— Und haben Sie noch einen Wunsch?
— Nein danke. Ah, doch, ein kleines OMO.
Keiner wäscht reiner. Gebremster Schaum! This would leave a trace. Noch etwas anderes? Nein, dankeschön. Bitteschön Aufwiedersehen. Aufwiedersehen. Omo Schaum-Stop reguliert sich selber.
The season has begun. Tourists pour into Paris Rome Belgrade Palermo Tripoli Athens Addis Ababa Istanbul wherever congresses commissions conferences conventions take place in June July August for those professional people who cannot organise their junketings to cut the gloom of winter or bear the thought of a vacation away from leurs semblables in case they miss a contact an idea or an occasion to shine. Well I prefer it Sandra says one gets some extra sun and besides, the excursions at least come off. Remember that terrible drive from Milan to Lake Como and the Dolomites in the pouring rain? I hate empty hotels they give me the willies I like them chock-block full of gorgeous sun-tanned men in open shirts and luscious girls in low décolletage that shows where the brown stops and the white begins. She says in her low décolletage that shows just that and laughs oh yes I like both sexes to look sizzling it keeps me on my mettle. Unfortunately most tourists in fact look horribly middle-aged. Those prosperous Germans ugh! The very same I suppose who came here as conquerors in that crazy war that made our mums and dads so crummily fixated on the forties.
Sandra chatters happily on in un amour de soutien-gorge, belonging apparently to a different species altogether undamaged unconcerned doing the same work with ease and careless poise from the start unretarded by wars national prejudices bilingualism fraternisation sex who learn simply from existing simultaneously on all levels unless they merely block off different ones in much the same swift generalisations brought up to date such as those prosperous Germans ugh who talk of roads endlessly across hotel tables balconies and bright green pools, wow, even as they swim they talk of roads, the Brenner Pass the Autobahn the E 5 the route through Yugoslavia.
The Romantische Strasse between the year-long Fleissigkeit and a place in the sun.
— Do you understand German then?
— Well, no, not really, who wants to? Just enough to get around you know.
Enough for one’s daily needs of bed food and excretion immer geradeaus dann links that will suffice me as far as German goes unless they read their Baedekers very loudly to their fat naked wives by hotel swimming-pools.
— The French talk of roads too, la Nationale 7 la route de Saragosse.
— No. The French talk of property. Elle a tout ce grand terrain, elle pourrait construire et sous-louer. Ah oui, ils ont acheté une maison de grand-standing, avec une vue magnifique sur la vallée de la Dordogne, trois chambres un amour de cuisine salle à manger un living deux salles de bains ma chère et deux W.C.
The number of the room has risen to 217. The bathroom door in pale green flanks the yellow cotton curtains that let in too much traffic from the left on to the double bed where the body lies too hot under the single sheet the pale green blanket folded over the white bedcover on the back of the chair. The time hangs clocklessly around the distant brain way up what forty-three forty-seven? Soon some bright chambermaid will come in with a breakfast-tray and say structures of power in fact depend on the willing cooperation of innumerable individuals for the administration of physical force. This morning we have listened to a belle fiction. Such a principle remains a principle, totally at odds with any real situation in the past or the renovating present. We have no evidence whatsoever that human beings, let alone horses, can so embody the divine principle descending into matter in a behaviour sufficiently organised to force a conqueror down into the earphones and out through exits in simultaneous rejection of le mensonge vital with a double-negation that would reintegrate him into some totality, compared with so many fragile truths that surround us in this our masculine-dominated civilisation where the spiral as a sort of stylised maze and magic invisible wall of defence rose like a ziggurat or seven-terraced Tower of Babel in a mass of noussphere to point omega comme nous répète ce grand génie as the woman spins a flaxen spool. The ziggurat lands on the clay-like sea you could cut with a knife to model some sort of earth-goddess if only you could get out. The air-hostess says uw zwemvest bevindt zich onder uw stoel. To inflate pull red toggle (1). To top up blow into mouthpiece (2). But the mouthpiece has no breath on account of the vital lie and all the fragile truths in French and out in simultaneous German. You must hurry, the clay-like sea will liquefy at any moment now and you will need your zwemvest. She walks up and down in absolute calm and relaxation having had acupuncture on the vessel of conception CV 52 which has made her orange hair puff up into a huge spiral against the cinema screen. She sure looks dandy, unharassed you know in a low décolletage qui pigeonne formidablement showing just where the brown stops and the white begins bitteschön as the florid Monsignor stands up and leaning right across he photographs her from above to catch just where the brown stops and the white begins. Hurry up hurry up the sea has liquefied and the ziggurat sinks please use the Emergency Exit only but the body lies strapped to the seat by the heat of the safety-belt which burns into the vessel of conception CV 52 knock-knock-knock-knock. The yellow light pours in from the left the bathroom door in green faces the body strapped and the room takes shape quite suddenly with pale blue walls the built-in cupboard in mahogany on the right flanking the door knock-knock. Herein. Come in, er, entrez. Oh, he can’t.
— Kalimera madame. Porte. Fermée.
— Oui. Toujours, la nuit.
— Bien madame. Déjeuner. Lettre. Pour madame.
— Merci. Er, efharisto.
— Ah! Kalo-kalo! Efharistosas.
— SAS?
— Nai. Sas. A vous. Merci à vous.
— Ah. Efharisto.
— EfharistoSAS.
Oh God here we go again why won’t he leave the room? Er, echete, er, nero metalico?
— Madame?
— Eau minérale.
— Ah, neró metálico! Nai. He shakes his head from side to side and exit.
Ma douce amour. Ah si je pouvais vous décrire l’émotion que je ressens à la vue de votre écriture maintenant (enfin!) si familière, et du timbre qui change — Marianne, Lilibet, Constantin et la ravissante Anne-Marie, Franco (moins ravissant) — selon les distances hélas toujours plus grandes entre ma princesse lointaine et moi. Je regarde l’enveloppe, je tremble, je m’évanouis presque, je n’ose l’ouvrir de peur de vous avoir contrariée, ennuyée peut-être avec mes tristes désirs impossible, irréalisables, je le sais, o mon amour. Jour et nuit the body lies in bed below the breakfast tray with quiet disparagement from the distant brain way up, suspending all belief in the language of a long-lost code that nevertheless on another level climbs anticlockwise through the centuries, crumbling the invisible wall which rose to a circular dance of simulation vital lies and other frustrations to the true end of childhood. Et puis je lis la lettre — trop brève hélas — où vous me parlez de vos voyages, de votre travail (qui m’intéresse naturellement). Ou plutôt oui, je l’avoue, j’imagine voir entre les lignes, que vous aussi, vous vous sentez bien seule, que vous cherchez quelque chose, et que peut-être, ah, ce grand peut-être, vous m’entrouvrez un peu la porte knock-knock and it opens without pause to admit the floor-steward in white bearing nero metalico and an empty wine-glass on a metalico tray. Efharisto. EfharistoSAS. Merci. The eyes glued on the letter the coffee-cup held half way between the breakfast-tray and mouthpiece meaning go away, vous m’entrouvrez un peu la porte, une fraction, un centimètre, que vous me permettez de vous adorer. He goes. Alors, ma douce amour, je ne me contiens plus, je me laisse envahir par les rêves les plus fous, je me vois dans vos bras, caressant vos — ah non, il ne faut pas continuer.