The Passion According to G.H. (11 page)

I’m trying to tell you how I reached the neutral and the inexpressive in me. I don’t know if I’m understanding what I’m saying, I’m feeling — and I very much fear the feeling, since feeling is only one of the types of being. Yet I shall cross the stupefied sultriness that billows from the nothing, and shall have to understand the neutral with the feeling.

The neutral. I am speaking of the vital element that binds things. Oh, I am not afraid that you don’t understand, but that I understand myself badly. If I don’t understand myself, I’ll die from the same thing I live from. Now let me tell you the scariest part:

I was being carried off by the demonic.

For the inexpressive is diabolic. A person who isn’t committed to hope lives the demonic. A person who has the courage to cast off feelings discovers the ample life of an extremely busy silence, the same that exists in the cockroach, the same in the stars, the same in the self — the demonic
precedes
the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

I’m going to tell you: I feared a certain blind and already ferocious joy that was starting to overtake me. And to lose me.

The joy of getting lost is a Sabbath joy. Getting lost is a dangerous finding. I was experiencing in that desert the fire of things: and it was a neutral fire. I was living from the tessitura of which things are made. And it was a hell, that place, because in that world where I was living neither compassion nor hope exists.

I had entered the Sabbath orgy. Now I know what happens in the dark of the mountains on the nights of orgies. I know! I know with horror: things enjoy themselves. The thing of which things are made delights itself — that is the raw joy of black magic. It was from that neutral that I lived — the neutral was my true primeval soup. I was moving forward, and feeling the joy of the hell.

And the hell is not the torture of pain! it is the torture of a joy.

The neutral is inexplicable and alive, try to understand me: just as protoplasm and semen and protein are of a living neutral. And I was all new, like a novice. It was as if before I had had a palate addicted to salt and sugar, and a soul addicted to joys and pains — and had never felt the first taste. And now I was experiencing the taste of the nothing. I was rapidly becoming unaddicted, and the taste was new as the mother’s milk that only has taste for an infant’s mouth. With the landslide of my civilization and of my humanity — which was a suffering of great longing for me — with the loss of humanity, I was coming orgiastically to taste the identity of things.

It’s very difficult to taste. Up till then I had been so engrossed by sentimentalization that, experiencing the taste of the real identity, it seemed as tasteless as the taste a raindrop has in your mouth. It’s horribly insipid, my love.

My love, it’s like the most insipid nectar — it’s like the air that in itself has no smell. Up till then my addicted senses were mute to the taste of things. But the most archaic and demonic of my thirsts had led me subterraneously to collapse all constructions. The sinful thirst was guiding me — and now I know that experiencing the taste of that almost nothing is the secret joy of the gods. It is a nothing that is the God — and that has no taste.

But it’s the most primary joy. And only that, at last, at last! is the pole opposite the pole of the feeling-human-Christian. Through the pole of the primary demonic joy, I was remotely perceiving and for the first time — that there really was an opposite pole.

I was clean of my own intoxification by feeling, so clean I could enter the divine life that was a primary life entirely without comeliness, life as primary as if it were a manna falling from heaven and that doesn’t have the taste of anything: manna is like a rain and has no taste. Experiencing that taste of the nothing was my damnation and my joyful terror.

Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.

But remember that all this was happening with me awake and immobilized by the light of day, and the truth of a dream was happening without the anesthesia of the night. Sleep with me awake, and only thus can you know of my great sleep and know what is the living desert.

Suddenly, sitting there, a tiredness all hardened and without any lassitude, overtook me. A little more and it would petrify me.

Then, carefully, as if I already had paralyzed parts within me, I started stretching out on the coarse mattress and there, all shriveled up, I fell asleep as immediately as a roach falls asleep on a vertical wall. There was no human stability in my sleep: it was the balancing power of a roach that falls asleep atop the lime of a wall.

When I woke, the room had a sun even whiter and more fervidly motionless. Returning from that sleep, to whose depthless surface my short paws had clung, I was now trembling with cold.

But then the numbness was passing, and once again, fully inside the burning of the sun, I was suffocating confined.

It must have been past noon. I got up before even making up my mind to, and, though uselessly, tried to open even more the already wide open window, and was trying to breathe, even if only to breathe a visual expanse, I was seeking an expanse.

I was seeking an expanse.

From that room excavated in the rock of a building, from the window of my minaret, I saw as far as the eye could see the enormous range of roofs and roofs calmly scorching in the sun. The apartment buildings like squat villages. In size it surpassed Spain.

Beyond the rocky gullies, between the cements of the buildings, I saw the favela atop the hill and saw a goat slowly climbing the hill. Beyond stretched the highlands of Asia Minor. From there I was contemplating the empire of the present. Over there was the Strait of the Dardanelles. Further beyond the craggy ridges. Thy majestic monotony. Under the sun thy imperial breadth.

And further beyond, already the start of the sands. The desert naked and burning. When darkness fell, cold would consume the desert, and in it one would shiver as on desert nights. Even further, the blue and salty lake was sparkling. Over there, that must be the region of the great salt lakes.

Beneath the trembling waves of sultriness, monotony. Through the other apartment windows and on the cement terraces, I was seeing a coming and going of shadows and people, like those of the first Assyrian merchants. They were fighting for control of Asia Minor.

I had dug up the future perhaps — or reached such remote ancient depths that my hands that had dug them up could not fathom them. There I was standing, like a child dressed as a friar, a sleepy child. But an inquisitive child. From atop this building, the present contemplates the present. Just as in the second millennium before Christ.

