Tristessa Page 7

  Her blood is on my pants like my conscience—

  But she comes back sooner than we expect, on the night of the 9th—Right while we’re sitting there talking about her—She taps on the window but not only that reaches in a crazy brown hand through the old hole (where El Indio’s a month ago put his fist through in a rage over junkless), she grabs the great rosy curtains that Bull junkey-wise hangs from ceiling to sill, she shivers and shakes them and sweeps them aside and looks in and as if to see we’re not sneaking morphine shots on her—The first thing she sees is my smiling turned face—It must of disgusted the hell out of her—“Bool—Bool—”

  Bool hastily dresses to go out and talk to her in the bar across the street, she’s not allowed in the house.

  “Aw let her in”

  “I cant”

  We both go out, I first while he locks, and there confronted by my “great love” on the sidewalk in the dim evening lights all I can do is shuffle awhile and wait in the line of time—“How you?” I do say—

  “Okay”

  Her left side of face is one big dirty bandage with black caked blood, she has it hidden under her head-shawl, holds it draped there—

  “Where that happen, with me?”

  “No, after I leave you, tree times I fall”—She holds up three fingers—She’s had three further convulsions—The cotton batting hangs down and there are long strip tails down to almost her chin—She would look awful if she wasnt holy Tristessa—

  Bull comes out and slowly we go across the street to the bar, I run to her other side to gentleman her, O what an old sister I am—It’s like Hong Kong, the poorest sampan maids and mothers of the river in Chinee slacks propelling with the Venetian steer-pole and no rice in the bowl, even they, in fact they especially have their pride and would put down an old sister like me and O their beautiful little cans in sleek shiney silk, O—their sad faces, high cheekbones, brown color, eyes, they look at me in the night, at all Johns in the night, it’s their last resort—O I wish I could write!—Only a beautiful poem could do it!

  How frail, beat, final, is Tristessa as we load her into the quiet hostile bar where Madame X sits counting her pesos in the back room, facing all, and lil mustachio’d anxious bartender darts furtively to serve us, and I offer Tristessa a chair that will hide her sad mutilated face from Madame X but she refuses and sits any old way—What a threesome in a bar usually reserved for Army officers and Mex businessmen foaming their mustaches at mugs of afternoon!—Tall bony frightening humpbacked Bull (what do the Mexicans think of him?) with his owlish glasses and his slow shaky but firm-going walk and me the baggy-trousered gringo jerk with combed hair and blood and paint on his jeans, and she, Tristessa, wrapt in a purple shawl, skinny,—poor,—like a vendor of loteria tickets in the street, like doom in Mexico—I order a glass of beer to make it look good, Bull condescends to coffee, the waiter is nervous—

  O headache, but there she is sitting next to me, I drink her in—Occasionally she turns those purple eyes at me—She is sick and wants a shot, Bull no got—But she will now go get three gramos on the black market—I show her the pictures I’ve been painting, of Bull in his chair in purple celestial opium pajamas, of me and my first wife (“Mi primera esposa,” she makes no comment, her eyes look briefly at each picture)—Finally when I show her my painting “candle burning at night” she doesnt even look—They’re talking about junk—All the time I feel like taking her in my arms and squeezing her, squeezing that little frail unobtainable not-there body—

  The shawls falls a little and her bandage shows in the bar—miserable—I dont know what to do—I begin to get mad—

  Finally she’s talking about her friend’s husband who’s put her out of the house that day by calling the cops (he a cop himself), “He call cops because I no give im my body” she says nastily—

  Ah, so she thinks of her body as some prize she shant give away, to hell with her—I pivot in my feelings and brood—I look at her feelingless eyes—

  Meanwhile Bull is warning her about goofballs and I remind her that her old ex-lover (now dead junkey) had told me too never to touch them—Suddenly I look at the wall and there are the pictures of the beautiful broads of the calendar (that Al Damlette had in his room in Frisco, one for each month, over tokay wine we used to revere them), I bring Tristessa’s attention to them, she looks away, the bartender notices, I feel like a beast—

