Or did that mean that someone in this town was listening to me… one single person… or perhaps even an entire police force?—I laughed mockingly: Where were they then, and where were the women? I looked at the bottle with renewed interest; a very tempting thought seemed concealed inside it.
The moment had come to halt the process; this was the moment to change things. Henceforth it was not I who needed to be newly described, but the females, since I could no longer find them. Yes, they needed to be newly pieced together from the materials available to me. What I could see were descriptions of women from literature, from the newspapers… myriads of them, whole insect swarms of black type that described women; wasn’t I completely shrouded in them, hosts of flies, gigantic alphabets of midges, black mosquitoes, locusts? But I felt I must forswear what already existed, for these descriptions had been made by men… it wasn’t enough to single one of them out, to picture it to myself, to call it up before my mind’s eye, as the vivid phrase goes, in the hope that its figure and its soul would come to a standstill before me. I’d just end up falling back on those old prototypes again: my mother perhaps, the Virgin Mary, Karl Marx, or maybe Kaspar Hauser. No, perhaps I’d have to adopt a female gaze first. From one of my scavenger hunts in the trash heaps I’d taken home a huge yellow woman’s hat, and I recalled that my mother, or one of the women from my distant past, had worn a hat like that in the summer, if not that very same one. I recalled how I looked up to stare into a circular yellow firmament, like a second sun that encompassed the entire horizon, and how I turned dizzy, how I lost all my earthly weight, and almost thought I was flying into those yellow-flaming heights, so that, out of balance, I had to cling to the woman’s knees… perhaps this was the gaze I had to recapture.
And yet they must be made from earth. Hadn’t they, just like me, been made from earth at one time? Didn’t they all contain the same glues that flowed from me—breath, mucus, tears—that flowed out to turn to earth once more? Didn’t all the sickness and putrefaction clinging to me simply mark the beginning of my transformation back into earth, and wasn’t this so for all human beings; mustn’t the females be made from earth as well? No rib of mine was necessary, anyway. All the things that escaped me every day, those substances already foreign to me, substances turning invisible… spittle, semen, shit… blood, dandruff, pox, scabs, sweat, filth, and the stale atmosphere that fled my lungs, what was all that but earth, and needn’t the females be described using the same things, couldn’t they too be created only from earthly descriptions? Didn’t the walking grave that was me contain, from the outset, all the means for doing so? How could I dream up a material that was theirs without thinking of my own material? I could bequeath them my fingernails, my teeth if need be, but they had to have souls that were different from mine. Perhaps their souls had to be begged from a female deity, who was Gaia, Earth. — And I would call these creatures the females, rather than women, flying in the face of prohibition, because it sounded more animal, more earthly. — But their souls might need to be described in much the same way as their hair. Surging and soft, a torrent that began to turn dark in the rain.
And suddenly I knew the place where the females had truly been present. Throughout my childhood I’d played with the idea of their souls. Throughout my childhood I’d unconsciously been searching for those souls. Again and again I’d expected to suddenly find them, all at once to see them lying in an unlooked-for room in the concentration camp barracks. Suddenly to stand before the wild tumultuous mounds of their hair, into which I could sink my hands, into which I could wade. Oh, if only I could have plunged one single time into the darkness of their souls, they’d never have vanished from me, they’d have continued to be present for me.
Yes, I felt I must describe the females who had lived in the torment and the simple solidarity of these barracks, where they were called females, because women staffed the guard details. That was where that honorific was invented: the females.
And when I stood outside my town, trying to recall myself to myself, those long rows of females came to mind; on the very evening of my birth they must have been herded past on the street below after leaving the factory, past the corner below where the long rows of trash cans now gleamed. Driven to the camp that began at the end of our street. And that evening might have marked my first awareness of them, with yellow evening heavens enabling me to fly, my memory of those ceaseless dragging steps, the muteness of their ranks, the weary wandering and coughing of those ceaseless rows of females.
And being a man, and not of their kind, I tried to get in through an old door. It was a door that had seemingly never been opened—smoothly painted over with yellow-brown paint, even the keyhole had been painted shut—a side door to the labyrinth of garret rooms where the cripple was ensconced by his window. I was unable to open that side door and slink in softly, inaudibly; I knew there were old closets there, old chests in which the females of our house kept unserviceable things, former possessions and bundles of old documents. Perhaps the lost pornography I’d sought in the trash was hidden there as well… but mainly I hoped to find my father’s old letters from the front, which—it was not completely impossible—might contain some mention of me. And if it were in reply to a letter from my mother, it would prove that a woman had once acknowledged my existence… Now that the cripple’s soul had long since taken flight through regal yellow skies, he would no longer hinder me from searching the garret for a piece of evidence I needed to write my tragic love story: now I could try to open the door.
Picking up the champagne bottle, I was about to leave when suddenly I felt as though I had an endless distance to go, as though a vast stretch of road lay ahead of me; suddenly I doubted whether my feet could carry me all the way to my goal. All the way to town… no, it seemed I hadn’t reached town yet, it lay far below me, over it a full moon cast a pale dome of light… it lay below me, and I saw myself on the trash heaps, trying to penetrate the light with my gaze… I was ancient, grown old amid that immense accumulation of trash that had given birth to my town… my feet would barely carry me if I tried to return to the town now, but I couldn’t let myself think about that, couldn’t let myself think that my dismissal was irreversible; I had to stride forward, heedless, with nothing but my last hope, ah no, lacking all hope, I had to stride toward the miracle, if need be crawl toward the miracle.