And I, now I was no longer an inquisitive child. I had grown, and had become as simple as a queen. Kings, sphinxes and lions — here is the city where I live, and all extinct. I was what was left, stuck by one of the stones that had fallen. And, since the silence judged my immobility to be that of a dead woman, they all forgot me, they left without pulling me out, and, presumed dead, I lay there watching. And I saw, while the silence of those who really had died was invading me as ivy invades the mouths of the stone lions.

And because I myself was then sure I would end up dying of starvation beneath the fallen stone that was pinning me by my limbs — I then saw like someone who is never going to tell. I saw, as uninvolved as someone who isn’t even going to tell herself. I was seeing, like someone who will never have to understand what she saw. As a lizard’s nature sees: without even having to remember afterward. The lizard sees — as a loose eye sees.

I was perhaps the first person to set foot in that castle in the air. Five million years ago perhaps the last caveman had looked out from this same point, where once there must have existed a mountain. And that later, eroded, had become an empty area where later once again cities had risen which themselves in turn eroded. Today the ground is widely populated by diverse races.

Standing at the window, sometimes my eyes rested on the blue lake that might have been no more than a piece of sky. But I soon grew tired, since the blue was made of much intensity of light. My bleary eyes then went to rest in the naked and burning desert, which at least didn’t have the hardness of a color. Three millennia later the secret oil would gush from those sands: the present was opening gigantic perspectives onto a new present.

Meanwhile, today, I was living in the silence of something that three millennia later, after it was eroded and built again, would be stairs again, cranes, men and constructions. I was living the pre-history of a future. Like a woman who never had children but would have them three millennia later, I was already living today from the oil that would gush in three millennia.

If at least I’d entered the room at dusk — tonight the moon would be full, I remembered when recalling the party on the terrace the night before — I would see the full moon rising over the desert.

“Ah, I want to go back to my house,” I suddenly asked myself, since the moist moon had made me long for my life. But from that platform I couldn’t manage a single moment of darkness and moon. Only the heap of embers, only the errant wind. And for me no flask of water, no vessel of food.

But maybe, less than a year later, I’d make a find that nobody and not even me would have dared to expect. A gold chalice?

For I was seeking the treasure of my city.

A city of gold and stone, Rio de Janeiro, whose inhabitants under the sun were six hundred thousand beggars. The treasure of the city could be in one of the breaches in the rubble. But which one? That city needed the work of a cartographer.

Raising my gaze ever further, to ever steeper heights, before me lay gigantic blocks of buildings that formed a heavy design, still not shown on a map. My eyes went on, seeking on the hill the remains of some fortified wall. Reaching the top of the hill, I let my eyes circumnavigate the panorama. Mentally I traced a circle around the semi-ruins of the favelas, and recognized that there once could have been a city living there as large and limpid as Athens at its apogee, with children running between the merchandise displayed in the streets.

My method of vision was entirely impartial: I was working directly with the evidences of vision, and not allowing suggestions outside the vision to predetermine my conclusions; I was entirely prepared to surprise myself. Even if the evidence ended up contradicting everything that had alighted upon me in my most tranquil delirium.

I know — from my own and singular witness — that in the beginning of this my work of searching I didn’t have the slightest idea of the kind of language that would be slowly revealed to me until one day I could arrive at Constantinople. But I was already prepared to have to bear in the room the hot and humid season of our climate, and with it snakes, scorpions, tarantulas and myriads of mosquitoes that arise when a city collapses. And I knew that many times, in my work in the open field, I would have to share my bed with the livestock.

For now the sun was scorching me at the window. Only today had the sun fully reached me. But it was also true that only when the sun was reaching me could I, because I was standing, become a source of shade — where I would keep fresh wineskins of my water.

I would need a drill twelve meters long, camels, goats, and sheep, an electric strip; and I would have to use the expanse itself directly because it would be impossible to reproduce, for example, in a simple aquarium, the richness of oxygen found on the surface of the oceans.

To keep my enthusiasm for the work from fading, I’d try not to forget that geologists already know that in the subsoil of the Sahara is an immense lake of potable water, I remember reading that; and that in the Sahara itself archeologists already unearthed the remains of household utensils and old settlements: seven thousand years ago, I had read, in that “region of fear” a prosperous agriculture had developed. The desert has a moistness that must be found again.

How should I set to work? to keep the dunes in place, I would have to plant two million green trees, especially eucalyptus — before bed I’d always read something, and I’d read a lot about the properties of the eucalyptus.

And I couldn’t forget, at the outset of the job, to prepare myself to err. Not forgetting that the error had often become my path. Every time something I was thinking or feeling didn’t work out—was because finally there was a breach, and, if I’d had courage before, I’d have already gone through it. But I’d always been afraid of delirium and error. My error, however, must be the path of a truth: since only when I err do I step out of what I know and what I understand. If “truth” were whatever I could understand — it would end up being just a small truth, one my size.

The truth must be exactly in what I shall never be able to understand. And, later, could I understand myself afterward? I don’t know. Will the man of the future understand us as we are today? He distractedly, with some distracted tenderness, will pet our head as we do with the dog that comes over to us and looks at us from within its darkness, with mute and afflicted eyes. He, the future man, would pet us, remotely understanding us, as I remotely would understand myself later, beneath the memory of the memory of the memory already lost of a time of pain, not knowing that our time of pain would pass just as a child is not a static child, it’s a growing being.