Monday, July 20, 2009

Pelléas et Mélisande

That night la Pelléas et Mélisande was playing at the firehouse, a one-time showing put on by the Concha Bros. Opera company owned and operated by Horacio and Roberto, brothers Antae and Agape preferring the loom business to opera. Across the street from the firehouse sat the legless man, his arms crossed over his chest wheezing. ‘--Concha’s should keep their whoring to themselves… all that stink and pale skin’. Having once bedded a putas diva with a leghorn stump (that made his own look like fine upstanding pegs) he had bad memories of straddle-backs and beans, the puta diva never once staying still long enough to make fair game of her.

The thought of her singing brought tears to his eyes. They drank tic-tac under a black opium sky, los putas diva saying it’d make him stiff as whiplash and kill the worms in his stool. The Concha brothers bought whores’ gloves from a man with a fat wife and three unsightly daughters. ‘--no not that one’ whispered the oldest unsightly sister. ‘--da’ll have a conniption if he sees you dressed like that’. ‘--da’s got a boxful of ladies gloves and no one says spit about that ’. Jeju Cheju-do and his cousin Ran Shou Tan live in a ramshackle hut behind the firehouse with two dogs and a courting pig they use to lure women to their hut, the pig sticking its corkscrew tail in the air and twirling it like a propeller.

The Cceres brothers and the Extremadura brothers are in cahoots with the Bridgwater brothers and the Bekkevoort brothers, who are in cahoots with the Brabant brothers and the Wolverhampton brothers, none of whom have anything to do with this story, for the moment at least… moments being what they are, incalculable and varying, this could be an oversight on behalf of the author, who is in cahoots with everyone except the harridan’s sister who is in cahoots with herself.

Croydon of Croydon stole a box of lace from Puerto Del Rosario, the sole proprietor of the Canarias Lace and Glove Co. Croydon (of Croydon) acquired a fancy for women’s gloves and lace from his da, who fancied whores and Cutters’ Gin. Pinchbeck, his ear pressed against the storefront window, listened, ‘…I say then…’ continued Rancho, ‘…that in a village of Estremadura there was a goat-shepherd--that is to say, one who tended goats--which shepherd or goatherd, as my story goes, was called Lope Ruiz, and this Lope Ruiz was in love with a shepherdess called Torralva, which shepherdess called Torralva was the daughter of a rich brazier, and this rich glazier…’. * And so the day went, the man in the hat making a fine mess of an otherwise okay to middling fine day.
* Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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