Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen

throat. The classic mound that swelled gently from the bottom of the belly seemed chaste. The fair beautiful body seemed whole and perfect, had fallen, even through glass, whole and perfect, like fruit unbruised—plucked rather than fallen fruit. Was there a sign of struggle in the Laboratory? Paraphernalia overturned? Did Somebody in the heat of quarrel push her through the window? Was there a face of horror at the window when the body fell? Now I saw what passion burned in the Nurseryman’s heart. Like a heaving bull. Panting and groaning, he fell upon the naked girl and clutching her to his body rolled and wallowed on the hothouse floor. If she had not already been dead, he might have killed her with his very body. Until the figure of the man and girl, combined into one strange being, half-clothed, with one head of wild and furious hair, lay still under the palms. I managed to take steps, but it was as though each step would draw up the very ground with it, as though my feet were magnets. I dragged closer and knelt to look upon this figure of violence. I saw surely that the Nurseryman was dead. I could not bring myself to touch him to see if he was breathing, but I saw no signs of breathing, heard no breath. The Nurseryman of the cold No! , the gardener of the icebound hothouse, had died of passion. I opened my mouth but I could not say any word. Could I have spoken, would I have greeted, at last, the Nurseryman now joined to the body of my admitter to the hothouse? The odd still figure, lasciviously spent, beautiful with white buttocks and tressed with flowing hair, and terrible, too, like a slain beast upon the floor come from the wilds into this fragile garden of poetry and blooming summer, this figure was mine. As though I had created it.
    I do not know why I picked up a little spade and slid it as if I were scooping something from the softest part of the flesh of the Nurseryman where his heart hung in the dark of his breast. The spade no doubt dug his heartless heart half out. Had I withdrawn the little scoop it might have spooned out the enigmatic heart to me, like a boiled egg. I wanted the No-man’s heart, now not so much in vengeance as in calm curiosity. Almost scientifically. The heart images! I imagined his heart might look like a bell. A bell aloft in the tower of his lungs. A bulb, buried in the depth of his root-veined breast. Testicles, that hung under the shaft of his neck. My God the images. Violence has brought me images. I craved the heart of the dead Nurseryman. They dug out Shelley’s heart. They fought on the shore for Shelley’s heart. O gardener of this garden, O lost nurse of this Nursery, unhappy and inhospitable host of the icebound greenhouse, what would your heart be like?
    And there, shrouded in the warm gathering fog, I sat down with this figure, settled, now, in some kind of understanding far beyond anything I could utter, of the fallen naked girl and the passion-stilled, heart-spaded Nurseryman, and in some kind of joining of them; for strangely I felt the third, we were, somehow, beyond anything I could explain if even I had words, a trio, our experience together and one with the other would never be known but had brought us together in this union, dark brother, wild sister. And there I remained until someone would come. I felt the killing cold creeping in upon the hothouse, and the fog was wrapping us around.
    But what could I have to say to those who, hearing the dawn crash, arrived to behold this vision under the palms? And, sleep-thickened, wondered of me what had happened? I was as dumb and as frozen as the gardener had been, I could have been a statue there among the steaming palms. Some did, however, when they got their senses back, recognize the young woman—a sophomore biology student from a neighboring state. The two bodies were so clenched together that they removed them as one, covered with a blanket and carried out into the cold. The little spade made a