For the doctor truly to be dead, a pack of mice would necessarily have had to swarm over the body, to bore into it and extract the mousy matter lent to the physician during his life in order to exercise their illegitimate “human” existence.
Point of Balance, Oil on Canvas, 2008
The Feather
I must have been twelve years old when I met Clara. However far back I rummage through my memories, in the depths of childhood I find them connected to sexual knowledge. She appears to me as nostalgic and pure as the adventure of night, of fear, of first friends. She is in no way distinct from other melancholies and other times of waiting, for example the tedious waiting to become an “adult”, which I could physically gauge whenever I shook hands with an older person, trying to delimit the difference of weight and size in my small hand, lost between the knobbly fingers, in the enormous palm of the one who was gripping it.
At no time in my childhood did I ignore the difference between men and women. Perhaps there was a time when for me all living beings were jumbled up in a single limpidity of movement and inertia; I have no exact recollection of this. The sexual secret was always apparent. It was a matter of a “secret” in the same way as it might have been a matter of an object: a table or a chair.
When I examine my most distant memories more carefully, however, their lack of actuality is revealed to me in my fallacious understanding of the sexual act. I used to imagine the female organs in erroneous forms and the act in itself as much more grandiose and strange than as I knew it with Clara. In all these interpretations, however – fallacious, and then increasingly just – there ineffably floated an air of mystery and bitterness, which slowly acquired consistency like a painting by an artist who has set out from amorphous sketches.
*
I see myself as I was when very little, in a nightshirt down to my heels, crying desperately on the threshold of a door, in a yard filled with sunlight, whose gate opens onto a deserted market, a market in the afternoon, warm and sad, with dogs sleeping on their bellies and people lying in the shade of the vegetable stalls.
In the air there is an acrid scent of rotting vegetables, a few large violet flies are buzzing loudly around me, imbibing the teardrops that have fallen onto my arms and making frenetic swoops in the dense and broiling light of the yard. I stand up and carefully urinate in the dust. The earth greedily sucks up the liquid and in that spot there remains a dark patch, as if the urine of an object that does not exist. I wipe my face with my nightshirt and lick away the tears at the corners of my lips, savouring their salty taste. I sit down once more on the threshold and feel very unhappy. I have been beaten.
Just now my father smacked my bare buttocks. I do not very well know why. I am thinking. I was lying in bed next to a little girl the same age as me; we were put there to sleep, while our parents went out for a walk. I did not sense them when they returned and I do not know exactly what it was I was doing to the little girl under the quilt. All I know is that in the moment when my father suddenly lifted the sheet, the little girl had begun to yield. My father turned crimson, he was enraged, and he beat me. That is all.
And so I am sitting on the threshold, I have wept and I have dried my eyes, I am drawing circles and lines in the dust with my finger, I shift my position more toward the shade, I am sitting cross-legged on a stone and I am feeling better. A girl has come to fetch water in the yard and she is turning the rusty wheel of the pump. I listen carefully to the creaking of the old iron, I watch how the water, like the haughty, swishing tail of a silver horse, gushes into the pail, I look at the girl’s large, dirty legs, I yawn because I have not slept at all and from time to time I try to catch a fly. It is the simple life that recommences after tears. Into the yard the sun forever pours its overwhelming, torrid heat. It is my first sexual adventure and my oldest memory of childhood.
Henceforward obscure instincts will burgeon, wax, distort and settle within their natural bounds. What should have been both an amplified and ever growing fascination was for me a string of renunciations and cruel reductions to banality; the evolution from childhood to adolescence meant a continuous diminution of the world and, as things started to structure themselves around me, their ineffable look disappeared, just like a gleaming surface clouding over with condensation.
Ecstatic, miraculous, the figure of Walter even today preserves its fascinating light.
When I met him, he was sitting in the shade of a locust tree, on a log, reading a Buffalo Bill comic. The clear light of morning filtered through the thick green leaves in a rustle of very cool shadows. His attire was not at all ordinary: he was wearing a cherry-coloured tunic with buttons carved from bone, deerskin trousers, and, on his bare feet, sandals plaited from straps of white leather. Sometimes, when I want to relive for an instant the extraordinary sensation of that encounter, I gaze for a long time at a Buffalo Bill comic. Nevertheless, the real presence of Walter, of his red tunic in the greenish air under the shade of the locust tree, was something else.
His first gesture was a kind of elastic leap onto his feet, like that of an animal. We made friends instantly. We spoke little and all of a sudden he made a stupefying proposal: to eat locust tree flowers. It was the first time I had met someone who ate flowers. In a few moments Walter was up in the tree gathering an enormous bunch. Then he climbed down and showed me how you ought delicately to detach the flower from the corolla in order to suck only its tip. I tried it for myself; the flower gave a little pop between my teeth, a very pleasant little clack, and in my mouth dispersed a delicate and cooling perfume such as I had never tasted before.
For a short while we remained silent, eating the locust tree flowers. All of a sudden he grasped me tightly by the arm: “Would you like to see our gang’s headquarters?”
In Walter’s eyes sparks had kindled. I hesitated for a second. “Yes, I would”, I answered with a voice that was no longer mine and with an impulse for danger which suddenly erupted in me and which I very well sensed did not belong to me.
Walter took me by the hand and through the little gate at the bottom of the yard he led me to a vacant lot. The grass and the weeds had sprung up there unchecked. The nettles stung my legs as I passed and with my hand I had to move aside the thick stems of hemlock and burdock. At the bottom of the vacant lot we came to a tumbledown wall. In front of the wall there was a ditch and a deep hole. Walter jumped inside and called me to follow; the hole led through the wall and thence we entered an abandoned cellar.
The steps were broken and overgrown with grass, the walls oozed dampness, and the darkness before us was consummate. Walter squeezed my hand tightly and pulled me after him. We slowly descended some ten steps. There we came to a stop.
“We have to stop here”, he told me, “we can’t go any further. At the back there are some iron men with iron hands and iron heads, growing from the ground. They stand there motionless and if they catch us in the dark they’ll throttle us”.
I turned my head and gazed desperately at the open mouth of the cellar above, whose light came from a simple and clear world where there were no iron men and where at a great distance plants, people and houses could be seen.
Walter produced a plank from somewhere and we sat down upon it. For a few minutes we were silent once more. It was good and cool in the cellar; the air had a heavy odour of dampness and I would have sat there for hours, isolated, far from the hot streets, far from the sad and tedious town. I felt good enclosed between cold walls, beneath the earth seething in the sun. The pointless hum of the afternoon came like a distant echo through the open mouth of the cellar.
“This is where we bring the girls we capture”, said Walter.
I vaguely understood what he must have been talking about. The cellar took on an unsuspected attraction.
“And what do you do with them?”
Walter laughed.
“Don’t you know? We do what all men do to women, we lie down with them