Her aplomb somewhat restored, the executive picked up the box of bonbons and studied its provenance. “Greek bonbons? I’ve never heard of Greek bonbons,” and she bit into a particularly delicious kind (which I’d already tried), filled with strawberry liqueur, and lied. “They’re quite bad, too. You should have ordered the chocolates from Ufa; those are very good.”
LINDA, who was also turning out to be rather an expert on CHOCOLATE, added: “That’s because those other countries add too much milk; in the OCCIDENT they try to save on everything. The Union’s CHOCOLATES are purer. Unfortunately, they’re hard to find these days; we no longer have an adequate supply of cacao. .”
The executive agreed with this, and explained, to my astonishment (I, who’d taken it for granted that the IMPERIUM possessed the world’s most extensive cacao plantations), “We’re not importing it from Brazil because of the trade gap.”
COLLAPSE OF THE IMPERIUM. As a uniquely privileged witness, the manservant hidden in the stables who recognizes the trembling emperor — despite the matronly cosmetics used to disguise his face — and watches him saddle the thoroughbred for his flight, I, who came from territories beyond the sea, watched the beggars proliferating in the metro stations and discovered — my heart in my throat — purple graffiti that denounced the cruelty of the IMPERIUM, all the spilled Russian blood. I saw my own years of savings devoured by runaway inflation; I dined for three dinars one evening and breakfasted the next morning for a thousand. I learned to live without the security, the hope, the center of the universe that was the Doctrine, and every day awoke with a smaller portion of soul, seeing more clearly, yes, but diminished ever further by the awareness of my error, the years gone by in vain, all that I had wagered on a false emperor. I was attacked in my own home by men sent from the Sassanid Empire in search of gold; I leapt into the void with my hands bound, like a Hindu prince escaping from his alcazar as it crashes down in flames around him, then fleeing at full gallop, hugging the neck of his steed. And my despair was such that I was tempted to traffic in weapons for the IMPERIUM’S southern wars and I dealt in the electron, the yellow stone, provided to me by two blond and insolent merchants from the Baltic.
I watched the IMPERIUM fall, saw its soul depart from its body through a thousand tiny cracks, saw that immense, enraged, and fearsome body emit wheezes of impotence until it collapsed, inert, abhorred, a shapeless sprawl on the ground, the occasion for photographs taken by tourists playing the triumphal hunter: one foot on the bear’s prone mass, fingers in a V.
CONTEMPLATION OF THE IMPURE. The naked body horrifies the aesthete. This garret was undoubtedly ideal for P.O.A., the orphaned lightbulb high above, the translucent washbasin, the creaking floorboards. I lowered LINDA onto a brass bed next to the window. The girl, at last feeling the effects of the considerable quantity of champagne she had drunk, went on talking as if in a dream, enumerating the reasons for her negative response (but by now incapable of actually changing anything). I looked out the window, scrutinizing the wet ribbon of the canal and a few seagulls wheeling across the gray sky. I leaned out over the ledge a little farther. Yes: the bridge with the winged lions2 was visible from here and I could mention it in my novel.
I loosened the buckles on her ankle boots and managed to get each one off with a single tug. I sat her up and tried to straighten her torso but her head swayed weakly on her limp neck. I raised her arms and pulled off the dress. When I had her in my hands at last, LINDA fell backward. Her inner framework, the ribbed structure that gave volume to her body’s core, was now visible. Lamentably, she was only a woman. A naked body crossing through space in a bra and pink panties. I sat down in front of her and devoted one long hour to the study of her feet, the pink folds in their soles. How could such prettiness include these rough cracks, these calloused stumps? In despair, I moved on to the legs where I breathed easier — a nice roundness to the knees — and then continued slowly upward, her perfect figure installing itself smoothly in my memory, fitting itself into the emptied ideal of LINDA EVANGELISTA. In the distance her breasts began, the deep anatomical recesses, the dazzling whiteness of her neck, the red swirl of hair on the pillow. I cannot endure the sight of a naked woman for very long: no one can. That’s why we always elude this moment, submerged in the shadows of close proximity, the single, blind, tactile continuum that is all women, the same basal heat. I subjected her (subjected myself) to this scrutiny because I sought to destroy any feeling of love that might otherwise contaminate the purity of my experiment. I examined her slowly, through the wee hours of that morning, piece by piece: the ceaseless play of valves, the measured flow of secretions, the unending skin like the surface of a Klein bottle, without a single point of rupture, artificiality, anything modeled by the hand of man.
It was getting lighter by the moment. A fly buzzed around and flew into the windowpane. LINDA turned over and I stood up in alarm. The black dot of the fly alit next to the girl’s neck. I fixed my eyes on the distended skin of the twin beanies that were her breasts and as I approached to observe them better — those purple nubbins, the serosities beneath the skin — I retched and was momentarily overcome with vertigo. I wobbled back on my heels unable to tear my eyes away, irresistibly attracted by one of those pores, and realized in horror that I was falling toward it in trigonometric increments. Then I passed through the black hole and opened my eyes onto a white clarity.
The moonlight covered the ground like snow, bathing all that surrounded him in phosphorescent splendor. At first he couldn’t tell what sort of strange being lay there but after observing it a while he realized it was the putrefying corpse of a young woman. He knew the body had belonged to a woman because the skin and the extremities had kept their form and whiteness. But her long [red] hair had slipped off the skull like a wig and the face was a shapeless mass, swollen as if she’d been severely beaten. The entrails poked out of the belly and the worms were busying themselves across the entire body. (Captain Shigemoto’s Mother, Junichiro Tanizaki)
I. Someone — a hand — helped me down the stairs. Once in the street, I collapsed to the pavement and dragged myself up against the wall like a BRODIAGA, filthy and in rags, resting after a long journey. I realized LINDA had left me there in the secret hope that I would never come back, that I would die, would forget her. I heard my own desperate panting as I tried to probe the distant walls of that deep black well and, little by little, my vision returned: sunflower seeds on the asphalt, a cigarette butt, still smoking. When the veil finally fell from my eyes, I saw, for the second time, the bridge with its Nubian lions, their gilded wings gleaming in the pale sun of the north.
With great difficulty I rose to my feet and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to take note of the building and the choppy curls of water in the canal. Suddenly, at the startling speed of a light source erupting into our field of vision, a Bach prelude flowed from one of the windows on the top floor. It was LINDA who, seeing me down there suffering in the light’s unbearable brilliance, was making use of this simple and touching prelude to bring the chapter to a pious close. And — why not admit it? — I was overwhelmed with true emotion, standing in front of that gray building, with LINDA in her garret, and the flapping wing of a sob hit me full in the face.