Beautiful Losers. Leonard Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ have the possibility of so becoming. If she had stuck her index fingers in your ears you would have got the same results.

      -Are you sure?

      -Yes.

      -Have you tried it?

      -Yes.

      -I have to ask you this. With Edith?

      -Yes.

      -F.!

      -Listen, my friend, the elevators, the buzzers, the fan: the world is waking up in the heads of a few million.

      -Stop. Did you do that with her? Did you go that far? Did you do that together? You’re going to sit right there and tell me every detail. I hate you, F.

      -Well, she stuck her index fingers-

      -Was she wearing nail polish?

      -No.

      -She was, damn you, she was! Stop trying to protect me.

      -All right, she was. She stuck her red nails in my ears-

      -You enjoy this, don’t you?

      -She stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed.

      -You did it to each other? With your bare fingers? You touched ears and fingers?

      -You begin to learn.

      -Shut up. What did her ears feel like?

      -Tight.

      -Tight!

      -Edith had very tight ears, nearly virgin, I’d say.

      -Get out, F.! Get off our bed! Take your hands off me!

      -Listen, or I’ll break your neck, chicken voyeur. We were fully dressed except for our fingers. Yes! We sucked each other’s fingers, and then we stuck them in each other’s ears-

      -The ring, did she take the ring off?

      -I don’t think so. I was worried about my eardrums because of her long red nails, she was digging so hard. We shut our eyes and we kissed like friends, without opening our mouths. Suddenly the sounds of the lobby were gone and I was listening to Edith.

      -To her body! Where did this happen? When did you do this to me?

      -So those are your questions. It happened in a telephone booth in the lobby of a movie theater downtown.

      -What theater?

      -The System Theatre.

      -You’re lying! There is no telephone booth in the System. There’s only one or two telephones on the wall separated by glass partitions, I think. You did it out in the open! I know that dirty basement lobby! There’s always some fairy hanging around there, drawing cocks and telephone numbers on the green wall. Out in the open! Was anyone watching? How could you do this to me?

      -You were in the men’s room. We were waiting for you beside the telephones, eating chocolate-covered ice-cream bars. I don’t know what was keeping you so long. We finished our ice cream. Edith spotted a flake of chocolate sticking to my little finger. In a very charming fashion she leaned over and flicked it into her mouth with her tongue, like an anteater. She had overlooked a flake of chocolate on her own wrist. I swooped in and got that, clumsily, I confess. Then it turned into a game. Games are nature’s most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game, indeed-

      -So Edith began it! And who touched whose ear first? I have to know everything now. You saw her tongue stretched out, you probably stared. Who started it with the ears?

      -I don’t remember. Maybe we were under the influence of the telephones. If you remember, one of the fluorescent lights was flickering, and the corner where we were standing jumped in and out of shadows as though great wings were passing over us or the huge blades of an immense electric fan. The telephones kept their steady black, the only stable shape in the shifting gloom. They hung there like carved masks, black, gleaming, smooth as the toes of kissed stone R.C. saints. We were sucking each other’s fingers, slightly frightened now, like children pulling at lollipops during the car chase. And then one of the telephones rang! It rang just once. I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying goodbye to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that-

      -Damn you, F.! You’re torturing me. Please.

      -You asked me for the whole picture. I forgot to mention that the lights were buzzing, unevenly, like the snores of a sinus victim. I was sucking her narrow finger, careful of the sharp nail, thinking of the wolves who bleed to death from licking the blood-baited knife. When the light was healthy our skin was yellow, the merest pimple exaggerated, and when it failed we fell into a purple pallor, our skin like old wet mushrooms. And when it rang we were so startled that we actually bit each other! Children in a scary cave. Yes, there was someone watching us, not that we cared. He was watching us in the mirror of the fortune-telling scale which he was climbing off and on, dropping in nickel after nickel, dialing various questions, or the same one for all I know. And where the hell were you? The basement of the System is a horrible place if you do not stick with the people you came with. It smells like a desperate clearing in a siege of rats-

      -You lie. Edith’s skin was perfect. And it smells of piss, nothing else, just piss. And never mind what I was doing.

      -I know what you were doing, but never mind. When the telephone rang this fellow wheeled around and stepped off the scale, quite gracefully, I must say, and in that moment the whole eerie place seemed like his personal office. We were standing between him and his telephone, and I feared (it sounds ridiculous) that he would do some violence, pull a knife or expose himself, for his whole weary life among the water pipes and urinals seemed to hang on this telephone message-

      -I remember him! He was wearing one of those Western string neckties.

      -Right. I remember thinking in that instant of terror that he had conjured up the ring himself with his incessant dialing, that he had been performing a ritual, like rain-making. He was looking right through us as he stepped forward. He stopped, waiting, I suppose, for the second ring, which never came. He snapped his fingers, turned, climbed back on the scale, and returned to his combinations. We felt delivered, Edith and I! The telephone, hitherto so foreboding and powerful, was our friend! It was the agent of some benign electronic deity, and we wanted to praise it. I suppose that certain primitive bird and snake dances began the same way, a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.

      -What are you trying to tell me, F.?

      -We invented the Telephone Dance. Spontaneously. I don’t know who made the first move. Suddenly our index fingers were in each other’s ears. We became telephones!

      -I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

      -Why are you crying?

      -I think you have ruined my life, F. For years I’ve been telling secrets to an enemy.

      -You’re СКАЧАТЬ