496
PARTISAN REVIEW
"No entiendo el frances/'
said Patrick, pointing his stubby nose at
the proffered bottle of armagnac.
"What in the world will we do with him?" said Marcelle in des–
pair.
"Just give him a drink," I said, "and let him go talk to Malaparte.
They can talk about their mutual friend, the Spanish ambassador."
Patrick took the glass from Marcelle's hand and went over to slt
near Malaparte, whose jaundiced face barely emerged from a forest of
lace and crinoline: he was being lionized, on the sofa. As for me, I went
to the buffet and began eating sandwiches, feeling terribly hungry and
a little sad. The odd thing was that, on the shelf ·beside the buffet, in the
midst of a pile of books sent to Claude-Edmonde for review, was Pat–
rick's recent little volume,
Sur le bord.
I opened it and read as I ate:
•
V ois autour de nous ces routes car
a
['instant
nous allons choisir
D'obsidienne
a
gauche ce chemin cassant et noir
que hantent les roussettes
De fourrure
a
droite cette allee rousse qui sent
le geranium
De vapeurs suffocantes de mitaux mous de pierres
magnitiques cette route ondulie qui s'ouvre
entre des rideaux de gaze safranie
ll
faut d'abord apprendre
a
marcher
Car il n'y a plus qu'un sol sans loi et la pesanteur
a change de formule
C'est la saison des opalines il fait bleu
a
l'ombre
des pollens
Au jour le jour est mort et les fetes commencent*
III
That last detail, finding Patrick's poems (which I had never seen
before)
on the edge
of the incident which shortly was to explode the
*See abou t us these roads for instantly
we are going to choose
Obsidian on the left this black and broken pathway
haunted by flying-foxes
Furry on the right this reddish alley which smells
of geraniums
Of suffocating vapors of soft metals of magnetic
stones this undulating road which opens
between curtains of saffroned gauze
First we must learn to walk
For now there is only a lawless soil and weight
has altered its formula
This is the season of the opaline it is blue in the shadow
of the pollens
The day by day is dead and the festivities begin
