Excerpt II: David Mitchel's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

This excerpt from David Mitchel's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is brought to you courtesy of The Excerpt Reader:

Captain Lacy's cabin on the Shenandoah, anchored in Nagasaki harbor

Evening of July 20, 1799

"How else," demands Daniel Snitker, "is a man to earn just reward for the daily humiliations we suffer from those slit-eyed leeches? 'The unpaid servant,' say the Spanish, 'has the right to pay himself,' and for once, damn me, the Spanish are right. Why so certain there'll still be a company to pay us in five years' time? Amsterdam is on its knees; our shipyards are idle; our manufactories silent; our granaries plundered; The Hague is a stage of prancing marionettes tweaked by Paris; Prussian jackals and Austrian wolves laugh at our borders: and Jesus in heaven, since the bird-shoot at Kamperduin we are left a maritime nation with no navy. The British seized the Cape, Coromandel, and Ceylon without so much as a kiss-my-arse, and that Java itself is their next fattened Christmas goose is plain as day! Without neutral bottoms like this" - he curls his lip at Captain Lacy - "Yankee, Batavia would starve. In such times, Vorstenbosch, a man's sole insurance is salable goods in the warehouse. Why else, for God's sake, are you here?"

The old whale-oil lantern sways and hisses.

"That," Vorstenbosch asks, "was your closing statement?"

Snitker folds his arms. "I spit on your drumhead trial."

Captain Lacy issues a gargantuan belch. "'Twas the garlic, gentlemen."

Vorstenbosch addresses his clerk: "We may record our verdict..."

Jacob de Zoet nods and dips his quill: "... drumhead trial."

"On this day, the twentieth of July, 1799, I, Unico Vorstenbosch, chief-elect of the trading factory of Dejima in Nagasaki, acting by the powers vested in me by His Excellency P. G. van Overstraten, governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, witnessed by Captain Anselm Lacy of the Shenandoah, ?nd Daniel Snitker, acting-chief of the above- mentioned factory, guilty of the following: gross dereliction of duty -"

"I fulfilled," insists Snitker, "every duty of my post!"

" 'Duty' " Vorstenbosch signals to Jacob to pause. "Our warehouses were burning to cinders whilst you, sir, romped with strumpets in a brothel - a fact omitted from that farrago of lies you are pleased to call your day register. And had it not been for the chance remark of a Japanese interpreter - "

"Shit-house rats who blacken my name 'cause I'm wise to their tricks!"

"Is it a 'blackening of your name' that the fire engine was missing from Dejima on the night of the fire?"

"Perhaps the defendant took the engine to the House of Wistaria," remarks Captain Lacy, "to impress the ladies with the thickness of his hose."

"The engine," objects Snitker, "was Van Cleef's responsibility."

"I'll tell your deputy how faithfully you defended him. To the next item, Mr. de Zoet: 'Failure to have the factory's three senior officers sign the Octavia's bills of lading.' "

"Oh, for God's sake. A mere administrative oversight!"

"An 'oversight' that permits crooked chiefs to cheat the company in a hundred ways, which is why Batavia insists on triple authorization. Next item: 'Theft of company funds to pay for private cargoes.' "

"Now that," Snitker spits with anger, "that is a flat lie!"

From a carpetbag at his feet, Vorstenbosch produces two porcelain figurines in the Oriental mode. One is an executioner, ax poised to behead the second, a kneeling prisoner, hands bound and eyes on the next world.

"Why show me those" - Snitker is shameless - "gewgaws?"

"Two gross were found in your private cargo - 'twenty-four dozen Arita ?gurines,' let the record state. My late wife nurtured a fondness for Japanese curiosities, so I have a little knowledge. Indulge me, Captain Lacy: estimate their value in, let us say, a Viennese auction house."

Captain Lacy considers. "Twenty guilders a head?"

"For these slighter ones alone, thirty-five guilders; for the gold- leafed courtesans, archers, and lords, fifty. What price the two gross? Let us aim low - Europe is at war, and markets unsettled - and call it thirty-five per head... multiplied by two gross. De Zoet?"

Jacob's abacus is to hand. "Ten thousand and eighty guilders, sir."

Lacy issues an impressed "Hee-haw!"

"Tidy profit," states Vorstenbosch, "for merchandise purchased at the company's expense yet recorded in the bills of lading-unwitnessed, of course - as 'Acting-Chief's Private Porcelain,' in your hand, Snitker."

