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Aidan Higgins : A Selection
“A girl of about nineteen, attractive but cross-eyed, who had come in with an older woman and gone upstairs ahead of me now uttered a high-pitched scream. Downstairs they shook their heads, not sympathetic, contemptuous of such undignified behaviour. The Andalusians are, and always were, noted for their bravery, valour. Muy valiente, they say of bullfighters, the highest praise. Caesar, that bald adulterer, had even remarked upon it. Was it the shock of the fluorescent screen or the touch of the doctor’s fingers that caused the scream ?
A Civil Guard came in with his small son. Unfastening a button of his uniform, he sat down and took off his shiny bicorne Napoleonic hat. Seen from above (the only way to look at it) it is tricorne.
It was hot in the waiting-room. When my turn came I went upstairs, slow as an old man. The Doctor sat behind his desk, writing. Buenas tardes, Don Jorge, I said. He stood up to greet me, came around the desk to give me a Roman handshake. I was an old man, bent and wheezing.
I am an old man, doctor, I said in Spanish
I think not, he said, but won’t you sit down. I sat down painfully. I am suffering , doctor, I said.
How did this come about ? he asked
An accident, I said, a stupid accident.
His white shirt was open three buttons down, there was a fuzz of man-hair on his pale chest. He prepared to examine me. With the tips of his fingers he ausculated me. There, there, painful yes ? Painful, si, I admitted, wincing, Oh Jesu, most painful. Acute pain on the left side, the doctor murmured, good, good. Now.
Not so good for me, I said (sweating like a horse after a hard gallop). No “
“Leaning forward until her brown knees were level with my chest, her shaded face drawn down to mine (she had removed her sunhat), her lips above my lips. Intense feeling flooded into me. I was held bound within the aura of her charms, about to penetrate one of her adopted disguises. She had revealed something secretly to me, something intensely private (she, the youngest of three daughters of Yiddish-speaking parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, running a grocery store on the Lower East Side, a Jewish store that stayed open until the last customer left at night, who had served behind the counter), a Jewish girl with brilliant eyes, all her future reflected there, the colour of her special being, innocent of any moral sense, a valour that required protection. Bob, her husband and protector (sweating and typing through the afternoon), had said: She thinks she can handle anything. I thought: Yes, anything but failure “
Both extracts from Balcony of Europe (1972)
“ Smell of the lawnmower’s catch near the clump of high waving bamboo, smell of Malaga after rain, a brown ligneous aroma suggestive of standing water in the boles of partly rotted trees (half dead at the top). Maja-aroma, scent of juniper, Maja-scented evenings in the Alameda Gardens in Malaga, the young widow in black drinking lemon tea in a dim bar. Heady scent of incense at Benediction.
Andalusian summer dusk, dry earth, vapoury sky, scent of magnolia, ambergris of the sea; thermal evenings in the Alameda Gardens near the port in Malaga. The line of fishing boats stretches far out beyond the mole and the Mediterranean glints and sparkles with all its little mirrors; all the entrancing little mirrors of the Mediterranean sparkle. The most disturbing of all smells (inanimate) must be seaweed, for a Picean, in the surges of the Atlantic pounding the back door at Salthill in Galway. No less disturbing is the odour (animate) of the open lip-between-the-legs of ladies, ‘ the intoxicating bouquet of roses and Parma violets’ (Aldo Buzzi) “
From Ruckblick in Flotsam and Jetsam (1996)