CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
On the Stairs, 6
TWO MEN MEET on the third-floor landing, both over fifty, both with square-framed glasses, both dressed in the same black suit, trousers, jacket, waistcoat, a little oversized, shod in black shoes, black tie on white shirt with an untapered collar, black bowler hat. But the one seen from behind has a printed cashmere-type scarf, whilst the other has a pink scarf with violet stripes.
They are two doorstep salesmen. The first is selling a New Key to Your Dreams, allegedly based on the teachings of a Yaqui sorcerer collected at the end of the seventeenth century by an English traveller named Henry Barrett, but actually composed a few weeks earlier by a botany student at Madrid University. Apart from the anachronisms without which this key to dreams would obviously unlock nothing at all, and the ornamentations with which the Spaniard’s imagination had sought to embellish this tiresome enumeration by emphasising its chronological and geographical exoticism, several of the suggested associations turn out to be surprisingly rich:
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CLOCK |
|
WIG |
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ARMCHAIR |
HERRING |
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CLIFF |
HAMMER |
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DESERT |
SNOW |
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HAT |
MOON |
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SHOE |
FOG |
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ASH |
COPPER |
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TELEPHONE |
HAM |
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SINGLE PERSON |
The second door-to-door man is selling a newspaper called The Watchtower!, the organ of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In each issue there are some longer articles – “What Is Human Happiness?”, “The 67 Truths of the Bible”, “Was Beethoven Really Deaf?”, “The Magic and the Mystery of Cats”, “Learn to Love the Prickly Pear” – and some pieces of general news: “Do Before You Die!”, “Did Life Begin by Chance?”, “Fewer Marriages in Switzerland”, and a few old saws of the likes of Statura justa et æqua sint pondere. Secretly slipped in between the pages are advertisements for articles of hygiene, offering mailing under plain wrappers.