I’d taken the phone off the hook, but somebody could maybe ring the doorbell, and I’d be free! The blouse! that I’d bought, they’d said they’d deliver it, and then they’d ring the bell!
No, they wouldn’t. I’d have to keep recognizing. And I was recognizing in the roach the saltlessness of the time I was pregnant.
— I recalled myself roaming the streets knowing I’d have the abortion, doctor, I who about children only knew and only would know that I was going to have an abortion. But at least I was getting to know pregnancy. Along the streets I was feeling inside me the child that still wasn’t moving, while I was stopping to look in the shop windows at the smiling wax mannequins. And when I entered a restaurant and ate, the pores of a child were devouring like the mouth of a waiting fish. When I was walking, when I was walking I was carrying it.
During the interminable hours that I roamed the streets making up my mind about the abortion, which I had nevertheless already arranged with you, sir, doctor, during those hours my eyes too must have been saltless. On the street I too was no more than thousands of cilia of a neutral protozoan beating, I had already known within myself the shiny gaze of a roach captured at the waist. I had walked the streets with my lips parched, and living, doctor, was for me the opposite side of a crime. Pregnancy: I had been flung into the happy horror of the neutral life that lives and moves.
And while I was looking at the shop windows, doctor, with my lips as parched as someone who doesn’t breathe through her nose, while I was looking at the fixed and smiling mannequins, I was full of neutral plankton, and was opening my suffocated and quiet mouth, I said this to you, sir: “what’s bothering me most, doctor, is that I’m having trouble breathing.” The plankton was giving me my color, the Tapajós River is green because its plankton is green.
When night arrived, I was making up my mind about the abortion I’d already made up my mind about, lying on the bed with my thousands of faceted eyes spying on the dark, with lips blackened from breathing, without thinking, without thinking, making up my mind, making up my mind: on those nights all of me was slowly blackening from my own plankton just as the matter of the roach was yellowing, and my gradual blackening was keeping track of the passing time. And was all that love for the child?
If so, then love is much more than love: love is something before love: it’s plankton struggling, and the great living neutrality struggling. Just like the life in the roach stuck at the waist.
The fear I always had of the silence with which life makes itself. Fear of the neutral. The neutral was my deepest and most living root — I looked at the roach and knew. Until the moment of seeing the roach I’d always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn’t get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona, for the human mask. When I humanized myself, I’d freed myself from the desert.
I’d freed myself from the desert, yes, but had also lost it! and also lost the forests, and lost the air, and lost the embryo inside me.
But there it is, the neutral roach, without a name for pain or for love. Its only differentiation in life is that it has to be either male or female. I had only thought of it as female, since things crushed at the waist are female.
I put out the cigarette butt that was already burning my fingers, I put it out carefully on the floor with my slipper, and crossed my sweaty legs, I had never thought legs could sweat that much. The two of us, the ones buried alive. If I had the courage, and I’d wipe the sweat from the roach.
Did it feel inside itself something like what my gaze saw in it? how much did it take advantage of itself and take advantage of what it was? even somehow indirectly, did it know that it crawled? or is crawling something we ourselves don’t know is happening? What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn’t knowing? If a person doesn’t look and doesn’t see, does the truth exist anyway? The truth that doesn’t transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?
If I wanted to, even now, after everything that’s happened, I can still keep myself from having seen. And then I’ll never know about the truth I’m trying again to cross — it still depends on me!
I was looking around the dry and white room, from which I could only see sands and sands of wreckage, some covering others. The minaret where I was standing was made of hard gold. I was upon the hard gold that receives nothing. And I was needing to be received. I was afraid.
— Mother: I killed a life, and there are no arms to receive me now and in the hour of our desert, amen. Mother, everything now has turned to hard gold. I interrupted an organized thing, mother, and that is worse than killing, that made me enter through a breach that showed me, worse than death, that showed me the thick and neutral life turning yellow. The roach is alive, its eye gaze is fertilizing, I am afraid of my hoarseness, mother.
Because my mute hoarseness was already the hoarseness of someone enjoying a gentle hell.
The hoarseness — of someone having pleasure. The hell was good for me, I was enjoying that white blood that I had spilled. The roach is real, mother. It is no longer an idea of a roach.
— Mother, all I did was want to kill, but just look at what I broke: I broke a casing! Killing is also forbidden because it breaks the hard casing, and leaves one with the sticky life. From inside the hard casing is emerging a heart thick and white and alive with pus, mother, blessed art thou among the roaches, now and in the hour of this thy my death, cockroach and jewel.
As if having said the word “mother” had freed inside myself a thick and white part — the intense vibration of the oratorio suddenly stopped, and the minaret fell mute. And as after an intense attack of vomiting, my forehead was relieved, fresh and cold. No longer even fear, no longer even fright.
No longer even fear, no longer even fright.
Had I vomited my last human remnants? And I was no longer asking for help. The diurnal desert was before me. And now the oratorio was starting up again but in another way, now the oratorio was the deaf sound of the heat refracting off walls and ceilings, in rounded vaults. The oratorio was made of the tremblings of sultriness. And my fear too was different now: not the fear of someone about to enter, but the much broader fear of someone who has already entered.
So much broader: it was fear of my lack of fear.
Since it was with my rashness that I then looked at the roach. And I saw: it was a creature without beauty for other species. And as I saw it, the little former fear returned for just an instant: “I swear, I’ll do everything you want! but don’t leave me imprisoned in the roach’s room because something enormous is going to happen to me, I don’t want the other species! I just want people.”
