House of Incest (2 page)

Sabina, you made your impression upon the
world. I passed through it like a ghost. Does anyone notice the owl in the tree
at night, the bat which strikes the window pane while others are talking, the
eyes which reflect like water and drink like blotting paper, the pity which
flickers quietly like candlelight, the understanding on which people lay
themselves to sleep?

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO I AM?

Even my voice came from other worlds. I was
embalmed in my own secret vertigoes. I was suspended over the world, seeing
what road I could tread without treading down even clay or grass. My step was a
sentient step; the mere crepitation of gravel could arrest my walk.

When I saw you, Sabina, I chose my body.

I will let you carry me into the fecundity of destruction.
I choose a body then, a face, a voice. I become you. And you become me. Silence
the sensational course of your body and you will see in me, intact, your own
fears, your own pities. You will see love which was excluded from the passions
given you, and I will see the passions excluded from love. Step out of your
role and rest yourself on the core of your true desires. Cease for a moment
your violent deviations. Relinquish the furious indomitable strain.

I will take them up.

Cease trembling and shaking and gasping and
cursing and find again your core which I am. Rest from twistedness, distortion,
deformations. For an hour you will be me; that is, the other half of yourself.
The half you lost. What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands: I am
the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.

Even the world and the sun cannot show their
two faces at once.

So now we are inextricably woven. I have
gathered together all the fragments. I return them to you. You have run with
the wind, scattering and dissolving. I have run behind you, like your own
shadow, gathering what you have sown in deep coffers.

I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU

Our faces are soldered together by soft
hair, soldered together, showing two profiles of the same soul. Even when I
passed through a room like a breath, I made others uneasy and they knew I had
passed.

I was the white flame of your breath, your
simoun
breath
shrivelin
the
world. I borrowed your visibility and it was through you I made my imprint on
the world. I praised my own flame in you.

THIS IS THE BOOK YOU WROTE

AND YOU ARE THE WOMAN

I AM

Only our faces must shine twofold—like
day and night—always separated by space and the evolutions of time.

The smoke sent my head to the ceiling: there it
hung, looking down upon frog eyes, straw hair, mouth of soiled leather, mirrors
of bald heads, furred monkey hands with ham colored palms. The music whipped
the past out of its tomb and mummies flagellated my memory.

If Sabina were now a memory; if I should sit
here and she should never come again! If I only imagined her one night because
the drug made fine incisions and arranged the layers of my body on Persian silk
hammocks, tipped with cotton each fine nerve and sent the radium arrows of fantasy
through the flesh…

I am freezing and my head falls down through a
thin film of smoke. I am searching for Sabina again with deep anguish through
the faceless crowd.

I am ill with the obstinacy of images,
reflections in cracked mirrors. I am a woman with Siamese cat eyes smiling
always behind my gravest words, mocking my own intensity. I smile because I
listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by
unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated; one arm dead, the
other rhapsodizing in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when
it fits into the undercurrents of my talk. I want to know what is running
underneath thus punctuated by bitter upheavals. The two currents do not meet. I
see two women in me freakishly bound together, like circus twins. I see them
tearing away from each other. I can hear the tearing, the anger and love,
passion and pity. When the act of dislocation suddenly ceases—or when I cease
to be aware of the sound—then the silence is more terrible because there is
nothing but insanity around me, the insanity of things pulling, pulling within
oneself, the roots tearing at each other to grow separately, the strain made to
achieve unity.

It requires only a bar of music to still the
dislocation for a moment; but there comes the smile again, and I know that the
two of us have leaped beyond cohesion.

Greyness is no ordinary greyness, but a vast
lead roof which covers the world like the lid of a soup pan. The breath of
human beings is like the steam of a laundry house. The smoke of cigarettes is
like a rain of ashes from Vesuvius. The lights taste of sulphur, and each face
stares at you with the immensity of its defects. The smallness of a room is
like that of an iron cage in which one can neither sit nor lie down. The
largeness of other rooms is like a mortal danger always suspended above you,
awaiting the moment of your joy to fall. Laughter and tears are not separate
experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walk
with a sword between your legs. Rain does not wet your hair but drips in the
cells of the brain with the obstinacy of a leak. Snow does not freeze the
hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst. All the ships are
sinking with fire in their bowels, and there are fires hissing in the cellars
of every house. The loved one’s whitest flesh is what the broken glass will cut
and the wheel crush. The long howls in the night are howls of death. Night is
the collaborator of torturers. Day is the light on harrowing discoveries. If a
dog barks it is the man who loves wide gashes leaping in through the window.
Laughter precedes hysteria. I am waiting for the heavy fall and the foam at the
mouth.

