each in the order of time. But this did not make things any more pleasant or easy to bear. It occurred to him one day as he sat bent double on a fence like a casse-poitrine in delicious rêverie and puffed away at his Romeo and Juliet that perhaps if he had been cremated rather than inhumed directly he would have been less liable to revisit the vomit. But happily for all of us this thought was too egregious to detain him long. He tried all he knew, without shifting his position however, to conceive of his exuviae as preserved in an urn or other receptacle in some kind person’s sanctum or as drifting about like a cloud of randy pollen, but somehow he could not quite bring it off, this simple little flight. Was it possible that his imagination had perished in the torture chamber, that non-smoking compartment? That would indeed be something to be going on with, that would be what a Madden prizeman, his eyes out on stalks like a sentinel-crab’s with zeal and excitement, would call a step in the right direction.
To state it then fairly fully once and for all, Belacqua is a human, dead and buried, restored to the jungle, yes really restored to the jungle, completely exhausted, conscious of his shortcomings, sitting on this fence, day in day out, having this palpitation, picking his nose between cigars, suffering greatly from exposure. This is he and the position from which he ventures, to which he is even liable to return after the fiasco, in which he is installed for each dose of expiation of great strength, from which he is caught up each time a trifle better, dryer, less of a natural snob. These predicates do not cover him, no number of them could. If as dense tissue of corporeal hereditaments – ha! – he was predicateless, how much more so then as spook? But cover they do the mean, the least presentable, aspect of his cruel reversion, three scenes from which, the first, the central and the last, we make bold to solicit as likely material for this fagpiece, this little triptych.
To begin then at the beginning, he felt himself nodding in the grey shoals of angels, his co-departed, that thronged the womb-tomb, distinctly he felt himself lapsing from a beatitude of sloth that was infinitely smoother than oil and softer than pumpkins, he found himself fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs so long lapped in gloom, and the next thing was he was horsed as it were for major discipline on the fence as see above, the bells pealing in all the steeples, his pockets crammed with cigars. He took the band off one of these, lit it, looked into his heart and exclaimed:
‘My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked, all the old pains and aches of me soul-junk return!’
Hardly had this thought burst from his brain as a phosphate from the kidneys when a woman shot out of the hedge and stood before him, serene yet not relaxedly gay. There she stood, frankly alluring him to come and doubt not, stretching forth to hug him her holy hands pullulant with a million good examples. There was nothing at all of the grave widow or anile virgin about her, nothing in the least barren in her appearance. She would be, if she were not already, the fruitful mother of children of joys.
‘They call me Zaborovna’ she simpered.
‘I don’t hear what you say’ said Belacqua. ‘Speak up will you.’
Now it must be clearly understood that there were no stews where Belacqua came from, no stews and no demand for stews. But here in the dust with night getting ready to fall it was quite a different matter. Belacqua felt he had been dead a long time, forty days at least.
‘You are Belacqua’ she said ‘whom we took for dead, or I’m a Dutchman.’
‘I am’ said Belacqua, ‘restored for a time by a lousy fate to the nuts and balls and sparrows of the low stature of animation. But who is we and who are you?’
‘I told you’ she said, ‘Zaborovna, at your service; and we, why little we is just an impersonal usage, the Tuscan reflexive without more.’
‘The mood’ said Belacqua, ‘forgive the term, of self-abuse, as the English passive of masochism.’
‘How long do you expect to be with us?’ said Zaborovna.
‘As long as I lived’ said Belacqua, ‘on and off, I have the feeling.’
‘You mean with intermissions?’ she said.
‘Do you know’ said Belacqua, ‘I like the way you speak very much.’
‘The way I speak’ she said.
‘I find your voice’ he said ‘something more than a roaring-meg against melancholy, I find it a covered waggon to me that am weary on the way, I do indeed.’
‘So musical’ she said, ‘I would never have thought it.’
It was high time for a pause to ensue and a long one did. The lady advanced a pace towards the fence, clearly she was sparring for an opening, Belacqua pulled furiously at the immense cigar, a bird, its beak set in the heaven, flew by.
‘Too late!’ he exclaimed at last in piercing tones. ‘Too late!’
‘What is too late?’ said Zaborovna.
‘This encounter’ said Belacqua. ‘Can’t you see my life is over?’
‘Oh’ she said, in a voice something between a caress and a dig in the ribs, ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’
In the echo of the above pause she seized her opportunity, transferred her slyly grave deportment to the knees and thighs of the revenant, which parts of him trembled in the chill of the hour. A colony of rooks made their evening flight and darkened the sky, yes actually darkened the sky. Belacqua polished off his cigar, pressed it out fiercely against the rail, elevated his mind to God, crossed himself a thousand times.
‘Forgive me’ he said, ‘I’m as bad as Dr Keate of Eton, I can see his shaggy red brows distinctly, I can’t recall your name for the moment.’
‘Zaborovna’ she said, ‘yours to command, Miss Zaborovna Privet, put your arm about her won’t you.’
Belacqua, whom nothing could teach not to spit and dig for clotted mucus in the presence of ladies, shanghaied now a snot on his cuff and brought his eyes that were so sore with one thing and another, whinging and the light that quick-change artist, close up to those, sparklers of the first water and in which he seemed to discern a number of babies, of the Privet, who after a short and gallant struggle was constrained to look away, so searing, so red-hot and parallel, were the prongs of his gaze. Away she looked to the cool, not to say bitter, east and observed her shadow, like an old man’s desire, prone and monstrous on the grass, but not a sign of her pick-up’s, out of whose lap she sprang at once and stood on the ground well to one side, thinking that perhaps she had been seeing single, and looked again. But her first impression was confirmed by the absence of any shadow but the fence’s and her own, projected in tattered umber far across the waste. The sun was there all right, belting away in the west behind, ignoring him completely. This body that did not intercept the light, this packet of entrails that had shed the ashen spancels, she looked it up and down. He had produced a razor from some abyssal pocket and was lovingly whittling a live match. This when pointed according to his God he used to pierce a deep meatus in a fresh cigar, visit his teeth all round, top and bottom, light the cigar. Then he made to throw it away but recovered himself in time and stuck it like a golf tee in the stuff of his pullover.
Tears rushed down the cheeks of Zaborovna as she hurled herself into the arms of her prey, no easy matter.
‘Wipe them’ said Belacqua.
He was most ardent and sad all of a sudden, a Gilles de Rais twinkle in his eye. How long then