"The former chief, God rest his soul" - Snitker changes his story - "willed them to me, before the court embassy."

"So Mr. Hemmij foresaw his demise on his way back from Edo?"


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Excerpt I: David Mitchel's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

This excerpt from David Mitchel's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is brought to you courtesy of The Excerpt Reader:

The House of Kawasemi the Concubine, above Nagasaki

The Ninth Night of the Fifth Month


In the rice paddy beyond the garden, a cacophony of frogs detonates.

Orito dabs the concubine's sweat-drenched face with a damp cloth.

"She's barely spoken"- the maid holds the lamp - "for hours and hours...."

"Miss Kawasemi, I'm Aibagawa. I'm a midwife. I want to help."

Kawasemi's eyes flicker open. She manages a frail sigh. Her eyes shut.

She is too exhausted, Orito thinks, even to fear dying tonight.

Dr. Maeno whispers through the muslin curtain. "I wanted to examine the child's presentation myself, but..." The elderly scholar chooses his words with care. "But this is prohibited, it seems."

"My orders are clear," states the chamberlain. "No man may touch her."

Orito lifts the bloodied sheet and finds, as warned, the fetus's limp arm, up to the shoulder, protruding from Kawasemi's vagina.

"Have you ever seen such a presentation?" asks Dr. Maeno.

"Yes: in an engraving, from the Dutch text Father was translating."

"This is what I prayed to hear! The Observations of William Smellie?"

"Yes: Dr. Smellie terms it," Orito uses the Dutch, " 'Prolapse of the Arm.' "

Orito clasps the fetus's mucus-smeared wrist to search for a pulse.

Maeno now asks her in Dutch, "What are your opinions?"

There is no pulse. "The baby is dead," Orito answers, in the same language, "and the mother will die soon, if the child is not delivered." She places her fingertips on Kawasemi's distended belly and probes the bulge around the inverted navel. "It was a boy." She kneels between Kawasemi's parted legs, noting the narrow pelvis, and sniffs the bulging labia: she detects the malty mixture of grumous blood and excrement, but not the stench of a rotted fetus. "He died one or two hours ago."

Orito asks the maid, "When did the waters break?"

The maid is still mute with astonishment at hearing a foreign language.

"Yesterday morning, during the Hour of the Dragon," says the stony-voiced housekeeper. "Our lady entered labor soon after."

"And when was the last time that the baby kicked?"

"The last kick would have been around noon today."

"Dr. Maeno, would you agree the infant is in" - she uses the Dutch term - "the 'transverse breech position' "

"Maybe," the doctor answers in their code tongue, "but without an examination..."

"The baby is twenty days late, or more. It should have been turned."

"Baby's resting," the maid assures her mistress. "Isn't that so, Dr. Maeno?"

"What you say"- the honest doctor wavers- "may well be true."

"My father told me," Orito says, "Dr. Uragami was overseeing the birth."

"So he was," grunts Maeno, "from the comfort of his consulting rooms. After the baby stopped kicking, Uragami ascertained that, for geomantic reasons discernible to men of his genius, the child's spirit is reluctant to be born. The birth henceforth depends on the mother's willpower." The rogue, Maeno needs not add, dares not bruise his reputation by presiding over the stillbirth of such an estimable man's child. "Chamberlain Tomine then persuaded the magistrate to summon me. When I saw the arm, I recalled your doctor of Scotland and requested your help."

"My father and I are both deeply honored by your trust," says Orito...
... and curse Uragami, she thinks, for his lethal reluctance to lose face.

Abruptly, the frogs stop croaking and, as though a curtain of noise falls away, the sound of Nagasaki can be heard, celebrating the safe arrival of the Dutch ship.

"If the child is dead," says Maeno in Dutch, "we must remove it now."

"I agree." Orito asks the housekeeper for warm water and strips of linen and uncorks a bottle of Leiden salts under the concubine's nose to win her a few moments' lucidity. "Miss Kawasemi, we are going to deliver your child in the next few minutes. First, may I feel inside you?"

The concubine is seized by the next contraction and loses her ability to answer.

Warm water is delivered in two copper pans as the agony subsides. "We should confess," Dr. Maeno proposes to Orito in Dutch, "the baby is dead. Then amputate the arm to deliver the body."

"First, I wish to insert my hand to learn whether the body is in a convex lie or concave lie."

"If you can discover that without cutting the arm"- Maeno means "amputate" - "do so."

