234
PARTISAN REVIEW
our way and walked toward us. I flinched from his approach like a spy
caught in the act, but he was heading for three shrouded corpses
propped like mummies on the edge of the shore, the lower parts
• tongued by the ripples of water our boat was stirring. "The
red,
sahib'''
cried Mosca. "Watch the red!" The two corpses in white
shrouds had been streamlined of sexual identity, but not the red one
being hauled fully onto the shore. "Red for the
woman, sahib!"
He
ogled the corpse. "Look, you can see her!" We could, and as soon as
we did, we were caught. She was his pride and joy, the erotic treat his
Times Square smut-hustler's tone had been promising us from the
moment he made his pitch. Rather than hiding the rounded,
ripely-defined ins and outs of her shape, the shimmering red muslin
hugged every curve, so alive to the frantic reflections of other fires that
she seemed
to
shudder in voluptuous response when the tall figure
leaned close to rip away the shroud, unmasking a well-fed siren's face
with the death-mouth shock a pit between two plump slippery cheeks.
The boatman was happy to watch me watch, nourishing himself
on the melodrama of my reactions as my eyes rushed from the trap of
the face to the naked seamless wholeness of the body beneath the last,
almost transparent, layer of wrapping. But she was carried to the pyre,
forced down into the nest of twisted wood, fragmented before
I
had
her in focus; the form broken, eyes on the forehead, mouth a hole in
the wood, a suspicion of horse teeth jutting through, one dislocated
breast, one bony insult of a backwards foot the attendant grabbed and
turned like a key in a lock when she began
to
slide out of place. The
slapstick foot kicked me out of my cloud.
I
wanted to see her burn.
I
wanted to feast my eyes on each exotic detail, each act in the comedy of
abominations, the stag-movie orgy, the voyeur's dream, my throat
dry, breath held, mind and sight fixed on the master of fires
descending upon her, probing suggestively with the blazing torch as if
he might complete the humiliation by shoving it between her legs.
Obscene chirpings from the boatman insidiously condition every
thought a minute before the torch swoops to diagram the fire's
passage, setting it in motion everywhere at once with the delicate
rapidity of a baton conducting music; but this isn't music, not this
pandemonium of banshees, whistles, Bronx cheers, chugging engines,
and a pig on the rampage, uprooting a sun-train on its way from the
Himalayas to the heart of the Ganges delta, all the tiger mouths of the
