608
PARTISAN REVIEW
she sang songs, but that she sang them in the old West in the old
days, and the man sanctioned by public affinnation to wear a pistol
openly in his belt is an inevictable part of the Missouri and the Yok–
napatawpha dream too, but never of Duse or Bernhardt or Maximil–
ian of Mexico, let alone whether the Emperor of Mexico even ever
had a wife or not (saying-the host-: 'You mean, she was one of
them? maybe even that emperor's wife?' and you 'Why not? Wasn't
she a Jefferson girl?') -to stand, in this hot strange little room furious
with frying fat, among the roster and chronicle, the deathless murmur
of the sublime and deathless names and the deathless faces, the faces
omnivorous and insatiable and forever incontent: demon-nun and
angel-witch, empress, siren, Erinys: Mistinguett too, invincible pos–
sessed of a half-century more of years than the mere three score or so
she bragged and boasted, for you to choose among, which one she
was-not
might
have been, nor even
could
have been, but
was:
so
vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn
away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and
dream-then gone, you are outside again, in the hot noon sun: late;
you have already wasted too much time: to unfumble among the road
signs and filling stations to get back onto a highway you know, back
into the United States; not that it matters, since you know again now
that there is no time: no space: no distance : a fragile and workless
scratching almost depthless in a sheet of old barely transparent glass,
a~d
(all you had to do was look at it a while; all you have to do
now is remember it) there is the clear undistanced voice as though
out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio, further
than
empress's
throne, than splendid insatiation, even than matriarch's peaceful rock–
ing chair, across the vast instantaneous intervention, from the long
long time ago:
(Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was
I:
