What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and the life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost: one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it.
My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity: Stanley became a first-rate failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest affection, there was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I could weep when I think of what life has made them. As boys they were perfect, Stanley least of all because Stanley was more temperamental. Stanley went into violent rages now and then and there was no telling how you stood with him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of goodness: they were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey often when I go out into the country because he was what is called a country boy. That meant, for one thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more tender, than the boys we knew. I can see Joey now coming to meet me:
he was always running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me, always breathless with adventures that he was planning for my participation, always loaded with gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me like the monarchs of old received their guests. Everything I looked at was mine. We had innumerable things to tell each other and nothing was dull or boring. The difference between our respective worlds was enormous. Though I was of the city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became aware of an even greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication was negligible. Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighbourhood, but Stanley had come from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was always between us the mark of the voyage. The fact that he spoke another tongue also increased our admiration for him. Each one was surrounded by a distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was preserved inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant individuality, which saddens me and makes the rye bread stand out glowingly.
The wonderful sour rye went into the making of our individual selves: it was like the communion loaf in which all participate but from which each one receives only according to his peculiar state of grace. Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual. There was another thing about the sour rye and that was that we often ate a raw onion with it. I remember standing with Stanley in the late afternoons, a sandwich in hand, in front of the veterinary’s which was just opposite my home. It always seemed to be late afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to castrate a stallion, an operation which was done in public and which always gathered a small crowd. I remember the smell of the hot iron and the quiver of the horse’s legs. Dr. McKinney’s goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the smell of the sewer gas just behind us where they were laying in a new gas main.
It was an olfactory performance through and through and, as Abelard so well describes it, practically painless. Not knowing the reason for the operation we used to hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended in a brawl. Nobody liked Dr. McKinney either: there was a smell of iodoform about him and of stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his own office was filled with blood and in the winter time the blood froze into the ice and gave a strange look to his sidewalk. Now and then the big two-wheeled cart came, an open cart which smelled like the devil, and they whisked a dead horse into it. Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a long chain which made a creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a bloated dead horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells. On the comer was Paul Sauer’s place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in the street: they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odour coming from the tin factory behind the house – like the smell of modem progress. The smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals.
And the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory with a hand-truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin. Fortunately for us there was a bakery opposite the tin factory and from the back door of the bakery, which was only a grill, we could watch the bakers at work and get the sweet, irresistible odour of bread and cake. And if, as I say, the gas mains were being laid there was another strange medley of smells – the smell of earth just turned up, of rotted iron pipes, of sewer gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the Italian labourers ate whilst reclining against the mounds of upturned earth. There were other smells too, of course, but less striking: such, for instance, as the smell of Silverstein’s tailor shop where there was always a great deal of pressing going on.
This was a hot, fetid stench which can be best apprehended by imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly Jew himself, was cleaning out the farts which his customers had left behind in their pants. Next door was the candy and stationery shop owned by two daffy old maids who were religious: here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of taffy, of Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The stationery store was like a beautiful cave, always cool, always full of intriguing objects: where the soda fountain was, which gave off another distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in the summer time and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, with the slightly ticklish, dry smell of the carbonated water when it was fizzed into the glass of ice cream.
With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell – the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour compared with the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind’s imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt – with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman’s wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting – why, I don’t know. I can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my Aunt Tillie’s hair after she had taken a shampoo.
This shampoo was performed in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a late Saturday afternoon, in preparation for a ball which meant again another singular thing – that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tulle. But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the table: I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the smell of her hair – that smell I can never forget, because somehow the smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for
