 THE LOG CABIN: PART TWO by Giose Rimanelli Illustrations by Stefano Maria Baratti | ||||||||
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SQUATTERS This picture of Eridanus, though gently drawn, it would reflect a kind of blurred world, however, without much appeal to the few squatters still living around along with the slushy aliens: the Chinese with his queue - a cranking caking worker on railroad and blind alleys with herbal medicine joints; the Eyetalian with his lovelorn eye in the middle of the forehead - a shocker player whose chief hang-up was that of promoting creative lifestyle; the Polach with his polar polish potash; the raus raus Teutonic Knight who settled on robsonstrasse with his Gott sei Dank, grazie a Dio,and his round-dance he called Reigen - practically a romantic butcher by trade chomping on Wurstin-rye or, on Wut, frenzy, and most often in tit or tat, Wurst wider Wurst; the green grim-looking Irisk, eternally pledging himself to the Queen of England's motto semper eaden, always the same, and the semper fidelis, always faithful to himself and to pub's jingles. A great many people had not yet arrived with their banks and their churches and money money money for the shaping of Downtown's gleaming glazing skyscrapers of the tiny yet handsome Eridanus. She was a kind of terse hygienic, rosy creature anchored in comfort on the Bernard Inlet, making a decent living with sawmills and the lumber sprawled over hundreds of thousands of acres of thick forests, gentle blue lakes and murderous rivers. Beside the coastal Indian tribes, the population of Trinicity was made up of retired gentlemen from England and former Colonies with stiff upper-lip British traditions, of exporters, explorers, exchange agents and, of course, immigrants from the eastern regions of the country along the 60th parallel. Eridanus was still young, though, notwithstanding the 3 very strange lines of people's activities: the annual belly-flopping contests in which, according to all you need to know "guidebooks, Amen weighing in the 350-pound-and-up range jump into a pool to determine who can make the biggest splash; followers of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, such as medicine men and anthropologists, in daylight quest with a lantern for an honest man", that is to say shy Big Foot who lived in the deep woods on the other shore of the Bernard Inlet, most probably a neighbor of the egg people, Skipper Horace, the Eyetalian, and Lady Do, the Great Dane, and where mysterious individuals (or Big Foot himself?) had planted signs that read: IF INTERESTED CALL 1-8OO = RAINS A LOT And folk heroes like Master Stonemason Jim Cunning, another reader of Rabelais, who had just began - out of a bet he made with raw, rough, grimy gold seekers and thirsty lumber workers in Agassy Jack Deigh saloon just because they tease by calling him an Aunderachiever - the building of 5.5 mile-long seawall that goes all around the 1,000 acres of majestic Leacock Park, right next to city center Eridanus. Her climate was mild, temperate: not at all cold or cool, but rainy. It was a slow, insistent thin rain disintegrating in the sun. The fact that the falling rain glistened on the ever groomed and luxuriantly green meadows made it a kind of companion, now almost whisperable to the urban well-heeled man who lived his life between home and work, silence, hedonistic bliss and hollow emptiness. The lumberjacks left for the woods in the summer, together with students and adventurers, and when they came back the city rocked to their brawls and riotous lovemaking. The geologists too left for the North in search of new minerals and riches, and when they returned they brought another piece of land on which to build another house and another garden because their children were beginning to grow numerous, and the cost of living higher.  Only the fishermen, who knew the sea and the route of the salmon, had an aversion to the dry land and even for that precious forest on the other side of the Inlet, still inhabited perhaps by those smart Salish people - the forefathers of the Coastal Indians - and in effect by the bald eagles swooping to their nests on the treetops, untamed animals and, of course, by some loving nuts like Skipper Horace and Lady Do, known as the egg people. The Trinicity, however, prospered and expanded from day to day, and already many binoculars were aimed on that part of the forest beyond the Inlet where Skipper Horace and Lady Do lived. Because people, as they become rich feel the need to build walls and protective palisades around their homes, or to get away from their poorer neighbors. And because people, as they become more and more cynical toward life, probably in the way of Diogenes who was living in a tub, who threw away his last utensil, a cup, when