The musician, imitating the gestures of a priest, opens a can of fruit in syrup. He places half of a yellow apricot in each woman’s mouth. They swallow it in just one mouthful.
Sacramental bread bathing in syrup!
A pregnant woman makes her entry. Stomach made of cardboard. The pope notices that she has a plaster hand. He takes the hand and breaks it into a thousand pieces. He opens the stomach using a pickax. (I must control it to prevent him from truly wounding her.)
He puts his hands on the interior of her stomach and takes out light bulbs. The woman screams as if she is giving birth. She gets up, tears a baby made of rubber from her breasts and hits the pope in the chest. The doll falls to the ground. The woman leaves. I pick up the baby. I open its stomach with a scalpel and take out a live fish convulsing in anguish. End of the music. Brutal drum solo. The fish continues to wriggle; the drummer shakes champagne bottles until they explode.
Upon seeing the froth covering everything, the pope has an epileptic attack. The fish dies. The drummer is silent. I throw the animal over the handrail; it falls in the middle of the spectators. Presence of death.
Everyone leaves the stage except me.
Jewish music. Dreadful hymn. Slowness.
Two huge white hands hurl a cow’s head at me. It weighs eight kilos (seventeen pounds). Its whiteness, its dampness; her eyes, her tongue. .
My arms feel its coldness. I myself get cold. In an instant, I become this head.
I sense my body: a corpse in the form of a cow’s head. I fall to my knees. I want to yell. That is impossible because the cow’s mouth is closed. I stick my index finger in her eyes. My fingers slip on the pupils. I don’t feel anything but my fingers — sensible satellite turning around a dead planet.
I feel myself like the cow’s head: blind. Desire to see.
I pierce the tongue with a hole punch; I open the jaws. I take out the tongue. I direct the head, mouth open, toward the sky, while I myself also look up, mouth ajar.
A howling that does not come from me but from the corpse. One more time, I see the public. Immobile, frozen, made by the skin of a dead cow. All of us are the corpse. I throw the head to the middle of the stage. It becomes the center of our circle.
A rabbi enters (the huge white hands were his).
He wears a black coat, a black hat, a white Father Christmas beard. He walks like Frankenstein. He is standing on a silver basin. He takes three bottles of milk from a leather suitcase. He dumps them into his hat.
I rub my cheek against his. His face is white. We take a milk bath. Baptism.
He grabs hold of my ears and kisses me passionately on the mouth. His hands take hold of my buttocks. The kiss lasts several minutes. We tremble, electrified. Kadish.
With a lead pencil, he traces two lines from the corner of my mouth to my chin. My jaw now looks like a ventriloquist’s doll. He is seated on the butcher’s block. One of his hands rests on my back as if he wants to pass through, to cut my spinal column, to put his fingers in my rib cage and squeeze my lungs and make me scream or beg. He makes me move. I feel like a machine, a robot. Dread. I must stop being a machine.
I slip my hand between his legs. I open his fly. I put my hands in and with a keen force I take out a pig’s foot (similar to the one that I imagined to be the phallus of my father when I was five years old). With the other hand I take out a pair of bull’s testicles. I spread my arms out in the form of a cross. The rabbi screams as if he were castrated. He appears dead.
The Jewish music becomes stronger; each time, it becomes more and more melancholy.
A butcher appears, wearing a hat, a coat, a black beard, his apron covered in blood.
He spreads the rabbi out and begins the autopsy: he puts his hands in his coat and takes out an enormous cow’s heart. Odor of meat. I nail the heart down to the cross. Long pieces of gut. I nail it.
The butcher leaves. Terrified, I lift up the rabbi’s hat. I take out the cow’s brain. I squash it against my head.
I take the cross and put it near the rabbi. I take from the suitcase a long plastic red ribbon and attach the old man to the cross, covered in guts.
I lift up everything — wood, meat, clothing, body — and I throw it all along the length of the ramp that descends to the public. (Everything weighs nearly 125 kilos: in spite of the shocking violence, the man feels nothing and has not a scratch on him.)
The women in white, black, pink, and silver enter.
They kneel.
Waiting.
A new person enters: a woman covered in black satin cut in triangles: a kind of spiderweb. A three-meter rubber dinghy is attached to her suit and resembles an enormous vagina. Orange plastic filled with air. The bottom of the raft is made of white plastic.
Symboclass="underline" the hymen.
Dance. She signals to me. When I approach, she dismisses me. When I move away, she follows me. She mounts me. The raft covers me completely. I take the ax. I split the white bottom. Hurling. I split the web and take refuge in the vagina. I stay between her legs, hidden by the black satin. From a bag hidden near her stomach, I take out forty live turtles and throw them at the public.
They seem to gush from the enormous vagina, like live stones, one could say.
I begin to be born. Cries from a woman giving birth. A woman sobs. I fall to the ground in the middle of the glass lightbulbs, bits of plates, feathers, blood, pieces of firecrackers (while he shaved my head, I lighted thirty-six, one for each year of my life), puddles of honey, pieces of apricot, lemons, bread, milk, meat, rags, wood splinters, nails, sweat: I rebirth in that world. My cries resemble those of a baby or an old man. The old rabbi, making a desperate effort, hops from here to there, attached to the cross like a pig in agony. He frees himself from the plastic ribbon. He exits.
The woman-mother pushes the woman in black toward me. I lift her. I bring her to center stage, her arms are spread open. A corpse-cross. The black paint suggests a cremation: my own death.
Giving me life, the woman threw death into my arms. Defiled with the makeup of my partner, I begin to turn completely black. My face looks as if it were burned.
The women attach us, one to the other, with bindings. I am tied to her by the waist, the arms, the legs, and the neck. This bony cadaver is encrusted in me, and I am encrusted in her. We look like Siamese twins: we nearly make one. Slowly, we improvise a dance. We sprawl on the ground. The movements are not hers or mine, but both of ours at the same time. We can control them.
The women in white and pink splashes us with mint, black currant, and lemon syrup. The gooey liquid, green, red, and yellow, covers us; mixed with the dust, it creates a kind of mud.
Magma.
The curtain begins to fall slowly. Our united bodies cling one to the other, like pillars. We want to rise; we fall.
The curtain is down.
(All the ingredients employed in the “Sacramental Melodrama” were thrown at the public: suits, axes, containers, animals, bread, auto parts, and so forth. Big altercations between those present who fought like birds of prey to salvage the relics. Nothing remained.)
Ahem, I ask myself if I regret having missed the “Sacramental Melodrama” or if I am glad to have missed it.
Wait! It’s not over yet! The audience then argued over the live turtles, the internal organs, the steaks, the hair, and so forth. I returned to the stage and addressed them: “Generally, one pays a high price for one’s place at a theater to receive very little. Today, there was no charge, you didn’t pay anything, and you received a lot. It is midnight. In order to present to you the last part of this poem, I need two hours of preparation. Go get some coffee and come back at two in the morning.”