Had I vomited my last human remnants? And I was no longer asking for help. The diurnal desert was before me. And now the oratorio was starting up again but in another way, now the oratorio was the deaf sound of the heat refracting off walls and ceilings, in rounded vaults. The oratorio was made of the tremblings of sultriness. And my fear too was different now: not the fear of someone about to enter, but the much broader fear of someone who has already entered.
So much broader: it was fear of my lack of fear.
Since it was with my rashness that I then looked at the roach. And I saw: it was a creature without beauty for other species. And as I saw it, the little former fear returned for just an instant: “I swear, I’ll do everything you want! but don’t leave me imprisoned in the roach’s room because something enormous is going to happen to me, I don’t want the other species! I just want people.”
But, at my slight cringing, the oratorio just intensified, and so I kept still, no longer trying to make a movement to help myself. I’d already abandoned myself — I could nearly see there at the beginning of the path already traveled the body I’d cast off. But I was still sometimes calling for it, still calling myself. And it was because I could no longer hear my answer, that I knew I’d already abandoned myself beyond my reach.
Yes, the roach was a creature without beauty for other species. The mouth: if it had teeth, they would be big, square and yellow teeth. How I hate the light of the sun that reveals everything, reveals even the possible. With the edge of my robe I wiped my forehead, without taking my gaze from the roach’s eyes, and my own eyes also had the same lashes as well. But no one touches yours, unclean thing. Only another roach would want this roach.
And me — who would want me today? who had already become as mute as I was? who, like me, was calling fear love? and want, love? and need, love? Who, like me, knew that I had never changed my form since they had drawn me on the stone of a cave? and next to a man and a dog.
From now on I could call anything by the name I invented: in the dry room I could, since any name would do, since none of them would. Within the dry sounds of the vault everything could be called anything, because anything would be transmuted in the same vibrating muteness. The roach’s much greater nature made anything, entering there — name or person — lose its false transcendence. So much so that I was seeing only and exactly the white vomit of its body: I was only seeing facts and things. I knew that I was in the irreducible, though I was unaware what the irreducible is.
But I also knew that ignorance of the law of the irreducible was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself by claiming I didn’t know the law — since knowing oneself and knowing the world is the law that, even unattainable, cannot be infringed, and nobody can be excused by claiming not to know it. Worse: the roach and I were not faced with a law we had to obey: we ourselves were the unknown law that we obeyed. The renewedly original sin is this: I must fulfill my law of which I am unaware, and if I don’t fulfill my ignorance, I shall be originally sinning against life.
In the garden of Paradise, who was the monster and who was not? between the houses and apartments, and in the elevated spaces between the high buildings, in that hanging garden — who is, and who is not? How long can I stand not at least knowing what is looking at me? the raw roach is looking at me, and its law sees mine. I felt that I was going to know.
— Don’t abandon me now, don’t let me make alone this already-made decision. I had, yes, I still had the desire to take refuge in my own fragility and in the sly, yet true, argument that my shoulders were a woman’s, feeble and slender. Whenever I had needed to, I’d excused myself by arguing that I was a woman. But I was well aware that it’s not just women who are afraid to see, everyone fears seeing what is God.
I was afraid of the face of God, I was afraid of my final nudity on the wall. Beauty, that new absence of beauty that had nothing to do with whatever I used to call beauty, horrified me.
— Give me your hand. Because I no longer know what I’m saying. I think I made it all up, none of this existed! But if I made up what happened to me yesterday — who can guarantee that I didn’t also invent my entire life prior to yesterday?
Give me your hand:
Give me your hand:
I am now going to tell you how I entered the inexpressive that was always my blind and secret search. How I entered whatever exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the line of mystery and fire, and which is surreptitious line. A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.
It wasn’t by using any of my attributes as an instrument that I was reaching the smooth mysterious fire of whatever is a plasma — it was precisely removing from myself all my attributes, and going only with my living entrails. To have reached that point, I was abandoning my human organization — to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality.
— I know, it’s bad to hold my hand. It’s bad to be left without air in that collapsed mine where I brought you without mercy on you, but out of mercy on me. But I swear I’ll get you out of here still alive — even though I’m not lying, even though I’m not lying about what my eyes saw. I’ll save you from this terror in which, for the time being, I need you. What mercy on you now, you whom I grabbed. You innocently gave me your hand, and because I was holding it I had the courage to submerge myself. But don’t try to understand me, just keep me company. I know your hand would drop me, if it knew.
How can I repay you? At least use me too, use me at least like a dark tunnel — and when you’ve crossed my darkness you’ll find yourself on the other side with yourself. You might not find yourself with me, I don’t know if I’ll cross over, but with yourself. At least you’re not alone, as I was yesterday, and yesterday I was only praying to at least get out of there alive. And not just alive — the way that primarily monstrous roach was just alive — but organizedly alive like a person.