A room with a ceiling threatening me like a
pair of open scissors. Attic windows lie on a bed like gravel. All connections
are breaking. Slowly I part from each being I love, slowly, carefully,
completely. I tell them what I owe them and what they owe me. I cull their last
glances and the last orgasm. My house is empty, sun-glazed, reflectively alive,
its stillness gathering implications, secret images which some day will madden
me when I stand before blank walls, hearing far too much and seeing more than
is humanly bearable. I part from them all. I die in a small scissor-arched
room, dispossessed of my loves and my belongings, not even registered in the
hotel book. At the same time I know that if I stayed in this room a few days an
entirely new life could begin—like the soldering of human flesh after an operation.
It is the terror of this new life, more than the terror of dying, which arouses
me. I jump out of bed and run out of this room growing around me like a
poisoned web, seizing my imagination, gnawing into my memory so that in seven
moments I will forget who I am and whom I have loved.

It was room number 35 in which I might have
awakened next morning mad or a whore.

Desire which had stretched the nerve broke, and
each nerve seemed to break separately, continuously, making incisions, and acid
ran
instead of blood. I writhed within my own life,
seeking a free avenue to carry the molten cries, to melt the pain into a
cauldron of words for everyone to dip into, everyone who sought words for their
own pain. What an enormous cauldron I stir now; enormous mouthfuls of acid I
feed the others now, words bitter enough to burn all bitterness.

Disrupt the brown crust of the earth and all
the sea will rise; the sea-anemones will float over my bed, and the dead ships
will end their voyages in my garden. Exorcise the demons who ring the hours
over my head at night when all counting should be suspended; they ring because
they know that in my dreams I am cheating them of centuries. It must be counted
like an hour against me.

I heard the lutes which were brought from Arabia
and felt in my breasts the currents of liquid fire which run through the rooms
of the Alhambra and refresh me from the too clear waters.

The too clear pain of love divided, love
divided…

I was in a ship of sapphire sailing on seas of
coral. And standing at the prow singing. My singing swelled the sails and
ripped them; where they had been ripped the edge was burnt and the clouds too
were ripped to tatters by my voice.

I saw a city where each house stood on a rock
between black seas full of purple serpents hissing alarms, licking the rocks
and peering over the walls of their garden with bulbous eyes.

I saw the glass palm tree sway before my eyes;
the palm trees on my island were still and dusty when I saw them deadened by
pain. Green leaves withered for me, and all the trees seemed glassily
unresponsive while the glass palm tree threw off a new leaf on the very tip and
climax of its head.

The white path sprouted from the heart of the
white house and was edged with bristly cactus long-fingered and furry, unmoved
by the wind, ageless. Over the ageless cactus the bamboo shoots trembled, close
together, perpetually wind-shirred.

The house had the shape of an egg, and it was
carpeted with cotton and windowless; one slept in the down and heard through
the shell the street organ and the apple vendor who could not find the bell.

Images—bringing a dissolution of the soul
within the body like the rupture of sweet-acid of the orgasm. Images made the
blood run back and forth, and the watchfulness of the mind watching against
dangerous ecstasies was now useless. Reality was drowned and fantasies choked
each hour of the day.

Nothing seems true today except the death of
the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool.
The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!

I am floating again. All the facts and all the
words, all images, all presages are sweeping over me, mocking each other. The
dream! The dream! The dream rings through me like a giant copper bell when I wish
to betray it. If brushes by me with bat wings when I open human eyes and seek
to live dreamlessly. When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has
corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of
my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall
into darkness after the collision with pain, and after pain the divine
departure.

Oh, the weight, the tremendous weight of my
head pulled up by the clouds and swinging in space, the body like a wisp of
straw, the clouds dragging my hair like a scarf caught in a chariot wheel, the
body dangling, colliding with the lantern stars, the clouds dragging me over
the world.

I cannot stop, or descend.

I hear the unfurling of water, of skies and
curtains. I hear the shiver of leaves, the breathing of the air, the wailing of
the unborn, the pressure of the wind.

I hear the movements of the stars and planets,
the slight rust creak when they shift their position. The silken passage of
radiations, the breath of circles turning.

I hear the passing of mysteries and the
breathing of monsters. Overtones only, or undertones. Collision with reality
blurs my vision and submerges me into the dream. I feel the distance like a
wound. It unrolls itself before me like the rug before the steps of a cathedral
for a wedding or a burial. It is unrolled like a crimson bride between the
others and me, but I cannot walk on it without a feeling of uneasiness, as one
has at ceremonies. The ceremony of walking along the unrolled carpet into the
ghtl
where the functions unravel to which I am a stranger.
I neither marry nor die. And the distance between the crowd, between the others
and me, grows wider.

Distance. I never walked over the carpet into
the ceremonies. Into the fullness of the crowd life, into the authentic music
and the odor of men. I never attended the wedding or the burial. Everything for
me took place either in the belfry where I was alone with the deafening sound
of bells calling in iron voices, or in the cellar where I nibbled at the
candles and the incense stored away with the mice.

I cannot be certain of any event or place, only
of my solitude. Tell me what the stars are saying about me. Does Saturn have
eyes made of onions which weep all the time? Has Mercury chicken feathers on
his heels, and does Mars wear a gas mask? Gemini, the evolved twins, do they
evolve all the time, turning on a spit, Gemini a la broche?