House of Incest Read Online Free PDF Page A

for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with
your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of
seeing you grow old, Jeanne; I fell in love with an unchanging you that will
never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could
take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look
eternally.
    They bowed to one part of themselves—only their
likeness.
    Good night, my brother!
    Good night, Jeanne!
    With her walked distended shadows, stigmatized
by fear. They carried their compact like a jewel on their breast; they wore it
proudly like their coat of arms.

    I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
    It was night, and I made a careless movement
inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself
against my madness. It was this seeing too much, this seeing of a tragedy in
the quiver of an eyelid, constructing a crime in the next room, the men and
women who had loved before me on the same hotel bed.
    I carry white sponges of knowledge on strings
of nerves.
    As I move within my book I am cut by pointed
glass and broken bottles in which there is still the odor of sperm and perfume.
    More pages added to the book but pages like a
prisoner’s walking back and forth over the space allotted him. What is it
allotted me to say?
    Only the truth disguised in a fairy tale, and
this is the fairy tale behind which all the truths are staring as behind
grilled mosque windows. With veils. The moment I step into the cavern of my
lies I drop into darkness, and see a mask which stares at me like the glance of
a cross-eyed man; yet I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul as if
the lies I tell were like costumes.

    LIES CREATE SOLITUDE

    I walked out of my book into the paralytic’s
room.
    He sat there among many objects under glass as
in a museum. He had collected a box of paint which he never painted with, a
thousand books with pages uncut, and they were covered with dust. His Spanish
cape hung on the shoulders of a mannequin, his guitar lay with strings snapped
like long disordered hair. He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I
swallow my own words. I chew and chew ything until it
deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I
want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I
could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of
minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation,
fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot
tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like
four long columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do
not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly
to catch the echoes and the overtones.
    His skin was transparent like that of a newborn
child, and his eyes green like moss. He bowed to Sabina, to Jeanne, and to me:
meet the modern Christ, who is crucified by his own nerves, for all our
neurotic sins!
    The modern Christ was wiping the perspiration
which dripped over his face, as if he were sitting there in the agony of a
secret torture. Pain-carved features. Eyes too open, as if dilated by scenes of
horror. Heavy-lidded, with a world-heavy fatigue. Sitting on his chair as if
there were ghosts standing beside him. A smile like an insult. Lips edged and
withered by the black scum of drugs. A body taut like wire.
    In our writings we are brothers, I said. The
speed of our vertigoes is the same. We arrived at the same place at the same
moment, which is not so with other people’s thoughts. The language of nerves
which we both use makes us brothers in writing.
    The modern Christ said: I was born without a
skin. I dreamed once that I stood naked in a garden and that it was carefully
and neatly peeled, like a fruit. Not an inch of skin left on my body. It was
all gently pulled off, all of it,