462
PARTISAN REVIEW
the monster who walks with you in the streets, who speaks only
through shadow-life.
Die, Jew, die, but not in the lunch-hour sun!
And fat-belly nodded his head in quick little jerks. "Sure, who
stops you from living here? Go on, live, be happy, slave over the
machine, go ahead! They take your son and they give him a gun, and
they promise you a world made out of honey. Sure, let them promise
you all the honey they have, but it stinks from the same dreck." And
fat-belly sat down violently on the stone step of the statue.
He walked back to the bench, looked up at the clock and saw
that only twenty minutes were left him. Walking over to a little .push–
cart that rested in the gutter between two trees, he bought a bar of
plain milk chocolate. Holding it in his hand made him realize that the
war was over. Slowly and easily it had passed, like silence into terror,
till now the culmination came, and he tore the wrapper off. Fat-belly
walked by, and he watched his lowered head, with the arms bouncing
up and down against the wide hips.
His tongue passed lovingly over the chocolate. There goes Every–
man, Here Comes Everybody, the H.C.E. of our culture-lag. Back
to the shop he goes, the man with my father's face. And soon he'll
be a mass of ulcerated liver, of cancerous intestine, of enlarged pros–
tate glands, putting aside his cloth to run to the bathroom, buttoning
himself as he flushes his life away.
The last of the chocolate he chewed quickly. It left his mouth
clogged and dry. He went to the public fountain and drank greedily.
The water loaded his stomach, and he felt full, squeezed in more
tightly to the center of things. Fat-belly, you spoke of dreck, that most
pungent of odorous things. It is the basis of your life, fat-belly, for
it is not your fate to return in death and decomposition to the sweet–
grassed earth. You are a Jew, and it is to dreck, your primordal ele–
ment that you return.
Ride the subway back to the bed and the dream. Return to your
great myth-heroes, old men with potent, finger-twisted beards, stand
with them as they tremble before the sneer of Torquemada, jiggle the
belly as you dance naked in flames. Leopold Bloom of the garment
center, will fear leave you in the morning with the catharsis of the sun?
Or would
it
be the race with time, as it came to him each day?
Between and beyond two wars, Leopold fat-belly Bloom, but this is
the end for you. Perhaps it would come in bed, where all knowledge
resides, like the last torturous turn with your wife that ends in choking
impotence. Perhaps it would come at the end of a working day, when
