Chapter 16B

At some moment Tamar has decided that she has been awake for a while.  She looks down and across, surveying her attire: a damp velvet dress lingers on her.  It reeks of a portal opened by crowns of smoke.  From the street comes a vociferous vociferating voice of vivacious young clods.  "Niña," they call in a language spoken in Venezuela, but not in Brazil ... Mr. Clemens, high priest of Geography at the Cathedral of Callousness (AKA St. Elizabeth's School for Troubled Girls), Clemens the Inclement, would chant out the names of South American sovereign states, whining for one, then bellowing for the next, in a great cacophonic concerto; the girls backed him up with a symphony of tight-lipped groans and rumblings -- Paraguay, Uruguay, Paraguay, Uruguay, Paragraph, Urugraph, Ur-Graph, Urmensch, Ur....  And at night, each tossing in her starched dormitory bed, they'd try to forget the concerto's chants; but each effort would only recall its dreary melody, fixing it before them as an enemy to be hated always more.

"¡Niña!" call the lads.  "¡Niña!" call all lads.  The lads, escapees no doubt from some Cathedral of Masculine Consciousness.  (In itself, for itself, throughout itself.)  No doubt they are all dressed.  Dressed in knickers to the neck.  No doubt they carry the marks of beatings upon their scrawny backs.  My heart swells and threatens to burst.  Burst all over.  Over their bebeanied heads.   Heads without hair.

"¡Niña!"  Tamar, trammeled, tamed rat, remits her tram tickets.

"¡Niña!"  It must be a conspiracy, a plot of aged and feckless farts, a scheme designed to wake and seduce her from her leaden bed.  Outside, the street throngs with aged, feckless farts, AFFs from the deathbeds of Madrid.  Aristocrats, gypsies, students who live on bread and wine, have run to the beds of the AFFs and roused them: Tamar is in this town!  Tamar must be recalled!  Tamar requires your presence at a most stupendabobble reprecentation.  R.S.V.P. at the Meadowglades, 18 Currants Road, Puddingglade.  Black tie, red sweater proferred but not requited.  And forth the fartless, feckless fats poured forth, to the Calle Arenal, to the Street of Sand and bones, clattering down the rainy alleyways, pushed in wheelchairs by their butlers and maîtres Dee, breaking their stinking fragile neckbones on unexpected stairways, but coming, always coming, attending the great gathering pronounced by the glorious G.  Outside the treslissed window of Tamar they clamored and called, uttering words fit to make an elephant's balls fall off. 

"¡Niña!" -- What would Colin C. Colinson say about such a word?  In his vastly influential book Talking About Talking, Colinson has devastated the Linguists' Society with an analysis of the invariabilities intrinsic to the Knownworld's many cultures, civilized and savage, all united in a theoretical overarch.  For details write: C C Colinson, Department of Exotic Languages, Colin University, Colinshire.

It has been some time since the cries died down in the street; some time since their addressee drank her final glass of wine or lukewarm milk; some time since Tamar took her last bath.  -- Imagine, gentlemen, if you will, if you might be so kind, a room filled with every conceivable sort of oddity: soap, shaving brush, dentifrice-paste for teeth, cloth with which to ablute one's face, large napped towel inscribed with an institutional crest.  Into this remarkable compendium of nostrums Tamar's nostrils venture slowly, reeling: and towards the enameled repository of bathwaters she lurches, recalling perhaps the ablutions of a Consorting Empress.  Divested of her robes, she enters.