  AND ALL THE previous ensalchichas and papas fritas of the year before, Ah Above, what you doin with your children?—You with your sad compassionate and nay-would-I-ever-say unbeautiful face, what you doin with your stolen children you stole from your mind to think a thought because you were bored or you were Mind—shouldna done it, Lord, Awakenerhood, shouldna played the suffering-and-dying game with the children in your own mind, shouldna slept, shoulda whistled for the music and danced, alone, on a cloud, yelling to the stars you made, God, but never shoulda thought up and topped up tippy top Toonerville tweaky little sorrowers like us, the children—Poor crying Bull—child, when’s sick, and I cry too, and Tristessa who wont even let herself cry . . .

  OH WHAT WAS the racket that backeted and smashed in raging might, to make this oil-puddle world?—

  Because Tristessa needs my help but wont take it and I wont give—yet, supposing everybody in the world devoted himself to helping others all day long, because of a dream or a vision of the freedom of eternity, then wouldnt the world be a garden? A Garden of Arden, full of lovers and louts in clouds, young drinkers dreaming and boasting on clouds, gods—Still the god’s’d’a fought? Devote themselves to gods-dont-fight and bang! Miss Goofball would ope her rosy lips and kiss in the World all day, and men would sleep—And there wouldnt be men or women, but just one sex, the original sex of the mind—But that day’s so close I could snap my finger and it would show, what does it care? . . . About this recent little event called the world.

  “I love Tristessa,” nevertheless I have the gall to stay and say, to both of them—“I woulda told the landladies I love Tristessa—I can tell them she’s sick—She needs help—She can come sleep in my room tonight”—

  Bull is alarmed, his mouth opens—O the old cage, he loves her!—You should see her puttering around the room cleaning up while he sits and cuts up his junk with a razorblade, or just sits saying “M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m” in long low groans that arent groans but his message and song, now I begin to realize Tristessa wants Bull to be her husband—

  “I wanted Tristessa to be my third wife,” I say later—“I didnt come to Mexico to be told what to do by old sisters? Right in front of the faculty, shooting?—Listen Bull and Tristessa, if Tristessa dont care then I dont care—” At this she looks at me, with surprised not-surprised round she-doesnt-care-eyes—“Give me a shot of morphine so I can think the way you do.”

  They promptly give me that, in the room later on, meanwhile I’ve been drinking mescal again—” All or nothing at all,” says I to Bull, who repeats it—

  “I’m not a whore,” I add—And I also want to say “Tristessa is not a whore” but I dont want to bring up the subject—Meanwhile she changes completely with her shot, feels better, combs her hair to a beautiful black sheen, washes her blood, washes her whole face and hands in a soapy washtub like Long Jim Beaver up on the Cascades by his campfire—Swoosh—And she rubs the soap thoroughly in her ears and twists fingertips in there and makes squishy sounds, wow, washing, Charley didnt have a beard last night—She cowls her head again with the now-brushed shawl and turns to present us, in the lightbulbed high-ceiling room, a charming Spanish beauty with a little scar on her brow—The color of her face is really tan (she calls herself dark, “As Negra as me?”) but in the lights that shine her face keeps changing, sometimes it is jet-brown almost black-blue (beautiful) with outlines of sheeny cheek and long sad mouth and the bump on her nose which is like Indian women in the morning in Nogales on a high dry hill, the
women of the various guitar—The Castilian touch, though it may be only as Castilian as old Zacatecas it is fitting-She turns, neat, and I notice she has no body at all, it is utterly lost in a little skimpy dress, then I realize she never eats, “her body” (I think) “must be beautiful”—“beautiful little thing”—

  But then Bull explains: “She dont want love—You put Grace Kelly in this chair, Muckymuck’s morphine on that chair, Jack, I take the morphine, I no take the Grace Kelly.”

  “Yes,” asserts Tristessa, “and me, I no awanta love.”

