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declension when she manifests herself under her alias, Mab, or, in Wales,
Mabh, and rules over the other diminutives, herself the size of the solitaire
in an engagement ring, as infinitely little as her forebears were infinitely
large.
"Now, I do call my horned master, the Horn of Plenty, but as for my
missus --" said the Puck, in his inimitable Worcestershire drawl.
Like a Japanese water-flower dropped in a glass of water, Titania grows.
. .
In the dewy wood tinselled with bewildering moonlight, the bumbling,
tumbling babies of the fairy crèche trip over the hem of her dress, which is
no more nor less than the margin of the wood itself; they stumble in the
tangled grass as they play with the coneys, the quick brown fox-cubs, the
russet fieldmice and the wee scraps of grey voles, blind velvet Mole and
striped Brock with his questing snout -- all the denizens of the woodland are
her embroiderings, and the birds flutter round her head, settle on her
shoulders and make their nests in her great abundance of disordered hair, in
which are plaited poppies and the ears of wheat.
The arrival of the Queen is announced by no fanfare of trumpets but the
ash-soft lullaby of wood doves and the liquid coloratura blackbird. Moonlight
falls like milk upon her naked breasts.
She is like a double bed; or, a table laid for a wedding breakfast; or,
a fertility clinic.
In her eyes are babies. When she looks at you, you helplessly
reduplicate. Her eyes provoke engendering.
Correction: used to provoke.
But not this year. Frosts have blasted the fruit blossom, rain has
rotted all the corn so her garland is not gold but greenish and phosphorescent
with blight. The acres of the rye have been invaded with ergot and, this year,
eating bread will make you mad. The floods broke down the Bridge of Ware. The
beasts refuse to couple; the cow rejects the bull and the bull keeps himself
to himself. Even the goats, hitherto synonymous with lechery, prefer to curl
up with a good book. The very worms no longer agitate the humus with their
undulating and complex embraces. In the wood, a chaste, conventual calm reigns
over everything, as if the foul weather had put everybody off.
The wonderful giantess manifested herself with an owl on her shoulder
and an apron-full of roses and of babies so rosy the children could scarcely
be distinguished from the flowers. She picked up her defunct friend's child,
the Herm. The Herm stood on one leg on the palm of Titania's hand and smiled
the inscrutable, if manic, smile of the figures in Hindu erotic sculpture.
"My husband shall not have you!" cried Titania. "He shan't! I shall keep
you!"
At that, thunder crashed, the heavens, which, for a brief moment, had
sealed themselves up, now reopened again with redoubled fury, and all the
drenched babies in Titania's pinafore coughed and sneezed. The worms in the
rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.
But the Queen stowed the tiny Herm safe away between her breasts as if
s/he were a locket and herself diminished until she was a suitable size to
enjoy her niece or nephew or nephew/niece à choix in the obscurity of an
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acorn-cup.
"But she cannot put horns on her husband, for he is antlered, already,"
opined the Puck, changing back into himself and skipping across the glade to
the heels of his master. For no roe-buck now raises his head behind that gorse
bush to watch these goings on; Oberon is antlered like a ten-point stag.
Among the props of the Globe Theatre, along with the thunder-making
machine and the bearskins, is listed a "robe for to go invisible". By his
coat, you understand that Oberon is to remain unseen as he broods magisterial
but impotent above the scarcely discernible quiverings among last year's oak
leaves that conceal his wife and the golden bone of contention that has come
between the elemental lovers.
High in the thick of a dripping hedge of honeysuckle, a wee creature was
extracting a tritonic, numinous, luxuriantly perfumed melody from the
pan-pipes of the wild woodbine. The tune broke off as the player convulsed
with ugly coughing. He gobbed phlegm, that flew through the air until its
trajectory was interrupted by a cowslip, to whose freckled ear the translucent
pustule clung. The infinitesimal then took up his tootling again.
The Herm's golden skin is made of beaten gold but the flesh beneath it
has been marinated in: black pepper, red chilli, yellow turmeric, cloves,
coriander, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, mace, nutmeg, allspice, khuskhus, garlic,
tamarind, coconut, candlenut, lemon grass, galangal and now and then you get
-- phew! -- a whiff of asafoetida. Hot stuff! Were the Herm to be served piled
up on a lordly platter and garnished with shreds of its own outer casing, s/he
would then resemble that royal dish, moglai biriani, which is decorated with
edible gold shavings in order, so they say, to aid digestion. Nothing so
deliciously aromatic as the Herm has ever been scented before in England's
green and pleasant land, still labouring as it is at this point in time under
its unrelieved late medieval diet of boiled cabbage. The Herm is hot and sweet
as if drenched in sun and honey, but Oberon is the colour of ashes.
The Puck, tormented for lack of the Herm, pulled up a mandrake and sunk
his prodigious tool in the cleft of the reluctant root, which shrieked
mournfully but to no avail as old shaggylugs had his way with it.
Distemperate weather! It's raining, it's pouring; the earth is in
estrangement from itself, the withering buds tumble out of the Queen's apron
and rot on the mulch, for Oberon has put a stop to reproduction. But still
Titania hugs the Herm to her shrivelling bosoms and will not let her husband
have the wee thing, not even for one minute. Did she not give a sacred promise
to a friend?
What does the Herm want?
The Herm wants to know what "want" means.
"I am unfamiliar with the concept of desire. I am the unique and
perfect, paradigmatic Hermaphrodite, provoking on all sides desire yet myself
transcendent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and
self-sufficient, the beginning and the end."
Titania, despairing of the Herm's male aspect, inserted a tentative
forefinger in the female orifice. The Herm felt bored.
Oberon watched the oak leaves shiver and said nothing, for he was choked [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]