Orito lubricates her right hand with rapeseed oil and addresses the maid: "Fold one linen strip into a thick pad... yes, like so. Be ready to wedge it between your mistress's teeth; otherwise she might bite off her tongue. Leave spaces at the sides, so she can breathe. Dr. Maeno, my inspection is beginning."

"You are my eyes and ears, Miss Aibagawa," says the doctor.

Orito works her fingers between the fetus's biceps and its mother's ruptured labia until half her wrist is inside Kawasemi's vagina. The concubine shivers and groans. "Sorry," says Orito, "sorry..." Her fingers slide between warm membranes and skin and muscle still wet with amniotic fluid, and the midwife pictures an engraving from that enlightened and barbaric realm, Europe...

If the transverse lie is convex, recalls Orito, where the fetus's spine is arched backward so acutely that its head appears between its shins like a Chinese acrobat, she must amputate the fetus's arm, dismember its corpse with toothed forceps, and extract it, piece by grisly piece. Dr. Smellie warns that any remnant left in the womb will fester and may kill the mother. If the transverse lie is concave, however, Orito has read, where the fetus's knees are pressed against its chest, she may saw off the arm, rotate the fetus, insert crotchets into the eye sockets, and extract the whole body, head first. The midwife's index finger locates the child's knobbly spine, traces its midriff between its lowest rib and its pelvic bone, and encounters a minute ear; a nostril; a mouth; the umbilical cord; and a prawn-sized penis. "Breech is concave," Orito reports to Dr. Maeno, "but the cord is around the neck."

"Do you think the cord can be released?" Maeno forgets to speak Dutch.

"Well, I must try. Insert the cloth," Orito tells the maid, "now, please."

When the linen wad is secured between Kawasemi's teeth, Orito pushes her hand in deeper, hooks her thumb around the embryo's cord, sinks four fingers into the underside of the fetus's jaw, pushes back his head, and slides the cord over his face, forehead, and crown. Kawasemi screams, hot urine trickles down Orito's forearm, but the procedure works first time: the noose is released. She withdraws her hand and reports, "The cord is freed. Might the doctor have his"-there is no Japanese word-"forceps?"

"I brought them along," Maeno taps his medical box, "in case."

"We might try to deliver the child" - she switches to Dutch-"without amputating the arm. Less blood is always better. But I need your help."

Dr. Maeno addresses the chamberlain: "To help save Miss Kawasemi's life, I must disregard the magistrate's orders and join the midwife inside the curtain."

Chamberlain Tomine is caught in a dangerous quandary.

"You may blame me," Maeno suggests, "for disobeying the magistrate."

"The choice is mine," decides the chamberlain. "Do what you must, Doctor."

The spry old man crawls under the muslin, holding his curved tongs.

When the maid sees the foreign contraption, she exclaims in alarm.

" 'Forceps,' " the doctor replies, with no further explanation.

The housekeeper lifts the muslin to see. "No, I don't like the look of that! Foreigners may chop, slice, and call it 'medicine,' but it is quite unthinkable that -"

"Do I advise the housekeeper," growls Maeno, "on where to buy fish?"

"Forceps," explains Orito, "don't cut - they turn and pull, just like a midwife's fingers but with a stronger grip..." She uses her Leiden salts again. "Miss Kawasemi, I'm going to use this instrument" - she holds up the forceps-"to deliver your baby. Don't be afraid, and don't resist. Europeans use them routinely - even for princesses and queens. We'll pull your baby out, gently and firmly."

"Do so..." Kawasemi's voice is a smothered rattle. "Do so..."

"Thank you, and when I ask Miss Kawasemi to push..."

"Push..." She is fatigued almost beyond caring. "Push..."

"How often," Tomine peers in, "have you used that implement?"

Orito notices the chamberlain's crushed nose for the first time: it is as severe a disfigurement as her own burn. "Often, and no patient ever suffered." Only Maeno and his pupil know that these "patients" were hollowed-out melons whose babies were oiled gourds. For the final time, if all goes well, she works her hand inside Kawasemi's womb. Her fingers find the fetus's throat, rotate his head toward the cervix, slip, gain a surer purchase, and swivel the awkward corpse through a third turn. "Now, please, Doctor."

Maeno slides in the forceps around the protruding arm.

The onlookers gasp; a parched shriek is wrenched from Kawasemi.

Orito feels the forceps' curved blades in her palm: she maneuvers them around the fetus's soft skull. "Close them."

Gently but ?rmly, the doctor squeezes the forceps shut.

