My fate was written by the confused bus rides that blurred together in my memory… Suddenly, sitting there wedged in on the sidewalk, I was overcome by a familiar feeling: it was as if I were sitting jammed inside a bus, amid densely packed fleshy bodies that pushed against me in bitter resistance, with hatred in fact, pressing against my aching, twisted thighs… evidently I’d managed to snatch the last free seat away from them… all that was missing was the rhythmic juddering of the vehicle that had persistently given me erections in my too-tight trousers. The various spans of time that bus had traversed with me inside became stretches of space in recollection, different spaces which had nothing to do with one another, and I no longer knew how often I’d ridden that route in the period I was recalling, how often I’d gotten off, gotten back on, fallen asleep again, been thrown out again from the warm interior of that swaying box filled with pungent smells… in fact, the green exhalations of the lacerated vinyl upholstery, soaked by the sweat of so many crotches, reminded me of the smell of the females. I’d only encountered it before as the burned smell of melted plastic that floated over the waters in the pressing shop. And I truly felt I’d been shut up in a quivering vagina: the bus, the interior with its inner movements, pushing, contracting, was a gigantic symbol for a vagina… it wasn’t driving, it was falling at a breakneck speed that took away my breath and my weight, sinking through all the different days and weeks only to dump me implacably in the town of my birth, suddenly outside its body’s moist interior, cut off, and the orangish, urine-colored bus hobbled on to birth another litter, exhausted, voided, but undeterred.
I got to my feet and walked away, nervous as a hunted man. I tried to recall the feeling I’d had when the pressing shop still awaited me—the pressing shop… I felt as though I’d lost my mother—but all that came to mind was an old project: I’d wanted to write a love story with a tragic ending. It was pointless to search for old, lost texts in order to tell it; the words themselves contained the necessary materials, and the story’s tragic ending could be created from inside myself as well, from the material of my existence and the language that went along with it. This country, I believed, offered plenty of tools for the purpose; the subsoil of this country was practically groaning with suppressed descriptions.
Indeed, fittingly enough, there seemed to be plenty of tragic material, material of virtually intolerable absurdity, tragedy that burst with absurdity. — It had gotten to the point that I spent several days collecting old women’s clothes from the trash heaps, painstakingly storing the slimy, moldy rags in a small cardboard suitcase; I meant to begin a new life with them; in my physical and mental degeneration I really was thinking about a new life to follow the death of my old life, however hard it was to admit it to myself. My thoughts—making a travesty of the human mental functions—went something like this: A moment would inevitably come when my descriptions of myself as a man would break down, and this would be the moment to seize. A moment in which I could ridicule the symbolism of my male descriptions, which had long since turned into an associative free-for-all, and whose style was increasingly deteriorating. Descriptions, I said to myself, have this peculiarity: when they describe something that has a processual character, they arrest the thing at some point that’s sure to be premature, preventing the process from continuing any further; and for that reason they are reactionary. — Reactionary, I said aloud, walking onward. — Reactionary, I repeated, mimicking myself. — The process of free association often prompted the resounding speeches that I delivered to myself, as I mentioned earlier, while wandering through town at night or walking back to town from the garbage dumps, trying to drown out the night bus as it roared past, to spare my consciousness the anxiety-inducing thought that some essence of femininity lingered inside that vehicle. — A hard-core reactionary, I yelled, yes, a real hard-core reactionary. This phrase gave me pause… the adjective hard suggests a phallic symbol… and thus our republic’s ideology unwittingly credits the foe with considerable virility. It would be no wonder if the females had absconded in that direction.
Preoccupied with these thoughts, I had finally arrived in front of the police station.
But no, I thought now, hard-core just means obstinate, intransigent… words I’d had some experience with, because I’d been under constant threat of reform school, court proceedings, the workhouse, ever since elementary school. — If you wanted to make the word reactionary into a phallic symbol, you’d have to add the word bottle, perhaps meaning a bottle in which everything has hardened, which doesn’t react, even under great heat. Pensively I regarded the champagne bottle I’d brought along, I shook my head, set it carefully on the curb, and sat down beside it. — Champagne, I thought, fizzy champagne… that would turn my perfidy into beauty. As I had too little money to donate an acceptable sum to the state, perhaps the champagne bottle would do. Really, I could grab it by the neck, whirl it around my head and offer it up to them with the velocity of a grenade. Oh, the blue glitter of the opaquely gleaming windows in the night. — And wouldn’t the gift of that bottle also compensate for my screaming… my terrible screams outside the closed police station, my attempt at a confrontation. And what had I screamed, anyway, was it Zola’s accusatory word from the Dreyfus Affair, so famous despite its absurdity…? Idiotic though it was, at some point I had screamed that word. — Or I’d screamed the word grenade… grenade… at least it sounded like that. — I recalled that during my repeated shouts the lights had gone out in the few still-lit windows of the police station. As though I weren’t supposed to see… as though I weren’t supposed to know behind which windows the police were still at work. — Grenade… all at once I felt that the word was a woman’s name. Grenade, bazooka… these really did remind me of women’s names. — I leaped up: the champagne bottle over there on the curb, what did it remind me of? The womb simulacrum in the trash can, women’s clothes dangling from the trash cans, skirts I put my hands up while calling women’s names, women’s names that made the police turn their lights out.