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Summer Night in a Florentine Slum
作者Author  /  Mina  Loy  旻娜•洛伊
Summer Night in a Florentine Slum
Mina Loy


Summer Night in a Florentine Slum


I leaned out of the window-looking at the summer-strewn street; late in heat-lit with lamps, and mixed my breath with the tired dust.

The dust was hot, the dust was dry-it lay low, it travelled about; and among it, Latin families lay on the lousy stones, in what they could manage of an earthy abandon.

They sprawled among each other, lightly ragged, heavy breathing men, with their offspring flung into sleep across their pelvises-blowing the life out of their Toscani cigars-among their messy curls-and the lubricous eyes of their women waited on them from the darkness.

The dwarf news-vendor from the Ponte Vecchio offered his surplus papers to the inopulent neighborhood-ladies from windows arraigning him-he furnishing no fit decoration for amorous couches-he juggling solid in his distorted pockets:

I have a woman at home with four children-and she is big again. A hair-strewn fury-swished down past them-accusing with a back-flung gesture-purest operatic-a hungry tram conductor-expecting supper-of being unfaithful-"by God the executioner!-I'll eat your heart."

Higher up the hill-an argument was in travail, involving the rhetoric of a woman far gone in heart diseases-and her daughter, a handsome half of a lady, who lived on a board, having been born without legs; groups of grey soldiers watched-their eyes intrigued.

The crowd pressed on the gasping witch-Ashy-her pulled muscles pushing on the rail of a wooden chair-while the alarmed semi-effigy slippelled about on hands and board-gelatinously shaking her tears out of herself-amazingly quick about it; round door lintels and out again screaming at variegated Madonnas scooping the air for a last gasp of a mother's love and hairpins.

Nothing but the flamboyant passage of Carabinieri could put a stopper on this.

Sophia came up to the window, with her husband, and a large wicker perambulator some goddess had showered philanthropically upon her, in which descent it had lost all upholstery, so babies fell about in it, on the wooden bottom.

Sophia was lovely and ran like a spider, curls and skirts behind her-and her husband for all his opthalmia-very beautiful indeed.

"Why doesn't he get them medicated?," I asked. "Medicated?" the wife gaped offended. "I can't see anything wrong with his eyes."

The babies' pinafores wouldn't do up a the back: "Look," said the Italian beggar as he ran his filthy palm along dorsal muscles-"Have you ever seen such a torso in your life-Donatello-Hey?"

These were friends of mine; they lived in a room-with a cobweb and a bed-sofa-under which they stored the family valuables; and a cardboard box full of a rich little boy's pajamas, and the photo of a gruesome wisp, their first baby-dead of starvation.

Sophia was gentle with it-but her eyes glistened to the treasure, a newspaper cutting from which she read, how her husband had hanged himself in a doorway-cut down at the critical moment by the police.

"He often does that," she said proudly-"He's so neurasthenic."

At their hungriest their passion had not waned, yet she had never loved him so much as when she saw his name in print.

They passed-in the shadow of a wall, that all day long a maddened woman had leaned against-holding a knife behind her back-She was waiting for revenge to the hooting of neighbors-who refrained from other interference, being of a race with consummate social tact.

Under the incessant sun-she clung to her purpose-in a fanatical cramp,

"Is the game fair?" I wondered. "Nature umpires!"

Not till the long heat attenuated to dusk, at the hour the man she was looking for, really must come home from work-had she slunk away to the imminent maternity hospital.

In the house opposite, the carpenter stretched a lean arm across the table, and pawed his young wife's breast-the table he had beaten her with the same morning-and she smiled at the alcove-and the Sun-god painted on the ceiling-darkened to the removal of the light.

While I drew in my head and pulled the English chintz curtains scattered with prevaricating rosebuds; and Beardsley's Mademoiselle De Maupin drew on her gloves at me from the wall.

[LLB 1982]

 

Aubrey Beardsley's illustration of "Mademoiselle de Maupin"

 

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