Tristessa Read online

  Yes, the thighs of Tristessa and the golden flesh all mine, what am I a Caveman? Am a Caveman.

  Caveman buried deep under ground.

  It would just be the coronna of her cheeks pulsing to mouth, and my rememberance of her splendid eyes, like sitting in a box the lovely latest in France enters the crashing orchestra and I turn to Monsieur next to me whispering “She is splendide, non?”—With Johnny Walker Scotch in my tuxedo coatpocket.

  I stand up. I must see her.

  POOR TRISTESSA IS swaying there explaining all her troubles, how she hasn’t got enough money, she’s sick, she’ll be sick in the morning and in the look of her eye I caught perhaps the gesture of a shadow of acceptance of the idea of me as a lover—Only time I ever saw Tristessa cry, was when she was junk sick on the edge of Old Bull’s bed, like a woman in the back pew of a church in daily novena she dabs at her eyes—She points to the sky again, “If my friend dont pay me back,” looking at me straight, “my Lord pay me back—more” and I can feel the spirit enter the room as she stands, waiting with her finger pointed up, on her spread legs, confidently, for her Lord to pay her back—“So I geev every-things I have to my friend, and eef he doan pay me back”—she shrugs—“my Lord pay me back”—standing alert again—“More” and as the spirit swims around the room I can tell the effective mournful horror of it (her reward is so thin) now I see radiating from the crown of her head innumerable hands that have come from all ten quarters of the Universe to bless her and pronounce her Bodhisat for saying and knowing that so well.

  Her Enlightenment is perfect,—“And we are nothing, you and me”—she pokes at my chest, “Jew—Jew—” (Mexican saying “You”) “—and me”—pointing at herself—“We are nothing. Tomorrar we may be die, and so we are nothing—” I agree with her, I feel the strangeness of that truth, I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there,—She says “I know you want to sleep.”

  “No no” I say, seeing she wants to leave—

  “I go to it sleep, early in the mawnins I go get see for the mans and I get the morfina and com bock for Old Bool”—and since we are nada, nothing, I forget what she said about friends all lost in the beauty of her strange intelligent imagery, every bit true—“She’s an Angel,” I think secretly, and escort her to the door with movement of arm as she leans to the door talking to go out—We are careful not to touch each other—I tremble, once I jumped a mile when her fingertip hit my knee in conversations, at chairs—the first afternoon I’d seen her, in dark glasses, in the sunny afternoon window, by a candle light lit for kicks, sick kicks of life, smoking, beautiful, like the Owner Damsel of Las Vegas, or the Revolutionary Heroine of Marlon Brando Zapata Mexico—with Culiacan heroes and all—That’s when she got me—In afternoon space of gold the look, the sheer beauty, like silk, the children giggling, me blushing, at guy’s house, where we first found Tristessa and started all this—Sympaticus Tristessa with her heart a gold gate, I’d first dug to be an evil enchantress—I’d run across a Saint in Modern Mexico and here I was fantasizing dreams away about foreordained orders for nothing and necessary betrayals—the betrayal of the old father when he entices by ruse the three little crazy kids screaming and playing in the burning house, “I’ll give each one your favorite cart,” out they come running for the carts, he gives them the High Incomparable Great Cart of the Single Vehicle White Bullock which they’re too young to appreciate—with that greatcart command, he’d made me an offer—I look at Tristessa’s leg and decide to avoid the issue of fate and rest beyond heaven.

  I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery.

  “LEAVE TRISTESSA ALONE” I say, anyway, like I’d say “Leave the kitty alone, don’t hurt it”—and I open her the door, so we can go out, at midnight, from my room—In my hand I stumble-awkwardly hold big railroad brakeman lantern to her feet as we descend the perilous needless to say steps, she’d almost tripped coming up, she moaned and she groaned coming up, she smiled and minced with her hand on her skirt going down, with that majestical lovely slowness of woman, like a Chinese Victoria.

  “We are nothing.”

  “Tomorrow we may be die.”

  “We are nothing.”

  “You and Me.”

  I politely lead all the way down by light and lead her out to street where I hail her a white taxi for her home.

  Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there’s nothing to be empty of.

  Art there, Lord Star?—Diminished is the drizzle that broke my calm.

