardon to the wielder of the mop though she is gone or not yet come and the booths are empty, idle, unobscene, unscatological. I try one out but there is nothingto it. My deeply yellow urine, like the light from those brass lamps, spills in the bowl and I leave it as a sign of my passing. Oh I am a foul left-handed fellow, Phaedrus, rarely ambidextrous. As I go I hear my feet … the wealthy author walks.
    Did I discover much?
    No, not much: stale powder, strong discharges, cheap perfume, moist hair. They write on the walls with lipstick. I’ve little interest in that. It’s painting of a crude sort; nothing’s clear. It has no permanence and lacks the shaping resistance of a decent medium. But where the women water in a public playground I did follow a track in the shape of a symbol from the Isle of Man that made my hair stand on end. There was something superb scratched in plaster with a bobby pin … somewhere … I’ve forgotten … while another time, in a roadside park, I encountered a painting, a silhouette in menstrual blood entitled
Sam
. Not much luck. Yet I keep on. Don’t