House of Incest

ALL THAT I KNOW
IS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUT
DIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.

The morning I got up to begin this book I
coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke
the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have
just spat out my heart.

There is an instrument called the
quena
made of human bones. It owes its origin to the
worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her
bones. The
quena
has a more penetrating, more
haunting sound than the ordinary flute.

Those who write know the process. I thought of
it as I was spitting out my heart.

Only I do not wait for my love to die.

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am
of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea,
and my eyes are the color of water.

I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing
face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.

I remember my first birth in water. All round
me a
sulphurous
transparency and my bones move as if
made of rubber. I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distant
sounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach of
human eyes. Born full of memories of the bells of the
Atlantide
.

Always listening for lost sounds and searching
for lost colors, standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with
memories, and walking with a swimming stride. I cut the air with wide-slicing
fins, and swim through wall-less rooms.

Ejecfrom
a paradise
of soundlessness, cathedrals wavering at the passage of a body, like soundless
music.

This
Atlantide
could
be found again only at night, by the route of the dream. As soon as sleep
covered the rigid new city, the rigidity of the new world, the heaviest portals
slid open on smooth-oiled gongs and one entered the
voicelessness
of the dream. The terror and joy of murders accomplished in silence, in the
silence of
slidings
and brushings. The blanket of
water lying over all things stifling the voice. Only a monster brought me up on
the surface by accident.

Lost in the colors of the
Atlantide
,
the colors running into one another without frontiers. Fishes made of velvet,
of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta, of silks and feathers
and whiskers, with lacquered flanks and rock crystal eyes, fishes of withered
leather with gooseberry eyes, eyes like the white of egg. Flowers palpitating
on stalks like sea-hearts. None of them feeling their own weight, the sea-horse
moving like a feather…

It was like yawning. I loved the ease and the
blindness and the suave voyages on the water bearing one through obstacles. The
water was there to bear one like a giant bosom; there was always the water to
rest on, and the water transmitted the lives and the loves, the words and the
thoughts.

Far beneath the level of storms I slept. I
moved within color and music as inside a sea-diamond. There were no currents of
thoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, traveling,
withdrawing, wandering—the endless bottoms of peace.

I do not remember being cold there, nor warm.
No pain of cold and heat. The temperature of sleep, feverless and
chilless
. I do not remember being hungry. Food seeped
through invisible pores. I do not remember weeping.

I felt only the caress of moving—moving into
the body of another—absorbed and lost within the flesh of another lulled by the
rhythm of water, the slow palpitation of the senses, the movement of silk.

Loving without knowingness, moving without
effort, in the soft current of water and desire, breathing in an ecstasy of
dissolution.

I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the
skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails.

The night surrounded me, a photograph unglued
from its frame. The lining of a coat ripped open like the two shells of an
oyster. The day and night unglued, and I falling in between not knowing on
which layer I was resting, whether it was the cold grey upper leaf of dawn, or
the dark layer of night.

Sabina’s face was suspended in the darkness of
the garden. From the eyes a
simoun
wind shriveled the
leaves and turned the earth over; all things which had run a vertical course
now turned in circles, round the face, around HER face. She stared with such an
ancient stare, heavy luxuriant centuries flickering in deep processions. From
her nacreous skin perfumes spiraled like incense. Every gesture she made
quickened the rhythm of the blood and aroused a beat chant like the beat of the
heart of the desert, a chant which was the sound of her feet treading down into
the blood the imprint of . The tee.

A voice that had traversed the centuries, so
heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with
eternal resonance; a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries
that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

Her black cape hung like black hair from her
shoulders, half-draped, half-floating around her body. The web of her dress
moving always a moment before she moved, as if aware of her impulses, and
stirring long after she was still, like waves ebbing back to the sea. Her
sleeves dropped like a sigh and the hem of her dress danced round her feet.

The steel necklace on her throat flashed like
summer lightning and the sound of the steel was like the clashing of swords… Le
pas
d’acier
… The steel of New York’s skeleton buried
in granite, buried standing up. Le pas
d’acier
…notes
hammered on the steel-stringed guitars of the gypsies, on the steel arms of
chairs dulled with her breath; steel mail curtains falling like the flail of
hail, steel bars and steel barrage cracking. Her necklace thrown around the
world’s neck,
unmeltable
. She carried it like a
trophy wrung of groaning machinery, to match the inhuman rhythm of her march.

The leaf fall of her words, the stained glass
hues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath on
my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.

Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be
finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock
orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of
soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing
against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene,
woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within
another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into
fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole
again.