Identity — identity that is the first inherence — was that what I was surrendering to? was that what I had entered?
Identity is forbidden to me, I know. But I’m going to take a chance because I trust in my future cowardice, and it will be my essential cowardice that will reorganize me once again into a person.
Not only through my cowardice. But I’ll reorganize myself through the ritual with which I was already born, as in the neutral of the semen the ritual of life is inherent. Identity is forbidden to me but my love is so great that I won’t resist my will to enter the mysterious fabric, into that plasma from which I may never again be able to depart. My belief, however, is also so deep that, if I cannot depart, I know, even in my new unreality the plasma of the God will be in my life.
Ah, but at the same time how can I want for my heart to see? if my body is so weak that I can’t face the sun without my eyes physically crying — how could I stop my heart from glittering in physically organic tears if in nakedness I felt the identity: the God? My heart that covered itself with a thousand cloaks.
The great neutral reality of what I was living was overtaking me with its extreme objectivity. I was feeling incapable of being as real as the reality that was reaching me — could I be commencing in contortions to be as nakedly real as what I was seeing? Yet I was living all that reality with a feeling of the unreality of reality. Could I be living, not the truth, but the myth of the truth? Every time I lived the truth it was through an impression of inescapable dream: the inescapable dream is my truth.
I’m trying to tell you how I reached the neutral and the inexpressive in me. I don’t know if I’m understanding what I’m saying, I’m feeling — and I very much fear the feeling, since feeling is only one of the types of being. Yet I shall cross the stupefied sultriness t
hat billows from the nothing, and shall have to understand the neutral with the feeling.
The neutral. I am speaking of the vital element that binds things. Oh, I am not afraid that you don’t understand, but that I understand myself badly. If I don’t understand myself, I’ll die from the same thing I live from. Now let me tell you the scariest part:
I was being carried off by the demonic.
For the inexpressive is diabolic. A person who isn’t committed to hope lives the demonic. A person who has the courage to cast off feelings discovers the ample life of an extremely busy silence, the same that exists in the cockroach, the same in the stars, the same in the self — the demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.
Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.
I’m going to tell you: I feared a certain blind and already ferocious joy that was starting to overtake me. And to lose me.
The joy of getting lost is a Sabbath joy. Getting lost is a dangerous finding. I was experiencing in that desert the fire of things: and it was a neutral fire. I was living from the tessitura of which things are made. And it was a hell, that place, because in that world where I was living neither compassion nor hope exists.
I had entered the Sabbath orgy. Now I know what happens in the dark of the mountains on the nights of orgies. I know! I know with horror: things enjoy themselves. The thing of which things are made delights itself — that is the raw joy of black magic. It was from that neutral that I lived — the neutral was my true primeval soup. I was moving forward, and feeling the joy of the hell.
And the hell is not the torture of pain! it is the torture of a joy.
The neutral is inexplicable and alive, try to understand me: just as protoplasm and semen and protein are of a living neutral. And I was all new, like a novice. It was as if before I had had a palate addicted to salt and sugar, and a soul addicted to joys and pains — and had never felt the first taste. And now I was experiencing the taste of the nothing. I was rapidly becoming unaddicted, and the taste was new as the mother’s milk that only has taste for an infant’s mouth. With the landslide of my civilization and of my humanity — which was a suffering of great longing for me — with the loss of humanity, I was coming orgiastically to taste the identity of things.
It’s very difficult to taste. Up till then I had been so engrossed by sentimentalization that, experiencing the taste of the real identity, it seemed as tasteless as the taste a raindrop has in your mouth. It’s horribly insipid, my love.
My love, it’s like the most insipid nectar — it’s like the air that in itself has no smell. Up till then my addicted senses were mute to the taste of things. But the most archaic and demonic of my thirsts had led me subterraneously to collapse all constructions. The sinful thirst was guiding me — and now I know that experiencing the taste of that almost nothing is the secret joy of the gods. It is a nothing that is the God — and that has no taste.
But it’s the most primary joy. And only that, at last, at last! is the pole opposite the pole of the feeling-human-Christian. Through the pole of the primary demonic joy, I was remotely perceiving and for the first time — that there really was an opposite pole.
I was clean of my own intoxification by feeling, so clean I could enter the divine life that was a primary life entirely without comeliness, life as primary as if it were a manna falling from heaven and that doesn’t have the taste of anything: manna is like a rain and has no taste. Experiencing that taste of the nothing was my damnation and my joyful terror.
Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.
But remember that all this was happening with me awake and immobilized by the light of day, and the truth of a dream was happening without the anesthesia of the night. Sleep with me awake, and only thus can you know of my great sleep and know what is the living desert.
Suddenly, sitting there, a tiredness all hardened and without any lassitude, overtook me. A little more and it would petrify me.