Orito takes the forceps' handles in her left hand: the resistance is spongy but ?rm, like konnyaku jelly. Her right hand, still inside the uterus, cups the fetus's skull.

Dr. Maeno's bony fingers encase Orito's wrist.

"What is it you're waiting for?" asks the housekeeper.

"The next contraction," says the doctor, "which is due any-"

Kawasemi's breathing starts to swell with fresh pain.

"One and two," counts Orito, "and-push, Kawasemi-san!"

"Push, Mistress!" exhort the maid and the housekeeper.

Dr. Maeno pulls at the forceps; with her right hand, Orito pushes the fetus's head toward the birth canal. She tells the maid to grasp the baby's arm and pull. Orito feels the resistance grow as the head reaches the aperture. "One and two... now!" Squeezing the glans of the clitoris flat comes a tiny corpse's matted crown.

"Here he is!" gasps the maid, through Kawasemi's animal shrieks.

Here comes the baby's scalp; here his face, marbled with mucus...
... Here comes the rest of his slithery, clammy, lifeless body.

"Oh, but-oh," says the maid. "Oh. Oh. Oh..."

Kawasemi's high-pitched sobs subside to moans, and deaden.

She knows. Orito discards the forceps, lifts the lifeless baby by his ankles and slaps him. She has no hope of coaxing out a miracle: she acts from discipline and training. After ten hard slaps, she stops. He has no pulse. She feels no breath on her cheek from the lips and nostrils. There is no need to announce the obvious. Splicing the cord near the navel, she cuts the gristly string with her knife, bathes the lifeless boy in a copper of water, and places him in the crib. A crib for a coffin, she thinks, and a swaddling sheet for a shroud.

Chamberlain Tomine gives instructions to a servant outside. "Inform His Honor that a son was stillborn. Dr. Maeno and his midwife did their best but were powerless to alter what Fate had decreed."

Orito's concern is now puerperal fever. The placenta must be extracted, yakumosô applied to the perineum, and blood stanched from an anal fissure.

Dr. Maeno withdraws from the curtained tent to make space.

A moth the size of a bird enters and blunders into Orito's face.

Batting it away, she knocks the forceps off one of the copper pans.

The forceps clatters onto a pan lid; the loud clang frightens a small creature that has somehow found its way into the room; it mewls and whimpers.

A puppy? wonders Orito, baffled. Or a kitten?

The mysterious animal cries again, very near: under the futon?

"Shoo that thing away!" the housekeeper tells the maid. "Shoo it!"

The creature mewls again, and Orito realizes it is coming from the crib.

Surely not, thinks the midwife, refusing to hope. Surely not...

She snatches away the linen sheet just as the baby's mouth opens.

He inhales once, twice, three times; his crinkled face crumples...
... and the shuddering newborn boiled-pink despot howls at Life.

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Excerpt: Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow

This excerpt from Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow is brought to you courtesy of The Excerpt Reader:


