Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read Online Free Page A

management. A certain presence (it shall be nameless) intervened in glowering dyspeptic manner, to direct and otherwise disrupt the vital affairs of operatic state. Neri kowtowed, cow that she was; Czgowchwz, mulish, stood her ground, as graciously as she might. Yet eventually the impasse devolved. They fired Czgowchwz by a wire to Rome, where she was in secret recording sessions on a new disc.
    The hunger strike began at once, in late February of the year of the Czgowchwz Return. Ralph lost forty pounds. Others ate saltines, matzos, drank distilled water. The rest boozed, guzzled, and moaned. Carmen stood her ground as always, and Arpenik the Wise and Kind persevered; she kept the best Armenian restaurant in New York going along, although she herself would not touch so much as a dollop of ekmek. Gaia della Gueza’s being socially prominent and the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier’s sudden spontaneous endorsement of the “ causa Czgowchwz” started a riot of talk, as each would arrive by night in mink and sable wraps to sit with the others, munching occasional grapes. Sympathy arrived in headline tributes from the notables about Gotham. Dolores, dead now, was publicly appalled outright for three weeks, daily, although ignorant of the issues.
    On the Tuesday of the strike’s second week Ralph received a package on the line; it was postmarked Paris. Opening the box in tremolo, he discovered a loaf of nut bread, a note in the wrappings reading: “ Mangele, bimbo, ti prego! —M,” and the first inscribed studio demo of M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano . He passed out. The remaining Secret Seven carted him on the BMT down to St. Marks Place, where was heard in New York the first Czgowchwz F sharp in alt. The entire record was Czgowchwz, unmistakably, but Czgowchwz in a new register. The voice had thinned to a spearhead shaft on the top; it had opened like the portals of doom at the bottom. It had breaks, or creases, never before heard in any voice. Yet what endured was somehow more essential Czgowchwz. “Quintessential Czgowchwz!” Alice screamed. “Definitive in its own right,” Paranoy insisted in the April Opera . Ralph, revived, lamented, “She wobbles in thirds!” Dixie, defiantly opposed to the transformation that first day, moaned, “She sounds like an Electrolux; the tops are like steel wool!” Others gagged on saltines, and a new era was upon the world, for the better or for doom...
    The Secret Seven rode out to International Airport with the nameless fiend, who sat mute as stone the way out and the way back. He carried the contract that must yet be signed before the Traviata could be sung. On the way back, the Seven nibbled a second nut loaf Czgowchwz had had baked in Paris. She had altered mysteriously. They stood beside her as she flung jonquils down to the assembly, and recorded the “An die Musik” on Ralph’s portable machine. (The jonquils, relics now, came from Max Schling’s.) It was gorgeous, as gestures go.
    The Secret Seven and the Countess Madge were to have a box. The Countess had had the same one, number 7, for every Czgowchwz performance. The Secret Seven normally stood, staying faithful to the line, keeping in touch with rumor, its labyrinthine progress toward the inner chamber known variously as “the truth” and “absolute fiction.” On occasion one or another of them would drop into the wings, or claque for Dulcinea Regalia, or descend into the pit of hell backstage and “super,” helping out in small ways. The Countess took a fancy to this last diversion, and she and Alice became the two whores in the window at Lillas Pastia’s in every Czgowchwz Carmen . The Countess managed to get a coarse horselaugh in during the Chanson Bohème on a broadcast. It’s all on Ralph’s tapes.
    The March 17 afternoon was chilly. The Irish swept endlessly up Fifth Avenue as if replenished hourly by fresh