Then, carefully, as if I already had paralyzed parts within me, I started stretching out on the coarse mattress and there, all shriveled up, I fell asleep as immediately as a roach falls asleep on a vertical wall. There was no human stability in my sleep: it was the balancing power of a roach that falls asleep atop the lime of a wall.
When I woke, the room had a sun even whiter and more fervidly motionless. Returning from that sleep, to whose depthless surface my short paws had clung, I was now trembling with cold.
But then the numbness was passing, and once again, fully inside the burning of the sun, I was suffocating confined.
It must have been past noon. I got up before even making up my mind to, and, though uselessly, tried to open even more the already wide open window, and was trying to breathe, even if only to breathe a visual expanse, I was seeking an expanse.
I was seeking an expanse.
From that room excavated in the rock of a building, from the window of my minaret, I saw as far as the eye could see the enormous range of roofs and roofs calmly scorching in the sun. The apartment buildings like squat villages. In size it surpassed Spain.
Beyond the rocky gullies, between the cements of the buildings, I saw the favela atop the hill and saw a goat slowly climbing the hill. Beyond stretched the highlands of Asia Minor. From there I was contemplating the empire of the present. Over there was the Strait of the Dardanelles. Further beyond the craggy ridges. Thy majestic monotony. Under the sun thy imperial breadth.
And further beyond, already the start of the sands. The desert naked and burning. When darkness fell, cold would consume the desert, and in it one would shiver as on desert nights. Even further, the blue and salty lake was sparkling. Over there, that must be the region of the great salt lakes.
Beneath the trembling waves of sultriness, monotony. Through the other apartment windows and on the cement terraces, I was seeing a coming and going of shadows and people, like those of the first Assyrian merchants. They were fighting for control of Asia Minor.
I had dug up the future perhaps — or reached such remote ancient depths that my hands that had dug them up could not fathom them. There I was standing, like a child dressed as a friar, a sleepy child. But an inquisitive child. From atop this building, the present contemplates the present. Just as in the second millennium before Christ.
And I, now I was no longer an inquisitive child. I had grown, and had become as simple as a queen. Kings, sphinxes and lions — here is the city where I live, and all extinct. I was what was left, stuck by one of the stones that had fallen. And, since the silence judged my immobility to be that of a dead woman, they all forgot me, they left without pulling me out, and, presumed dead, I lay there watching. And I saw, while the silence of those who really had died was invading me as ivy invades the mouths of the stone lions.
And because I myself was then sure I would end up dying of starvation beneath the fallen stone that was pinning me by my limbs — I then saw like someone who is never going to tell. I saw, as uninvolved as someone who isn’t even going to tell herself. I was seeing, like someone who will never have to understand what she saw. As a lizard’s nature sees: without even having to remember afterward. The lizard sees — as a loose eye sees.
I was perhaps the first person to set foot in that castle in the air. Five million years ago perhaps the last caveman had looked out from this same point, where once there must have existed a mountain. And that later, eroded, had become an empty area where later once again cities had risen which themselves in turn eroded. Today the ground is widely populated by diverse races.
Stand
ing at the window, sometimes my eyes rested on the blue lake that might have been no more than a piece of sky. But I soon grew tired, since the blue was made of much intensity of light. My bleary eyes then went to rest in the naked and burning desert, which at least didn’t have the hardness of a color. Three millennia later the secret oil would gush from those sands: the present was opening gigantic perspectives onto a new present.
Meanwhile, today, I was living in the silence of something that three millennia later, after it was eroded and built again, would be stairs again, cranes, men and constructions. I was living the pre-history of a future. Like a woman who never had children but would have them three millennia later, I was already living today from the oil that would gush in three millennia.
If at least I’d entered the room at dusk — tonight the moon would be full, I remembered when recalling the party on the terrace the night before — I would see the full moon rising over the desert.
“Ah, I want to go back to my house,” I suddenly asked myself, since the moist moon had made me long for my life. But from that platform I couldn’t manage a single moment of darkness and moon. Only the heap of embers, only the errant wind. And for me no flask of water, no vessel of food.
But maybe, less than a year later, I’d make a find that nobody and not even me would have dared to expect. A gold chalice?
For I was seeking the treasure of my city.
A city of gold and stone, Rio de Janeiro, whose inhabitants under the sun were six hundred thousand beggars. The treasure of the city could be in one of the breaches in the rubble. But which one? That city needed the work of a cartographer.
Raising my gaze ever further, to ever steeper heights, before me lay gigantic blocks of buildings that formed a heavy design, still not shown on a map. My eyes went on, seeking on the hill the remains of some fortified wall. Reaching the top of the hill, I let my eyes circumnavigate the panorama. Mentally I traced a circle around the semi-ruins of the favelas, and recognized that there once could have been a city living there as large and limpid as Athens at its apogee, with children running between the merchandise displayed in the streets.