Book One
Where We Lay Our Scene
I
Franca Viola
It was the summer of 1970, and time had not yet trampled them flat, these lines:
Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
—Philip Larkin, "Annus Mirabilis" (formerly "History"), Cover magazine, February 1968
But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced. Sexual intercourse had come a long way, and was much on everyone's mind.
Sexual intercourse, I should point out, has two unique characteristics. It is indescribable. And it peoples the world. We shouldn't find it surprising, then, that it is much on everyone's mind.
Keith would be staying, for the duration of this hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer, in a castle on a mountainside above a village in Campania, in Italy. And now he walked the backstreets of Montale, from car to bar, at dusk, flanked by two twenty-year-old blondes, Lily and Scheherazade . . . Lily: 5'5", 34-25-34. Scheherazade: 5'10", 37-23-33. And Keith? Well, he was the same age, and slender (and dark, with a very misleading chin, stubbled, stubborn-looking); and he occupied that much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven.
Vital statistics. The phrase originally referred, in studies of society, to births and marriages and deaths; now it meant bust, waist, hips. In the long days and nights of his early adolescence, Keith showed an abnormal interest in vital statistics; and he used to dream them up for his solitary amusement. Although he could never draw (he was all thumbs with a crayon), he could commit figures to paper, women in outline, rendered numerically. And every possible combination, or at least anything remotely humanoid — 35-45-55, for instance, or 60-60-60 — seemed well worth thinking about. 46-47-31, 31-47-46: well worth thinking about. But you were always tugged back, somehow, to the archetype of the hourglass, and once you'd run up against (for instance) 97-3-97, there was nowhere new to go; for a contented hour you might stare at the figure eight, upright, and then on its side; until you drowsily resumed your tearful and tender combinations of the thirties, the twenties, the thirties. Mere digits, mere integers. Still, when he was a boy, and he saw vital statistics under the photograph of a singer or a starlet, they seemed garrulously indiscreet, telling him everything he needed to know about what was soon to be. He didn't want to hug and kiss these women, not yet. He wanted to rescue them. From an island fortress (say) he would rescue them . . .
34-25-34 (Lily), 37-23-33 (Scheherazade) — and Keith. They were all at the University of London, these three; Law, Mathematics, English Literature. Intelligentsia, nobility, proletariat. Lily, Scheherazade, Keith Nearing.
They walked down steep alleyways, scooter-torn and transected by wind-ruffled tapestries of clothing and bedding, and on every other corner there lurked a little shrine, with candles and doilies and the lifesize effigy of a saint, a martyr, a haggard cleric. Crucifixes, vestments, wax apples green or cankered. And then there was the smell, sour wine, cigarette smoke, cooked cabbage, drains, lancingly sweet cologne, and also the tang of fever. The trio came to a polite halt as a stately brown rat — lavishly assimilated — went ambling across their path: given the power of speech, this rat would have grunted out a perfunctory buona sera. Dogs barked. Keith breathed deep, he drank deep of the ticklish, the teasing tang of fever.
He stumbled and then steadied. What was it? Ever since his arrival, four days ago, Keith had been living in a painting, and now he was stepping out of it. With its cadmium reds, its cobalt sapphires, its strontian yellows (all freshly ground), Italy was a painting, and now he was stepping out of it and into something he knew: downtown, and the showcase precincts of the humble industrial city. Keith knew cities. He knew humble high streets. Cinema, pharmacy, tobacconist, confectioner. With expanses of glass and neon-lit interiors — the very earliest semblances of the boutique sheen of the market state. In the window there, mannequins of caramelised brown plastic, one of them armless, one of them headless, arranged in attitudes of polite introduction, as if bidding you welcome to the female form. So the historical challenge was bluntly stated. The wooden Madonnas on the alleyway corners would eventually be usurped by the plastic ladies of modernity.
Now something happened — something he had never seen before. After fifteen or twenty seconds, Lily and Scheherazade (with Keith somehow bracketed in the middle of it) were swiftly and surreally engulfed by a swarm of young men, not boys or youths, but young men in sharp shirts and pressed slacks, whooping, pleading, cackling — and all aflicker, like a telekinetic card trick of kings and knaves, shuffling and riffling and fanning out under the streetlamps . . . The energy coming off them was on the level (he imagined) of an East Asian or sub-Saharan prison riot — but they didn't actually touch, they didn't actually impede; and after a hundred yards they fell like noisy soldiery into loose formation, a dozen or so contenting themselves with the view from the rear, another dozen veering in from either side, and the vast majority up ahead and walking backward. And when do you ever see that? A crowd of men, walking backward?
