Open-jawed shops with loud speakers selling furniture and horoscopes. The Voice slipping coin after coin in the slot machine for music. “Do you want more music? Do you want more music?&qot Coins in the slot machine for music.
Long boardwalk of monsters with walrus faces, the rictus of the ray fish, the eyes of telescope fishes, and woodpecker’s voices. Sand in everything, lips which seemed peeled of their skin. The rust, the rust in reality slowing down her rhythm to a sob.
The sea sullen, withdrawn.
Men dragging the enormous net thrown from the end of the pier for deep sea fishing. The net was empty. The fish were being carried away. On the ground lay the jellied star fish unwanted, unsaleable. The sailors jerked out their knives and threw them into the fishes, pinning them to the boardwalk. Laughter. Another knife. No blood stains, but stains of sea ebbing from the wounds. Entrails of gelatine breaking. Coiling and recoilings of gelatinous pain. The sailors laughing.
The sea inside Lilith churning with revolt. The sea in her ebbing heavily back and forth away from human touch.
He moves wooden arms around her: they fall crossed in front of her, clasping nothing. The scarecrow is agitated. Do you want to dance? Do you want waffles? What do you want?
The sea inside of her recoiling angrily against all touch. Recoiling from the sand in his voice. He is chaining words together to establish a current. Words chained together. The chaplet of meaning might produce the semblance of a symphony. He was chaining together with meaning what need never have been separated and should have been continuous like a symphony in the blood.
“Everything was unreal before you came, Lilith. No woman loved me for myself. I created and invented them. I did not have to create you.”
All that he said vanished faster than music and was without echo in her.
Only the flow of words, dying quickly because underneath her is this sea, her nature which will not flow into him; underneath was her lie and his blindness to the lie.
The Voice talked to create the semblance of a symphony, seeking to conjure up life by interpretation. This rhythm was illusion; it was only the rhythm of thought. He could not touch her. The sea was angry. People were walking without rhythm, caressing without rhythm. People were talking and weeping and dancing without rhythm. The miracle did not take place. It did not happen in the body. The miracle did not happen, the simple miracle of love.
According to the pattern written with indelible philosophical ink, this is the moment when life should glow. But the sea in her heaves with discontent and has no answer, no yielding either.
She no longer heard the music from the boardwalk, the angry snoring of the sea. Before her stood a tall man in armour. She was kneeling before him. She was caressing the polished armour, seeking the sex with her mouth. The man in the armour did not move. She struck at it with a hammer. As the pieces of armour fell off, the body fell apart. All the pieces lay on the floor—the heart, the hands, the head, the feet, but no sex. The woman was still seeking it with her mouth. Another man was walking towards her. There were noeyes in his face. He turned around. The eyes were placed in the back of his head. He saw her. He walked away from her with arms outstretched. She followed him. He saw her but he walked away faster and faster. Finally he sat down and sobbed. Enormous tears came out of his eyes, but they were like soap bubbles, they rose in the air. He sat there weeping from the back of his head.
A kitten was biting her toes. She sat down and covered her feet with her dress. A man took the kitten and opened its paws with a knife, as if they were oysters. A man who was pursued came into her room through an attic window over her head and threatened to choke her. Hearing a noise he tried to hide. The door opened and four men were there to catch him. But Lilith loved the man and felt pity for him.
She was sitting in front of the Voice, their knees were touching. He was saying that she was not ill, she did not need any more care, but she must wear this dress of which he showed her a picture. It was a flowing white dress. Lilith said: “But it’s a wedding dress!” He said: “You were never really married.” She saw that they had been living together in a completely padded apartment, sound-proof. Satin-lined. But she was not a woman. She was a lamp-light, five-pointed, standing in the fog. She felt the black-rusted iron casing around her, and the glass chapel head. Inside the glass chapel there was a tongue of light, and on her shoulder was a sparrow. She was awake and twinkling without eyelids. She felt yellow, wet, and multiplied hundreds of times along the street; she felt dust in her eyes which she could not shake off because of the iron frame.
In the Castle there were twelve guest rooms. The rooms were richly furnished but with beds only. Each room had a different kind of bed. In the first one there was a luxurious four-postered bed with a silken canopy. In the second twin beds of rose-wood. In the third an immense crib of carved wood. In the fourth a small Russian crib lined with horse fur. In the fifth an Empire style bed with gold ornaments. A copper bed, and a bed of white fur. On the white fur bed she saw a beautiful fig split open with the red pulp looking like flesh. She touched it and it felt like the inside of a woman. A crime was committed in one of the rooms. Everyone was looking for the body. She knew where it was, but she would not tell. Some one spotted a line of blood along the wall. There was a violently bad odor, the smell of a cadaver.
Looking out of the window she saw a lake. There was a woman in an automobile riding over it, trying to land. But she drove into the wing of the wharf and could not free herself. Lilith reached out with her hand, took up the automobile, and laid it on the narrow sidewalk before the hotel. The woman was old and haggard. Lilith said to her: “Do you want some coffee?” She began to make coffee and the coffee pot grew immense—it boiled and sputtered and danced beyond her control. It was a huge factory grinding and smoking and boiling. The woman before Lilith is monstrous, paralyzed in a posture of agony. Hands contorted as if cut off at the wrist. Her legs are covered with blood-suckers. Everybody turns away from her, fainting with horror. Lilith did not want to hurt her feelings: she continued to look at her as if she were beautiful. The monster sprawled on the floor and stretched her swollen legs, saying: “I have six toes on each foot.” As Lilith looked at her she was aware that the monster’s eyes were piercing and divinatory. Lilith looked at her more fixedly, disregarding her ugliness. Then slowly the monster’s body straightened, her hands grasped Lilith softly, and she looked almost beautifulered wi<…>
It was not a woman, but the Voice. And the Voice was knocking at her door. He stood there with his pulpy hat in his hand, entangled in his valises.
Neither her powers of illusion, nor her dreams, nor even the night itself had worked the miracle. He remained nothing but the Voice with a death-like breath.
Copyright
Derived from The Winter of Artifice: a facsimile of the original 1939 Paris edition
(c) 2007 Sky Blue Press