Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett

stretched to breaking point and viewed from a carefully selected Blickpunkt against a very special quality of hard light during œstrum were not alas even reasonably exciting. The truly tremendous bowel of the hips (frequent and easy) breaking out and away from the waistroot (Lupercus a liability) like a burdocked bulb of Ruffino and the two hoops of the buttocks received an almost Rhineline from the dark peltsheath. Sheath within sheath and the missing sword. Not forgetting for a moment this was the suit he had bought for next to nothing from a lefthanded indivisible individual, with a charitable desire to justify his fatigue, he forced his right hand down past the craggy coxa (almost a woman's basin in these trousers) into the glairy gallant depths and fished up a fifty. A cigarette quick for maxillas and malas and the ticket handy there in the breast of my reefer and the heavy valise to snatch him down skilfully detached and meagre into the loveglue and a smoke after that was nearly as good as in the Maison du Café.
    â€œAt last!”
    â€œBeloved!”
    â€œTaxi!”
    Vie de taxi. Je t'adore ä l'égal.
    Carry your coffin my lord. Männer. Moving east to the segregation of the sexes. Ausgang on the right. Rule of the road. Lady on right arm. Nonsens unique. Astuce. But sleep on the right side. Gentle reader don't overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the Armistice with a pubic lanugo and
    BELACQUA
    we had to call him and no indolent virgin is his sister (indolent virgin!) and he does not much care whether he plays the tinkle-tinkle of a fourhander or not but he won't facing the keyboard observe the rule of the road (a megalomaniac you see with his head in his thighs as a general rule) so we ask you to humour now what naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation, pray that he will let a few good sighs out of him ere it be too late and speedy promotion from the Godbirds.
    And the lady that even in this very short and public space of time and notwithstanding that fur has no conductive properties of the appropriate kind worth speaking of has succeeded in transmitting certain unexpectedly stimulating sensations to her young visitor, were we not obliged to dub her the
    SMERALDINA-RIMA
    though most anything else would have done as well and notably Hesper we fancy would have been better and anything that comes in handy for short. He handed her into the cab of the Wagen with its charming deep Bluepoint zoster and spoke the address confidently to the chauffeur who but a moment previously had thought to light a cigarette and now naturally was in no kind of humour to start his engine and set off but was not slow to yield to thepromising accent of the callow tourist whose heavy fibre case he hoisted vigorously on board on his left beside him and clipping the yet intact Ova between a rubbery helix and hypertrophied mastoid process gratified in his dialogue doubtless his nearest colleagues with what no doubt was a passionate Hessian epigram, set his machine angrily in motion, suffering with a kind of hopeless interest the refracted deportment of his clients.
    Down the cobbled alley then of bitter Xmas trees, trembling in many and many an umbral stasis twixt tram and trottoir, the superb Wagen flew towards the spire that eliminates in impeccable imperial alignment the now dim height of Hercules and the mean cascade sullen and abandoned dropping, the little there was of it and because it bloody well had to, down the choked channel of Hohen-zollern rocaille, snowclad, upon the castle.
    â€œWhere did you get the hat?” Another glaucous helmet.
    â€œDo you like it?”
    â€œVery nice do you?”
    â€œOh I don't know do you?”
    Snotgasp of reliefhilarity in honour of private joke.
    â€œIt goes with the ring.”
    He turned over the hand and looked at the warts. Two dwindling warts in