Penned between the wardrobe door and the foot of the bed, I still hadn’t tried to move my feet again, drawing back instead as if, even in its extreme slowness, the roach might spring forward — I’d seen roaches who suddenly fly, the winged fauna.
I stayed still, calculating wildly. I was alert, I was totally alert. Inside me a feeling of intense expectation had grown, and a surprised resignation: because in this state of alert expectation I was seeing all my earlier expectations, I was seeing the awareness from which I’d also lived before, an awareness that never leaves me and that in the final analysis might be the thing that most attached to my life — perhaps that awareness was my life itself. The cockroach too: what’s the only feeling a cockroach has? the awareness of living, inextricable from its body. In me, everything I had superimposed upon the inextricable part of myself, would probably never manage to stifle the awareness that, more than awareness of life, was the actual process of life inside me.
That was when the cockroach began to emerge.
That was when the cockroach began to emerge.
First the heralding quiver of its antennae.
Then, behind those dry stands, the reluctant body started to emerge. Until nearly all of it reached the opening of the wardrobe door.
It was brown, it was hesitant as if of enormous weight. It was now almost entirely visible.
I quickly lowered my eyes. On hiding my eyes, I was hiding from the roach the cunning idea that occurred to me — my heart was beating almost as in a joy. Because I suddenly felt that I had resources, I’d never before used my resources — and now a whole latent power was throbbing inside me, and a greatness was overtaking me: the greatness of courage, as if fear itself had finally invested me with courage. Moments before I had superficially assumed that my only feelings were indignation and disgust, but now I recognized — although I’d never known it before — that what was happening was that I was finally taking on a fear much greater than myself.
This great fear deepened everything within me. Turned inward into myself, as a blind man sounds out his own attentiveness, for the first time I had wholly fallen back upon an instinct. And I shivered with extreme pleasure as if finally mindful of the grandeur of an instinct that was bad, total and infinitely sweet — as if finally tasting, and within myself, a grandeur greater than myself. I was getting drunk for the first time with a hatred clear as a fountain, drunk with the desire, justified or not, to kill.
A whole lifetime of awareness — for fifteen centuries I hadn’t struggled, for fifteen centuries I hadn’t killed, for fifteen centuries I hadn’t died — a whole lifetime of tamed awareness was now collecting inside me and banging like a mute bell whose vibrations I didn’t need to hear, I was recognizing them. As if for the first time I was finally on the level of Nature.
A wholly controlled rapacity had overwhelmed me, and since it was controlled it was all power. Up till then I’d never mastered my own powers — powers I neither understood nor wanted to understand, but the life inside me had hung on to them so that one day at last this unknown and happy and unconscious matter would unclasp what was finally: I! I, whatever that was.
Brazenly, stirred by my surrender to what is evil, brazenly, stirred, grateful, for the first time I was being the unknown person I was — except that not knowing myself would no longer keep me back, the truth had already surpassed me: I lifted my hand as if to swear an oath, and in a single blow slammed the door on the half-emerged body of the cockroach ———————
As I did I had also closed my eyes. And that’s how I remained, trembling all over. What had I done?
Maybe then I already knew that I didn’t mean what had I done to the cockroach but: what had I done to myself?
Because during those seconds, eyes shut, I was becoming aware of myself as one becomes aware of a taste: all of me tasted of steel and verdigris, I was all acid like metal on the tongue, like a crushed green plant, my whole taste rose to my mouth. What had I done to myself? With my heart thumping, my temples pulsing, this is what I’d done to myself: I had killed. I had killed! But why such delight, and besides that a vital acceptance of that delight? For how long, then, had I been about to kill?
No, it wasn’t about that. The question was: what had I killed?
That calm woman I’d always been, had she gone mad with pleasure? With my eyes still closed I was trembling with delight. To have killed —was so much greater than I was, it was appropriate to that limitless room. To have killed opened the dryness of the sands of the room to dampness, finally, finally, as if I’d dug and dug with hard and eager fingers until I found within myself a thread of drinkable life that was the thread of death. I slowly opened my eyes, with sweetness now, in gratitude, shyness, with a modesty of glory.
From the finally damp world from which I was emerging, I opened my eyes and met the great and harsh open light, I saw the now-closed door of the wardrobe.
And I saw half of the roach’s body outside the door.
Sticking out, erect in the air, a caryatid.
But a living caryatid.
I hesitated to comprehend, looking at it in surprise. I gradually realized what had happened: I hadn’t slammed the door hard enough. I’d caught the cockroach, yes, which couldn’t go any further. But I’d left it alive.
Alive and looking at me. I quickly averted my eyes, with violent revulsion.
I needed, therefore, to strike again. One more strike? I wasn’t looking at the roach, but I told myself I still needed to strike one more time — I repeated it slowly as if each repetition could command the pulses of my heart, the beats that were spaced too widely like the soreness of a pain I couldn’t feel.
Until — finally managing to hear myself, finally managing to get myself under control — I lifted my hand high in the air as if my whole body, along with the blow of my arm, would come down against the wardrobe door.
But that was when I saw the roach’s face.
It was sticking straight out, at the height of my head and my eyes. For a second I sat there with my hand frozen in the air. Then I gradually lowered it.
A second earlier I might still have been able not to see the countenance on the cockroach’s face.
But it happened a fraction of a second too late: I was seeing. My hand, which had lowered when it abandoned its determination to strike, was slowly rising back to stomach-level: though I myself hadn’t moved, my stomach had cringed inside my body. My mouth was terribly dry, I ran an equally dry tongue over my rough lips.