  I dont say nothin about love, like I dont start singing “Love is a completely endless thing, it’s the April row when feelers reach for everything” and I dont sing “Embraceable You” like Frank Sinatra nor that “Towering Feeling” Vic Damone says “the touch of your hand upon my brow, the look in your eyes I see,” wow, no, I dont disagree or agree with this pair of love-thieves, let em get married and get under—go under the sheets—go bateau’ing in Roma—Gallo—anywhere—me, I’m not going to marry Tristessa, Bull is—She putters around him endlessly, how strangely while I’m lying on the bed junk-high she comes over and cleans up the headboard with her thighs practically in my face and I study them and old Bull is watching out of the top of his glasses to the side—Min n Bill n Mamie n Ike n Maroney Maroney Izzy and Bizzy and Dizzy and Bessy Fall-me-my-closer Martarky and Bee, O god their names, their names, I want their names, Amie n Bill, not Amos n Andy, open the mayor (my father did love them) open the crocus the mokus in the closet (this Freudian sloop of the mind) (O slip slop) (slap) this old guy that’s always—Molly!—Fibber M’Gee be jesus and Molly—Bull and Tristessa, sitting there in the house all night, moaning over their razor-blades and white junk and pieces of broken mirror to act as the pan (the diamond sharp junk that cuts into glass)—Quiet evenings at home—Clark Gable and Mona Lisa—

  Yet—“Hey, Tristessa I live with you and Bull pay” I say finally—

  “I dont care,” she says, turning to me on the stool—“It’s awright with me.”

  “Wont you at least pay half of her rent?” asks Bull, noting in his notebook figures he keeps all the time. “Will you say yes or no.”

  “You can go see her when you want,” he adds.

  “No, I wanted to live with her.”

  “Well, you cant do that—you havent got the money.”

  But Tristessa keeps looking at me and I keep staring at her, suddenly we love each other as Bull drones on and I admire her openly and she shines openly—Earlier, I’d grabbed her, when she said “You remember everything the other night?”—“Yes”—“in the street, how you kiss me”—And I show her how she’d kissed me.

  That little gentle brush of the lips on the lips, with just the slightest kiss, to indicate kiss—She’d shined on that one—She didnt care—

  She had no money to take the cab home, no bus was running, we had no more money any of us (except money in the bloodbank) (money in the mudbank, Charley)—“Yes, I walk home.”

  “Three miles, two miles,” I say, and there was that long walk through the rain I remembered—“You can come up there,” pointing to my room on the roof, “I wont bother you, no te molesta.”

  “No te molesta” but I would leave her molest me—Old Bull is glancing over his glasses and paper, I’ve screwed everything up with the mama again, Oedipus Rex, I’ll tear out my eyes in the morning—San Francisco, New York, Padici, Medu, Mantua or anywhere, I’m always the King sucker who was made out to be the positional son in woman and man relationships, Ahhyaaaaa—(Indian howl in the night, to campo-country sweet musica)—“King, bing, I’m always in the way for momma and poppa—When am I gonna be poppa?”

  “NO TE MOLESTA,” and too, for Bull, my poppa,—I said: “I’d have to be a junkey to live with Tristessa, and I cant be a junkey.”

  “Aint nobody knows junkies like another junkey.”

  I gulp to hear the truth, too—

  “Besides, too, Tristessa is an oldtime junkey, like me, she no chicken—in junk—Junkies are very strange persons.”

  Then he would launch into a long story about the strange persons he’s known, in Riker’s Island, in Lexington, in New York, in Panama—in Mexico City, in Annapolis—In keeping with his strange history, which included opium dreams of strange tiered racks where girls are being fed opium through dreamy blue tubes, and similar strange episodes like all the innocent faux pas he’d made, tho always with an evil greed just before it, he’d thrown up at Annapolis after a binge, in the showers, and to conceal it from his officers he’d tried to wash it down with the hot water, with the result the smell permeated “all of Bradley Hall” and there was a beautiful poem written about it in the newspaper of the Navy Goats—He would launch into long stories but she was there and with her he just conducted routine junkey talk in baby Spanish, like, “You no go tomorrow good look like that.”

