Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Perhaps, though, tomorrow night ... perhaps then. He can’t see how he can hold out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn...

Cold air hits Pudding like a blow. He sobs, bent, alone, cheek resting a moment against the rough stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular quarters have become a place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the Night, with her soft boots and hard foreign voice.

“you cannot ask a woman to reveal her last mystery, now, can you?”

Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth. .

But tonight he lies humped im the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves.

“At Badajoz,” whispering humbly, “during the war in Spain ...a bandera of Franco’s Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimental hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you, Mistress: they-they were pro- claiming you as their bride. ...”

He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man’s flesh creeps coarse-grained in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts group here and there over his skin.

She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep her hands still. “What are you thinking, Pudding?”

In these war years, the focus of a woman’s face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the’ sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional.

“Domina Nocturna..shining mother and last love..your servant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered,”