  PART TWO

  A Year Later . . .

  DIMINISH’D NEVER IS the drizzle that broke no calm—I didnt tell her I loved her but when I left Mexico I began to think on her and then I began to tell her I loved her in letters, and almost did, and she wrote too, pretty Spanish letters, saying I was sweet, and please hurry back—I hurried back too late, I should have come back in the Spring, almost did, had no money, just touched the border of Mexico and felt that vomity feeling of Mexico—went on to California and lived in a shack with young monk Buddhist type visitors every day and went north to Desolation Peak and spent a summer surfing in the Wilderness, eating and sleeping alone—said, “Soon I go back, to the warm arms of Tristessa”—but waited too long.

  O Lord, why have you done this to your angel-selves, this blight life, this ugh raggedy crap scene full of puke and thieves and dying?—couldnt you have placed us in a dismal heaven where all was glad anyhow?—Art thou Masochist, Lord, art thou Indian Giver, art thou Hater?

  Finally I was back in Bull’s room after a four thousand mile voyage from the mountain peak near Canada, a terrible enough trip in itself, not worth moot herein—and he went out and got her.

  Already he’d warned me: “I dont know what’s the matter with her, she’s changed in the past two weeks, the past week even—”

  “Is that because she knew I was coming?” I thought darkly—

  “She throws fits and hits me over the head with coffee cups and loses my money and falls in the street—”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Goofballs—I told her not to take too many—You know it takes an old junkey with many years of experience to know how to handle sleeping pills,—she wont listen, she dont know how to use em, three, four, sometimes five, once twelve, it’s not the same Tristessa—What I wanta do is marry her and get my citizenship, see, you think that’s a good idea?—After all, she’s my life, I’m her life—”

  I could see Old Bull had fallen in love—with a woman not named Morphina.

  “I never touch her—it’s just a marriage of convenience—you know what I mean—I cant be getting stuff on the black market myself, I dont know how, I need her and she needs my money.”

  Bull got $150 a month from a trust fund established by his father before he died—his father had loved him, and I could know why, for Bull is a sweet and tender person, though just a little of the con man, for years in New York he supported his junk habit by stealing about $30 every day, twenty years—He’d been in jail a few times when they’d found him with wrong merchandise—In jail he was always the librarian, he is a great scholar, in many ways, with a marvelous interest in history and anthropology and of all things French Symbolist poetry, Mallarmé above all—I’m not talking of the other Bull who is the great writer who wrote “Junkey”—This is another Bull, older, almost 60, I wrote poems in his room all last summer when Tristessa was mine, mine, and I wouldnt take her—I had some silly ascetic or celibacious notion that I must not touch a woman—My touch might have saved her—

  Now too late—

  He brings her home and right away I see something is wrong—She comes tottering in on his arm an
d gives a weak (thank God for that) smile and holds out her arm rigidly, I dont know what to do but hold her arm up, “What’s the matter with Tristessa is she sick?”

  “All last month she was paralyzed down one whole leg and her arms were covered with cysts, O she was an awful sick girl last month”

  “What’s the matter with her now?”

  “Shh—let her sit down—”

  Tristessa is holding me and slowly levels her sweet brown cheek against mine, with a rare smile, and I’m playing the befuddled American almost consciously—

  Look, I’ll save her yet—

  TROUBLE IS, WHAT would I do with her once I’d won her?—it’s like winning an angel in hell and you are then entitled to go down with her to where it’s worse or maybe there’ll be light, some, down there, maybe it’s me’s crazy—

  “She’s going crazy,” says Bull, “those goofballs’ll do it to everybody, to you, anybody I dont care who.”

  In fact Bull himself took too many two nights later and proved it—

  The problem of junkies, narcotic addicts bless their soul, bless their quiet thoughtful souls, is to get it—On all sides they’re balked, they are continually unhappy—“If the government gave me enough morphine every day I would be completely happy and I would be completely willing to work as a male nurse in a hospital—I even sent the government my ideas on the subject, in a letter in 1938 from Lexington, how to solve the narcotic problem, by putting junkies to work, with their daily doses, cleaning the subways, anything—as long as they get their medicine they’re all right, just like any other sick people—It’s like alcoholics, they need medicine—”

  I cant remember everything that happened except for last night so fateful, so horrible, so sad and mad—Better to do it that way, why build up?

