Marshal a thousand personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, make the longest detour – still the end would be defeat. In the final meeting everything was destined to fall apart – the cunning, the skill, the power, everything. She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than anything, she would resemble
each and every other grain of sand on that ocean’s shore. She would be condemned to recognize her unique self everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she had chosen for herself! That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal! That her power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was maddening, hallucinating. It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the black legions. Onward! Through every degree of the everwidening circle. Onward and away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines of the universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches’ revel.
In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms of the Creator. Who killed Cock Robin ? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I, my lovely angel could say, and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless face could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the moon itself. In her death-like trance of innocence she fascinated even more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong, lithe, muscular, seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity, the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh preserved from mortal decay.
She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyramid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world where animation is just a notch above death. She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her. She had learned how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets; everything was killed off which could be humanly killed. She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness, discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically intact. Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire. The one eye was a warm brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the magnetic eye which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to nicker under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.
The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were a shock. Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python. What annoyed her was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality. The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the comer of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day.
From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take on, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming other itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor.
All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-on, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight towards some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward towards those whom she was abandoning. Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn’t even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she had been seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason no one knew, she had done a tailspin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life, on the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from another dimension.
Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the life of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something man-made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr’acte in which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimetre of skin itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and
