She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, other charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were nonexistent. She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defence is attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed.
Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers towards the fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth. She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions – she had only to bear in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was never outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the everturning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving. She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise what soever; she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self. She had not intended to make herself a legendary figure, she had merely wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in the pursuit of beauty, she soon forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. She became so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at times positively uglier than the ugliest woman in the world. She could inspire horror and dread, especially when her charm was at its height. It was as though the will, blind and uncontrollable, shone through the creation, exposing the monster which it is.
In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit, gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few moments. It was like a frantic long distance message, an S.O.S. from a sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by flesh rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without aspect. I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron grate. I said that in the frantic grappling in the dark I sometimes forgot her name, what she looked like, who she was. It’s true. I overeached myself in the dark.
I slid off the flesh rails into the endless space of sex, into the channel-orbits established by this one and that one; Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon, Telma, the Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven; waifs, will’o’-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a memory, a desire, a longing. I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday afternoon near the railroad tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying haunch, her Southern drawl, her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts, I could start with Georgiana, the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work outwards and upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension of sex, world without end. Georgiana was like the membrane of the tiny little ear of an unfinished monster called sex. She was transparently alive and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue, the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in itself a being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world. The whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we call sex, which is like another being growing into our own being and gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only a dim memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is giving birth to itself.
It was precisely this snake-like copulation in the dark, this double-jointed, double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket of doubt, jealousy, fear, loneliness. If I began my hem-stitching with Georgiana and the myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she too was at work building membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and what-not of sex. She would begin with the monster who had raped her, assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too began somewhere on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform, uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to meet. Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of inventions, of imaginings, of obsessions and delusions, putting together tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished sentences, jumbled dream talk, hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now and then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation, observing smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her with a pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh and blood creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an hour ago, her cunt perhaps still choked with the sperm of the last fuck. The more submissive she was, the more passionately she behaved, the more abandoned she looked, the more uncertain I became. There was no beginning, no personal, individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen on the field of honour now crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat We were alert and responsible to the least thrust, as only the practiced can be.
We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was no resisting our bloody work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming in blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished save the fixed black star hanging like a scalp above the hole in the ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an oracle, everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the day before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born. And not a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did she stop, for if she had, the vacuum she created in her flight would have brought about an explosion fit to sunder the world. She was the world’s lying machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending, devastating fear which enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death apparatus. To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her the personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged to turn in her traces. Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus which dogged her every step. Every day this colossal reality took on new proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralysing. Every day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes. It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from the start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground.