Whittaker was waiting for them, with his drink (and the mailsack), on the other side of the smeared glass.
Keith went on within, while the girls lingered by the door (conferring or regrouping), and said,
"Was I seeing things? That was a new experience. Jesus Christ, what's the matter with them?"
"It's a different approach," drawled Whittaker. "They're not like you. They don't believe in playing it cool."
"I don't either. I don't play it cool. No one'd notice. Play what cool?"
"Then do what they do. Next time you see a girl you like, do a jumping jack at her."
"It was incredible, that. These — these fucking Italians."
"Italians? Come on, you're a Brit. You can do better than Italians."
"Okay, these wogs — I mean wops. These fucking beaners."
"Beaners are Mexicans. This is pathetic. Italians, Keith — spicks, greaseballs, dagos."
"Ah, but I was raised not to make distinctions based on race or culture."
"That'll be a lot of help to you. On your first trip to Italy."
"And all those shrines . . . Anyway, I told you, it's my origins. Me, I don't judge. I can't. That's why you've got to look out for me."
"You're susceptible. Your hands shake — look at them. And it's hard work being a neurotic."
"It's more than that. I'm not nuts, exactly, but I get episodes. I don't see things clearly. I misread things."
"Particularly with girls."
"Particularly with girls. And I'm outnumbered. I'm a bloke and a Brit."
"And a het."
"And a het. Where's my brother? You'll have to be a brother to me. No. Treat me as the child you never had."
"Okay, I will. Now listen. Now listen, son. Start looking at these guys with a bit of perspective. Johnny Eyetie is a play-actor. Italians are fantasists. Reality's not good enough for them."
"Isn't it? Not even this reality?"
They turned, Keith in his T-shirt and jeans, Whittaker in his horn-rims, the oval leather elbow-patches on his cord jacket, the woollen scarf, fawn, like his hair. Lily and Scheherazade were now making their way towards the stairs to the basement, eliciting, from the elderly all-male clientele, a fantastic diversity of scowls; their soft shapes moved on, through the gauntlet of gargoyles, then swivelled, then exited downward, side by side. Keith said,
"Those old wrecks. What are they looking at?"
"What are they looking at? What do you think they're looking at? Two girls who forgot to put any clothes on. I said to Scheherazade, You're going to town tonight. Put some clothes on. Wear clothes. But she forgot."
"Lily too. No clothes."
"You don't make cultural distinctions. Keith, you should. These old guys have just come staggering out of the Middle Ages. Think. Imagine. You're first-generation urban. With your wheelbarrow parked in the street. You're having a little glass of something, trying to keep a grip. You look up and what do you get? Two nude blondes."
". . . Oh, Whittaker. It was so horrible. Out there. And not for the obvious reason."
"What's the non-obvious reason?"
"Shit. Men are so cruel. I can't say it. You'll see for yourself on the way back . . . Look! They're still there!"
The young men of Montale were now on the other side of the window, stacked like silent acrobats, and a jigsaw of faces squirmed against the glass — strangely noble, priestlike faces, nobly suffering. One by one they started dropping back and peeling away. Whittaker said,
"What I don't get is why the boys don't act like that when I walk down the street. Why don't the girls do jumping jacks when you walk down the street?"
"Yeah. Why don't they?"
Four jars of beer were slewed out in front of them. Keith lit a Disque Bleu, adding its smoke to the sulphurous snorts and sneezes of the coffee machine, and the ambient mist of superstitious distrust: the bar-goers and their cataract gaze, seeing and dismissing, seeing and not believing . . .
"It's your own fault," said Whittaker. "Not content with being naked — you're blondes."
The girls were still quietly colouring and bristling, and blowing the stray strands from their brows. Scheherazade said,
"Well we're sorry about that. And next time we'll wear clothes."
"And we'll wear veils," said Lily. "And why blondes?"
"See," he went on, "blondes are the opposite of their pious ideal. This gets them thinking. Brunettes are hopeless — they're Italians. They won't fuck you unless you swear you're going to marry them. But the blondes. Blondes'll do anything."
Lily and Scheherazade were blondes, one a blue-eyed, one a brown — they had the transparent complexions, the candour of blondes . . . Scheherazade's face, Keith thought, now had about it a look of quiet surfeit, as if she had hurriedly but successfully eaten something rich and greedy. Lily seemed pinker, puffier, younger, the eyes inward, reminding him (as he kept wishing she wouldn't) of his little sister; and her mouth looked taut and underfed. They were both making the same movement, beneath the brow of the table. Smoothing their dresses kneeward. But the dresses wouldn't go.
"God, it's almost worse in here," said Scheherazade.
"No, it's worse out there," said Lily.
"Mm. At least in here they're too old to leap up and down."
"And too hoarse to yodel in your face."
"They hate us in here. They want to lock us up."
"They probably hate us out there too. But at least they want to fuck us."
