I was gradually reaching the limit of my abilities to contain the disconcerting rushes, the incompatible surges that were sweeping over me. I roamed aimlessly through the house, I spent a whole hour caressing with my fingertips the polished wooden ornaments decorating the doors to von Üxküll’s apartments, I went down to the basement with a candle to lie down on the hard dirt floor, damp and cold, I inhaled with delight the dark, stale, archaic smells of this underground chamber, I went to inspect with an almost forensic meticulousness the two ascetic bedrooms of the house servants and their bathrooms, Turkish-style toilets with carefully polished corrugated foot rests, set far apart to leave ample room for the intestinal discharge of these women whom I pictured as strong, white, and well built, like Käthe. I no longer thought about the past, I was no longer at all tempted to turn back to look at Eurydice, I kept my eyes firmly in front of me on this unacceptable present, which was swelling endlessly, on the innumerable objects cluttering it, and I knew, with an unwavering confidence, that she, she was following me step by step, like my shadow. And when I opened up drawers to go through her lingerie, her hands passed delicately beneath my own, unfolded, caressed these sumptuous underclothes made of very delicate black lace, and I didn’t need to turn around to see her sitting on the sofa unrolling a silk stocking, adorned at midthigh with a wide band of lace, on that smooth and carnal expanse of white skin, slightly hollowed out between the tendons, or else putting her hands behind her back to hook her bra, in which she adjusted her breasts, one by one, with a quick movement. She would have carried out these gestures in front of me, these everyday gestures, shamelessly, without false modesty, without exhibitionism, exactly as she must have carried them out alone, not mechanically but with attention, taking great pleasure in them, and if she wore lace underwear, it wasn’t for her husband, or for her lovers of a night, or for me, but for herself, for her own pleasure, the pleasure of feeling this lace and this silk on her skin, of contemplating her beauty thus adorned in her tall mirror, of looking at herself exactly as I looked at myself or wanted to be able to look at myself: not with a narcissistic gaze, or with a critical gaze that searches for defects, but with a gaze that is desperately trying to grasp the elusive reality of what it sees—a painter’s gaze, if you like, but I am not a painter, any more than I am a musician. And if she had stood thus in front of me in reality, almost naked, I would have looked at her with a similar gaze, whose desire would only have sharpened its lucidity, I would have looked at the texture of her skin, the weft of her pores, the little brown flecks of beauty spots strewn by chance, constellations yet to be named, the thick strokes of veins that surrounded her elbow, climbed her forearm in long branches, then came to swell the back of her wrist and hand before ending up, channeled between the joints, disappearing into her fingers, exactly as in my own man’s arms. Our bodies are identical, I wanted to explain to her: aren’t men the vestiges of woman? For every fetus starts out female before it differentiates itself, and men’s bodies forever keep the trace of this, the useless tips of breasts that never grew, the line that divides the scrotum and climbs the perineum to the anus, tracing the place where the vulva closed to contain ovaries that, having descended, evolved into testicles, as the clitoris grew unrestrainedly. Only one thing was actually lacking to be a woman like her, a real woman, the mute e, in French, of feminine word endings, the extraordinary possibility in that language we shared of saying and writing: “Je suis nue, je suis aimée, je suis désirée.” It’s this e that makes women so terribly female, and I suffered inordinately from being stripped of it, it was a flat loss for me, even harder to compensate for than the loss of that vagina I had left at the gates of existence.
From time to time, when these inner tempests calmed down a little, I took up my book again, I let myself be carried peacefully away by Flaubert’s pages, facing the forest and the low, gray sky. But, inevitably, I came to forget the book on my lap, as the blood rose to my face. Then to gain time I again took up one of the old French poets, whose condition must not have differed much from my own: I know not when I am asleep / Or when I wake, unless I’m told. My sister had an old edition of Thomas’s Tristan, which I also lazily leafed through until I saw, with a terror almost as keen as that of a nightmare, that she had marked the following lines in penciclass="underline"
Quant fait que faire ne desire
Pur sun buen qu’il ne puet aveir
Encontre desir fait voleir.
When he does what he does not desire to do
Because he can’t have what he wants
He turns his will against desire.
And once again it was as if her long ghostlike hand had come and slipped under my arm, all the way from her Helvetian exile or else right behind me, to place a finger gently in front of my eyes under these words, this irrevocable sentence that I couldn’t accept, that I rejected with all the miserable determination I could still muster.
And thus I fell into a long, endless stretto, where every response came before the question was over, but in retrograde, like a cancrizans. Of the last days spent in that house, only scraps of images, disconnected and senseless, remain, confused but animated too by the implacable logic of dream, the very speech or rather the clumsy croaking of desire. I slept every night now in her odorless bed, stretching myself out on my stomach with all my limbs extended, or else curling into a ball on my side, my head empty of all thought. Nothing remained in this bed that recalled her, not even a strand of hair, I had taken off the sheets to examine the mattress, hoping to find at least a bloodstain, but the mattress was as clean as the sheets. So I set about soiling it myself, squatting with my legs wide apart, the ghostly body of my sister open beneath me, her head turned slightly aside and her hair pulled back to reveal her small, delicate, round ear that I loved so, then I collapsed in my slime and abruptly fell asleep, my belly still sticky. I wanted to possess this bed, but it was the bed that possessed me, no longer let me go. All kinds of phantoms came to coil up in my sleep, I tried to chase them away, for I wanted only my sister there, but they were stubborn, they returned by the ways I least expected them, like the shameless little feral girls in Stalingrad, I opened my eyes and one of them had slid right up against me, she was turning her back to me and pushing her buttocks against my belly, my penis entered her from that end and she stayed like that, moving very slowly, and then afterward she kept me in her ass, we fell asleep that way, embedded in each other. And when we woke up she slipped her hand between her thighs and raked my scrotum, almost painfully, and again I became hard inside her, one hand on the bone of her taut hip, and I turned her over onto her stomach and began again, as she clenched her little fists in the sheets and moved without a sound. She never left me free. But then another, unexpected feeling came over me, a gentle and forlorn feeling. Yes, that’s exactly it, it’s coming back to me now, she was blond, gentle and forlorn. I don’t know how far things went between us. The other image, the one of the girl sleeping with her lover’s cock in her ass, doesn’t involve her. It wasn’t Helene, that’s certain, for I have a confused idea that her father was a policeman, a high official who didn’t approve of his daughter’s choice and regarded me with hostility, and then also with Helene my hand had never gone farther than her knee, which here was perhaps not the case. This blond girl too took up room in the big bed, room that wasn’t hers. All this caused me a great deal of concern. But finally I succeeded in driving them all away, by brute force, at least up against the torsaded posts of the canopy, and in leading my sister back by the hand and laying her down in the middle of the bed, I spread out on top of her with all my weight, my belly naked right against the scar slicing across hers, I thrust against her, vainly and with increasing rage, and finally there was a great opening, as if my body in turn were split open by the surgeon’s blade, my bowels poured onto her, the children’s door opened on its own beneath me and everything flowed in that way, I was lying on her as one lies in the snow, but I was still clothed, I took off my skin, abandoned my naked bones to the embrace of this cold white snow that was her body, and it closed in over me.