But, at my slight cringing, the oratorio just intensified, and so I kept still, no longer trying to make a movement to help myself. I’d already abandoned myself — I could nearly see there at the beginning of the path already traveled the body I’d cast off. But I was still sometimes calling for it, still calling myself. And it was because I could no longer hear my answer, that I knew I’d already abandoned myself beyond my reach.
Yes, the roach was a creature without beauty for other species. The mouth: if it had teeth, they would be big, square and yellow teeth. How I hate the light of the sun that reveals everything, reveals even the possible. With the edge of my robe I wiped my forehead, without taking my gaze from the roach’s eyes, and my own eyes also had the same lashes as well. But no one touches yours, unclean thing. Only another roach would want this roach.
And me — who would want me today? who had already become as mute as I was? who, like me, was calling fear love? and want, love? and need, love? Who, like me, knew that I had never changed my form since they had drawn me on the stone of a cave? and next to a man and a dog.
From now on I could call anything by the name I invented: in the dry room I could, since any name would do, since none of them would. Within the dry sounds of the vault everything could be called anything, because anything would be transmuted in the same vibrating muteness. The roach’s much greater nature made anything, entering there — name or person — lose its false transcendence. So much so that I was seeing only and exactly the white vomit of its body: I was only seeing facts and things. I knew that I was in the irreducible, though I was unaware what the irreducible is.
But I also knew that ignorance of the law of the irreducible was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself by claiming I didn’t know the law — since knowing oneself and knowing the world is the law that, even unattainable, cannot be infringed, and nobody can be excused by claiming not to know it. Worse: the roach and I were not faced with a law we had to obey: we ourselves were the unknown law that we obeyed. The renewedly original sin is this: I must fulfill my law of which I am unaware, and if I don’t fulfill my ignorance, I shall be originally sinning against life.
In the garden of Paradise, who was the monster and who was not? between the houses and apartments, and in the elevated spaces between the high buildings, in that hanging garden — who is, and who is not? How long can I stand not at least knowing what is looking at me? the raw roach is looking at me, and its law sees mine. I felt that I was going to know.
— Don’t abandon me now, don’t let me make alone this already-made decision. I had, yes, I still had the desire to take refuge in my own fragility and in the sly, yet true, argument that my shoulders were a woman’s, feeble and slender. Whenever I had needed to, I’d excused myself by arguing that I was a woman. But I was well aware that it’s not just women who are afraid to see, everyone fears seeing what is God.
I was afraid of the face of God, I was afraid of my final nudity on the wall. Beauty, that new absence of beauty that had nothing to do with whatever I used to call beauty, horrified me.
— Give me your hand. Because I no longer know what I’m saying. I think I made it all up, none of this existed! But if I made up what happened to me yesterday — who can guarantee that I didn’t also invent my entire life prior to yesterday?
Give me your hand:
Give me your hand:
I am now going to tell you how I entered the inexpressive that was always my blind and secret search. How I entered whatever exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the line of mystery and fire, and which is surreptitious line. A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.
It wasn’t by using any of my attributes as an instrument that I was reaching the smooth mysterious fire of whatever is a plasma — it was precisely removing from myself all my attributes, and going only with my living entrails. To have reached that point, I was abandoning my human organization — to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality.
— I know, it’s bad to hold my hand. It’s bad to be left without air in that collapsed mine where I brought you without mercy on you, but out of mercy on me. But I swear I’ll get you out of here still alive — even though I’m not lying, even though I’m not lying about what my eyes saw. I’ll save you from this terror in which, for the time being, I need you. What mercy on you now, you whom I grabbed. You innocently gave me your hand, and because I was holding it I had the courage to submerge myself. But don’t try to understand me, just keep me company. I know your hand would drop me, if it knew.
How can I repay you? At least use me too, use me at least like a dark tunnel — and when you’ve crossed my darkness you’ll find yourself on the other side with yourself. You might not find yourself with me, I don’t know if I’ll cross over, but with yourself. At least you’re not alone, as I was yesterday, and yesterday I was only praying to at least get out of there alive. And not just alive — the way that primarily monstrous roach was just alive — but organizedly alive like a person.
Identity — identity that is the first inherence — was that what I was surrendering to? was that what I had entered?
Identity is forbidden to me, I know. But I’m going to take a chance because I trust in my future cowardice, and it will be my essential cowardice that will reorganize me once again into a person.
Not only through my cowardice. But I’ll reorganize myself through the ritual with which I was already born, as in the neutral of the semen the ritual of life is inherent. Identity is forbidden to me but my love is so great that I won’t resist my will to enter the mysterious fabric, into that plasma from which I may never again be able to depart. My belief, however, is also so deep that, if I cannot depart, I know, even in my new unreality the plasma of the God will be in my life.
Ah, but at the same time how can I want for my heart to see? if my body is so weak that I can’t face the sun without my eyes physically crying — how could I stop my heart from glittering in physically organic tears if in nakedness I felt the identity: the God? My heart that covered itself with a thousand cloaks.
The great neutral reality of what I was living was overtaking me with its extreme objectivity. I was feeling incapable of being as real as the reality that was reaching me — could I be commencing in contortions to be as nakedly real as what I was seeing? Yet I was living all that reality with a feeling of the unreality of reality. Could I be living, not the truth, but the myth of the truth? Every time I lived the truth it was through an impression of inescapable dream: the inescapable dream is my truth.