"I don't know how to break this to you," said Whittaker, "but they don't want to fuck you out there either. They're fruits. They're all terrified. Listen. I'm friends with the top model in Milan. Valentina Casamassima. Also a blonde. When she comes to Rome or Naples and they all go crazy, she turns on the biggest guy there and says, Come on, let's fuck. I'll suck your cock here in the street. I'm going down on you right now."
"And?"
"They quail. They back off. They crumple."
Keith uneasily turned his head away. And felt a shadow cross the harlequinade — the harlequinade of his time. Near the centre of this shadow was Ulrike Meinhof, strolling nude in front of the Palestinian recruits (Fucking and shooting, she said — they're the same), and even further in there was Cielo Drive, and Pinkie and Charles. He said,
"That's too high a price."
"Meaning?"
"Well they're not really trying to pull you, are they, Lily. I mean, that's not how you set about it, is it. Their only hope," he said, "is to stumble on a girl who dates football teams." This was perhaps obscure (and they were staring at him), so he went on, "That's what Nicholas calls them. My brother. I mean, there aren't many of them, but they do exist. Girls who like dating football teams."
"Ah," said Lily, "but by pretending to like dating football teams, Valentina proves that they don't even want girls who like dating football teams."
"Exactly," said Keith (who was in fact quite confused). "Still. Valentina. Girls outtoughing the boys like that. It's . . ." It was what? Overexperienced. Uninnocent. Because the young men of Montale were at least innocent — even their cruelty was innocent. He said helplessly, "Italians are play-actors. It's all a game anyway."
"Well, Lily," said Whittaker, "now you know what to do. When they whoop and leap, you know what to do."
"Vow to go down on them."
"Yeah. Vow to do that."
"I was in Milan in the spring, with Timmy," said Scheherazade, leaning back. "And you didn't have to vow to go down on them. You got stares and whistles and that gurgly sound they make. It wasn't a . . . a circus, like here."
Yes, thought Keith, a circus — the highwire, the trapeze, the clowns, the tumblers.
"You didn't get crowds. You didn't get queues."
"Walking backward," said Lily. Who now turned to Scheherazade, and said with a solicitous, almost a motherly urge, "Yes. But you didn't look like you look now. In the spring."
Whittaker said, "It isn't that. It's Franca Viola."
So the three of them attended to Whittaker, with the reverence due to his horn-rimmed gaze, his fluent Italian, his years in Turin and Florence, and his unimaginable seniority (he was thirty-one). There was also the fact of Whittaker's orientation. What was their attitude to homosexuals, around then? Well, they accepted them utterly, while also congratulating themselves, every couple of minutes, for being so amazingly tolerant. But they were moving beyond that now, and homosexuality had the glamour of the vanguard.
"Franca Viola. Incredible girl. She changed everything."
And with a proprietorial air Whittaker told the tale. Franca Viola, Keith learnt, was a Sicilian teenager who had been kidnapped and raped by a rejected suitor. Which was one thing. But kidnap and rape, in Sicily, provided the alternative route to confetti and wedding bells. Whittaker said,
"Yeah, that's right. What the penal code calls matrimonio riparatore. So, Keith, if you ever get tired of playing the guitar under the balcony with a flower in your mouth, and if the jumping jacks don't work, remember there's always another way. Kidnap and rape . . . Marrying the rapist. That's what Franca Viola's family was telling her to do. But Franca didn't go to the church. She went to the police station in Palermo. And then it was national news. Incredible girl. Her people still wanted her to marry the rapist. So did the village, so did the islanders, so did half the mainland. But she didn't. She pressed charges."
"I don't understand," said Scheherazade. "Why in the world would you marry the rapist? It's prehistoric."
"It's tribal. Shame and honour. It's like Afghanistan. Or Somalia. Marry the rapist, or your menfolk'll kill you. She didn't do that. She didn't marry him — she put him in jail. And she changed everything. Now Milan and Turin are partly civilised. Rome is beginning to get better. Naples is still a nightmare. But all that shit is draining southward. Sicily will be the last to go. Franca was sixteen when it happened. Incredible girl."
Keith was thinking that his sister Violet, another incredible girl, was also sixteen. In any kind of shame-and-honour arrangement, Violet would have been murdered long ago — by Keith himself, and his brother Nicholas, and his father, Karl, with the moral and logistical support of Uncle Mick and Uncle Brian. He said,
"What happened to her, Franca?"
"She got married properly a couple of months ago. To a lawyer. She's your age now." Whittaker shook his head. "Incredible girl. The balls on that girl. So when we go outside again, and the boys swoop down on you, you'll have two choices. Go with Valentina Casamassima. Or think of Franca Viola."
They drank one last beer and talked about the May Events, in France in 1968, and the Hot Autumn, in Italy in 1969 — and the slogans. Never Work. Never trust anyone over twenty-five. Never trust anyone who hasn't been to prison. The Personal is Political. When I think of revolution, I want to make love. It is forbidden to forbid. Tutto e subito: All and Now. The four of them agreed that they would settle for that. They would all now settle for All and Now.
