Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Read Free Book Online

because one is accustomed to see tears falling down to the feet. Ah, truly, a pin board may come up to the chin of a woman and still she will find reason to weep. I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say ‘Love’ and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.”
    “Wunderbar!”
exclaimed Frau Mann. “
Wunderbar
, my God!”
    “I’m not through,” said the doctor, laying his gloves across his knees, “someday I am going to see the Baron again, and when I do I shall tell him about the mad Wittelsbach. He’ll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler.”
    “Ah,” exclaimed Frau Mann, “he will enjoy it. He is so fond of titles.”
    “Listen,” the doctor said, ordering a round, “I don’t want to talk of the Wittelsbach. Oh, God, when I think back to my past, everyone in my family a beauty, my mother, with hair on her head as red as a fire kicked over in spring (and that was early in the ‘80’s when a girl was the toast of the town, and going the limit meant lobster à la Newburg). She had a hat on her as big as the top of a table, and everything on it but running water; her bosom clinched into a corset of buckram, and my father sitting up beside her (snapped while they were riding on a roller-coaster). He had on one of those silly little yellow jackets and a tan bowler just up over his ears, and he must have been crazy, for he was sort of cross-eyed—maybe it was the wind in his face or thoughts of my mother where he couldn’t do anything about it.” Frau Mann took up her glass, looking at it with one eye closed. “I’ve an album of my own,” she said in a warm voice, “and everyone in it looks like a soldier—even though they are dead.”
    The doctor grinned, biting his teeth. Frau Mann tried to light a cigarette; the match wavered from side to side in her unsteady hand.
    Frau Mann was slightly tipsy, and the insistent hum of the doctor’s words was making her sleepy.
    Seeing that Frau Mann dozed, the doctor got up lightly and tip-toed noiselessly to the entrance. He said to the waiter in bad German: “The lady will pay,” opened the door, and went quietly into the night.

La Somnambule
    Close to the church of
St. Sulpice
, around the corner in the
rue Servandoni
, lived the doctor. His small slouching figure was a feature of the
Place
. To the proprietor of the
Café de la Mairie du VI e
he was almost a son. This relatively small square, through which tram lines ran in several directions, bounded on the one side by the church and on the other by the court, was the doctor’s “city.” What he could not find here to answer to his needs could be found in the narrow streets that ran into it. Here he had been seen ordering details for funerals in the
parlour
with its black broadcloth curtains and mounted pictures of hearses; buying holy pictures and
petits Jésus
in the
boutique
displaying vestments and flowering candles. He had shouted down at least one judge in the
Mairie du Luxembourg
after a dozen cigars had failed to bring about his ends.
    He walked, pathetic and alone, among the pasteboard booths of the
Foire St. Germain
when for a time its imitation castles squatted in the square. He was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go in to Mass, bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird, pushing aside weary French maids and local tradespeople with the impatience of a soul in physical stress.
    Sometimes, late at night, before turning in to the
Café de la Mairie du VI e
, he would be observed staring up at the huge towers of the church which rose into the sky, unlovely but reassuring, running a thick warm finger around his throat, where, in spite of its custom, his hair surprised him, lifting along his back and creeping up over his collar. Standing small and insubordinate, he would watch the basins of the fountain loosing their skirts of water in a ragged and flowing hem, sometimes crying to a man’s