he saw a peasant drink from his hands. And when Alexander the Great asked what he might do for him, do you know what Diogene's answer was? "Fuck off of my back!" "Noo!" replied Reverend Dr. Citron Lock Lomon to his daughter, Blanchine Blanchette. Do you really want to know what he said? "OK" He just said, "Only step out of my sunlight!" This is what he said. "O yeah? Thanks, father!" The Reverend Dr. Citron, founder of the First Purple Church of Granville Street, had always kinds of point-of-view quarrels inside his own family: with self assertive song-writer Blanchine Blanchette especially, but fortunately not so much with submissive wife Isadore, a 44-year-old lover of lingerie fantasies from corset to garter belt to bikini to camisoles to painted bras to exotic hose to G-string, whose motto was, "Beauty isn't about looking young", although she was repeating quite often, and irritantly, that "I would never want to be less than 40. It's so much more fun now. Age to me is nothing. This nonsense about being old is nothing."  To which Blanchine Blanchette would answer from her room, singing: Who is fairest of us all? And Isadore: She loved to undress by dressing up, believing that her husband and, generally speaking humanity's deepest concerns were that sensuality and curiosity are gird towards the unrevealed. In his Sunday's sermons, however, Reverend Dr. Citron never failed to admonish his congregation to stay away from temptation of crude wealth, crude greed, crude pride, crude vanity, crude luxury and crude hatred because these are crude signs of that endemic evils which afflicts the most progressive and civilized countries, making men and women slave of their own self, of their own habit. He would say and repeat: "If you don't watch out you'll end up having breakfast alone, don't you know that? If you don't whack out you'll go trough life alone, don't you know that? People you meet are narcissistic images of yourself, don't you know that? Affairs are mutual delusions and distractions from death, don't you know that? You'll take the boat to nowhere if you lose your soul, don't you know that? Well, I don't want to scare you, because you're my people. But remember: whatever I say comes from the Book, which is many books. Don't call me a plagiarist, therefore. I read a lot, and I follow the Book which is many books as I said, and never and then never I use the scary technique of scaring people, because as I said before you're my people, and I love you." Always at this point he would usually mention - as a sort of tangible contrast between what he thought was good and evil - the aggressive commercial behavior of the Irisk O'Fine, Patrick O'Fine of New Wye, exemplary case of the egg people. Skipper Horace the Eyetalian, and Lady Do the Great Dane, both dearest to God and nature, who were living in harmony with themselves and others, talking to birds of pray and to egrets with the same loving manner of Francis, the Saint, who called the Sun brother and the Moon sister. In the meantime, on the other side of the Inlet, Skipper Horace was singing to Lady Do one of his generally sad jigs of the sea: Good morning Mauger dear, says he. Haul away me bully boys We're all got to go. And have you got a fine ship For to carry me over the sea? Fare thee well me bully boys We've all got to go.  LADY DO - Now, now -- What's that, Horace? Again with that ugly song? HORACE - It's a Chanty! Always the same Chanty, sweet Lady Do. LADY DO - Did you say Mauger? HORACE - Do you still think of him? LADY DO - I can't help it, yes! HORACE - Mauger fell overboard. I think I said Jack, though. The Chanty says good morning Jack. The Mate, who else? The ship lay in the eye of the storm. My God! Her topsides are stove in, she's sinking, sinking, Lady Do, so the Chanty says, and Mauger - No, Jack. He was just too late. He said, I heard the Mate who was at the tiller cry out look out - I at once looked under the boom and saw a very high sea just about to brake over us. I caught hold and had the weight of same on looking round me I saw all the lee bulwarks was washed away and hear the Mate cry out, Her side is knocked in the boat she is sinking, not very pleasant words at such a time I hastened to windward to my horror to prove his words only too true get the boat out was the thing in hand. So Mauger's gone with all of that. LADY DO - With all of that? But what, Horace? HORACE - As the Chanty says, fare thee well me bully boys, we've all got to go. Oh, yeah! LADY DO - You saw my old man die, did you, Horace? HORACE - I saw a tremendous sea (reaching I should think, quite half way up to our masthead). But I instantly took two turns of the lashing of the dinghy around each arm and thus survived as the wave swept the deck. Suddenly, pale as a dish rag, she went off inside the