Nightwood Read Online Free

that sense of peace that formerly he had experienced only in museums. He moved with a humble hysteria among the decaying brocades and laces of the Carnavalet; he loved that old and documented splendour with something of the love of the lion for its tamer—that sweat-tarnished spangled enigma that, in bringing the beast to heel, had somehow turned toward him a face like his own, but which though curious and weak, had yet picked the precise fury from his brain.
    Nadja had sat back to Felix, as certain of the justice of his eye as she would have been of the linear justice of a Rops, knowing that Felix tabulated precisely the tense capability of her spine with its lashing curve swinging into the hard compact cleft of her rump, as angrily and as beautifully as the more obvious tail of her lion.
    The emotional spiral of the circus, taking its flight from the immense disqualification of the public, rebounding from its illimitable hope, produced in Felix longing and disquiet. The circus was a loved thing that he could never touch, therefore never know. The people of the theatre and the ring were for him as dramatic and as monstrous as a consignment on which he could never bid. That he haunted them as persistently as he did, was evidence of something in his nature that was turning Christian.
    He was, in like manner, amazed to find himself drawn to the church, though this tension he could handle with greater ease; its arena he found was circumscribed to the individual heart.
    It was to the Duchess of Broadback (Frau Mann) that Felix owed his first audience with a 'gentleman of quality'. Frau Mann, then in Berlin, explained that this person had been 'somewhat mixed up with her in the past'. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could imagine her 'mixed up' with anyone, her coquetries were muscular and localized. Her trade—the trapeze—seemed to have preserved her. It gave her, in a way, a certain charm. Her legs had the specialized tension common to aerial workers; something of the bar was in her wrists, the tan bark in her walk, as if the air, by its very lightness, by its very non-resistance, were an almost insurmountable problem, making her body, though slight and compact, seem much heavier than that of women who stay upon the ground. In her face was the tense expression of an organism surviving in an alien element. She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots—one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies, and the bulge in the groin where she took the bar, one foot caught in the flex of the calf, was as solid, specialized and as polished as oak. The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly-stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll. The needle that had made one the property of the child made the other the property of no man.
    'Tonight,' Frau Mann said turning to Felix, 'we are going to be amused. Berlin is sometimes very nice at night, nicht wahr ? And the Count is something that must be seen. The place is very handsome, red and blue, he's fond of blue, God knows why, and he is fond of impossible people, so we are invited—' The Baron moved his foot in. 'He might even have the statues on.'
    'Statues?' said Felix.
    'The living statues,' she said, 'he simply adores them.' Felix dropped his hat; it rolled and stopped.
    'Is he German?' he said.
    'Oh no, Italian, but it does not matter, he speaks anything, I think he comes to Germany to change money—he comes, he goes away, and everything goes on the same, except that people have something to talk about.'
    'What did you say his name was?'
    'I didn't, but he calls himself Count Onatorio Altamonte, I'm sure it's quite ridiculous, he says he is related to every nation—that should