Geronimo 1

The Russian was showing his portrait of the great
Geronimo, who, present in person, sat holding his cup of tea, which
for all he heeded, it might at any moment sail out of the window.

His pale hazel eyes, as if something astonishing had
been dashed into them, stared over our heads and far away in an
effort to see whence it came. Even his mass of curly light brown
hair shot up from the deeply lined enormous forehead in a tall sur-
prise. Resembling the death-mask of Beethoven, could it open up
in a trick mirror, (he had somewhere described himself as the white
negro) he wore a pair of golden pince-nez which pinched up a ridge
of flesh for lack of a nasal bridge that backed into the general
block of cranial bone.

The lower muscles of his cheeks were so developed they
reminded one of how Demosthenes filled his mouth with pebbles, and
when he spoke it was indeed as if those muscles muffled his
languorous yet, at the same time, blustering voice.

Kasho! invited him to stand up beside the painted like-
ness for the sake of comparison. Geronimo complied-- moving with
an attractive unbending slouch to reach the canvas, where, throwing

Geronimo - c

back his shoulders, he set up his face as its own criterion. It
had a staring eternal blankness of the toad. About the brow hung
an ancient weariness. The mouth, with its long upper lip, pro-
truded like that of an impertinent gamin in readiness to deride.

It was evident that, having had to accept this face him-
self, he was impishly pleased for others to share in the nuisance.
There was something of the torturer's complacency about the non-
chalence with which he stood confronting us.

(He would, in the end, prove to be less self-conscious--
as a man, not as an intellect-- than any man I have ever known;
he had no idea of what abstract values a race may convey despite
its failure to conform, inasmuch as a mask to conventional measure-
ments.)

He took no notice of any one-- particularly of me. I
had only to be dragged within the precincts of the serious In-
telligentsia of Palms to find myself surrounded by a ring
of ice.

So Kashof also ignored me, dividing his attention be-
tween his portrait of the silent celebrity and Esau. He was making

Geronimo - J

an earnest to-do over him, showing him all his paintings, hinting
that he might help a few into the new salon.

In those days, never going anywhere of my own volition,
I felt like a casualty borne along by an army on the march and
dumped on their successive halting places to ache all alone in the
conflict of my psychologic wounds.

Try as I would, I could not divert my mental flux from
flowing into the conflicting channels that had been hollowed out
for it by the turbulent years.

Assisting at the peculiarly unanalyzable conversation of
second-rate artists, I despised them with the instinct of blind
loyalty to an inner conviction as yet-- unformed!

The Duty obsession stamped upon my brain with a hoor,
cloven, of that Jew's exhortation for me to arise among the
geniuses of Earth, KAX (whereas I succeeded in'taking place' nowhere
and that Christian's digging me into the bottomless pit of in-
feriority. My confusion resulted in feeling sullen over the
accident of my presence-- anywhere.

Geronimo - 4

In obedience to my father, I should challenge the/s

Geronimo fellow, but he appeared so far off, secure on his learned
territory, vulnerable to nothing but solid fact.

Insofar as I could make out, the only fact left of my
education was the first-- William the Conqueror, 1066. Could I
shout at this guest of honor. "Put off your superiority. I also
-- -- --" And then what? 1066?

Besides I liked his face; famous for being the ugliest
in Italy. It projected an appealing sadness that picked out a
pattern of beauty from the accident of flesh and bone, and this
esoteric design advanced to consort with the misery hidden behind
the outward harmony of my own features.

In my girl-hood my favorite song had always been 'In the
Gloaming'. With his aria pallor of Tuscan earth bleached in an
August sun-- according to an irrational onomatopoeia words assumed
for my untutored mind-- Geronimo gloamed.

This soothed me.

The hours I wailed away in the jail of home accompanying
my singing from a puce covered song book with a broken back
writing in an oriental atavism "when the lights are dim and low!"

Geronimo - 5

Sadness in that era may have been an aphrodisiac for unrecognized desire. Or else sequestered adolescents, in their so often futureless emotions, imagined the fusion of twain sadnesses intensifying delight in the consummation of life-- perhaps they were not entirely wrong--.

The crazy orange and green diagram of the portrait standing on an easel-- staggered about in the air-- flew onto Geronimo's real rawn face-- intercepting its invisible beauty's approach to me-- then off again, while with a mental kind of visualization I was trying to decipher his features in accordance with the occult impression they conveyed to me. My sensibility fumbled about with it as once in the hazy past my fingers had struggled with the misshapen wax of the spoiled night-light. Half consciously I was waiting for his face to light up.

Kashof, placing picture after picture on another easel, mostly of apples painted in deference to Cezanne, was like a pickpocket making off with the lining of a pocket whose contents he had overlooked.

Geronimo - 0

As we left, Esau, glancing at me with his usual envious repulsion, burned upon Kashof, "You should have submitted your case to my wife," he hissed ironically, willing even to draw attention to me for the other man's discomfiture, "She is a member of that Salon-- I have no influence whatsoever."