  IT ALL STARTED out with Bull being out of morphine, sick, a little too many goofballs he’d taken (secanols) to make up for the morphine lack and so he is acting like a baby, sloppy, like senile, not quite as bad as the night he slept in my bed on the roof because Tristessa had gone mad and was breaking everything in his room and hitting him and falling on the floor right on her head, goofballs she bought in a drugstore, Bull would give her no more—The anxious landladies are hovering at the door thinking we’re beating her up but she’s beating us up—

  The things she said to me, what she really thought of me, now came out, a year later, a year too late, and all I should have done was tell her I loved her—She accused me of being a filthy teahead, she ordered me out of Bull’s room, she tried to hit me with a bottle, she tried to take my tobacco pouch and keep it, I had to struggle with her—Bull and I hid the bread knife under the rug—She just sits there on the floor like an idiot baby, doodling with objects—She accuses me of trying to smoke marijuana out of my tobacco pouch but it is only Bull Durham tobacco for my roll-me-owns because commercial cigarettes have a chemical in them to keep them firm that damaged my susceptible phlebitic veins and arteries—

  So Bull is afraid she’ll kill him in the night, we cant get her out, previously (a week ago) he’d called cops and ambulances and even they wouldnt get her out, Mexico—So he comes sleep in my new room bed, with clean sheets, forgets that he’s already taken two goofballs and takes two more and thereupon goes blind, cant find his cigarettes, gropes and knocks down everything, pees in the bed, spills coffee I bring him, I have to sleep on the floor of stone among bedbugs and cockroaches, I revile him all night poutingly: “Look what you’re doing to my nice clean bed”

  “I cant help it—I gotta find another cap—Is this a cap?” He holds up a matchstick and thinks it’s a capsule of morphine. “Bring me your spoon”—He’s going to boil it down and shoot it—Lord—In the morning at gray time he finally leaves and goes down to his room, stumbling with all his things including a Newsweek he could have never read—I dump his cans of pee in the toilet, it’s all pure blue like the blue Sir of Joshua Reynolds, I think: “MY GOD, he’s gotta be dying!” but turns out they were cans of washing blueing—Meanwhile Tristessa has slept and feels better and somehow they stumble around and get their shots and next day she returns tapping in Bull’s window, pale and beautiful, no more an Aztec witch, and apologizes sweetly—

  “She’ll be back on goofballs in a week,” says Bull—“But I’m not giving her any more”—He swallows one himself—

  “Why do you take em!” I yell.

  “Because I know how, I’ve been a junkey for forty years”

  Comes then the fateful night—

  I’ve already finally in a cab and once on the street told Tristessa I love her—“Yo te amo”—No reply—She lies to Bull and tells him I propositioned her saying “You’ve slept with a lot of men, why not sleep with me”—No such thing I ever said, just “Yo te amo”—Because I do love her—But what to do with her—She never used to lie before the goofballs—In fact she used to pray and go to church—

  I’ve given up on Tristessa and this afternoon, Bull sick, we get a cab and go down into the slums to find El Indio (the Black Bastard he’s called in the trade), who always has something—It’s always been my secret hunch that El Indio loves Tristessa too—He has beautiful grown daughters, he lies in a bed behind flimsy curtains with the door wide open to the world, high on M, his elder wife sits anxiously in a chair, ikons burn, arguments take place, groans, all under the endless Mexican skies—We come to his pad and his old wife tells us she is his wife (we didnt know) and he’s not in so we sit on the stone steps of the crazy courtyard full of screaming children and drunks and women with wash and banana peels you’d think, and wait there—Bull is so sick he has to go home—Tall, humped, wizard cadaver-like he goes, leaving me sitting drunk on the stone drawing pictures of the children in my little notebook—

  Then out comes a host of some kind, a portly friendly man, with a waterglass of pulque, two glasses, he insists I chugalug mine with his, I do, bang, down, the cactus juice dripping from our lips, he beats me to the draw—Women laugh—There’s a big kitchen—He brings me more—I drink and draw the children—I offer money for the pulque but they wont take it—It starts to grow dark in the courtyard—

