Of the outside world I no longer had the slightest idea, I didn’t know what was happening in it. There was no radio, no one came. Abstractedly, I understood that to the south, while I was losing myself here in the mad bitterness of my impotence, many human lives were coming to an end, as so many other lives already had, but it all was the same to me. I couldn’t have said if the Russians were twenty kilometers away or a hundred, and I couldn’t have cared less, worse, I didn’t even think about it, for me all that was occuring in a time—not to mention a space—completely different from my own, and if that time came to meet my time, well, then, we’d see which one would give way. But despite my abandon, a naked anguish welled up from my body, trickled out of it, the way droplets of melted snow fall from a branch to strike the branches and needles below it. This anguish was mutely corroding me. Like an animal digging through its fur to find the source of a pain, like a child, obstinate and furious at his fractious toys, I sought to put a name on my sorrow. I drank, I emptied several bottles of wine or else glasses of brandy and then I abandoned my body to the bed, thrown open to the winds. A cold, wet breeze circulated through it. I looked at myself sadly in the mirror, contemplating my red, tired sex hanging in the middle of the pubic hair, I said to myself it had changed quite a bit, and that even if she had been there it would no longer be as it was before. When we were eleven or twelve our sexes were minuscule, it was almost our skeletons that collided with each other in the twilight; now, there was all this thickness of flesh, and also the terrible wounds it had undergone, a slit belly no doubt for her, and for me the long hole through my skull, a scar wrapped around itself, a tunnel of dead flesh. A vagina, a rectum, is also a hole in the body, but inside the flesh is alive, it forms a surface, for it, there is no hole. What is a hole, a void, then? It’s what is inside the head when thought dares to try to flee from itself, to separate itself from the body, to act as if the body didn’t exist, as if you could think without a body, as if the most abstract thought, the thought of the starry sky above and the moral law within, for example, were not wedded to the rhythm of the breath, the pulsing of blood in the veins, the grating of cartilage. And it’s true, when I played with Una when we were children, and later on, when I learned to use for my own purposes the bodies of the boys who desired me, I was young, I hadn’t yet understood the specific weight of bodies, and what the commerce of love involves, destines and condemns us to. Age meant nothing to me, even in Zurich. Now, I had begun the preliminary work, I sensed what living in a body could signify, and even in a woman’s body, with its heavy breasts, a body forced to sit on the toilet or crouch down to urinate, whose belly has to be cut open with a knife to take the children out. I would have loved to set that body down in front of me, on the sofa, its thighs open like the pages of a book, a narrow band of white lace hiding the bulge of the sex, the beginnings of the thick scar above it and, to the sides, the ridges of the tendons, hollows where I longed to set my lips, and to stare at it as two fingers slowly came to push the fabric aside: “Look, look how white it is. Think, think how black it is beneath.” I desired madly to see this sex lying between those two coombs of white flesh, swollen, as if offered on the serving tray of its thighs, and to slip my tongue through the almost dry cleft, from bottom to top, delicately, just once. I also wanted to watch this beautiful body pissing, leaning forward on the toilet seat, elbows resting on the knees, and to hear the urine gushing into the water; and I then wanted her mouth to lean forward as she finished, take my still-limp penis in her lips, I wanted her nose to sniff at my pubic hair, the hollow between my scrotum and my thigh, the line of my hips, to grow intoxicated with my rough, sour smell, that male smell I know so well. I was burning to lay this body down on the bed and spread its legs, to bury my nose in that moist vulva like a sow nuzzling for a nest of black truffles, then to turn the body over on its stomach, spread its buttocks with both hands to contemplate the purplish rosette of the anus blinking gently like an eye, put my nose to it, and breathe in. And I dreamed of pushing my face as I slept into the curly hair of her armpit and of letting her breast weigh on my cheek, my two legs wrapped around one of hers, my hand resting lightly on her shoulder. And when, upon waking, this body beneath me had completely absorbed me, she would have looked at me with a floating smile, would have spread her legs once again and rocked me inside her to the slow, subterranean rhythm of one of Josquin’s old Masses, and we would have slowly moved away from the shore, carried by our bodies as by a warm, becalmed sea rich in salt, and her voice would have come whispering next to my ear, clearly and distinctly: “The gods created me for love.”
It was beginning to grow cold again, it snowed a little, the terrace, the courtyard, the garden were dusted with snow. There wasn’t much left to eat, I had finished the bread, I tried to make some myself with Käthe’s flour, I didn’t really know how to go about it, but I found a recipe in a cookbook and made several loaves, from which I tore pieces that I swallowed hot as soon as they came out of the oven, crunching at the same time on raw onions that gave me an awful breath. There were no more eggs or ham, but in the basement I found some crates of little green apples from the previous summer, a little mealy but sweet, which I ate throughout the day, drinking sips of brandy. The wine cellar, however, was inexhaustible. There were also some pâtés, so I dined on pâté, on bacon grilled on the stove with onions, and on the greatest wines of France. At night, it snowed again, in heavy gusts; the wind, coming from the north, struck the house mournfully, banging the poorly fastened shutters as the snow beat against the windows. But there was no lack of wood, the stove in the bedroom roared, it was pleasant in this bedroom, where I stretched out naked in a darkness illumined by snow, as if the storm were whipping my skin. The next day it was still snowing, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down, thick and heavy, covering the trees and the ground. A shape in the garden made me think of the bodies lying in the snow at Stalingrad, I could see them clearly, their blue lips, their bronze-colored skin pricked with stubble, surprised, stunned, dumbstruck in death but calm, almost peaceful, the very opposite of Moreau’s body bathing in its blood on the carpet, of my mother’s body with its twisted neck, spread out on the bed, atrocious, unbearable images, I couldn’t stay with them despite all my efforts, and to chase them away I climbed in my mind the steps leading to the attic of Moreau’s house, I took refuge there and huddled in a corner, to wait for my sister to come find me and console me, her doleful knight with the broken head.