When we were back in that frightening tower, I sat at my desk and tried to draw. The beauty that struggled to germinate in the past had withered under the ugly psychic shadows falling between my mind and its modest visions.

Opposite me Esau, so wedgelike that his smouldering black eye flattened full face on his profile in the Egyptian fashion, seemed to watch me in ricochet. Imperturbable, immovable-- on his fingers imperceptibly stirred about his companionate pistol-- "I wonder", he sneered, "You do no work, after the very great honor," (he stressed the words with austere servility) "the Salon has done you."

I was almost sure that Esau would not shoot me. The pistol for the sense of power it gave him, sufficed him. Still, I being enceinte, it made me feel terribly jumpy. Danger objects to being expected. When it arrives it leaps out un

Geronimo - 7

to being expected. When it arrives, it leaps out unforeseen.

Only a few days later Grail came up to the tower with Llewellyn, his musician. He experimented on etching with Esau in another room, while I drew the musician's profile. "He is like a Niederlander of the Middle Ages," I pointed out, and Grail had neighed in derision, offended I had not wished to draw him, his good looks being considered deific. I could not help the peculiar personal angle from which I saw people. Grail, to me, appeared like an old lady-- his famous drifting hair, moth-eaten.

The musician seemed to Grail the more ill-chosen in that, owing to a wine stain birth mark spread over the whole one side of his face, one could only, in comfort, look at half of it. That half, which was all of his face he wished were alive, I turned towards the light.

When it was time to rest, Llewellyn yawned, stretched himself and his arm reaching above Esau's desk he automatically picked up the pistol left there, aimed it straight at me and pulled the trigger. The bullet skimmed my temple like a passing wing.

Long prepared by what had evidently been a greater ap-

Geronimo - 8

prehension than I had realized, I did not even start when the shot rang out.

The other two men rushed in. The abuse Esau heaped on Llewellyn was heart rending-- a strangely indirect abuse, which, implicitly without taking my life into account, denounced the infringement of his rights in a decisive act.

"Leave him alone," I commanded, surprised into laughter, "It was an absent-minded tic."

After this Esau-- as if a jealous emulation of chance obsessed him-- grew really disturbing with his pistol. Particularly when I came down to breakfast.

The night brought forth the wierdest sensations. When my body lay down, it was given up entirely to the growth of invasion. The intermittent roll and stress of a blind invader endeavoring to unbundle itself from the tissues enfolding it, to thrust further with its steadily animating limbs the extensile confines of the cavern in which it lay, making room for a sure augmentation on the morrow.

In this comatose insistent motion like a progressive stir

Geronimo - 9

of life through evolutional stages-- swimming-- spasmodic-- undulative as a thing borne by a wave-- taut in the incipience of a leap-- a fist would land its muffled blow, an aimless foot as if to walk through the flesh, raise a hard excrescence upon the abdominal wall.

Lastly, this entrammelled marauder seemed to push up-
ward against the heart to stop its beat. Choking, I would creep
to the window sill to inhale air.

Beneath me, the cobbled hill-road dropped to the City
gate-- no ruggedness deserted but for the central row of refuse
heaps awaiting the morning sweeper with his wheel-barrow and
broom-- the scattered litter cast from windows before they closed
in that sleep inanimate dwellings share with the living being
they shelter.

We had moved from the high tower where my habitual
distress hung in an isolation suspended in the sky, moved down
to earth where the effluvia of a lovely Italian slum left little
freshness to breathe.

Geronimo - 10

I arrived at the breakfast table after a long semi-
asphyxiation. Under the high <u>hand</u>-calculated linear significance
of the medieval arches of the ground-floor, at the head of the
long Florentine table in his <u>full</u> carved chair, the diminutive
form, Esau, advancing his tortoise neck, actually crouched over
the pistol.

He would grasp it as I came into the room and cover
my approach, Its cannon, 'together with the neurosis in his eyes,
following me in an identical abortive intention.

"And <u>why</u>, if you please, can't you eat your breakfast?"
he demanded.

Geronimo 1

His pale hazel eyes, as if something astonishing had been dashed into them, stared over our heads and far away in an effort to see whence it came. Even his mass of curly light brown hair shot up from the deeply lined enormous forehead in a tall surprise. Resembling the death-mask of Beethoven, could it open up in a trick mirror, (he had somewhere described himself as the white negro) he wore a pair of golden pince-nez which pinched up a ridge of flesh for lack of a nasal bridge that backed into the general block of cranial bone.

Kashof invited him to stand up beside the painted likeness for the sake of comparison. Geronimo complied-- moving with an attractive unbending slouch to reach the canvas, where, throwing

Geronimo - 2

back his shoulders, he set up his face as its own criterion. It
had a staring eternal blankness of the toad. About the brow hung
an ancient weariness. The mouth, with its long upper lip, pro-
trused like that of an impertinent gamin in readiness to deride.

