Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

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Segment 1

[0759] dangling at mid-thigh at the end of a meagre cord, there was nothing
more to be squeezed, not a drop. So that non che la speme il desiderio,
and I longed to see them gone, from the old stand where they bore false
witness, for and against, in the lifelong case against me.
[0760] For if they
accused me of having made a balls of it, of me, of them, they thanked me
for it too, from []depths of their rotten bag, the right lower than the
left, or inversely, I forget, decaying circus clowns.

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Segment 2

[0761] And, worse still,
they got in my way when I tried to walk, when I tried to sit down, as if
my sick leg was not enough, and when I rode my bicycle they bounced up
and down.
[0762] So the best thing for me would have been for them to go, and
I would have seen to it myself, with a knife or secateurs, but for my
terror of physical pain and festered wounds, so that I shook.

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Segment 3

[0763] Yes, all
my life I have gone in terror of festered wounds, I who never festered,
I was so acid.
[0764] My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over,
now as of a joke which still goes on, and []it is neither for at the same
time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?
[0765] Watch
wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works
will one day speak of God, to the worms.

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Segment 4

[0766] But those cullions, I must be
attached to them after all, cherish them as others do their scars, or the
family album.
[0767] In any case it wasn't their fault I couldn't dig, but my
leg's.
[0768] It was Lousse dug the hole while I held the dog in my arms. [0769] He
was heavy already and cold, but he had not yet begun to stink.
[0770] He smelt
bad, if you like, but bad like an old dog, not like a dead dog.
[0771] He too
had dug holes, perhaps at this very spot.

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Segment 5

[0772] We buried him as he was, no
box or wrapping of any kind, like a Carthusian monk, but with his collar
and lead.
[0773] It was she put him in the hole, though I was the gentleman.
[]For I cannot stoop, neither can I kneel, because of my infirmity, and if
ever I stoop, forgetting who I am, or kneel, []make no mistake, it
will not be me, but another.
[0774] To throw him in the hole was all I could

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