As Rossetti approached them, he perceived himself to be shrinking. It is no coincidence that Sekhmet’s knees are so high that the supplicant cannot reach them. That inhuman, ruthless, whiskered head of hers slowly pulled away from Giovanna’s mouth, and there she stood, tall, stiff, hardbreasted and lion-faced. Much more imperishable than he (for she was made of diorite), she sat down on her plinth, as if to put him in his place.
Giovanna now turned, pointing her bronze palm branch at him like a spear.
At Sekhmet’s feet lay a half-rotten wooden coffer. Giovanna pointed to it sternly. Realizing what she expected, he withdrew three bronze coins and deposited them there. While the stone goddess sat watchful, with her lion-snout shadowed, he said: Giovanna, I’ll buy you a plump canopic jar with a falcon head…
But she replied, more inflexibly than he ever could have imagined: You’re not even a dream.
Rossetti returned, of course, to his plinth, where it came to him, again too late, that had he only been grave and stone-bearded like the god Ptah, he might have kept Giovanna; but since his desire for her had never been less superficial than some anthropoid pattern gilded over the glossy black bitumen of a mummy-case, and the stone cat goddess horrified him, he presently dismissed the matter from his mind. He no longer found it wearisome to adorn his standing-throne, especially on a May evening when he could overlook the brilliant gold-orange treetops of Trieste, whose church towers went golden-pink in the turquoise sky. His affections resembled bubbles in a carafe of mineral water, which may perhaps be bluer or more silver than the liquid they hang in. The matter of who might substitute for him whenever he went night-wandering concerned him, but since so many heroic effigies had already gone missing, and he had never cared that much for his so-called public, who paid him small regard and quickly rotted in any event, he essayed to overcome his self-constraint, and indeed so well succeeded that the plinth often stood empty, without any repercussions whatsoever. Admiring himself in the foxed mirror at the Caffè Stella Polaris, he presently grew sufficiently confident to drink espresso in broad daylight at the Caffè James Joyce, where vertical strips of brass ran around the counter, the legs of women accordingly getting sliced vertically, the toes of their dark leather shoes shining like stars, the black and white tiles widening away, the chocolate voices of women all fever-warm tracks of a railroad which might have carried him to his old flame Silvia (another lady about whom he endeavored never to think), and although none of these coffeehouse women showed interest in him (indeed, they sometimes mistook him for an ornate coatrack), he liked sitting there hour after hour, paying in bronze coins, dreaming about sweet women whose bodies presented the pinks, blacks and beiges of a Tiepolo drawing, while coffee-steam condensed on his forehead and he pretended that he was sweating. In a way, he was lost, and when Our Lady of the Flowers thought about him she sometimes wept, to the benefit of souls in hell, but he was not discontented, especially when he visited Leonor Fini.
A certain Duke of hers took a liking to Rossetti’s powers of observation, which were of the category miscalled “phenomenal,” so he sometimes invited him over to inspect his art collection. Narrowing her eyes with pleasure, like a cat whose mistress is gently scratching her between the ears, Leonor said: Darling, sometimes I’m almost proud of you. The Duke says you’re the only one who’s ever understood his Serbian icons. — For a long time Rossetti pored over a certain old Italian panel of singing girl-children, whose marble was now greenish like the translucencies of frog-spawn. Better than anyone he could hear the hymns soughing from their eternally half-opened mouths. He yearned to make them aware of him. Since he could not, and for that reason among several others grew ever more unmoored, he and Leonor become friends of a sort and occasionally even lovers; he once brought her a pair of thick earrings from which strings of beads depended like fingers of a hand.
Sometimes when she was marble-nude, gazing at herself in the mirror, alone but for her cat, Leonor found herself wondering how Rossetti would look in pink panties; by then he was up for anything; what a dear man he was! And women were mostly such bitches; she barely knew whom to trust! When she discussed this matter with the Duke (Lilith plumping herself out in Leonor’s lap, blinking gently as she got stroked), he insisted that Rossetti could be counted on, after which she valued him the more. And cypresses tilted up the flagstones across the courtyard; their friends faded into bluish-grey cartes de visite, like the portrait of the late-nineteenth-century signora in the long floral gown who stood with her sleeve-hidden hands on her hips, gazing dreamily along a diagonal to the other world, her hair parted high in the fashion of the period; once upon a time she had taught Leonor a certain trick of horizontal dancing. Our Lady replenished the coins in Rossetti’s plinth, and almost every year was as still as the grey-blue sea along the Istrian coast.
Leonor fell out with her Duke, and Rossetti continued his own amours. Of course he never again descended the flight of stairs to that cold dry place to visit Giovanna, so he never learned that Sekhmet’s flesh is sometimes rough, sparkling and dull, sometimes smooth, glossy and dark; that sometimes her lion-head is narrower and more doggish than others; that her breasts rise and sink upon her chilly chest-cliff as she pleases. He never learned that Giovanna, now unalterably herself, remained so fixed, stern, unbending and upright that even Osiris came to approve of her, and for all I know they have made her a goddess by now. As it was, every time he paid a call on Leonor he met all the cats he liked; including those naked Sphinxes whose marble breasts were bigger than planetoids; while other sorts of cat-women were invariably to be found admiring themselves in mirrors. They were more his type.
For a time Leonor moved to Paris; then her mama died, along with ever so many cats; she herself got old, and several other sad things happened. As she aged, she estimated Rossetti still more highly, because although he had barely known her then, he remembered the way she used to paint in gouache on crumpled paper in her carefree days.
THE TRENCH GHOST
Of course the Trench Ghost loved to play at soldiers. On those summer evenings when the light tempted even him, with the smooth grey-green translucence of old robed and headless figures of alabaster, he sometimes rose out of the ground, but never for more than an hour or two; his favorite time, as one might expect, was night, and since he could see quite well in the dark, and, like a salamander, preferred the clamminess of dirt, the best way to meet him, had anyone ever wished to, would have been to wander through the old installations at Redipuglia, preferably hooting like an owl, or groaning a little, which would have been music to him. Deep in the dirt, as trench-diggers and even certain well-connected archaeologists knew, lay tiny votive bronze figurines with genitalia and elongated limbs. The Trench Ghost, as one might imagine, was proficient at discovering these. How it was that he could pass through earth, and even concrete, more easily, and certainly more inconspicuously, than a mortar shell, while yet being able to shuffle material things about, might require an ectoplasmic physicist to explain; I can’t, but then I also never understood why soldiers slaughter each other. For whatever reason, their blood darkened the dirt of Redipuglia, thereby bringing the Trench Ghost into being. How or what he was before the war I have not learned; nor could I tell you my own whereabouts before I was born. At first he scarcely wondered why he existed. Lacking solid dislikes or memories, he nonetheless had to be, without remedy. Prior to his ghosthood he might well never have lived, although at times he seemed to see his own form, whatever that might have been, and beside him the bare toes of a woman, and then a waving white curtain gone blue with Triestine sea-light; this recollection, if you care to call it that, was as worm-eaten as an old wooden statue of Saint Anna; and I for my part suppose him never to have been human; let’s say that he was the genius loci of Redipuglia, some “emanation” or sad freak of the mass grave beside those trenches. Couldn’t a pair of beetle-ridden relics have acted as anode and cathode in the celestial battery which powered him? As for his origins, there could hardly have been any Trench Ghost in that vicinity before Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke at Sarajevo; there weren’t even any trenches… — but no, earlier battles had most certainly soaked his earth. — Whether he was subject to diminution and eventual extinction in proportion as that buried mountain of dead human matter decayed was not for his consideration. Death meant nothing to him, being merely fundamental.