Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sus the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish ehe city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the insolable season. In America, they call it "the Fall", bringing to mind the Fall of Man, as if the fatal drama of the primal fruit-theft must recur again and again, with cyclic regularity, at the same time of every year that schoolboys set out to rob orchards, invoking, in the most everyday image, any child, every child, who, offered the choice between virtue and knowledge, will always choose knowledge, always the hard way. Although she does not know the meaning of the word, "regret", the woman sighs, without any precise reason.
Soft twists of mist ihe alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit, seep in through the cracks in the window frames so that the tours of their high, lonely apartment waver a. On these evenings, you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse to tears.
She sighs.
The custard-apple of her stinking Edehis forlorn Eve, bit -- and was all at oransported here, as in a dream; a she is a tabula rasa, still. She never experienced her experience as experience, life never added to the sum of her knowledge; rather, subtracted from it. If you start out with nothing, theyll take even that away from you, the Good Book says so.
Indeed, I think she never bothered to bite any apple at all. She wouldnt have known what knowledge was for, would she? She was iher a state of innoor a state of grace. I will tell you what Jeanne was like.
She was like a piano in a try were everybody has had their hands cut off.
On these sad days, at those melancholy times, as the room sinks into dusk, he, instead of lighting the lamp, fixing drinks, making all cosy, will ramble on: "Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the eree and you ch sugar-e between your strong, white teeth, like you did when you were little, baby. Whe there, among the lilting palm-trees, uhe purple flowers, Ill love you to death. Well go bad live together in a thatched house with a veranda rown with fl vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way. . . the ship, the ship is waiting in the harbour, baby. My monkey, my pussy-cat, my pet. . . think how lovely it would be to live there. . ."
But, on these days, nipped by frost and sulking, nor pussy she; she looked more like an old crow with rusty feathers in a miserable huddle by the smoky fire which she pokes with spiteful sticks. She coughs and grumbles, she is always chilly, there is always a draught gnawing the back of her neck or ping her ankles.
Go, where? Not there! The glaring yellow shore and harsh blue sky daubed in crude, unblended colours squeezed directly from the tube, where the perspectives are abrupt as a childs drawings, your eyes hurt to look. Fly-blown towns. All there is to eat is green bananas and yams and a brochette of rubber goat to chew. She puts on a theatrical shudder, enough to shake the affronted cat off her lap. She hates the cat, anyway. She t look at the cat without w
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