barn to her private museum of bird skins, eggs and scientific specimen mounts, walking stiffly without a cane in her trousers with a little flare and sailor looks, to veg, to view perchance to make sure again that the lone egg of the black swift, collected in 1917 by an oologist named Wroom, was still there in the red drawer of her 2,210 bird egg clutches collection, along with a pair of whooping crane eggs taken in 1867 by a field collector, the year in which what is today called downtown Eridanus - the West End - was sold for 114 pounds, 11 shillings, and 6 pence. As usual they would quarrel about anything, and as usual anyone passing on that path to the log cabin would find them, Skipper Horace and Lady Do sitting, sitting before the twilight on their rocking chairs, rocking themselves slowly, almost rhythmically, looking at the forest, the birds of the forest, the rocky embankment of the tiny stretch of sea between the mountains in which floated logs abandoned to the tides. You could still recognize down there on the beach the place were Malcolm's bright crazy little shack was sitting one day, along with the sloppy pile house of his few neighbors, the Manx boat builder named Quaggan, the Channel Islander called Nicolai the Shy Pole, and the engine driver Four Bells, whose real home was in the prairies. Then, and suddenly - just like a thunderstorm down the gorges and across the Inlet - everything was gone.  HORACE - Our good friend Earle said. LADY DO - What in heaven could ever say that man? HORACE - He was a good man and a major poet among poets. LADY DO - I took a creative writing course with him at the Anabasis University, which was OK, only that he was so annoying when he kept repeating not to imitate, for Christ sake, Mr. W.R. Espy who was an inveterate punster who collected clerihews, dabbled in double dactyls, limned lipograms, mixed macaronics and exulted in anagram, homonyms, oxymorons, palindromes and spoonerism! HORACE - According to his obituary, he was the author of these lines: I love the girls who do But best, the girls who say, "I don't! But maybe just for you." HORACE - Do You like them? LADY DO - Well...I think I know now why your friend the Poet was blasting at this poet! HORACE - Please Lady Do, let's drop it, will you? He said, I mean Earle, he said that all the sloppy ramshackle honest pile houses where fishermen lived and kingfishers visited are bulldozed into oblivion, along with the wild cherries and forest path to the spring. LADY DO - Malcolm was already dead, was he? HORACE - I met him in Taormina, Sicily, while playing some piano for his own solace. We exchanged a few words about Canada and Mexico, jazz musicians such as Eddie Lang and Venuti, Satchmo and Bix, but no literature. I was, if I may, nel mezzo del cammin, eccetera - the years of Christ, as they say, 32/33, and just married for the first time, while Malc was on the threshold of his fiftieth anniversary, looking fit though and handsome. In a strange way he reminded me of Dylan Thomas, whom I met years before in Rome, at a reading of his own poems. Later, it was exactly our friend Earle who told me that both those gifted men were lovers of...  LADY DO - ...the bottle, she interjected. HORACE - Yeah! He was in his way to a Sussex cottage, while on a visit to England, where he chocked to death in his sleep. LADY DO - I hate drunkards! It killed my old man. HORACE - Mauger? No! How many times I've to tell you nooo? He fell, was washed away under the keel! How many times, Lady Do? LADY DO - He used to call you Eyetalian, and you didn't like it. HORACE - I used to call him Irisk, and he didn't like it. LADY DO - I have to believe this? HORACE - How many times I've to sing for you the smutty song? He meets with many a friend, And if that he is lost at sea His friends will grieve for him full sore, Perhaps they'd wives and families, Their fate it is full sore" LADY DO - I still don't believe your mind, Mau, drowning? And, besides, in your "smutty song" there are too many "sore"... HORACE - Always a purist? LADY DO - I myself don't like that Eyetalian! How can I say to people: I went to Eyetaly? HORACE - People have very personal opinions...and problems too. LADY DO - At any rate, who on earth can live ages, winters, in a beach house like wretched... HORACE - ...squatter? Earle wrote beautifully about it. He said that while Malc and his wife were in Europe, their shack had been wrecked and burned into oblivion, along with the homes of all their fellow squatters, by the official preservers of Rent, Sanitation and Taxes.  