(He would, in the end, prove to be less self-conscious--
as a man, not as an intellect-- than any man I have ever known;
he had no idea of what abstract values a face may convey despite
its failure to conform, inasmuch as a mask) to conventional measure-
ments.)

He took no notice of any one-- particularly of me. I
had only to be dragged within the precincts of the serious In-
telligentsia of to find myself surrounded by a ring
of ice.

Geronimo - 3

an earnest to-do over him, showing him all his paintings, hinting
that he might help a few into the new Salon.

The Duty obsession stamped upon my brain with a hoof,
cloven, of that Jew's exhortation for me to arise among the
geniuses of Earth, Kax (whereas I succeeded in'taking place' nowhere
and that Christian's digging me into the bottomless pit of in-
feriority. My confusion resulted in feeling sullen over the
accident of my presence-- anywhere.

Geronimo - 4

In obedience to the master, I should challenge the Geronimo fellow, but he appeared so far off, secure on his learned territory, vulnerable to nothing but solid fact.

In as far as I could make out, the only fact left of my education was the first-- William the Conqueror, 1066. Could I shout at this guest of honor. "Put off your superiority. I also -- -- --" And then what? 1066?

In my girl-hood my favorite song had always been 'In the Gloaming'. With his ario pallor of Tuscan earth bleached in an August sun-- according to an irrational onomatopoeia words assumed for my untutored mind-- Geronimo gloamed.

This soothed me.

The hours I wailed away in the jail of home accompanying my singing from a puce covered song book with a broken back, reiterating in an oriental atavism "when the lights are dim and low!"

Geronimo - 5

Sadness in that era may have been an aphrodisiac for unrecognized desire. Or else sequestered adolescents, in their so often futureless emotions, imagined the fusion of twin sadresses intensifying delight in the consummation of life-- perhaps they were not entirely wrong--.

The crazy orange and green diagram of the portrait standing on an easel-- staggered about in the air-- flew onto Geronimo's real fawn face-- intercepting its invisible beauty's approach to me-- then off again, while with a mental kind of visualization I was trying to decipher his features in accordance with the occult impression they conveyed to me. My sensibility fumbled about with it as once in the hazy past my fingers had struggled with the misshapen wax of the spoiled night light. Half consciously I was waiting for his face to light up.

Kashof, placing picture after picture on another easel, mostly of apples painted in deference to Cezanne, was like a pick-pocket making off with the lining of a pocket whose contents he had overlooked.

Geronimo - 6

As we left, Esau, glancing at me with his usual envious repulsion, turned upon Kashof, "You should have submitted your case to my wife," he hissed ironically, willing even to draw attention to me for the other man's discomfiture, "She is a member of that Salon-- I have no influence whatsoever."

Opposite me Esau, so wedgelike that his smouldering black eye flanged full face on his profile in the Egyptian fashion, seemed to watch me in ricochet. Imperturbable, immovable-- on his fingers imperceptibly stirred about his companionate pistol-- "I wonder", he sneered, "You do no work, after the very great honor," (he stressed the words with austere servility) "the Salon has done you."

Geronimo - 7

The musician seemed to Grail the more ill-chosen in that, owing to a wine-stain birth mark spread over the whole one side of his face, one could only, in comfort, look at half of it. That half, which was all of his face he wished were alive, I turned towards the light.

Geronimo - 8

The other two men rushed in. The abuse Esau heaped on Llewellyn was heart rending-- a strangely indirect abuse, which, without taking my life into account, denounced the infringement of his rights in a decisive act.

The night brought forth the wierdest sensations. When my body lay down, it was given up entirely to the growth of invasion. The intermittent roll and stress of a blind invader endeavoring to unbundle itself from the tissues enfolding it, to thrust further with its steadily animating limbs the extensible confines of the cavern in which it lay, making room for a sure augmentation on the morrow.

Geronimo - 9

Lastly, this entrummelled marauder seemed to push upward against the heart to stop its beat. Choking, I would creep to the window sill to inhale air.

Beneath me, the cobbled hill-road dropped to the city gate-- no ruggedness deserted but for the central row of refuse heaps awaiting the morning sweeper with his wheel-barrow and broom-- the scattered litter cast from windows before they closed in that sleep inanimate dwellings share with the living beings they shelter.

Geronimo - 10

I arrived at the breakfast table after a long semi-asphyxiation. Under the high hand-calculated linear significance of the medieval arches of the ground-floor, at the head of the long Florentine table in his tall, carved chair, the diminutive form, Esau, advancing his tortoise neck, actually crouched over the pistol.

He would grasp it as I came into the room and cover my approach, its cannon, together with the neurosis in his eyes, following me in an identical abortive intention.

"And why, if you please, can't you eat your breakfast?" he demanded.