"That's how babies feel," said Keith. "Apparently. They think: I am nothing and I should be everything."
Then it came over them that it was now time to go, to go out there, and Whittaker said,
"Oh yeah. Another thing that drives them crazy is that you're almost certainly on the Pill. They can't get over it — what that means. Contraception is still illegal. And abortion. And divorce."
"How do they get around that?" said Scheherazade.
"Easy. Hypocrisy," said Lily. "Mistresses. Backstreet abortions . . ."
"How do they get around contraception?"
Whittaker said, "They're meant to be great experts at coitus interruptus. Great artists of timely withdrawal. Oh, sure. I know what that means."
"What?"
"They come up your arse."
"Whittaker!"
"Or all over your face."
"Whittaker!"
And Keith felt it again (he felt it several times a day): the tingle of licence. Everyone could swear now, if they wanted to. The word fuck was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it. He said,
"Yeah, Whittaker, I've been meaning to ask you. You say ass just like we say arse. Without sounding the r — ahce. Lily and Scheherazade say it like that, but they grew up in England. Like you say lahndscape. And those aunts that bothered you at the picnic. Those aunts crawling up your shorts. That gave me the horrors. What's that accent?"
"Boston Brahmin," said Scheherazade. "Posher than the Queen. Now if we may be excused . . ."
As the girls moved off again Whittaker said,
"I think I see how it's going to go. Out there. What happened? Earlier. Tell."
"You know, boys are so cruel. And so fucking rude." Keith said that the mimed rampage, out there, the sexual revolution, was also a kind of plebiscite. "On the girls. And guess who won. I found myself thinking, Would you please insult Lily too?"
"Mm. Would you have the common courtesy to treat Lily like a stripper in a bear pit?"
"Scheherazade's the people's choice. By acclamation . . . She's transformed, isn't she. I haven't seen her for a few months, and I barely recognised her."
"Scheherazade, in general, is absolutely glorious. But let's face it. It's her breasts."
". . . So you understand about Scheherazade's breasts."
"I like to think so. I paint, after all. And it's not the size, is it. It's almost despite the size. On that wandlike frame."
"Yeah. Precisely so."
"I read something the other day," said Whittaker, "that made me warm to breasts. I saw them in a different light. In evolutionary terms, this guy says, breasts are there to imitate the arse."
"The arse?"
"The breasts ape the arse. As an inducement to having sex face to face. When women evolved out of oestrus. You must know what oestrus is."
Keith knew. From Gk oistros "gadfly or frenzy." Heat. Whittaker said,
"So arselike breasts sweetened the bitter pill of the missionary position. Just a theory. No, I understand about Scheherazade's breasts. The secondary sexual characteristics in their Platonic form. Plan A for the tits. I understand — in principle." He looked at Keith with affectionate contempt. "I don't want to squeeze them or kiss them or bury my sobbing face in them. What d'you guys do with breasts? I mean they don't lead anywhere, do they."
"I suppose that's true. They're sort of a mystery. An end unto themselves."
Whittaker glanced over his shoulder. "I can tell you they're not universally admired. Someone I know had a very bad reaction to them. Amen."
"Amen?" Amen — pronounced Ahmun — was Whittaker's reclusive Libyan boyfriend (who was eighteen). Keith said, "What's Amen got against Scheherazade's breasts?"
"That's why he never goes down to the pool any more. He can't take her breasts. Wait. Here they come."
Did this mean — could this truly mean — that Scheherazade, down by the pool (as Lily had hinted), sunbathed topless? There was still time for Keith to say, "Are you seriously telling me her tits look like an arse?"
He himself paid a quick visit to the basement — before they all filed out into the street . . . The Italian toilet, and its negative sensual adventure: what was it trying to say? Southern Europe in its entirety had it like this, even France, the grime-scored crouchpads and flowing knee-high stopcocks and the fistfuls of yesterday's newspaper wedged between pipe and brickwork. The stench that threaded acid into the tendons of the jaw, and made the gums sting. Don't flatter yourself, the toilet was saying. You are an animal, made of matter. And something in him responded to this, as if he sensed the proximity of a beloved beast, moist and leathery in the spiced darkness.
Then they all filed out into it — past the female mannequins in the boutique windows, and into the swirling oestrus, the pitiless verdict, the mortifying unanimity of the young men of Montale.
So they drove from town to village — to the castle, perched like a rock on the mountainside.
You know, I used to have a lot of time for Keith Nearing. We were once very close. And then we fell out over a woman. Not in the usual sense. We had a disagreement over a woman. I sometimes think he could have been a poet. Bookish, wordish, letterish, with a very peculiar provenance, a committed romantic who, nonetheless, found it fairly difficult to get any kind of girlfriend — yes, he could have been a poet. But then came his summer in Italy.


To purchase the book visit Amazon; Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow, courtesy of The Excerpt Reader