You females… who mustn’t be called that anymore… isn’t this the only explanation for your condition: that some unheard-of sensitization of my eyes has made you invisible to me? That I am a man transformed into the tiniest of things, and before me, before my eyes’ insect-like sensitivity, a monstrous metaphor is manifesting itself? Am I not simply the chosen one, chosen through some terrible mistake, who persists in God’s great petrified lie? And isn’t it clear to all that the chosen ones will be beaten? She’s waiting for me in that house down there, she’s waiting for her husband, her god. Should I give up at last, and transform myself into my father? Should I at last profess to being chosen…? Oh, I’ll only disappoint her once again; I can’t be a hundred percent her husband, nor a hundred percent her god. I’ll remain the child in the ark, set adrift on all shoreless rivers, senselessly expelled. Senselessly found, taken to land, senselessly rescued anew. And wasn’t I that wanderer of the deserts, females all I succumbed to, wasn’t I myself the Moses my hymns were sung to? Who fell down before the portal, who will not pass through until his death. Let him lead the sons, and, free from envy, the halfway father, let him cover them with his blessings when they pass through. With him collapsed outside the gate, while those he showed the way no longer turn to look at him, outside the gate, that portal which they call—hackneyed, worn-out, overstretched—by the mythical term the gates of paradise. On bended knees, unable to see with scar-covered retinas, able only, dying, to sense the gates distantly, oh, to see the gray light called sweet darkness recede beyond the portal. To see it darker and darker, that is, sweeter and sweeter, the sweeter it is the harder to attain, more unattainable the farther the dying gaze tries to penetrate. And nothing penetrates now but the gaze. Do I really see this town of mine only through the band of a cunt? Do I see nothing now but how it blurs back there and goes soft? Unfilled void, glimmering dim over onward-growing, swelling forms; chameleon-colored, fish-mouth closed with the inertia of metals flowing together. Quicksilver mushroom membranes growing together, flooded with milky serum. Until that medusa-like boundary reminds me, the blind man, that the real existence of my town can be experienced only by smell. And was it really to be found behind that cleft of flesh I saw last… behind that obscenely grimacing mouth of skin and hair formed by my half-opened eyelids? Is it down there still, behind the lashed slit of my eye that a frigid sleep now seeks to close? Would it still be discernible behind the fleetingly parted thighs of the woods? Down there in the south, my town that staged my brilliant ovulation. That spat me out in the heat of the summer, with the shudder of a thirsty cry, the slap of a blind shell landing in the mud; it was I who was born in a cloudburst of breaking green waters… My father was born to my town, and in their fear the females shuffled faster past the street corner under the window… while birth swallowed me up and throttled me, throttled, strangled, snapped at me, but finally spat me out anyway… the birth of my father mixed up its spawn, it was I it vomited out, the first raven cry it squeezed out was mine. Cursed town, I won’t sing your praises with my father’s prick; cursed town, I’ll pour myself all over you, I’ll jerk off against your walls, I… I’ll pass down the sloping tracks of dead bodies between you and me, O maman, my sun of absentia, I won’t heed the dead gods between us, I’ll come closer to gaze at last into the place of my birth, into the hole of my birth, closer to gaze into my nation. Females, I’ll take your fathers from you. Oh, so as to gaze at last through this blurred lens, through this grate. Oh, to press to my eye the scalding monocle of a vulva. To learn how to see, to recognize myself in you. To see the blood, your blood that has grown on inside me, in my veins’ Milky Way; to see the nerves menstruating within the windings of my brain. To smell death as it begins to cover me with black spots. To see the twitching of the genius as it schemes to slip out in the fluid channel of your darkness. No, I’ll wait no longer, I don’t want you to hold my eyes shut forever. Not only my breath should stroke the strength of your thighs, my breath that once learned to breathe within you. My eyes want you back as well, my eyes that, through you, learned how to see. My eyes want to press close to you. To your water plants, to the hole of your rage. To your soul’s lovely core, to the cloaca with your feces. To the exploded bomb in your flesh. Down the branches of your veins… to cease comparing you to vegetative things: your hair doesn’t flutter in the trees, you aren’t in the flowers, nor in the fruit and vegetables that rot in the trash cans… down your hills, to cease comparing you to animal things, O she-wolf… to let the soft pulse of your senses mount in my throat at last… not to kill, only to compare you at last to human and female things, O creatress… ah, so that I no longer need to compare you with your silence, with your invisibility, with your odorlessness, with your murderous purity. Yes, your murderous purity is a dead general’s vengeance. — Ah, are you finally where I can’t follow you, jailer, have you finally fallen in line among the ranks, are you finally free in your silence? Oh, you’ve freed yourself from the word that loved me, and I’m chasing all alone through the madness of my dreams that still echo with the word your mouth spoke, your cunt spoke. And you say you can never forgive me… never forgive me… you’re divorced from Jack the Ripper… you say you can’t stand me any longer, but are you really free, in your carefully dosed academic silence? You needn’t reveal it to me, you needn’t do what you once wanted to do, before you’d freed yourself from love. — Sad labor of persuasion, as I toil, handful by handful. — I’m speaking to you as though you really were free now… and I hear you laugh, I hear you laugh long and unflagging. Your laughter drowns out the stick rapping above the ceiling of the room, faint padding footsteps through the smoke. Though your freedom may be possible in other countries, in the sight of this nation it’s soaked in blood. Corpses lie between the barbed-wire barriers within sight of your wild rendezvous. Gas taps open into this freedom. The wall around your freedom is pocked with bullet holes, electric shocks lash lazy madmen in the cells of your freedom. Your freedom is paid for with the money of those left behind. It’s not your fault that I was left behind, I forgot you on a long ride spent sleeping…