It was a face without a contour. The antennae stuck out in whiskers on either side of its mouth. Its brown mouth was well-drawn. The long and slender whiskers were moving slow and dry. Its black faceted eyes were looking. It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish. It was a cockroach as old as salamanders and chimeras and griffins and leviathans. It was as ancient as a legend. I looked at its mouth: there was the real mouth.
I had never seen a roach’s mouth. I in fact — I had never actually seen a cockroach. I had just been repulsed by its ancient and ever-present existence — but had never actually come face-to-face with one, not even in thought.
And so I was discovering that, though compact, a roach is composed of layers and brown layers, fine as onionskin, as if each could be lifted by a fingernail and still there would always be another underneath, and then another. Maybe the scales were its wings, but then it must be made of layers and layers of thin wings pressed together to form that compact body.
It was reddish-brown. And had cilia all over. Maybe the cilia were its multiple legs. The antennae were now still, dry and dusty strands.
A cockroach doesn’t have a nose. I looked at it, with that mouth and eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman. But its eyes were radiant and black. The eyes of a bride. Each individual eye looked like a cockroach. The fringed, dark, dustless and living eye. And the other eye was the same. Two roaches implanted in the roach, and each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.
Each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.
— Pardon me for giving you this, hand holding mine, but I don’t want this for myself! take that roach, I don’t want what I saw.
There I was open-mouthed and offended and withdrawn — faced with the dusty being looking back at me. Take what I saw: because what I was seeing with an embarrassment so painful and so frightened and so innocent, what I was seeing was life looking back at me.
How else could I describe that crude and horrible, raw matter and dry plasma, that was there, as I shrank into myself with dry nausea, I falling centuries and centuries inside a mud — it was mud, and not even dried mud but mud still damp and still alive, it was a mud in which the roots of my identity were still shifting with unbearable slowness.
Take it, take all this for yourself, I don’t want to be a living person! I’m disgusted and amazed by myself, thick mud slowly oozing.
That’s what it was — so that’s what it was. Because I’d looked at the living roach and was discovering inside it the identity of my deepest life. In a difficult demolition, hard and narrow paths were opening within me.
I looked at it, at the roach: I hated it so much that I was going over to its side, feeling solidarity with it, since I couldn’t stand being left alone with my aggression.
And all of a sudden I moaned out loud, this time I heard my moan. Because rising to my surface like pus was my truest matter — and with fright and loathing I was feeling that “I-being” was coming from a source far prior to the human source and, with horror, much greater than the human.
Opening in me, with the slowness of stone doors, opening in me was the wide life of silence, the same that was in the fixed sun, the same that was in the immobilized roach. And that could be the same as in me! if I had the courage to abandon . . . to abandon my feelings? If I had the courage to abandon hope.
Hope for what? For the first time I was astonished to feel that I’d based an entire hope on becoming something that I was not. The hope — what other name could I give it? — that for the first time I now was going to abandon, out of courage and mortal curiosity. Had hope, in my prior life, been based upon a truth? With childlike surprise, I was starting to doubt it.
To find out what I really could hope for, would I first have to pass through my truth? To what extent had I invented a destiny now, while subterraneously living from another?
I closed my eyes, waiting for the astonishment to pass, waiting for my panting to calm to the point that it was no longer that awful moan that I’d heard as if coming from the bottom of a dry, deep cistern, as the cockroach was a creature of a dry cistern. I was still feeling, at an incalculable distance within me, that moan that was no longer reaching my throat.
This is madness, I thought with my eyes closed. But it was so undeniable feeling that birth from inside the dust — that all I could do was follow something I was well aware wasn’t madness, it was, my God, the worse truth, the horrible one. But why horrible? Because without words it contradicted everything I used to think also without words.
I waited for the astonishment to pass, for health to return. But I was realizing, in an immemorial effort of memory, that I had felt this astonishment before: it was the same one I had experienced when I saw my own blood outside of me, and I had marveled at it. Since the blood I was seeing outside of me, that blood I was drawn to with such wonder: it was mine.
I didn’t want to open my eyes, I didn’t want to keep on seeing. It was important not to forget the rules and the laws, to remember that without the rules and laws there would be no order, I had to not forget them and defend them in order to defend myself.
But it was already too late for me to hold myself back.
The first bind had already involuntarily burst, and I was breaking loose from the law, though I intuited that I was going to enter the hell of living matter — what kind of hell awaited me? but I had to go. I had to sink into my soul’s damnation, curiosity was consuming me.
So I opened my eyes all at once, and saw the full endless vastness of the room, that room that was vibrating in silence, laboratory of hell.
The room, the unknown room. My entrance into it was finally complete.
The entrance to this room had a single passageway, and a narrow one: through the cockroach. The cockroach that was filling the room with finally open vibration, the vibrations of its rattlesnake tails in the desert. Through a painstaking route, I had reached the deep incision in the wall that was that room — and the crevice created a vast, natural hollow hall as in a cave.
Naked, as if prepared for the entrance of a single person. And whoever entered would be transformed into a “she” or “he.” I was the one the room called “she.” An I had gone in which the room had given a dimension of she. As if I too were the other side of the cube, the side that goes unseen when looked at straight on.
And in my great dilation, I was in the desert. How can I explain it to you? in the desert as I’d never been before. It was a desert that was calling me as a monotonous and remote canticle calls. I was being seduced. And I was going toward that promising madness. But my fear wasn’t that of someone going toward madness, but toward a truth — my fear was of having a truth that I’d come not to want, an infamizing truth that would make me crawl along and be on the roach’s level. My first contact with truths always defamed me.