One more woman, wearing an executioner’s hood, high leather boots, a thick belt. She holds a whip. Her breasts are covered with a black shawl.
A rock band: six guys with hair to their shoulders.
No one must have taken drugs, except the musicians.
A handrail connects the stage to the public. The objects and costumes used during the show will be thrown at the spectators.
Sudden and rowdy opening of the curtain. The calm before the storm. I appear, dressed in a shiny black plastic suit, high trousers like those of a garbage collector, rubber boots, leather gloves, large plastic glasses. On my head, a white motorcycle helmet, like a big egg.
Two geese. I cut their throats. The music explodes: a cascade of electric guitars.
The birds ramble, dying. Feathers fly. Blood squirts on the two women in white. Trance. I dance with them. I beat them with the dying birds. Noise of death. Blood.
(I had anticipated cutting the birds’ throats on the butcher’s block. But, in my trance, carried away by a strange force, I ripped their necks with my bare hands as easily as if uncorking a bottle.)
The woman in pink, her feet still in the basin, moves her hips, while the woman in black, like a slave, begins to cover her body in honey.
I destroy the geese on the butcher block.
The woman in silver violently opens and closes the scissors. Ah, that metallic sound!
She gives the scissors to the two women in white who begin to cut the black plastic off me.
She destroys my suit. I lose my boots and gloves. Curiously possessed also, the women tear up my suit with their bare hands.
My body is then covered with twenty pounds of steak stitched onto me like a shirt.
Howling, the women hurl the red meat and tear it to shreds piece by piece. They give the pieces to the woman in silver. With an enormous silver knife, she calmly throws the steak into the boiling oil. (The proximity of the hot plate to the sweating bodies of the women produces electric shocks.)
Each piece of meat once fried is put on a white dish; the two women put the dishes in the public’s view.
I remain dressed in black leather pants. A phallus made of the same material is hung perpendicular to the floor. I have leather bracelets on my wrists and ankles: homage to Maciste, the Hercules of the Italian peplum (sword and sandal films). Concentration. Karate-kata.
I take the hatchet and cut my leather phallus into slices on the butcher’s block.
The woman in black, conscious of the skeleton, dances; she moves the bones like a marionette while I break the white dishes with a hammer in one blow.
The women in white dance without stopping. When they feel tired they take the Zazen posture.
I bring a metal frame. Slowly, I lift the black shawl covering the breasts of the executioner. Her skin is not painted. She has a sound and strong chest, a powerful body.
I put the frame around my neck while turning my back to the public.
The woman gives me a lash of the whip.
I trace a red line on her right breast with lipstick.
Second lash of the whip. The line begins at her solar plexus and descends to her vagina.
(The first lash was strong but not so much: I needed more. I sought a still-unknown psychological state. I needed to bleed to transcend myself, to break my own image. The second lash branded me instantly. Then the executioner lost control, for she had often dreamed of flogging a man. The third time, very excited, she lashed me with all her might. The wound took two weeks to heal.)
The woman wants to continue to beat me; she pushes me with all her strength. With the apparatus around my neck, I whirl around and fall to the ground. (I could have broken my cervical vertebrae but, in the strange emotional state where I found myself, time slowed down, and as if I were in a movie in slow motion, I lifted myself up without the slightest injury.) I pinch her breasts to bring her back to herself. Calm.
The woman in black brings me lemons. Ah, this yellow color!
I lay them down in a circle. I kneel in the middle.
A professional hairdresser, nearly paralyzed with fear, approaches to cut my hair.
The woman covered in honey comes down from the roof of the car. I dance with her.
Sexual desire with dreamlike force. Her tights seem to summarize all of social hypocrisy. I remove them without preamble. They slip down her honey-covered thighs. Bees. Its impact on her black pubic hair. The submission of woman. Her eyes half-closed. Her naturally accepting nudity. Liberty. Purity. She kneels next to me. On her body, starting from the stomach, I glue the hair cut from my head.
I want to give the impression that these pubic hairs grow like a forest and invade the whole body. The hands of the hairdresser are paralyzed by anxiety. It is the executioner who must manage to shave my head.
Two models of Catherine Harley, strangers to all that has happened and panicked at the idea of soiling their very expensive silk clothing (rented for the occasion) come and go, carrying two hundred fifty baguettes onto the stage.
Now my brain is on fire. I take four black snakes out of a jar of money. At first, I try with tape to stick them onto my head to substitute for hair, but I finish with trying to put them on my chest like two live crosses. Perspiration impedes me.
The snakes move around my hands like living water. Marriage.
I chase the woman in pink with the snakes. She hides in the car, like a turtle in its shell. She dances inside. She makes me think of a fish in an aquarium.
I frighten the model dressed in green. She drops her bread and jumps back.
A spectator laughs. I throw the bread at her face. (During a reception, some days later, this woman approached to tell me that receiving the bread in the face seemed like communion, as if I had presented her with a gigantic sacramental bread upside the head.)
Suddenly, lucidity: I see the public seated there in the chairs, paralyzed people, hysterical, excited, but immobile, nonparticipatory, terrorized by the chaos, which is about to engulf them; I want to throw the snakes on them or to blast them.
I restrain myself. I refuse the easy scandal of a collective panic.
Calm. Violence of the music. Amplifiers turned all the way up. I put on pants, a shirt, and orange shoes. The color of a Buddhist burned alive.
I exit and return with a heavy cross made with two wooden beams. On the cross, a crucified chicken upside-down, with two nails in its claws, like a decapitated Christ. (I had let it rot for a week.) On the cross, two road signs: on the lower part, a sign with an arrow stating “exit on top”; above the chicken, a sign stating “no exit.” I give the cross to the silvery woman. I bring another. Two signposts: always the one on the bottom indicates the exit at the top; always the one on top prohibits exiting.
I give the cross to a woman in white. I bring a third cross. I give it to the other woman in white.
The two women straddle the crosses, transforming them into gigantic phalluses; they fight; with one of the two sticks at the end of the cross in the car window, they simulate the movements of a sexual act achieved with the vehicle.
I put the basin in front of the cross. The crucified chicken is shaken off over the spectators’ heads. We let the cross fall.
Among the musicians, I choose the one with the longest hair. I lift him. He is as stiff as a mummy. I dress him in priest’s clothing. I cover him with stoles.
The women, on their knees, open their mouths and stick out their tongues as far as they will go.
A new character appears: a woman dressed in a tube-shaped suit, like an upright worm. This suggests the idea of a “papal form” in decomposition — a pope becomes a Camembert.