The luminous mask of her face, waxy, immobile,
with eyes like sentinels. Watching my sybaritic walk, and I the sibilance of
her tongue. Deep into each other we turned our harlot eyes. She was an idol in
Byzance
, an idol dancing with legs parted; and I wrote with
pollen and honey. The soft secret yielding of woman I carved into men’s brains
with copper words; her image I tattooed in their eyes. They were consumed by
the fever of their entrails, the indissoluble poison of legends. If the torrent
failed to engulf them, or did they extricate themselves, I haunted their memory
with the tale they wished to forget. All that was swift and malevolent in woman
might be ruthlessly destroyed, but who would destroy the illusion on which I
laid her to sleep each night? We lived in
Byzance
.
Sabina and I, until our hearts bled from the precious stones on our foreheads,
our bodies tired of the weight of brocades, our nostrils burned with the smoke
of perfumes; and when we had passed into other centuries they enclosed us in
copper frames. Men recognized her always: the same effulgent face, the same
rust voice. And she and I, we recognized each other; I her face and she my
legend.

Around my pulse she put a flat steel bracelet
and my pulse beat as she willed, losing its human cadence, thumping like a
savage in orgiastic frenzy. The lamentations of flutes, the double chant of
wind through our slender bones, the cracking of our bones distantly remembered
when on beds of down the worship we inspire turned to lust.

As we walked along, rockets burst from the
street lamps; we swallowed the asphalt road with a jungle roar and the houses
with their closed eyes and geranium eyelashes; swallowed the telegraph poles
trembling with messages; swallowed stray cats, trees, hills, hedges, Sabina’s
labyrinthian
smile on the keyhole. The door moaning,
opening. Her smile closed. A nightingale
disleafing
melliferous
honeysuckle. Honey-suckled. Fluted fingers. The
house opened its green gate mouth and swallowed us. The bed was floating.

The record was scratched, the crooning broken.
The pieces cut our feet. It was dawn and she was lost. I put back the houses on
the road, aligned the telegraph poles along the river and the stray cats
jumping across the road. I put back the hills. The road came out of my mouth
like a velvet ribbon—it lay there serpentine. The houses opened their eyes. The
keyhole had an ironic curve, like a question mark. The woman’s mouth.

I was carrying her
fetiches
,
her marionettes, her fortune teller’s cards worn at the corners like the edge
of a wave. The windows of the city were stained and splintered with
rainlight
and the blood she drew from me with each lie,
each deception. Beneath the skin of her cheeks I saw ashes: would she die
before we had joined in perfidious union? The eyes, the hands, the senses that
only women have.

There is no mockery between women. One lies
down at peace as on one’s own breast.

Sabina was no longer embracing men and women.
Within the fever of her restlessness the world was losing its human shape. She
was losing the human power to fit body to body in human completeness. She was
delimiting the horizons, sinking into planets without axis, losing her polarity
and the divine knowledge of integration, of fusion. She was spreading herself
like the night over the universe and found no god to lie with. The other half
belonged to the sun, and she was at war with the sun and light. She would
tolerate no bars of light on open books, no orchestration of ideas knitted by a
single theme; she would not be covered by the sun, and half the universe
belonged to him; she was turning her serpent back to that alone which might
overshadow her own stature giving her the joy of fecundation.

Come away with me, Sabina, come to my island.
Come to my island of red peppers sizzling over slow
braseros
,
Moorish earthen jars catching the gold water, palm trees, wild cats fighting,
at dawn a donkey sobbing, feet on coral reefs and sea-anemones, the body
covered with long seaweeds,
Melisande’s
hair hanging
over the balcony at the Opera
Comique
, inexorable
diamond sunlight, heavy nerveless hours in the
violaceous
shadows, ash-colored rocks and olive trees, lemon trees with lemons hung like
lanterns at a garden party, bamboo shoots forever trembling, soft-sounding
espadrilles, pomegranate spurting blood, a flute-like Moorish chant, long and
insistent, of the ploughmen, trilling, swearing, trilling and cursing, dropping
perspiration on the earth with the seeds.

Your beauty drowns me, drowns the core of me.
When your beauty burns me I dissolve as I never dissolved before man. From all
men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you.
I feel you in me; I feel my own voice becoming heavier, as if I were drinking
you in, every delicate thread of resemblance being soldered by fire and one no
longer detects the fissure.

Your lies are not lies, Sabina. They are arrows
flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To nourish illusion.
To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and
with them we will traverse the world. But behind our lies I am dropping
Ariadne’s golden thread—for the greatest of all joys is to be able to retrace
one’s lies, to return to the source and sleep one night a year washed of all
superstructures.