Echo's Bones. Samuel Beckett

into his heart and exclaimed:

      ‘My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked, all the old pains and aches of me soul-junk return!’

      Hardly had this thought burst from his brain as a phosphate from the kidneys when a woman shot out of the hedge and stood before him, serene yet not relaxedly gay. There she stood, frankly alluring him to come and doubt not, stretching forth to hug him her holy hands pullulant with a million good examples. There was nothing at all of the grave widow or anile virgin about her, nothing in the least barren in her appearance. She would be, if she were not already, the fruitful mother of children of joys.

      ‘They call me Zaborovna’ she simpered.

      ‘I don’t hear what you say’ said Belacqua. ‘Speak up will you.’

      Now it must be clearly understood that there were no stews where Belacqua came from, no stews and no demand for stews. But here in the dust with night getting ready to fall it was quite a different matter. Belacqua felt he had been dead a long time, forty days at least.

      ‘You are Belacqua’ she said ‘whom we took for dead, or I’m a Dutchman.’

      ‘I am’ said Belacqua, ‘restored for a time by a lousy fate to the nuts and balls and sparrows of the low stature of animation. But who is we and who are you?’

      ‘I told you’ she said, ‘Zaborovna, at your service; and we, why little we is just an impersonal usage, the Tuscan reflexive without more.’

      ‘The mood’ said Belacqua, ‘forgive the term, of self-abuse, as the English passive of masochism.’

      ‘How long do you expect to be with us?’ said Zaborovna.

      ‘As long as I lived’ said Belacqua, ‘on and off, I have the feeling.’

      ‘You mean with intermissions?’ she said.

      ‘Do you know’ said Belacqua, ‘I like the way you speak very much.’

      ‘The way I speak’ she said.

      ‘I find your voice’ he said ‘something more than a roaring-meg against melancholy, I find it a covered waggon to me that am weary on the way, I do indeed.’

      ‘So musical’ she said, ‘I would never have thought it.’

      It was high time for a pause to ensue and a long one did. The lady advanced a pace towards the fence, clearly she was sparring for an opening, Belacqua pulled furiously at the immense cigar, a bird, its beak set in the heaven, flew by.

      ‘Too late!’ he exclaimed at last in piercing tones. ‘Too late!’

      ‘What is too late?’ said Zaborovna.

      ‘This encounter’ said Belacqua. ‘Can’t you see my life is over?’

      ‘Oh’ she said, in a voice something between a caress and a dig in the ribs, ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’

      In the echo of the above pause she seized her opportunity, transferred her slyly grave deportment to the knees and thighs of the revenant, which parts of him trembled in the chill of the hour. A colony of rooks made their evening flight and darkened the sky, yes actually darkened the sky. Belacqua polished off his cigar, pressed it out fiercely against the rail, elevated his mind to God, crossed himself a thousand times.

      ‘Forgive me’ he said, ‘I’m as bad as Dr Keate of Eton, I can see his shaggy red brows distinctly, I can’t recall your name for the moment.’

      ‘Zaborovna’ she said, ‘yours to command, Miss Zaborovna Privet, put your arm about her won’t you.’

      Belacqua, whom nothing could teach not to spit and dig for clotted mucus in the presence of ladies, shanghaied now a snot on his cuff and brought his eyes that were so sore with one thing and another, whinging and the light that quick-change artist, close up to those, sparklers of the first water and in which he seemed to discern a number of babies, of the Privet, who after a short and gallant struggle was constrained to look away, so searing, so red-hot and parallel, were the prongs of his gaze. Away she looked to the cool, not to say bitter, east and observed her shadow, like an old man’s desire, prone and monstrous on the grass, but not a sign of her pick-up’s, out of whose lap she sprang at once and stood on the ground well to one side, thinking that perhaps she had been seeing single, and looked again. But her first impression was confirmed by the absence of any shadow but the fence’s and her own, projected in tattered umber far across the waste. The sun was there all right, belting away in the west behind, ignoring him completely. This body that did not intercept the light, this packet of entrails that had shed the ashen spancels, she looked it up and down. He had produced a razor from some abyssal pocket and was lovingly whittling a live match. This when pointed according to his God he used to pierce a deep meatus in a fresh cigar, visit his teeth all round, top and bottom, light the cigar. Then he made to throw it away but recovered himself in time and stuck it like a golf tee in the stuff of his pullover.

      Tears rushed down the cheeks of Zaborovna as she hurled herself into the arms of her prey, no easy matter.

      ‘Wipe them’ said Belacqua.

      He was most ardent and sad all of a sudden, a Gilles de Rais twinkle in his eye. How long then was this, this – ha! – strangury of decency going to go on, going to go on. The Privet was present, panting away to no apparent avail, wilful waste, like the beatific paps of a nun of Minsk; while as for himself, cold as January at the best of times, he was no more capable now, when any moment might be the last of the current lot, ring him back to the gloom where stews and therefore Privets had no sense, of rising to such a buxom occasion than Alfieri or Jean-Jacques of dancing a minuet. Yet he was sorely tempted to try, that was the bitch of it.

      ‘Dry those handsome eyes’ he said as distinctly as the cigar would allow. ‘Don’t drown the babies I see there for a corpse in torment.’

      He withdrew the cigar, put his features into a sudden spin of anguish, righted them no less abruptly, replaced the cigar. That was the kind of thing he meant, that was the torment coming to the surface to breathe. Now she knew.

      Soothed by this kind clonus she said:

      ‘It is not so much you as your shadow. What has befallen it?’

Now the fact of the matter is that a personal shadow is like happiness, possession of being well deceived, hypnosis, (1) ­apprehensible only as a lack. A stranger’s shadow, the shadows of natural things, of trees, wings, ocean clouds and the rest, one goes honing after these and indeed it is hard to imagine how one could ever manage without them. But one’s own, except in the case of a very nervous subject, (2) is as unobtrusive as the motion of the earth, to adopt the system of Galileo, that dials it.

1. Cf. Titania and the Ass.

2. Cf. Richard III.

      Belacqua looked wildly about him.

      ‘God I don’t know at all’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I had it.’

      Zaborovna delivered herself now and not a moment too soon of the butterfly doctrine noted above. It was true, she said, of more things than heartsease (a woman’s term) and shadow. It was only a chance, she said, that she had seen hers at all. She would pay more attention to it in future. She looked to make sure it was still there.

      ‘You may be right’ said Belacqua. ‘I don’t say you’re not. I’m a marked man whatever way you look at it.’

      There is more in it than that, thought Zaborovna, but hist!

      ‘Every evening during the season’ she said, ‘Saturdays ­excepted, I lend myself to sublime delinquencies in the old town where I lodge, and lodge in some splendour believe me. Happily