He began by telling me first of all that I owed him nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in me of himself.
What he noted in my diary were only the passages which revealed our sameness. I began naturally enough to think that he loved in me only what there was of himself, that beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no curiosity.
“How are we to know,” I asked him, “when it is we are writing prophetically, or when it is that our desires work miracles and bring us what we wish? Here we are sitting, telling each other all our adventures—and in my diaryI had written long ago: ‘my husband will have a terribly tragic and adventurous life… we will sit together in the evenings and I will listen to his stories… we will write in my diary together’.”
My father said: “Although I was prevented from training you, your blood obeyed me.” As he said this his face shone with the luminosity of early portraits: this luminosity the one trait which had never faded from my memory. He glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom, as he did on the German postcard photographs I had pasted in my diary… Herr Professor… Berlin… Taken soon after we had left Berlin, when he was thirty years old and the beautiful perfumed countess was in love with him but he could not bear the smell of ether which pierced through her perfume.
“We must look for light and clarity,” he said, “because we are too easily unbalanced.”
I felt as if I were entering a finished world, a static world. Was this the end? The goal? A finished world. A creation to which there was nothing to add. The way he saw his life as a completed work. The air was too rarified, too crystallized his vision. Like rock crystal. I could look through it as I looked for hours through glass and colored stones, with a love of transparency, a love of clairvoyance. But I felt I was not where he was.
“You’ve got such strong wings,” he said. “One feels there are no walls to your life.”
I was sitting at the foot of his bed. The waiter was coming in and out of the room with bottles of mineral water. The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing for ten days.
“Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, and you’re my daughter, and I can’t marry you! You’re the synthesis of all the women I loved.”
“Just to have found each other will make us stronger for life.”
Samba the negro came in with mail. When my father saw the letters addressed to me he said: “Am I to be jealous of your letters too?”
Between each one of these phrases there was a long silence. A great simplicity of tone. We looked at each other as if we were listening to music, not as if we were saying words. Inside both our heads, as we sat there, he leaning against a pillow and I against the foot of the bed, there was a concert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two longs spools of flute-threads interweaving between his past and mine, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like the springs inside of our bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy poundings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the throb of blood, the beat of desire which drowned all the vibrations, louder than any instrument, the harp singing god, god and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in his eyes, god, god, god, Isolina with auburn hair, and the drums pounding desire at the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an instant, in love, in love with the harp singing god, and the violins shaking their hair and I passing the violin bow gently between my legs, drawing music out of my body, my body foaming, the harp singing god while all the women of the world lay under him in a ritual of fecundation, the drum beating, beating sex, d pollen inside of the violin cases, the curves of the violin case and the curves of women’s buttocks, cries of the ‘cello, the ‘cello singing a dirge under the level of tears, through subterranean roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways to the harp singing god, god, god, god, and the faun through the flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black notes ascending the dust route of the ‘cello’s tears, an earth tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, the walls of our faith, the ‘cello weeping, and the violins trembling, the beat of sex breaking through the middle and splitting the white notes and the black notes apart, and the piano’s stairway of sounds rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind and beyond the violins comes the second voice of the orchestra, the voice out of the bellies of the instruments, underneath the notes being pressed by hot fingers, in opposition to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instruments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked into the ‘cello, our dreams wrapped in dust inside of the piano box, this box on our heads cracking with resonances, the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves, faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not exchanged, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth who could have eaten me whole, singing inside the boxes of our heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried us into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in us, sex, sex, sex, sex, desire, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of women’s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissonances, the hardness, the flute weeping.
We danced because we were sad, we danced all through our life because we were sad, and the golden top dancing inside of us made the notes turn, the white and the black, the words we wanted to hear, the words we heard, the new faces of the world turning black and white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stairways from the bellies of the ‘cello full of salted tears, the water heaving when the violins sang together, the sea coming on us, the sea of forgetfulness, yesterday grinning through the bells and castanets, and to-day a single note all alone, like our fear of solitude, quarreling, the orchestra taking our whole being together and lifting us clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one long smooth note like the wind at night, no bloodshedding knife to its touch, the touch of music from distance far beyond the orchestra which answered the harp, the flute, the ‘cello, the violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of our palates, music in the tongue, in the fingers, when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the violin cords, and all desire mounting in space to fall again on the bellies, the bellies of women he fingered like a musician, their cries rising and falling with the heaving wind of the question-marked opening of the ‘cello, borne on the orchestra’s wings, and hurt and wounded by its knowledge of me, for thus we cried, thus we laughed like the bells and the castanets, thus we rolled from black to white stairways, from bodies rolling to bodies erect and dreaming spirals of desire and spirals of liberation from desire, where is serenity? All our forces at work together, our fingers playing, our voices, our heads cracking with fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, the chaos, the fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting in a hall inside the spider webt, the failures, the defeats. I writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and he and I dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkless clothes, vanity and worship, faith and doubt, losing our blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in us, too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of our desire splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, sex songs, quest and hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the gaping split-open face of the trombone swollen with laughter. Walls falling under the pressure of will, walls of the absolute falling with each part of us breathing music into instruments, our arms waving, our voice, our love, our hatred, an orchestra of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent in our heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to stifle, to silence, to drown, and with this singing of feet, head, tongue, sex, this dismembering to pass into the everywhere, trains moving, bodies separating, arms and legs melting together like the spires of cathedrals, drinking life, music spilling out from the eyes in place of tears, music spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling from his finger-tips in place of caresses, music exchanged between us instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of our thoughts, our reveries, our emotions, our unknown self, our giant self, our shadow.