House of Incest (3 page)

There is a fissure in my vision and madness
will always rush through. Lean over me, at the bedside of my madness, and let
me stand without crutches.

I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and
open their bellies. Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic
underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and
sombre
faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I
am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I
cannot forget; I catch the odors of the past on street corners and I am aware
of the men who will be born tomorrow. Behind windows there are either enemies
or worshippers. Never neutrality or passivity. Always intention and
premeditation. Even stones have for me druidical expressions.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy
of miracles.

I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution.
I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The
truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairy tales. I am wrapped in lies
which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes. The
shell of mystery can break and grow again over night. But the moment I step
into the cavern of my lies I drop into darkness. I see a face which stares at
me like the glance of a cross-eyed man.

I remember the cold on Jupiter freezing ammonia
and out of ammonia crystals came the angels. Bands of ammonia and methane
encircling Uranus. I remember the tornadoes of inflammable methane on Saturn. I
remember on Mars a vegetation like the tussock grasses of Peru and Patagonia,
an
ochrous
red, a rusty ore vegetation, mosses and
lichens. Iron bearing red clays and red sandstone. Light there had a sound and
sunlight was an orchestra.

Dilated eyes, noble-raced profile, willful
mouth. Jeanne, all in fur, with fur eyelashes, walking with head carried high,
nose to the wind, eyes on the stars, walking imperiously, dragging her crippled
leg. Her eyes higher than the human level, her leg limping behind the tall
body, inert, like the chained ball of a prisoner.

Prisoner on earth, against her will to die.

Her leg dragging so that she might remain on
earth, a heavy dead leg which she carried like the ball and
ain
of a prisoner.

Her pale, nerve-stained fingers tortured the
guitar, tormenting and twisting the strings with her timidity as her low voice
sang; and behind her song, her thirst, her hunger and her fears. As she turned
the keys of her guitar, fiercely tuning it, the string snapped and her eyes
were terror-stricken as by the snapping of her universe.

She sang and she laughed: I love my brother.

I love my brother. I want crusades and martyrdom.
I find the world too small.

Salted tears of defeat crystallized in the
corners of her restless eyes.

But I never weep.

She picked up a mirror and looked at herself
with love.

Narcisse
gazing at
himself in
Lanvin
mirrors. The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse riding through the Bois. Tragedy rolling on cord tires.

The world is too small. I get tired of playing
the guitar, of knitting, and walking, and bearing children. Men are small, and
passions are short-lived. I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at
walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of
ecstasy.

But there is a martyrdom of tenseness, of
fever, of living continuously like the firmament in full movement and in full
effulgence.

You never saw the stars grow weary or dim. They
never sleep.

She sat looking at herself in a hand mirror and
searching for an eyelash which had fallen into her eye.

I married a man, Jeanne said, who had never
seen painted eyes weep, and on the day of my wedding I wept. He looked at me
and he saw a woman shedding enormous black tears, very black tears. It
frightened him to see me shedding black tears on my wedding night. When I heard
the bells ringing I thought they rang far too loud. They deafened me. I felt I
would begin to weep blood, my ears hurt me so much. I coughed because the din
was immense and terrifying, like the time I stood next to the bells of
Chartres. He said the bells were not loud at all, but I heard them so close to
me that I could not hear his voice, and the noise seemed like hammering against
my flesh, and I thought my ears would burst. Every cell in my body began to
burst, one by one, inside of the immense din from which I could not escape. I
tried to run away from the bells. I shouted: stop the bells from ringing! But I
could not run away from them because the sound was all round me and inside me,
like my heart pounding in huge iron beats, like my arteries clamping like
cymbals, like my head knocked against granite and a hammer striking the vein on
my temple. Explosions of sounds without respite which made my cells burst, and
the echoes of the cracking and breaking in me rolled into echoes, struck me
again and again until my nerves were twisting and curling inside me, and then
snapped and tore at the gong, until my flesh contracted and shriveled with
pain, and the blood spilled out of my ears and I could not bear any more… Could
not bear to attend my own wedding, could not bear to be married to man,
because, because, because…

I LOVE MY BROTHER!

She shook her heavy Indian bracelets; she
caressed her Orient blue bottles, and then she lay down again.

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am
tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give
me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head.
I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on
earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on
account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my
sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything,
because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I
have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one!
I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken
through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great
terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I
stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of
madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the
sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our
secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds
self-made and self-nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

Knowing only fear, it is true, such a fear that
it chokes me, that I stand gaping and breathless, like a person deprived of
air; or at other times, I cannot hear, I suddenly become deaf to the world. I
stamp my feet and hear nothing. I shout and hear nothing of my shout. And then
at times, when I lie in bed, fear clutches me again, a great terror of silence
and of what will come out of this silence towards me and knock on the walls of
my temples, a great mounting, choking fear. I knock on the wall, on the floor,
to drive the silence away. I knock and I sing and I whistle persistently until
I drive the fear away.