  I’ve already swallowed a fifth of wine on the way down, it’s one of my drinking days, I’ve been bored and sad and lost—too, for three days I’ve been painting and drawing with pencil, chalk and watercolors (my first formal try) and I’m exhausted—I’ve sketched a little bearded Mexican artist in his roof hut and he tore the picture out of the big notebook to keep it—We drank tequila in the morning and drew each other—Of me he drew a kind of tourist sketch showing how young and handsome and American I am, I dont understand (he wants me to buy it?)—Of him I draw a terrible apocalyptic black bearded face, also his body tinily twisted on the edge of the couch, O heaven and posterity will judge all this art, whatever it is—So I’m drawing one particular little boy who wont stand still then I start drawing the Virgin Madonna—

  More fellows appear and they invite me into a big room where a big white table is covered with pulque cups and on the floor open urns of it—Amazing the faces in there—I think “I’ll have a good time and meanwhile I’m right on El Indio’s doorstep and I’ll catch him for Bull when he comes home—and Tristessa’ll come too—”

  Borracho, we drain big cups of cactus juice and there’s an old singer with guitar with his young disciple boy with thick sensitive lips and a big fat hostess woman like out of Rabelais and Rembrandt Middle Ages who sings—The leader of this huge gang of fifteen appears to be Pancho Villa at the table end, red clay face, perfectly round and jocund, but Mexican owlish, with crazy eyes (I think) and a wild red checked shirt and like always ecstatically happy—But beside him other more sinister lieutenants of some sort, to them I look downtable right dead in the eye and toast and even ask “Que es la vida? What is life?”—(to prove I’m philosophical and smart)—Meanwhile a man in a blue suit and blue hat appears the most friendly, he be
ckons me to the toilet for a swaying talk over urine—He locks the door—His eyes are sunken deep in pudgy battered W.C. Fields sockets—“sockets” too clean a word—but a wicked pair of funny eyes, also a hypnotist, I keep staring at him, I keep liking him—I like him so much that when he takes my wallet out and counts my money I laugh, I fiddle a little bit trying to get it back, he holds off counting—Others are trying to get in the toilet—“This is Mexico!” says he. “We stay here if we like”—When he hands me back my wallet I see my money’s still in it but I swear on the Bible on God on Buddha on all that was supposed to be holy, in real life there was no more money in that wallet (wallet, shwallet, just a leather foldcase for travelers checks)—He leaves me some money because later I give twenty pesos to a big fat guy and tell him to go out and get some marijuana for the whole group—He too keeps taking me to the toilet for earnest confabs, somehow my dark glasses disappear—

  Finally Blue Hat in front of everybody simply snatches my notebook out of my (Bull’s) coat, like a joke, pencil and all, and slips it in his own coat and stares at me, wicked and funny—I really cant help laughing but then I do say “Come on, come on, give me back my poems” and I reach into his coat and he twists away, and I reach again and he wont—I turn to the most distinguished-looking man there, in fact the only one, who is sitting next to me, “Will you undertake the responsibility of getting my poems back.”

  He says he will, without understanding what I’m saying, but I drunkedly assume he will—Meanwhile in a blind dazzle of ecstasy I throw fifty pesos on the floor to prove something—Later I throw two pesos on the floor saying “It’s for the music”—They end up feeding that to the two musicians but I’m too proud after reconsideration to start looking around for my 50 pesos too but you will see that this is just a case of wanting to be robbed, a strange kind of exultation and drunken power, “I dont care about money, I am the King of the world, I will lead your little revolutions myself”—This I begin to work on by making friends with Pancho Villa, and brother there’s a lot of knocking of cups and arm-around-chugalugs down, and song—And by this time I’m too stupid to check my wallet but every cent is gone—I take great pride meanwhile in showing how I appreciate the music, I even drum on the table—Finally I go out with Fat Boy to talk in the toilet and as we’re coming out here comes a strange woman up the steps, unearthly and pale, slow, majestic, neither young nor old, I cant help staring at her and even when I realize it’s Tristessa I keep staring and wondering at this strange woman and it seems that she has come to save me but she’s only coming for a shot from El Indio (who, by the way, had by now, on his own accord, gone to Bull’s two miles away)—I leave the gay gang of thieves and follow my love.