LADY DO - I hate the word Oblivion! HORACE - You hate too many things, Lady Do. Do you will hate me if I call you DoReMiFack? LADY DO - Yes. I hate you! HORACE - And you hate to be...obliterated? LADY DO - Yes, yes! I hate you for your grotesque mind. HORACE - Well, the word oblivion is a condition of being oblivious. What's wrong with that? It helps the survivals. It can happen to us too, to anyone to be shoveled into oblivion. Which is good, after all. The truth is that Malc wrote beautifully about everything he touched with his hands, and loved with his heart. He too was a kind of skipper: like me if you don't mind, or Conrad. LADY DO - The whale man? HORACE - That was Melville. LADY DO - It's fine with me. Then would you say the same of Earle, the Poet? HORACE - Who said what? LADY DO - The Eyetalian. Who else? Listen to this: when the doomed are most eloquent in their sinking, it seems that then we are least strong to save... HORACE - The Eyetalian said so? LADY DO - It's Earle or Malc, Horace? Malc, of course: as quoted disparagingly by Earle. HORACE - Disparagingly? LADY DO - Truth, you know, kills twice. Keep listening. I read, you listen. It's a tiny little book. The words are the man: they have the wry, archaic irony of his talk, as it still sounds in my ears; they have his stance, teetering on a rope of comic fancies between grandeur and self-pity, between exultation in his own power and agonies of self-contempt. Even the image traces as epitaph; his whole life was a slow drowning in great lonely seas of alcohol and guilt. It was all one sea, and all his own. HORACE - I love it. You said that Earle wrote that? Yes, I love it. And also Malc would have loved it, you see? History shows that anytime someone is moved, there is trouble. In fact, if you're a strong player on the collusive team, it doesn't matter where you are. You can be that from every place. But if you're a weak player and you're not on the first floor, you're nothing. LADY DO - I don't understand. HORACE - You don't? I still have a nightmare of being a 74-year-old Southern Eyetalian whose body was torn to pieces when he was dragged behind a pickup truck down a rough rural road in the pine woods east of Eridanus, Nabokov County, or he was someone else with whom I sympathize, living to die in someone else unthinkable universe?  LADY DO - You're turning nuts, do you? HORACE - He had been beaten, but the prosecution showed that he was alive when those three guys chained him to the bumper and raced three miles along a logging trail and a blacktop road. LADY DO - Stop it, Horace! HORACE - During the dragging, Mr. Southern Italian turned over and over to relieve the pain as his flesh was torn away and his skeleton was ground up on the blacktop. He finally died a mile and a half out, when the truck took a sudden turn and his head and arms were severed by a metal culvert. LADY DO - G-d! A nightmare, you said? EYETALIAN - Reality, Lady Do. Am I nuts? Are people nuts? I heard a song, besides, from the tulgey wood. It was saying: Why you keep hating our friend Earle? LADY DO - No, I don't hate him. But he went on and on in class, and that was it. Let me read again from this little book: He sank in it a thousand times and struggled back up to reveal the creatures that swam round him under his glowing reefs and in his black abysses... EYETALIAN - Let me croone along: The bonny "Mignonette" Where came the storm in motion As high the billows met LADY DO - Again with that song? EYETALIAN - You like it better in French, isn't it? LADY DO - Please! EYETALIAN - Va bene: Qui n'avait jamais navigué LADY DO - I said no, please! EYETALIAN - OK. He was our friend, though! And you loved him. LADY DO - Who, whom...Meee? EYETALIAN - DoReMiii? Love and hatred are cousins, my dear DoReMi. Or, even better, phony in love and sincere in hate. He was our friend, though. A true friend is a rare bird, and Earle was that one. LADY DO - Oh, him! I hate drunkards! I won't get fooled again. EYETALIAN - Fine, fine! Except in a nightmare, no one is going to kill me, Lady Do. Forgotten the old days? LADY DO - Those of love, wine and...? EYETALIAN - In those days we used to gamble with everything we had. LADY DO - It was a play.  EYETALIAN - Of course! But The Daily Telegraph said that anyone who has loved and lost, anyone who has experienced infidelity or felt love die, will watch this play with stomach churning pangs of recognition. LADY DO - Oh, The Daily Telegraph said so? EYETALIAN - As a prank I pretended sometimes to be female - 30s, dark hair, big mouth, epic tits - plugged-in as horny as a turn-of-the-century Schnitzler's hot-ticket comedy, a vehicle... LADY DO - ...of sexual dominance, I know! EYETALIAN - No. High-tech purgatory, perhaps, paradise remaining Malc's vision of all that we now know about pines and maples, cedars and hemlocks and alders, and our own forest path to the spring, from our cabin. So, just like Earle, would you ask Who Was He? LADY DO - No, he doesn't say so.. And I too. No one can say Who Was He. For once at least, let