Johanna looked at the whiteness of my body as into a mirror. She was herself standing at the beginning of all things, unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to stand at the beginning of all things. And I wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.
“Nubile, nubile,” dreamed Johanna. “I could so easily break you in two.”
Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. I tread into it lightly. Caresses of down, and Johanna could do nothing against the moth invasion. Myrrh between our breasts. Incense in our mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the passing of wind in the tips of our fingers. The skin flowered under the brushing of lips and we discovered a softness like that of clouds about to burst and spill their honey. Clouds about to burst. Kisses curling into the conch-shell necks. The soft raised mounts touching as the salted pollen burned a passage-wy. Tendrils of hair bristling and between our closed lips a moan, a sigh, a sob.
Pounding of drums. Delirious sensual diffusions. Effulgence of face and breasts.
“How soft, how soft, how soft you are,” said Johanna, “how soft and treacherous.”
Cool. green-eyed fury and passion. The defence of lies. Weaving lies swiftly, like spider webs. Lies. Lies. I love no man. I love no man.
“But I see his image in your eyes. I feel him in you.”
Disguise. Infernos of doubts. Johanna, Johanna, we are not enemies. I was laughing. Peaks of faith and infernos of doubts. The taste of sacrilege. The mouths he kissed. The women whose savour he knows. Poisonous kisses. Culpable joys. Him. The one man within two women. Jealousy dormant, lying at our side, between our caresses, slipping in between our caresses.
(Johanna, Johanna, if you arouse hatred between us, you break the magic alliance and thrust us both into a world which is not as aware of us as we are of each other! All that he has failed to notice! All that he has failed to love in both of us, how delicately we have culled it, nourished each other, assuaged that famine for love, for minuteness in love! Assuaged with a woman-knowledge. Must we awake to the great pain of rivalry, the bleak war, when this hour contains all that slips between his fingers! The jewels in your voice which fall on my fantastic registering, the filigrane of my gestures which your eyes alone can follow, the words fallen which I alone can hear, the arrows of humiliations which I cover with velours and fur and brocade, the velours and incense of our words for each other, our power to lift every ordinary hour to a level of wonder— is it all to be lost, Johanna? It must not be lost. Stay in my arms. Let us keep our perfidious alliance. Together, we are queens, and we triumph. At war with each other, nourishing the hatred, we cripple each other.)
But jealousy had stirred in our flesh. We lay together, hair almost braided together, while the dawn entered the room.
(Johanna, you are afraid? You are doubting? Everything you fear is true. But you should be rejoicing that it is I and none other, I who am half of you! You don’t understand me. There is no treachery, only intermarriage, a trilogy, and passion running triangularly. But you look upon me as upon an enemy. I only completed you. But I am not complete without you. You crush the possibility of a miracle. You and I destroying solitude and fear and pain in one kiss, in one night—all the pain and rancor between women, centuries of war, buried in our twinsoft flesh, Johanna. You and I revolving around him. Your vulnerability and mine. I would always find a way to heal his thrusts.)
The grey dawn entered the room, a grey, gelatinous dawn, which showed the dirt on the window, the crack in the table, the stains on the wallpaper. Johanna and I sat up on the bed as if the dawn had opened our eyes. Slowly we seemed to descend from some dangerous height, with the weight of our fatigue and the appearance of the daylight. I saw on Johanna’s mouth the rouge spread by our kisses so that the shape of her mouth seemed lost. It was as if the colors had run.
Every cell of our dream seemed to burst all at once, with the doubt which had entered Johanna’s mind. Johanna’s face was changed. Her eyes seemed glazed, and her profile shrewd. Her serpent back stiffened, and I saw her gathering herself together as if to pounce. I felt the danger and I struggled to open my eyes, to prepare myself.
Doubt. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Johanna. It crystallized her features, her eyes, it tightened her mouth, it stiffened her body. I shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.
Bare eyes looking at each other, with bare, knife-pointed questions.
Johanna leaped from the bed and stood before me, tense, ominous, and her words burned and rent the air like summer lightning.
“I’m not duped by your love of me,” she hissed. “I know you’re playing a foul trick on me. But you didn’t fool me. I knew about it long ago. I’ve been acting all the time. I pulled off a Lesbian act on you. You thought I loved you! I hate you! I could murder you. You sicken me with your lies. Say something! Don’t lie there with round, innocent eyes. I know that you and Hans…”
“I love you, Johanna,” I said quietly, “I love you.”
“And I loathe you!” screamed Johanna. “You’re shrewd and you’re devilish. I’ll say this much for you—at last he’s found his mate! Clever you are! Far more clever than him! You’ll devour him… Funny, he always said I would devour him. But wait! When he gets you he’ll get a real spider. Wait till he finds out that he’s got a Lesbian on his hands. He used to call me a Lesbian! Me! Me!”
She strode back and forth like a panther, she jerked her head spasmodically, and then turned on me tempestuously with a shriek in her voice:
“Say something! Say something, will you! I’d like to walk over your damned face, I’d like to crush it out, your damned innocent face, you little viper!”
She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window. Then she walked over to me, and with that hard, gem-like smile of the whore, and that low, begging voice, that obscene, begging voice of the whore, she said:
“Give me the money to go away! You can do that for me at least! I want to go back to the man I really love. Don’t worry—I won’t kill you!”
She moved away, heavily, as she spoke, almost stumbling, and with that crazy, peaked, demonic smile of hers she cried:
“Do you hear me? Now—now you have the final chapter for your book!”
At this I leaped up with a sob: “Cheap! Cheap!” I shouted. “Don’t be cheap! I’ll forgive you anything, Johanna, but for God’s sake don’t cheapen yourself.” Hysterically, my voice thin and desperate, I repeated again: “It’s so cheap! So cheap! Don’t you say that! Not you, Johanna!”
Then suddenly all my anger seemed to be washed away. All my resentment. I seemed to be falling into darkness. Fog. The weight, the tremendous weight ofmy head pulled up by the clouds and swung in space, the body like a wisp of straw—clouds dragging my head, body loose and dangling—dragging me over the world. I could not stop, descend, rest. I could hear the movements of the planets and stars, the rushing, the shifting and shuffling of circles. I could hear the passing of mysteries and the breathing of monsters. I lived within a mystery. In the dark I always stretched my hand and touched Hans. My eyes were closed. The eyes of reality. To feel and to flow without destroying the dewiness of events by dissection… The dew… The night. The moisture of things and of human beings. The aureole of our breath…