378
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
a language were extremely difficult-like Japanese-or if
he had little opportunity to read it-like Farsi-or if he didn't
care for the sound of it-like Flemish-he would content himself
with picking up a smattering. Enough so that it would not look
or sound utterly strange to him. (But by this time virtually no
language seemed utterly strange to him. Only the Finno-Ugric
languages for a while mystified and intrigued him as something
alien, metaliic, from another star. But in time he learned some
Hungarian, a little Estonian, Finnish.)
He rarely forgot what he learned. His memory seemed infi–
nitely expandable, a kind of universe with languages and their
dialects like solar systems and galaxies spreading away and away
through the vast reaches of his cerebellum. Someday Pano would
tell him he had a photographic memory.
Meanwhile, he daydreamed about battalions of Adorables
(he had begun to call the little girls that in his fantasies), all
dressed in silk and cloth of gold. Tiny saints, they marched
southward over the Alps and through Hartford's brain cells into
Genoa, where he watched spellbound as Saracens with Brooklyn
accents kidnapped them, yelling and yanking their curls and
throwing dead garter snakes at their silken rags.
Sometimes a Saracen would strip off an Adorable's gown
and tie her spread-eagled in her pantywaist and bloomers on a
plank and prepare to stick pins or knives in her (it made Hart–
ford's skin hot to think of it), and just as she was about to die a
martyr's death, up he would dash, smiting the Saracens with
their own swords and slashing the ropes that bound his suffering
Adorable.
If
he was actually asleep and dreaming in his own bed
(whatever rooming house bed happened to be his in the town his
parents were playing that night), he would always wake up at
this moment in the dream and scramble out of bed and stumble
down the hall to the single bathroom that served the entire floor.
And there, in the urine-yellow light of the single bulb, he would
wash all that shameful white stuff off his privates.
One day in 1915, when Hartford was eighteen years old, he
came home from the library to the cheap hotel his folks were
staying in while they played in Cincinnati. A paddy wagon was
pulling away from the curb as he climbed the front steps and
walked into the lobby. The desk clerk looked embarrassed while