When I sit before my mirror I laugh at myself.
I am brushing my hair. Here are a pair of eyes, two long braids, two feet. I
look at them like dice in a box, wondering if I should shake them, would they
still come out and be ME. I cannot tell how all these separate pieces can be
ME. I do not exist. I am not a body. When I shake hands I feel that the person
is so far away that he is in the other room, and that my hand is in the other
room. When I blow my nose I have a fear that it might remain on the
handkerchief.

Voice like a
mistlethrush
.
The shadow of death running after each word so that they wither before she has
finished uttering them.

When my brother sat in the sun and his face was
shadowed on the back of the chair I kissed his shadow. I kissed his shadow and
this kiss did not touch him, this kiss was lost in the air and melted with the
shadow. Our love of each other is like one long shadow kissing, without hope of
reality.

She led me into the house of incest. It was the
only house which was not included in the twelve houses of the zodiac. It could
neither be reached by the route of the milky way, nor by the glass ship through
whose transparent bottom one could follow the outline of the lost continents,
nor by following the arrows pointing the direction of the wind, nor by following
the voice of the mountain echoes.

The rooms were chained together by steps—no
room was on a level with another—and all the steps were deeply worn. There were
windows between the rooms, little spying-eyed windows, so that one might talk
in the dark from room to room, without seeing the other’s face. The rooms were
filled with the rhythmic heaving of the sea coming from many sea-shells. The
windows gave out on a static sea, where immobile fishes had been glued to
painted backgrounds. Everything had been made to stand still in the house of
incest, because they all had such a fear of movement and warmth, such a fear
that all love and all life should flow out of reach and be lost!

Everything had been made to stand still, and
everything was rotting away. The sun had been nailed in the roof of the sky and
the moon beaten deep into its Oriental niche.

In the house of incest there was a room which
could not be found, a room without window, the fortress of their love, a room
without window where the mind and blood coalesced in a union without orgasm and
rootless like those of fishes. The promiscuity of glances, of phrases, like
sparks marrying in space. The collision between their resemblances, shedding
the odor of tamarisk and sand, of rotted shells and dying sea-weeds, their love
like the ink of squids, a banquet of poisons.

Stumbling from room to room I came into the
room of paintings, and there sat Lot with his hand upon his daughter’s breast
while the city burned behind them, cracking open and falling into the sea.
There where he sat with his daughter the Oriental rug was red and stiff, but
the turmoil which shook them showed through the rocks splitting around them,
through the earth yawning beneath their feet through the trees flaming up like
torches, through the sky smoking and
smouldering
red,
all cracking with the joy and terror of their love. Joy of the father’s hand
upon the daughter’s breast, the joy of the fear racking her. Her costume
tightly pressed around her so that her breasts heave and swell under his
fingers, while the city is rent by lightning, and spits under the teeth of
fire, great blocks of a gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity
and falling into the sea with the hiss of the eternally damned. No cry of
horror from Lot and his daughter but from the city in flames, from an
unquenchable desire of father and daughter, of brother and sister mother and
son.

I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The
hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes and the minutes
raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with
gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them.
I heard the tolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams and
the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth.

I came upon a forest of decapitated trees,
women carved out of bamboo, flesh slatted like that of slaves in joyless
slavery, faces cut in two by the sculptor’s knife, showing two sides forever
separate, eternally two-faced and it was I who had to shift about to behold the
entire woman. Truncated
undecagon
figures, eleven
sides, eleven angles, in veined and vulnerable woods, fragments of bodies,
bodies armless and headless. The torso of a t-rose, the knee of Achilles,
tubercles and excrescences, the foot of a mummy in rotted wood, the veined
docile wood carved into human contortions. The forest must weep and bend like
the shoulders of men, dead figures inside of live trees. A forest animated now
with intellectual faces, intellectual contortions. Trees become man and woman,
two-faced, nostalgic for the shivering of leaves. Trees reclining, woods
shining, and the forest trembling with rebellion so bitter I heard its wailing
within its deep forest consciousness. Wailing the loss of its leaves and the
failure of transmutation.

Further a forest of white plaster, white
plaster eggs. Large white eggs on silver disks, an elegy to birth, each egg a
promise, each half-shaped nascence of man or woman or animal not yet precise. Womb
and seed and egg, the moist beginning being worshipped rather than its
flowering. The eggs so white, so still gave birth to hope without breaking, but
the cut-down tree lying there produced a green
live
branch that laughed at the sculptor.

Jeanne opened all the doors and searched
through all the rooms. In each room the startled guest blinked with surprise.
She asked them: “Please hang up something out of your windows. Hang up a shawl
or a colored handkerchief, or a rug. I am going out into the garden. I want to
see how many windows can be accounted for. I may thus find the room where my
brother is hiding from me. I have lost my brother. I beg you, help me, every
one of you.” She pulled shawls off the tables, she took a red curtain down, a
coral bedspread, a Chinese panel, and hung them out of the windows herself.