But the shipwreck does not exist. Only entertainment exists.
Days go by. Time goes by. The leaves fall from the trees. But they grow back. Governments fall, others take their place. The price of gasoline goes up and back down.
“We’re used to watching scenes from Dachau while calmly eating our macaroni and cheese.”
“The image, in contrast to active memory, has a debilitating quality about it.”
“What’s the latest on Nicaragua, anyway?”
“It’s been a while since they gave us any news on the Iran-Iraq war.”
A coup d’état in some African country awakens that country from the lethargy of the map, only to let it sink back again into the nonexistence of the white world, the white news, the white madness. Because it will be whites who will meet with whites in Geneva to agree, if in fact they do agree, on nuclear arms. Those with black, yellow, and brown skins are out of the game. “White gentlemen,” she adds. “Because the white ladies aren’t going to agree on anything of the sort. They will visit museums or fine clothing stores, or they will attend a charity ball.”
“Whites have done a good job of dividing the world into capitalists and communists.”
Time goes by. Days go by. The seasons change their shirts, one after the other. He persists in not changing his. He likes grime. He feels more comfortable in filth. As for her, she likes order; she’s obsessive about cleanliness. Days go by. Time goes by. November is a very sweet month.
He smokes. Before he even looks for it, his lighter is in his hand. Before he even has time to desire something, she gives it to him, having guessed it. They have everything. But something is missing from their relationship. What could it be? “It’s like last night at the theater,” she says. “From my seat, I could only see half the stage. When the singers sang on the part of the stage that I could see, everything was fine. But when the action took them over to what was for me the dark side of the moon, I could only hear their voices. That was agony. I had to imagine them. And however much I bent down, I was still in a disadvantageous position.
From that box, with those two lesbians in front of me who would not let me squeeze into the front row, I couldn’t enjoy the show fully. I felt as if half of me was also missing. It was as if my destiny was showing me, at that moment, my situation. Because that’s how I am, my darling, without you. A half. With the thirst of the whole. Listening to the voices and imagining the movements. With two lesbians lying in wait like dogs.
Besides, if one should bend over too much, throwing up is just a matter of time.”
Yes, what was missing was perspective, that which keeps people alive. Without it, even the most permanent things in life seem temporary. The best things become bad. The most bearable become unbearable.
She leads him. She opens up horizons for him.
She helps him understand himself. Who he is. What he wants out of life. He writes and thinks of her in her pensive moods. He writes: “The word belongs half to him who speaks it and half to him who hears it”
(Montaigne). “Every door has its nail” (popular proverb).
But how to find the halfway point, the golden rule of cohabitation? How not to encroach upon each other’s land? When a woman, by nature, wants to share everything with the man she loves, and a man, by nature, when he loves a woman, wants to share everything with his friends? Or with other women whom he doesn’t love? When the home is the woman’s natural environment, and everything outside the home (the ballpark, the bar) is the man’s natural environment? When the void seeks to be filled, because the void does not accept itself, and woman has such a void, by nature (Bellotti), while man has a protuberance that can fill the void?
He builds guns, cannons, rockets, all phallic extensions of this protuberance. While woman lives surrounded by holes: drains, wells, bidets, buttonholes.
The void dresses up in fine clothes to cover itself. But it’s always lying in wait, gaping, under the clothes.
Thus the problem remains. And the soul is the void within the void. That’s where it’s based. And it gives off a foul odor when nothing fills it. By contrast it is calmed when something fills it. What would be the reason for having doors if nobody came in through them? (Windows are no more than breasts. They can only be aroused.) A tomb is a door that closes because nobody can go through it. However, things become more complicated from the moment that man himself realizes that he is half woman, since at the base of his penis lies the canceled female sex.
Suddenly, he is attracted to the shag carpet, to its provocative, fiery red. He tells her of a secret source of pleasure, at the root of his tree. If she presses down there…. It is the remnant of the female, which, when gender was determined in his mother’s womb, decided to become male. That is where the roots of his pleasure lie. She presses down on it. And then he, sweetly, upon this red shag carpet, explodes like an overripe pomegranate.
He leads her along paths, not at all certain at first, to the source of her ancient joy, where as a little girl, an adolescent, she tasted that joy alone, in her lonely room, in her lonely bed. And as he leads her, as they trace together the paths, the musical roads of pleasure, she attaches herself to him, she becomes a barnacle on him, a limpet on his rock. Any attempt to unhook her has the opposite result: she hangs on even tighter. The limpet begins to spread and gradually covers the entire rock. By then, the rock has taken on the limpet’s shape, like a Chinese hat.
“Weaning is impossible. We have reached the point beyond which there can be no separation,” he writes.
— 3-
He leads her, he takes her into depths that even she doesn’t know, into unexplored regions, but she likes sinking with him, tied to him, their bodies tightly bound, with their exchangeable temperatures, where the current circulates, comes around again, where the force leaves her to gather in him and pass back into her, two bodies like suction cups, one upon the other, four absorbent hands, his on her chest and the nape of her neck, there where all the pathways of the nerves converge to pass through, and he with his hand, controlling the tollgate of the nerves, as if he dominated them; and she is quiet and dominated, because her head has the pedestal of his hand to lean on, her beautiful head, as he says and she knows it, while with her hands she massages his back, feeling the bones, his silken skin; bound this way, one on top of the other, he carries her with him to the tunnel, so he can bring her out into the light on the other side, so they can keep going, passing through another tunnel, another light, until a field appears before her, the field of daisies from her childhood years, where she becomes a child again, during the time she snuck out of the shack without her mother knowing, ran through the daisies to meet her lover and lie down with him on the sweet-smelling soil among the daisies that would break their fingers on her, just as she is now breaking hers on his back, until little by little her hands abandon him, becoming wings, or at any rate trying to become wings, because she wants to fly now, or rather she is flying, carrying under her back, stuck to her, the red shag carpet; he sees her hand quivering like a wing and he lets his hand take hers, their fingers intertwined, without rings that hurt; they are now in ecstasy, they move, they fly together, and instead of soaring, he takes her lower and lower, to a premythical, forgotten time, where, as a little girl, she would see around her an alien, treacherous world, lying in wait for her, tempted by her beauty, but now she does not fear it because he’s there, and in this inverted position, her eyes, their eyes, fixed on one another, communicating almost desperately, their panting, and time is folded over, like a crust, a pastry crust that envelops her, like the cream puffs her grandmother used to make and bake in the oven just as she now, as if burning up with a fever, is baked with him in ovens, crematoriums, from which he escaped but to which she offers herself in a holocaust, and she gives herself to him and he gives himself to her entirely; she is in a deep, hidden corner, from where as a little girl she now sees herself becoming an adult, for what she was always waiting for, love without terms, without limitations, without borders, without stopwatches or dos and don’ts, the kind of love that nourishes you and makes you beautiful in your own eyes, giving him everything that is she, freely, selflessly, generously, while he whispers sweet words in her ear: “I love you, I’ll always love you, I want you,” sees her opening the bolt to where she keeps her treasures: “Take them,” she says, “take them all,” and relieved that she has given him everything without asking for anything in return, she reaches, finally, her fulfillment.