  “Yes, I clean my face now.”

  “It no look good—They take one look at you and they know you takin too many secanols”

  “Yes, I go”

  “I brush your coat—” Bull gets up and helps clean her things—

  To me he says, “Them artists and writers, they dont like to work—Dont believe in work” (as the year before, as Tristessa and Cruz and I chatted gayly with the gaiety I had last year, in the room, he’s banging with a Mayan stone statue about the size of a big fist trying to fix the door he’d broken down the night before because he took too many goofballs and went out of his room and locked-clicked the padlock, key in the room and him in his pajamas at One A M)—wow, I do gossippy—(So he’d yelled at me “Come help me fix this door, I cant do this by myself”—“Oh yes you can, I’m talking”—“You artists are all lazy bums”)

  Now to prove I’m not like that I get up slowly, dizzy from that shot of their love stuff, and get some water in the tin pitcher to heat on the upturned ray-lamp so’s Tristessa can have hot water for her wound-wash—but I hand him the pitcher because I cant go thru the hassel of balancing it on the flimsy wires and anyway he’s the old master Old Wizard Old Water Witch Doctor who can do it and wont let me try it—Then I get back on the bed, prostrate—prostate gland too, as morphine takes all the sex out of your parts and leaves it somewhere else, in your gut—Some people are all guts and no heart—I take heart—You shoot spades—You drink clubs—You blast oranges—I take heart and bat—Two—Three—Ten trillion million dizzying powder of stars fermangitatin in the high blue Jack Shaft—prop—I dont drown no buddies in oil—I got no guts to do it—Got heart not to—But the sex, when the morphine is loosed in your flesh, and slowly spreads, hot, and headies your brain, the sex recedes into the gut, most junkies are thin, Bull and Tristessa are both bags of bones—

  But O the grace of some bones, that milt a little flesh hang-on, like Tristessa, and makes a woman—And Old Bull, spite of his thin hawky body nobody, his gray hair is well slicked and his cheek is youthful and sometimes he looks positively pretty, and in fact Tristessa had finally one night decided to make it and he was there and they made it, good—I wanted some of that too, seein’s how Bull didnt rise to the issue except once every twenty years or so—

  But no, that’s enough, hear no more, Min n Molly n Bill n Gregory Pegory Fibber McGoy, oy, I’d leave them be and go my own way—“Find me a Mimi in Paris, a Nicole, a sweet Tathagata Pure Pretty Piti”—Like poems spoke by old Italians in South American palm mud, flat, who wanta go back to Palabbrio, reggi, and stroll the beauteous bell-ringing girl-walking boulevard and drink aperitif with the coffee muggers of the card street—O movie—A movie by God, showing us him—him,—and us showing him,—him which is us—for how can there be two, not-one? Palmsunday me that, Bishop San Jose . . .

  I’ll go light candles to the Madonna, I’ll paint the Madonna, and eat ice cream, benny and bread—“Dope and saltpork,” as Bhikku Booby said—I’ll go to the South of Sicily in the wi
nter, and paint memories of Easels—I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that—I’ll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life—This part is my part of the movie, let’s hear yours.

  BY JACK KEROUAC

  The Town and the City

  The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

  Some of the Dharma

  Old Angel Midnight

  Good Blonde and Others

  Pull My Daisy

  Trip Trap

  Pic

  The Portable Jack Kerouac

  Selected Letters: 1940–1956

  Selected Letters: 1957–1969

  Atop an Underwood

  Orpheus Emerged

  POETRY

  Mexico City Blues

  Scattered Poems

  Pomes All Sizes

  Heaven and Other Poems

  Book of Blues

  Book of Haikus

  THE DULUOZ LEGEND

  Visions of Gerard

  Doctor Sax

  Maggie Cassidy

  Vanity of Duluoz

  On the Road

  Visions of Cody

  The Subterraneans

  Tristessa

  Lonesome Traveller

  Desolation Angels

  The Dharma Bums

  Book of Dreams

  Big Sur

  Satori in Paris