This woman is my coffin, and as she walks I am hidden in her image. And so as I curse her I damn myself and yet love her, falling asleep with a cast of her hand on my cock.
On the first of May you’ll go to the cemetery and there in Section Ten you will find a woman sitting on a gravestone. She will be waiting for you, to tell your fortune from the cards. You will leave her and look for explanations on the walls of boarding establishments for young ladies, but the girls’ faces in the windows will turn into budding buttocks and tulip arses, and will quiver as a lorry drives past. You will be crazed with fear they’re going to fall down into the street, fear that is close to the pleasure you felt at your first boyish erection and close to the terror you felt when your sister taught you to masturbate with a hand of alabaster.
Who do you think can console you now? Emilia is fragmented, torn scraps of her likeness have been borne away by the wind to places beyond your knowledge, and that is why you cannot call on her to be the medium of your calming, and anyway you have long ago learned not to mourn moments of farewell.
The sky slumbers and somewhere behind the bushes a woman moulded of raw flesh is waiting for you. Will you feed her on ice?
Clara always sat on the couch, wearing little, and expecting to be undressed. One day she took my revolver from a drawer, took aim, and fired at a picture. The cardinal’s hand went to his chest and he fell to the ground. I felt sorry for him and later on whenever I visited brothels on the outskirts of the city, and paid the whores for their skills, I was always aware that I was purchasing a moment of eternity. Any man who once tasted the salt of Cecilia’s cunt would sell his rings, his friends, his morals and all the rest, just to feed the insatiable monster hidden beneath her pink skirt. Oh, why do we never distinguish the first moments when women treat us as playthings, from the time when we drive them to despair? I woke up one night in the early hours, at the time flowers drop their petals and birds begin to sing. Martha was lying by my side, a treasure-house of all ways of making love, a hyena of Corinth, lying with her cunt spread open to the dawn. She caught the disgust in my eyes and surely wanted nothing better than to see me nauseated by the filth of her. I watched her sex swelling and pouring out of her cunt, over the bed and on to the floor, filling the room like a stream of lava. I got out of bed and fled madly from the house, not stopping till I reached the middle of the deserted town square. As I looked back I saw Martha’s sex squeezing out of the window like a monstrous tear of unnatural colour. A bird flew down to peck at my seed and I threw a stone to drive it away. “You will be lucky, you will repeat yourself over and over again,” a passer-by spoke to me and added: “your wife is just giving birth to a son.”
Two little sparrows kept rendez-vous every noon behind the pale blue corsage of Our Lady of Lourdes: I was innocent when I entered the catacombs. The row of square boxes naturally aroused my curiosity. There were a few boys hanging by their bound feet from the tops of the olive trees, flames roasting their curly young heads. In the next room I found a bunch of lovely naked girls entwined in a single monstrous living creature like something from the Apocalypse. Their cunts were opening and closing mechanically, some empty, some swallowing their own slime. One in particular caught my eye, the lips moving as though trying to speak, or like a man whose tongue has turned to stone trying to crow like a cock. Another was a smiling rosebud that I’d recognize among a hundred specimens, to this day. It was my dead Clara’s cunt, dead and buried, with nobody to wash her body with the mint-scented lotion she loved. Sadly I brought out my cock and stuck it aimlessly into the writhing mass, uncaring and indifferent, telling myself death always brings debauchery and misfortune together.
Then I put an aquarium on my window-sill. I had a golden-haired vulva, in it, a magnificent specimen of a penis with a blue eye and delicate veins on its temples. As time went on I threw everything I had ever loved into it: broken cups, hairpins, Barbara’s slippers, burnt-out bulbs, shadows, cigarette ends, sardine tins, all my letters and used condoms. Many strange creatures were born in that world. I felt myself to be a Creator, and I had every right to think so. When I had the aquarium sealed up I gazed contentedly at my mouldering dreams, until there was no seeing through the mildew on the glass. Yet I was sure that everything I loved in the world was there, inside.
I still need fodder for my eyes. They gulp down all they get greedily and roughly. At night, asleep, they digest it. Emilia scattered her shocked scorn generously, arousing desire in all she met, provoking visions of that hairy maw.
I still remember something that happened when I was a boy. I’d just been expelled from high school and nobody would have anything to do with me. Except my sister. I would go to her secretly, in the night. Lying in each other’s arms, legs entwined, we slowly dreamed ourselves into the dulled state of all those who lie on the knife-edge of shame. One night we heard soft footsteps and my sister nudged me to hide behind the armchair. Our father came into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him, and climbed into her bed without a word. That was when, at last, I saw how one makes love.
Emilia’s beauty was not meant to fade, but to rot.
A MAP OF THE PAIN by Maxim Jakubowski
IT ALL BEGINS in Blackheath, in South East London. They are in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly while preparing the evening meal. He drones on about the cutbacks at the BBC and his fears for his job. She isn’t really listening to him. Her mind is miles away, in a bed with another man who touches her in all the right places, in all the right ways, another man who has betrayed her so badly.
He moves over to the fridge. Opens it, searches inside.
The heat is oppressive. London has not seen the likes of it for years. And he still wears his tie.
“I don’t think we have enough tomatoes for the salad,” he says.
Her husband the vegetarian.
She fails to answer.
“I said we’re low on tomatoes.”
The information registers through a haze of mental confusion.
“I’ll pop over to the 7-Eleven on the High Street,” she volunteers. “They’re still open. I should have bought more stuff over lunch at the Goodge Street Tesco. It won’t take me long,” she says.
“I’ll come along,” her husband says. “Keep you company.”
“No, it’s all right,” she answers. “You can prepare the dressing.”
He’s always been good that way, willing to cook and do things in the kitchen. She picks up her shoulder bag, with her purse and the manuscript she’s working on and walks out onto the mews.
The night air is stale and sticky. She is wearing her white jeans and an old promotional tee-shirt.
She walks at her usual jaunty pace past the Common. Toward the shops. And breezes past the convenience store where a few spotty youths are squabbling by the ice-cream counter, and a couple of drab, middle-aged men are leafing through the top shelf girlie magazines. She heads on to the railway station. Network South East. The next train to Charing Cross is in five minutes. She uses her monthly Travelcard.