me quote Earle, honestly. EYETALIAN - Honestly? Good word. There's 45 million kids in public schools, and 5 million in private schools. You think you can do it with vouchers? Se let's make it for better. I don't want to die now and my old neighborhood of squatters is worse and I say, "I did great, I did OK." In an era characterized by public discourse on "what the definition of IS is"- I think Malcolm aimed far higher, at corralling the concept of AI as opposed to I and the rest of humanity. LADY DO - Wrong! EYETALIAN - Well, I is not enough for either me or Malc or Earle, for sure. If I' am all I am of my life, it's not enough. We're in this to make the whole place better, after taking care of your own. That has meaning...Make a contribution. Do everything you can... LADY DO - You misread me, Horace!  EYETALIAN - Glory be to thee, Lady Do! It is from misreading or misinformation that an individual becomes Eyetalian, and evil eye? LADY DO - And I became Lady Do or Ms. DoReMi from Lady Donna, and worst of all Great Dane? Do I yap? The trouble is that you take things too personally... EYETALIAN - Well, you just said something I would classify as a form of cultural denigration. LADY DO - Wow! EYETALIAN - Yes: the Duchess sang a lullaby to her baby, giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases LADY DO - Wow! Wow! Wow! EYETALIAN - I speak severely to my boy For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases! LADY DO - Wow! EYETALIAN - Okay, now, Lady Do! It's nice to live in secure times, when one doesn't have to awake in the morning to questions of life and death instead of languages. Still, it isn't easy to be satisfied with the smallness of our experience, I believe. LADY DO - Are you quoting from newspaper's articles, as always, or what Horace? EYETALIAN - What, quoting? Here's an apocryphal quotation, attributed to Dylan Thomas: She said as I whispered Ich diem: "This is royalty's night out, So please switch the light out", The Queen may be had but not seen. LADY DO - I was referring to newspapers' articles which are funny yet serious. I've one in mind, not mine of course, that says just what I've been trying to say.  EYETALIAN - To say? Of whom, ma'am? LADY DO - The listener, I believe. And I believe what Ms. Wood believes: that we have developed a bad case of magnitude envy. In a culture obsessed with entertainment, celebrity, buzz, spin, market share, synergy, gestures, decaf skim lattes and cigar bars, we feel diminished and puny. EYETALIAN - I think she's just a fat girl who writes like Norman Rockwell paints. Let's drop it for now, okay? Everything's too intense, too insane...Do you remember the poem he once read to us? LADY DO - He who? EYETALIAN - Earle, of course, lecturing on Malc's work. Christ Walks In The Infernal District Too...Remember? LADY DO - Since that day, Kitchmess Day, Earle ditched me on Hasting Street, I prefer not to remember... EYETALIAN - To ditch the bitch on Kitchmess Day? Christ! Here's the Carol: Poppa Sun, look how we're hung With sexy greens & gaudy notions. So rain down plagues on Danes & Rotions & grant us population explosions LADY DO - What is it, now? Do I know? EYETALIAN - Well, Lady Do, of course you do. LADY DO - Do I? I weep for you.  EYETALIAN - At this point is better, I think, to change pace in our discourse. I ask you: is that true that what men really want from women is wank fodder? Masturbation, not intercourse? LADY DO - My G-d! EYETALIAN - A little devil came back to me, whiffling through the tulgey wood. Would you listen, Do? And how is it you live? Come, tell me how you live And what it is you do! EYETALIAN - I sail, my Lady Do, on stormy seas, and boil myself in wine. LADY DO - Addressing to somebody? EYETALIAN - Yes. To the White Rabbitt with pink eyes, Lady Do. By the way: can you tell me how many artificial elements have been created recently? LADY DO - Is this another of your tricks, Horace? EYETALIAN - Yes. I'm mixing sand with cedar. Did you ever hear of plutonium, curium, californium? LADY DO - Why? EYETALIAN - The one who made all of that stuff just died. LADY DO - Made what? EYETALIAN - A large rabbit-hole under a hedge, Lady Do. LADY DO - I am not eating rabbit tonight. Il makes me weary. EYETALIAN - What about butterflies in salmì? By this hour the shadows among the trees had deepened, and suddenly they felt lonely, abused. They stopped rocking their bodies to and fro and he reached for her hand. Very slowly they walked inside for the usual supper of vagrant rabbits caught in wrought iron snares around the cabin and, eventually, for their evening's home movies of Tweedledum & Tweedledee of sexual rot, or burbled games from Big Bang to weary shag: the history of the impure world. She smiled wryly. 
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